Hunted. Beverly Long
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don’t have any food.”
“I did. I had a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter in my backpack.”
“I’ll fix you a bacon, egg and cheese on toast.”
She tilted her head. “That’s my favorite sandwich.”
He winked at her. “It’s the only thing I remember you eating in the mornings. You had one every day for the entire summer, with a glass of chocolate milk.”
She’d always assumed she was invisible to her brother’s friends. “Do you have milk?” she asked.
He nodded. “White milk and chocolate syrup.”
She smiled. “That’s how I always make it.”
“And I’ve got ice for your shoulder,” he reminded her.
Even though she knew staying with Ethan may be a bad idea, she really didn’t want to be alone. “You’ve got a deal. Thank you,” she added. “I’ll try not to be any trouble.”
* * *
ETHAN LED THE way to the Donovan cabin, with Chandler following close. They didn’t talk. He figured she was hurting and he was trying to process the past half hour.
Chandler McCann had certainly grown into a beautiful woman. When she’d entered the cabin and he’d seen her in full light, he’d been practically speechless. Her skin was lovely and it had made him crazy that she’d been marred by the chemical burns of the air bag. Those marks would heal but it was hard to see perfection harmed. Her dark hair had been piled up on her head but the strands that had escaped fell past her shoulders and were silky and shiny.
And then there were her eyes. A vivid emerald-green, with a slight tilt up at the corners. Thick, dark lashes.
She was stunning. And absolutely off-limits. They both might be adults and in any other circumstance he’d consider it, but she was Chandler McCann. Neither Baker nor Mack had ever delivered one of those “stay away from Chandler, you big lug” kind of conversations. Probably hadn’t figured they needed to.
Both of those men―men he admired greatly―doted on this woman. Nobody would be good enough for her. Certainly not Ethan Moore.
The McCanns were old money in Denver. The kind that had a beautiful house in the wealthy district and cabins in the mountains. The kind where wealth was passed down generation to generation. No money had passed down when his mother had died. In fact, there hadn’t been enough in his mother’s bank account to bury her. Ethan had made sure the funeral was nice, though, using some of his savings. He hadn’t expected anything different. He’d been sending money to her every month, knowing that her health limited the number of houses she could clean, knowing that her idiot of a husband did a poor job of providing for them. About the only thing he did well was run his mouth and swing his fist.
Ethan had survived the verbal and physical abuse his stepfather had dished out because he knew that Mack McCann and Brody Donovan were going to grow into men that others would be proud of.
And Ethan wasn’t going to get left behind.
A week after graduation, he’d enlisted in the army.
He’d always known he was going to have to find a different path than his best friends because there weren’t any prestigious military academies or fancy colleges in his future. But he had been determined to be a man others would respect.
Which led him to the second reason why there was no way, no how, that there would be any “hooking up” between him and Chandler. Nobody would respect a man who got involved with somebody when his personal and professional lives had fallen apart. Under investigation.
Ugly words that had come on the heels of ugly accusations. And even though the wildebeest was finally off his back, there were still many who didn’t believe in his innocence.
And that had hurt him more than he expected it would. When he’d made the decision to retire, his supporters had urged him to reconsider. This will blow over, they’d said. But it hadn’t. And all the long months while he waited for his paperwork to be processed, he’d dreamed about a few weeks at the cabin, knowing that if there was anywhere that he could get his head back on straight, it was here.
The timing was fortunate in that he’d been here to offer Chandler a helping hand. The McCanns had been family when he’d needed it the most. Now was his chance to pay back some of that kindness.
And one didn’t pay back kindness by jumping into bed with the only daughter.
He needed to focus on offering assistance and getting her back on her merry way. But something didn’t seem quite right. It was almost as if the explanation of her accident had been too easy. She hadn’t seemed embarrassed about her carelessness or even angry. She’d reported the facts calmly with relatively little emotion.
Which made him question whether she was telling the truth.
He rounded the last curve in the path and raised the beam of his flashlight to show the Donovan cabin. Then he turned to look at her. “Still doing okay?”
“Yes. As we were walking, I kept thinking of all the times you, Mack and Brody used to sneak out at night and meet one another. This path was well traveled. You could probably still walk it with your eyes closed.”
“Almost,” he admitted.
“Remember the time I tried to follow you? I got about halfway down the path and it was so dark that I tripped on something. That’s when you heard me.”
It had been toward the end of his last summer here and he and the others had taken a liking to fishing in the lake in the middle of the night.
“Mack tried to send me back. You said I could come but only if I wore a life jacket in the boat.”
He smiled at her. “If Baker found out, I sure as hell didn’t want to have to tell him that we’d taken you out on a lake, in the middle of the night, without a life jacket.”
“The three of you didn’t wear them. As I recall, when Mack and Brody got done fishing, they jumped over the side and swam for a while. You stayed in the boat with me.”
“We were too stupid to wear life jackets,” he said. “You were the smart one.”
“I always appreciated that you stuck up for me. And it was such a cool night, almost magical. I could understand why the three of you were willing to give up sleep to do it.”
Magical. That was a good description of most of his experiences at the cabin.
He stepped up onto the front porch, unlocked the door and pushed it open. He flipped on a light and pointed her toward a chair. “Have a seat,” he said as he turned up the heat on the thermostat. He pulled a plastic bag out of one of the drawers and stuffed it with ice from the freezer. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I’ve got some pain relievers, too.” He walked toward the bathroom and came back with a small bottle of ibuprofen in his hand. He poured a glass of water and shook out two tablets. “Here.”
“You should take some, too,” she said. “Your back has to hurt from crashing through those tree limbs.”
It did, but there weren’t that many tablets left in the bottle. He’d save them for Chandler. “I’m fine.”
She sat down in the big rocking chair that he always used, holding the ice on her sore shoulder. She nodded at the book on the footstool. “You read Mr. Donovan, too?”
He nodded. Larry Donovan, Brody’s dad, had been a quiet man who stood a foot shorter than his son. He’d never heard the man raise his voice. Yet he wrote the most hair-raising, nail-biting suspense that Ethan had ever read. “Every book. He scares the hell out of me sometimes.”
“Me, too. I was afraid to even look at a chain saw after I read his last one.”
Molly crowded up next to her, just the way she always did