Rush saw the pretty redhead catch sight of his weapon. He noted the way her eyes widened nervously, and how—when she tipped her gaze back up—they stayed that way. Not like a deer in headlights. She was startled, but there was no hint in naivete in her gaze. There was intelligence. Some kind of understanding. And an undercurrent of fear, which made Rush feel surprisingly guilty. Though even acknowledging all of that still didn’t prepare him for what happened next.
She jumped at him. So quickly and so unexpectedly that he didn’t have a chance to react the way he should have. The way he was trained to. Instead, he kind of stumbled backward, flailing his arms a little. He actually had to catch himself on the still-open door of his Lada.
The whole thing only stunned him more. No one ever got the drop on him. Not the police coming up against him when he was undercover, and not the guys he turned in at the end of each case. For the sun-kissed redhead to do it now...it was almost unfathomable.
He expected her to continue with her leap. To knock him to the ground and disarm him. So it was another surprise when she simply used her advantage to turn and run. Her flip-flops smacked against the ground in an almost comical way. She cast a final, heartbeat-long look over her shoulder, then leaped over the ditch and darted into the woods.
“What the hell just happened?” Rush growled, staring at the space where the redhead had just disappeared.
Before he could come up with a logical explanation for the way she’d run off rather than taking the clear advantage, a distinctly feminine, distinctly terrified scream carried out of the foliage. The scream did for Rush what seeing the woman waving at him from the side the road hadn’t; it sent his protective instincts into overdrive.
Without a second thought, he set off at a run. His long legs brought him to the ditch, then over it. They carried him through the low brush, then into the trees. There, just inside the first patch of shade, he paused and whipped his head back and forth.
“Hey!” he called, then paused as he realized he didn’t have a name to call. “Uh. Red? You out here?”
He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to scream again, or not. On the one hand, it would sure as hell help him locate her. Let him know she was alive as well. On the other hand, he didn’t have much desire to hear the ear-piercing shriek a second time, and he didn’t want her to have to go through whatever it was that caused it again, either.
“Red!” he yelled a little louder.
A faint reply—words, but not ones he could hear enough to understand—floated up from somewhere just ahead. They had a strange, echoey quality he couldn’t quite place. So he took a few steps forward, then paused again.
“You there, Red?”
There was a few seconds of silence before he heard her voice again, a mutter that made Rush wonder if she was really answering him at all.
“I don’t know if—” She cut herself off, then added another string of incomplete sentences. “God. What if...no. I just—no.”
“Red?” he replied, puzzled this time. “You okay?”
“You know...” said her disembodied voice. “Some of us gingers find that nickname offensive.”
For no good reason at all, Rush felt the need to ask, “Are you one of those gingers?”
She didn’t reply immediately, and he could perfectly picture her face—a face he didn’t even know, for crying out loud—puckering up as she thought about what to say. He could easily imagine her arched brows buckling together in a frown. Even though it was completely impossible in reality, he swore he could practically hear a sigh escaping from her full lips.
“No,” she finally called.
“Okay, then, Red,” Rush replied. “Keep talking so I can get to you.”
The request was met with more silence.
“Now would be good,” he prodded.
She did answer this time, but her tone was somehow muted. “Are you going to shoot me?”
“Shoot you?” he echoed before recalling the reason he was chasing her in the first place.
He nearly laughed. Just a few minutes earlier, he’d been furious at himself for leaving her on the side of the road. Then more furious at himself for being weak enough to go back. He knew damned well it wasn’t because he needed to know why she followed him. Although that would’ve made perfect sense. The real reason was far more basic. Far more base.
From the moment he pulled away, Rush couldn’t stop seeing flashes of her tanned skin. Her throat. Her shoulder. The thin line between her tied-up T-shirt and the waistband of her pants.
If she’d been a sixty-five-year-old man with a bushy beard and dirty old jogging pants, he wouldn’t have turned around. Or maybe he would’ve just stuck around in the first place. At the very least, he would’ve saved himself the trouble of the ridiculous inner argument. Yet there he was, standing in the middle of the woods, searching for his stalker and worrying more about her well-being than he was worrying about his own.
And you forgot all of that?
“Um. Mr...Sunglasses?” The redhead’s voice—a little clearer but still hesitant—dragged him back to the fact that he was supposed to be doing something.
“Mr. Sunglasses?” he repeated, tipping his head to listen for her reply.
“Well,” she said, “it was a toss-up between that and Mr. Blue Truck.”
“It’s a Lada,” he corrected as he took a few steps in what he thought was the right direction.
“A what?”
“The ‘truck’ is actually a Lada.”
“Oh. Does that matter?”
“Well, it’s not really a truck. It’s more of an off-road vehicle.”
“It looks like a truck.” The statement had a stubborn note that made Rush smile.
“It’s not, though,” he said. “Technically.”
“Technicalities are that important?” she asked.
Rush’s smile slipped away. The flippant way she said it made him sure it wasn’t a dig of some kind. She wasn’t aware of his past. She couldn’t possibly have a clue about just how much weight a technicality could have in someone’s life. In his life. But it was still a damned good reminder that he wasn’t in Whispering Woods to make friends. He was there to right a decade-and-a-half-old wrong.
“Is there a particular reason you were following me?” he asked. “Or is stalking something you do for fun on Wednesdays?”
“I wasn’t following you,” she replied.
Her voice sounded impossibly close. Like she should be standing just in front of him.
Rush stopped walking, his eyes narrowing as he searched the dense trees for a sign of her. “You expect me to believe it was a coincidence that you made every turn I made while keeping a few hundred feet behind me?”
“That’s...well. Okay. Yeah. I can see how that could seem like stalking,” she said. “I mean. I was following you. But I wasn’t following you. If that makes sense.”
Weirdly...it did.
“Are you telling me all of this is because you took a damned wrong turn?” he asked.
“I was lost. It happens.” She said it like a shrug.
He considered it. He supposed she could be telling a story to cover up her true intentions. He had plenty of experience with liars, though, and if the redhead was one, she had to be damned near perfect at it. The thing that really tipped him in favor of believing