“This isn’t a stroll for the fun of it, is it?” She picked her way across the wooded ground, wincing as branches cracked under her steps. Haydn was managing better than she was, keeping pace easily with Brandon.
“Well, it’s a nice walk. And it’s always good to have options in case things come up.” Brandon’s attention was on the woods around them, his gaze scanning the area as they made their way slowly along. “So I’d like you to remember where we’re going so you can find your way back again.”
Ah. She tried to look up more often and take note of unusual trees or shrubs as cues to mentally mark their path. “This seems easy to navigate.”
Brandon nodded. “If something comes up and I tell you to run, this is the way I’d like you to take if you can.”
“I’d be making a ton of noise.” Didn’t seem like the best way to bolt if she was running away from someone.
“You’d be making a lot of noise no matter where you went.” Brandon paused and held out his hand to her to help her over a log. “The idea here is for us both to know which way you’re going and be familiar with what’s going to be around you. It’ll give me a better chance to take out whatever is pursuing you if I know your route.”
Okay, that made more sense than a simple escape plan.
“You do run faster than I do.” And Haydn did, too.
In fact, both Haydn and Brandon were moving through the woods more quietly than she was managing. With or without the awkward medical boot encasing her right ankle and foot, she was managing to step on every dry twig in this entire forest.
“I wish I could be more capable.” She hated being helpless. So far in this, she’d treated it like a mini vacation. It’d been easy to pretend Brandon was a super thoughtful boyfriend spoiling her with this retreat tucked out of the way. In reality, he was working to keep her alive. “You’ve taken care of everything, and I’ve done nothing useful at all.”
They crossed a small creek bed, dried up but still there. As they reached the top of the slight rise, Brandon turned to face her. “You’ve been cooperative. You listen. You ask intelligent questions. That’s more than most people could manage. This isn’t exactly something they prepare people for in college.”
She huffed out a laugh and closed her eyes. Tiredness washed over her in a wave. “I’m an accountant. There can’t be many other things in this world more normal and more boring. I think I got more preparation for this situation back when I was in the Girl Scouts than I did in college.”
Brandon nodded. “No one expects to be in this kind of situation. It’s amazing you’re not still in denial. But you didn’t waste precious time that way. You accepted what was happening and you did what I asked so I could keep you safe. You’re still doing it.”
And he would save her, over and over again. She believed that with every cell in her body.
“You wouldn’t lie to me.” She looked up into his eyes, a striking combination of gold and green in the changing light. “You said we had to do this, so we are.”
He reached out, gathered her into his arms. When he spoke, his voice was so intense it cracked. “Your faith in me is unbelievable.”
“I don’t know why someone is trying to kill me,” she whispered into his chest. “I don’t know what I saw in those client files, but that has to be it, right? The reason I got fired, too.”
Ky thought so. She’d heard the conversation, and if Brandon thought a…vendor…was after her, then her employer had hired professionals to kill her. If it hadn’t been for Brandon and Haydn, she’d have died in her car and no one would’ve known it’d been anything but a freak accident. People would’ve shaken their heads and missed her, maybe, but they wouldn’t have imagined it could’ve been anything but coincidental.
Brandon continued to hold her close. “We thought it could’ve been because you knew me, Rojas, and Cruz. We haven’t exactly been making friends over the last year, and someone could’ve been targeting you to get at us. There’s people out there watching us.”
She drew her head back so she could look up into his face. “If you blame each other, you have to blame Elisa and Lyn, too. And don’t you dare feel bad or sorry because I care about all of you. I wouldn’t give up a single one of your friendships for anything.”
He bent his head and pressed his lips against hers.
She clung to him, opened, so he could send them drowning in this newfound thing between them.
A few moments later she was breathless, and his voice wasn’t exactly steady, either. “It makes it simpler to know it was your boss who hired somebody. Now that we know who to look at, we can find the connection to whoever is coming after you. It’s a matter of timing now. Either we find them first and you’ll be fine, or they’ll find us and I’ll need to take them out here.”
He made it sound straightforward, but she turned over the possibilities in her head. “What if you don’t find who is coming after me, though? What if they break off and don’t come after us here? We can’t stay here forever.”