Murder_ A Sinful Secrets Romance - Ella James Page 0,11

me, so I need to spend some time figuring out where my bears are tonight, and how they seem to be doing. I track them via their anklets and then, because my mom is still going strong—she’s leaning toward a woman mostly covered by a large shawl; “perhaps really a mourning veil,” she says excitedly—I check the footage from Cams 1 and 2 around the time I was out practicing.

To my horror, I see something. Something blurry. Something moving. Something man-sized. And then, just when I start to second-guess myself, I see a hand. A real, flesh-colored hand—I’m sure it is!

I stop the footage and hit rewind, and I can finally see. It is a person. Holy shit! It’s someone wearing camouflage. I would never have realized had I not seen that left hand. He must have taken off his camo gloves.

Oh holy shit, who is this person?

The trajectory in which he’s moving in the footage points him toward me. He’s moving toward me at the time I would have been headed back to the house.

Shiiiiitttt.

“Hey Mom, can I call you back?”

“Of course. Don’t worry with it tonight. I feel much better. Thanks for listening, love.”

“No prob. It sounds amazing, Mom. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up with her and dial Jamie. “It is a man! It’s a man, it’s a man!”

“Whoa there, Squirrel. Your new neighbor?”

“No, the camo ripple ghost thing on the cams. It’s totally a man. He took his—I guess camo glove off, I could clearly see a hand. Who the hell is it?! He’s a murderer! Talk to Niccolo, Jamie! Tell his Mafioso ass to come save me!” I flop back in my desk chair, out of breath and laughing at my own dramatics.

“How much Absinthe did you have this morning?” Jamie asks.

“STFU, whoreface. I mean it, there’s a man on the cams and he was out there when I was out there. Tell me that’s not creepy as hell.”

I keep Jamie on the phone for thirty minutes, running my wild theories by her, forcing her to promise she will call me first thing in the morning, telling her if I’m kidnapped, I’ll grab the bag of pistachios from my night stand and drop them in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. In other words, trying to make her laugh.

Say what you will about my dislike of Niccolo—she fell for him in the days after my accident; at one point the police tried to link the accident to his younger brother; BFF-related jealousy; yada yada whatever—but I do have one legimate complaint: he’s a boring mofo. She spends too much time with his dreary ass, if you ask me. Right now he’s producing a movie in L.A. Since Jamie lives in Nashville, they’re only seeing each other two or three times a month, leaving more time for me and actual fun.

I review the camera footage one more time, watching up until the moment the hand, and the blur of the man’s body, disappear, sometime after he has turned around, away from me and back toward the hill behind my house.

I take the safety off the .38 I keep in my nightstand drawer, say my prayers, and fall asleep mostly untroubled, having managed to partition off my ax-murderer anxiety and any residual upset about the zoning situation—me talking and snarile-ing at the commission meeting in my pathetic attempt to arouse pity.

In dreamland, I find myself on that road, holding a gardenia petal in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I keep hearing the squeak of boots against the fresh powder. Snowflakes fall on my nose and forehead, melting on my skin. When I move, my long hair sways around my hips. When I wake up Thursday morning, I remember that: my hair was long. Down to my ass. Not in real life, but in the dream.

I Google it and read that long hair in dreamland is a sign of strength.

Even so, I grab the .38 and tuck it into the pocket of my sheepskin coat before I slip into the woods.

When I tell people I run a bear sanctuary, I almost always get one of two responses.

“You? Like—just you? Aren’t you scared of being EATEN?” Or, “OMG, what’s it like playing with those precious bears?”

The boring truth is, there is almost zero chance of being “eaten,” not just because black bears are almost never aggressive unless provoked, but also because there are lots of common sense precautions.

I don’t take food into or around