Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,19

stick from the surrounding forest, he went to work freeing the vehicle. It took a lot of elbow grease, and he had to hunker down to chip away at mud encasing the tires. As he dug out the last rut, his gaze strayed to something odd clinging to the underside of the rear bumper.

A small black magnetic GPS tracker.

Holy hell.

He wrenched it off on a harsh curse, his blood running cold.

Someone had been watching Lisa. Thanks to her brother’s careless text, Duarte didn’t have to guess at who might have put the damn thing on her vehicle. Phoenix’s enemies, tracking her.

For how long?

Long enough to know her activities and movements.

Long enough to know where she was now, and whoever it was could easily follow her to the mountain. If they hadn’t already.

And Duarte had just left her all alone, unprotected, at the cabin.

As the dread seized him, a sudden chilling image flashed into his mind’s eye: Lisa in the hands of a killer, a gun jammed against her temple.

It was there and gone in an instant, like glimpsing a single frame from a rolling film. Nothing to tell him where or when it would happen, only the stark vision of Lisa’s pretty face contorted in terror as the nose of a SIG nine-millimeter pressed tight at her head.

Fuck. For all he knew, it could be happening right now.

Icy panic froze his veins at the mere possibility.

Duarte drew his pistol and bolted back to the shortcut, adrenaline pouring through him like acid. His boots chewed up the uneven terrain. Branches slapped at him as he cut a frantic path through the bramble and over the rocky, root-tangled forest floor.

All the while he ran, he tried to reassure himself that she was okay. He’d only been gone a few minutes, and the chances that any of Phoenix’s enemies had trailed her to this remote stretch of North Carolina wilderness were slim at best.

But even slim odds were too much for his liking. Especially when his warrior’s instincts were clanging in high alarm.

Something felt off about the mountainside as he tore up the incline, racing to reach Lisa. Someone was in these woods with him now. He’d bet his life on it.

He knew it the same way his instincts had served him well on combat patrols.

A bogey was somewhere on his land right now with his sights set on Lisa. Closing in on the cabin... armed and ready to kill.

Son of a bitch.

Duarte’s chest squeezed as if caught in a vise. If anything happened to Lisa because he’d let his fucking guard down, he didn’t know how he would live with himself.

And then he heard it.

A single gunshot. Up ahead of him through the woods. Where the cabin was.

No. It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

He couldn’t already be too late to save her.

He ran faster, his heart about to explode in his chest.

Goddamn it, no!

~ ~ ~

Yanked from a pleasant drowse, Lisa bolted upright.

Was that a gunshot?

Holding the sheet to her naked chest, she shook off her sleep and blinked to clear her eyes. She was in the middle of John’s bed. His empty bed.

And that sharp, echoing crack outside had definitely been a gunshot.

“John?” No answer. No sound at all from anywhere in the cabin. “Oh God, where are you? John!”

She flew off the mattress. Got dressed as fast as she could, forgoing her bra, which had evidently gotten lost somewhere on the bedroom floor a few hours earlier. No time for shoes, she tore out of the cabin and into the dewy, early morning forest outside.

She spotted him a couple of yards ahead of her, near the ditch she’d stumbled into the night before.

“John!”

He wasn’t alone. Another man stood in front of him, his back to Lisa. A mane of shaggy, sun-streaked dark blond hair fell to his shoulders in beach bum waves, but there was nothing else soft about him. He was dressed in a camo shirt and olive cargo pants that made him blend in with the foliage around him. A big man, he was tall and muscular and intimidating, nearly the size and bulk of John.

And, like John, he also held a pistol down at his side.

They both looked her way as Lisa hurried toward them. John’s dark eyes were grave, but he didn’t warn her away as she ran toward him with her heart in her throat.

The other man’s face was equally sober, and... vaguely familiar.

Confused, Lisa tried to process the tanned, angular cheeks and sharp blue