couldn’t point to a damn thing except there were new people haunting these woods carrying AR-15s, which wasn’t illegal, and if they were just playing at being soldiers he couldn’t say a whole helluva lot about any of it. There’d been no overt threat. He didn’t like that one of them had followed her the other day, but on the other hand she was probably right: after checking out her kit they’d have to realize she was exactly what he’d told them she was, a painter.
Except that the increasing amount of surveillance they seemed to be under was making him jumpy as a cat. It was almost like the tightening of a noose. Which didn’t make sense. Why the hell would they care about a painter?
So they shouldn’t pay Sky any further attention. Did he like that one of them may have been lurking outside the cabin yesterday? Definitely not. But it wasn’t like he could prove it was one of them. People wandered these woods all the time, and while the numbers weren’t huge, there were still about twenty or thirty hikers and campers out here at any one time. Then there were the poachers. They probably constituted a bigger threat than Buddy and his friends.
In fact, it could well have been a poacher who mixed it up with that bear yesterday. That was more likely than that it had been one of the toy soldiers.
Sky wouldn’t have a thing to fear from the poachers. They didn’t like attention, and the only people who could cause them trouble were the rangers.
So... He blew a long, loud breath between his lips and told himself to calm down. He usually wasn’t one to get worked up, but since Sky’s arrival he’d been getting worked up a whole lot.
She awakened his every protective instinct, and he seemed to have a whole lot of those. Worse, he had figured out that she desperately needed affirmation in every way. She had been a trained soldier. Hector had undermined her in a lot of ways. She was struggling to regain her confidence, and to have argued with her about her ability to look after herself would have been wounding.
He couldn’t do that to her.
And to think that such a short time ago he would have thought her perfectly safe in that clearing, just sitting there painting. What had been the threat to her then? A bear? Not likely when all she was doing was sitting there. The smells of human and those oil paints would have kept any sensible bear quite a distance away.
So why was he so certain that things had changed? Because that Cap guy had been hanging around on the fringes of so many radical groups that espoused terrorism? No reason they would pick on one woman.
But then there was the hiker. Much as he’d tried to minimize that when talking about it with her, it still nagged at him. A lot of things could kill you out there alone in the woods. No question. A fall, a stumble, hypothermia if you got caught in the rain...yeah, whole lot of reasons. And no good reason to tie it to Buddy and Cap.
He stopped in at headquarters, let Dusty loose in the corral with a few other horses and spoke for a few minutes with Lucy.
“I’ll make sure someone goes that way at least once before you get back,” Lucy promised him. “We’ll keep an eye on her for you. I just wish I knew what was coming down. Or if something even is.”
So did he. Climbing back into the truck, he headed into town, determined to stop and see Gage and find out about this ATF move. As law enforcement himself, he had a right to know.
Then he was going to stock two coolers and hightail it back up there.
Because for some reason he kept seeing those trip wires he hadn’t been able to check out last night. Tonight, he promised himself. Tonight he was going to make sure they were innocent...or not.
Having an action plan settled him a bit. He knew he ought to insist Sky stay in town until this was over, but he figured he wouldn’t get very far with that. That woman was stubborn.
And for some reason that made him grin. Her arguments might sometimes seem to be all over the map, but he had figured out the gist: Sky had something to prove, and to her that meant sticking this out and being his sidekick.