“So, in essence, you depended on Isaac Driscoll to obtain things not available to you?”
There were too many words in that sentence he didn’t understand, but he nodded anyway. “Yes.”
“Did you like Isaac Driscoll?”
“I don’t know. I just traded with him.”
The agent waited for a second before talking. “Okay. Have you seen anyone unusual in, er, your area of the woods so to speak, recently?”
Don’t tell anyone about me.
“No.”
“Okay.” He gave Lucas a long look and Lucas stared back. “Have you ever been to town before, Lucas?”
“No.” That was almost the truth. He’d been to town once, but only walked a few steps into it. He didn’t want to tell the agent about that. His muscles still got achy and tight when he thought about it.
“How did you come to live way out there?”
“I . . . my . . . parents couldn’t care for me. Driscoll let me stay on his land.”
The agent stared at him, but his face didn’t say anything. “So, you’ve been living out there how long?”
“Fifteen winters.” So many. So much cold. So much hunger. So much loneliness.
The agent was looking at him in that funny way. Lucas didn’t know what he was thinking. “Alone? All of them?”
“Yes.”
The agent was quiet for a minute. He nodded. “All right, Lucas, thank you for your time. We’ll be out to talk to you if we have more questions. And of course, to return your property once it’s been tested.”
Lucas had no idea what they were testing for, but he nodded. I want to go home. But even as he thought it, his heart dropped. Because the forest was no longer the place that made sense. Everything was different now.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Agent Gallagher opened the door and smiled. “Ready to go if you are.”
She nodded, getting up from the chair where she’d been sitting as she’d resisted turning on the monitor again, and followed the agent out of the room. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the man—Lucas—being led out of the holding cell by Dwayne. “Sorry for the holdup,” Dwayne was saying. “Thanks for answering our questions. You’re free to go.”
Dwayne turned and Lucas followed, swiping a magazine out of the holder on the wall outside the restroom door as they walked by, and quickly sliding it under his coat. Harper blinked. Had he just stolen a magazine right behind the sheriff’s back?
Dwayne stepped aside and Lucas looked up and met Harper’s eyes. For a frozen second, their gazes locked, and Harper felt trapped in his stare. Spellbound. She wanted to shake her head in amazement at seeing him in the flesh. As though he might have only existed inside that screen in the room she’d just exited, and the reality of his three-dimensional presence in front of her was almost . . . shocking.
And God, the way he was looking at her—the animosity she’d seen when he’d stared up at the camera gone, replaced only by . . . deep curiosity and that same keen intelligence. She’d never felt so completely captured in someone’s gaze. She swallowed. He was big. Bigger than he’d appeared on the small screen. At least six four and muscular. Completely overwhelming.
“Harper is going to give me a ride to Driscoll’s,” Agent Gallagher said as Dwayne approached them, Lucas trailing. The agent’s words—thankfully—snapped her from her trance before the older men noticed.
Dwayne looked pleased, shooting Harper a smile. “Excellent. Glad it worked out.”
Lucas stopped a few steps behind Dwayne, his gaze not having left Harper. He stared, his eyes moving over her like he was trying to figure something out. She stared back, and after a beat, Lucas looked away, his gaze roving the room, stopping quickly on this or that, and then moving on to something else. He was cataloguing as though he had just landed on some alien planet. Or stepped out of a time machine. Maybe he did. Maybe he’d recently come from the Cretaceous period and was experiencing civilization for the first time. Then again, the Levi’s he was wearing sort of disproved that theory.
“I’m going home now,” Lucas murmured, and even in that low tone, his voice was surprisingly smooth and expectedly deep. He looked at Harper again, and she saw that his eyes were blue with gold surrounding his iris. Sunset eyes, she thought. They were especially extraordinary in the otherwise rough-hewn lines of his face.
He turned toward the door, and Agent Gallagher stepped forward, halting him. “Deputy Brighton will give you a ride.