time he kicked his boots under the pull-out mattress so he didn’t trip over them in the middle of the night and sat down in the chair, Hadley’s breathing had already evened out as she slept. Without the usual annoyed expression she wore when she saw him, she looked softer, sweeter, somehow even sexier than usual. Hell, she looked every bit like she was the kindhearted person she presented around Web. But she wasn’t. And Will couldn’t—Web couldn’t—afford to forget that.
Chapter Eight
Will’s neck was never going to be the same.
As he sat up, he rolled his neck and shoulders, working out the aches from sleeping mostly upright in a chair that was about as comfortable as the middle of the back seat of a subcompact car. Sunshine cut through the blinds in the cabin’s big front window, landing in a bright puddle in the middle of the empty pull-out bed. The sheet was still a twisted, rumpled mess, as if she’d slept about as well as he had—but there was no Hadley in sight.
That probably wasn’t a bad thing, considering he’d seen plenty of her in his dreams—correction, his nightmares last night. And in every single one of them, she’d been wearing those silky little pajamas, and the strap holding her top in place kept slipping off her shoulder. It was just enough to give him a perma-hard-on while he slept, but that was it. Thank God.
“So are you sure everything is going okay in Harbor City?” Hadley’s mom’s voice filtered in from the porch through the half-opened front door. “I worry about you being out there all alone.”
“I’m not alone,” Hadley said softly. “I have friends and a job I love doing, if not the people I do it with.”
“And now you have Will,” Stephanie said.
Feeling like some kind of cartoon villain, Will tiptoed over to the window, getting almost there before his little toe got snagged on the foot of the pull-out bed. He kept moving forward but his toe went backward and the stupid iron bar stayed in place. Pain shot up his leg and he clamped his jaw shut to keep from yelling out, reflexively lifting his leg and spinning around.
That’s when he saw it. Immediately, he froze with his injured foot in the air and fear clamping down on his balls.
Snuggled inside the tangled sheets bathed in a pool of sunshine was a fox or a coyote or a baby wolf or an alien animal that only lived on this ranch. Hell, this could be the snipe Knox and Weston had been talking about last night at dinner, even though he knew, like the rest of the world with internet, that they weren’t real. This thing, though, was very real, even if he had no clue what it was. All he knew was it was an animal he’d never seen in any of the Harbor City parks. About the size of a cat, it was gray with orange on its sides. It flicked its bushy tail, the black tip landing right up against its snout. It had one yellow eye cracked open and was staring right at Will. Its lips curled back, revealing pointy little teeth, and let out a low growl.
Cold panic slid down Will’s spine. “It’s okay, boy,” he said, holding up his hands while still balanced on one foot. “I’m allowed to be here.”
The low growl turned into a medium one.
“Hadley,” he hollered, not sure if this was a pet or a rabid animal ready to rip his face off. “I think I might have found the snipe your brothers were going hunting to find.”
The front door opened and Hadley walked in. She was still in her pajamas, her long brown hair pulled into a high ponytail that bounced as she moved. She took one look at him frozen in place with his hands out, his right foot off the ground, and what he was pretty damn sure was a very manly look of pure fucking what-the-hell on his face before breaking out into giggles.
“That’s not a snipe,” she said, her arms wrapped around her belly. “It’s Lightning.”
“What is a lightning?”
“He’s a greedy old swift fox who would steal the hard-boiled egg off your breakfast dish and poop on whatever he claims is his, but he wouldn’t bite you,” she said, coming closer and scratching the fox behind the ears. “Gabe found him as a tod years ago after he’d been injured protecting his sister, who’d gotten cornered by a coyote. She