Page 79 of Snake

“Chase!” Autumn called.

“Figure your own way out of this hellhole,” he yelled back. “I’m going home.”

He started walking again and kept going, all the way off the site. He was heading to the rental car. She patted her pockets, looking for the keys, but she’d given them to one of Adrienne’s sons, who’d been helping unload. Had he returned the keys to Chase?

Was Chase seriously going to strand her here?

“CHASE!” She hated to shout, but she put her whole chest into his name. He didn’t even twitch.

She started to run after him, but a hand caught her arm at once. Looking back, she saw Cox.

He shook his head. “Don’t.”

“What? Don’t what? Go after him? I have to!” Just then a car door slammed hard, she looked that way—yep, Chase had the keys and was leaving. But he wouldn’t leave town without her, right? Not even Charlton Isley III was that much of a jerk.

“No, you don’t,” Cox insisted. “I don’t want you goin’ after him.”

“What?” Who was Cox to say where she could and couldn’t go?

Chase spun the wheels and sent gravel in every direction as he pulled away—and headed not toward the clubhouse or the B&B but toward the town limit.

He really meant to leave her behind.

“He’s leaving!”

“Let him,” Cox answered, and it sounded like an order, not a request.

“That guy is in his feelings right now, hon,” Bart Elstad said, coming up from the side. “From where I stood, he’s lookin’ for a reason to blame you for that. Give him his space.”

Cox still had her arm; he’d shifted his grip so it was less obviously restraining, but she knew he’d hold her in place if she tried to get free. She yanked anyway, and yep, he wasn’t having it.

“He came at you once,” he said, holding her eyes with his own and not letting go. “Not again.”

Was it the look in his eyes? Was it the way he held her? Was it the words themselves, the protectiveness clenched around every syllable? Or was it what they’d shared last night, and the bit of afterglow that had held between them all day?

In one way or another, it was Cox. She turned her back on her boss, and maybe her career, because Cox was holding her here. Which felt like a metaphor bigger than this moment.

Oh, that couldn’t be a good idea. It had to be a terrible idea.

But once she made that reckless decision, one that would certainly have painful consequences, she shoved worry to the side. All her life, she’d been focused on strategy—seeing the whole field; making all the right choices; navigating around insults, slights, and condescension without showing damage; always putting herself in the best position for success. She was tired of the game, tired of always trying to predict, to control where each move would take her, to map each path that opened and erase each one that closed.

Right now, she stood at the end of her map, and all around her was nothing but blank space.

Okay. Time to see what happened next.

Chapter Nineteen

There was a lot of traffic in Cox’s head, and no one in there directing it. Autumn stood before him, looking up at him with eyes both fretful and curious. Her wrist was still caught in his grip. He had to figure out what the fuck was going on in his head.

He’d stopped her from chasing after her boss. The words that had come from his mouth had suggested that he was worried for her safety—and he was; that shithead was behaving like a bratty middle-schooler, and he’d already assaulted her once—but the real truth was he’d grabbed for her without thinking. She’d been ready to run away, and he’d had to stop her. If there had been any thought at all in his gesture, it had been only stop her.

She’d stopped. The boss was gone, it looked a lot like he meant not to come back, to leave Autumn behind, and she was standing still, waiting for him to make sense of why she was.

Like a traffic cop herself, she got his thoughts moving in a more orderly fashion. Casting an irritated look at the road, she sighed impatiently. “Well, I’m going to have to find a new way home, apparently. What a jerk.”

At some point, Cox had noticed that Autumn didn’t really cuss. An occasional ‘damn’ or ‘hell,’ maybe an ‘ass,’ but rarely anything more colorful. She wasn’t a prude, didn’t twitch at his or any of the Horde’s much more robust collection of obscenities, but she didn’t use them herself. He found it curious.

“D’you need to go earlier than you planned?” he asked.

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