Page 68 of Harrison Hyde and the Runaway Bride

“Dad’s been a wreck all week,” Lily said. “But Ethan has him laughing out loud.” She spoke softly, so her father wouldn’t hear in the front seat of Ethan Brand’s gigantic pickup truck. It occurred to Harrison that his sister would never call Maria’s singing cowboy cousin by his unwanted nickname. She’d known him as Ethan Brand because Spotify knew him as Ethan Brand.

She was a serious girl, Harrison’s baby sister. She always had been. She put her head down and did the work, whatever the work of the moment happened to be, from learning to write her name to earning her pin. She sat beside Harrison in the back seat, looking so much like their mom it was almost as if she was there, too, peeking out from inside her daughter’s blue eyes every once in a while.

Ethan had been in lighthearted conversation with their father the entire time.

Harrison’s initial impression of “Bubba” had beenbig.Then, talented, when he’d heard him playing by the campfire. And later, kind, when he was the only one who called him by his actual name. It turned out he was also a gentle and caring sort of man. He felt a little bad that it surprised him. But the big guyhad talked Hyram right out of being scared and had probably lowered the older man’s blood pressure while he was at it.

“I can’t wait to see the ranch,” Hyram said. “The way you describe it, it’s obvious you love it.”

“We’re already on it, actually,” Ethan replied. “This here road cuts right through Brand land.”

“Amazing. Oh, if only it were daylight.” Hyram was looking out his window, but it was hard to see much besides shapes in the darkness. “Do you take after your mom or your dad, Ethan?” Hyram asked at length.

“Oh, well, that’s a whole other story, Hyram. A whole other story. My birth mother passed when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Before she died, she left me on the doorstep of the Texas Brand with, she said in her note, the kindest family she’d ever met. They’d taken her in once, when she was in trouble. Helped her so much she named me after the head of the family. My mother’s sister, my aunt Chelsea, came lookin’ for me, and wound up stayin’. She married Garrett and they adopted me.”

“That’s a helluva story!” his father said. “Left on the doorstep!” Then he coughed for about a minute and a half.

Ethan hadn’t mentioned his birth father, but Harrison had heard the rest of the tale from Maria. His birth father had murdered his mother and was serving life in prison. That was probably the cause of the uneasiness behind his eyes. There were unseen depths to Ethan Brand.

Harrison glanced behind them, but he didn’t see the headlights of Maria’s van back there. He pulled out his phone to text her and tapped her contact, which was just her initials in a blue circle. He didn’t have a photo of her to his name. He’d have to remedy that. When he thought of her, his heart twisted into a knot of pleasure and pain that was impossible to untie. They went hand in hand. He wanted to be with her, but he couldn’t be with her, and it was killing him.

That was when something broadsided them out of nowhere. Lily screamed as they were plowed off the pavement and into some trees, and the truck crumpled inward around them. Harrison threw himself over his sister, and when the grinding stopped and he looked, the spot where he’d been sitting no longer existed.

Up front, Ethan got his door open, got out, and helped Harrison’s father out behind him, picking him right up. “He’s fixin’ to ram us again,” he shouted. “Everybody out, fast!”

The rear passenger door was mashed against a tree, impossible to open. Lily scrambled over the back seat, and jumped out of the truck through the open driver’s door. Through the shattered passenger side window, Harrison saw a big black truck with an oversized, after-market bumper, surging toward him. He dove over the seat and out, as the killer rammed the truck again. Racing into the thick woods, he caught up to his sister, encircled her shoulders with his arm and kept running as the attacker rammed the truck yet again.

The revving and smashing continued. Ethan was up ahead, carrying Hyram piggyback.

Harrison still had his phone in his hand. He wondered if it had been an error turning it back on when they’d landed. Maria’s contact was still open. He tapped the word AMBUSH and kept on running.

The deer let her approach, but when Maria got close, it sprang up, leapt away on three legs, then lay down again. She tried a second time, and the same thing happened. The third time, theanimal kept on going, it’s gait uneven, but rapid as it vanished into the woods.

She sighed, shaking her head. “This one’s up to you, Mother Nature,” she said as she turned. Willow was shining her phone’s flashlight onto the front of the van. When she got close enough, Maria could see a small dent in the fender.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Just hope the deer is.”

“Looked pretty peppy to me,” Willow said. “Want me to keep driving?”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind.” She was exhausted, worried, and maybe it was just because she was tired, but she didn’t feel very hopeful about things with Harry. Now that she’d spent time with his family, she didn’t blame him for not wanting to move away from them. Or for wanting to keep his promise to his mother. It kind of made her love him even more.

Oh, dear Lord, I love him, she thought. I love him, and he’s fixin’ to break my heart. She couldn’t even be angry about it. He’d been honest from the start.

Her phone pinged, and she picked it up.

Harrison: AMBUSH

“Oh, Lord, somethin’s wrong.” She showed Will the one-word text, and Willow stomped the gas pedal. “Tell the family he’s in trouble,” she said, then she told her own phone to call dispatch, while Maria texted. Dispatch answered, and Willow talked on speaker. “It’s Deputy Brand. We’ve got trouble. Possibly another attempt on Harrison Hyde.”

“Location?”

“North Brand Lane,” Willow said. “Start looking around the five-mile mark.”

“Dispatching deputies now.”

They rounded a curve, and the headlights illuminated devastating wreckage. Maria thought her heart stopped. The smashed-in vehicle was red. Other than that, you could barely tell it was a truck. It was flattened against some trees. Willow shut the headlights off and stopped where she was, pulling off the road a good distance ahead of the scene.

Maria yanked the door handle, but Will grabbed her arm then pointed. Off the opposite side of the road from Bubba’s ruined pickup, there was a large black truck with some kind of metal grill on the front. Willow opened the glove compartment and pulled out a handgun only she could have put there.

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