Page 29 of Line of Resistance

But from the sound of it, they were involved with the authorities, at least at the local level. Maybe that played a part. Gave them a little more… flexibility.

Nate’s eyes came her way, appraising in a way that made her shift in her seat. “What about you?”

Eloise held the bag tighter, using it like a shield. “What do you mean, what about me?”

Nate’s wickedly appealing lips twitched, hinting at a smile. “How many moose have you killed?”

Eloise chewed her lower lip, uncertain how much of an answer she wanted to offer. Eventually, she settled on the simplest option, which was the truth.

“Moose? None.” She glanced outside again, feeling irrationally angry at a dead animal who was just doing his thing because his thing directly led to her being trapped in the snow with the one man she planned never to see again. “But I would’ve killed that one if I could have.”

CHAPTER TEN

NATE

NONE OF THIS was going the way he expected.

Not only was he now just as stranded as Eloise was, but he had to take an animal down in front of her. Luckily her reaction hadn’t been what he expected.

At all.

It was almost as surprising as the confident way she said she would have done the same thing. As if hunting wasn’t completely foreign to her. It went directly against the sweet, soft, gentle temperament she’d shown so far.

Mostly.

She hadn’t been so sweet and soft when he was holding open the back hatch of her SUV. It made him think maybe there was more to her.

It was intriguing. And problematic.

Nate shifted around, trying to give Eloise as much space as he could in the back of her small SUV. The silence stretched out between them, lasting long enough he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Is that something you’re capable of? Killing a moose?”

The more he thought about it, the more he realized there were hints Eloise wasn’t all sugar and spice. She’d nearly taken his head off over Bryson. Managed to beat a few bruises into his back when he hauled her out of the bar. The Nerf gun she wielded like a sniper.

And that sneaky scowl he’d caught sight of a handful of times. It drove him fucking wild. Made him continue doing exactly what he said he wouldn’t.

Which was unlike him.

He’d dated occasionally over the years, usually hanging around for a month or two, but backing off before things got serious. Eloise definitely wasn’t the first woman he’d given mixed signals, and, as much as he hated to admit it, she probably wouldn’t be the last. Not because he didn’t desperately want something serious. Something real. He did.

His reasons for running away the second real feelings started to settle in were more deep-seated and difficult to reconcile. Almost as difficult as it was turning out to be to stay away from Eloise.

“I guess my best answer is, maybe?” She pondered his question for a second, chewing on her lower lip. “They’re probably a lot like a deer. If you hit them in the right spot they go down easily, but if you don’t...”

“Moose are not like deer.” He understood her reasoning, and it opened up a can of worms he fully planned to dig into, but he couldn’t have Eloise believing an animal as large and dangerous as a moose would be easy to take down. “Once I had to help take down a moose trapped in someone’s backyard.” He shook his head. “It was the first time I ever had to deal with anything like that, and I was shocked at how much of a pain in the ass they can be.” He met her gaze, wanting to be sure she understood he didn’t take killing an animal lightly. “I’ve seen them put a grown man in the hospital, and he got off lucky. If that thing had gotten to you—”

A wave of fear closed his throat, making it impossible to continue the thought. Eloise was more of a temptation than he’d faced in forever, and the thought of her getting hurt at a time when he couldn’t get to her was almost unbearable.

“I get it.” Her eyes dropped his, fixing on where her gloved hands sat in her lap. “But that’s just the way things go when you live somewhere like this.”

He sat with her comment for a minute, trying to wrap his brain around all the new information he was getting. “How long have you lived here?” He thought Naomi mentioned Eloise moving sometime in the past few years, but she wasn’t acting like someone new to Alaska.

“This time?” Eloise tucked her hands between her thighs, wedging them into the fabric of her skirt. “Almost three years.”

“This time?” Nate resisted the urge to shift closer. “What about the time before that?”

“I moved here with my dad when I was really young then left to go to college. When I graduated, I got a job in Idaho and lived there for a few years.” She curled inward, arms tucking close to her body. “Then I came back.”

She was clearly cold, and in his haste to get to her, he ran out of Tyson’s house with nothing to warm her back up. He might have managed to figure out where she was, but thanks to an unexpected roadblock, her situation hadn’t changed. Except, now she had company. Whether that was good or bad was yet to be seen.

---