Page 38 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

Or worse.

After what we shared last night, the bond between us is even stronger—and I’m even more determined to make sure that Charli’s psycho ex never gets a chance to get close to her again. She doesn’t deserve that. No, she deserves a chance to get out into the world and live the life she was meant to live—the life she was on track for when I knew her.

And the life that, I can’t help but wonder, she might have been able to stick to if I hadn’t dumped her the way I did.

Not that I believe for a second that I was some lynchpin to her success or ability to do what she wanted, no. Nothing like that. But I did abandon her with no warning. Gave her no chance to get her feet under her before I took off. Anyone would have been thrown for a loop by that—anyone would have looked for someone, in their next relationship, who would give them the kind of stability and certainty that I had so utterly failed to provide for her.

And James gave her that. At least, for long enough that he managed to pull her into his web, and by the time she realized, it was too late. That’s the part that kills me, knowing that I might have laid the groundwork for him to move in and take what he wanted from her.

All the more reason to make fucking sure that he never gets the chance again.

But I can’t make out any trouble around the cabin, even in the area of the woods where we were fired on before. The roads are quiet, despite the fact that the weather has started to improve. I want to tell myself that he might have lost interest, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that a guy like that would give up on what he thought he was owed so quickly.

I can’t believe how close she came to marrying him. That’s another thing that fucks with me—we found her in her wedding dress. Just a few more hours, and she would have been his wife, and I would never have known a thing about it. I would never have had a chance to make things right with her…

And now, the thought of that stings just to think about. I don’t even want to imagine what her life might have looked like if she hadn’t been brave enough to flee with everything she had, and leave that bastard behind for good.

I take the path back to the cabin—there isn’t a single route down there, of course, and we try to vary up the journeys we take to get there whenever we’re able to. Safer that way. Harder for people to find us if we haven’t beaten down the grass and branches to guide whoever’s looking for us straight to our cabin. Before, it was just a precaution, but now it feels damn close to a necessity.

And I’m just about to round the final bend of the river that will bring me in line with the cabin once more, when something catches the corner of my eye. I glance around—it’s a flash of metal and red light, buried among the undergrowth. My eyes slide this way and that, and I try to make out if anyone’s watching me, but I can’t see anything else out of place.

Slowly, I pick my way toward the object. Sure enough, it’s a trap—not one of the old metal traps we use for hunting, but something more modern. It still has the sharp teeth and snap mechanism, but it’s fitted with some kind of alarm, a blinking red light, along with a speaker that’s surely meant to go off the moment someone treads on it. Whoever put this here, they wanted to know when it was activated.

It would have led them right to us.

I pull the small penknife from my pocket and slip it beneath the wire that ties it to a small battery back—as quickly as I can, I saw through it till it pops loose, and lift the trap into my hands. As I examine it, my heart sinks. They’re still looking for us, and chances are, this is far from the only trap they were hoping we’d stumble into.

I carry it back to the cabin, and when I get there, Chuck and Dax are already up, sipping on coffee in the kitchen. Chuck parts his lips to greet me—but when he sees what I’m carrying, his brow furrows.

“What the fuck is that?” he demands, striding over to me, his eyes fixed on the trap.

“I found it out in the woods this morning,” I reply, dropping it down onto the counter with a clatter. “Attached to a battery pack. Looks like it comes with an alarm and some kind of tracker.”

“Shit,” Chuck mutters as he looks it over. “Yeah, I recognize this. It sends out a location when it’s set off, and digs itself into the ground so whoever’s in it can’t go anywhere.”

“So whoever left this for us…”

“They wanted us to get stuck,” I finish up for Dax, grimly. There’s no point trying to deny it. We can all see the truth for what it is. Might not be pretty, but God knows we’ve been faced with hard shit before.

“This is good,” Chuck remarks, placing the trap back on the table.

“Good?” I exclaim. “How the fuck can you?—”

“Because it means they still don’t know where we are,” he points out. “They haven’t come deep enough into the woods yet to find us. And now that we know those traps are out there, all we have to do is find them, move them, and then set them off. Send them on a wild goose chase and give us more time.”

He speaks with a clipped, authoritative tone—the same kind I know he used when he used to work comms. Dax stiffens slightly, and Chuck glances over at him.

“Callum and I can handle this. You don’t have to?—”

“No,” Dax shoots back, cutting him off. “I want to help. I’m not going to stand around doing nothing while she’s in danger.”

He looks toward my bedroom door, where Charli’s still sleeping—she slipped into bed late last night and snuggled against me, her head resting on my arm, her hair spilled out over the pillow. I could tell she was smiling, though I didn’t think to ask her what had put her in such a good mood.

“I meant what I said last night,” Chuck adds. “She has shit on that man that he doesn’t want to get out. All we need to do is find some way to prove it, and we’ll be able to find someone out there who’s desperate to get their hands on that information.”

I look between the two of them. Hearing them speak about her like this, it’s heartening—but I can’t help but feel other questions nagging at my mind, other questions that I know I need the answer to.

“If we’re going to do this,” I begin, “then we need to be honest with each other.”

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