Page 3 of Recurve Ridge

Good thing that neither Jon, me, nor any of my boys back in the cabin counted as theaverage human. Years of training kicked in as adrenaline dumped into my system at will.

My prey appeared to be a solitary chaos. I paced the clearing’s boundary on silent feet, seeking what tore through my section of the woods. The flighty sounds stumbled on alone long after its predator had been outrun. Snapped twigs brushed the pads of my fingers as I passed, their sharp edges digging into hardened calluses.

I stepped around small depressions that disturbed pine needle mulch and bared the earth in tiny sections. No heel prints indented the exposed soil. I knelt at the side of the damage path, letting my fingers sink into the exposed dirt beneath the cypresses’ overhang where less snow gathered. The shallow imprint had no defined edges. Less than what a full-grown man would make, which meant my prey was either a small-framed person or a child.

Or a barefoot woman running alone.

That thought spurred me into the depths of the forest that had become my home over the past five years. I learned the ridge’s secrets though never divulged my own in turn, relieved by its silent support. The perfect companion for a man who took society’s eviction notice and hung it over his threshold in place of a welcome mat.

A flash lit a path beyond the trees. I frowned. Skin had a way of throwing light in the darkest places, an easy giveaway for any unassuming target. I spotted that earlier when she first darted away.

When had I become so sure the runner was female?

That should provide her more endurance than a child. I filed the extra information away as a wild guess at best. Regardless, those rare flashes gave me something to aim toward.

The dodging pattern transformed into a primal path, the brain existing in pure survival mode after more than a few minutes after her critical incident. Soon the spike would deplete, and she’d crash.

I intended to be there when she fell.

But for now, she ran.

I timed my breaths with her movements, catching the second the pattern changed—a falter in step, a dodge around a fallen log…. I weaved between scarred trunks and snagged a flailing limb as she shot past.

The body attached to the slim extremity followed as I swung the cold arm in a broad arc. She grazed the next tree, knocking small heaps of snow to the forest floor, tangled in the undergrowth, and crashed face-first into my chest, slamming the breath from us both.

No startled cry ripped from her as I cupped a hand behind her head, worried I broke the poor creature’s nose. A handful of twigs and pine needles trickled from her damp, mussed hair and streamed over the back of my hand in a steady cascade. She didn’t make a single sound or move at all.

The woods settled as I wove my fingers through her dark chocolate curls, a natural silkiness detectable among the snares. What should have been long, luscious waves resembled a hawk’s nest that tumbled over my knuckles, massing about her head like a dark halo to a fallen creature.

A tearstained alabaster face turned up. Eyes older than her maybe nineteen, early twenty years perhaps stared at me. Her gaze slid out of focus, glazed with unadulterated terror. I doubted she saw me or anything else in front of her. Despite her pale skin, ice cold beneath my roughened palms, her body warmth soaked into my torso too fast. I registered the lack of clothing barrier at a sensory level before my eyes took in the additional information. Barefoot and naked.

She was naked.

In my arms.

Bruises bloomed on every surface in a wide array of blacks and blues, all recent. I scanned her arms and legs, but there were no telltale yellowish tinges, no evidence of older abuse. She was blessed with deep blue irises ringed with violet, a hue somewhere between midnight and dark ocean. I wanted to fall into her eyes and never escape. Fear, along with exhaustion, dulled their luminous quality, but her stunning beauty still sucked breath from my lungs. My chest closed tight on expired air that refused to escape.

Whoever hurt you just topped my shit list.

A ripple of renewed energy slid through my heated veins. I didn’t quell the urge to find who had ruined her and revisit the pain she suffered on the asshole tenfold.

Biting back a growl, I scanned her body for more immediate injuries. Puffy pink lips were split in more than one place and torn in others. I leaned forward, tracing the rounded depressions with my gaze alone. Were thoseteeth marks?

Someone ripped her from whatever coddled world she had existed in before her assault and threw her into my dark territory where civilization and soft people had no place.

That made both her person and her vengeance mine to safeguard.

Fury seared my insides as I stared at her bare form, my gaze utterly uncontested. The woods fell into an eerie purgatory. No call echoed through the close-knit branches often filled with the soft chatter of my furry and feathered neighbors.

The girl took a shuddering breath that should have jerked her back to the present but didn’t. Her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers in an erratic rhythm that began to slow as her body accepted her current predicament over the ongoing struggle to escape.

One breath became many. She gulped at the frigid air in shallow gasps that barely made it into her lungs before she expelled short pants in racking, tearless sobs. My heart wrenched as I held her tight, weathering the remnants of her fear and wondering what the fuck to do with her.

I was used to triaging broken bones and burns or worse on a battlefield, not recuperating a shattered mind in a fragile body.

I stared over her head, my jacket heavy across the taut line of my shoulders. No threat appeared from the gloom that might obscure an enemy. The only other heartbeat came from the prey in my arms, and even that thumped at half the rate I expected.

My gaze swept back to the girl, and a different muscle turned over.

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