Page 74 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
He glances out the window. It’s dark, except for the distant streetlights and the neon beams above the diner’s sign. We see a few parked cars, including ours, but nothing out of the ordinary. Marcus could be out there. Hell, he could be anywhere.
“We’ll take another route into town,” Carlos decrees, “just to be safe.”
“Nowhere is safe anymore,” I sigh.
“I’m still armed and trained to deal with this stuff, Olivia. I need you to take a deep breath and calm down for me. We’ve got this.”
I hope he’s right.
I want to believe him, I really do. But looking back, I’m starting to think that my original idea to leave Ember Ridge wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Marcus is here because of me. He’s hurting people because of me. And he’s not going to stop until he has me back under his control.
Or worse, until I’m dead. Because if Marcus can’t have me, no one else can.
The restof the drive back to Ember Ridge is quiet, rife with tension.
Carlos doesn’t need to tell me that he’s worried, I can feel it. I can feel it deep in my bones, on top of my own fear. Nothing feels safe anymore, regardless of what he says, despite his reassurances.
“Take another deep breath,” he tells me, both hands firmly gripping the wheel.
He keeps his eyes on the road, the night unraveling ahead with its dark blurs and sprinkle of overhead stars. We’re taking the scenic route around the south side of themountain. It added an extra twenty minutes to our estimated arrival time, but it should be a less traveled road at this hour with less chance of picking up a tail.
“I’m breathing,” I tell him.
“Deep breath. I can hear you.”
My response is an exaggerated sigh.
“Hey, I care about your well-being, Olivia, and I don’t want you spiraling over this guy. As long as I’m around, as long as Leo, Dax, and Beck are around, there’s no way he is getting anywhere near you.”
“They should be home by now,” I mutter, checking my phone. “They haven’t texted me yet. Last I heard, they were leaving the scene.”
“No one in their right mind would go after the three of them,” Carlos tells me.
“Yeah, but we’ve already established that Marcus is not in his right mind,” I retort.
Looking out the side mirror, I see two pinpoints of light behind us. They are small, not too close, but they still set my teeth on edge.
Carlos tries to ease my mind with stories about the guys from over the years he’s known them, their bravery, their feats of strength. It settles me just a little bit.
That is, until I peek in the side-view mirror again. The two lights I saw earlier are getting bigger. They’re approaching fast, which means they’ll overtake us in a matter of minutes. When Carlos spots them in the rearview mirror, I see a muscle twitching in his jaw before he shifts his focus back on the road ahead.
“Carlos is that—” I ask, noticing the headlights swelling brighter in the side mirror.
“Yeah, I see it.”
He speeds up, the engine roaring as he tries to put more distance between us.
My heart skips a few beats as the car behind us seems determined to catch up. I’m shaking like a leaf, my hands jittery and my pulse racing as cold sweat trickles down my face.
“Call Dax,” Carlos says. “Tell him where we are: mile marker 3.”
“Okay.”
I grab my phone, but my hands are shaking so hard, I drop it on the floor between my feet. I reach down, desperate to retrieve it, when the car bumps into us from the rear, hard enough to jostle our vehicle.
“Shit!” Carlos snaps. One hand is on the wheel while the other is fiddling with the snap of his gun holster. “I don’t have my radio with me either; I’m off duty. Shit, shit, shit.”
