Page 73 of Her Silver Fox Firefighters
His eyes snap up. “What?”
“She likes you, too,” I laugh.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he grumbles, “not right now, anyway, not with what we’re dealing with.”
I stare at him for a while. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head. Maybe he’s going over the moments he’s had with her, lingering gazes, near touches, words that carry more meaning now that he knows she likes him. It’s sweet. And it reminds me of how I felt when it became clear that Dax, Leo, and Beck were serious about me.
All I want is for Chloe to experience that same kind of heat, that same kind of joy. A love like that is hard to come by. And it’s worth every sacrifice to keep.
“Okay, maybe it does matter,” Carlos concedes with a half smile. “It’s nice to know it’s reciprocated, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it, not until we take Marcus down.”
His phone pings. He frowns as he opens the message. “Wait, that can’t be right,” he says, scrolling through something that unsettles him more and more with each passing second.
“What is it?”
“I got a match for that fingerprint the guys sent me from today’s arson,” he mutters. “I thought it was odd that they wanted me to check public servants and law enforcement personnel databases, but it makes sense now. Shit.”
“What, Carlos?”
The concern in his dark eyes is palpable. The humor and the lightness from earlier is all but gone. Something tells me our conversation is about to delve into an unsettling depth.
“The fingerprint they found on an internal part of the incendiary device belongs to Marcus Bennett,” Carlos says.
“No.”
The air leaves my lungs with a whoosh as the implications of his statement crash into me, like icy waves against the cliffs. Shivers run down my spine, the proximity of deadly danger suddenly strong enough to put the literal fear of God in me as I sit back and try to take a deep breath.
“Are you telling me that Marcus is your arsonist? The guy who’s been setting deadly fires across Ember Ridge for the past few months?” I manage.
“I’m going to have to check the partials collected from the previous arson scenes and compare them to this to confirm,” he replies. “But it looks like it, yes.”
“Oh, God. Then that means Marcus has been in Ember Ridge this whole time. I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. I’ll have to figure out a way to track his movements since you first arrived in Ember Ridge, Olivia. If he’s been around since you have?—”
“Then he knows where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m with.”
“Exactly.”
“And he’s just, what, setting fires and killing innocent people for kicks? I truly don’t understand,” I repeat as tears viciously prick my eyes.
I blink them back, desperate to keep my composure and my mind focused, because what we’ve just learned changes everything. I was never safe in Ember Ridge, not even with three valiant men like Dax, Leo, and Beck by my side, not even with Carlos’s support or my abundance of caution, for that matter.
“Maybe he’s biding his time,” Carlos surmises. “Working up to something worse.”
“Worse than killing innocent people in horrific fires?”
“He had no qualms about murdering Chloe’s parents. The sky’s the limit with this guy.”
That doesn’t make me feel any better. On the contrary, it sends my anxiety skyrocketing, which dampens my mood and pushes me into a dark place in my mind. I need to be more careful, especially now that I’m carrying two babies inside me. I need to be mindful of how I respond to external stressors.
But how the hell can I do that when I am now painfully aware that Marcus could be around every corner?
Watching. Waiting.
“I need to tell the guys,” Carlos says, then proceeds to forward the results to their phones. “And I need to get you back to them, safe and sound.”
“What if he’s watching us right now?” I whisper.
