Page 54 of Wild in the Woods
“This is how I found you. Yeah. I got to town just as they mobilized citizen volunteers to come look for this kid. I heard someone say you were at the warming house on 12 waiting for a ride. It wasn’t hard to find you, Lu. Or follow you. It never is.”
He pushed Luke behind him, as if she might snatch him away.
“This story? This one’s going to be mine. You’re not getting all the glory, you bitch.”
Rudd’s face twisted as he lashed out with a booted foot and nailed her in the pelvis. She skidded backward, lost her grip on the rope, and fell.
Down, down, crashing through the water into the blackness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Foxpushedthefour-wheelerto the maximum as he raced towards the coordinates from Lulu’s radio. He had so many questions. Why hadn’t she stayed at the warming house, and how the hell had she stumbled upon the lost kid?
His brother and Jett were right behind him. They couldn’t get to her fast enough. The feeling that something was wrong wouldn’t leave him alone. He just needed to get to her. Quick. She wasn’t responding on the radio anymore, and they’d lost the tracking signal.
Taking the four wheelers as far as they could go, they parked, and Fox began to jog. The GPS gave them a general idea of where she was, accurate within half a mile of her last point of contact. That still left a lot of area for them to get it wrong. He figured she would have left the warming house in search of water, and probably tried to make her way to the stream they’d seen yesterday.
His brave, strong woman. His heart soared. She’d found the child!
God, he hoped that was true.
They’d mapped a search area from the child’s last known location and spread out to where the water may have taken him. But Lulu’s coordinates took him out of that search area, suggesting that the flood waters split along the way and carried the child in a different direction.
He caught the whiff of another male’s scent on the air. It was heavily laden with cologne and the undertones of starch and drycleaning fluid.
“Who’s that?”
Ryker sided up to Fox and gestured to a figure coming out of the woods. A man was carrying something. He picked up the scent of a child and something else. Something that made his pulse ratchet.
Lulu’s scent.
Fox burst forward. The man faltered and called out.
“I need help here. This kid is hurt. I just pulled him out of a hole!”
The child shook in the man’s arms.
“Jett, grab a blanket.”
Fox steadied the child on his feet and gave him a quick once over before wrapping a thick wool blanket around him. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
He blinked, tears on his lashes. “Luke. Where’s the nice lady?”
The child was coated in Lulu’s scent. He was about to ask the same question. Turning his attention to the man, Fox immediately boiled with slow rage. The guy was wearing expensive slacks, neatly pressed, a Polo shirt and modern leather boots much too clean for him to have been involved in any rescue mission.
“Who are you?”
“Richard Demarsky. I came to assist Lulu Orlando with her story and overheard her location. She wanted to show me the overlook, so we walked there,” he pointed into the distance. “And that’s when I found the boy.”
Rudd.
Fox narrowed his eyes. “Whereis she?”
“She’s in the hole,” Luke said thickly. “He pushed her in the hole.”
