Page 22 of Montana Freedom

“You don’t have to tell me where you’re going,” he said. “But I would rather not have to track you down and find you nearly dead on the ground again.” His mouth quirked. “I don’t think I could take it.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable request. It still irritated me to have a limitation put on me, but if I looked at it logically, I didn’t want him to have to come rescue me again either.

There were plenty of other things I wanted him to do.

“All right,” I said. “I will.”

“Thank you.”

We stayed there, the previous tension between us building again. God, I wanted him to kiss me.

He didn’t, but I didn’t imagine the way his fingers tightened ever so slightly on my arm. “I’m very glad you’re here—and safe,” he said, finally releasing me and moving past me down the porch steps.

I felt like I was left in a vacuum because he took all my breath with him.

“Oh, and Emma?” When I turned, he was walking backward down the path, smiling wider than I’d ever seen. “If you need to leave, come borrow one of the ranch trucks. I don’t want to have to bail you out for driving a stolen car either.”

He turned around without missing a beat and left me gaping after him.

Chapter8

Daniel

“Look,” I said, pointing to the grass. “Signs of deer. We try to keep them off the property, but sometimes they sneak in.”

Emma looked down at the ground. “How can you tell? It just looks like grass to me.”

“There’re patterns to the way animals walk,” I told her. “Ways the grass bends under weight, and once you’ve been out here long enough, you get to know them. Of course, it’s easier if whatever you’re tracking leaves you a trail. Broken branches, footprints. If it’s human, scraps of cloth. But you use whatever you need to in a rescue.”

She looked pensive. “Why were you there?”

I looked over at Emma, who rode Cinnamon a few feet away. She’d told me she’d never ridden a horse, and I couldn’t let it stay that way. So we were riding by the small lake on the property, and I was having trouble keeping my eyes off her. Over the last week, I’d seen Emma bloom.

The fear that had permanently etched on her face had eased, and she was smiling more. Right now, her head was tilted back toward the sky, the sun shining through her hair and turning brown to gold.

She was beautiful.

There was no point in forcing myself to ignore it. Everything from the way she smiled to her unusual eyes to the way she seemed to look up at me from under her lashes even when we were at the same level as we were now. I found myself glancing at her lips more often than was healthy.

Then I’d begin to recite the reasons it was a bad idea in my head. It was the only real thing holding me back in those moments—which seemed to happen at least once a day—when we were in proximity and kissing her would be so fucking easy.

I was dying to find out what those lips tasted like.

She was staring at me, and I realized I hadn’t answered her question. The small, victorious smile on her face told me she knew why too. We were playing a game, she and I. And she was the only one winning. “Why was I where?”

“When you…” She swallowed, and a shadow fell over her face. “When you rescued me. Why were you all there? Ranching and rescuing don’t seem like they go hand in hand.”

“Ah.” It was a valid question. “We were there to rescue Noah and Kate, which you knew. But to answer your real question, the seven of us who work here are all retired Navy SEALs. We found one another through recovering from our own traumas and decided we wanted to create a place where others could do the same. No matter if they were in the military or not.”

Emma’s face went slack with realization, and her gaze roved over me, suddenly taking in my whole body in an entirely different way. I would be a fucking liar if I said the way she looked at me didn’t affect anything. It did.

The list of reasons why I should ignore the power of her gaze began rolling through my head. She was here to recover and was a victim of trauma—it was inappropriate. Emma was easily a decade younger than me. I was a terrible fit for her.

And yet even with those reasons, my body reacted to the way she looked at me andlovedit. Like she was suddenly seeing me as a powerful warrior.

“I guess I should have noticed. It feels obvious now.”

I smiled. “No reason you should have known.”

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