Page 6 of Willow Embers
Mentally and emotionally, I’m still a hot frickin’ mess.
I take another small sip, screw the lid on, and hold the canteen back out to him. “Thanks.” I bite out the word. “Can we go now?”
He takes the bottle from me, careful not to let our hands touch. A tiny twinge of regret tweaks something in me, but I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to suss it out before he speaks.
“You said he took off.” He studies me carefully as he asks, “Did you see what he was after?”
I shake my head.
“But he’s friendly?”
“He failed out of service dog training because he wanted to play with everyone he saw,” I say grudgingly.
Beauden’s lips twitch. “So, he probably saw a deer or a rabbit and decided to make friends.”
I roll my eyes, because yeah, that’s pretty much the conclusion I came to as well.
“Do you have any extra clothes in your bag? Something that smells like you?”
I wrinkle my nose. “How will that help?”
Instead of answering, he kneels in front of my bag and starts digging through it. I should probably tell him to stay out ofmy things, but instead, I stand there. Waiting. Feeling utterly useless.
He pulls out my pink bandana and holds it up. “Do you wear this?”
I nod, confused.
“Good.” He sets the bandana on the ground in the middle of the trail, then zips up my bag and hands it to me. “We’ll leave the bandana here. A lot of lost dogs will eventually find their way back to where they lost their owners, especially if they’ve got a scent to follow.
It sounds reasonable enough.
So, I sling my bag over my head. “What now?”
He watches me for another charged minute, then turns his attention to the trail. “Stay behind me and keep an eye out for any game trails.”
“I’ve already been up and down this trail. He’s not anywhere on it.” The weight of those words sits like a stone in my middle.
Beauden looks back at me with determination burning in his deep brown eyes. “He’s up here somewhere. We’ll find him.”
He has no idea how much I want to believe that. Hell, Ineedto believe it. But coming from him? It feels a lot like another empty promise he made me.
I love you, Nixie. And I promise, I’ll call you the first chance I get.
He didn’t.
The month I waited to hear from him felt like a lifetime. Then I found out he did call— his mom, his brother, even his best friend. Everyone but me.
“Just…” I shake my head and motion impatiently to the trail. The sun is sinking behind the mountains, and though the sky is still light, the temperature is already dropping.
With a curt nod, he marches down the trail at a pace that has me jogging every other step to keep up. After a couple ofminutes, he pauses to look at a small path branching off the main trail that I didn’t even notice the first time I ran down this way in a panic.
It gives me one breathless moment of hope before reality steals it away. There could be a dozen game trails out here. A hundred. And Tiberius could have run his happy butt down any one of them. Or none of them.
I bend over and put my hands on my knees as I fight for air, sanity, and anything else inside me that might help me stay on my feet. Especially when it would be so much easier to just curl up in the dirt and bawl my eyes out.
Beauden doesn’t say anything. Not a single fucking word. And when I dare a glance at him, he turns away.
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t ache. But it does piss me off, and it’s the anger that puts the starch back in my spine.
