Page 12 of The Unknown Colton
But no person appeared.
Maybe when she shouted at him, she’d startled a bird or something. Or maybe it had been just a sudden gust of wind.
She could feel Troy’s heart beating fast and hard, could feel the heat of his skin, the hardness of his muscled body. This was where she should have been, in his arms, the minute he got back into town.
But he hadn’t come straight to her. And then someone had been inside her damn cabin. Doing what?
“I called Parker and Eli,” she assured him andwhoever might be out there listening to them. She felt that strange sensation again, that creepy awareness of someone watching her. Who was it?
The intruder in her cabin proved that she wasn’t just imagining things. Someone could really be following her around. If not for Troy showing up when he had, they might have gotten her.
She wound her arms around him now and held on. But as she tightened her grasp around his back, he flinched.
“You are hurt,” she said. “Troy—”
“Lakin!” Parker’s voice echoed around the woods. “Troy! Where are you?”
“Here, we’re here!” she called back to her brother.
“The police are on their way,” Parker said loudly, as if warning off whoever might be hiding in the woods with them.
Lakin was pretty sure that someone was out there, watching them, waiting… For what? For her to be alone?
Branches rustled again, but it was Parker who pushed them aside. “Thank God you two are all right,” he said. “Who was it? Did you see them?”
Troy shook his head.
“I saw the front door of the cabin was open,” Lakin explained, “so I didn’t go inside. And when the intruder ran out the back, I just saw a shadow heading toward the woods.”
“It was a good thing you noticed the door wasopen,” Parker said. He shuddered as if horrified over what could have happened to her.
“I’m sure it wasn’t…”The serial killer, she thought. But she didn’t say the words out loud. She didn’t want to think of him or give him any more attention. Wasn’t that why serial killers killed? They wanted the notoriety and attention? The press had already given him a name, had already reported too much about him.
But not everything.
They didn’t know what had happened years ago within the Colton family. They didn’t know how eerily close the crimes felt to one that had almost destroyed her family before she’d even become part of it.
Her family was strong and resilient. They had not allowed that tragedy to define them. But if someone brought that tragedy to the attention of the press, they might make her family relive it all over again.
“Let’s head back to the office,” Parker said. “Shelby PD’s finest, Bobby Reynolds, is on his way, and Eli and Kansas are, too. We’ll leave the policing to all of them.”
“And leave the chasing after bad guys to them, too,” Lakin said pointedly to Troy. “You shouldn’t have gone after him. What if he’d had a weapon?”
He shrugged. “I just wanted to see who it was.”
“Eli will figure that out,” Parker said.
Lakin worried that everybody expected too much of her oldest brother but nobody more so than Eli himself. He had so much responsibility bearing downon him; she didn’t want to add to his burden. But she did want to know who the hell had been in her place, just not badly enough to chase after them herself.
With her arm around Troy, she urged him from the woods. Parker fell behind them, as if making sure that nobody could sneak up on them. Proof that Parker wasn’t any more willing to leave everything up to his older brother than Lakin was. He was trying to protect her, too, just as all her brothers had always done, Eli, Mitch and Parker.
Troy had always wanted to protect her, too. But she wondered now if the one she really needed the most protection from was him.
Going so long without seeing him or even communicating with him had hurt her. Badly. And it had hurt their relationship to the point where Billy Hoover and Eric Seller weren’t the only ones questioning it.
Like those men, she was also wondering if there was a future for the two of them. Did Troy love her as much as he once had? Did he love her enough to start their future now instead of waiting? Because Lakin was tired of waiting.
The deaths of those young women, including the aunt she’d never met, proved to her that life could be cut much too short.
