Joel
I swept the final bit of dirt into the dustpan and dumped it into the trash can.
It was the middle of the night.
Rosie was finally asleep.
But I didn’t want her to wake up to a disaster of a house, and I’d wanted to watch tape from the game tonight—or last night, anyway.
The guys looked strong.
They’d won without issue, so strongly that I hadn’t even been missed. Which, frankly, was a bit of a blow to the ego, but also the way it needed to be.
I set the broom aside, paused the tape our video coach had sent me, and surveyed the space.
I’d managed to put it back together—righting furniture, straightening shit in cabinets, closing up drawers and doors, and throwing out shit that had been torn or ruined or food that had been opened and dug through.
Including those tins of cookies that Rosie’s mom had brought by not long before.
A welcome gift.
A housewarming present.
An overture of…
Something.
But, as always, when it came to Annie Donovan, it was clouded with confusion and discomfort and…bullshit.
Because she lived in a world shrouded with fog.
Because she’d never been there for her daughter.
Except, she’d approached me in the parking lot before I’d gotten on the bus for the game.
And she’d warned me about…John Donovan.
Billie’s dad.
She’d warned me and—
I’d gotten on the fucking bus and my woman—
Had ended up in handcuffs, in a jail cell, with a black eye, with a cut on her cheek.
I bit back a curse, tugged out my earbuds, and shoved them into the case. I’d had enough tape, enough watching my teammates play in a game I should have been pulling my weight at.
I didn’t regret coming back or resent my Rosie for having that need.
But I fucking hated the circumstances that had brought us to this moment—to the black eye and cut on her cheek, to the cleaning in the middle of the night, to the storm in my gut that told me I shouldn’t have left her in the first place…
The storm that told me this was all just beginning.
And sighed.
Knowing that I needed to get my head on straight.
Knowing I needed to keep it that way.
I put on a pot of coffee, waited while it brewed, then carried my mug to the windows, staring out to the dark back yard. It wasn’t pitch black any longer, the horizon having lightened just the slightest bit in the distance, a faint glow of orange coating a narrow strip of the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
Isolated, but not.
A quiet, peaceful slice of heaven…inhabited by a wolf.
Who sunk his teeth into my woman.
Christ.
I took a fortifying sip of coffee, and then another.
Calm. Breathe. Think. Protect—
The last word sliding through my mind had me freezing, plunking my mug on the side table and leaning forward, so close to the glass my nose almost bumped into it.
But…
The shadows were moving, forming…
At first I thought it might be a deer or a coyote or bobcat, but it was bigger than those. Maybe a bear or a mountain lion or—
No.
I was glad I’d put the mug down already because when my eyes adjusted and I realized—
I was sprinting toward the door on the deck.
Yanking it open with a crash that shook the house.
Pounding across the deck in bare feet, the cold of morning biting at the soles as I darted across the lawn, toward the tree line, but I hardly noticed the small jabs of pain.
Because I’d reached the trees.
And the person crawling toward me.