Page 3 of Let Me Be the One
“Seriously, that’s it? Literally, only three?”
“You say it like I’m unnatural or something.”
“Well, no, but…only three?”
“Stop carrying on, Glory. So I don’t get around nearly as often as people want to think. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is when you’re canceling all our plans.”
Blu looked at Tanner, then back at where the voices loomed ever closer. Despite his arms feeling leaden, Tanner hefted the chain saw from the wagon. It pulled at his already tired shoulders.
“I’m done with Sutter. The rest of you can do whatever you want with him.”On the heels of that statement, the woman shoved out of the thick foliage. Her long brown hair sported a few twigs, and her fancy white blouse was ripped at the shoulder over a welt. Clearly disgruntled and oblivious of her surroundings—of him—she lifted one foot, eyeing a heeled shoe totally unsuitable for where she’d been.
Ah, hell. It really was her. None other thantheCallie McCallahan. The one woman who epitomized his tormented past.
A woman who, in the dark of night, still occasionally invaded his thoughts.
Physically, the past ten years had been kind to her. But based on what he’d heard, her relationships hadn’t been kind at all. Funny how he’d just caught up on her life without having to ask a single question.
Sucked that she was still so sexy, even more so with the added maturity that now curved her once-willowy figure in all the right ways. A little weight made her hips rounder, her breasts heavier, but those crazy long legs were the same. A man couldn’t help imagining them tight around his waist as he rode her hard and deep, or locked over his shoulders while he brought her to a climax with his mouth.
Damn it, she was already stirring him.
A sick sort of dread gripped his guts. He couldn’t blink. Couldn’t look away.
A second woman appeared, picking her way out of the woods more delicately.
With the devil riding him hard, and desperate to get the upper hand with her for once, Tanner gave the rip cord on the chain saw a hard tug.
The thunderous roar filled the evening air, and quickly snagged the attention of both women.
* * *
BEFORE THE UNFOLDINGscene could register, Glory flattened herself to Callie’s back and let out a bloodcurdling scream that nearly froze Callie’s blood. It didn’t help that she kept on screaming.
Honestly, Callie couldn’t tell which was louder, her cousin or the tool.
It took her a startled second before she spotted the man a few yards away from them, standing in a grove of saplings. Moments ago, a sense of danger had closed in around her, as if someone or something lurked in thesewoods, but it was nothing compared to the suffocating future she’d left behind.
She’d escaped—that was the only way to describe how she felt.
Catching her fiancé cheating, along with the timely inheritance of a house, had been all the impetus she’d needed to grab for a different path.
This place—spooky woods and all—would be her haven for now.
The chain saw, however, was a little over-the-top. The man wielding it?
Mmm. She knew a really heinous villain could look like a nice everyday guy. But hey, she’d already decided that she would face a den of hungry lions for a week rather than a lifetime of the mediocre existence her family had laid out for her.
So what was one guy with a chain saw?
Hot, that’s what he was. Like her most forbidden fantasy…in the flesh.
Real-life men didn’t look like him, at least no man that she’d ever met. Did that make him more dangerous, or less so?
Glory gasped, “Oh my God, do you see him?”
Six feet of honed body and piercing brown eyes, staring right at her? Yup, she saw him. Her heart, already in her throat, kicked into a racing beat.
