Page 13 of His Build
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said, breaking the silence. “It’s okay to take photos, right?”
“Of course it’s okay,” he said. “I was about to head out, but I’ll wait til you’re done.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“It’s no problem. It gets dark fast in the trees—easy to get lost. I know I have a couple times, and I was born and raised here.”
“I have a GPS.”
“These roads aren’t—”
“I said I’m fine,” she said, her voice taking on that clipped coolness he’d heard before, in the car after her fender bender. It was a tone not to be trifled with.
He opened his mouth to argue—even an astute navigator could get lost here at night. But the muscle pulsing in her jaw made him think better of it. “Okay then. I’m starving anyway.”
He didn’t know why he’d felt the need to share that, but he was starving. In fact, he’d very much like to be at home right this minute, on his own deck over this very lake, grilling up a burger and cracking a cool beer under the stars.
Normally he would have tackedaloneonto that mini-fantasy. But for the briefest moment, he pictured her there with him. Laughing as he told some dumb joke by the barbeque. Leaning back to take a pull of beer, the soft skin of her neck close enough to touch…
“See you,” he said, picking up his feet before he overshared anything else.
Thankfully, she was far enough up the path towards the house—and he was still on the path to the boathouse—that he didn’t have to pass her too closely.
She moved towards the house as he passed anyway, as if to make triply sure they didn’t get too close. He wanted to sniff his pits or take a peek in a mirror. Was he that ogre-like?
He shook his head as he headed to his truck. Nope, he didn’t need her. Burger. Beer. Solitude.
The cab was warm from sitting outside all day in the sun—or maybe that was just him. Graydon rolled down all the windows and kicked the engine into gear, peeling out into the dirt road in a spray of gravel.
Okay, so he was a little irritated too. He hadn’t meant to come off like he didn’t think she knew what she was doing—he was genuinely concerned she might get lost. There were no signposts back here—these were country roads. Rutted wagon trails, his dad used to say, though they didn’t lead to ranches. They led to million-dollar lakefront homes.
Gray’s truck rumbled as he nosed it into the thick wooded drive. In here, the last dregs of light from the sunset barely reached the dirt road. The irritation still simmered in him, though he felt a flash of worry too at Lucy stubbornly trying to get out of here. He flicked the lights on. Specks of insects and motes of forest flotsam—pine needles and spider webs—lit up in his beams as he drove up the road. He turned at the first hidden corner onto another unmarked road, and then the other way onto another. He’d been going a good ten minutes—the highway was just over the ridge up ahead.
Then he drew to a stop.
Damn it.
He clapped his hands on the steering wheel. She was almost a hundred percent certain to get lost in here. Hell, he’d nearly second-guessed a turn back there.
Throwing his arm over the passenger seat and twisting his torso to get a view out the back window, he cranked the gearshift into reverse. The engine whirred as he drove backward with only the red glow of the taillights as his guide. Graydon had been driving in and around Jewel Lakes County since he was a teenager, and knew how to get to a clip without rearing up against a tree. He passed the nearly hidden corner and made a three-point turn to face forward again. Then he navigated the darkened gravel road back to the Jones property.
Emerging from the trees, his headlights swept across an empty stretch of dirt where the cars had been parked earlier.
The SUV was gone. Next to the truck, the house was a dark, angular monolith in the now decidedly evening light.
“Shit,” he said out loud, then maneuvered back out at speed, gravel popping under his tires. He headed out to the road, making the first turn again, then another.
There was no sign of her at all.
His heart picked up speed. Maybe he’d missed her somehow, and she was back on the highway already, halfway home. Maybe she’d ended up at an adjacent property and was getting directions from some kind, rich stranger.
But he knew neither of those things could be true. He would have seen her—somewhere in here. There weren’t that many wrong roads to go down.
Then he remembered her number was at the bottom of the few perfunctory emails she’d exchanged with him. Maybe it was her cell, and maybe he might get a bar or two on his phone. Service was good down by the lake, but sometimes in here it blanked out. He had just pulled out his phone when a bouncing beam of light flashed in front of him.
The vehicle was heading toward the lake—the entirely wrong direction, if it was her.
It had to be her.
