He set her on his grandpa’s denim-blue couch, covered her with a fleece blanket, and let out a deep breath. Her presence threw off the vibe of his cabin. Despite his love for his team, he rarely had any visitors to his place.
He strode across the room and tossed the useless phone with no bars on the circle dinette table that overlooked the front window, then sat to unlace his muddy boots.
Should he leave her here and hike to his neighbor? The guy was a medic. He might know how long it would take her to wake up.
But a scream answered his question.
Dani bolted upright, her eyes wild.
He took a step toward her, about to speak, when she screamed again.
“Stay away from me. Help!”
TWO
Dani scrambledup off the couch, her head pounding worse than anything she’d ever felt. Her thoughts…nowhere to be found. “Who…who are you?”
Her captor stared at her with both hands up but said nothing. He frowned. The big guy wore a T-shirt and jeans and had a thick, full beard. Did she like beards?
Who was this guy?
She backed up and patted her coat pockets with trembling fingers, hunting for any kind of weapon. Or did she own a phone? This man was going to kill her. And she wasn’t going down without a fight.
The bearded lumberjack stood in the center of the room.
A living room? Where was she?
“I’m not going to hurt you.” He had a warm voice, soft, but she just knew he could be loud if necessary. He said, “We met, remember? I’m Grizz. You stopped by base camp on the way up Copper Mountain.”
“I don’t know you.”Think, Dani, think.“Where am I? Why did you take me?”
The big guy took two steps closer, and she shrank back until she hit a wall beside the door. Could she make a run for it? Would this grizzly bear of a man chase her?
“No one is going to hurt you, Dani.” He stopped moving. “You were in trouble, and I got you to safety. This is my cabin. In Alaska.”
Alaska? She lived in Washington, DC.
How had she wound up five time zones away?
Dani didn’t know much about him or what was happening, but she did know that she was an investigative journalist. As such, she’d get to the bottom of this story. Just as soon as her insides stopped quaking. She patted all of her pockets but couldn’t find her cell phone. She definitely had a phone. But where was it?
And who would she even call?
“Did I have a cell phone on me?” Why had she asked? Like this guy would tell her the truth.
He shook his head. “Sorry, I didn’t see one. You slid down the mountain in a mudslide, so you may have dropped it.”
Grizz stomped to the kitchen on the opposite side of the cabin, each footstep pounding in sync with Dani’s headache. “I’m going to make us some soup.”
The Midnight Sun hotshot logo on his T-shirt stretched across the man’s chest.Hotshot?
Her mind scrambled for memories. Sounds of laughter haunted her. And someone calling her a diva?
She sank to the dusty wood floor, her back skidding down the wall. She needed to keep this guy talking. “What happened when you saw me? I don’t remember.”
He pulled a container out of the freezer and dumped the frozen contents into a pot. A blue flame from the stove glowed. He stirred the meal with a wooden spoon. “I’m a Midnight Sun hotshot. You and another man came into our base camp asking about some sort of secret compound in the woods. We advised you against traipsing up the mountain by yourselves, but you headed out anyway.”
“I was working on a story,” she whispered. “My—my boss encouraged me to follow a lead I got from an inside source here in Alaska. He gave me an ultimatum. I had to get the story.”
