Delores Fossen - Grayson

Grayson didn’t say goodbye back because he had no intention of dying today.

He heard the click of her seat belt, finally. And Grayson jerked the steering wheel to the left. The car careened in that direction, but not before the back end smashed into a live oak tree. The jolt rattled the entire vehicle and tossed them around like rag dolls.

Thank God they were wearing their seat belts.

He also thanked God that he was able to hang on to the steering wheel. They’d dodged a head-on collision, and the impact with the tree had slowed them down some, but they literally weren’t out of the woods yet.

The car went into a skid in the opposite direction.

More trees.

Grayson didn’t even bother to curse. He just focused all his energy on trying to control an out-of-control car.

And it was a battle he was losing.

There was a trio of hackberry trees directly in front of them. If he managed to miss one, he would no doubt just plow into the others, or one of their low-hanging limbs.

He fought with the wheel, trying to make it turn away, but they were in another skid, the mud and rocks helping to propel them in a direction he didn’t want to go.

“There’s the man we saw earlier,” Eve said, her voice filled with fear.

She pointed to Grayson’s right, but he didn’t look in that direction. Not because he doubted her. No. The hiding man probably was there, but Grayson had to give it one last-ditch effort to get the car into the best position for what would almost certainly be a collision.

“Cover your face,” Grayson managed to warn her. Because the limbs would probably break the glass.

His life didn’t exactly flash before his eyes, but Grayson did think of his family. His brothers. His little niece, Kimmie.

And Eve.

She was there, right smack-dab in the middle of all of his memories.

He watched the front end of the car slide toward the middle tree, but at the last second, the vehicle shifted. No longer head-on. But the driver’s side—his side—careened right into the hackberry.

Grayson felt the air bags slam into his face and side. The double impact combined with the collision rammed him into Eve and her air bag. There were the sounds of broken glass and the metal crunching against the tree trunk. The radiator spewed steam.

“We’re alive,” he heard Eve say.

Grayson did a quick assessment. Yeah, they were alive all right, and the car was wrapped around the hackberry.

“Are you hurt?” he asked Eve, trying to assess if he had any injuries of his own. His shoulder hurt like hell, but he was hoping it was just from the air-bag punch and that it hadn’t been dislocated. He would need that shoulder to try to get them out of this crumpled heap of a car.

When Eve didn’t answer, Grayson’s stomach knotted, and he whipped his head in her direction. Her hands were on the air bag that she was trying to bat down, but her attention was fixed on the side window.

Grayson soon saw why.

The man, the one who’d hidden in the trees, was running straight toward them.

The man was armed, a pistol in his right hand.

Eve heard Grayson yell for her to get down, but she didn’t have time to react. Grayson pushed her down, her face and body colliding with the partially inflated air bag.

“My gun,” he snarled.

Grayson cursed and punched at the air bags. He was obviously trying to find his weapon. When Eve had last seen it, Grayson had put it on the console, but the crash had probably sent it flying.

Oh, mercy.

That meant they were sitting ducks, unarmed, with a gunman bearing down on them. She couldn’t get out of the car, not with the man so close and on her side of the vehicle. They couldn’t get out on the driver’s side because it was literally crunched around a tree. Thank God for the air bags, or Grayson would have been seriously injured or killed.

Eve glanced up at the approaching man. The person who was likely responsible for the explosion that had destroyed her grandmother’s cottage. The fear raced through her.

Still, she felt anger, too.

This idiot had endangered them and was continuing to do so. She wouldn’t just stand by and let him shoot Grayson and her. Neither would Grayson.

They both grappled around the interior of her car, and Eve remembered her own gun in the glove compartment. It took some doing to get the air bag out of the way, but she finally managed it. She threw open the glove box door, latched onto the gun and handed it to Grayson.

He immediately took aim.

The man must have seen him do that because he ducked behind a tree. She wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. If the man had stayed out in the open, Grayson would have had a clean shot. This way, they were still trapped.

“One of the deputies will be here soon,” Grayson reminded her.

Probably one of his brothers. Both Dade and Mason were Silver Creek deputy sheriffs, and since Grayson had requested backup, they would no doubt get there as soon as humanly possible.

But that might not be soon enough.

Using his left hand Grayson continued to bat away the air bag, but he kept his attention pinned to the tree where the man had ducked out of sight. Eve kept watch as well, but there were other trees near that one, and it wouldn’t take much for the man to move behind one of those closer trees and sneak right up on them.

“Who is he?” Eve meant to ask herself that question, but she said it aloud.

“I don’t know,” Grayson answered. “But he could be the killer we’re after.”

Yes. Eve was aware that there was an unidentified killer on the loose.

Thanks to the newspaper coverage, she was also aware that just a few days ago a young woman’s body had been found in the creek. The woman had been fully clothed, no signs of sexual assault, but her fingerprints and face had been obliterated. That’s the term the press had used, obliterated , and Eve had assumed the killer had done that to prevent her from being identified.

It had worked.

So, why would this killer come after Grayson and her now?

Until the body was identified, and that might never happen, it wasn’t likely that Grayson would be able to come up with a list of suspects.

But Eve had a sickening thought.

Perhaps the man had killed the woman in or near the cottage. Maybe he was destroying any potential physical evidence that would link him to the crime. And here she’d walked in with so much on her mind that she hadn’t even considered a trip home could be dangerous. This in spite of her knowing about the murder that possibly happened just a stone’s throw away from the cottage.

That oversight could be deadly.

She choked back a sob. Only minutes earlier her main worry had been getting pregnant, but for that to happen Grayson and she had to survive this. If something went wrong and he got hurt, it would be her fault because he wouldn’t have been out here in these woods if she hadn’t called him.

“I’ll get you out of here,” she heard Grayson say.

It sounded like a promise. But Eve knew backup was still a few minutes away. A lot could happen in those few short minutes.

Because she had her attention pinned to that tree, she saw the man lean out. Or rather she saw his gun.

“Get down!” she warned Grayson.

Just as the shot slammed through the window directly above Eve’s head. The sound was deafening, and the bullet tore through the safety glass.

Grayson moved forward, his body and forearm pushing her deeper onto the floor so that she could no longer see what was going on.

And Grayson fired.

Eve automatically put her hands over her ears, but the blast was so loud that it seemed to shake the entire car. What was left of the safety glass in the window came tumbling down on top of her.