Based on what she’d told him about leaving New York, she’d done everything right. How the hell was her stalker still tracking her?
After what had almost happened to Sitka, she was unlikely to reach out to police again for help. She’d just keep hoping to outrun her stalker, to simply survive. But if he could track her here, how would she ever lose him? Eventually, a stalker this obsessed wouldn’t be content with simply watching and leaving notes. Eventually, he’d try to make her his own. And when that inevitably failed, he’d kill her.
A sharp pain sliced through Tate’s chest, and he hit the gas harder, making Sitka give a sharp bark as she hunkered low on the seat.
“Sorry, Sitka.” She was used to fast driving in the police SUV, but that was better designed for her than the front seat of his truck.
He raced up the dirt road leading to Sabrina’s house, and then his heart gave a little kick when he spotted taillights in her drive. Sabrina? Or someone else?
He didn’t slow until he’d swung into the driveway, effectively blocking whoever was in that vehicle from escaping. Then, he hit the brakes hard, apologizing to Sitka as she yelped and righted herself again.
The brake lights on the old truck in the drive flashed and then stayed lit for a long moment, until the car turned off and Sabrina stepped out.
She crossed her arms over her chest, glancing repeatedly at the woods as she approached. When he rolled down the window, she demanded, “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” he shot back. “We agreed that the Desparre PD would help you, Sabrina. No more running. So why are you sneaking away without even a goodbye?”
As the angry words burst from his mouth, he realized how much the idea hurt. They barely knew each other, but he’d felt an instant connection. He admired her strength and determination, the way she was willing to make sacrifices to keep the people she loved safe. He liked the way her eyes lit up when she gave him a real smile, the silly jokes she made about Sitka patrolling. He liked her and the idea of her not being in Desparre just felt wrong.
She frowned back at him, then her gaze darted briefly to Sitka, before returning to his. “It’s one thing for me to make a stand and try to put an end to what’s happening to me. I’ve lived with this threat for a long time, and I’m willing to take that risk to get my life back. And believe me, I want the help. But this is my fight. And now it seems like he’s targeted Sitka. I’m not going to let anyone else get hurt because of me.”
“We’re trained for this,” he insisted, trying to push his personal feelings to the background. “This threat is never going to just go away. We have to stop it.”
She seemed to pale at his words, but her jaw clamped down, and she shook her head again.
Turning off his engine, he stepped out beside her. Before he could shut the door, Sitka was out, too, sitting next to Sabrina and looking up at her as if to say I’m off duty. Pet me, please.
A ghost of a smile flitted across Sabrina’s face as she complied.
“Sabrina.”
When she met his gaze again, fear and determination there, he said, “You don’t want to spend your life running from this threat. I’m not going to let you do that. We’re going to eliminate it.”
He tried to infuse his words with certainty. It was his duty to protect her, to help her feel safe again, so she could finally regain her life fully, something he’d probably never have himself.
He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out and taking her hand in his, couldn’t help himself from wanting to step a little closer, to wrap his arms around her.
Duty was only part of it, he realized. He was falling for Sabrina Jones...if that was even her real name. He didn’t want to lose her.
She stared up at him, warring emotions on her face, until finally she nodded. “Okay, I’ll stay. Just promise me that you’re all going to be careful. If this guy turns his focus on you and Sitka and you can’t find him, I want you to be honest with me. I want you to tell me, so I can make my own decision about whether to stay or go.”
He nodded, not breaking eye contact. “I promise.”
But he knew it wasn’t a promise he could keep. This wasn’t a fight he was letting her take on alone anymore.
One way or another, they were going to end this here.
Chapter Seven
“Are you sure about this?” Sabrina asked as she let him into her cabin.
In response, he picked up the emergency button she’d left on the front-hall table and slipped it over her head.
She tried not to visibly react as his hands skimmed her neck, lifting her hair out of the way so the thin chain could lie underneath. But even after he removed his hands, his touch lingered, making her neck tingle.
The scent of sandalwood—his aftershave maybe—drifted toward her, intoxicating. This close, she saw how purely deep brown his eyes were, no variation to distract from the intensity of his gaze. Her breath caught, and the tingling in her neck spread down her arms and across her back.
His gaze lingered on hers, and the desire she felt was reflected back at her, beneath a layer of anxiety and concern. The corners of his lips tipped up slightly, making her want to step forward, lean into him and see what happened.
Then Sitka stepped between them, tail wagging, and broke the spell.
Sabrina laughed, releasing some of the tension both from the situation and her proximity to Tate. She leaned down and pet Sitka, giving her pulse a chance to calm.
Then she straightened and asked, “If you’re sure this is the right move, how do we find him? And are you sure you should even be here right now?” Her gaze dropped to Sitka, then rose to Tate. “I’m pretty sure he targeted Sitka because he saw you here.”
Because he thinks you could be important to me, Sabrina didn’t add. The problem is, he could be right.
A pair of vertical grooves appeared between Tate’s eyebrows, marring his perfectly smooth skin. He nodded slowly. “I still think this could have been a badly timed accident. But if it wasn’t, then yeah, that makes sense. Anyone who might be an ally to you, anyone who might be a friend, he sees as a threat. Competition.”
Competition. Sabrina couldn’t help her indignant snort, but it quickly turned into a familiar angry frustration. She’d spent two years as the object of some man’s unrequited obsession, and he thought it was his right to destroy everything in her life so he could have her for himself.
“I know,” Tate said softly, as if he could read her mind. “It’s unfair.”
Unfair was too simple a word for this. It was more than just unfair that she’d been forced to give up seeing her family and friends again, possibly for the rest of her life. That she had to take low-key jobs so she could stay below the radar. That she never felt truly safe, all because some man she might never have even spoken to thought his right to want her was greater than her right to live the life she wanted.
“Tell me,” Tate said softly, compassion in his eyes. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I just...” She sighed, looked away. She’d grown up with a strong single mom who’d worked hard to raise her and her younger brother. A mom who’d never sugarcoated the dangers women faced in the world or the inequities. Still, she’d always felt loved, supported, protected, safe.
Until her stalker had shown up. He was someone she might have smiled at once politely. Someone she might have had a brief conversation with at a kiosk or never spoken to at all. Someone who lived in the shadows because he was too much of a coward to tell her who he really was.
She didn’t realize she’d clenched her hands into tight fists until Tate’s hands were over hers, loosening them. Shifting her gaze back to him, she pulled her hands free and missed the contact immediately. “Police in New York said my stalker probably wasn’t anyone identifiable in my life. They think he was somewhere on the outskirts, that I might not even recogni
ze him at all when—if—they finally figured out who it was. But he has some kind of fantasy where he’s essential in my life, and I have to live with that.”
Breathing through the tears that wanted to rush forward, Sabrina said bitterly, “I can’t even use my real name.”
“Your name isn’t Sabrina?” Tate asked softly, not sounding particularly surprised.
“It is Sabrina.” The way he said her name made her suddenly glad she’d only changed her last name. She’d done it because the PI thought keeping the same first name would be easier to remember and respond to. Over the years, she’d had moments where it had felt like the only thing left in her life that was still her. “But it’s not Jones.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, and she could see him debating whether to ask what her real last name was.
“Don’t,” she told him. “It’s better if you don’t know.”
He continued to stare back at her, like he might argue, until Sitka stood, spun in a quick circle and barked.
Sabrina laughed, and a grin broke out on Tate’s face. “You’re right, Sitka,” he told her. “Maybe we should go sit down.”
Realizing she’d kept him standing in the entryway a long time, Sabrina felt her cheeks heat. She turned into the house, leading him toward the living room where they’d sat before. Even though she was all packed up to disappear, the house looked mostly the same.
Seeing how small an impact she’d had on the space in the six months she’d lived here was slightly depressing, but it was less depressing than the series of dingy hotels she’d called home before this.
Glancing around as he chose the same side of the couch he’d sat on before, Tate asked, “You want me to help you bring your stuff back in?”
Shaking her head, Sabrina sank onto the other side of the couch. Her gaze was immediately drawn into the woods. But the view that had inspired so much of her creativity now made her shiver. Was her stalker outside right this moment, seeing that his attack hadn’t scared away Tate and Sitka? Was he already planning a new way to permanently remove them from her life?
Anxiety bubbled up, the certainty that she’d made a mistake letting Tate block her in. “I—”
“Don’t,” Tate said.
Woof! Sitka contributed, either picking up on Tate’s tone or stating her own agreement. She pushed her way between Tate and the coffee table and sat in the space between them, her brown eyes intent on Sabrina.
“I feel selfish staying,” she admitted softly.
“That’s ridiculous.” He shifted on the couch, one knee up so he was facing her. “I’m a police officer. Believe me, I’ve faced worse threats.”
He said it like he was speaking about something specific. Sabrina couldn’t help the shiver that went through her, imagining him in danger. But in law enforcement, it was part of the job.
When he’d first promised to help her get free of this threat, she’d immediately seen all the possibilities open up in her life again—possibilities like asking him on a date. But she was wrung out from two years of impending danger. How would she handle being in a relationship with a man who went to work each day anticipating danger?
“Running forever isn’t the worst thing,” Sabrina told him. Having police show up at Dylan’s family’s lake house, hearing the news that he’d been shot inside his home and then getting the note a few days later? That was the worst thing.
“No,” he agreed. “But that’s not your fate, Sabrina. So let’s talk through some things, see if we can figure out how he found you here.”
She couldn’t stop herself from glancing out the window again, into the vast woods. She didn’t think she’d ever see them the same way again.
“You said you haven’t spoken to your family in two years, so I assume you’ve had no contact with anyone else, either, right? Not even this PI who helped you disappear?”
She shook her head. “No. I check her website every once in a while, to see if the New York police caught my stalker. She’s supposed to leave a coded message there if it happens. In the first few months, I checked it a lot. Now I look once every month or two.” Was there some way to look at her site and see where people accessed it from? “You don’t think he’s somehow tracking me from that, do you?”
“No. What about jobs, hobbies?”
Sabrina sighed, shook her head. “The PI I hired was good. And expensive. She worked with a skip tracer to help me disappear. What it boiled down to was basically that I needed to change everything about my life to stay safe.”
Something flickered in his eyes at her words, something more than sympathy.
“Back in New York, I was a fashion designer. Accessories,” she added, when he looked surprised. “Here, I’ve been selling jewelry I make over an e-commerce site. It’s the closest I’ve come to normal, but it’s a pretty different field.”
“What did you do in all the places you lived in between?”
“Waitressing. I picked cheap diners or places near highways that were open all night and catered to truckers. Places that didn’t want an employment check or actual ID.”
His lips tightened into an angry line. “Places where they could pay you under the table in cash, which means they didn’t bother giving you a living wage.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But I could manage on the money.” Anxiety twisted in her belly, remembering what had made that year and a half before Desparre so unbearable. “It was the other threats.”
The anger on Tate’s face shifted into a deeper fury. “From the people working at these places? Because they saw you as part of a vulnerable population, someone with no real ID who wouldn’t dare go to the police about anything illegal?”
“Sometimes,” she agreed, because at almost every place she’d worked, dodging someone’s hands as she served food had started to feel normal. “Sometimes it was the customers, because these places weren’t exactly in the safest areas. And I’d take any shift I could get, which usually meant nights.”
Her mouth suddenly went dry, thinking of all those nights rushing to her crappy car after a shift, usually in a parking lot where they didn’t care about safety lighting. More than once, she’d used pepper spray on a customer who’d tried to corner her, even one who’d tried to drag her into his long-haul truck.
That had been one of the scariest moments of her life, second only to the moment she’d realized Dylan’s death was because of her. She’d been exhausted after a long shift and fitting the key in the twenty-year-old junker she’d been driving in Iowa when goose bumps had erupted across her neck. She’d already had her pepper spray out because she’d learned the hard way that she needed it. As she’d spun around, lifting that spray, fear had exploded. The guy was huge, well over six feet and at least twice her weight. It might not have all been muscle, but it didn’t matter. She’d barely started to depress the trigger on her pepper spray before he swatted the canister away like he was swatting a fly.
She’d choked on the fumes, but he’d just coughed and slapped a hand over her mouth, as if there was anyone around to hear her scream or care if they had. His other arm had yanked her flush against him, shoving her face into his sweat-stained T-shirt. It had been hard to breathe as he’d dragged her, ignoring the fists she’d slammed into his arms and the one solid kick she’d gotten to his knee, like he barely felt them.
He’d loosened his grip slightly to open the door of his truck, and she’d wrenched herself away, simultaneously flinging a desperate punch. She’d gotten lucky as he’d twisted back toward her and her punch had landed right on his prominent Adam’s apple. He’d gagged and she’d run.
She’d gotten in her car and raced out of that town, out of Iowa. She’d never had such a close call again, but it had been a tough reminder: her stalker wasn’t the only threat out there.
“I’ve been careful,” she told Tate, trying to shake off the remnants of that memory. “He shou
ldn’t have been able to track me here. I’ve changed cars. I’ve lived in eight different states before coming to Alaska.”
Frustration bubbled up, stronger than it had been in a long time, because she’d actually started to hope again. “So how the hell did he find me here?”
* * *
TATE RAN UP the hill outside Desparre’s downtown at a punishing pace, let the steady rhythm of his pounding feet calm his fury.
Sabrina had almost left. If he’d been seconds later, she’d have been gone, and he wouldn’t have been able to find her.
The idea hurt a lot more than it should have and Tate tried not to focus on why. Because right now, his feelings for her didn’t matter. Only her safety did.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself harder, his chest heaving as he finally crested the hill. He was alone, having dropped Sitka off at home after they’d left Sabrina’s cabin. Sitka liked to run with him, but when he was in this kind of mood, he never brought her along. There was no reason to punish her for his bad mood.
Bending over, Tate rested his palms on his knees as his heart rate slowed. Then he straightened and peered over the edge of the hill. If downtown Desparre was sleepy, the outskirts were damn near comatose. There were lots of places to get lost in nature. A boon for locals who knew the area and the safety precautions. Not so great for unprepared tourists looking for adventure. Or for a cop who’d been ambushed on a quiet trail.
These days, though, he didn’t constantly scan his surroundings on his run. The impulse was still there, but he tried to resist. It was a slippery slope from appropriate caution to paranoia.
When Sabrina had shared some of her experience, he’d wanted to open up about his own. He’d wanted to tell her he knew exactly what it was like to have someone come after you. Sure, the reasons and methods were different. The outcome, too. But the terror of that moment in the park would never fully go away. The nightmare he’d had last night was rare, but the fear was always in the back of his mind.
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