A Stranger on Her Doorstep

by Julie Miller

  “Yes, ma’am. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He was smiling as she shifted the truck into gear. “You’re strong enough to do this, Ava. I know you are. If I can help you in any way with your situation, I will. I owe you everything.”

  She pulled back onto the highway. “Just get your memory back.”

  Chapter Six

  Light flickered through the treetops higher up the mountain, sharp and blinding enough that Ava shielded her eyes and looked away. It wasn’t the soft glow of the rosy gold sunrise creeping through the forest like a warm fog on the eastern side of the mountain. That flash was harsh and cold. Possibly, the sun was reflecting off the window of a rental cabin or the windshield of a car parked at a scenic overlook. Only, the reflection seemed to be moving. She couldn’t tell if it was the swaying of the trees, or the reflection itself that was shifting. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the discordant light vanished.

  “Aliens,” Ava muttered out loud, frowning at the anomaly. If only she could truly dismiss such aberrations in her life so casually. She paused in her morning hike to take a quick assessment of her surroundings. Bird calls. Pine boughs creaking in the wind overhead. Soft splashes of water tumbling over the rocks in Panner’s Creek down the bank below her feet. The lodgepole pines and smaller deciduous trees were thick enough on either side of the path to block the sounds of the highway higher up the mountain and any view she had of civilization below her in the valley. These things were all familiar to her.

  A flash of light through the trees above her was not.

  If she’d only seen the flash once, Ava would have dismissed it as a trick of light and brainstormed a story about an alien invasion. But she’d spotted that reflection high in the sky twice now. Logically, she knew she wasn’t going to run into whoever was behind that periodic flash unless she hooked up her rock-climbing gear and started an ascent up the mountain. But logic had little to do with the sensation crawling over her skin that said she wasn’t as alone on her walk this morning as she liked to be.

  “Come on, girl. Leave that critter alone. All you’re doing is getting wet.” Ava whistled to draw Maxie’s attention from the frog she’d followed to the edge of the creek. Since they were still on private property, she could let the dog off leash. Seeing the pooch she demanded so much from enjoying her free time gave Ava pleasure, too.

  Third flash. Slightly different location.

  Was that simply because the angle of the sun changed as it climbed higher into the sky? Or had whatever been making that reflection moved?

  And then she heard the hum.

  A drone.

  Of course. The latest technology for professional and amateur photographers alike. Someone must be trying to get that perfect picture of a sunrise over the mountains. Or maybe it was a geological team, or the forestry department or a conservationist, a scientist mapping out topography or tracking the movement of a flock of birds or herd of mountain goats or...

  Tracking?

  Ava shivered despite the pleasant morning temperature. She tilted her face to the sky once more. The flashes of light were the drone changing directions, the lens of its camera or another shiny component catching the unfiltered rays of the mountain sunrise.

  Ava was in the best shape of her life following two years of physical therapy, fitness training and self-defense classes. She hiked these paths every day and barely broke a sweat. Now, she rubbed her palm over her chest, struggling to catch her breath as the mountain air thinned.

  The mountain air hadn’t changed in the last thirty seconds. She was the one who was making it difficult to breathe.

  With such dense tree cover and the relatively steep angle, could whoever be up there see her down here? It wasn’t as if she were wearing bright colors in her worn jeans and her grandfather’s faded plaid shirt that she’d rolled up to the elbows. She turned back along the trail beside the creek. It was one of many paths she’d followed through these woods over the years. Almost every path led back to her cabin. But surely that was too far away for anyone higher up on the mountain to be tracking her.

  Not for the first time, she wondered how long the hooded scar-face man had watched her before the night of her abduction. Had choosing her been an impromptu decision? The lady professor is working late on a Friday night—I can take her. Or had he been watching her for days, weeks, specifically choosing her as his next victim long before he created the opportunity to strike?

  “Breathe, Ava,” she coached herself. “They’re watching the scenery. Not you.” Still, a sudden sense of urgency poured adrenaline into her legs. She needed to get back to the cabin to make sure Larkin was still asleep in the guest bedroom. Still safe, still secret. She needed to get back to her security zone before paranoia got the better of her.

  Maxie was splashing her big paws in the water, getting ready to jump in after the living toy she’d been playing with. Ava thumped her walking stick down on the dirt path. “Maxie! Come. We need to go.” The big dog stopped, raised her spotted head and looked up at Ava. Maybe Ava gave off a unique scent when she started to panic. Maybe Maxie could hear the edgy timbre in her mistress’s tone. In one instant, she was playing like an overgrown puppy, and in the next, she was loping up the embankment to lean against Ava’s thigh. The dog’s weight and warmth snapped Ava out of her spiraling mood. Ava lowered her hand to Maxie’s head. “That’s my good girl.” Reassured that she wasn’t alone, that she was safe, Ava hooked the leash to Maxie’s collar, and they headed back to the cabin.

  Thinking she was being watched could be due to any one of a half dozen upheavals she’d gone through yesterday, from greeting an injured stranger with her shotgun to sharing more details about her kidnapping with Larkin than she’d shared in any one conversation with her therapist over the past two years. Yes, he was a kindred spirit who understood PTSD. Yes, he stirred up desires in her that hadn’t responded to any man since her abduction. Not that she was ready to act on those impulses. But even the fact that she was aware of a man, and that she suspected he was aware of her as a woman, had thrown her isolated, well-ordered world into chaos.

  She’d agreed to help him because it’s what the old Ava would have done, because her isolated, well-ordered world was a lonely place to be—because safe wasn’t the same as happy, self-confident or even content. Helping Larkin was the biggest risk she’d taken since her life had been cut to bits two years ago. She had to shake things up or she’d never be free of her frightened, lonely life. She’d never be able to complete her book. She’d never be able to live or love again.

  But change was hard. It was scary. Taking that risk with her own Larkin Bonecrusher in the flesh was probably what made her see a drone as a threat and pick up the pace. She reminded herself that she had made the offer to help a wounded veteran regain his memory and true identity. He’d offered to walk away and take his trouble with him. But she’d wrestled him back into her truck and made up the bed in the guest room because she was afraid she’d be making another life-altering mistake if she refused to help and something happened to him.

  Willow and Larkin had been reluctant allies in her first book. But by book two they’d forged a tight bond of complementary skills and an unshakable trust that one would always have the other’s back. Maybe there was something in the stranger’s obsession with her books that spoke to that same need in her. They were stronger as a team. She’d keep him at her cabin for a few days because she’d become an expert at safe and secret. In return, she might learn to believe in herself again—and she might learn that there was someone else in this world who believed in her, too.

  She unhooked Maxie when they cleared the trees and chased the dog up onto the porch in a game of tag that left the dog panting, and her a little winded—this time from true exertion, not panic. “You win!” With Maxie thoroughly personified in her imagination, Ava pressed a shushing finger to her lips. “We have to be very quiet, Queen Dragon. Larkin m
ight still be asleep. Our wounded warrior needs his rest.”

  Maxie cocked her head from side to side, reacting as if she understood the words. But as soon as she unlocked the door, Maxie was all dog, dashing past Ava and heading to the kitchen for a noisy drink from her water bowl.

  Ava locked the dead bolt and leaned her walking stick in the corner beside the door. She paused a moment to listen to the stillness inside the cabin. A quick walk through the kitchen revealed the mug and glasses she’d set out for Larkin’s morning coffee, milk or orange juice remained untouched. She spotted the light beeping on her answering machine on the landline next to the fridge. Not even a ringing telephone had awakened him, apparently, since no one was moving about the house.

  Swallowing the trepidation that always seemed to crop up when she got an unexpected message, she pushed the Play button. “Hey, Ava. Kent Russell here. My patient, Mr. Bonecrusher, left the hospital last night. I know you said you were just the good Samaritan who helped him out, but I was wondering if you knew where he had disappeared to. I really need to find him. Give me a call.”

  Give him a call? And tell him what? Just how good was she at lying through her teeth and pretending she wasn’t harboring his missing patient? Not answering would only make the doctor call again—or worse, stop by to speak in person. Although he might dismiss any nervous behavior because she was the town eccentric, she needed some time to practice playing dumb before that conversation happened.

  In the meantime, she’d better check on said patient. She hurried up the stairs and peeked into the bedroom across from hers.

  Pushing the door open without a sound, she tiptoed across the rug to the bed to make sure Larkin was still breathing. Although he’d said Dr. Russell had told him rest wasn’t a bad thing, she still felt the old-school concern that a head injury and sleeping for so long meant something was wrong.

  There was nothing wrong with the way this man slept.

  Ava felt a skitter of awareness chase across her skin that was completely unlike that sense of being watched she’d experienced on her walk. Sometime in the night, Larkin had shed the hospital gown and tossed it onto a chair. He’d rolled over onto his back, pushing the covers down to a precarious position below his belly button and over the points of his hips. She glanced at the floor beside the chair and felt another skitter waking her senses. He’d shed his jeans, too.

  Ava studied his exposed chest long enough to make sure it was rising and falling with even, normal breathing. She studied it a bit longer because she hadn’t really looked at a man in a long time for any reason other than to assess whether or not he was a threat to her.

  This was therapeutic, she reasoned, being able to feel safe indulging her rusty hormones. She made a clinical assessment of Larkin’s chest and torso and reached the conclusion that she didn’t need to buy him any shirts. The muscular hills and hollows of his shoulders, chest and stomach revealed colorful bruises, a sprinkling of much older scars and some intriguing mileage on her guest. The hair that dusted his chest and narrowed into a straight line that disappeared beneath the top of the sheet was mostly a golden color, mixed with a darker shade of bronze and a few sprinkles of silver, just like the close-cropped hair on his head and the beard that was filling in across his jaw and neck.

  She moved closer to touch his forehead and cheek. The skin that had been cool and clammy yesterday afternoon was now a warm, healthy temperature. Without any clothing or injury to impede her view, she studied the ink on his shoulder. The fictional Larkin wore a tattoo that had been branded into him by the first master he’d served before defying his tyrannical rule and joining Willow and her band of rebels fighting to bring rights to all people and the magical creatures of Stormhaven. She suspected the Marine Corps tattoo represented a different kind of loyalty to his comrades and a cause. Touching her fingertips to the dark lines, she wondered at the significance of that date embedded in the stylized links encircling his bicep. She traced the curve of the eagle’s head up to the top of his shoulder and over the sharp angle of his clavicle, skirting the crisp white square of gauze taped over his stitches.

  A deep-pitched moan hummed in Larkin’s throat. She snatched her fingers away and snapped her gaze up to his face to make sure he was truly asleep and not squinting through nearly closed eyes, watching her ogle him like a woman who’d never seen a half-naked man before. Since there was no bemused grin or sudden effort to cover himself, she exhaled a silent breath, relieved to see he was truly resting. He might even wake up remembering his name and who had tried to kill him. That’s what she should be thinking about, not her wildly errant hormones. She needed to go. Therapy session over.

  Ava grabbed the shopping list he’d made for her off the bedside table, pulled the covers up to his chest and hurried downstairs to retrieve her purse and the dog. Locking the door behind her, she hustled Maxie into the truck and climbed in beside the Great Pyrenees. She wanted to get into town to run Larkin’s errands and pick up groceries before it got too crowded with tourists on a Saturday.

  With one last glance at the cabin to make sure her temporary roommate was still locked inside, and another glance up the mountain to ensure the flashing lights of the drone hadn’t followed her home, she started the engine and headed down the road.

  Forty minutes later, Sue Schulman, a lifelong Pole Axe resident who’d outlived two husbands, knew everyone in the county and ran the ironically named Hole in the Wall General Store, was helping Ava gather the items on Larkin’s list. After the initial gush of welcome and surprise that Ava had left her remote cabin and come to town on the weekend to shop for new clothes, the older woman with the short, bright white hair had literally shushed herself, unwrapped a rawhide treat for Maxie and proceeded to move around the store to retrieve items and bring them to the front counter where Ava waited. Everything Ava needed, from a disposable cell phone to toiletries, was on the shelves at Sue’s. If Larkin had wanted a pair of off-season snowshoes or a lime green foam ax with Pole Axe, WY emblazoned on it, she could get him that, too, without ever leaving this warehouse of a store that took up one side of the block between the clinic and the town’s second stoplight.

  Sue didn’t mind Maxie coming into the store along with Ava, and she didn’t mind carrying a conversation. With anyone. Not with Ava. Not with the tourists who delighted in her stories about the area’s history. Not the locals who remembered her daddy’s ranch or went to school with one of her two sons. But the two men in suit jackets and sunglasses who chatted for a few moments at the door before one of them left, made Sue pause for breath.

  “I wonder what they want.” She laid a stack of men’s long-sleeved work shirts on the counter in front of Ava. “You go through these, dear,” Sue directed. “They’re all the size you asked for and will go with those new jeans. Still don’t know why you won’t let me put you in a pair of women’s pants. Your tomboy casual style simply doesn’t show off your shape.”

  That was the whole idea of dressing the way she did. Drawing attention to herself was the last thing Ava wanted.

  The older woman turned her focus back to the man in the suit and frowned. “We won’t make a sale off him.”

  Ava noted the high-school girl walking over to the burly man, who removed his sunglasses and smiled at the teenager as she offered to help him. “Maybe he’s lost and stopped in to ask for directions,” Ava suggested, although a curious suspicion was tickling the back of her neck. Her reaction could be attributed to her instinctive reaction to strangers. But the only time she’d seen a man with a chest that stocky was Detective Charles when he’d worn a Kevlar vest beneath his shirt the day he’d walked her through the crime scene, from the campus parking lot where she’d been taken to the warehouse district where she’d been released. Either the man at the door was training for a bodybuilding competition, or he was armed beneath that suit jacket. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you know him?”

  “I don’
t think so.” Sue tapped a bright pink fingernail against her bottom lip. The older woman had spent her whole life in the area, while Ava had only been a summertime resident, so if anyone could place a face, it was Sue. They watched the dark-haired man strike up a friendly conversation with the teen before pulling his cell phone from inside his jacket and showing the screen to the girl.

  “Maybe he does just want directions.” Ava picked up a green chambray shirt that reminded her of the color of Larkin’s mysterious eyes.

  “Ava.” Suddenly focused on her again, Sue clicked her tongue in a gentle reprimand and plucked the green shirt from Ava’s hands. She pulled out a pink-and-gray plaid instead. “I think it’s time you zhush up your look a bit. If I can’t get you to wear women’s clothes, at least try something a little more feminine. Pink was your grandma Myrna’s favorite color.” She held the shirt up to Ava’s chin and frowned. Then she reached into the stack of men’s shirts and pulled out a different one to hold up. “The soft blue, I think. It draws the attention up to your eyes. Away from the marks on your skin.”

  And just like that, Ava was done with the whole shopping experience. Not because of Sue’s comment—after all, her scars were a part of her she could hardly deny. But because of the rest of the conversation she knew would follow. “The blue is fine. I think I’m finished—”

  “I feel like I have to take up Myrna’s cause since she’s not here to help you. I know you came to Pole Axe runnin’ from something—a lot of folks do. Why else would you come to this godforsaken town if you weren’t born to it.”