Page 6

The word costs me more than she knows.

“I expect you to survive.”

The truck lurches over a rut and Sophie instinctively reaches for men at the same moment I extend my arm to steady her. My hand lands on her stomach. Heat burns through the thin fabric of her sweater.

We both freeze. I feel every shallow breath she takes. The softness beneath my palm. The delicate tension in her body.

For one selfish second, I let myself feel her. The woman I’ve loved from the shadows. The woman I walked away from because I wanted her too much. Sophie slowly lifts her eyes to mine. My entire body goes rigid.

I want to pull her across the seat. I want her beneath my hands, not fighting me but reaching for me. I want to hear my name leave her lips without fear. I want everything I have spent three years telling myself I can never have.

I drag my hand away. Sophie releases an unsteady breath. I stare at the road.

“Why did you leave after my birthday?” she asks again.

I stay silent. Because words have never come easily to me and saying the truth will change everything.

She turns in her seat. “Samuel, look at me.”

I can’t.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

The cabin is still twelve miles away. I push the accelerator to the floor and carry the woman I love deeper into the mountains.

CHAPTER

TWO

SOPHIE

“You have to let me go,” I say.

His eyes return to the road. “No.”

“My father will be looking for me.”

“Good.”

“He’ll find you.”

“Eventually.”

“And when he does?”

Samuel is silent.

I study his profile, searching for some crack in the stoic mask. His nose is slightly crooked from having been broken more than once. There’s a pale scar near his temple, another across the back of his hand. His hands are broad and strong.

I shouldn’t think about his hands on my body, but I can’t help myself. One locked around my waist. The other gripping my arm. His palm spanning my stomach inside the truck. The heat of that accidental touch still lingers beneath my sweater.

He’s bigger than I remember. Living in the mountains hasn’t softened him. His broad shoulders strain the seams of his red-and-black flannel, and every small adjustment of the steering wheel makes the thick muscles in his forearms flex.

I shouldn’t notice his arms. I shouldn’t wonder what they would feel like wrapped around me if I weren’t fighting to escape. That thought is especially unacceptable. Samuel is taking me somewhere against my will.

He is not the man I secretly watched at every backyard barbecue my father hosted. He isn’t the quiet soldier who once stayed on the phone with me for three hours when Dad was overseas and we weren’t sure if he would make it back from his mission. He isn’t the man who taught me how to change a tire or sat through my awful middle-school production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.