Page 9 of Beyond the Blue Horizon

I hadn’t been expecting it, either.

None of it.

Not the storm or the crash or this man who’d come up on us as if it was his life’s purpose to rescue us.

Thank God he stopped.

He could have driven by rather than throwing himself out into the frozen tundra to help us.

I flinched the second I thought it, subtly shaking my head. I couldn’t rely on him. Couldn’t trust him. I couldn’t trust anyone.

I needed to remember that.

“Guess it’s a good thing I had to make a trip into the city today and was coming back this way,” he said in a low voice. I had a hunch he meant it to be gentle, but it still cut like a growl.

“Yeah, I guess it was,” I managed.

Intensity billowed off him on suffocating waves. His presence was more commanding than anything or anyone I’d stumbled upon in all my life.

An energy crackled in the air.

An awareness that slithered across my skin.

A draw that I didn’t understand.

I inhaled a shaky breath like I could rid my reaction to him.

The only thing it served to do was drag his aura in, and I was struck by a rush of his scent.

Mossy woods and crisp snow and the faint vestiges of warm, smokey leather.

All of it was bound in an undercurrent of sex.

“You good?” he rumbled, the two words gravel.

“Yeah. I think I’m fine. You don’t have to worry.” I tried to sound as casual as I could.

He hesitated for a moment, like he wasn’t sure that he believed me, before he shifted around a fraction to look into the backseat. “How about you two?”

“As right as rain,” Nelly enthused.

“Notwain. Is snow,Newwy. Wook.” Finn pointed a chubby finger out the window at the swirling snow that continued its barrage from the sky.

A roughened chuckle rolled out of Theo. “Yeah, little man. It is definitely snowing and cold out there. Think we’d better get you into town so we can get you warmed up.”

Finn exaggerated a shiver. “Soco-wed.”

His words were garbled with his little stammer that always twisted his Ls into Ws.

“We’re off, then,” Theo said as he faced forward and put his truck into drive.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure it was clear then carefully eased back onto the road.

A heavy silence swamped the cab, the only sound the roar of the diesel engine as he began to wind through the forest in the same direction we’d been traveling.

Tension built and bound as I warred with what I was going to do.

I wondered if Theo could feel every one of my worries because his low voice finally cut into the burden. “I have a buddy who owns an autobody shop. I’ll give him a call to have him come tow in your car once the storm clears.”