Page 23 of Creed (Rock Hard Mountain Men #3)

I stuck out my arms for Creed to grab, and he tried to pull me through from his side of the fence, but I wouldn’t budge.

I was thoroughly stuck in the fence.

Lying face down in the dirt, I started to laugh.

“You know, I think I’ve seen porn that started this way.”

I couldn’t see Creed’s face from my position, but I could feel his confusion radiating above me.

Right. The man had spent his life stuck deep in the closet. He’d probably never even watched porn before.

After a moment of consideration, Creed prodded at the parts of my midsection that he could reach. “Are you trying to suck in your stomach?”

“Yes, of course, but it’s clearly not enough.”

“Stop doing that. Just let everything relax?”

I craned my head as best I could to look at him, raising one eyebrow in silent doubt.

“Trust me,” he insisted. “I know it sounds counterintuitive, but by holding in your stomach you’re tensing up everything else, and tense muscles aren’t as malleable as soft ones.”

There wasn’t much choice but to trust him. It took a moment for me to relax and let every muscle in my body go slack. I felt my stomach press more firmly against the ground and the sides of the fence and couldn’t help doubting Creed’s assessment.

Creed picked up my hands again. “Ready? Before I pull, exhale all the air from your lungs then hold your breath. It’ll help.”

I did as he said, and when my lungs were as empty as possible, I nodded.

He pulled.

The planks of the fence dug painfully into my flesh, and I was probably going to have some deep scrapes after this, but surprisingly, I started to slide forward inch by inch.

My stomach was almost through the fence, when I was abruptly jerked back to a stop.

“What now?” I gasped. The wooden planks squeezing me from either side was making it very hard to breath, and I was starting to feel dizzy from the limited air.

Creed dropped my hands to prod around at my waist again.

“Take off your pants.”

My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. “What?”

“Your pants are caught on the fence. Probably because you came to a stop. I can’t reach the other side of the fence to un-snag them, so try to at least unbutton them.”

I sighed again. “I have definitely seen porn that started this way.”

Maybe making sexual jokes in the presence of children wasn’t a great thing to do but damn it all, I needed something to help me keep calm, and inappropriate humor was the only tool I had to rely on in that moment.

It took some wiggling, but I managed to get a hand under myself and undo the button and zipper of my pants. Then Creed dragged me by my arms once again, and this time I slid right out of my pants and the rest of the way through the fence.

I was half naked, dirty, and covered in bloody scratches, but I was free.

“That’s it,” I muttered as I retrieved my pants from the other side of the fence and started putting them back on. “After this, I’m going on a diet.”

Creed grabbed me and spun me around to face him with an alarmed look on his face.

“Don’t you dare.”

His gaze flickered down over my body, covetous and hungry in a way that I’d never been looked at before.

It was reassuring to know that he enjoyed my figure just the way it was, and I patted his arm in a show of comfort.

“Don’t worry. I’ve said the same thing many times before and it’s never happened.”

Creed’s eyes narrowed as he continued to stare at me, like he thought I would suddenly start losing weight right in front of him.

“Good,” he eventually declared, then turned around to take Mavis back from Robyn so we could continue our escape.

I just shook my head, picked up the backpack, and followed him.

Navigating our way through the forest in the dark was nothing like the hike Creed had taken me on earlier.

I’d thought the previous hike was hard, but it was practically a stroll through the park compared to this.

We had a flashlight, but Creed claimed that waving a light around in the middle of the night would make us easier to find, so we stumbled our way through the dark.

There wasn’t a path, not even a natural deer trail that we could follow, so we were forced to stomp our way directly through the underbrush while trying to leave as little evidence of our passing as possible.

I had no idea how Creed did it. The man must secretly be part cat, because despite his size, he barely left any footprints, and easily navigated between the trees as if it were broad daylight.

He did all this while also carrying a mostly unconscious child and didn’t even look like he was breaking a sweat.

In contrast, I nearly smacked my face directly into a tree trunk three times in the first hour.

“Do you even know where we’re going, or are we just wandering around blindly?” I asked when we stopped to catch our breath for a moment.

I had no illusion that the break was mostly for Robyn’s sake. If it had just been the two of us, Creed would have insisted we keep going. In bed, I enjoyed that kind of confident control, but in this case, it was just annoying.

I couldn’t even get mad at him for it. Creed’s unrelenting spirit was the thing most likely to help us survive.

“I know where we’re going,” he assured me as he handed me one of the water bottles from the bag that Robyn had supplied.

The boy had been smart enough to pack plenty of essentials. We had enough food and water for a few days so long as we used it sparingly.

I only took a brief sip of water, saving as much of it as I could.

“How can you possibly know where we’re going? We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

Rather than answer me with words, Creed merely pointed toward the sky.

I looked up, seeing the cloudless night sky above us dotted with thousands of stars.

Of course, the man could navigate purely by the sight of the stars.

Why was I even surprised?

That kind of competency was hot, don’t get me wrong, but still...

What the hell?

Why would he even know that kind of stuff?

Surely the military had more sophisticated navigational technology.

“We escaped on the north side of the village,” Creed explained. “We’ll head east for a bit to ensure we give the area a wide berth, and then we’ll head south. If we are where I think we are, there should be a town just a few days hike from here.”

He was already starting to pack up again, ready to continue our journey.

I groaned but hoisted myself off of the tree I was leaning against.

“Isn’t there a road or something we can follow? We were brought there in a van. That means there is some way to travel to and from the village.”

Creed handed me the bag before picking up Mavis again and carefully positioning her on his back.

“The road is the first place they’ll look for us. If we want to avoid getting caught, we have to stay as far from the road as possible.”

The bag may not have been as heavy as the one I was carrying when we started our little hiking trip, but it still weighed on me as I hoisted it onto my shoulder. I groaned as the straps settled into place and prepared myself to continue the difficult journey.

“I can take that,” Robyn offered, reaching for the bag.

Summoning up more energy, I forced my face into a smile that I hoped looked genuine.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got it. This isn’t my first time hiking across a mountain.”

Technically, it was my second time, but the boy didn’t need to know that.

We kept going, slowly but steadily. The sounds of the night followed us everywhere, leaving the hair on the back of my neck in a permanently upright position.

It felt like we were constantly being watched, and with every unidentifiable noise my imagination kept flipping between the cult we were running from and the natural dangers of the forest.

I wasn’t sure which was worse.

After another hour of hiking, we came upon a small river. I wasn’t sure what the difference between a river and a stream was, but the water here was deep enough and moving fast enough that calling it a river seemed appropriate.

Creed showed no sign of surprise when we reached the river, so I assumed he somehow knew it was there. He checked the direction the river, looking at the sky a few times to cross-reference whatever information was in his head, before declaring “This is a good spot.”

Sensing that we were about to stop for a while, I set the bag down. “A good spot for what?”

Creed also laid Mavis on a large flat rock.

“To throw them off our trail. I don’t know if they have any scent hounds, or expert trackers, but just in case, we should leave a false trail. Give me your shoes.”

Assuming that Creed had a plan, because at this point it was safe to assume he always had a plan, Robyn and I took off our shoes and handed them over without question.

We each stood on a rock to keep our socks out of the dirt and watched as Creed walked along the riverbank, stopping occasionally to press our shoes into the soft mud of the riverbank and leave false tracks to make it look like three people were walking side by side.

He continued until he reached a rockier area where our shoes wouldn’t leave any obvious tracks, then he walked backward along his own footprints until he returned to us.

“Here, put these back on and let’s keep going. It’ll be daylight soon enough, and we need to find shelter before then.”

“Since you laid the false trail going downstream, I assume we’re not going that way,” I said as I laced up my boots. “So where are we going?”

Creed pointed across the river. “We’ll cross here. The water will help wash away our scent, and the opposite bank has plenty of large rocks we can climb out on without leaving obvious footprints.

The moment I stepped into the water, I shivered. It was colder than I expected for the middle of summer. According to Creed, the rivers this far into the mountain probably came from the snow melting off their peaks, but I still hadn’t expected it to be quite so cold.