Page 15 of Huck Frasier (Seals on Fraiser Mountain #5)

Frasier

I gave her a day.

Twenty-four hours to come back on her own.

She didn’t.

So I stopped waiting.

I wasn’t chasing her this time.

I was tracking her.

And she’d left enough breadcrumbs to make it easy—Lark’s porch swing still swaying, Marley’s jacket missing from the hook, Axel muttering, “You really want to do this?” while tossing me the keys to the truck.

Yes. I did.

Because if she thought she could run without hearing what I had to say—

She had no idea who the hell she was dealing with.

I found her forty minutes outside of town in a roadside motel with broken blinds and a flickering vacancy sign.

She didn’t even look surprised when I pounded on the door.

She just opened it in silence.

Hair up. Hoodie on. Eyes red.

“Frasier,” she whispered.

“Don’t.”

I stepped inside. Slammed the door behind me.

She backed up, arms crossed like she could hold herself together if she just clenched hard enough.

“You don’t get to do this,” I growled. “You don’t get to light a match, set my world on fire, and walk away like it was nothing.”

“I warned you.”

“You warned me you were scared. You didn’t warn me that you’d quit before we even had a chance.”

“I’m not like you, Frasier. I don’t know how to stay. ”

“Then learn.”

Her breath hitched.

I closed the space between us in two steps. Not touching. Just there. Close enough for her to feel it. The heat. The anger. The ache.

“You think I came here to beg?” I said, voice low. “I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“You think I’m here to fix it?”

She shook her head.

“I’m here because you don’t get to write the ending by yourself. Not this time. You and me—we started this together. So we finish it together.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. She blinked them away, hard. “What if I mess it up?”

“You will.”

She swallowed.

“And I’ll still be there.”

Her voice cracked. “I don’t know how to be that person.”

“Then let me show you.”

She crumbled into me. “My mom is crazy, what if I’m like her?”

No kisses. No heat.

Just her, shaking in my arms like a woman who finally stopped running.

And me—holding her like a man who finally caught what he couldn’t let go.

“Your mom is alive?” That surprised the hell out of me.

“Yes, she’s alive, I guess.”

“How come she wasn’t at Lark and Axel’s wedding?”

“Did you not hear me? She’s crazy.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t seen her since we graduated from high school. She left and never came back. We stayed home and went to our state college. We were worried. The police wouldn’t help because she left on her own.”

“When we graduated from college, I left. Lark stayed a bit longer. She would go home and check to see if she had returned, but she never did. I don’t want to talk about her.”

I was going to find out what the hell happened to their mother, I would keep it a secret.