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Sweet mama, the man was a work of art. Lila could have watched that smooth arm motion, that flick of his strong wrists all day. Every time he raised his knife-wielding hand over his head, his thermal shirt rode up and she caught a glimpse of taut muscle under bronze skin.

She had to keep reminding herself that she was supposed to be doing more than just admiring his stunning physique. Working at The Fang, she’d seen him carry two cases of liquor at a time, one on each shoulder. She’d seen him lift heavy tables out of the way of her mop. And of course, lately she’d had the good fortune to watch him chop firewood. So she knew how incredibly fit he was. But she’d never gotten such a close-up, front-row seat to this spectacle.

A knife thudded into the ground just past a tall cottonwood, and he turned to her expectantly.

Right. The knife.

“I’m sorry, it went by so fast. Can you do that one again?”

Focus.

“I can do it more slowly. Maybe the knife thrower was going for accuracy more than force.”

She brought up the image in her mind. “It was both. He wanted both. Oh!” A distinctly male energy shivered through the memory. “It was a him. I didn’t see him, but it feels like a man.”

“Okay. Making progress.” He strode toward the knife, which was barely visible in the leaf litter of the forest floor. “Let’s try this one again, but slower.”

She watched the blade flash through the air, long and lethal.

“It’s not that one. It was much shorter and kind of stubbier.”

“Like a Bowie knife?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

He crouched next to the box and pulled out a knife in an embossed leather case. When he pulled it out, she felt a shudder run through her. “It could be that one. Whose knife is it? How do you have all these knives?”

“Some of them are mine. Brownie Flynn has a big knife collection and let me borrow a few. This one is his.” He rose to his feet and pulled it from the case. “Ready?”

She nodded, then watched it launch toward the cottonwood. It fell just short. “Not that one.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He strolled toward the spot where it had landed. “Do you want to try throwing them? Maybe that will give you another perspective.”

The knife in her blip had been viewed from off to the side. She didn’t see how throwing one would help. But the offer was too tempting to refuse. When else would she get the chance to throw knives in the autumn woods with a bronze god of a man?

She stepped toward him and accepted the knife he settled into her hand. She shivered at the weight of it, then turned it over to feel the solid heft of the hilt. Well-balanced. Maybe…comforting. It made her feel strong.

Bear positioned himself next to her, so close she felt the heat from his body. He’d taken off his overshirt after about ten knife tosses, and a fine sheen of sweat dampened his skin. She inhaled deeply. Smells were important to her, especially when it came to people. If someone’s personal smell wasn’t to her liking, she tended to avoid them.

But Bear had always smelled good to her, and still did, even in his sweaty state.

“This is a knife designed for hunting. Are you right or left-handed?” he asked her.

“Left-handed.”

“Then put your left foot forward, right foot slightly behind. You want to stand up straight, but stay nice and relaxed. Hold the knife like a hammer. Good.”

He adjusted her grip. She ran her tongue across her lips. His nearness was making her dizzy. Maybe she shouldn’t be throwing knives when she was under the influence of Bear Davis. She already knew this knife wasn’t the right one—something about it was different, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. But she didn’t want to interrupt the flow of this lesson.

“You’re going to aim for that rotted stump over there. It’s a nice soft, big target. Hard to miss. You got it?”

She frowned at the stump. “It’s only about six feet away, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge.”

“It’s your first throw. We’re taking it easy, starting with a half-spin. If you get interested in knife-throwing, I’ll teach you some more advanced throws.”

She pictured trips to the woods to get more lessons from Bear. Worked for her. She smiled at him, and noticed his dark pupils dilate in response. A shot of heat went directly to her lower belly.

Get a grip. Literally. Grip the knife.

“Blade faces you. Handle toward the sky. There you go. Now give it moderate force and aim toward that log.”

She let the knife fly. It dropped to the ground about two feet away from the target. “Ugh, that was terrible. Let me try again.” She darted toward the throwing knife and snatched it up by its handle.

“Get into position first,” he warned her when she was about to fling it again. “Always check your surroundings, make sure everyone knows you’re about to throw a knife. Make sure you’re wearing hard shoes.”

She laughed. “I haven’t changed my shoes since thirty seconds ago.”

“Basic safety protocol. Just getting it on the record. Now go. See if you can’t bury this knife right in the heart of that stump.”

“Geez, Bear, you make it sound so gruesome.” She winked at him, then lifted her hand to the throwing position, the knife next to her ear.

“Moderate force,” Bear murmured in her other ear, then stepped back.

She could still feel his breath on her skin as she released the knife. It soared through the air, over the stump, past the next tree, and disappeared into a pile of leaves next to a boulder. Exhilarated, she twirled in the air. “That was amazing!”

Bear let loose a “whoop” she’d never heard from the stoic bartender before. “Look at you go,” he hooted. “That was a solid throw.”

“But I missed. I overshot the stump.”

“That’s okay. You’re stronger than you realize.”

She ran in the direction of the knife, skirting the stump that had emerged untouched from her knife-throwing adventure. Dropping to her knees next to the boulder, she poked gingerly through the faded cottonwood leaves. An earthy smell rose from the pile of dead leaves, as if the microbes and fungus were already claiming their own. She’d seen the knife land, but couldn’t say exactly where.

Bear jogged over to join her. “Watch out for the blade,” he warned. “We don’t know how it landed.”

“I know.” She frowned as her finger encountered something hard, but not sharp, not metal. Definitely not her knife, although it did have a similar shape. She blew the leaves away so she could see the item more clearly, and pulled it free.

It was a black nylon sheath meant for a knife.

She stared down at it as chills swept through her. Had it belonged to the knife-thrower? Why else would a random knife sheath be out here?

Recoiling from the thought of holding something that had belonged to a killer, she dropped it onto the leaves and backed away.

Bear pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gingerly picked it up. “Nice find,” he said, obviously trying to sound casual. “We’ll have to give this to Cromwell. He can run some tests.”

“It could belong to anyone.”

“That’s true.” He nodded, then pulled his phone from his pocket and took a photo of it. “I’ll ask around if anyone’s missing a sheath.”

Her heart hammered. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from it. “How are we going to explain to Cromwell how we found it? We just happened to stumble across it while strolling through the woods?” Maybe hand in hand, since she’d told him she had a crush on Bear?

“I’ll think of something.”

She was sure that he would; he seemed very much at home with murder investigations.

How much did she really know about Bear?

When it came to people, she relied on her instincts. They never led her wrong, as far as she knew. On the other hand, her intuition was dampened here in Firelight Ridge.

He’d made that throwaway reference to not calling himself a cop anymore—which he’d never explained. Why wouldn’t he want to tell her if he used to be a police officer? Was there something more to the story? Something Officer Cromwell knew, but she didn’t?

She shot him an uneasy glance as he walked back to his box of knives. “Wait,” she called. “We still don’t know what kind of knife I saw.”

He turned and held up the sheath. “This kind of sheath is for a throwing knife about six inches long. We’ve been working with hunting knives, because that’s what most people use out here. Hang on.”

After rummaging through his box again, he pulled out a six-inch knife that was just one piece of steel, with no grip. One end was sharpened to a point, the other left dull so it could be held.

“Throwing knives are very different. They’re either balanced or unbalanced. This one is balanced. I’m going to throw it, you tell me if it matches what you saw.”

Now that she’d thrown a knife herself, she could appreciate his quickness and grace even more. The knife spun through the air and embedded itself in the trunk of a cottonwood, where it vibrated, the thud echoing through the forest.

She nodded numbly. “That’s it. That’s definitely it.”

“That’s significant. A throwing knife wouldn’t be anyone’s weapon of choice. That suggests whoever threw it isn’t a hunter or someone comfortable in the wilderness. Maybe knife-throwing is a hobby of his. Rita surprised him and he used whatever weapon he had at hand.”

Lila barely listened as she thought about Rita Casey’s last moments. That poor woman had felt a knife just like that one rip into her back. Lila shuddered as she imagined the burn of it, the terrifying assault of it. Had she known it was a knife, or had she thought it was a bear? Why had she come to the woods alone? She wasn’t from here, she wasn’t an experienced Alaska local who knew how to handle the wilderness.

She hadn’t come here alone.

That knowledge came the way all her intuitions did. Suddenly and absolutely.

“Someone was with her.” Her voice was faint, barely a breath. She cleared her throat and climbed to her feet. The fallen leaves shifted, and suddenly there was the knife she’d thrown. She picked it up, and immediately felt stronger and more confident. Maybe she was about to become a knife person.

“What was that?” Bear was busy packing up his box of knives.

“Someone came out here with her. But they got separated. She was hoping to find him, and they were trying to get help. Don’t ask me for any more details, because that’s all I’ve got.”