Forever (Shifter Island Book 3) Read Free Page A

told him.
    “Y’got more to be sorry about than an old boat,” he said. Then he turned back to Lane. “The lady’s not comin’, son. What happens from here on is her problem, not yours. You done your due diligence. Now, I’m leavin’. If your stubborn backside ain’t in the boat, I’ll be leavin’ you behind. Up to you.”
    That said, he disappeared into the woods.
    And Lane stood there huffing, fists clenched, looking like the willful child he claimed Abby was.
    “You should go,” Aaron told him.
    He expected Abby to echo that, and was puzzled when she didn’t. Instead, she shook her head and pulled in a deep breath, and her lack of agreement made the wolf inside of Aaron stand at attention. Its mate was being threatened, something no wolf took lightly, and it took some doing for Aaron to quiet the animal down.
    “Give me a minute, please,” Abby said. “Please, Aaron.”
    She looked from him to the path they’d taken to come here, clearly asking him to retreat, to leave her alone with this pathetic human man.
    The wolf surged up again, and this time Aaron was tempted to let it have its way, to allow it to come bursting out into the sunlight. That would send the man running.
    To the authorities, possibly.
    “All right,” he said, just loudly enough for Abby to hear. “But I won’t let him take you.”
    He wanted to add, I won’t let you go with him, no matter what he says , but he held his tongue and moved back into the woods.

Four
     
    When she was sure that Aaron had moved as far away as he was likely to go, Abby screwed up her courage and walked across the clearing toward the man she’d once thought she was interested in.
    It fascinated her, in a way, that he was both pale and brick red at the same time. Furious, no doubt. Frustrated.
    “I am not going back home with you,” she told him. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You need to understand that. It’s not a topic for discussion. I am not leaving here with you.”
    He blinked at her, his lips smashed into a narrow line.
    “I’m sorry about not talking to you before I left,” she said as genuinely as she could manage. “Telling you what I was going to do. I know the note was pretty lame—it was a cowardly thing to do. But I couldn’t—I just couldn’t talk to you. I knew what you’d say, what you’d try to do. You’re doing it right now.”
    Still nothing. No reply.
    “You should go,” she sighed. “Just… go.”
    “I’ve spent an entire week of my life looking for you,” he said in a mean, brittle tone. “You said you were going home, so I looked for you there. I called you. I called your office. No one had seen you. The shuttle to the mainland didn’t have your name on any of the lists. You didn’t tell the front desk you were checking out. You vanished , Abby. You disappeared off the face of the earth, as far as anyone knew. When I finally found out that you’d taken that little boat, and no one could find it, I thought you might be dead. Do you understand that? I thought you might have drowned in the damned ocean . Has that entered your head at all?”
    It had, more than once—but she couldn’t allow that to matter.
    Then she realized that he’d actually done something impressive. Instead of going back home to the job that was clearly the most important thing in his life and forgetting he’d ever even met her, he’d been out looking for her, calling around trying to find her.
    Maybe he had been genuinely worried about her.
    No, she decided.
    He’d been worried and scared, but not about her welfare. What he’d been afraid of was that, after word got around that she had disappeared, the police would believe he had done something to her. That he’d killed her himself, because that sort of thing happened all the time: women going on vacation with a boyfriend and not coming home because the boyfriend (or fiancé, or husband) had killed them.
    Her co-workers would have talked. His co-workers would have talked.