One More Time Read Free Page B

phone with me right then, and I wasn’t going to end up hacked into a bunch of little pieces if I could help it. “There’s someone outside my house—”
    “I’ll be right there. Where are you? Are you safe?”
    I couldn’t tell if having him sounding genuinely worried about me was a good thing or not. “I’m in my living room, kneeling on the floor and trying not to be seen.”
    “Good. I’m getting in my car now. I’ll check it out, then come up to the house. Stay on the phone with me.”
    “Okay, okay. I can do that.” Breathing became easier as I relaxed a little bit. Trent was coming, he had a gun, and he would take care of whatever it was. “But what if it’s a bear?” He couldn’t possibly hold off a bear with just a gun.
    He laughed, and I heard the sound of his car as he started driving. “If it’s a bear, we’ve both got big problems.”
    “Well that’s not reassuring at all,” I grumbled.
    “Wasn’t supposed to be. I’m coming down the hill now. I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”
    I nodded and licked my lips as I pressed my hand against the cold glass window. “Be careful.”
    “Will do.”

Chapter Two
     
     
    Trent
     
    I PULLED up to Caleb’s house, which was more like a mansion compared to the rest of the houses in town. We didn’t really have neighborhoods in Thornwood, just the town, and everyone lived in it. But Caleb’s house was on the far east side of it and I lived directly in the center of the townhouses that stood between my mom’s diner and the grocery store. I got a text and glanced down at it before I parked my car in Caleb’s driveway.
    Where’d you go? The bed’s cold.
    I shook my head and sent a quick text back. Neediness didn’t really work for me, as endearing as my current bedmate thought it might be.
    Out on a call.
    There was no text of him telling me to be safe or to be careful or any of that, which didn’t really surprise me. I’d found him on one of those quick hookup sites and was actually kind of surprised he decided to stay for a while after we were done. Most of the time the guys I brought home didn’t.
    Anyway, couldn’t think about that right then. Caleb had someone by his house, and I was ready to rush in and save him, though I was pretty sure it was nothing. City boy might think we had bears, but I hadn’t seen one around the town in at least a year. Deer on the other hand we had plenty of, elk too. But not bear.
    I went around his house along the path toward the garage that could have easily fit my house inside it. Actually it probably was a barn at one time that someone had converted somewhere along the way. I hadn’t been particularly close to the Smiths, who had owned the property before Caleb, but I did think it was a shame he didn’t have horses in the fields like the Smiths had. I grew up seeing the foals playing each summer in those pastures.
    The area around the garage was dark, which was something Caleb should have probably looked into, and I figured I’d mention it to him at some point. I had my gun out of the holster and held firmly between my hands, but just as I suspected, there was nothing for him to be worried about, just some knocked-over trash cans. No trash was in them, but there was probably the smell of old trash on them and I saw plenty of raccoon paw prints around.
    With a shake of my head, I holstered my gun and went back up the trail to the house. I knocked on the door, waited a little while, then knocked again until I heard Caleb moving around in the house. He had all the lights off but with there being a full moon out and the house mostly made up of big glass windows like in one of those pretty magazines my mom had liked, it wasn’t hard to track his movements inside the house. I even saw when he ran into a box and I heard him cursing as he opened up the front door.
    “Hi, officer,” he said as he pulled the door open. He looked around the house toward the garage, and I turned to look with