“Kieran.”
He backed away, turned smoothly, and leaped into the open door of the truck.
Her heart did a remarkable series of acrobatics that left her feeling breathless. She slid into the seat beside Kieran, holding her feelings in check. It wasn’t the time for questions and confessions. Not yet.
“We’re going to get a room at the motel for a few hours, check in with Julie, and get some rest,” she told him, as if everything had happened exactly as she expected. “We may have to spend the day there. But Julie’s family can’t keep the authorities off our tail forever. We’ll have to get some distance between us and Minnesota.”
His ear twitched, and she knew he understood her. She prayed he couldn’t hear the way her heart pounded at the prospect of spending a day trapped in the same tiny room with him. Or in the cramped truck, for days on end, heading for an unknown destination with a man to whom she could not yet reveal her heart.
The dam within herself was being held together wit spit and twine and the frayed edges of willpower, but it was all she had.
As she put the truck in gear and headed for the motel she spoke to him in the only way she dared.
Please stay, Kieran. Don’t even think of running again.
But she knew he couldn’t read her mind.
* * *
“Ms. Wakanabo?”
Julie stopped in midstride. A man had stepped into her path on the Pine Street sidewalk—a man she’d never met before but knew about, as she knew through her family grapevine about all the outsiders who came to Merritt.
Especially now. And especially outsiders like this one.
“Mr. Gévaudan,” she said, and held out her hand. “I’ve heard of you.”
He arched a gray-shot dark brow. A handsome guy, tall and well muscled, with yellow-green eyes that seized and held her gaze as his fingers grasped hers.
“Perhaps through our mutual acquaintances, Alexandra Warrington and Kieran Holt?” he asked.
Julie stiffened. This one wasn’t going to play games. She knew he’d talked once to Alex and Kieran, after the bar fight the afternoon before Peter’s murder. She knew he’d been asking questions around town about Kieran since he and Alex had “disappeared.”
His interest in them might not have been so strange if he’d been one of the townsfolk who suspected Kieran had committed the murder. But there was something else here, something Julie felt as he held her hand. Something very much like what she’d sensed when she first met Kieran Holt.
He released her fingers. “I’ve been concerned about what I’ve been hearing about Alexandra and Kieran,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to know them well, but I’d hoped to learn more about their wolf research. I understand you’re a friend of theirs.”
Julie began to walk. She’d already talked to the police, dodged their questions with inscrutable smiles and nods, as had Grandma and the rest of the family. The cops had no real reason to suspect that her family had helped Kieran and Alex to leave the area, and still had no idea where the suspects might have gone.
But this one, this stranger—he was different. The back of Julie’s neck prickled as she heard him follow.
“I realize you don’t really know me, Ms. Wakanabo,” he said. “But I’ve come to you because I want to help Alex and Kieran, and I believe you know where they are.”
Julie forced herself to turn very slowly, to regard Gévaudan with an expressionless face. “What makes you think that?”
He smiled. It held a hint of charm, but it was also unyielding. “Call it intuition. Something you’re not unfamiliar with, I think.”
She planted her hands on her hips. “You don’t know anything about me, Mr. Gévaudan. The whole town knows I don’t believe this crap about Kieran killing Schaeffer. And Alex is my friend. Even if I knew something—which I don’t—I don’t think I’d tell you.”
He grew sober. “I don’t blame you for your caution. I’d do the same in your place.”
“Glad you understand. And now I have stuff to take care of, so—”