“It didn’t take a rocket scientist. They were just distracted.”
“As long as it worked,” Elsie said with a shrug, then blew out a breath. “The other night, the man in my house told me to stop hiding and that he was going to find me. Or that he was always going to find me? Something like that.” She mumbled the last sentence, but Wyatt heard enough clearly. “And he mentioned ‘the past’ in this vague kind of way.”
“Your past?” he asked.
She didn’t look at him, didn’t answer. It was more than answer enough.
This was not random. There was no way it could have been.
Who was he? Who was trying to find her?
And what did he mean by find her? He wondered if she was hiding from someone intentionally.
He looked at her but Elsie was already shaking her head. “Before you ask, I don’t know. I don’t know any of the answers to what you’re wondering.”
“You have to know more than I do.”
Hesitation.
“Not really.”
Why did he feel like every layer he finally got behind just left more layers in its place? Elsie Montgomery was far more of a mystery than he’d have ever guessed.
“Let me take you home?” Wyatt cleared his throat. “To your house.” A head shake. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”
This time she didn’t appear to be hiding any emotions and he saw understanding in her smile. “Thanks. And yes, I think that would be wise. Just in case anything happened at my cabin while I was gone...”
He understood. Two of them could more effectively sweep the place for intruders. She had really meant it earlier when she’d told him he could help. He’d heard her reply, had felt relief at it, but wasn’t sure he’d really expected her to follow through to this degree.
They walked to the docks.
“Your boat or mine?” Elsie asked, looking up at him with clear eyes.
Wyatt took a deep breath. “You’d better drive yours and I’ll drive mine. That way you’re not left without transportation once I head back out.”
“Smart.” She was frowning. “I should have thought of that.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Her raised eyebrows seemed to point out the irony of his instruction. That was different, Wyatt knew, even if Elsie didn’t. It was one thing to be a perfectionist like Elsie seemed to be, demanding something from herself that was asking too much. He wasn’t a perfectionist, not even close. If he was hard on himself, he deserved it.
They walked first to Elsie’s boat, which Willow jumped into with the ease of a dog who had grown up around the water and was used to using boats as transportation.
Come to think of it, she’d been amazing on the plane, too.
“That’s quite the dog you’ve got, you know? I love my dog, but Sven took a lot longer to adjust to the plane than that, and boats still scare him. He just presses down into the deck the entire ride. And when he has to climb in one, he sort of slinks toward it like ‘here we go again.’”
Elsie laughed. “She’s a great dog, but it’s training, too. We worked on those things when she was a puppy, because they’re necessary in a dog that does search and rescue work. We can’t worry about how she’s going to respond in situations like that. She needs to be all but bombproof.”
“That’s a lot of training. Says a lot about the quality of her trainer.”
Elsie blushed. “I mean, like you said, she’s a good dog.”
He let that one go. Clearly she didn’t want to take the compliment, but she did deserve it.
After looking around to satisfy himself with the knowledge that her boat hadn’t been tampered with, Wyatt headed to his own boat and prepped it for the ride across the bay. Had it really only been a few days ago he’d done this same trip in the middle of the night? Such a short time had passed since then, but it felt like so much had changed. Elsie had gone from a near stranger, just a friend of his sister’s, to someone he cared about, as a friend, in such a short time.
Or was it that short? They’d known each other almost their whole lives.
No, it was still short because Wyatt had spent so much of his life self-absorbed and barely noticing his sister’s mousy friend. Who was not as mousy or timid as he’d initially believed.
She still needed protection, though. The danger against her was like a living thing, growing as time passed and becoming clearer and clearer.
It bothered Wyatt that someone had spoken to her during both incidents. Bold criminals seemed to be the more dangerous type, just from what he’d observed while flying for the troopers and watching them do what they did.
The ride across the bay passed quickly and soon Wyatt was beaching the boat, downing the anchor and walking toward Elsie’s cabin. It looked undisturbed, but appearances didn’t always tell the whole story.
Elsie herself came to mind again. He was too intrigued by her. He needed to stay focused on the goal, which was keeping her safe. Then he’d be back out of her life, back in his own somewhat empty one, just existing...
Yeah, it didn’t sound good that way.
But that was just the way it had to be. Wyatt should know better by now than to want something he couldn’t have.
He made his way toward her cabin, struck by some of the similarities this little corner of Alaska had to the island where they’d been today. The trees were the same tall Sitka spruce, the ground damp from ocean air and humidity, moss everywhere.
Did Elsie notice the similarities? The island seemed to scare her and make her go into some dark place in her head where he couldn’t reach her. This place seemed to make her comfortable.
No sooner had Wyatt processed through the thought than he wondered if it was true. She was comfortable here, but was she happy? She certainly seemed to enjoy the independence, but she was so isolated. By choice? A weird tie to her past?
