Free A Beauty Dark & Deadly (A Dark & Deadly Series Book 1) by Heather C. Myers Page A

and didn’t want to disturb him.
     
    After saving his document at least three times, Jason stood up.  His legs hurt, and he made a note to himself to make sure to get up and walk around a little as he wrote.  However, it was easier said than done, because once he was in the zone, it was hard to remind him of anything else.  He stood for a moment, letting feeling resume in his lower body, and stretched as he felt a yawn coming on.  Then he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and ran his fingers through his hair before heading down the stairs.
     
    When he entered the kitchen, however, Emmy was not inside cooking, as he expected her to be.  He furrowed his brow and then headed into the living room.  She was not there either.  Maybe she was in her room…?  It was then that he noticed how quiet his house really was.  He had always been used to the silence, but now that there was a second person living with him, the silence seemed to get louder.  He headed upstairs, checked every room, but Emmy was not there.
     
    Where, then, could she be?
     
    Maybe she was outside?  He ran his fingers through his hair once again and pushed his door open, stepping outside.  The sun’s rays, though somewhat hidden behind the tall trees that surrounded his quaint home still made his eyes wince.  He scrunched his nose, and raised his arm over his head, hoping to block out the blinding rays as he took a couple of steps, moving his head to the left and the right, but seeing no young woman or any sort of evidence of if she had been here.  Chewing the bottom of his lip, he finally let his arm fall back to his side once he got used to the light and took a couple more paces to the right.  He decided to circle the house, making sure to cover his entire basis, and made a personal decision to not think about what to do if it turned out that she was not there.  Jason took his time as he traced the perimeter of his house.  Instead of keeping his eyes on the ground, as he usually did, his blue eyes scanned whatever was directly in front of him.
     
    When he got to his garden, Jason stopped walking.  No, she was not at his garden but it appeared that she had been.  A bowl of water was sitting there temporarily forgotten with dust particles already gathering on the surface.  He knelt down and pursed his lips.  Underneath the bowl of water was a discarded empty turkey package, as though Emmy had wanted to make sure the package didn’t blow away.  She probably wanted to throw it away instead of littering.  He smiled at the sheer thoughtfulness of the action, but he wasn’t as happy as he could be.  Emmy was still gone, or at least, she wasn’t found yet, and he wanted to know why, where she was, and if she was coming back.
     
    Jason tilted his head so that his focus was on the forest in front of him.  She couldn’t possibly be in the forest, could she?  She was new to his property, new to Tahoe, really.  It would be dangerous for her to go running off into the forest without someone who was familiar with the terrain, without him.  He felt his stress level raising a fraction, and pushed his fingers between the locks of his hair, but instead of running them through, he gripped them albeit somewhat gently.  Should he follow her?  How did he know she really was in the forest?  And if she was, why would she go in there if she knew she could most probably get lost there?  Did she choose to leave?  Was she forced…?  No, she would have screamed, wouldn’t she?  And he didn’t see any signs of a struggle.
     
    Jason chuckled at his law enforcement-like thoughts.  He had written too many thrillers, hadn’t he?  He shook his head and decided to finish his circle of the house.  Maybe she had just wanted to go for a walk, and she hadn’t asked him because she hadn’t wanted to disturb him.  If this was so, the thought made him smile.  Stacey was almost always bothering him, at least twice, when he holed himself up