Free Boneyard Ridge by Paula Graves

conference....” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze rose toward the ceiling. “Do you hear that?”
    Hunter listened. At first, he heard only the sound of wind whistling around the cabin’s eaves, and the faint whisper of rain drizzle. But slowly, the deep, rhythmic whump-whump sound of spinning rotors filtered through the ambient noise.
    “Helicopter,” he said quietly, his gut tightening.
    “Looking for me?”
    “I don’t know.” He reached over and turned off the kitchen light, then headed through the house and extinguished the rest.
    “They’ll find this place eventually.” Susannah’s voice was so close behind him he could feel her breath on his neck. “Won’t they?”
    “Probably,” he admitted.
    But he couldn’t let it happen tonight.

Chapter Six
    The only light in the cabin came from the glowing red wires of the space heater, but it was enough to reveal the tense set of Hunter’s jaw and the dangerous glitter of his eyes as he peered between the drawn curtains over the front window. The helicopter had passed nearly a half hour earlier, but he was still on high alert, his ramrod posture and spare, deliberate movements convincing her all over again that he had spent at least some of his life in uniform.
    “They’re gone,” she murmured.
    His gaze cut toward her. “They could come back.”
    “Meanwhile, we starve to death in the dark?”
    For a second, she thought he was going to bark at her like a drill sergeant and tell her to shut up and fall in line. But then he visibly relaxed, a hint of a smile conjuring up one of those rare dimples she was starting to covet. “No. I think we can manage dinner without exposing our position.”
    “It’s not going to be an MRE or anything, is it?” she asked. She’d tried one of those military dried-food packets once, the so-called “Meals Ready to Eat.” She hadn’t exactly been impressed.
    He slanted a curious look her way. “Why would you ask that?”
    “Well, clearly you’re former military.”
    That statement earned her a double dose of dimples. “What makes you think that?”
    She ticked off the clues. “You’ve approached this whole thing with the planning of a field general. You carry a military-issue rucksack. And use it to carry a field kit of necessary supplies. You know your way around triage first aid. And you have the posture of a bloody soldier.”
    “I was a bloody soldier,” he admitted. “A lifetime ago.”
    “How long a lifetime?”
    He sighed as he nudged her toward the back of the house. “A little over a year.”
    The elusive half memory that had flitted through her mind earlier made another brief appearance before dancing beyond her reach once more. “That long, huh?”
    He stopped in the middle of the kitchen and turned to look at her. “Like I said, a lifetime.”
    Sore spot, she thought, her gaze dropping to the leg he favored. Encased in jeans, there was nothing obviously wrong with the limb, except the limp he couldn’t hide, not even here in the cabin, where the floor was level and there were no obstacles to navigate except for the occasional chair or table.
    She’d never been the kind of woman who could resist poking at a sore spot. “War injury?” She nodded toward his bad leg.
    The glare he shot her way would have scared a lesser woman. But Susannah had stared down her share of monsters over the span of her twenty-eight years. She didn’t even flinch.
    He looked away and crossed to the pantry. “Yeah.”
    She crowded him a little, earning another dark glare. “I should know you, shouldn’t I?”
    “What makes you think that?” He pulled a can of chicken and dumplings from the pantry and made a show of looking at the expiration date printed on the can in the faint orange glow of the kitchen heater.
    “Well, for one thing, I keep thinking I’ve heard your name somewhere. Hunter’s not that common a first name.”
    “You don’t know it is my first name.” He held the can in front of her.