Crack.

That’s a foot crushing a twig, no doubt about it. The sound drifts from further along the bank and my jaw is hard as I turn, strolling toward the disturbance, hands still in my pockets.

There’s a hatchet back by the woodpile, but I don’t need it. Whoever this is, I’m guaranteed to loom right over them. I’m as big as the wooden cabinets I build.

Rustling noises whisper through the night. There’s the dull thump of footsteps over rock, then splashing from the creek bed.

I get close. Real close. I’m a quiet man when I want to be, my strides silent over the scrubby grass and baked dirt. I get so close, I can hear my trespasser’s ragged breathing, and I stand over their shadow as they splash their face with the shallow water.

I clear my throat. “That’s not clean.”

The troublemaker shoots about ten feet into the air, letting out a feminine gasp. And I’m all ready to lecture about sneaking around on a man’s property in the dark, but then a wobbly voice says, “Mr Bray?”

I know that voice.

I’m fucking haunted by that voice.

It slinks through my dreams and whispers in my ears at night. It curls through me, low and smoky, whenever my restraint finally crumbles and I take myself in hand; it urges me on as I work my shaft, saying my name. My name, not his.

“…Josie?”

The shadow moves, and it’s exactly the right height.

And okay, now I’m startled, stumbling back. An unknown trespasser, I could handle with no problems. But this?

“Josie Martin?”

She huffs a bitter laugh, and even though it’s pitch black out here, I can see her face in my mind’s eye. Her toffee brown hair that glints gold in the sun. Her freckles and the gap between her front teeth. I know the exact expression she’ll be pulling: the wry twist of her mouth, and the way she squints one eye shut for a split second.

“You caught me,” she says.

I fucking wish.

But there are too many questions, all clogging my throat. Too many worries, and too much visceral, raw delight. Having her near again is like touching a live wire—I’m suddenly so awake, my whole body crackling with energy. The hairs on my arm stand on end.

“What are you doing here?”

The little shadow that is Josie gusts out a long sigh. “Yeah, Mr Bray. That’s the million dollar question.”

Three

Josie

I remember this kitchen better than the one in the trailer I grew up in. Isn’t that funny? I only left Maple Creek three years ago, but the memories of that cramped, cluttered trailer are already hazy, my whole childhood one big blur of microwave meal packets and the faint strains of the game on my dad’s radio.

Meanwhile, every single day I spent at the Barns lives on in my brain in crisp technicolor. We’re talking surround sound and HD. I remember every last detail.