Everyone was smiling and laughing, sipping delicious-looking drinks and biting at yummy-looking pastries and sandwiches. All of New Moon Café was celebrating my most recent victory with me, and they didn’t even know it.
At my approach, the front counter girl paused, her amber ponytail bobbing as her head raised.
Her cookie-bearing hand was in the jar, the cookie with the still-glistening chocolate chips suspended over the others.
“How many cookies did you just make?” I asked.
“Ten,” she replied.
“Can I have all of them?” I asked.
She blinked, grinned to show dentist-white teeth, and said, “Sure!”
After I handed over the last of my cash and accepted my bursting brown bagful of cookies, I went to sit at the table in the corner, the one under the landscape painting of a sweeping mountain ridge.
And then I sat there in my wooden seat, not thinking, not planning, just eating and enjoying. Just being.
It was me and chocolate chip cookie after cookie. Sugary goodness incarnate. A delicious oblivion. Flavor nirvana.
By the time I’d finished, an idea had come to me thanks to a swath of red-and-white striped bags hanging by the front counter’s cash register.
Who could say no to free cookies in a nice pretty bag delivered by yours truly, the most innocuous-looking blonde there was?
I marched back up to the front counter, bought a striped bag and 10 more cookies from the now downright-bemused cashier with my debit card this time, and was off.
Driving back to the garage and the dirt road going off it was easy; it was following the road afterward that got hard. The dirt road started off as a wide two-laner but rapidly shrank to a single lane that was a bumpy, weed-infested jungle before almost disappearing entirely. Soon I was bouncing along what looked to be a man-made, car-flattened path through a field.
By the time it dawned on me that if this was the wrong way I was screwed, it was too late. There was no turning back. While a pickup truck or larger vehicle could have easily carved its own path through this thick underbrush to turn around, for my little sedan it would have been near impossible. To have gotten out of there, I probably would have had to back up all the way.
The path seemed endless. A constant stream of tall grass, leaning-over arms of wildflowers, and terrifyingly close branches of trees mashed at my closed windows, all as eager to get in as I was to get away.
Far-off buildings suggested an abandoned village, though I was more worried about the fact that I was now on an incline, the “road” as overgrown with vegetation as ever. Higher and higher my little car went, while overhead it grew darker and darker due to increasing number of trees.
Finally, however, the path came out to a wide surface of dirt, at the end of which, standing small and unmistakable, was a cabin. I stopped the car but kept it running as I peered at the rough-hewn log structure. It looked well-kept yet empty. There was a maroon pickup truck parked off to the side. After turning off the car, I was just getting out when the front door of the cabin opened.
“Can I help you?” a bearded man said gruffly.
I paused, taking him in, wishing I could look at the photo I’d left crumpled up in my passenger seat to be sure.
As I walked up to the door, the more certain I became.
It looked like Brock Anderson, and yet, in the picture, he hadn’t looked so…handsome. This man was tall and tan with shaggy brown hair and—yes—that unmistakable scar on his left eyebrow. Yes, this handsome man was Brock Anderson. I had found him.
Chapter Five
“Are you lost?” Brock asked me.
I shook my head, holding back the victorious smile I could feel working its way onto my face.
“I…” I held up my now ridiculous-looking bakery bag. “I’m your new neighbor.”
As he regarded me with increasingly suspicious lowered brows, I gave the bag a shake and continued. “I brought cookies!”
Now his scowl reached his mouth. Narrowing his eyes and shaking his head, he said, “The closest town or house is miles off.”
I nodded, speechless. The fact was so obvious. How had it not occurred to me before? I’d been too busy trying to avoid hitting a tree that I had hardly noticed I was driving to a remote hideout.
“So what exactly are you doing here then?” he asked, and this time his voice was cold.
“I…I’m…” I stared at the log cabin behind him—the one that would have the evidence I needed. I had made it here, and now I was messing it up.