“Here’s hoping! How about you? Are you feeling okay?” Stella asked, indicating her growing belly.
“Feeling great,” Camila said. “Just started my second trimester.”
“That’s wonderful.” Stella finished off a stuffed pepper. If the delicious food Camila served was the poor man’s version of what she could cook, then Stella couldn’t wait to taste what she could make with better ingredients.
After leaving Fila’s, Eric insisted on following Stella in his truck to Runaway Lodge, but he sat in the back of the room, his shoulders rounded, talking to no one as Olivia directed the meeting and Stella worked with the volunteers to schedule them all on the roster of events.
He waited until everyone else had left before he stood. Concerned by the gray tinge to his complexion, Stella hurried to his side. “Are you okay?”
“That’s about the fiftieth time you’ve asked me that tonight.”
“Ready to admit you aren’t?” she asked.
She thought he’d blow up at her, but instead he heaved a sigh. “Yeah, I guess I am. Damn ankle is so big I don’t think I can get my boot off.”
“I’ll give you a ride to the hospital.”
“What about my truck?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Guess you’ll have to come fetch it another time.”
“You don’t have much of a bedside manner,” he grumbled.
“Not when I’m dealing with someone who brought it all on himself,” she agreed. “You were showing off, because for some reason you don’t want me to feel like I can achieve the goal I’ve set myself.”
“I told you before; it’s a dangerous job…”
“And you want to hog all that danger for yourself. Yeah, I know,” she said, holding the door open so he could hobble out. “Bye, Monica, Bye, Olivia,” she called over her shoulder.
“Bye!”
“You really are a ball-breaker, aren’t you?” Eric said when they made it to her truck.
“Yeah, I am. This is me, Eric, and I’m not going to change. If you don’t like me exactly the way I am, then go find someone else.”
Something flashed in his eyes, but it was gone a second later. He didn’t like being confronted like this, did he? Stella didn’t care. She wasn’t about to back down.
“Maybe I’m set in my ways,” he admitted a moment later. “Maybe I’m having a hard time adjusting to you newfangled women.”
“You’re not that old, Eric.” She got into the truck and waited for him to make his way to the passenger side, knowing he wouldn’t take any help from her. When he was settled in, she said, “But you’re right; times are changing. You’ll have to change with them if you don’t want to get left behind.”
Eric just grunted, sat back in his seat and was quiet all the way to town.
Steel had meant to stay away from Stella’s fundraiser, but when the day of it dawned two weeks later, he found he couldn’t. He’d done a good job keeping his distance from her, though. He’d texted a time or two, just to let her know he was thinking of her, but made it clear he didn’t think it wise for them to be seen together yet.
He’d made no headway in talking to Lily or Lara again, had spent a lot of time with the other petty dealers, talking about the possibility of growing a new pot crop, trying to get them to open up about how drugs were making their way into town—especially the ones responsible for the deaths.
All he’d heard were blanket denials that anyone local was supplying the drugs to a killer. He kept coming across an honor-among-thieves mentality among the dealers that made them assert they knew their customers well enough to know they couldn’t be killing young women.
It interested Steel to hear that these same dealers believed the overdoses weren’t accidental.
“No way all the dead people would be hot young teenage girls,” was how one of them summed it up succinctly. “If it was a mix, some old, some young, some guys, some girls, yeah—then I’d believe it, but not this shit. Someone’s doing it on purpose.”
He knew Bolton had questioned Lily and Lara again, and that both girls had stuck to their story: they’d never seen Sue’s boyfriend. Had no idea who he could be.
Something about that didn’t sit right with Steel. Sue was dead. Lily and Lara had to know they could just have easily been the victim. Why would they keep secrets?
Steel went over all of it again and again in his head.
But today he needed a break.
He needed to see Stella.
He’d spotted Eric Holden limping a couple of weeks back and heard a rumor that he’d twisted his ankle running an obstacle course. The only obstacle courses he knew of were situated at the Halls’ ranch—and Stella’s. Had Eric been helping her train?
Have you given up on me? He’d felt like a teenager himself when he’d sent the text to Stella.
Not yet. Hurry up, she’d texted back.
Working on it.
He arrived to find the road down to the bridge that led to Runaway Lodge packed with vehicles, so he parked where he could and walked the rest of the way, carrying swim trunks and a towel. It had been a while since he’d swum in a public place, preferring to find some lonely mountain lake or stream to cool off in the summer instead, but he remembered childhood visits to the lodge and found his mood elevating in anticipation as he approached the little bridge that crossed Runaway River.
They’d lucked out with the weather today. More often than not it had rained these past few weeks, and Pittance Creek, which had almost dried up, now flowed fast and high like all the other streams and rivers in the area. Runaway River was just as high, spinning under the little bridge like a spring torrent.
The trees to either side of it still bore marks from the fire that had scorched them a month or so back. Liam and Tory had driven their truck hellbent for leather through
