“You might get another chance to talk to Natalie now,” she pointed out with a grin in her voice. “Good luck, Valerian. Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
The words were said in a singsong voice and were followed by dead silence as she ended the call.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Valerian muttered the words to himself as he put the phone away. From what he’d heard, Stephanie and Thorne did things he couldn’t do, let alone wouldn’t do. Fair dues, the guy had wings, but sex in the air while flying? Yeah, that was something he definitely couldn’t and wouldn’t do. But maybe it was just gossip and untrue.
After all, life mates tended to pass out during sex, which wouldn’t be good if they were a hundred feet up in the air, and Stephanie and Thorne were definitely life mates, as well as happy, something he’d never thought he’d be able to say about Stephanie McGill. In fact, for quite a while there, he, and most of the other Enforcers, had feared she’d go rogue and they’d have to hunt down the young woman and bring her in for execution. None of them had been pleased to have to consider that possibility. They’d all liked Stephanie and felt bad about what had happened to her. None of them had wanted the job of taking her down if the turn had ultimately driven her mad and she’d gone rogue.
But that wasn’t a likelihood now that she’d found her life mate.
And now he had found his, Valerian thought. He just had to find out what there was in her past and present that might throw a wrench in his claiming her, fix it, and woo her into being his life mate. Easy.
“Right,” Valerian growled with a shake of the head, and pulled out his phone to check messages as he started down the path to the eighteenth hole.
Three
Natalie spent the first half of her walk from the equipment barn to the seventeenth hole muttering to herself about the stupidity of males and how one young male in particular was becoming a pain in her arse. How could Timothy not check the gas in the golf cart before releasing it to a client? That was just . . . well, it should be common sense.
But to be fair, it wasn’t normally Timothy’s job, so he might not have thought of it, the objective part of her mind argued. And he had been good about coming in early to fill in for Roy. And mistakes were to be expected when someone was new on a job.
Natalie grimaced at her fair side. It was all true, of course. But this wasn’t the first mistake Timothy had made in the last few weeks, and the mistakes he was making weren’t small ones.
Every muscle in her body tightened as Natalie considered the two biggest mistakes. One had to do with the water feature Timothy had mentioned earlier. He had lost control of the reel mower, run off the course into the water feature, and hit the pump. That had cost her money and time. The other big mistake hadn’t cost her anything in the end, but it could have killed her business. It happened just a week before the pump incident. She’d asked him to fertilize the turf. Timothy had filled the tank of the sprayer and had been heading out to begin spraying when Natalie arrived at the shop. She’d gone to check on the fertilizer and see if they had enough for another spray later or if she needed to order more and nearly had a heart attack when she saw all the empty containers of herbicide. Timothy had somehow confused one for the other and was about to spray her entire golf course with a chemical that didn’t just kill weeds, but turf too. They used it to edge the sand traps to prevent the grass from spreading into the bunkers, and he was about to spray the whole course with that rather than the fertilizer.
Fortunately, she’d managed to catch up to Timothy before he got out of the parking lot. But had she not checked on him and happened to spot the mistake, he could have killed off every blade of grass on the course and put her out of business. The kid was giving her an ulcer.
By the time Natalie reached the eighteenth hole, she was too out of breath to even mutter her displeasure. She was hauling a five-gallon gas can that she’d foolishly filled to the top, which meant it weighed a good thirty pounds. That wasn’t too bad. She probably would have managed it well enough if she were in better shape, and if the gas can weren’t older than even she was. It was an ancient metal one with a handle that had twisted over time and was now digging painfully into her hand.
Had Natalie been using her head instead of fretting over the latest problem Timothy had caused for her, she would have filled it only a quarter full. She didn’t need five gallons to get the cart back to the shop from the seventeenth hole. But she hadn’t been using her head, and while the can had been heavy when she’d picked it up, it hadn’t seemed too terribly bad. Now those thirty pounds were feeling like ninety and didn’t seem so manageable anymore.
Wincing, Natalie set the gas can down. The plan was to shift her hold in the hopes of easing the pain the handle was causing, but the sound of rustling leaves to her right stopped her from picking it up again. Straightening quickly, she glanced toward the tree line that ran alongside the eighteenth hole. When she’d set out, the moonlight had lit the open path enough that she hadn’t even thought of grabbing a flashlight. But the trees were just a dark blob along the side of the course. She couldn’t even distinguish shapes, let alone sort out what was making that rustling sound. It could have been the leaves in the trees, or could have been leaves on the ground. They’d had a couple of cold evenings recently, encouraging some of the deciduous trees to start shedding, and the sound was similar to that of someone traipsing through dry, fallen leaves.
The rustling stopped abruptly now that she wasn’t moving, but rather than be relieved, Natalie felt a sudden prickling along her neck that made her heartbeat speed up. She listened for another moment, but when no other sound reached her ears, she told herself she was being silly. There was no one there. This was the country, after all, not a dark parking lot in the city where muggers or rapists might be lurking in the shadows.
“It was probably a stray cat, or a fox or something,” Natalie muttered to herself, and bent to pick up the can again. She’d barely taken two steps, though, before the rustling sounded again. Someone or something was moving through the woods parallel to her. She tried again to tell herself that it was just a stray cat or fox, but other less benign options were now pushing their way into her thoughts. Coyotes, for instance.
Were coyotes known to attack people? Natalie wondered about that as she instinctively began to move a little more quickly. She was just telling herself that wasn’t likely when she recalled the story that had gone viral some weeks back about a young girl who had been chased and attacked by a coyote while walking her dog. The dog, a little breed as she recalled, had fought off the animal, but had been wounded doing so.
“Brilliant,” Natalie muttered to herself, realizing she was freaking herself out and now imagining a whole pack of coyotes trailing her along the course. The snapping of a branch caught her ear then and she instinctively stopped again and whirled to search the trees with eyes straining to see anything in the dark. Much to her surprise, the trees had thinned out here, and she actually could make out shapes now. Including what appeared to be a human form in some kind of long coat or cape ducking behind a tree trunk.
“Hello?” Natalie called out when the figure didn’t reappear on the other side of the tree. Clearing her throat when she heard how weak her voice sounded, she tried to sound brave and a little annoyed when she added, “I know you’re there.”