The thought of letting Colby Acton, a man nice enough to think to bring a toy for a scared girl, walk unknowingly into a confrontation with something straight out of a monster movie made her even more nervous.
If she could figure out some way to warn him, she had to do it.
“I should just say—” Colby Acton cleared his throat. He had the cutest, most unexpected blush. “I’m a really big fan.”
This had honestly never happened to her before.
Do I look like someone famous?
She said, “A really big fan of...?”
“Your work. Your photographs.”
Okay. Now she definite
ly had to save his life.
“Your book on your trip through the Arctic?” he said. “That picture you got of the narwhal surfacing with that little disc of ice on its horn? Those Arctic foxes rolling around in the snow? It got me to finally take a trip to Alaska.”
This, even more than the werewolves, made her feel like she’d slid sideways into some kind of Twilight Zone dimension.
“I could send you some of the Arctic shots that didn’t make it into the book,” Aria offered.
He looked like she’d just offered him a million dollars. “Really?”
Aria grinned. “Anything for my best and only fan.”
“I’m sure you have a lot of fans,” he said loyally. “Your publishers should send you on tours.”
She laughed. “I think you’d have to follow me from bookstore to bookstore to make sure I had even one person in the audience. But thank you, Deputy Acton. This is one of the nicest things to ever happen to me, really.”
“Call me Colby, please.”
“Colby,” she said, just to feel the name on her tongue. She decided she liked it. She’d never known a Colby before. “Then I’m Aria.”
“Aria,” Colby said.
She had the funny feeling that he was tasting her name in the same way she’d tasted his, but she found that almost as hard to believe as the Adventures of a Fugitive and His Pet Wolves, Really, Officer. Men like Colby Acton didn’t let their eyes linger on curvy single moms with rain-frizzed hair and dried mud all over their shoes. Even if they were—unbelievably—nature photography buffs.
He was here in the line of duty, and she had to focus on what was important. She couldn’t let him go up against Eli Hebbert without knowing at least a little of what Hebbert was capable of.
Besides murder.
“I should start telling you what happened, right?” she said. Might as well get back to business.
Colby leaned back in his chair, all business now. She could almost see him putting on a mask of crisp, flawless professionalism. “I’d like that, Aria.”
So she told him what she could. The picnic, the quest into the woods to take pictures, the rainstorm that had almost made her turn around—
She stopped midsentence, feeling an overwhelming desire to laugh. She managed to hold it in for a second or two before all the stress and fear of the day just came bubbling out of her in this one hysterical fit of giggles. It brought actual tears to her eyes.
“I just realized,” she said, almost hiccupping as she tried to get control of herself. “I was out there in this... God, this bright red poncho, this hooded bright red poncho, out in the middle of the woods, off the path... It was just so Little Red Riding Hood!”
And that, she thought wryly, was something that would be a lot funnier if you’d known she’d run into the actual Big Bad Wolf.
But Colby reacted like it at least meant something to him. He put his hands on his knees and tensed forwards, his dark blue eyes so magnetic that Aria felt like they were pulling her towards them.
“Is it ironic that you’d feel like Little Red Riding Hood?”