“Why are you following Eva?” he shouted at them.
“Dude,” one of the men said, “I love her!”
Cole’s fingers tightened on his shotgun.
The man saw the move and shouted out. “What? No! Not like that. She’s my favorite celebrity on TalkieTalk. I had to see her.” He waved over at her as Eva poked her head around Cole’s shoulder. “Hey there… you’re a lot shorter in real life.”
Her fingers squeezed Cole’s arm as he faced down this weirdo. “Oh no,” Cole said. “You don’t get to pretend that you’re some nonthreatening lunatic.”
“Cole! What are you doing? Put the gun down.”
Cole glanced to the side of him, seeing West, who inched forward likeColewas the one who was off his rocker. “It’s okay,” his brother said. “Those are just some of Eva’s stupid fans. They’re not going to hurt her. Drop the gun, Cole.”
Cole didn’t.
“Cole?” West sounded frustrated. “Do it now! The guy’s livestreaming this whole thing.”
“I don’t care if he brought a whole camera crew.”
“Cole!”
Growling out in irritation, Cole lowered his weapon.
West swiped the shotgun out of his hands. “What are you thinking? You could’ve killed the guy; I can just see the headline now: Thanksgiving Prank Turns Into a Massacre.”
His brother didn’t understand. “He had a gun,” Cole said.
The men denied it in ugly unison. Of course they were playing innocent, now that they were caught.
“Earlier they did,” Cole said, irritated that West was making this difficult. Hadn’t he seen Eva’s texts? “I don’t know where they stashed them.”
“They did!” Eva pushed forward, her hair stringing over the blanket. She looked a sight. Cole guessed that they both did. “We called you! We texted!”
“Sorry, I was a little busy with your daddy! I’ve been stuck on the line with him for the last hour trying to assure him that his little girl is just fine!” West glared at his brother. “What’d you do, Cole? You can’t handle being alone with her for that long without making a liar out of me?”
Cole glanced over at the men, who still recorded them.
Something wasn’t fitting together. These men hid their guilt too well, but they’d tried to hunt them down earlier. “Look,” Cole said. “Let’s just call the sheriff and get these guys out of here.”
“You want me to drag him from his Thanksgiving dinner? That’s going to go over real well.” But West was already dialing for the police. After a heated conversation, he hung up. “Deputy Morningstar is on his way.”
Cole let out a breath. The last thing he wanted to do was face Morningstar after the guy had been ripped from his family festivities, but these guys here were dangerous, no matter what West believed.
Outside, the storm picked up. The wind beat against the windows and splattered them with a few rogue raindrops. The peace of the morning was officially banished. The world was about to explode as the consequences of everything they’d done in the past week came for them.
Life was about to get real.
“Let’s get Eva inside,” West said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
West refused to even look at her.
Well, Eva had a beef against him too! She rearranged the blanket over her shoulders, trying to pretend that there wasn’t a storm of accusations simmering between them as they ran up the steps to the porch. Her anger simmered just below the surface in the face of the horror hunting them down earlier. “Those guys were chasing us in the meadow,” she said. “They really did have guns. It was terrifying…”
West almost ran into that oversized pumpkin that she and Cole had carved up two days ago. They’d abandoned Eva’s cute ideas for a harvest theme, when they’d drilled a hole into it that was so hideous that it resembled a gaping zombie maw. Chuckling out evilly, they’d immediately thrown all their energies into warping the pumpkin into a Halloween freak show. It was grotesque.
West edged around it and stalked into the kitchen. He was wearing that blue plaid button-up that she’d given him. The manipulative move wasn’t lost on her. She’d always said that the vibrant colors made his eyes pop. He worked out too much for it to fit properly, anyway, and the fabric stretched up against his shoulders. His eyes went to the window where Cole was holding up those men in the barn. “Your daddy wants to talk to you…” he said.