Page 45 of The SEAL and the Sheriff

At first glance, nothing had changed. The conveyors stood silent. The belts hung slack. Thin bands of daylight cut between the wallboards exactly as they had before.

Hudson stopped so abruptly she almost walked into him. He dropped to his knees, his hand hovering over prints pressed into the grime beside a steel support. “Boot prints.”

Sarah joined him. “I see only one.”

“Because you’re only looking at the heel.” He pointed. “There’s another over it.”

One larger, one narrower, overlapping.

“Two men.” He looked past the prints. Then behind her, then toward the loading bay. “At least.”

A clatter sounded beyond the conveyor line. Sarah spun. A man stepped out carrying a box in one gloved hand.

For one suspended second, all three of them stared at one another.

Sarah moved first. “Sheriff’s Department!” Her voice broke the silence. “Stop!”

The man’s eyes flicked from her to Hudson. Then he bolted.

She took off after him. Hudson’s boots hammered the boards just behind her, so close she didn’t have to look.

She cut left through a gap between two silent conveyor lines, ducked beneath a sagging beam and burst into the next aisle. The runner disappeared through the doorway ahead into the packing room.

Hudson peeled away to her right as if he’d read her mind. Cut him off.

She ducked through the maintenance cut she’d been sneaking through since she was a kid. It brought her out behind the silent freezer units and into the covered loading bay. Hudson burst through the main doorway from cold storage on the opposite side a second later. For one stupid, glorious second, she thought they’d trapped him.

The man reached the far end of the loading bay and glanced back at her. He smiled, then vanished through the personnel door onto the exterior walkway, the door swinging shut behind him.

A sharp whistle shrieked through the cannery.

What?

To her right, every trace of ease disappeared from Hudson’s posture.

“Loading bay!” a man shouted.

Another voice answered from the mezzanine above the loading gates. “I’ve got movement.” Boots struck the narrow catwalk. Several pairs. Voices shouted from opposite directions, bouncing around the empty building until she couldn’t tell where anyone actually was.

“Sarah.” Hudson’s hand closed on her wrist. “They baited us.”

A door slammed somewhere behind them.

“Too many.” He tugged her back, retreating into cold storage. “Here.” A narrow maintenance void behind the old refrigeration units. Little more than a slit between the steel housing and the timber wall, lost in shadow.

He was guiding her toward it when his hand shot out and caught the metal waist buckle swinging from her jacket, a second from striking the steel housing beside them.

By the time she registered the danger, Hudson had trapped it in his fist. He angled his body into the gap first, checking the space and nudging a loose scrap of metal out of their path before drawing her in after him.

There wasn’t room to turn around.

Her back hit freezing metal. Hudson’s chest was against hers. His arm braced around her, pinning both of them into the only space the cannery had left to offer. Every breath he took moved through the solid press of his chest against her. Every breath she released came back warm between them. Even wedged into this impossible space, he made room for her to breathe, even if she suspected the control cost him.

She was absurdly aware of him. The solidity of his frame. The steady expansion of his chest beneath her cheek. He was the only solid thing in a building full of moving shadows and converging voices, his presence keeping the urgency in her chest from becoming something louder.

Outside, the building had dissolved into voices and footsteps. Inside the gap, there was only Hudson and his unwavering presence.

A voice, gruff and terse, passed within feet of where they stood—close enough that every cell in her body screamed to move, to do something, anything other than stand here and wait to be discovered.