Comes Now the Wicked Woodsman by Christa Wick Page A

and put the hammer down, her gaze as intent on me as her brother's.
    "No," I answered truthfully.
    Cort was a classmate in the forestry program. Some five years older than me, he had become not only a good friend but a stand in for the pseudo-big brother I'd lost when Braeden had turned into a complete asshole.
    I didn't want him in Night Falls because I didn't want him hurt.
    "Is he here?" I repeated.
    Braeden wiggled my cell phone at me. I wasn't allowed to use it and Clover wasn't allowed to use her phone or the Internet unless Braeden was watching over her shoulder.
    The jerk was really taken his duty as prison guard seriously.
    "Just here," he answered. "And I'm tired of hitting decline call or pretending to be you in texts."
    "What?" I yelled, dashing forward and trying to snag my phone from his oversize mitt.
    Braeden lifted the phone toward the ceiling, his long arm and my already dreadfully short height insuring he would always win a game of keep away against me -- unless I started walking around with a ladder or a cherry picker.
    "I demand to know what you've texted him!"
    A smirk marred Braeden's handsome features, the green irises glittering like cut emeralds.
    Standing next to him for the first time since right after he had slammed the door on Joshua, I wrapped my hands around his thick bicep and tried to force his arm down. His smirk grew, the amused flare of his nostrils adding to my humiliation.
    Yeah, I was a toy poodle nipping at the heels of a wolf. Friggin' hysterical.
    I snatched my hands back, my emotions retreating behind the wall I had been steadily building since he screwed me in the barn.
    "Don't get your panties in a twist, baby girl," he relented, lowering my phone and offering it to me. "I just fed him a line about being exhausted and sad from all the sorting. But now he's threatening to come out here, so you need to call and talk him down."
    Avoiding Braeden's gaze, I thumbed through the messages the two had exchanged the last few days. Cort wanted to know if I was coming back this week, warned that I could get dropped. from classes. Braeden kept giving him what looked like openings to say something deeper.
    Was he fishing to find out if Cort liked me?
    Putting his big paw over the phone again, Braeden forced me to look up at him.
    "We both agree that no one else needs to get drawn into this, correct?"
    I nodded, another part of me shriveling up inside as the surge of comfort at seeing Cort's flood of texts faded with Braeden's not so subtle threat that Cort would be hurt if he came to Night Falls.
    "So call him," he said, stepping close to me. "Let him hear that you're fine, that you're not sure if you're coming back this semester and how you need some pressure free time to decide."
    I snorted at his reference to a pressure free decision -- this whole damn setup defined coercion, the reality of it exaggerated by the way Braeden loomed over me, arms folded across his big chest as his eyes turned to thin slits.
    Leaving me my phone and Clover her hammer, he turned to exit the room, calling out over his shoulder.
    "After that, Rooster is stopping by to take you out."
    Seriously?
    Who the hell decided that?
    ********************
    Paisley

    My call to Cort went straight to voicemail. I knew it would because we had a lot of the same classes and I was supposed to be sitting in Advanced Forest Measurements and Models right then instead of imprisoned in my best friend's house with my former crush serving as my primary jailor.
    I left a message, repeating the dribble Braeden had been texting him while pretending to be me. I told him we would talk soon, that I just needed to figure some things out after gran's death and said what a great friend he was for giving me space.
    "That sounded like you were dumping him," Clover said as she forced me to sit at her vanity table and allow her to apply some of the make-up on me that I was always sending her.
    She stopped rubbing in foundation when I didn't respond.