Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
NOELLE
Sleep doesn't come.
The guest cabin is quiet in a way that makes my thoughts louder. Every creak of the woodstove settling sounds like footsteps. Every gust of wind against the metal roof sounds like a car on a road that doesn't exist past mile marker twelve.
The flash drive sits on the nightstand where I left it. One hundred and forty-seven pages of evidence. Seven months of running. One man in a suit asking questions in Whisper Vale.
And one man in a cabin a hundred yards away who just told me the rawest truth of his life because I was about to do the exact thing his mother did.
The ceiling stares back at me until dawn turns the window gray. Then pink. Then gold.
By five fifteen, my boots are on. By five twenty, I'm standing in Dane's barn feeding Hatchet his oats because that's where my body goes when my brain won't shut up. The mule noses my palm. Warm breath, rough lips. Judgment in his left eye.
"Don't start."
He chews. Judges.
The satellite phone is on the kitchen counter when I let myself into Dane's cabin. He's not here. His boots are gone, his knife belt is gone. Through the window over the sink, I can see him on the far ridge. Sitting on a boulder, facing east, watching the sun come up. Alone.
My chest aches.
The phone is heavy in my hand. Seventeen digits for the number I memorized three months ago.
The direct line for an FBI field office in Reno that handles financial crimes.
A junior agent named Debra Suarez who took my initial call back in Connecticut, said she'd flag the case, said to call back when I had a plan.
Three months later. No plan. Just a flash drive, a mountain, and a man I'm about to lose if I don't stop running.
Debra Suarez answers on the second ring.
"This is Noelle Sharpe. I called in March about Carrington and Associates. Raymond Schultz."
Silence. Then typing. "Ms. Sharpe. We flagged your file. Where are you?"
"Somewhere safe. For now." My voice is steadier than I expect.
"A private investigator showed up in the area yesterday asking about me.
I have one hundred and forty-seven pages of documentation on a flash drive.
Financial records, shell company filings, communications between Schultz and my former firm's senior partners. Everything you need to build a case."
More typing. "Can you come to the Reno field office?"
"Yes. But I need protection. Someone showed up at my apartment building at two in the morning with a threat. These people have resources."
"We can arrange protective custody for the duration of the investigation."
"I don't need protective custody. I need you to take the evidence, open the case, and make sure Schultz knows the FBI has everything.
Once the files are in federal hands, threatening me becomes obstruction of justice.
The whole point of silencing a witness disappears when the testimony is already on record. "
Debra Suarez pauses. "You've thought this through."
"I'm a lawyer."
"Former lawyer."
"The bar card expired. The brain didn't."
We talk for twenty minutes. She gives me a case number, a direct email, instructions for transmitting the files securely.
The appointment is tomorrow at ten in Reno.
Parker can drive me, or Dane can, or I can drive myself.
The point is that after tomorrow, the flash drive becomes federal property.
After tomorrow, threatening me becomes a felony.
After tomorrow, running is no longer necessary.
After tomorrow, I can stay.
The phone goes back on the counter. My hands are shaking, but not from fear. From something that feels dangerously close to hope.
Through the window, Dane hasn't moved from the boulder. Same position. Same eastward stare. Hatchet brays from the barn, probably wondering why I stopped feeding him.
The walk across the property takes ninety seconds. Scrubby grass, morning dew soaking through my boots. He hears me coming because of course he does. Eight years in the Army, twenty years of reading terrain. He doesn't turn around.
"I used your satellite phone."
A beat. "Okay."
"Called the FBI field office in Reno. Agent named Suarez. I'm turning over the evidence tomorrow morning."
Now he turns. Those brown eyes, bloodshot from a night of not sleeping. The beard, the scar, the shoulders carrying a weight I put there by threatening to leave.
"Once the files are in federal hands, threatening me becomes obstruction," I tell him. "Schultz is smart enough to know that prosecuting a case is easier than silencing a witness who's already talked. The leverage disappears."
"What about the PI?"
"Parker already told Margie not to talk.
If the PI comes back, Parker can tell him the woman in the photograph is cooperating with a federal investigation, which makes any further contact witness tampering.
" My voice cracks. Just barely. "I'm a lawyer, Dane.
This is what I do. Build cases. Identify vulnerabilities.
Close exits. I spent seven months running when I should have been fighting. "
He stands. Slowly. Unfolding from the boulder until he's at full height, silhouetted against the sunrise that's painting the entire east face of the mountain gold.
"What changed?"
"You did." My eyes burn. "You told me about your mother. You stood in your kitchen and showed me exactly what it looks like when someone leaves, and I realized I was doing the same thing. Wrapping it in logic. Calling it protection. Making it sound noble so I didn't have to admit I was scared."
"Noelle."
"I'm not her, Dane." My voice breaks fully now. Tears on my cheeks, cold in the morning air. "I'm not passing through. I'm not leaving for your own good. I'm not going to pack a bag and drive away and never come back."
He closes the distance in three strides. His hands frame my face, thumbs wiping tears, tilting my head up. His forehead presses against mine.
"I know." Rough. Quiet. "I knew when you reorganized my toolbox."
A wet laugh escapes me. "That's when you knew?"
"Woman who alphabetizes my wrenches isn't a woman who's planning to leave."
His mouth covers mine. Warm, firm, tasting like coffee from a percolator. My fists grip the front of his henley, pulling him closer. Pulling him down. His arms wrap around me, lifting me off my feet. My legs lock around his waist.
"Inside," I whisper against his mouth.
He carries me across the property without breaking stride. Through his front door, down the hallway, onto his bed with the military corners I've been ruining for a week. His body covers mine. Heavy, warm, solid.
My flannel comes off. His henley follows. Bare chest to bare chest, my nipples hard against the dark hair on his skin. His mouth drops to my throat, my collarbone, lower. Tongue circling one nipple while his hand palms my other breast, rough calluses against sensitive skin.
"Dane."
He strips my jeans, my underwear. Kneels between my thighs.
His mouth finds my pussy without hesitation, tongue dragging slow through my folds before settling on my clit.
Two fingers push inside me, curling, stroking.
My back arches off the bed. His free hand presses flat on my stomach, holding me down while he works me with his tongue.
The orgasm builds fast. His mouth is relentless, sucking my clit, tongue flicking while his fingers drive deep. When I come, my thighs clamp around his head. He groans against me, the vibration pulling another wave that makes my vision blur.
Before I finish shaking, he's over me again. Condom on. One deep stroke that fills me completely. My nails dig into his shoulders.
"Look at me." His voice is gravel.
Those brown eyes, gold flecks catching the morning light through the window. He moves. Slow, deliberate, grinding against my clit with every thrust. My legs wrap around him. His hand slides under my ass, tilting my hips, changing the angle. Deeper.
"Right there. God, right there."
His pace builds. Harder. Faster. Sweat on his forehead. My name on his breath. When his thumb finds my clit, circling hard while he fucks me, the second orgasm rips through me. He follows two thrusts later, his body going rigid, a sound in his throat that's half groan, half prayer.
We lie there. Breathing. Tangled.
His hand finds mine. Scarred fingers lacing through mine. Our palms press together.
"I love you," I say. "Which is objectively insane because we've known each other for nine days."
"Took me three." That mouth twitch. Real this time. A full smile that reaches his eyes, crinkles the corners, transforms his entire face. "I love you too, counselor."
"Former counselor."
"Bar card expired. The woman didn't."
The laugh that comes out of me is messy. Wet. Free.
"Tomorrow," he says. "We drive to Reno. You give Suarez the evidence. Then we come home."
Home. This cabin. This mountain. This man who carries a knife on his belt, talks to a mule, reads weather better than most people read books. This life I chose from a paper catalog because it promised silence.
It gave me so much more.
"Five a.m.?"
His arms tighten around me. "Four fifty-eight. Since you're an overachiever."
Hatchet brays from the barn. Approval, if I'm reading the catalog of mule sounds correctly.
Dane laughs. Real, low, rumbling through his chest into mine.
"He approves," we say at the same time.
And for the first time since I left Connecticut with two suitcases and a secret, I'm not running toward something.
I'm already here.