Way of the Shadows

Then he was just a few feet from Jenny.

Her hair was a deep, dark red. She’d braided it and the braid hung over her shoulder. He was so close to her. Close enough to touch.

Jenny looked up then, and she gasped when she saw him. A hand rose to her chest, and the shovel slipped from her fingers.

He smiled at her. “Morning, ma’am.”

She blinked, and some of the alarm faded from her gaze. That was good. That was real good. He didn’t want her scared. Not yet.

He drew even closer to her. Close enough to catch her scent. She smelled sweet. He liked that. His gaze slid toward the diner. The shades were still pulled. He couldn’t see in. That meant no one could see out.

“We’ll be open in about ten more minutes,” Jenny told him. “The cook’s getting things going now.”

The cook. That would be the big, ex-lumberjack named Henry. But if Henry was getting things going in the kitchen...

Then he can’t see us out here.

And Jenny was so perfect. She reminded him of what he’d lost.

His hand lifted and brushed over her cheek.

Her eyes widened as she sucked in a sharp breath. “Mister—”

“It will hurt, Jenny,” he warned her.

Too late, Jenny opened her mouth to scream.

She never had the chance to make a sound.

* * *

NOELLE WAS ABOUT to fall flat on her face. It took all of the energy she had to climb the steps leading up to their cabin.

This place wasn’t like the one-room shack they’d slept in before. This cabin was more like a luxury resort and as far from the place in her nightmares as possible.

The EOD was footing the bill for these digs, so Noelle was more than happy to escape to the fine lodgings.

She’d been up for over thirty-six hours, minus that one rough hour of sleep she’d gotten while she’d been in Thomas’s arms.

Her gaze slanted toward him. I want you, and unless I’m mistaken, you want me, too. His words kept echoing through her mind.

The problem was Noelle wasn’t used to taking what she wanted. She was used to closing herself off from others. Used to waking from dark dreams she could never fully remember—alone.

“We need to head back to the sheriff’s station at eighteen hundred hours,” Thomas said as he secured the front door behind them. He glanced around the cabin. A spiral staircase led upstairs. “That gives us a few hours to sleep.”

And sleep was certainly her priority because of the whole almost-falling-on-her-face bit, but...

She kept thinking about what it had been like to be held in his arms. To kiss him. To touch him.

His head cocked as his eye raked over her. “Something wrong?”

“I’m just...trying to figure out who could’ve killed the senator.” Well, she should be doing that, anyway.

He grunted as he headed toward her. “Mercer is arranging for new clothes to be delivered to us.”

Since their bags were at the bottom of an icy lake, she appreciated the arrangement.

“Get some sleep, get some food, and then you’ll be able to work up a profile.”

He sure sounded confident. But it wasn’t as if she just waved a wand and magically figured out a killer. “I’ll need to head back to Lawrence’s place. I want to search every inch of that house.”

He flashed her a hard smile. “Already on the to-do list. Mercer wants us to find evidence proving Lawrence is our guy—and if the senator was working with anyone else in the attack against the EOD, we need to find out just who that person is.”

Right. Because the case wasn’t closed, not even with the death of their chief suspect.

“There are supposed to be two bedrooms upstairs,” Thomas added as he glanced up at the winding staircase. “Pick which one you want, and I’ll take the other.”

I’ll take the one with you.

Wait, no. She had not nearly said that. She must be more exhausted than she’d realized. Noelle turned on her heel and hurried toward the stairs.

“Do you need to talk?”

Her hand curled around the bannister. His voice had been so rough. “About what?”

“About the nightmares you have.”

How could she talk about what she didn’t remember?

“You begged someone not to hurt you. Pleaded for them to let you go.” The hardwood floor creaked beneath his footsteps. “And you promised not to tell...”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I don’t remember any of that.” Her heart raced in her chest.

“You do when you let down your guard. When you sleep, that veil in your mind falls away.”

She shook her head. “I... No, you’re wrong.”

He was just a few feet away. “Have you ever thought that maybe you just don’t want to remember?”

The dead man on the floor...the blood on her hands...

“I want to remember.” Those forty-eight hours had shattered her life. Her mother had wanted to push them away while Noelle had desperately wanted to grab that time back.

His gaze held hers. “There are plenty of moments from my life that I wish I could forget.”

She thought of the scars on his body. His captivity. “What if you had the scars, but no memory of how you’d gotten them?” She didn’t have scars on her body. Not on the outside, anyway. But those two nights had left deep marks inside of her. “Every time you looked at them, wouldn’t you wonder?”

He took another gliding step toward her. She tilted back her head to keep meeting his gaze.