Her arms were starting to burn at trying to stabilize her weight in suspension. Rodney was acting like they were having a normal conversation instead of him sitting near a circle of poison, talking to a woman hanging above it and dripping blood.
Axel would have loved to add that to his profile of the man.
“You’d be surprised at the secrets people share when there’s enough money involved. And you can look up anything on the internet, you know. Even how to handle this stuff.” He nodded toward the powder.
Carly didn’t doubt that.
She also didn’t understand the why of it all.
“So, let me get this straight—” Carly bit back a small yip of pain as she shifted to try to get more comfortable. A losing battle, she knew. “—you’re trying to find and punish David for hiding Talia. But didn’t you already have him? You kidnapped him and then had him in that chair in his basement, right?”
At that, Rodney stood. She couldn’t read his expression as it went from anger and indignation to something akin to being thoughtful, a look that didn’t really fit him.
“His family saw that he was up to no good with Talia and everyone shunned him for it. Having him taken to his own house was the only place we were guaranteed not to be disturbed.” That anger came out again, quick and hot. “I almost had him talking when you and your friends showed up to town.”
“You left,” she realized. “And David escaped. Didn’t he?”
There was that growl again.
He took a step forward, gun in his tightened grip and aimed at the ground.
“I underestimated him. I won’t do that again.”
So David was still out there.
But why hadn’t he come forward?
Were he and Talia gone?
And, more importantly, why was Willa helping the man who’d taken and, she assumed, tortured her son?
Carly wanted to ask—wanted to get to the bottom of something—but it was clear that whatever Rodney had been building up to was close. He did another slow look up and down her body.
Then his gaze dropped to the floor.
He grinned.
“But you’re not getting away from me.”
This wasn’t like when Carly was in the woods with the man. Where she felt no need to accept that she might not make it out alive. This was different. She was absolutely vulnerable.
Carly thought of her mother again.
An ache that never left became more pronounced as an old anguish ran through it. She didn’t want to, but it made her think of her father.
What would he think when he found out his daughter was killed in a similar way to his wife?
Would he be upset?
Or would he think it poetic?
The daughter who helped send him to prison for poisoning her mother, poisoned herself.
It sent a wave of regret through Carly.
Then defiance.
She didn’t want to give him the chance to feel anything when it came to her.
That defiance rolled into a building rage. It came out at the man who still didn’t make sense to her.
“Why the theatrics? You could have disappeared. Why grab me in the first place? Why do all of this and chance being caught?”
Carly’s voice rose at every question until she was all but yelling.
Rodney was unaffected. His smile stayed in place. His gun, however, didn’t.
He moved it up, so it was aimed at her head.
“You were getting too close.”
That wasn’t an answer Carly wanted.
But the writing was on the wall.
Rodney Lee was done with talking. He was done with her.
Carly closed her eyes, refusing to let her last moment on Earth happen while staring at a vile, violent man.
If she had to go out, she’d rather go out in darkness behind closed eyes.
And, at least this way, poison wouldn’t be the end of her.
Carly took a small, quick solace in that.
“Don’t move.”
A deep baritone cut through the cold air like the gunshot she’d been expecting.
Carly opened her eyes as a flurry of motion took place at the back of the barn.
Noah Miller had come through the side door with a shotgun trained on Rodney. He glanced over at Carly but didn’t address her. His focus squared up on the man who had frozen, gun still aimed.
“Now lower it or I’ll shoot,” Noah commanded. The sheer power and authority in his voice surprised her.
It made something in Carly actually flutter.
But there was no time to feel anything more.
“You won’t shoot me,” Rodney said. “It’s against your religion.”
Everything happened all at once.
Rodney pulled the trigger, just as Noah pulled his. Carly yelled, expecting to be there one second and gone the next.
Yet, no new pain came and neither did a kill shot.
Rodney’s body was blown back, then crumpled to the floor.
There was no way around it.
He was dead.
“Carly?” Noah’s voice was filled with panic as he turned to face her.
She was ready to say she was okay—other than the obvious—but then a peculiar sound followed an odd sensation coming far above her.
Carly craned her head back to look.
“Oh my God, he shot the rope.”
Rodney’s bullet hadn’t been meant for her head.
It had been meant to sever the rope above the hook and have her fall to the ground.
It was a lot of trouble to go through to make a statement.
But man, was it effective.
“Noah! I can’t touch the ground!”
Panic spread as quickly as the rope was unraveling.
Noah sprang into action. He threw his gun down and started over.
“You can’t touch it, either,” Carly warned.
Noah came to a halt right outside of the circle of powder. He looked around the barn. There wasn’t much to work with and there wasn’t time to figure out a way to work with what there was.
Carly could see it in his expression.
There wasn’t a way to grab her without risking exposing himself.
And Carly realized with such a strong force ramming into her chest the she didn’t want him to risk it.
To risk himself.
She wanted Noah to be safe. To be healthy. To decorate his Christmas tree with so many ornaments and bobbles that the branches weighed down and sagged from the weight.
She hadn’t known him for long but there she was, accepting exposure instead of wanting him to risk himself.
That meant something. A lot, in fact. It also didn’t stop Noah from being himself.
He stripped off his coat just as Carly dropped down half an inch.
“Don’t touch it,” she warned him.
He didn’t listen.
The rope gave way with a small snap. Carly didn’t have time to yell.
Noah, however, was fast.
He ran through the powder and caught her before she could touch the ground. Sheer power kept both of them from being causalities of momentum. Instead he held her like a bride, his jacket beneath her.
Carly didn’t have time to react.
Not yet.
“Walk very carefully out of this,” she ordered instead.
Noah nodded and did as he was told.
He held her against his chest, bleeding and in her underwear, until they were outside. The cold hit harder now that the barn’s walls weren’t there to cut through it.
Carly realized she was shivering.
It took her a few seconds longer to realize it wasn’t all thanks to the cold.
“Are you okay?”
Carly opened her mouth to try to convince him that she was, especially now that he was there.
Yet, what came out next was something she hadn’t let out in a long time.
Tears.
They poured out of Carly like the waters behind a broken dam. Her body shook which made all the pain worse.
“It’s okay,” Noah soothed. “I got you.”
Somehow that relief only made her tears worse.
* * *
THE BOOTS WERE goners.
They were burned outside of the abandoned barn as a hazmat team, CSI, and the Tactical Criminal Division and local law enforcement surrounded the area. A fire truck showed up, but it was Selena Lopez who rushed Carly to the hospital.
Noah, too.
He slid into the back seat of her rental SUV without shoes and still holding Carly, wrapped up in his coat.
She insisted she was fine, but the dried blood against her skin and swollen and red eyes would have been enough to convince anyone otherwise.
Never mind that she had been dangling above enough anthrax to kill her.
“They’re going to make sure you’re good and you’re going to let them,” Selena had barked at her. It was obvious she cared for Carly and Carly felt the same. She gave in and didn’t argue as they sped to the city.
“How did you find me?” Carly had asked instead.
“Axel called and said they couldn’t find you. Your tech guru found out the last place your phone had been active was off of the road behind the Kellogg property. I realized we hadn’t checked the barn yet. Then I saw your rental.”
Carly nodded against him.
He could feel her wince.
He also felt her jump as she remembered something.
“Willa Lapp got me to the barn and when I realized it was a trap she admitted that David had been taken a few days before we came to town.”
Noah stiffened. He felt her look up at him to see why.
“When Axel called me, my father showed up at the house. He said that my little brother was worried about his friend Aaron, David’s brother. When Dad went to go talk to Willa about it she turned him away.”
“Once he told us that we sent local PD out to their place,” Selena added from the driver’s seat. “Right before I got here, Axel got a call that they had Levi in custody but that Willa and Aaron are still missing.”
Noah, who had only been in contact with Axel before he’d gone to the barn and right after he’d gotten Carly, had apparently missed a few steps the team had gone through in that time.
“Does anyone know where David is?” That was still a resounding no. Carly sighed. “Rodney didn’t, either.”
“Maybe he and Talia left together,” Noah offered.
Carly’s voice was quiet when she spoke again.
“Maybe.”
The rest of the ride, Carly recapped what had been said in the barn while Selena updated her on what she’d missed at the casino.
“They said they wouldn’t have known the van had been missing at all had we not shown up. There were no security cameras in the area it was originally taken from or returned. Opaline, Amanda and Alana were looking into any traffic cams or footage from surrounding businesses that might have caught the driver leaving with it or coming back when we realized you’d gone missing. The man who detailed the car said he was paid in cash left in a bag next to the car. Aria called the number he was originally contracted by and it was the landline at the Wallflower Bar.”
That got Noah’s attention.
“Where Rodney liked to drink on occasion,” he said.
Selena nodded.
Carly wasn’t as enthused.
Not that he blamed her given what she’d just been through.
“So it was all about Rodney’s obsession with Talia? The anthrax attack on the community and abduction of David? And then stringing me up in an abandoned barn?” Noah felt her skepticism pouring off of her and onto his chest.
“You don’t like this,” he stated.
“It just seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble and work for an outcome that he still wasn’t close to getting,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Selena sighed.
“Just because he was bad didn’t mean he had to be smart about it.”
At that, they agreed.
Still, Carly was unconvinced.
She was quiet for the last few minutes of the ride.
Noah tried to ignore how warm she was against him.
Chapter Eighteen
Carly decided that, once and for all, listing things she hadn’t expected to happen while she was in Potter’s Creek was a useless pursuit.
Rodney, David, Talia, anthrax, the Grand Casino and the Kelloggs’ abandoned barn? All unexpected.
Meeting Noah and feeling for him the way she was? Definitely unexpected.
Waking up in his house smelling like his body wash to the faint glow of a bedside lamp shaped like a horse shoe?
Carly decided there was no reason to deep dive with rhetorical questions about how she’d gotten there.
The short but eventful journey from touching down at the airport, to being beneath the sheets of a bed-and-breakfast’s bed with a bandage around her arm, to being beneath the sheets at the Miller farm with a few more bandages and soreness had admittedly been a wild path.
But one she didn’t regret for a second traveling, unexpected or not.
So she palmed the cell phone on the small side table and sat up. It was almost two in the morning and there were no new calls or texts.
Carly hadn’t meant to sleep this long, but she was glad she hadn’t missed out on anything. Then again, their bad guy couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. He was gone.
Wasn’t he?
Carly’s three new wounds stung a little as she moved. The doctor at the hospital had confirmed none of them had been deep. He’d disinfected them and bandaged them with a stern warning that if she felt off at all to come back immediately, then put her on strong antibiotics just in case. But, as far as they and their tests could tell, she hadn’t been exposed.
Neither had her savior.
That had somehow meant more to her.
A sound of movement from the other side of the house pushed the haze of sleep out of her in an instant. She got up from the bed and took her phone out of the bedroom, alert.
That feeling of fight or flight ebbed as she approached the kitchen. By the time she was next to the dining table, it was all but gone.
“Oh my God,” she breathed out. Noah froze in front of the middle of the kitchen, his hands full. Carly laughed. “What is all of this?”
Selena and Axel had both agreed at the hospital that they would feel better if Carly stayed with someone they could trust while she got some rest. They’d meant Noah and he had quickly agreed. Carly hadn’t been able to deny she liked the idea, too, especially while she slept. She felt safe with Noah around.
When they’d gotten the okay to leave and come back to the farm, Gina had even still been up and in the kitchen, right where Noah said he’d left her. She’d made his dinner that he’d been planning to make Carly and the three of them had eaten in companionable silence. Carly had liked it.
The warmth of the kitchen, the quiet of the house.
But now?
Now the kitchen was an explosion of reds, greens, silvers and golds. Garland and tinsel and little paper trees and candy canes. Ornaments decorated the table centerpiece while a crimson-and-green table runner stretched beneath it. A Santa hat sat on the counter, beneath it one of four place mats covered with embroidered snowflakes.
The cherry on top of the extremely festive look?
Noah holding a baking sheet filled with Christmas tree–shaped cookies.
“I was hoping you’d be asleep a little while longer.” He put the cookies down on the countertop next to the sink and looked like a child who’d just been caught trying to sneak a peek at Santa. He motioned to the holiday decorations around him.
“Originally I was thinking of putting some decorations out for our dinner but, well, after everything that happened Gina offered to run out to the Walmart in the city and grab something better than what we had here.”
Carly was still in awe at how festive everything was. She walked over to him, staring at the garland he’d strung along the tops of the upper cabinets.
“But why?”
Noah looked, dare she think it, bashful.
“I thought it might be nice to give you some holiday cheer.” He checked the time on the microwave in the corner. He turned his head to do so. It was all she needed to get in front of him. “Since it’s past midnight—”
This time it was Carly’s turn to give a kiss that wasn’t expected, the moment he turned back to her.
Every ache or pain in her body quieted, just as the bar had around them when Noah had touched his lips to hers.
And now it was Noah who kissed her back.
Warm. Soft. Brief.
As soon as it started, it was over.
Carly stepped back and met his hooded gaze.
She didn’t want to leave him, but she did want to give him an out.
Just because she wanted him, didn’t mean he still wanted her.
There was still a lot she didn’t know about Noah Miller, and there was still a lot that he didn’t know about her.
Yet, being in the barn and thinking about her mother had changed something within Carly. Or, maybe, shifted was the better word. She loved who she had become, despite her trauma. She loved her job, her team and the ability to fight for justice for those who couldn’t always get it themselves.
What she hadn’t acknowledged to herself, until she was staring at the man who had refused to leave her side in the hospital, was how she’d put up barriers to love.
It was easy to fake it, to go through the motions, and she’d done a good job of that through the years. Dated off and on, but never got too far. She’d had an excuse ready for every relationship’s end. Usually she blamed her job. Sometimes she blamed the men. But most of the time? It always boiled down to one fact.
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