Chapter Five

Zoey had never been the kind of woman who had hoped for a man to save her, but right now, staring up at Eli’s face in the dim light of her attacker’s cell phone, she could have kissed him.

It was crazy how one little decision had nearly gotten her killed. That was the last time she would go into a barn without using a light switch.

“Eli,” she said, his name dripping from her lips like nectar.

“Is there anyone else?” he asked, moving to clear the rest of the barn. He walked to the front of the barn and flicked on the lights that she had struggled to find.

“I don’t think so,” she said, lifting her head up from the mud of the ground and glancing around. She moved her hands, which were zipped to her feet behind her back. “Hey.” She motioned toward them with her chin.

Taking her unspoken direction, Eli pulled a knife and cut her free.

“Thanks.” She sat up, rubbing her wrists where the clear plastic had cut into her flesh. She wiped the dirt from her lips, spitting the remnants of mud and guck from her mouth.

“You okay?” he asked, walking over to her as he holstered his weapon.

She thought about standing to make a point of how strong and unaffected she was by the attack, but her body refused to comply. As she breathed, her ribs ached and her head felt as if it were about to explode. The best she could do was lie. “I’m fine.”

Or, at least she would be in a day or two.

He knelt down, coming face-to-face with her as he assessed her well-being.

“Seriously, I’ll be okay.”

He reached up and his fingers grazed against her cheek where she could feel a lump swelling on her skin. “Your eyes are bloodshot.” He looked down to her neck. “You’re lucky you broke free of his grasp.”

If she was feeling a bit better, she was sure she would have said something about him stating the obvious, but as it was, she could only agree with him. The man’s body lay at her feet and, as she glanced in his direction, his body twitched. His head rested on the ground, just feet from where hers had been only moments before. There was a red hole at the center of his forehead and blood was dripping out, twisting down his temple and oozing to the floor where it nearly disappeared in the black dirt and spent hay.

She touched her neck, feeling the hot bruises where the man’s hands had wrapped around her neck and nearly ended her.

“Where’re your brothers?” Eli asked, pulling her back to the reality that waited just outside the barn.

His question put her on alert. It was too similar to her attacker’s robotic “Where’s Chad?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, trying not to sound suspicious.

“Are they inside?” He motioned toward the house.

She shook her head and felt some of the tightness recede from her body as she slipped her hand into Eli’s. Squeezing his warm fingers, she tried to force a smile. “I just got here. I don’t know about Jarrod and Trevor.” She slowly moved to standing with Eli’s help.

He brushed her hair out of her face for her. The action was intimate—he was far too close. She let go of his hand and stepped back from him. As much as she loved his touch, it had no place in her life.

“Wait,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He glanced away. “That’s not important. What are we going to do with this bastard’s body?”

He wasn’t getting away from her question that easily, but they did need to focus. The only good news was that, out here in the middle of Mystery, Montana, gunfire wasn’t something that was feared. The ranch was close enough to public hunting lands that if anyone heard it, they would write it off as a successful hunter.

Her thoughts turned to the dead guys in the shanty her brother had found and she grimaced, thinking about how often her family found themselves in need of body removal.

“I would say he could stay in here, but I don’t want my horse to spook at the smell.” She nudged the body with the toe of her boot.

Eli patted the body down, pulling a wallet from the guy’s back pocket. Opening it up, he pulled out a military ID card. “Smitty Foster. Know him?”

She shook her head.

“Is he one of your brothers’ friends?”

There was little chance that this bastard wasn’t connected with the Gray Wolves—not that they didn’t have other enemies. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to open up to Eli about everything that was happening in their lives right now. However, the hit man market was a small world. He had known about Trish, which meant it was likely he knew about the Gray Wolves.

“Are you just fishing for information? Or do you really not know what’s going on here?” she asked, trying to sound as nonconfrontational as possible. She didn’t want to push him away, just get an idea of what they were working with.

He gave her a guilty smile.

“That’s what I thought.” She wiped off the front of her shirt. “How much do you know?”

He stared at her for a long moment, almost as if he were trying to decide how much information he wanted to give her. His silence ticked her off, but it also drew in memories of what it had been like to be with him day in and day out.

Spontaneity was something she couldn’t live without.

“You know about Bayural? About what exactly happened with Trish?” she said, not waiting another second for him to answer.

He nodded. “I got the highlights through the grapevine.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, holding out her hand and motioning for the guy’s wallet so she could give it a quick once-over.

He handed it to her. “Sounds like you ticked off the wrong people.”

“You can say that again.” She flipped open the wallet. It was definitely bare bones. ID—probably fake—one credit card with the same name as ID, and two hundred dollars in cash. “But we were just doing our jobs.”

“When you take out the CIA’s trash, you’re bound to get your hands dirty.”

She closed the wallet and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. “Getting elbow deep in the muck is fine, but it’s an entirely different thing when I’m facedown in the crap in my own home.”

He stepped closer to her and wiped a bit of mud off her cheek. “If you want, you don’t have to face these bastards alone.”

“I...” she began, not sure exactly what to say. It was a generous offer and she wanted him to stay, but he had a life of his own, a job that required him, probably a girlfriend everywhere he went, and that was to say nothing of her own life and roadblocks she had carefully put in place when it came to him. “I’m honored that you would offer, but—”

“Stop, Zoey.” He put his hands up like he was a street cop controlling traffic—but this was one wreck he couldn’t avoid.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he continued, talking over her feeble attempt to mutter her protests. “I know you. I know what you’re thinking. I know that you think my being here is a bad idea. And I agree.”

She wasn’t sure what hurt worse—the fact that he thought he knew her mind but wasn’t trying to make a move on her, or that he agreed it was a bad idea they spend any time together.

“You can’t possibly know what I’m thinking.” If he could, he would have been running for the hills.

“I think I get the gist. Regardless, though, you need me here.”

“I have my brothers,” she argued.

“If that’s true, where are they now?” He waved around the barn and to the dead man on the floor. “I know you love them, and they love you, but didn’t Trish’s death show you the limits of what family can actually do?”

“How dare you come after my brothers? My team? My sister?” She threw her arms over her chest to keep her hands from striking him. He had no business calling out her family, or what he perceived as their mistakes. Trish’s death was a tragedy, and sure, mistakes had been made, but it was none of his business.

He sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that. At all. I’m just worried about you.” He gave her a cute contrite look that was in direct contradiction to the anger that roiled in her gut. “I just mean that you need protection, someone who is with you through thick or thin. I can do that.”

There was no way he was going to take no for an answer, and she wasn’t sure that she could even get the word past her lips—not when he had just saved her life.

“Let’s just take one day at a time.”

A huge smile spread across his wide face, accentuating his chiseled jaw and piercing green eyes. There was a quickening inside of her, as though her body was springing back to life after being so close to death.

“I’ll take a day,” he said. He crouched down and grabbed the dead guy under the arms.

Unwilling to stand idly by and simply watch as he did the heavy lifting, she took hold of the man’s feet and lifted him up. “Where do you think we should put this trash?”

He grunted as he shifted the dead weight in his arms and walked backward toward the open barn door. “Your trunk empty?” he asked, motioning toward her car with his chin.

“It can be.” They lugged the body over and dropped him on the ground. The body wheezed as it deflated.

“Huh,” Eli said, looking down at the guy. “That’s a new one. You ever hear that sound before?”

Though she’d never pulled the trigger and killed a man, thanks to STEALTH she’d heard more than her fair share of dying breaths—just never one postmortem. Bodies did strange things after the soul left them.

“No,” she said, opening up the trunk, unloading the boxes from the conference and putting them on the ground next to the body. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen with a body?”

He grabbed a box out of the trunk and set it on the ground, taking a moment. “Postmortem hyperthermia. Hands down.” He nodded, grabbing a box from her hands. “I was on assignment in Guatemala and came across a woman who had just died of what I think was a drug-induced heart attack. Her daughter had tried to resuscitate her before I arrived on scene. By the time I got there, she’d been down about forty minutes, but she was hot to the touch—hotter than a fever. Like, crazy hot.”

“Okay, that’s weird.” She took hold of the dead guy’s feet and they flung him into the back of the car. As he landed, the car bounced.

“Yeah, but it got better. The daughter swore that her mother’s body had been taken over by a demon. Went into a full panic. I tried to calm her down, but she ended up setting the entire house on fire—mother’s body and all.”

“Can’t say I blame her.” She wiped her hands on her dirty jeans, aware that they were precariously close to slipping back into their old ways—bantering with one another, having strange conversations in even stranger circumstances and at the same time enjoying each other’s company.

She needed to go back to being pissed off at him. It would make it easier to push him away.

One day at a time.

“I need a shower,” she said, trying to avoid spending another second with the man who drew so many feelings and questions. She walked to the barn to make sure there were no obvious signs of a struggle in case anyone stopped by. Thankfully, she appeared to have taken all the damage. She ran her fingers over the spot in her gut where the bullet had struck her only hours before.

Bullet to the chest, nearly strangled to death, beaten and now dealing with her ex—it had been one hell of a day.

Clicking off the barn’s light, she walked back to the house with Eli at her side. They were in step with each other as they made their way up onto the porch. It struck her as she grabbed her keys and unlocked the front door that there was no way to hide Eli from her brothers in the light of morning.

They were going to rib her something fierce.

She stopped herself before she opened the door and turned to him. “It may be best if you sleep—”

“In the barn? No. And it’s too cold to sleep out in my truck,” he said, cutting her off as though he could really read her mind. “I’ll take post outside your bedroom.”

“So you can listen to me snore?” she said, opening the front door. He pushed past her, taking point as they entered the house.

“Snore, chat, whatever...” His mischievous grin returned.

She looked away in an attempt to hide her own grin. He couldn’t know that he still flustered her. “Don’t you have to go to work? Make those bosses happy?”

She could almost hear his grin fade as she brought up one of the many things that could drive them apart, though none were greater than the old hurts that lay between them. “As far as they’re concerned, I’m still in Billings at the conference, at least for the next few days.”

“And what happens when those few days are over?” She closed and locked the door behind them, then threw her keys into the bowl that sat next to the door.

“Like we said, one day at a time.” He walked toward the kitchen like he knew the place. “Besides, I make my own hours.”

She raised a brow. When he had worked for them, he was on salary and worked at her side constantly. There was none of the “we’ll call you when we need you” freelancer thing. He had been a major part of their team and their lives. It was because of him that they had been forced to change the way they worked. When he left, it became abundantly clear that it was a liability to let anyone outside the family inside their circle at that level...security could be breached best by trust.

There was the sound of him putting water in a teakettle as she walked into the kitchen.

“London fog?” he asked, holding up a box of decaf Earl Grey.

“Sure.”

“You’re still drinking it every night before you go to bed?” he asked, his back turned to her as he set about working.

It made her squirm that he knew her that intimately. “Um, yeah. Most of the time.”

She wasn’t sure she should admit it or not. It would have made her feel better to lie and tell him she had changed, that she wasn’t the woman he had once known, but aside from making her feel better, it wouldn’t have served any purpose. The only thing that had really changed—besides her location—was the need to keep people, and love, at arm’s length.

If she could just figure out how to keep Eli close enough to ensure her safety, but far enough away from the danger of falling in love with him all over again.