North

by Vanessa Vale

  I sucked in a breath. “No, I didn’t.”

  Jed’s gaze dropped to mine.

  “Your signature is on it.”

  “How did you get a hold of it?” Jed asked his boss.

  “We got a subpoena for the logging company’s records. We’ve been poring over files ever since. Wasn’t all that hard to find.”

  I felt Jed stiffen. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “We did. You didn’t answer.”

  I didn’t know what time that was, but he’d been with me last night from dinner until before dawn.

  “You also didn’t check in this morning,” she added.

  “That’s because someone tried to kill North. Shots fired at an intersection on the way to Billings.”

  There was a pause and we could hear her talking to someone else, as if she’d covered up the phone with a hand. “I’m glad to hear you are all right, Miss Wainright.”

  “Why? So I go to jail?”

  “We have the evidence needed for Jed to arrest you.”

  He squeezed my thigh again, getting me to meet his gaze. He shook his head.

  “I believe you,” I whispered to him, meaning I knew he hadn’t planned all of this. I would already be in his custody and already know what the feel of handcuffs was like.

  “When did I sign this contract?” I asked. “From what Jed told me, the lease with a logging company would only become an option if the land was purchased. Since I signed the contract last night, I had to have done it since then.”

  “That’s correct,” she confirmed.

  “If the contract was signed online, then it’s a generic digital signature. And there’s a time stamp,” I said, very familiar with the arrangement. I was sure she was too.

  “Nine thirty-four,” she replied, as if reading it off of her computer.

  My heart stuttered, literally skipped a beat and adrenaline pumped through me. Sheer relief. Jed knew I hadn’t signed that contract because I’d been handcuffed to his bed. But then realization struck. A scary one.

  “I couldn’t have signed it.” I didn’t want to say why and I felt my cheeks heat. Jed was my alibi and I was sure sleeping with the suspect wasn’t allowed.

  “She was with me,” Jed said, not elaborating. He didn’t even stall in responding. My heart leapt in my chest. “She couldn’t have signed the contract.”

  “You’re sure?” the director poked.

  His eyes held mine. “Very sure.”

  I licked my lips. “This means someone else did. And it wasn’t Macon.”

  16

  JED

  * * *

  “We’re looking for the wrong person,” I said. With the cell still in my hand, I lifted North up and onto her feet. Then I stood. Paced the deck. “Shit, Amy, have we been looking at Macon by mistake? That it’s been someone else entirely within the company?”

  She made a funny sound. Something like a grunt, but a little more ladylike. A groan, but she was too high up the food chain to outwardly respond to a possible fuck up. It was frustration and eye-opening epiphany.

  I turned to North, set my free hand on my hip. After I’d gotten out of bed, I’d pulled on my jeans, nothing else, thinking it would be easy to strip and move onto round two.

  “You said you signed the land contract last night. Who knew?” I asked North. She’d only pulled on my t-shirt. Her hard nipples were hard to miss, poking at the letters on the front. She’d felt good in my lap, but it was fucking distracting.

  She leaned against the rail and the dogs came up onto the porch. She patted them absently as she looked to me. “My assistant, Julian.”

  “Julian Zeman?” the director asked.

  I moved to stand in front of North so the director could hear her.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I signed it, called him to notify him it was done and to ensure the bank wired the money.”

  “Why?” my boss asked.

  She looked up at me. Her blue eyes held doubt and resolve.

  “Why did I sign the contract?” she repeated.

  “Yes.”

  Her head tipped to the side. Her long hair was tousled and I liked the sight of her. Mussed. In my t-shirt. Here. A warm breeze cut across the deck, and she tucked a lock behind her ear.

  “I didn’t know Jed was undercover. Then.”

  I gave her a nod to continue.

  “I wasn’t… convinced of his interest in me.”

  She’d doubted me. Even last night. After.

  So much had changed since then. Had her lack of trust forced her to sign the contract which in turn made the director believe her guilty? She’d completed the deal with Marshall so she’d know I wasn’t sniffing around solely to finish that job for him, which had been my original intention. Why hadn’t she told me when she’d taken me to her bed?

  Shit, all those answers. I’d pushed her into revealing everything about what Macon had done. Spanked her even. It had been my goal to get her out of her head. I’d done that, but one of the results was me being in the dark about the contract because I’d made her forget all about it.

  “Interest in you? Jed, are you—”

  “You’ve wanted to get answers from a Wainright for months,” I snapped. “You’ve got one on the horn. Focus, Director.”

  “When you’re back in the office, we need to have a talk,” she replied, her voice laced with authority. Like I gave a fuck.

  “I won’t be back in the office,” I told her. “I sent my two week notice to HR this morning.”

  North wasn’t the only one signing papers. Her eyes widened. Yeah, I’d surprised her right back. I had the ranch. I had this cabin. I had Jock and his family I needed to know better. I had North.

  “Jed, think this through,” the director said.

  I tipped North’s chin up so she couldn’t look away. My gaze shifted between her eyes and mouth.

  “I have.” I spoke to my boss but studied North. The blueness of her eyes. The freckle on the side of her nose I hadn’t seen before. “Don’t worry, everyone around here thinks I’m a disgraced agent. Nothing you do now can make that worse.”

  She huffed. Then sighed. “Continue, Miss Wainright.”

  North swallowed, thought for a second, as if my announcement had made her forget the conversation. “I signed the Marshall contract after hours. Probably eight-thirty.”

  “How long has he—Julian—been your assistant?” she asked.

  “Two years.”

  “He has access to all your files.”

  “Yes. He knows more about what I do than I do. All good assistants are that way.”

  “He had access to Macon?” she asked.

  North considered. “Of course. I assume he talked mostly with Macon’s assistant, Janice. Macon didn’t have time for anyone he didn’t deem important. Hell, he didn’t even see them. You think Julian signed the logger contract for me?”

  “If he worked for Macon on the side, then he could have signed contracts for you. Things you didn’t know about. Like the land lease.”

  “I’d have known if the corporation bought land and leased it to loggers. It’s not like that can slip by anyone. I mean, even if I didn’t get wind, accounting would have. We might be a billion-dollar company, but paying millions for land is hard to hide.”

  “Unless someone in accounting’s in on it too,” the director added.

  “I asked Julian for all of Macon’s open contracts and I read through them yesterday,” North continued. “That’s how I learned about the deal with Marshall. Well, first from you,” she said, looking at me and when I’d come to her office. “It was in the pile. There was nothing in there about a logging lease.”

  “Julian left it out intentionally then,” I assumed.

  “I’ll go to the office and confront him.”

  North’s words made me laugh. “Fuck no. Someone shot at you driving down the road. Until we know who’s after you, you’re staying here.”

  “Where’s here?” the director asked. />
  “Somewhere safe,” I countered, not telling her. I was on a burner phone even she couldn’t trace.

  “Jed, I want this done,” North said, setting her hand on my chest. My bare chest. Which meant my dick went hard at the feel of her touching me. “If this stuff, and I mean the contracts, not the shooting, keeps happening, then Macon isn’t really gone. I need him and his shit out of my life for good. You taught me that.”

  “I got you out here to keep you safe and you want me to turn around and put you in danger?”

  She gave a little shrug. “I don’t want to be shot at again. I might be stubborn, but I’m not stupid. But if Julian’s behind all this, then I want to know.”

  I agreed with her, but I didn’t like it.

  “I’ll confront Julian—”

  “We,” I butt in. “We’ll confront him. You’re not doing it alone.” No fucking way.

  She gave me a small smile. “We’ll confront him and if it turns out we’re wrong or he’s not involved in the shooting, we’ll come back here.”

  A squirrel ran across the porch rail. Boozer stirred, hopped up and chased after it. Eddie didn’t even stir.

  “Fine, but there are hundreds of people in your office building. I can’t protect you there.” I was losing my shit thinking about it.

  “Then somewhere else remote. This is Montana,” she countered.

  “I won’t have you driving around with a lunatic with a rifle out there.”

  She smiled at me, went up on her tiptoes and kissed my jaw. “Then it’s a good thing I have a helicopter.”

  17

  NORTH

  * * *

  It took a while, because Jed was beyond stubborn. It felt good to have someone be protective, but he took the alpha male thing to the extreme. Then I remembered the way the windshield of my SUV shattered from a bullet and how I’d felt thinking I might die, and I gave in. We finally came up with a plan to confront Julian and for Jed not to have a coronary.

  It might not have been Julian. Someone else could have electronically signed a contract for me. Hell, there was an entire Contracts Department. They made them so that meant they could sign them.

  No one could get away with falsifying signatures on known contracts. They’d be fired. But the one with the loggers seemed to be off the books. Julian hadn’t even shared the paperwork for it, which meant one of two things. He didn’t know about it and that was why he didn’t include it in the stack he’d given me, or he knew about it and that was why he’d kept it from me.

  That didn’t explain the shooter or why someone wanted me dead. I couldn’t sign a logger contract if I wasn’t breathing. During our conversation with the FBI director, we couldn’t even determine if the two issues went together.

  All I knew was that I needed to clear my name. To get the FBI off my back. To bury Macon completely. I’d thought he’d been gone when I’d dropped a handful of dirt onto his coffin. I wasn’t going to take the fall for whatever he’d been up to.

  Unlike Jed, the director had been easy to convince. She wanted her case closed at all costs. I was just a person of interest to her. Nothing more. While I had to assume she didn’t want me dead, she set the risks to my health and safety at different parameters than Jed.

  Only when he’d felt the plan was solid—and he could stay in control of the situation—did he relent. With reinforcements. My brothers.

  Whatever he’d talked about with South had swayed him. He trusted them. After we hung up with the director, we put the plan in motion, first connecting with South again and getting him and East and West in on it. I would summon Julian to the ranch the next day. While I might be a workaholic, even I would take the day off after someone tried to kill me.

  So there was nothing to do except for Jed to strip me of his t-shirt and take me back to bed. Eat lasagna he’d pulled from the freezer. Play fetch with the dogs. Make me come—without me touching myself—until I passed out in his arms.

  I trusted Jed. It seemed ridiculous, but I set the true proof of that onto the fact that I gave myself over to him. Let go completely. Knew he’d catch me if I fell. He brought me to orgasm.

  Just as he’d planned since he’d laid eyes on me at the wake.

  The next morning Paul landed the helicopter in the field in front of the cabin, the blades whipping the tops of the pines and sending some of the wildflowers into the air. Every bit of tension Jed had lost from our day of isolation and sex was back. I was in my dress and heels from the day before, at least until we were on the ranch and I could change. Jed had taken my panties and wouldn’t give them back, so I was commando.

  He had a gun tucked into the back of his jeans.

  Now that I knew all of his truths, so much more made sense. His constant vigilance. His need for control. His protectiveness. If he had his way, I’d be handcuffed to the bed once again. Safe.

  I loved being in bed with Jed, but I wanted to get to know him. If he liked crunchy or smooth peanut butter. Hell, if he was allergic to the stuff. I knew he was my man. Even after only a few days, I knew he was the guy for me. I wanted to be with him without any secrets. Without the past looming over us. I only wanted to look to the future. With him. However that would look.

  If someone had told me my life would be like this a week ago, I’d have laughed. No way would I trust a man. Let one do the things Jed did. Tell me what to do. No, I’d have laughed not because of that, but because it made me hot.

  And, of course, no way would I have even imagined Macon being dead. Maybe it was the one thing Macon did for me that was good.

  Dying.

  East hopped from the helicopter, bent at the waist to duck the low rotors, and came over to us. Jed tossed him his keys as East would drive Jed’s truck with the dogs back to the ranch.

  The thing everyone agreed on was that I wasn’t going anywhere by car.

  No one could follow a helicopter from here in a vehicle, not in this terrain. Since the helicopter hadn’t been at the house because of the weather yesterday morning, no one who might be watching the ranch would know it was even being used. No shooter would know where to sit and wait.

  With the noise of the rotors, we didn’t talk. East gave me a fierce hug, then pushed me toward Jed and the helicopter.

  It took less than an hour and we were back at the ranch. I was safe inside and away from windows.

  South and West were waiting. Before I went upstairs to change, I called Julian. My brothers and Jed were standing before me, listening. Hovering, as if Julian could cause me harm through the phone.

  As usual, he answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve been so worried. Everyone in the building’s been talking about what happened,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I replied, glancing up at Jed. We were in the kitchen and he gripped the edge of the granite. I wouldn’t mention to Julian how I’d been scared. I never shared anything but business with my assistant. “Look, obviously I’m not coming into the office.”

  “Right.”

  “I need Macon’s files you pulled for me. They’re on my desk. Plus anything else that’s come in, which I’m sure is plenty.” Besides the few days after Macon died, I never took a day off. I was behind.

  “It’s all waiting for you. I rearranged your schedule.” Just as I expected. He anticipated what I needed which was why he was a great assistant.

  “In-person meetings will have to be video,” I said. “For the next few days until the police investigate.”

  I had no idea what was going on with the police. I hadn’t been questioned. I was sure South had given them a full accounting and they were working on it. But if Julian really was involved—

  “Done,” he said, efficient as usual.

  “I can’t review paperwork over video though,” I added. “Bring them here, please.”

  While I wasn’t belligerent to my employees, I would never ask Julian to come to the ranch. I told him what to do, with manners, and he did it.

  “Be there in two hou
rs.”

  “Thanks, Julian. I don’t know what I would do without you.” I didn’t, actually. He was very good at his job. I didn’t know if that meant he’d hid his misdeeds from me or if he was just going about his day as usual.

  I hung up and I walked right to Jed, wrapped my arms around him. I loved that I could now seek comfort from him.

  “If he’s guilty, we’ll know,” Jed said, kissing the top of my head.

  I looked to South and West, who nodded, crossed their arms over their broad chests.

  For the first time, I realized, I wasn’t alone.

  18

  JED

  * * *

  I’d been with the FBI for almost twenty years. I’d seen everything. Handled the stress. Coped with danger. Been shot at. I’d dealt with it all without breaking a sweat.

  But North saying my name in that scared voice the day before through the phone had taken years off my life.

  For the first time ever, I had a liability. A weakness. I loved someone enough that if they were being harmed or threatened that it made me lose my shit.

  I’d loved my parents. I was getting close with my brother and his family again. I would not see harm come to them.

  North Wainright though… she was my Achilles heel. My heart. A part of me. That was why I’d resigned from the FBI. I couldn’t be away from her. The need to protect was too great. It would be impossible to go off on a mission now. I’d have to come to terms with letting her leave my sight, let alone this house. She was independent as fuck and smothering her wasn’t going to work. Or handcuffing her to my bed. Although I did remember the perks of that, ones she’d enjoyed immensely.

  Putting her in the same room with a man who might possibly be an attempted murderer and other things made me panic. I tried not to lose my shit. When South and West looked my way, they understood.

  They’d underestimated North and what she was capable of. Of what she’d done for them. They wouldn’t now. Neither would I. We’d worked on the plan. Ensured she was protected.