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.
“When I look at the scars I have now,” Thomas said, “I remember how much my captors enjoyed cutting into me. They wanted me to break.” His eyes narrowed. “I didn’t. No matter what they did to me, I didn’t break.”
No, the Dragon hadn’t. But had she? In those lost hours, what had Noelle done?
“Then I remember what it was like to kill them.” His hands fisted. “You know what I am and what I’ve done. But when I close my eyes, I don’t like seeing the bodies in my mind.”
You know what I am. She reached out to him and pressed her hand to his clenched fist. “You’re a soldier. You survived. You fought. That’s what you did.”
His gaze fell to her hand. Her skin was so pale while his was a dark tan.
“You need to be careful,” Thomas warned her. His stare was still focused on her hand.
“Careful?”
“You already know I want you, and right now...my control isn’t real strong.”
She pulled back. “I didn’t mean—”
A muscle jerked in his jaw. “I know what you meant, but I’m running on no sleep and the memory of you being nearly na**d in my arms. So you should go to your room, I’ll go to mine, and when we wake up in a few hours, we can just pretend we never crossed the line between us.”
The line between partners...and lovers?
“I’ll stay hands-off, and we’ll keep things just business.” The gold in his eyes heated. “And we’ll get the job done here so we can head back to D.C.”
That was the right thing to do. They had to work together. But... I want him.
Noelle turned away. She climbed up the stairs. She was right at the top when she just had to look back once more.
He was still standing at the base. That hot, golden gaze was focused on her.
“When did we meet before?” Noelle asked quietly.
A mask seemed to slip over his face.
“Don’t lie to me.” So, maybe she was also running on no sleep and the memory of him being so warm and na**d beside her. Because she sure felt as if she’d been pushed to the edge. “You’re familiar to me. And sometimes, sometimes...like right now, I’ll catch you looking at me as if—as if you know me.”
“I do know you,” he growled. “We’re working together and—”
“You knew me before the EOD. You even slipped up once.” Another day, another case, but the words had nagged at her. “You told me that you’d seen me, but I hadn’t seen you.”
He glanced away from her, giving Noelle his profile. “You don’t have clearance to know about all the cases I’ve worked. So all I can say is that our paths have crossed.”
There was more. “Do you always keep secrets from women you want to have sex with?”
His shoulders stiffened. “I keep secrets from everyone.” He turned on his heel, giving her his broad back. “Get some sleep. Eighteen hundred hours will be here before you know it.”
Frustration had her muscles knotting, but she spun around and pretty much stomped her way into the room at the top of the stairs. The room was filled with heavy oak furniture, and a big, wide picture window overlooked the snow-covered land around the cabin.
The bed was a massive four-poster, which waited in the middle of the room. Noelle stared down at the covers, then she just let herself fall, face-first, into them.
She wanted sleep to take her away because the look in Thomas’s gaze... It had unnerved her far too much.
* * *
THERE WERE NO creaks from upstairs. No soft rustles of clothing. Noelle had been up there for fifteen minutes, and Thomas was pretty sure the woman had crashed.
He pulled out his phone and called Mercer. The situation was about to slide out of his control, and he needed to know what to do when—
“Don’t tell me you’ve found another body,” Mercer said, his words rumbling as the EOD Director answered the call on the second ring.
Thomas’s gaze stayed locked on the staircase. “Pairing me with Noelle was a mistake.”
Silence.
“She wants me to tell her how I know her.” He hated looking right into her eyes and lying. The lies were cutting him up inside.
“You’re in Alaska to track down the man who hired the Jack of Hearts to kill me...and to destroy the EOD.”
“Yeah, well...” His hand raked through his hair. “All signs indicate that guy is on a slab in the county morgue right now. We’ll do recon work after we’ve had a little time to rest, but Noelle is pushing, and I want to know just how much—”
“You can reveal?” Mercer’s tone was measured.
“It’s been fifteen years. She still has nightmares.”
“I thought she might.” It almost sounded as if sympathy was in Mercer’s voice. Obviously, they had a bad connection. Mercer felt sympathy for no one. “And that’s why she’s paired up with you.”