I didn’t hear one, but I cut it just to be safe.

  “You still okay?” I called.

  “I wouldn’t say I’m okay, but the lid is holding!”

  “I’m gonna keep working, then,” I told Emma, and got back to it, lifting another load, pausing to check on her, repeating that sequence again and again, until I’d moved as much of the turf as I safely could. Everything else, I’d need to do by hand.

  I jumped out and ran to my shovel. “Knock on the wood by your head, as hard as you can!”

  Emma knocked. I climbed down into the opposite side of the grave, by her feet, and started digging faster than I ever had in my life, grateful the soil wasn’t too compacted. Beneath me, I could hear her breathing, loud, ragged, like she was hyperventilating.

  “Emma, you gotta calm down,” I told her.

  “You calm down!” she yelled back, and I was relieved to hear some of her fiery personality peek through the panic. It was like the old Emma. The one I grew up with. Not the Stepford wife she’d turned into after marrying Beau.

  “Don’t be rude or I’ll leave you where you are,” I threatened.

  An audible gasp. “Noah!”

  “Oh, come on, now. You gotta hear me up here sweating my ass off trying to get you out.”

  “All I hear is your big feet stomping around. If you crush me, I swear to god, I will haunt you.”

  I shook my head, chuckling in relief, the sound borderline hysterical, because what the fuck? How was she alive? There must have been an autopsy. Embalming. Some sort of process that should have led to someone discovering the fact that she wasn’t actually dead.

  “How did I get here?” she called, echoing my thoughts.

  “I can answer all your questions when you get out,” I told her. “Just focus on staying as calm as you can while I work.”

  “Can you . . . talk to me?” she asked, voice cracking. “It’s too quiet in here, and I’m so scared.”

  I started digging faster. “Of course I can. It’s nighttime up here, middle of February. I only have half a foot of soil to go, and then you’ll be out, and I’ll call nine-one-one.”

  “No!” she screamed.

  “You need to get looked at.”

  “No, Noah! Promise me.”

  “I can’t do that. You’ve been through a lot.”

  I didn’t say more, didn’t know how much she remembered. Yeah, she’d “died” two days ago, but before that, she’d been in a coma for another three. Apparently, she’d tripped going down their stairs, and Beau didn’t find her until he got home from work. She’d sustained a head wound and slipped into a coma. When it was discovered she was brain dead, Beau decided to pull the plug, against her family’s wishes. And now here she was, alive and screaming, traumatizing me in a way that was absolutely going to require therapy.

  “Is the sheriff still Beau’s brother?” she called.

  “Yes.”

  “Then no. We can’t call nine-one-one, because then Beau will find out I’m alive and try to finish me off.”

  I froze, my shovel stabbed into the dirt, a frisson of unease slipping down my spine. Nothing about the past week had sat right with me, and I’d had my suspicions about Beau, but did Emma just imply he’d tried to kill her?

  I blew out a breath and chucked the shovel load of dirt over my shoulder. “Okay. We won’t call nine-one-one.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Please, keep talking.”

  “It’s nice out tonight. Warm.” For the next twenty minutes, I spoke to her, making the most inane small talk of my life, saying way more than I usually did. Every so often, I paused to check in, to make sure she was still breathing, my heart stuttering to a stop if her response wasn’t immediate. The entire time, in the back of my mind, I was cursing out Beau. If he’d really tried to kill her . . .

  My shovel pinged off something hard.

  “Oh, thank god,” Emma sobbed.

  I quickly cleared the rest of the soil. “Close your mouth and cover your face,” I told her. “I’m going to open the lid, and dirt will fall in.”

  “Okay!”

  “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  I threw the top open, still half convinced this was some kind of fever dream, but there she was, as stunning as ever, her curves clad in a white sundress, blond hair fanned across the pillow, dirt caving in all around her, still very much alive.

  She pulled her hands away and tried to scramble up, but slipped on the silk liner. I grabbed her without thinking, hauling her close, and she threw her arms around my neck.

  “Thank you,” she sobbed into my shoulder, her body racked with shudders.

  I was shaking a fair amount myself. “Christ, are you okay?”

  “No,” she cried.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone?”

  “No, please. No one.”

  “Not even your family?”

  She shook her head against my chest. “I just . . . I need time to think. Is there somewhere you can take me where I’ll be safe?”

  “I mean, my cabin, but it’s—”

  “Yes. Please. Can we go there now?”

  Every instinct inside of me was screaming to get this woman to a doctor. Three days in a coma, two days dead, and then she magically popped back to life? That must require medical attention, right? Hell, scientists would probably want to study her. But she sounded so scared, so convinced that she was in danger, and with Beau’s brother being the sheriff, and two more cousins on the police force, calling them meant he’d immediately be notified. And it wasn’t like we could bring her to a local clinic without Beau finding out.

  He might have been a monumental asshole, but he was smart, and rich. I wouldn’t put it past him to find a way to get Emma moved back into the family hospital under his watch, where he’d have complete control over her again.

  “Emma, if you’re set on hiding, we need to get this grave put back together.”

  “How long will that take? I need a shower.” She pulled back enough to glance around, her pupils wide with fear. “And to get the hell out of this hole.”

  “Hours if I do it myself. I can take you back to my place and get you settled first, and then return.”

  She clung on harder. “No, please don’t leave me. I can’t be alone right now.”

  “Then let me at least call my dad. He can get it done, and you know that man can keep a secret.”

  She hesitated, probably picturing my father, Hank Evans, the big, scary, bearded, antisocial bastard everyone in town avoided. Almost no one spoke to him besides his immediate family, and he only spoke to other townsfolk if forced at gunpoint. So, never. As far as secret keepers went, he was as good as it got.

  “He won’t tell anyone?” Emma said.

  “Not if I ask him not to.”

  She stared up at me, her brown eyes bottomless pools of darkness. “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  She let out the longest exhale I had ever heard. “Okay, then.”

  “I’m gonna help you up now,” I warned her. “Let me know if anything hurts.”

  She tried to squirm free. “No, I’m too heavy.”

  I frowned, hugged her closer, and stood slowly, my arms around her waist, easily holding her aloft. Was she a curvy goddess? Yes. Could I still bench-press her? Also yes.

  “Oh,” she said in a soft voice, looking down.

  “Can you get your feet under you?” I asked.

  “Y-yeah, sorry.”

  I gave her a second and then gently set her on them, warning her the silk lining would be slippery. She wobbled a little, her legs not wanting to hold her. Seeing her unsteadiness, I decided the easiest way to get us both out would be for me to climb up first and then pull her after me.

  A few minutes later, we were in the excavator rumbling back to the garage, both of us covered in dirt. Emma was sitting in my lap because the seat only fit one person. High school Noah would have lost his mind over it, but adult Noah was still too concerned about Emma’s welfare to appreciate having such a gorgeous woman wrapped around me. I was struggling to process the events of the past hour; I couldn’t even imagine how she was feeling.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “I’m worried you might go into shock or something.”

  “I feel like I might already be there,” she said, shivering.

  I pulled her closer with my free hand. “Sorry I’m so sweaty.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said. “I need the body heat.”

  “Emma . . . how the fuck did this happen?”

  She shook her head. “I have no idea. The last thing I remember is hearing another rumor about Beau cheating on me, and I think I snapped or something. I went into his home office and pried open all the locked desk drawers, trying to find proof so he couldn’t lie to me this time. Instead, I found a bunch of unpaid bills and a pile of late notices for our mortgage and cars. We have a joint checking account, but he paid for almost everything out of a separate one only he had access to. I was able to get into it from his computer, and . . . well, it was overdrawn. I went back through the payment history as far as I could. We’d been living well outside our means for years.”

  “How?” I asked. Between Beau’s inheritance and salary, they should have been rolling in dough.

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” she said. “I waited for him to come home, then confronted him. The last memory I have is us fighting at the top of the stairs, and . . . I think he pushed me down them.”

  I tightened my hold on her, starting to shake again. This time with the violent urge to go murder her husband. “I’m so fucking sorry,” I said, the words feeling inadequate.

  She sniffed, dropped her head to my shoulder, and started crying again, the sounds muffled as she tried to fight it. I eased my foot off the gas and wrapped both my arms around her because my long-ass legs meant I could steer with my knee at this speed. “I have you,” I told her. “It’s okay to let go.”

  Her sides heaved as the floodgates opened, and huge, loud, heartbreaking sobs tore from her throat. I wished there was something I could do besides just sit there and hold her. Wished I could take her pain away or go back in time to prevent this from happening in the first place. What she’d been through, no one should have to experience. No wonder she didn’t trust anyone right now. No wonder she needed time to process.

  I rubbed my hands over her back, making soothing noises, my eyes searching the grounds as I drove because her story had turned me paranoid, and I was worried Beau might suddenly show up to . . . I don’t know? Check on the grave or something? Make sure his work was complete? Murderers were always doing shit like that in crime documentaries.

  God help him if he did. Because I was mad enough to bury him alive.

  Chapter 3

  Noah

  Emma started to calm as we reached the garage. I drove right into the open bay and cut the engine. We sat there for another few minutes until her tears abated, and then I stood, holding her bridal-style, and headed toward my truck.

  “I can probably walk,” she said.

  “The fact that you’re not a hundred percent sure about that means you’re getting carried.”

  I got her settled into the passenger seat and then headed over to my side to start the engine and crank the heat. Yes, we were in a bit of a warm spell, but it was still only fifty degrees, and Emma’s skin felt freezing. I’d rather continue sweating through my shirt than watch her shiver.

  I threw the truck in reverse and called my dad as I started backing out.

  “You headed over here for dinner?” he said by way of answering, his gravelly voice rough and familiar.

  “No, Dad. Emma’s alive,” I told him.

  The line went dead.

  I called him back, yelling, “Don’t hang up!” when he answered, and this time, he listened while I got the whole story out.

  “You’re not messing with me?” he said.

  “He’s not,” Emma answered him in a quavering voice.

  Dad swore. “I’ll walk over now. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

  I thanked him and got off the line. My parents lived on the property, in a renovated caretaker’s cottage just beyond the back fence. They had their own little clearing out there, bordered by the forest, Mom having just enough space for a decent-size garden and her own little apiary. Nights like tonight, when I worked late, I usually stopped by for dinner before heading home because Mom insisted, doubting my ability to feed myself even though she’d done a damn fine job teaching me how to cook.

  “I’m gonna take the back way to my place,” I warned Emma. “Just to be safe. If we pass anyone, duck down.”

  “I will.”

  Thibodeaux was a postage-stamp-size town. With a population of just under three thousand, everyone knew everyone here. And everyone’s business. My truck was an older-model Ford that Dad handed down to me when I got my license, and I’d been maintaining it ever since. It was lifted, painted a deep hunter green, and was loud because it was diesel. Meaning, people knew it was my truck, and because I hadn’t dated anyone since me and Maisie called it quits six months ago, all it would take to get the rumor mill started was someone seeing me drive past with a blond woman in the passenger seat.

  “What happened to me . . . after?” Emma asked.

  I glanced over at her as we passed beneath a streetlight, and, man, she was beautiful, even splotchy from crying, caked in dirt, and visibly exhausted and terrified. Beau Broadturn was a goddamn idiot. And a fucking asshole. The last thing I wanted was to hurt this woman any more than she already was, but she deserved to know the full truth of what he had put her and her family through.

  “It ain’t a pretty story,” I warned her. “You ready to hear it now, or do you want to wait until you’ve recovered a little bit?”

  She huffed a humorless laugh. “I don’t think there’s any recovering from this.”

  I reached out before I could think better of it, my hand landing on her shoulder, squeezing. “If anyone can recover from this, it’s you, Emma.”

  Her chin wobbled, and her eyes grew glassy. “Thank you. I . . . I think I’d like to hear the story now.”

  I gave her one more squeeze and released her, returning my focus to the road because it was late, and these backwoods had a lot of deer in them. “Well, Beau had complete control over you from the start. Had you brought right over to the hospital without telling anyone there’d even been an accident. Your mama didn’t find out until the next day. She and you were supposed to have lunch, she said, and she kept getting your voicemail. Beau wasn’t answering her calls or texts, so she finally went to the police station to have them do a welfare check, and that’s when Ben Broadturn let it slip that you were in a coma.”

  Emma tipped back against the headrest, her eyes closed. “Oh, Mama.”

  “She was furious,” I said. “Went straight to the hospital to try and see you, but Beau said you were in too critical a condition for visitors. He gave her and your dad the runaround for another day before they forced their way in. Even then, they couldn’t do much. Beau was your medical power of attorney, your husband, and a doctor. He had the ultimate control over you, and he wouldn’t listen to anyone else when they wanted to bring in outside specialists for a second opinion.”

  Emma made a low, angry sound. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Your dad tried to file a conflict-of-interest complaint with the hospital, but as you know, Beau’s dad is the head of the hospital, and he declined it. I think your parents were trying to go over his head to the state health-care commission, but bureaucratic bullshit slowed it down, and by that point, Beau had already ruled you brain dead.”

  “Clearly, I am,” she snarked.

  “He, um . . .” Fuck, how to tell her this? “He didn’t give your parents a chance to say goodbye before he pulled the plug.”

  Her hands fisted, all the warning I had before she leaned forward in her seat and screamed. It was bloodcurdling, hair-raising, a sound torn straight from hell. Thank god no one else was on the road with us because it caught me off guard so bad I jerked away from her. We briefly swerved into the oncoming lane before I managed to straighten us out.

  “I’m going to fucking kill him,” she seethed.

  “Not to toot my own horn, but I am pretty good at disposing of bodies.”

  She turned my way. “Be careful about offering to help, because I’m dead serious. Do you know, I think he might have been trying to kill me for months?”

  My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “What?”

  “Even before the fall, I hadn’t been doing well,” she said. “I’d been sick for, like, half a year, and just kept getting worse with all these strange symptoms that Beau claimed he couldn’t figure out. He had me convinced it was some sort of autoimmune disease. The weird thing is, he went away for a week to a medical conference, and while he was gone, I started to feel better. When he got home, the symptoms got worse again. Looking back, I think he could have been the one making me sick, like giving me something, but at the time, I figured it was stress-triggered because our marriage . . . wasn’t going well. Not just with the cheating rumors, but—god, this is so embarrassing to say out loud—he hadn’t touched me in months. Even if I begged him to. He blamed it on the sickness, but I’d also been gaining weight, and he had opinions about that.” She buried her head in her hands. “Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe I just said that. I’m so sorry. We haven’t spoken since high school, and here I am oversharing about my sex life.”

  I tried to shove my rage at Beau down and control my tone, but it was impossible. “We’ve trauma bonded,” I said. “The normal bounds of conversation no longer apply. Also? Beau is a fucking bastard. He should have been the one begging you. Christ, didn’t he realize what he had?”

  She went quiet, and I wanted to kick myself because I’d probably crossed some kind of line, but goddamn, it couldn’t be helped. I wanted to kill Beau myself, not just for hurting Emma physically, but for the emotional damage he’d clearly done to her as well.

  “Do you really mean that?” she asked in a small voice.

 

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