Page 36 of Naughty With The Mountain Man
Instead, I’m weirdly, horribly calm.
Until I seeTroy.
He’s not in cuffs at first. He’s talking fast, hands up, somewhere between defensive and indignant, like a man arguing over a parking ticket. Then Dixon lifts a hand, and two deputies step in.They turn him, pull his arms behind his back, and snap the cuffs on like they’ve been waiting to do it all morning.
Troy’s eyes cut to me, wild and… hurt? “Ellie, I—It wasn’t supposed to—Jonah said?—”
My stomach drops through the floor.
Jonah Marks stands ten feet away, already zip-tied, already smirking. He looks at me like I’m a puzzle he solved and is bored of now.
Dixon’s voice is steady. “Jonah, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, assault, and conspiracy. Troy… same list. You can add stalking, intimidation, and obstruction if you open your mouth again.”
Troy opens it anyway. “I wasprotectingher!”
I flinch. Micah’s hand finds the small of my back—just a touch, just enough to sayI see you.Breathe.
“Protecting me?” My voice sounds foreign in my own mouth. Thin around the edges. “By drugging me and stuffing me in a van?”
Troy shakes his head, desperate. “No—no, that was Jonah. He went too far. I just wanted to scare you a little. Make you see we should be together. You’re always with those kids—you never see me. I thought if you needed me?—”
“Needed you?” I echo. The words hit like ice water. “You thought if I was afraid enough, I’d fall in love with you?”
He flinches at the wordlove, like I offered it and then snatched it back. “Idolove you,” he says, and it sounds all wrong—thin, possessive, broken. “You’d be safer with me than with—” Hisgaze flicks to Micah. He sneers. “—than with a ghost who doesn’t know how to live.”
Something dark moves under Micah’s calm. He doesn’t step forward. He doesn’t need to. Nate does it for him, dragging Troy back with two fingers and a look that sayschoose silence if you like your bones unbroken.
“Take them,” Dixon says. The deputies march Troy and Jonah out into the bitter morning. Sirens stay off, but the cuffs are loud enough.
And just like that, the thread pulls free of the knot I’ve been living in. The packages. The notes. The ornaments. The quiet stalking that blurred into a roar.
Troy.
A coworker who brought bagels on Fridays and organized pickup basketball in the gym. A man who joked with the teens, who called meSunshineand meant it like a compliment.
I didn’t see it.
I didn’t want to.
Greta is here—apparently sheriffs call diners and diners call everyone. She presses a Styrofoam cup into my hands. “Cocoa,” she says. “Don’t argue.”
I don’t. My fingers curl around it like I’ve been cold for weeks.
“You okay?” she asks, eyes soft. Behind her, Nate pretends not to listen and fails. The man is a professional eavesdropper.
“I… will be,” I say, because it’s the only truth that fits in my mouth right now.
Micah shifts closer, heat at my shoulder. “You don’t have to stay,” he says. “We’ll give statements and get you home.”
Home.
The word lances through me. It used to mean a one-bedroom with a creaky radiator and a plant I was slowly killing. Now it means cedar and flannel and a stubborn man who makes coffee without asking and sleeps on the floor when he thinks I need the bed more.
Home is complicated.
I sip cocoa and watch deputies load evidence—ornaments in baggies, phones in labeled bins, a coil of zip ties that makes my stomach lurch. The medic finishes with my wrists, slaps gauze and tape over the raw skin, and gives me a gentle smile that doesn’t reach her tired eyes.
Nate steps in. “We’ve got enough,” he says quietly. “DMV footage puts the van at the warehouse an hour before the grab. Jonah switched plates in the lot. Troy rented the van with a fake company card he bought online. He’s never heard of OPSEC.”
