Page 50 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

“Oh my God,” she mutters, as her eyes start to leak once more. “I—I don’t know what to…I can’t?—”

“It’s okay,” Callum promises her. “We have everything we need. “Everything it’s going to take to bring him down.”

“We do? You got everything?” she asks, and he nods again.

“We got everything. He’s done for. You don’t have anything to worry about, I swear.”

“Oh, fuck,” she gasps, and she sinks her head into his shoulder, her trembling hands reaching up to grasp hold of him, as thoughshe can barely believe what she’s hearing. I reach for her hand, covering it with my own, and Dax moves in to squeeze her shoulder, a silent promise that he’s there and he’s not going to let anything else happen to her.

And as we hold her, a rush of relief courses through me. It might not quite be over yet—but we’re closer than we’ve ever been to setting her free of his influence for good.

The thought of the freedom that lies on the other side is almost more than I can take.

25

CHARLI

“That looks painful,”Callum remarks, reaching up to press a damp cloth against my cheek where James hit me.

I wince, but shake my head. “It’s really not that bad,” I assure him. “I—it could have been a lot worse. I didn’t even realize he had a gun till he pulled it on you, Dax.”

“I’m fine,” Dax grunts from the bathroom door. He hasn’t let me out of his sight since the moment we got back to the cabin, and I guess it shouldn’t come as a shock. His kind of protective is almost possessive, insistent on making sure I don’t get too far from him. I can only imagine how tough it was for him to just stand back and let James speak to me like that, but judging by what Chuck has shown me on the recording, it seems like we have everything we need to take him down.

“And besides,” I add, managing a small smile. “Whatever he did to us—it’s nothing compared to what we’re going to do to him.”

All three of the guys grin when I say that part. They know as well as I do that it’s true. We’ve got him, dead to rights—that recording is going to wreck him. Not just him, but his father’scareer too. I can’t believe we’ve really done it. We still need to find someone to expose it all, of course, but we’re closer now than we’ve ever been, and I can’t believe how near I am to finally being free of that fucker for life.

“You did so well,” Callum murmurs to me, gently lifting the cloth from my cheek. Behind me, Chuck is running a bath so I can scrub the remnants of this day off of me. Beyond the cabin, James and whatever guards were conscious enough to run have sped back to the town nearby, probably planning to make a break for it from there, but they have no clue what we have on him.

“I didn’t,” I reply, shaking my head. “I just sat there, let him talk at me. You were the ones who took out the guards and got me out of there?—”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” Dax replies, his voice almost sharp. “You handled him. You got him to say what we needed him to say. Without you, none of this would have worked.”

“Yeah, but without me, you wouldn’t have been stuck in the middle of all of this either,” I reply. I’m joking, mostly. But I can’t help but feel some guilt, knowing that these guys wouldn’t have been involved in something as dark and dangerous as this if I hadn’t turned up on their doorstep out of the blue.

Callum frowns at me, and Chuck finishes running the bath. The sudden quiet in the air as the running water stops rings heavy in my ears.

“You really think that’s how this works?” Callum murmurs to me.

“What do you mean?”

“You think that the only reason we helped you with this was because we had to?”

I glance between the three of them—Chuck sitting at the edge of the bathtub, Dax in the doorway, Callum leaning on the sink in front of me.

I shake my head. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” I point out. “If I hadn’t—I mean, if I hadn’t crashed my car so close to you, then I would never have been here. I would never have pulled you into it. You would never have had to get involved?—”

“We didn’t have to do anything,” Chuck shoots back, cutting me off. “It doesn’t work like that, Charli.”

“Yeah, I don’t do shit that I don’t want to,” Dax cuts in. “You wanted to leave. You were begging us to let you go. Not like we didn’t have any choice but to just go along with you.”

“We wanted to help you, Charli,” Callum adds, reaching out for my hand. “We still do. That’s why we did all of this.”

I feel a lump rise in my throat. Today has been so crazy, my emotions so close to the surface, that it’s hard to control them. Hearing James speak to me like that, being pulled back into the memories of everything I tried to forget about him, it’s…a lot to take on, that’s for sure.

But then, coming back to this place, and being surrounded by these guys—knowing that I can rely on them, knowing that there’s not a damn thing they won’t do to keep me safe, it’s everything I could have asked for.

“Hey, are you alright?” Callum asks, concerned, as he notices the shift in my attitude.

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