“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.