Of all the circumstances by which Shae could imagine spending the night at Capelli’s place, staying out of some creepshow’s path didn’t even make the top one hundred. Yet here she stood, in her holey old Charlotte Rogues hockey T-shirt and a pair of RFD sweats, staring at his living room for the second time tonight, and yeah. She officially hated this.

“Sorry you couldn’t really take much with you,” came Capelli’s voice from beside her, after the hard click and rattle that signaled the front door to his apartment being locked up à la Fort Knox.

Shae’s moxie lifted her shoulders in a default move the rest of her could barely back up. Breathe in. Breathe out. “That’s okay. I was already ready for bed, and I understand why Addison and Isabella didn’t want me rummaging around just yet.”

A closer perusal of her apartment had showed a handful of seemingly random things either missing or wildly out of place, to the point that the crime scene techs who had arrived just after Shae had (reluctantly) agreed to stay with Capelli had told her not to touch anything until they’d combed over every last bit of it.

For the next twenty-four hours.

“Right,” Capelli said, as cautiously as if he’d just read her mind, and with how stupidly perceptive he was, she really wouldn’t put the ability past him. “Well, I’ve got an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, and you’re welcome to borrow whatever else you need in the morning. There are clean towels in the closet.”

“Guess you’re a regular Boy Scout, huh?”

Funny, the comment seemed to hit a nerve, drawing his shoulders into a rigid line around his neck. “Not really. I just like to be prepared.”

“You didn’t have to offer to put me up, you know.” Shae gestured to the tidy living room around them. Her pride might have taken a back seat to the whole crazy-stalker-note thing, but there was no sense not addressing the truth now that they were standing here alone. Again. “I don’t want this to be awkward for you.”

The slight lift of Capelli’s dark blond brows was the only betrayal of his surprise. “I might feel a lot of things about what happened between us earlier, Shae, but awkward isn’t one of them.”

That made two of them on the surprise. “It’s not?”

“No.”

“What is?” she asked, genuine curiosity pulsing to life in her veins.

“It’s complicated,” he answered, and Shae bit back the urge to give up a great, big amen. “At any rate, I really don’t mind you staying here tonight. As long as you’re okay with it, too.”

“It’s better than crashing on Gamble’s futon.” She didn’t even want to get started on how it would save her from her parents’ guest bedroom. As tough as she was, that might be enough to break her right now. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy like a brother, and we’re tight. But when it comes to stuff like this, he’s kind of like a big, badass mother hen.”

“He seemed pretty concerned about you,” Capelli said. “Kellan and Quinn and January, too.”

Of course half of Seventeen had blown up her phone ten seconds after she’d called Isabella, who had still been at the Crooked Angel at the time. Occupational hazard of mixing work and play. “Yeah. It took a little convincing, especially with Gamble.” You could take the guy out of the Marines, and all that jazz. “But I let them all know I’m fine.”

“Are you?”

The question pinned her into place with its simplicity, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—tip her hand. “Of course.”

Capelli looked at her, his brown eyes brimming with doubt. “It’s perfectly normal to be shaken up by something like what happened tonight. The guy was in your apartment, Shae.”

“I’m aware of that.” Her stupid, stupid heart thwacked against her sternum.

“Isabella meant it when she said intelligence is taking the threats seriously. The whole unit is on the case.”

Under normal circumstances, Shae’s tolerance for dangerous situations was sky-high. Tonight, however? Not so freaking much. “Would it be okay if we didn’t talk about the notes or this murder investigation until tomorrow? I’m just kind of…fried.”

“Oh.” Capelli blinked, but only once before giving up a slow nod. “Sure. What do you want to do instead?”

She laughed, although the sound came out way more sad and soft than she’d intended. God, what was wrong with her? “Truth? I want to drown this day in a giant vat of wine.”

Capelli’s pause told her he was trying to rate her level of seriousness on a scale of one to ten. Finally, he surprised her with, “I have ice cream.”

“You know what? That works.”

Shae followed him into the kitchen, watching as he pulled a plain white bowl from the most orderly cupboard known to mankind. “I should’ve known you’d be an ice-cream-in-a-bowl kind of guy.”

“Um, how else would you eat it?” he asked. Placing the bowl on the impeccably clean white granite counter, he opened a drawer for a spoon, then another for an ice cream scoop, and she couldn’t help it. She laughed a real laugh.

“Right out of the container. It tastes better that way.”

“You do realize it’s physically impossible to make something taste better just by virtue of the container it’s in?”

The wry expression that had snuck over his face was a clear indication that he was teasing her in his own weird, Capelli sort of way, and she teased him right back.

“Spoken like someone who’s never eaten ice cream right out of the container,” Shae said, unable to keep from noticing how the lean muscles of his forearm flexed as he scooped out three of the neatest portions of strawberry ice cream she’d ever laid eyes on.

He rinsed the stainless steel scoop, placing it carefully in the dishwasher before handing over the bowl and spoon. “I’m serious.”

“I see that.”

Whether it was the residual adrenaline in her system or the uncharacteristic, almost sweet way Capelli was looking at her, Shae couldn’t be sure. But all at once, her emotions welled up, spilling past her lips before she realized they would. “I know you think I’m reckless. Too impulsive and brash. Probably even a little dangerous.”

“Shae,” he started, but she cut him off with a shake of her head.

“We both know it’s true, and anyway, I meant it when I told you I don’t make apologies for who I am.” Taking a breath, she cradled the bowl of ice cream to her chest, letting the coolness seep through the cotton of her T-shirt to ground her. “I know I drive you crazy. Hell, I drive lots of people crazy. But I’m not just some dumb adrenaline junkie. I have reasons for living fast and not holding back, and they’re not small.”

Capelli’s brows, nearly gold in the warm, soft kitchen light, lifted over the dark rims of his glasses. “You do?”

“What, you thought I was just born this way?”

The wry tone she’d wrapped around the words scattered the tension that had started simmering in the air between them, and he let a smile break over his mouth. “Yeah, actually.”

He took a few steps across the floorboards, ending up at the small, two-person table on the far side of the kitchen. But rather than simply sitting and waiting for her to do the same, Capelli pulled out one of the chairs in a silent offer, and Shae felt the stress of the last couple of hours slip another notch.

Smiling her thanks, she sat and took a bite of her ice cream, and okay—it might not be enough wine to do the backstroke in, but Capelli had impeccable taste in frozen desserts.

“I hate to break it to you,” Shae said. “But you’re wrong there. I haven’t always been impulsive. Well, not like I am now, anyway,” she amended, because while she might’ve had a come to Jesus meeting with her lifestyle after Abby had died, it hadn’t been a total personality transplant. “In fact, I was once a perfectly normal teenager doing perfectly normal things in a perfectly normal suburban city. Not one risky move in sight.”

“No way.” Capelli’s expression suggested equal parts gentle teasing and genuine surprise, and Shae let another mouthful of ice cream linger on her taste buds before sending it down the hatch to answer.

“Cross my heart. Honor roll, student council, homecoming committee, college scholarship. The whole enchilada.”

Capelli’s brows creased, making the little V behind the bridge of his glasses that always formed when he was processing something. “What happened?”

She paused. But even though she didn’t blab about it to everyone who happened by, the accident wasn’t some sort of secret she kept locked away either, and truth be told, her fearless best friend would’ve had a fit at anyone getting all moony over her death.

So Shae said, “The summer after my senior year happened. I was all set to go to UNC on a full ride. Both of my sisters had gone there, and nearly everyone in my graduating class was heading off to college somewhere. It just felt like what I was supposed to be doing, too.”

Although Capelli didn’t say anything, his quiet stare from across the table told her he was not just listening, but listening intently, and funny how that just made more of the story pour right out of her.

“A bunch of my friends and I decided to celebrate graduation in the Smoky Mountains. We’d gone on trips like that a few times during the year, staying at my best friend Abby’s parents’ cabin near the Wayehutta Trail in Bryson City. My boyfriend at the time had an ATV, and so did Abby’s and a few of their buddies. It felt like the most normal thing in the universe for all of us to pack up and head out for a week of fun before we all started our summer jobs.”

Shae stopped, her chest squeezing only slightly at the memory of how blissfully unaware she’d truly been that life could change so drastically, so fast.

“It sounds pretty normal,” Capelli said, and she smiled around the bite of ice cream she’d taken to try and freeze out the pang behind her breastbone. Talk about normal. Knowing him, he’d probably been halfway through some triple-major degree at some Ivy League school at the time.

“It was painfully normal,” she agreed. “The first couple of days were exactly what you’d expect. A bunch of off-roading and hiking during the day, a bunch more drinking and getting a little rowdy at night. The third day, we were all geared up for more of the same, but Abby’s boyfriend had a nasty hangover, so she and I took his ATV out while he stayed behind to sleep in.”

Shae had played the what-if game about that moment, that one tiny decision that had rippled out and touched everything that had come after it, a hundred thousand times in the last eight years. What if Tyson hadn’t been hung over and had gone riding that day. What if Abby had been the one hung over and she’d stayed behind instead. What if they’d taken a different trail. What if Shae had been the one driving. What if, what if, what if…

“Anyway.” She shook her head, pushing the what-if game aside. “Even though I knew how to operate an ATV, I was too chicken to drive Tyson’s on the really bumpy back trails, so Abby did it.”

“You were chicken?” Capelli asked, surprise widening his dark brown stare for just a breath before his expression grew apologetic. “I’m sorry. It’s just difficult to get my head around that.”

Rather than being offended, Shae bit back a laugh. Of course the first thing he’d try to do would be analyze what she was telling him.

“Abby was way more fierce than me back then. She didn’t even think twice about driving.” A knot formed in her gut, but she kept telling the story anyway. “A couple of the guys we were with decided they wanted to go really far up the trail that day to get to this lake none of us had ever been to before. We mapped out the trail, so Abby and I knew the terrain was going to be a little rougher than we were used to navigating, but God, we didn’t hesitate.”

In that second, something small yet definite shifted in Capelli’s demeanor, just a slight tightening of his body against the black ladder-back chair where he sat, and yet it marked his realization as clearly as if he’d shouted. “You were in an accident.”

She nodded. “We were pretty far away from the main trails, on a route none of us were familiar with, and there had been a few nasty storms earlier in the week.”

Gripping the spoon between her fingers even though her stomach churned far too hard for her to consider taking another bite of ice cream, Shae inhaled. Breathe in. Breathe out. This part never got any easier on the rare occasions she let the story out of the box where she usually kept it tucked away.

Still, she couldn’t shy away from giving it a voice. “About a half-mile from the lake, Abby and I went around a pretty sharp bend in the trail. She didn’t see the fallen tree blocking our path until it was too late.”

“Jesus, Shae.” Capelli reached one hand across the expanse of black wood between them. Just shy of contact, he hesitated, as if the movement had been automatic and his brain had registered it on a delay. But his fingers were close enough for Shae to feel their warmth, his hand enviably steady, and she angled her knuckles against his, letting the barely there brush of their skin anchor her.

“We hit the downed tree head-on,” she continued, focusing on the feel of his hand, on the one tiny spot where they touched. “Abby and I were both thrown from the ATV.”

The muscle along the hard edge of Capelli’s jawline twitched. “Were you badly injured?”

Oh, the irony of it all. “No.” Aside from some nasty scrapes and bruises that she hadn’t even felt in the moments right after she’d sustained them, she’d been completely unharmed. “But honestly, no one knows how. I was thrown fifteen feet from the ATV, which ended up flipping into a shallow ravine on the other side of the trail from where I landed.”

“Oh.” The tension that eased from his shoulders lasted for less than a second before he connected all the dots. “What about Abby?”

“Abby was…not so lucky.”

Shae dropped her stare, concentrating on Capelli’s fingers. He had wide, strong hands, callused in some places, yet smooth in others, and suddenly, urgently, she wanted to wrap her fingers around his and not let go.

“When we hit the tree, Abby was thrown in the other direction,” she said quietly instead. “She ended up in the ravine about twenty feet below the trail, pinned beneath the ATV.”

Capelli went perfectly still across from her. But unlike anyone Shae had ever confided in, he didn’t interrupt, didn’t offer up any of the “oh my God”s or “how awful”s she’d long since grown used to, opting instead to simply give her the space she needed to tell the rest of the story.

So Shae took it.

“It took me a few minutes to figure out what had happened, that we’d even been in an accident. But our other friends had been behind us, and as soon as they made it around the bend, they figured things out pretty fast.” Thankfully, they’d all been going slower than she and Abby had, so they’d all been able to stop in time to remain safe. “Two of them went for help—cell coverage is pretty much nonexistent out on the trails—and the other two were shell-shocked enough not to be of much help.”

“That’s a normal physical response to really bad accidents,” Capelli said, his voice softening as he added, “you must have been in shock, too.”

“I was,” Shae admitted, although she hadn’t known it until far after the fact. “I ran down into the ravine, but one look told me I wasn’t going to be able to do anything.” Not that she hadn’t tried. God, she still remembered crazily trying to pull the five-hundred pound ATV off of Abby with all her might. “I didn’t have any idea how to help, other than to stay with Abby and tell her everything was going to be fine. I knew it was a bald-faced lie. Even though I couldn’t see most of her body, I could still tell she was bleeding a lot.”

Abby had been so thoroughly pinned beneath the ATV that Shae hadn’t even been able to hold her hand. She’d found out later, quite by accident, that trying would have been in vain. One of Abby’s arms had been crushed so badly, her hand had very nearly been severed.

Shae swallowed, completing a few rounds of inhale/exhale before finishing with, “Anyway, I lay there on the ground with her, telling her to just hang in there and that help was on the way, but she died before the paramedics even got to the scene.”

“I’m really sorry, Shae.”

The straightforward sentiment oddly soothed her, and she managed a tiny smile. “Thank you. Abby’s death was really hard on me, obviously, but at the same time, it really opened my eyes. I decided not to go to college that fall. Instead, I drove all over the country. No plan, no routes mapped. I just packed a bag full of clothes, got on the road, and went wherever I felt like going.”

“That does sound like you,” Capelli said.

“It is me. At first my parents thought I just needed time, and maybe part of it was my way of coping and finding as much closure as I could. But after the first few weeks on the road, I knew I couldn’t ever go back to living my life the way I had been. Life is too short not to live it out loud and without apologies.”

Capelli tilted his head, looking at her through the soft overhead light of his kitchen. “So you never came back and went to college?”

“Nope. Much to my parents’ dismay.” They’d given her a little leeway, considering, but… “After the first year, their understanding turned to concern, then outright disappointment that I wasn’t ‘settling down’.” Shae paused to sling air quotes around the words. “But I didn’t want to settle down. I wanted to see things, do things. If any second could be my last second, I was going to make every single one of them count.”

“I suppose logically, your motivation makes sense,” Capelli said slowly, and God, everything really was black and white in his universe.

“Yeah, well the go-where-the-wind-takes-you lifestyle really only works if you’re a trust fund baby or you like sleeping on park benches, and honestly, after a couple of years, I got tired of waiting tables and doing odd jobs to pay for the next stop on the road trip. I might be capricious as hell, but I’m not a slacker. Sitting on my ass isn’t my idea of a good time. So I came back here and enrolled at the fire academy.”

Capelli let that sink in for a second. “For the adrenaline aspect?”

“Funny enough, no, although that’s what my parents and sisters all thought. Don’t get me wrong,” Shae said, because the truth was still the truth. “I do love the thrill of running into a burning building. But I don’t just think it’s cool for my own personal gain.”

At Capelli’s look of obvious surprise, she continued, even though her heart pounded at the words. “When Abby died, I felt so helpless. I know there probably wasn’t anything I’d have been able to do for her even if I’d been trained,” she added. “Her injuries were extensive, and I get that. But being a firefighter lets me help people when they’re at their worst, when they really need it the most. And if I can help save just one person…”

She broke off to steady the waver that desperately wanted to climb into her voice. “Doing everything I possibly can to help is what I want to do with my life. Even if that means taking risks.”

They sat there for a minute—or hell, maybe it was ten—Shae with her melting ice cream and her heart in her throat and Capelli just quietly studying her. Finally, he simply closed the fraction of space between their hands, sliding his fingers firmly over hers without saying a word, and as crazy as it was, Shae wouldn’t have traded the gesture for all the adrenaline on the planet.