Larger Than Life by Alison Kent (read the beginning after the end novel .txt) 📕

At the way she held her chin high even as it threatened to quiver. He wasn't about to move until he found out what was wrong. Seeing her this terrified when she was one of the strongest women he'd had the pleasure to know had him on edge, had his nape tingling, his gut drawing up tight like a red rubber ball.

"I shouldn't be doing this, involving you," she was saying. "My instinct tells me it's okay. That I can trust you. But I'm running into a wall here. Keeping my mouth shut has been a part of my self-preservation for so long that I'm not sure I can get past it."

He understood. He had expected no less. "I'm not here to bust your operation. I know you've wondered."

"I have," she admitted. "You told me you'd done some things in your life that no one could prove. Well"— she paused, shrugged—"so have I. You may not have come here for me, but you're here now. And if you're law enforcement I expect you to do your job. You can't be who you are and not."

He reached out, toyed with the open collar of the plain purple shirt she wore tucked into blue jeans. It wasn't the way he wanted to touch her, but it was all he would let himself do. "I'm not law enforcement or military. I'm not a mercenary. I don't do what I do for money."

"I'm not even a private investigator," he added for good measure, certain each of those options had at some point crossed her mind. "I told you before, I'm no saint. I'm also no stranger to working outside of the law. I've been known to cross lines that I shouldn't."

"Like trespassing?" she asked, her voice shaking though she did at least smile.

"Yeah. That, too." He stepped closer, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, brought her to his body and held her, feeling as if he should've been around for her sooner, to offer her this from the very beginning. "If you want a show of good faith, Neva, I'll give you this. The money the Bremmer boy shouldn't have had access to? It may belong to a laundering operation."

"The good people of Earnestine? Involved in a crime? Say it isn't so," she mocked, as her head came to rest on his chest. She touched him carefully. She didn't squeeze, didn't linger. And then she stepped back, seeming as reluctant to leave him as he was to let her go. "Speaking of crimes, I need to get Liberty upstairs."

They returned to where the girl paced nervously, chewing her cuticles, her hair a tangled mess of brittle brown strands. Neva gave Liberty a quick reassuring hug before kneeling down to slip her hand into the cubbyhole on the bottom right corner. A loud click sounded as the latch securing that section of the wall released.

She reached around the side and pulled; the partition swiveled open on a hidden base to reveal a small closet, one hiding a steep staircase that angled to the right at the first landing and disappeared between the outside wall of the barn and what Mick surmised to be an inside wall belonging to Candy's apartment.

"Wow," Liberty said as Neva shepherded the girl inside. Mick followed, bloody well impressed with the deceptive setup and layout of Candy's living space. It would take a lot more than a first glance to notice the discrepancy between where the barn ended and her apartment began.

Pushing the cubbyholes back into position, Neva locked the wall into place and used a flashlight she grabbed off the bottom step to illuminate their climb to the top. The door there opened into another small closet; once inside, she entered a numbered code into a keypad on the frame and hung the flashlight's strap on the doorknob.

"Wow," Liberty said again, as the closet wall slid open on similarly concealed tracks to reveal a small sitting room complete with a computer desk and open kitchen area beyond. "Is this where I'm going to live?"

"No, but it's where you'll stay until I can move you out of here safely." Neva flipped one wall switch and the panel closed, flipped another and two table lamps came on. "You need to be sure this is what you want because once I put the ball in motion, that's it. You can't come back. It's too risky to both of us. To Ed and Candy, too."

"I am sure. I want to be able to work and start saving money to go to school. I don't want to be one of five wives doing nothing but changing diapers all my life." Liberty walked farther into the room, ran her fingers over the padded arm of the cushy blue corduroy love seat. "I can't believe that's all my parents want for me."

"Finding this out now is better than finding it out later. You've got your entire life ahead of you and learning now to rely on yourself is going to take you far," Neva said, then glanced at Mick, who was clueless about teenage girls.

He merely nodded and shrugged. Give him a physically menacing threat, he was all over it. And though the idea of hunting down her parents and making them see the light sounded like a damn good one, he had no experience with this. Meaning he wasn't sure he was going to be a whole lot of help. "What do you want me to do?"

She flipped a third switch and an inset section of the wall beside the door and above the desk slid up to reveal a bank of four small screens. Pulling out the keyboard tray, she clicked through several windows on the flat panel monitor, bringing up the feed from the security cameras positioned on the exterior corners of the barn.

"I want to get Liberty settled in her room. Will you watch and let me know if anyone besides Candy or Ed shows up?" she asked, gesturing toward the wall.

"That I