Gone? Without her. Without saying goodbye. That wasn’t possible.
Tres grabbed her arm. “Are you okay? You look like you need to sit down.”
She felt strange, as if all the parts of her brain were scrambling into new positions and she no longer had control of her body. “Where did he go?”
“Straight to his detox. I don’t know exactly where. You know what he’s like. He can be a secretive little turd when he doesn’t want to be disturbed. It’ll be a tree house in a wilderness somewhere off the grid.”
“Tree house?”
“Or a yurt.”
There was no need to overreact. This wasn’t a mystery. He was exhausted, and she could catch up with him. “Did he leave me a message?”
“No. He’ll see you back in the city at the end of the month. I’ve got your car ready if you want to leave now too. Luggage on board. All your gadgets. Your spa experience awaits you.”
He left without leaving a message, without leaving her any way to contact him. He wouldn’t do that. “I don’t understand.” She turned away from Tres, looked out across the town square to the window of the canteen where she’d stood all those mealtimes, bored, irrelevant, humiliated, broken down and doubting herself all over again.
This was worse.
“Rory, Rory. I think you should sit down.” Tres’s arm over her shoulder. “From what Zeke said, you’ve had a foul time of it. You know there are going to be formal interviews to come. You need rest before that part of the process starts. Let’s get you out of here.”
She broke away from Tres’s hold. She’d survived her Abundance initiation because she’d known it wasn’t real. Zeke abandoning her, how was she supposed to interpret that?
She shook her head, but it didn’t clear the fog. “I have to say goodbye to someone first.” She needed to move, to think, to be professional and not fall apart in front of dozens of law enforcement and welfare professionals because her brain was telling her this was a disaster.
Before she could step away, her vision filled with Orrin in cuffs being led to a police car. He tried to alter his course and come after her, his face contorted in rage, but was yanked back into line. When he finally figured out the role she’d played in his downfall, that rage could eat him alive. She wasn’t above hoping it did.
The goats greeted her with snickers and baas. Tres would make sure they found new homes with people who would care for them.
“Why would he leave me like this?” she said, entering their outdoor pen, holding her hands out flat for them to sniff. “He loves me, I know he does.” She checked their water. “What changed between loving me at the cabin and leaving me now?”
Bernadette screamed. Rory almost screamed back at her.
“This is a nightmare and I just need to wake up and find he’s standing behind me ready to tease me about liking smelly goats.” She scratched Petunia behind her floppy ears. “But I didn’t tell him about you guys. There’s so much I didn’t tell him, but I thought we’d have time, not whatever this is. I thought we’d have the rest of our lives.”
“Never thought I’d find you hanging out with farm animals.”
It felt like her heart bounced at the sound of that steady deep voice. So close in tone to the one voice she really needed to hear.
“They’re good listeners.” She turned to face Cal. “When did you get here?”
“In Abundance, about a half hour ago. At this place of goats, in time to hear you say you were in love with Zeke.”
“I didn’t say that.” Not out loud, not here, not in front of Cal. Least of all in front of Cal. It was too soon.
“I’m cutting to the chase.”
There was no trying to get one over him. She stroked Melanie between her eyes and the goat snickered happily. “I can’t talk to you about this.”
“About the fact Zeke has loved you his whole life? Waited for you to be ready for that?”
“If that was true, we’d be on our way to a tree house together.”
“There’s a goat trying to eat your shirt.”
She twisted around to look. “That’s Violet. She likes shirt.”
“He’s scared, Rory.”
She gave Violet a shove and pried her shirt out of the goat’s mouth. “He’s not scared of anything.”
“The one thing he’s scared of is you.” Cal climbed the pen’s fence and sat astride it. “And Mom, but that doesn’t count. That’s self-preservation.”
“Why would he be scared of me?”
Cal held his hand out to her, inviting her up. “Because you’re the one person who can turn his world on a dime.”
She took his hand and sat beside him and they both watched the mini goat Therese, in the next pen, try to jump in with the bigger goats.
“That one has ambition and persistence,” Cal said. “Like someone else I know.” If there was a message in that, her brain was too shook to comprehend it. “Congratulations. You did good. We’re all proud of you.”
Oh, ambition and persistence. “Thank you.”
“Now will you quit thinking you have anything to make up for. It was as much my fault the way things went down between us as yours.”
Yes, it was time to forgive herself. Some things weren’t worth persisting with. “I’m in love with Zeke. I know that must seem odd to you.”
“Not at all. He’s a catch.”
It was too strange talking to her old lover about her new one. Bernadette screamed in sympathy. Cal told the cranky goat to take a chill pill.
He bumped her shoulder. “You and me, we were good together. Great together. Brilliant partners in crime. But we should have left it at that.”
He’d wanted to keep their relationship strictly professional. She’d pushed for more and he’d caved. It was odd to remember that she’d been the instigator of it all now.
“We were never meant to last,” he said. “I was just who you needed at the time. Knowing that didn’t make it easy to give you up.”
“Wow, that makes me sound like a giant user.” But Cal was right. After her father died, Cal was a big brother, misplaced, too-young father-figure, and then boss, partner, and finally lover. He was the stability she’d clung to, the excitement she craved without fear of failing.
“I needed you too, Rory. I wasn’t ready to take over Sherwoods from Dad. You made it all so much easier until I realized I was holding you back.”
“From what?”
“From working out who you really are in love with.”
So he’d known all along she was meant to be with Zeke. Sometimes it was easy to hate Cal for being right all the time. “Feels like that’s a bust.”
“He tried every distraction to get over you. He’s waited for you forever. He needs to know this isn’t a whim for you, a convenient fallback.”
He couldn’t possibly think that now. Gertrude sniffed at their feet. She scratched the goat’s head with her boot heel. Cal was wrong, finally.
“Your hair is a mess, your nails are broken, you don’t have a phone in one hand and a book in the other. You’re not even wearing clean clothing and you’re hanging out with goats. This isn’t your regular life. This is the ultimate date drug, designed to make you think and say and do things you don’t mean.”
“And you think I can’t tell the difference between a shirt-eating goat and figuring out Zeke is the love of my life because my hair is a mess?”
“I think he’s scared you can’t. They doped him on DMT. He’s not himself right now. And he’s trying to give you space to decide what you really want when you’re not forced to be together. He’s trying not to break his own heart.”
He was ridiculous, and she wanted to feed him to these goats. “What do I do?”
“Get out of here. Go detox. Keep loving him. Be patient. You once needed time. Now he does.”
She shoved Cal, made him grab hold of the fence so not to topple off it. “And you’re the man who says he knows me.”
He laughed. “He’s so scare
d this isn’t what you want, if you push him too hard he’ll shut down.”
Jesus, these Sherwood men. Cal wanted her to play nice, and Zeke had been out there on his own waiting for her for too long. After all of this he’d never shut down on her.
And if he did, she’d know once and for all exactly how this mystery was going to play out and where they stood on forever.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Azure all the way to the horizon where the fishing boats were tiny specks. Zeke waded out of the sea, dropped into a sun lounger and put his sunglasses on.
All the scrapes and nicks on him were just about faded to nothing. He wasn’t scaring the resort staff who came to deliver room service to his bungalow with his smashed face anymore. They’d thought he was a gangster when he arrived, now he was just the guy who drank too much milky sweet coffee, had a thing for fresh pastries and elaborate desserts and balanced it all out with hours of gym, yoga, beach runs and swims.
And sleep.
He slept like a man who’d had way too little sleep and what there was of it was fucking uncomfortable. Prescient, he’d basically chosen this resort for its beauty, remoteness and brand of bed before he’d even known about all the hard ground he’d have to sleep on. Being reunited with a Grand Master made everything better.
Almost everything.
Despite the tropical heat, there was nothing he could do about the frost that encased his heart.
And apparently his sight was still glitching.
Because there was an unexpected item in the bagging area.
It was two weeks since the DMT was fully out of his system, two days before he was due to start a ten-day jungle trek, but he was still seeing things that weren’t real. Had to be some latent PTSD effect because there was absolutely no way Aurora Rae Archer wearing a floaty bit of nothing over some string that was meant to be swimwear was walking up the beach towards him.
He nearly fell out of his lounger trying to get a better look at this imposter who couldn’t be Rory, because Rory was detoxing at the Sedona spa in Malibu, according to Tres, so what he was looking at, extraordinary grace, glossy black hair, insanely beautiful body, was a mirage.
A mirage who smiled like Rory and make him gasp.
“Holy fuck.”
Who took off her big dark glasses and was unmistakably his Aurora Rae.
That would explain how his bones had been singing with pleasure so deep it was a vibration in his body from the moment he saw her. Made him feel weightless as he walked down to the shoreline to meet her, even as he knew this exchange was going to be fraught, and steeled himself.
“Cal,” he said in greeting. “Cal told you where I was. Dirty, low-down, rotten bastard.”
“Cal wouldn’t tell me. I had to pull out the big guns.”
He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Mom. She might as well have stuck me with a knitting needle.”
Rory shook her head at that. “You look much better.”
“You look incredible.” Her skin had a glow to it; the darkness under her eyes was gone. “But I like you when you’re all sweaty and disheveled, straw in your hair and grime under your broken fingernails.” He wanted to reach for her, dug his toes in the wet sand to curb the impulse. He’d crossed the world to stop himself from confusing things between them further; he wasn’t allowed to crash that intention now because he craved the feel of her body against his.
“What are you doing here, Aurora Rae?”
“You’ve had enough space.”
He waved a hand to indicate what she wasn’t wearing. “Are you hiding a shiv in that?” She might as well have already knifed him with that declaration, certainly pricked his tweak of arousal.
“Now why would I do that?”
“Because I ghosted you.”
Her mouth flatlined and she looked away, out towards the beginnings of sunset.
“I can explain.” He’d planned on this conversation being held back home where everything was familiar again.
“I hope so.”
“May I kiss you?” He hadn’t planned on asking that. Do you have a death wish, you fucking idiot?
“Not if you’re about to tell me you don’t love me, and you don’t want to be together.”
That was fair. “I love you more than I ever thought possible.” Also fair. Loving her was a privilege and an honor. “But this, us, is a big deal.”
“Now I want to shiv you.”
The fairest of all. He reached out his hand and she took it, stepping closer. Tiny waves lapped at their feet, no hint of the tidal pull of feeling flowing between them. She nodded and he took her face in his hands and brought his lips to hers. She didn’t smell of goat’s soap or cattle anymore. The kiss was cool and tentative, not enough to defrost his heart but then he’d hurt her terribly and he didn’t deserve her warmth.
“So why?” She waved a hand at the jungle behind them. “Why leave me like that, without a word or a way to contact you?”
“We were detoxing.” They had an agreed schedule for time to be spent recovering alone after a fully immersive assignment like they’d just done. It was a completely reasonable but utterly redundant answer. The look on her face said car crash. He felt it in his gut like evisceration. “Because I don’t want us to be a mistake.”
She flung her hands up. “You’re infuriating. How can we be a mistake?”
He led her to his sun lounger and they sat side by side under his big umbrella. There were others on the beach earlier, but they had it to themselves now.
“Everything about going undercover is an act. You play a role for a specific purpose. You do and say things you wouldn’t normally do. You’re forced into situations and relationships you wouldn’t normally have, and you make decisions based on circumstances that aren’t—”
“I don’t need undercover con for beginners. You don’t think we’re real?”
He bumped her shoulder. This was hard. This was the stuff in relationships he’d always avoided, the meat and potatoes of loving someone and still being unsure of them. He’d had no practice at it, spent all his time in the sweetness and light of new connections where tomorrow didn’t matter and being good at goodbye was an asset.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow with Rory was the connective tissue that kept him moving through life. Everything else was sleep, sugar, work, redistribution of justice and mindless distraction.
“We might’ve been real a long time ago. You didn’t choose me until I was the only one you could turn to in a circumstance where you were being mind-fucked into isolation and doubt.”
She looked down at her hands folded in her lap with their shiny red nails. She knew there was truth in the timing.
“And I wasn’t strong enough to do the right thing, to wait until we were back in our places so that all of our choices weren’t warped. I’m trying to do that now.” He took her hand brought it to his lips, watching her expression soften. “I’ve loved you too long to be someone you conned yourself into needing. Someone you love who isn’t right for you. It wouldn’t be loving you if I let that happen.” He relinquished her hand and knew there was a chance he was losing her too. “Better that we stay friends than become lovers who burn so bright we flame out too fast. That’s not something I want to live with.”
She stood, walked to the edge of the circle of shade thrown by the umbrella and faced the sea. If the restaurant plated his heart and served it with whipped cream, he’d cut it into small pieces and eat it to stop the ache in his chest.
“There’s only one thing worse than not having you in my life, and that’s having you resent me,” he said.
A breeze lifted the hem of her beach wrap and kicked it back from her legs. He’d had those legs hitched around his waist. He’d had her tenderness in his hands and he’d fucked badly with it.
“You know the thing that hurts the most?” Her voice shook, and she kept her back to him. She wasn’t the least bit interested in his resp
onse. “Not that you couldn’t tell me all this before you jetted off to paradise.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “I forgive you for that. You weren’t in a fit state to be thinking entirely clearly. It’s that even now you don’t trust me to know my own mind.” She turned fully to face him, distress in every line of her body. “You don’t trust me to make my own decisions. You don’t think I haven’t thought about how we came together? Interrogating myself is my new jam. Did I force things between us, did I coerce you? Am I repeating a pattern? Did I set myself up to get to this place where we don’t know who we are to each other anymore?”
He couldn’t sit any longer. She put a hand up to stop him standing. Fuck. He’d really, truly screwed this.
“Did I lose my best friend because I took him for a lover? I couldn’t stay away and be patient any longer. Had to come and hear what you had to say. I had to remind you that I’m done with keeping you at arm’s distance. I chose you when I didn’t have to choose anybody. I chose you when it was inconvenient and unprofessional and possibly dangerous to both of us and all of that is on me.”
“Ah, Rory.” Having eaten his heart, his mouth could no longer form the right words.
“Nothing about Abundance conned us into being together. Yes, the timing was poor and our stress levels, what they did to us, sped things along, but we’re professionals and we’re smarter than that. The gaslighting is all on you and I can’t rescue you from yourself.”
Without his heart, missing his words, and slammed by her reasoning, he also lost the agency to move. He let her leave the beach, her head held high, and when he could finally summon the will to stand, he threw himself in the sea, where he considered that the reason he couldn’t float wasn’t lack of body fat, it was lack of courage.
He was a talented con. He was used to easy victories. He’d wanted to bust Abundance as much for the victims as the thrill of testing his abilities. He’d wanted to work with Rory because every moment at her side was simply better than anything else he could be doing.
He’d done to Rory what Orrin Epcot did to his followers and he’d done it not because he was on a power trip, not because he thought he had superior judgment, but because he was scared of changing things between them and losing her.
The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game Book 3) Page 25