“Can you drive me to school?”
Bailey cleared her throat. “I think it would be best if you rode with Adam and me,” she said.
“Yeah,” I reluctantly agreed. “I have some more things to do for your dad today. But maybe Monday, okay?”
Chase’s bottom lip came out and puckered up over his top lip.
“You know, if you do that too often, your mouth just might get stuck that way. Then how would you drink your chocolate milk?”
That made him giggle, the pout disappearing. I hugged him tight.
“You go have a great day, kid. Learn lots.”
“Okay.”
Bailey smiled, offering a slight nod of thanks. I smiled back before sneaking away and then headed downstairs. Annie was sitting at her desk, as usual, talking on the phone as I came to the foot of the stairs.
“Morning, Pepper,” she said in her polite, yet happy, way.
“Morning.”
I started across the entryway toward the kitchen, already thinking about how good the frozen egg and croissant sandwiches in the freezer were going to taste when the alarm on the front gate went off. I paused close to Annie’s desk, watching as she pushed the button on her computer that would allow her to speak to whoever was waiting at the gate.
What if it was Colin? What if he’d already figured out what I’d done and he’d come to shut me up? What if—?
But it was a woman’s voice that filled the dead air between the gate and us.
“I’m looking for Nolan Everett,” the woman said. “Could you let him know his fiancée is here?”
Annie glanced over her shoulder at the workroom, her eyes skittering over Nolan’s empty desk.
“I’m afraid Nolan hasn’t come in to work just yet. Can I give him a message?”
“Is there a place I could wait?”
“I’m sorry, but this is a secure compound. We only allow entrance to people with scheduled appointments.”
There was a long, pregnant pause before the woman responded. “Can you tell him that I’m staying at the Hyatt downtown? Room five ten?”
“Sure.”
“Tell him I’ll be there until he comes to see me. Can you tell him that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
Annie watched her computer screen for a long moment. I wanted to move behind her, to see the face of the woman who claimed to be Nolan’s fiancée, but I couldn’t make myself do it.
“Rude woman,” Annie said under her breath, putting her monitor to sleep as she turned to other business.
I would have laughed if my heart wasn’t breaking. Had I just spent two nights with a liar? With a man who was committed to another? Had I just made another stupid mistake, just like all the other mistakes? Was that why he’d insisted that last night could only be for the one night? Was that why he kept insisting that we couldn’t be together?
I went into the kitchen, but I couldn’t get that woman’s voice out of my head. Why would she insist on Annie telling Nolan that she was staying in town until he came to see her if she was his fiancée? Wouldn’t he be happy to see her?
It bothered me, this seeming puzzle. I thought about the man in my bed upstairs, the man who’d come to check on me when he knew I was upset, the man who’d given me what I needed when I was going through a hard time. I thought about the man who was so kind and gentle enough to treat my wounds when I fell. I thought about his rough assessment of his own character, his touch, his compassion. These things were not the actions of a man who would cheat on his fiancée.
Colin laughed at a child who fell in the street while we were walking back to the hotel one afternoon. He refused to leave a tip for a waitress who was clearly overwhelmed by the busy lunch hour. He conspired to force a man out of business for reasons only he could possibly understand.
Colin was not a good man. Colin was the kind of man who would forget he had a fiancée. Nolan wasn’t.
There was more to this story. And I was going to find out what it was.
***
I snuck the keys to one of the many black SUVs Gray Wolf Security owned and drove out the back gate so that Annie wouldn’t see me go on her security software. The Hyatt wasn’t far from the University of Texas in Austin, a tall building tucked in the corner of a parking lot that was more like a grove of trees than the woods I’d hidden in after leaving Dallas. I parked under a cluster of said trees and ran across the lot, ducking in through a side door of the hotel behind a couple tugging a toddler behind them. I found the elevators and was standing outside of this stranger’s door before I could talk myself out of it.
She was pretty. That was the first thought that floated through my mind. Taller than me with red hair that was a deep, rich color, almost a mahogany, the kind of red hair that women often tried to imitate with the bottle. And green eyes that were a little muddy, mixed with gold in a way that was attractive in its own way.
She looked me over, her eyes lingering on my dark blond hair that was still damp and hanging in strings around my face. I reached up and pushed it back before crossing my arms over my chest.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m a friend of Nolan Everett’s.”
Her eyebrows rose, new curiosity filling her eyes. She looked at me again, her eyes lingering in new places, a mixture of envy and disgust sliding through her expression. She took a deep breath, then stepped back.
“Come in.”
She was super neat. That was the second thought. Her hotel room looked like it’d just been cleaned, though I could see she’d been there at least one night because of the discarded fast food containers in her wastebasket.
She was polite, too. That was my third thought. Polite and kind, exactly the kind of girl I could imagine Nolan being engaged to.
“How do you know Nolan?” she asked after she offered me a chair before perching on the edge of the mattress herself.
“He works for my brother-in-law.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “David Grayson is your brother-in-law?”
“He is.” I found myself looking at her with open curiosity now. “How do you know David?”
“Everyone in Texas knows the Grayson family. His father was a state senator who ran for Congress—and won—just before he died.”
I half nodded. I was aware of that, but I had forgotten. It wasn’t really something that was at the forefront of my thoughts when I thought about David.
She tilted her head slightly. “Is Nolan okay?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“When the man up and disappears, refuses to speak to me or his father, when he writes impartial letters that simply say he doesn’t think he’s a good man…you tend to worry.”
“You were engaged?”
“For four years.”
I bit the inside of my lip, thinking what a long time four years was.
“We were engaged just before he left for basic training. We were going to get married when he came back from his third tour of duty over in Afghanistan. He said he was going to get a promotion, that he was going to take a job with the Marines that would allow him to stay in the United States, probably at Pendleton. And we’d get married and have a family and…” Her voice trailed off as she spoke, tears filling her eyes. “Then, three weeks before the wedding, he writes me, telling me that he’s not good enough for me and that he can’t marry me. Then…nothing.”
“How did you find him?” I asked, feeling almost as if I were intruding on her pain just by asking.
“A friend who works for the Dallas Police Department. He saw him there yesterday, speaking to a detective in the robbery division. She told me, told me that she’d asked around and he’d shown identification that had Gray Wolf Security on it. I drove straight here.”
She found him because of me. How ironic was that? He went to Dallas for me, to help me with my case and his past caught up to him because of it. I wondered if he knew that was a possibility. I wondered if that
was why he’d insisted that he could offer me his touch for one more night, if that was why he kept pulling away from me.
Would he be here now if it had been he who’d been standing beside Annie’s desk when she arrived?
“Do you know how he is?” she asked again. “Something happened over there, his entire unit was gunned down on a single mission. He was the sole survivor. His commander called me, told me what’d happened. He was unhurt, but they sent him to a hospital in Germany. He was so shaken by the whole thing that the doctors there recommended he be given a discharge. It must have broken his heart…he was a career soldier. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted to be.”
“It was that or ride the broncs like his father.”
Her eyes widened slightly when I said that. “Did he tell you that?”
I got up and moved to the window, my thoughts spinning. I tried to imagine Nolan in Afghanistan, tried to imagine him seeing something that tragic, that horrible. But I couldn’t. The Nolan I knew was too gentle to have survived such horror.
“He never wanted to be like his father. He saw how broken the rodeo circuit made him. He always said he’d never live a life like that unless he had no other choice.”
I nodded slowly. “He wanted to be someone better.”
“He was. He is.”
I turned to look at her again, imagining her with Nolan. That I could imagine easily.
“He needs to remember his choices, why he made them. He needs to remember his past.”
She frowned, her head tilted slightly. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he thinks he’s a bad person for what happened. He’s taken the guilt on his own shoulders. But, maybe, if he sees you again…”
“I never understood why he broke up with me. And why he never came home to see his dad. I thought…he would see his dad at least. They were so close. His father raised him alone and did the best he could. He wrote to him every week, sent him pictures and gossip from the other guys in his unit. But when all that happened, he just stopped contacting him at all.”
“He’s ashamed,” I said, recognizing now all the signs I’d known were there, but didn’t really understand. We were so much alike and now I knew why. He was as lost and broken as I was. But he had a trail he could follow that would take him back home. My trail had burned itself out.
I crossed to the door, needing to get out of there. It was stupid, really, how easily I fell in love. But I had fallen in love. Again. This time it was with a nice guy, a guy who would have treated me well. But I didn’t deserve him any more than this girl deserved to sit around wondering what had happened to her perfectly designed dreams.
“I’ll make sure he knows you’re here.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little confusion in her voice.
I glanced back at her, tears making her face shimmer just the slightest bit. I think she understood then. I think she saw it in the pain I couldn’t quite hide. Her eyes narrowed as I stepped through the door, tension slamming into her shoulders like a heavy stone landing on a surprisingly stout pillar.
“You and Nolan…”
I heard her say the words, but I didn’t stop to respond. I had to get out of there before I ruined everything for him.
I was halfway to the borrowed SUV when the sobs slipped from between my lips. I was inches from the door when strong arms came around my chest. I was within a breath of safety when I was dragged backwards and pushed into the back of a luxury car, the leather like butter against my startled cheek…
Chapter 20
Nolan
I was at my desk when David came in late in the afternoon, working on a report that I should have written the night before. Detective Snider had called to let me know that he had a lead on Colin Pierce, that he was pretty sure he was still in town. He said they had a warrant, and they were hopeful that he would be in custody before the end of the day. I was still waiting for the follow-up call, the one letting us know that Pepper was safe from whatever danger the man might pose for her.
I was torn on the idea that Pepper might be in danger at the hands of this man. He was arrogant. An adrenaline junkie, who thought he was constantly one step ahead of the law. He took jobs—not because he wanted the money he earned from them—but because he enjoyed the danger of the things requested of him. Pepper going to the cops and telling them all she knew would just amp up the danger. He might get off on that.
But, again, he couldn’t continue in his games if the cops caught up to him.
David came over to my desk and perched on the edge.
“How’s it going?”
I gave him an update, telling him about Detective Snider’s call. David nodded, his eyes moving around the room as he listened.
“Good,” he said. “Where’s Pepper?”
Alarms went off instantly in my head. “I assumed she was at the hospital, visiting Ricki.”
David stood. “You mean she’s not here?”
“She hasn’t been here all afternoon.”
David crossed the room, concern clearly etched on his face. “Annie,” he called to the office manager, “have you seen Pepper today?”
“Yes. This morning, she came down right before Bailey and the boys.”
“Did she go with them to the school?”
“No. She wasn’t supposed to leave the compound.”
“Did you see where she went?”
Annie gestured toward the kitchen. “She was headed that direction when I last saw her.”
“When was that?”
“Just after that woman…” She trailed off as her eyes fell on me. She pressed her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry. It totally slipped my mind.”
“What did?”
“Someone came to see you. A woman. She said she was your fiancée.”
David was looking between Annie and me, his eyes narrowed as he listened.
“Your fiancée?”
“When was this? Did Pepper hear this exchange?”
Annie nodded, her hand still pressed to her mouth. “She was standing right here.”
“Did Caryn say where she was staying? Did she say anything about us, about what—?”
“She said she would be at the Hyatt until you went to see her. Room five ten.”
I rushed back to my desk and grabbed my car keys. David was right behind me as I burst out the front door.
“Where are you going?”
His eyebrows rose as if he couldn’t believe I was questioning him. “She’s my responsibility.”
I didn’t argue that.
We drove in silence across town. I ran through yellow lights, rushed through green lights, barely missing getting pulled over at one intersection where the light was still red until the split second before I drove through it. I saw the cop, saw the finger he raised in chastisement. But I kept going, fear pumping through my heart like ice water.
I hadn’t seen Caryn in over a year. There was once a time when I would stare at her picture for hours at a time and talk to it when there was no one else I could trust with the things I needed to unburden from myself. We made so many plans, dreams that we knew would come true if we just stayed committed to each other, to the future. But then my world turned upside down and that picture ended up in the wastebasket outside some German psychiatrist’s office.
But there she was.
She stood in the doorway of a strange hotel room, a parade of emotions rushing across her face as she set eyes on me for the first time in over a year. She looked the same, her eyes just as green, her hair just as red. But there was something different that I couldn’t put my finger on right away.
And then I realized what it was. She was the same. But I was different.
“Nolan,” she said breathlessly, her hands reaching for me. “I can’t believe it’s really you!”
I dodged her touch, moving around her to barge into her room. It was neat as a pin, just like Caryn had always been, not a single item out of place. It drove her crazy for something to
be out of place, a quirk that I teased her incessantly about in the early days of our relationship.
I didn’t find it funny now.
“Did she come here?”
Caryn, watching me search the room, watching David come into the room uninvited, frowned.
“Who?”
“Pepper Dennison. Where is she?”
“That blond woman?” Understanding suddenly burst across her face. “You’re looking for that blond woman you’ve been sleeping with?”
I didn’t even acknowledge those words. I was convinced that there had to be evidence of Pepper in this room, not realizing that her words were all the evidence I was going to get.
“Is that why you’re here? You didn’t come to see me? Didn’t come because you left me high and dry at the altar with no explanation?”
“I wrote you a letter.”
“A Dear John letter? Is that all I deserved after everything we’d been through?”
There was nothing to say to that. She was right. She did deserve more than that. But I didn’t have time to argue the point with her.
“When was she here?” David asked, stepping between Caryn and me so that she was forced to focus on him.
“This morning. Three or four hours ago.”
“Did you watch her go? Did you see her get into a car?”
“No. Why would I? She came in here, practically announcing that the two of them were having an affair. Why would I care where she went?”
David turned to me, his movement saying what I already knew. We weren’t getting anything else out of this woman.
I started across the room, determined to find Pepper some other way. There had to be cameras in the parking lot. Maybe if we could figure out when she left…God, tell me she’d just decided to go do some shopping. Tell me that she was at the hospital with Ricki right now, safe and sound. Tell me she was okay.
Caryn grabbed my arm as I tried to pass her.
“Why, Nolan? Why didn’t you have enough respect to come and tell me face to face? Why didn’t you respond to any of my letters? Why don’t you go see your dad?”
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