I didn’t say a word. My blood was still boiling. What was there to say in front of Sandra anyway? Let them go care for the blubbering coward behind me. With one last look at her, I left the shop.
44
Willow
I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
I stared down at Bradley as Sandra tried to revive him. I honestly didn’t know what to feel.
At the confirmation that he was still breathing, relief washed through me but not much else. Emergency services soon arrived and he was taken away with them straight to a hospital. When they left, Sandra turned to me with a glare on her face. I couldn’t remember the last time that she had been so furious at me.
“Willow,” she said. “Caleb crossed the line.”
I knew that he had been wrong, but I couldn’t accept the condemnation so easily.
“As did Bradley, the second time for that matter.”
“He was confronting him!” she said. “He was trying to protect you.”
Her words confused me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She took a deep breath, and I knew whatever was coming was something major. “Willow, he made me promise not to tell this to you, at least not yet. At least until he was able to get Caleb to come clean and tell you the truth.”
It felt like I was going to have to sit down for this, but there was no chair anywhere. I felt fragile, as if I could break. I didn’t want to hear it, but my voice, soft and scared floated out of my mouth. “What truth?”
“Bradley called me last night with information he had found. I dismissed it, I thought that he was just acting dumb and letting his jealousy take over his brain, but after today and this ... wreckage, I don’t know what to think anymore. And the way Caleb reacted to Bradley? Was it just because Bradley provoked him, or was it because Bradley threatened to tell you the truth himself if he didn’t?”
Blood rushed to my head, and I felt quite faint. All my dreams and hopes were tied up with Caleb. He was the only man for me. I’d already decided that. I fought back the desire to tell Sandra to fuck off and mind her own business. Both her and stupid Bradley. Why did anybody have to interfere? I didn’t go around telling other people how to live their lives. “Tell me what?” I asked harshly.
“I’m so sorry, Willow, but Bradley thinks, and now even I agree with him, that Caleb is the same boy Henry was talking about yesterday. The murderer that was sent to prison. Bradley said he was going to investigate more before he approached you, but he must have freaked out after today and confronted Caleb about it.”
I gazed at her in shock. “What?”
She moved towards me, her tone gentle. “I know you’re in love with him, Willow, but there are now two things pointing towards the fact that Bradley might be right.”
She tried to touch me, but I flinched and glared at her as I took several steps backwards.
“Willow,” she said, “you might be in over your head, and neither Bradley nor I can be silent anymore. Please speak to Caleb directly. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Please ask him about this and see what he says. It could all be some major misunderstanding, but you still have to ask, and quickly, before you fall even more deeply in love with him.”
“You want me to ask Caleb if he’s a convicted murderer?”
“It’s either that or you wait for a little while longer while we investigate this properly to find out the whole truth. But even with the bit of suspicion we have, I don’t think I want him anywhere near you. Even if you can’t ask him outright about the conviction then why don’t you ask him about this break in? Ask if this is in any way related to him.”
My heart was contracting because I already knew the answer to that question. “And what would that prove?”
“It proves, Willow,” she explained in a patient voice, as if she was talking to a child, “that he runs in dangerous circles. Anyone who can so easily attack someone else like this is not ordinary. I need you to approach this as logically as possible. Three months ago he was just a stranger to you and you were fine. Don’t fight to hold onto him now without even making the effort to find out if these allegations are true. Maybe he’s not the only one for you, you know.”
I couldn’t help it. My body jerked away in response to the very idea.
“I promise you that hearts do mend even if it feels like they never will. After he is out of your life, you’ll be fine again.”
“I don’t want to talk about any of this anymore,” I said, and walked out of the store. In a strangely calm state of mind, I walked down to the cafe around the block. I ordered a pot of tea, something I never do, and sat down at a table by the window. Then I took out my phone and began making notes, breaking down all the renovations and repairs that we would need to quickly put the shop back in order.
Half-an-hour passed by before I was done. I had not drunk the tea and it was cold. I looked at the cakes behind the glass counter. They made good blueberry pies and usually, I would have ordered one. Now the thought made me feel slightly queasy. I looked down at my notes. Now I needed to hand this list to Caleb just as we had agreed, so that he could begin to mobilize the resources that we needed.
I looked out of the window. A man was walking past with his child. She was licking a lollipop. My hand trembled. For some inexplicable reason, I felt angry with the man. I didn’t even know him. It was simply because he let the innocent child eat the lollipop. I turned away. There was something very wrong with me.
The words Sandra said came into my head. Caleb was a murderer. He had been in prison. And I was supposed to leave him because of that.
She had to be joking.
45
Caleb
I had lost my cool in Willow’s shop and there would be consequences. The shock on Willow’s face told me that, but at the moment I had a more pressing problem to handle. First, I made a call and arranged for security for Willow and her parents. Then I got my secretary to hire a team of workmen to start that morning.
Then I called Finnegan. “You smashed her shop?’
His laugh was curt. “Shouldn’t you be thanking me that I didn’t touch her?” My blood ran cold at the thought, but this was no time for losing my shit again.
“I told you I was working on it,” I said as calmly as I could.
“Well, we heard you were busy losing a lot of money yesterday and we wondered if you were trying to be clever.”
“You think I lost money to be clever? To start with I don’t control the stock market and most of my own fortune was wiped out.”
“If you get careless, that’s your fucking problem. We just wanted to let you know that we don’t care if you lose other people’s money or even your own. We still want our product.”
“So you went out of your way and made things personal?” I growled.
He laughed again, it was a cynical laugh. “Frank told me how murderous you could be. How brutal you could be to protect yourself. But Wolfe, that was prison. This is the real world, and out here, you can’t so easily defeat your enemies because not all of them line up next to you at the canteen. I left the woman alone because I just wanted to send a little message that we know just how important she is to you. You have a week to bring me results.”
He ended the call, and it took every ounce of strength inside to calm myself down to the state where I didn’t want to find him and smash his head in.
Then I was back at my office sitting at my desk. As I hoped, Finnegan hadn’t guessed what I was up to. He thought I’d deliberately incurred those losses to make them nervous about my ability. True, I had deliberately allowed those losses to happen, but I had a deeper plan. And now, I had another week to watch my plans unfold, but I knew if I really needed the time I could stretch even that week out.
I had tried my best to think of and to cover every eventuality. My life still felt like it was hanging from a thread in a storm.
I wished I hadn’t lost my cool with that sniveling bastard. It was almost certainly
going to come back to bite me in the ass. I knew the coward would tell her what he knew, and I would have to handle that issue when I was just not yet ready for it.
When a call came in right then, and I saw Willow’s name flash on the screen, I stared at the phone on my desk as if it was a snake. What was our conversation going to entail?
I picked up the phone. “Willow,” I called softly.
“Hey,” she said abruptly.
Immediately, I noted the difference in her tone. It was guarded and tense and I knew immediately that she had heard what Bradley knew. I hated to hear her voice sound so strange and distant. “Willow,” I began.
But she cut me off. “I’m done taking account of the repairs and possible renovations that we need. I’ll email the full report to you now.”
I knew, like me, she didn’t want to deal with Bradley’s accusation right now. “Okay,” I said quietly.
“The men that you sent to help us clear out the damage have been at it all morning. Thank you.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Right. Caleb?”
“Yeah.”
“Take care of yourself, okay?” Her voice broke then, and she quickly cut the call.
“Fuck,” I swore. I stood up and paced the room. I felt so angry, frustrated and damn helpless. I wanted to go to her and comfort her, tell her I loved her, I’d always loved her. Tell her what we had done together. What we had promised each other. Tell her about that night. How we stood in front of the burning house and made a blood promise to each other, but that would be selfish. Yes, I would make her finally understand, but would the price be too high.
No. I would bear the pain. I had broad shoulders. Step by step I would win her back. First I needed to take care of Finnegan and his lot. As long as she was safe, I knew she couldn’t resist that thing between us.
I was putting the finishing touches on a letter to my clients who had lost big yesterday, when my phone vibrated. It was a call from one of the bodyguards I had put on Willow.
“Thought I should let you know, Mr. Wolfe, looks like she has a tail on her,” he said. “We’re still in the shop and there’s a dark sedan parked down the street, opposite the launderette. It’s been there for the past four hours. Looks like there’s a man in it.”
“Keep an eye on him,” I said, shooting from my chair. “I’ll be right there.”
In no time, I’d jumped in my car and was heading to Willow’s shop. Night had fallen, so it was quite easy for me to arrive unnoticed. I parked some distance away, took my gun out of the glove compartment, and got out of the car.
He never saw me coming.
He had gotten lax in his surveillance from inside the car so by the time he looked up from his phone and noticed my approach, I was already at the passenger’s door of his car.
His window was rolled down and he was now staring down the barrel of my gun, which was pointed at his forehead. Horror flashed across his face. When I saw that it was the same guy who I had caught trailing me the last time, I shook my head.
“You again?” I muttered.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I’m just about to go into the launderette.”
“If you move even an inch, I will blow your head off right now,” I warned, as I got into the car.
“Listen, I don’t want no trouble.”
“Shut up and give me your phone,” I commanded, and with my gun pointed at his head, he didn’t dare refuse. He threw it at me and I began to scroll through his previous calls as I spoke with him.
“Who hired you?” I asked. I realized then that I should have done this from the very first time I met him. I had been too careless, but not anymore.
He shifted nervously. “I don’t know, man.”
I looked up from his phone. “How have they been keeping in touch with you then?”
“The number’s untraceable. All I get are instructions.”
“What about your payment?”
He looked around him. “It’s dropped in random locations, and I'm told to go pick it up.”
“What were you told to do here?”
He tapped a cigarette out of its box. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Yes,” I said curtly.
He put the cigarette back and looked at me sullenly. “I was told to just keep an eye on the girl.”
“What about me? There are no eyes on me?”
“I don’t know nothing about that. I just do what I’m told,” he said.
“Take me to where you live,” I ordered.
His face fell. “Look man. This is just a job to me. I have no idea what all of this is about. All I have is receipts, but even those are just records of dates and times.”
“Where are the receipts?”
“Home,” he admitted reluctantly.
In a way, I felt sorry for him. He was so wrong for the job. I’d met guys like him inside. Their lives were never their own. They were always somebody’s bitch. I’d learned a long time ago, there was no place for pity in my life. Pitying someone could mean you ended up dead.
I lowered my gun, cocked it and pressed it to his ribs.
Dejection filled his face, but he had no other choice than to do as he was told. He drove me to his house. He tried to engage me in conversation, to get me to feel sorry for him, but I told him to shut up. Twenty minutes later we arrived at a modest house just outside town.
“Get out of the car,” I instructed.
He hesitated. “My kids are in there, man. And my wife. Please don’t do this.”
The audacity of human beings truly astounded me. They protected their own at all costs, but the harm they caused to others was inconsequential. I felt absolutely no sympathy for him.
“You’re going to take me inside, and you’re going to give me all the information I need on every member of your family. The schools your kids attend, where your wife works and all of your social security numbers. You should thank your good luck that I’m not blasting your head off right now.”
He did as he was told but just before we got into the house, he stopped me and pleaded. “Please put the gun down. My kids are in there. I’ll get you everything you need. Just keep the gun out of sight, okay?”
I pushed him in, but the moment I got in and saw his three kids playing in the living room I put the gun away.
He got me all the information I needed and I gave him my instructions.
“I’m going to give you forty-eight hours. Figure out who’s behind your commission, and bring his name to me. Otherwise, your family’s going to be gone. And don’t even try to run because I will chase you all to the ends of the earth.”
46
Willow
True to Caleb’s predictions, repairs weren’t taking even half as long as I’d expected them to.
It was under a week and the men had not only made significant progress, but they had turned the place that I had more or less cobbled together with Sandra and one handyman into an upmarket boutique florist.
Jake, the foreman, had insisted on repainting the walls using the most expensive paints, replacing even the windows that were not broken so they would all be the same flawless design. He broke the tiled floor that had been in place when I came to the shop and gave me a sparkling granite surface. Even the ceiling was fitted with new cornices and painted a soft gray to match the rest of the color scheme. Then, the counters were all ripped out and gorgeous new rounded counters made of glass and marble arrived. I watched in amazement as they were expertly fitted in by a team of men. Just one look at them told me they must have cost the earth.
At that point I had protested, but Jake was having none of it. “Look, Ma’am,’ he said. “I’ve been hired to do an awesome job, and I’m going to do it to the best of my ability within the budget I’ve been given. If you are not happy with any part of my work, just let me know and I’ll rip it out and redo it.”
I backed off then. I wanted to ask what the budget was, but I bit my tongue and let it go. It
certainly seemed as if the budget was in the hundreds of thousands.
Although, to be honest, my mind wasn’t on it. I cared less about the windows, tiles, even the shop, than I cared about what was happening to Caleb.
He kept in touch twice a day, like clockwork, but he never visited or invited me over to his place. I worried about him constantly, but I knew I had to give him space and time. His troubles were worse than mine. Until he got those monsters off his back I had no business making life harder for him. I threw myself into work and waited for his twice daily calls. They were always brief and I always clutched the phone so hard my fingers ached. And every time I wished he would ask me to go over to him, but he never did.
When the call was over I would put the phone down and miss him terribly. Until this morning, when I could bear it no more and decided to surprise him with dinner.
“Have you asked him?”
The question came out of nowhere. I quickly slipped my phone back into my pocket and returned to wiping down the vases. My response was tinged with frost. “Asked him what?”
“Willow, you can’t avoid this forever,” Sandra said.
“I want to focus on what’s important and that’s getting the shop renovated.”
She didn’t listen. “You’re suspicious too. That’s why he hasn’t come around, isn’t it?”
I glared at her.
She turned to look out outside. “Well, well, what do you know, Bradley’s here.”
At the racket of his rusty engine outside the shop, my heart sank. He was the last person I wanted to see, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was avoiding him either, so I continued on with my work of wiping down the dusty vases.
“Did you order something from him?” Sandra asked.
I shook my head. “No, did you?”
She shook her head.
I sent a dark gaze towards the door. It was that look that he encountered when he walked through and it immediately stopped him in his tracks. One side of his face was still bruised from the punches that Caleb had landed on him, but I felt absolutely no sympathy for him. He diverted his gaze towards Sandra who was much happier to see him.
Saint & Sinner: A Second Chance Romance Page 19