It wasn’t like Raegan Devereaux to be patient. He liked her impatience. Liked that she knew what she wanted and went after it, even if sometimes he didn’t agree. But on this he did agree. Ever since he’d seen that stuffed animal, he wanted to expand their search and find their daughter. Only now Raegan was the one dragging her feet.
He knew what had happened to him had scared her, but instinct told him this was more than that. Something was bugging her. Something she wasn’t talking to him about.
He made a left onto a gravel road dotted with potholes. The truck jolted, sending a sharp stab of pain up his arm. He winced but covered it quickly so she couldn’t see. “So you never told me what happened at KTVP the other day. Everything go okay?”
When she didn’t answer, he looked across the cab. “Raegan?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Fine.” There it was again. His favorite word. There was definitely something going on with her.
Lifting his foot from the gas pedal, he pulled the truck to the side of the gravel road and killed the ignition.
“What are you doing?” Her brows snapped together. “Is something wrong with the truck?”
The lift in her voice at that possibility was just a little too hopeful, kicking his suspicions up even more. “Nothing’s wrong with the truck.” He twisted in his seat toward her, ignoring the tug in his arm. “But something is wrong with you, so spill.”
Her shoulders dropped, and she focused out the windshield, careful, he noticed, to keep her eyes off his. “I’m fine. Let’s just keep going.”
“Not until we talk. You’ve been acting weird, and I want to know why.”
She pursed her lips but didn’t turn his way.
The blunt approach clearly wasn’t working. He’d have to try flirting. “Those little frown lines between your eyes are going to get stuck there if you’re not careful.” He leaned toward her and reached for her hand. “I could kiss ’em away if you want.”
Her eyes fell closed, and the heartache he saw on her face pushed his suspicion to full-on worry. Drawing her hand to his lips, he kissed each knuckle, one by one. “Come on, baby. Talk to me. We said we wouldn’t keep secrets anymore, remember? Tell me what happened at the station.”
“It’s not the job. I quit the other day. I don’t even care about the station.”
“You quit your job?”
Her eyes fluttered open. “Yes. I didn’t tell you because of . . . everything. Jeremy wanted me to run my story. Not the cases we’ve been looking into but my personal story. About Emma. It was never about those other missing kids. He just steered me toward those articles because he hoped I’d dig until I created a link to Emma’s case. Then he could use her disappearance to get his tearjerker, Emmy-winning story.”
Alec’s impression of the dickhead took a serious header. And that wasn’t saying much because his impression didn’t have far to fall. “You told him where to go, I’m guessing.”
“Of course I did. I’m not about to let him use our daughter as a ratings ploy.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Unless it could help us find her.”
She sighed, and her shoulders dropped. “I know that. And I would have agreed if that were the case, but it wasn’t. He wanted the focus on me, not on Emma.” She glanced out the window. “Anyway, I can find another job. And I have my trust fund in the meantime.”
The trust fund she hated to use because whenever she touched it—as she had when Emma had gone missing and they’d hired the best private investigators to find her—her self-absorbed parents made her feel guilty from thousands of miles away.
“You don’t need to touch your trust fund. You have me.”
“You’re not going to start paying my bills.”
“Raegs, that was our apartment.”
“But it’s not anymore,” she said softly.
“What if I want it to be?”
Her gaze flicked over his, filled with a million doubts all playing across her gorgeous features. “Alec—”
“No, hear me out . . .” His chest drew tight as a drum, but it was a good tight. A right tight. One he liked because it told him he was alive. “I don’t want to just spend the night at your place. I want it to be our place. I want you, every day and every night. The way we should have been the last three years.”
She didn’t reach for him. Didn’t melt into his arms as he’d hoped. Instead, she looked down at their joined hands with a sadness that rocked him to his core. “And what happens if we don’t find Emma? Or worse, what if what we find isn’t what we both hope to find?”
He held her hand tighter because something in her sad voice made him feel like she was about to pull away. “Then we get through it together.”
Her eyes slid closed. “Alec—”
“Do you want guarantees?” Panic spread beneath his ribs, drilling holes in that drum. He reached for her other hand, as if doing so could keep her with him. “I can’t give them to you, Raegan. I don’t know what we’re going to find. All I can do is tell you that I love you. That I have always loved you and that I will always love you. Nothing we uncover today or tomorrow or twenty years from now is going to change that fact.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. One that tugged on his heart and drew him toward her like a lifeline. He closed his arms around her, feeling the wetness of her tears against his throat, hoping she felt the truth in the beat of his pulse where her cheek was pressed against his neck. “I know it’s a risk. I know my track record is shit. But give me a chance, baby. Give us a chance. I love you so damn much, Raegan. More than you will ever know.”
She sank into him and slid her arms around his waist, holding him just as tightly. “I love you too. I’m just . . . I don’t want to lose you again. I don’t want what happened before to happen again. I don’t want any of this to be the reason . . .”
Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t need to say the words for him to know what she meant. Their unspoken meaning slammed into him with the force of a freight train, twisting his heart like buckling metal.
She didn’t want him to hit rock bottom again and decide he had nothing to live for.
Slowly, because his hands were shaking, he framed her face and gently drew her back so she could see his eyes. “Look at me. That’s never going to happen again. Do you hear me? I was stupid and selfish that day, and I wish you didn’t even know about it, but I promise you, I’m not going back there. I have too much to live for.”
Her eyelids dropped. “But—”
“Raegan.” He tightened his fingers on her jaw, forcing her eyes to flutter open and focus on his. “Even if we weren’t together now, even if something—God forbid—happens in the future and you decide you don’t want me anymore, I still won’t ever go back there. Because if I did, if I left this world like that, there’d be no chance to win you back and prove to you this is the real deal. Because it is. This is for good or bad, for better or worse. Remember? This is forever.”
“I’m scared,” she whispered. Lifting her arms, she slid her hands around his neck and pressed her lips to his. “I’m just so scared.”
He was scared too. Scared of what they’d find, scared of the truth, and scared to death of the unknown. But more than anything, he was scared of losing her again.
No matter what, he wouldn’t let that happen.
Raegan closed her fingers around Alec’s as she walked next to him on the pothole-laden gravel road and scanned the single-wide trailers to her right and left.
“How do you know she’s here?” she asked, stepping over a mud puddle while she tried to ignore the smell around her. She couldn’t quite place it. A mixture of urine and garbage that made her glad she hadn’t eaten much lunch before they’d driven out here.
“Out here” was the only description she had for where they were. Since Alec hadn’t let her drive and hadn’t told her where they were going, she’d had to sit back and watch the scenery. She knew they were somewhere north of Portland b
ack in the hills, but the trailer park was surrounded by such tall trees blocking all view that she had no idea in which direction the highway was or how she’d ever find her way out of here if she got separated from Alec.
“Because this is where she was the last time she contacted me, looking for money.”
He didn’t specify when “the last time” was, but Raegan knew he’d come out here after Emma had disappeared. He’d been looking for his father then, convinced he knew where Emma was. At the time, Raegan had tried to go with Alec, if for no other reason than to make sure he didn’t kill John Gilbert and wind up in jail himself, but Alec hadn’t let her tag along. Back then, in the days and weeks after Emma’s disappearance, Alec hadn’t wanted Raegan anywhere near him.
That memory sliced to the center of her heart, but she swallowed against the pain and told herself John Gilbert wouldn’t be here. From what Alec had told Raegan, the cops had already questioned her. Hunt had already questioned her. Gilbert wasn’t stupid enough to hide in plain sight.
Raegan squeezed Alec’s hand and tried for a smile, hoping to reassure him—and herself—that everything was going to be okay. “Maybe she won’t be here now.”
He huffed. “She’s here. She’s got nowhere else to go.”
Raegan continued to hold his hand tightly against hers, but her back tingled as they rounded a corner and four rows of trailers came into view. Most were old, with run-down, peeling metal siding. The cars parked in front of them weren’t much better. Clunkers from the seventies and maybe eighties, most beat-up and dented, a few jacked up on blocks. Everywhere, garbage littered the ground.
“Oh my,” she muttered before she could stop herself.
Alec’s pulse jumped against hers, but when she glanced up he wasn’t looking at her; he was staring at the trailers with a mixture of disgust and rage that told her he was absolutely remembering growing up in a place very similar to this. “She’ll try to hit you up for money. It’s what addicts do. Don’t give her anything.”
Addict . . . The word circled in Raegan’s head as they continued walking, but her heart beat faster because it made her remember his words in the truck. He wanted them to move in together, and, oh, she wanted that with the same desperation he did, but she was scared. Scared of what their search for Emma might do to him. Scared of the things Hunt had told her at the hospital. Scared of his spiraling out of control once more and this time losing him forever.
He’d told her he wouldn’t let that happen again, but he couldn’t guarantee it. He’d even admitted as much when he’d said he’d always be an addict. Letting him go now, before either of them were too invested, would be better than wondering if and when it was all going to come crashing down, wouldn’t it?
Her heart screamed no. She was already invested. She loved him more than she ever had, and she knew a big reason for that was because of everything he’d lived through to get back to her. She couldn’t walk away from him now, knew if she even tried she’d regret it forever. All she could do was exactly what Hunt had told her to do at the hospital—talk to him, not let him sink into the darkness, and love him. Every single day, so he knew he was never alone. Then hope and pray that would be enough.
She squeezed his hand, wanting to reassure him, trying to reassure herself at the same time. His gaze was fixed ahead as he led her between two dilapidated trailers, on a mud path that sank beneath her black ankle boots. Her heart beat hard and fast as they sidestepped a metal garbage can lying on its side, then moved out from between the trailers into what she guessed could be considered a backyard.
It was mostly a flat muddy area bordered by trees. Cigarette smoke drifted Raegan’s way, followed by a cough and a gruff voice muttering, “Holy shit. Thought you said you wasn’t ever comin’ out here again, boy.”
Raegan stepped out from behind Alec and looked toward the back of the trailer where a bony woman with stringy hair and a pockmarked face sat in a plastic chair puffing on a cigarette.
“Charlene.” Alec’s voice was as strained and deep as Raegan had ever heard it. She swallowed hard, hoping this moment wouldn’t be the trigger to send him spiraling.
The woman exhaled a long breath and eyed him with both disgust and superiority. “Still tryin’ to class me up, I see. Name’s Charlie, and ya know it.” She lifted her angular chin Raegan’s way. “Who’s that?”
Raegan stood still as she tried not to be shocked by the woman who’d raised Alec, though “raised” was a subjective term. Not his biological mother—his biological mother had abandoned him when he was just a baby—but the woman his father had lived with from the time Alec was very young until she’d disappeared when he was arrested at thirteen.
Raegan swallowed hard, trying not to pass judgment, knowing instinctively this was no kind of mother for any child. “I’m—”
“Just a friend,” Alec cut in, never looking away from Charlene . . . or Charlie.
Charlie reached for the blue beer can on the plastic table to her left, her fingers as wrinkled and bony as her face, making her look eighty rather than the fifty she probably was. “Just a friend,” she muttered. “You bring your friend all the way out here to meet your mama?”
“You’re not my mother.”
She stabbed her cigarette into an already full ashtray. “I was more a mother to you than that woman you call Mommy now, but you don’t give a shit. Just let me rot out here like the ungrateful child you always was. I got health issues, ya know.” She coughed for effect. “Children ’r’ supposed to take care of their parents. But no, just ’cause I don’t got a whole bunch a letters behind my name, you just forget all about me.”
It both angered and frustrated Raegan that this woman—that these people from Alec’s past—kept tabs on him, always waiting for the moment to sink their claws in and drag him back when he was nearly free.
Alec stepped toward Charlie. “I’m not here to talk about me. I want to know about Gilbert.”
“John?” Her thin lips turned down, and she shook her head as she tapped another cigarette out of the pack. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout John.”
“Yeah, I heard you were asked about him, and that you said you haven’t seen him.”
“And I haven’t,” she answered, puffing out a line of smoke. “I wouldn’t lie to the cops, or . . . who was that guy who called to talk to me?”
“A friend,” Alec answered.
“Yeah, another friend.” She leaned back in her chair and eyed Raegan as if she wanted to claw Raegan’s eyes out. “You got all kinds a friends now, don’tcha, son?”
“Look.” The bite to Alec’s voice told Raegan he was heading quickly past his patience limit. “We both know you and my father have a sick sort of relationship. You’re the first person he turns to when he’s in trouble.”
“What kinda trouble he in this time?” she asked, drawing the cigarette between her lips as if she were completely clueless, which they all knew she wasn’t.
Alec stepped toward her. “Don’t play games with me, Charlene. I know he came to see you after he got out the other day. I want to know what he wanted.”
She stared up at him like a cat stares at a goldfish, waiting for the moment it accidentally jumps out of the bowl and into the cat’s mouth. Long, tense moments passed that made the hair on Raegan’s nape stand straight. Finally, Charlie tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and said, “Let’s just say, for argument sake, that I heard . . . somethin’. What’s in it for me?”
Alec’s jaw clenched down hard. Reaching back for his wallet, he pulled a ten free and laid it in front of her. Her grayish-blue eyes went wide, and she licked her lips, but her gaze flicked back up to the wallet in his hand.
This was clearly a familiar game. Raegan watched with wide eyes as Alec laid another ten on the table.
Charlie scooped up both bills and stuffed them into her shirt. “He just wanted a place to stay for a few days. He left yesterday. I ain’t seen him since.”
“So you lied to the p
olice.”
She shrugged. “I omitted. Ain’t the same thing. ’Sides, what ’r’ you gonna do? Tell ’em? I know you won’t ’cause you want my help.”
“Where was he going?”
She shrugged and puffed on her cigarette.
Alec stared at her, then laid another ten on the table.
Charlie swiped it away to join the first two and grinned. “Don’t know. He didn’t say.”
A muscle in Alec’s jaw ticked as he laid another ten on the table. “He say anything about me?”
She giggled and grasped the money. “He said you was messin’ things up for his job. You and some girl.” She nodded Raegan’s way. “Must a meant that one there. She’s pretty enough.” She leaned around Alec. “He give you that shiner, honey? I know good ol’ John Gilbert’s work when I see it. He got ya good, didn’t he?”
Raegan’s spine tingled, and she glanced at Alec, willing him not to break.
Alec stared at Charlie for several seconds, then pulled a twenty out of his wallet and held it up. “Who’s he working for, Charlene?”
“Hell if I know.”
He extracted another twenty and fingered the money in front of her. She reached for it, but before her grubby fingers could clasp it, he tugged the bills back.
Frustration lines creased Charlie’s forehead and around her eyes as she glared up at him. “Some rich bitch in the city, okay?”
“What does he do for her?”
She sighed, her eyes never once leaving the cash in his hand. “I don’t know.”
When he didn’t hand over the money, she glared up at him. “I’m tellin’ ya the truth. I know what he used to do for her, ’fore he got sent up. By you. But that’s it.”
“And what was that?” Alec asked, waving the money in front of her.