Chapter Twelve
The bass was so loud that Trent could feel it vibrating through his chest before they even entered the building.
How Cujo had gotten them tickets to the hottest up-and-coming metal band at the eleventh hour was anybody’s guess, but Trent wasn’t complaining. Cujo had a little book of people who knew people that he constantly leveraged.
The venue, an old, run-down warehouse in one of Miami’s rougher neighborhoods, was well known for hosting heavy metal and rock concerts. True music lovers flocked there to see their favorite bands, and it was rare for it to not sell out.
They went straight to the front instead of getting in line. It paid to have grown up in Miami. Trent had gone to school with one of the guys working the door and had taken care of his ink.
With a quick handshake they were in. Upstairs was a balcony overlooking the stage, where they could stay out of the surging bodies and rogue crowd surfers. At one time, he’d have been the first guy off the stage but at thirty-two, he was getting too old for that shit.
Hitting up the bar, they grabbed beers and headed over to the edge to watch the band. Five English guys in their early twenties were making the metal rounds with phenomenal reviews. To be that young and have the world at your feet had to be pretty awesome.
The sound was freakin’ insane. The singer’s voice was a total contradiction—borderline angelic on the harmony with every note crystal clear and brutally raw as he screamed through the chorus.
It was too loud to really hold much of a conversation.
Given how packed it was, he was kind of relieved that Harper hadn’t come with them, for her sake.
Not that he didn’t want her by his side, he’d not seen her for two days and it was making him twitchy, but protecting her in this kind of craziness would have been out of even his control.
His phone vibrated in his back pocket.
Hey. I’m home. Make it okay?
One beer in, crazy show. How was your day?
Shitty but I’ll live. Bath then bed.
Naked???
First—definitely, second—maybe
Now there’s a thought! Night, baby.
“Everything okay?” Cujo shouted in his ear.
Trent leaned toward him. “Yeah, Harper’s just getting home from work.”
“I have one word for you, my friend. Whipped.” Cujo laughed, taking a swig of his beer.
“Starting to think it ain’t so bad, brother.” Trent shook his head, more at himself than anything.
“Really? You’ve known her what? A month?” Cujo’s brows were furrowed, like he was unable to compute what he was hearing. “And I bet she hasn’t even put out yet, seeing how you’ve been a cranky bastard.”
“So? What’s a month? And come on, dude. This is Harper we’re talking about.
You saw her back. You think she’s just going to roll over and get to it after that?
Didn’t realize I had to report which bases I cleared to you, Cuj.
” They hadn’t fought physically since they were fourteen, but Trent had a feeling tonight might change that if Cujo kept up with this line of questioning.
“We always talk about this shit.” Cujo had the gall to look offended.
“We don’t do this talking thing.”
“Yeah we do. You just don’t want to do it about Harper.” Cujo reached for his beer, downing the last of it. “Normally you give me some crass-ass response and you would definitely have asked me if I got lucky with those twins from last night by now.”
Trent’s easy retort stuck in his throat as he considered Cujo’s comment. That wasn’t it, was it? The idea of sharing what was happening between them, what had happened in the car, just felt wrong. It seemed almost sacrilegious to compare notes with Cujo over something so perfect.
“I just don’t get why you’d want to be with just one person. You’re a fucking legend. And with the show, you’re going to get access to all kinds of high-end ass. Don’t shut down your options, man.”
“Keep your opinions to yourself, dude. At the risk of sounding like a girl, I really like her. And it’s killing me that not only do you not get that but you are actually encouraging me to play around.” Trent slammed his beer on the ledge of the balcony.
Cujo put his arm out to stop Trent from leaving. “Explain it to me then.” He sounded sincere. Contrite even. “What’s the big deal? You’ve done a complete fucking one-eighty over this girl. It isn’t like you.”
“I can’t explain it. If I’m ever going to settle down, I want what my mom and dad have. I thought I had that once, but after Yasmin I swore I’d never let a girl get to me like that again. But now … I don’t know. Harper’s different.”
Trent took a sip of his beer. Thinking about his ex used to cause a burning in his gut.
They’d been together nearly two years. And while things hadn’t been perfect and money had been tight, he’d though they’d been happy.
Until the afternoon he’d gotten off early and rushed back to their building to tell her about the hundred-dollar tip he’d gotten.
The suitcases in the hall should have been his first clue.
Somewhere between “What the fuck are you doing home?” and “I’m outta here,” Yasmin had laid out clearly just how little she thought of him and their life.
The apartment was too small. (It was all he could afford.) He was going nowhere.
(He was just starting out—and building up a solid client base took time.) He had no “options.” (Being a tattoo artist was what he truly wanted to do.) He didn’t buy her enough gifts.
(Well, someone needed to pay the gas bill.)
He’d thought they were in it together. He’d thought they were on an adventure, trying to build a future.
To this day, he could feel the reverberations of the door slamming behind her and the room falling into silence.
Cujo nudged him with a shove to his shoulder. “So Harper’s got you rethinking stuff, huh?”
Trent paused and then smiled.
“Yeah.” He took a swig of his beer to compose himself. “So lay off her, okay, dude? Harper and me still have bunch of crap to get through and it’ll be tough enough without you and me going at it.”
* * *
Sitting on a beautiful patio in the company of an incredibly charming man while sipping a nicely chilled glass of sauvignon blanc was the perfect way to spend a Thursday lunchtime.
It had been close to sixty hours, not that Harper was counting, since she had last seen Trent, and when he had swept into the café to whisk her away for food, it was all she could do to keep her hands off him.
“You know I write my own schedule, Harper. If you give me yours in advance, I could likely write mine around it somehow during the week.” Trent held her hand across the table, gently massaging her palm. “We could probably spend a bit more time together.”
Trent’s eyes flashed hot, then closed. He took a deep breath and shuddered.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He opened his eyes, gave her a devastating grin. “Just thinking about the time we spent in my car.”
“Oh my g … did you really just say that out loud?” she whispered, mortification ripe in her tone.
“You embarrass so easily, darlin’,” he said, laughing. “So tell me what happened in your world.”
They talked as they enjoyed the bread basket, pulling out pieces of the soft focaccia and ripping off chunks to dip into the delicious olive oil that had been brought to their table.
Trent excused himself to go to the washroom and Harper used the time to check her phone. Drea was going to send her shifts through for the coming week.
Opening her text messages, she was thrilled to see one from Joanie:
A- !!! Thank you!!
Wow—congrats—you deserve it! she texted back quickly.
The next one was considerably more disturbing:
Once February uneven brute
Harper felt the blood drain from her face, her hands clenching around the phone. Nathan had attacked her in February, and nobody could argue that he wasn’t an uneven brute.
One message she could reconcile as an anomaly.
But two? With strange words, from an unknown number.
She tried to remind herself that Nathan was locked up, far away from sunny Miami.
He couldn’t be texting her. But deep in her soul, Harper knew the message wasn’t just a random grouping of words.
It was an anagram. Her hands started to flare as she looked at the phone, mouth dry with fear.
Grabbing a napkin and a pen from her purse, Harper wrote the letters and worked systematically through them.
Canyon … Canonry … On … Can … You.
You Can Run …
But so many other words were possible. Van Buren County, heck, even Century Avenue was in there, the street where her friend Carrie lived in Matteson.
Scrolling back through her messages, she pulled up the text she’d received when she’d been out shopping with Drea. She was starting to sweat, and a cold shard of icy fear pierced its way through her chest, constricting her breathing.
Atrophied sinister voyeurism: Harper, I missed you. It isn’t over.
She’d become so used to not being Taylor that it hadn’t occurred to her until now that if the message was, in fact, from Nathan, he knew her new name. And if he knew that—and her phone number—he probably knew where she was.
“You okay?” Trent asked before she could figure out what the latest text meant. She hadn’t even noticed he’d returned to the table. “You’ve gone pale, darlin’.”
She crumpled the napkin into a ball in her hand and plastered a fake smile on her face.
“What? No. It’s fine. José’s sending me a shift change. Was hoping for a few more hours.”
She swiped the screen closed. She needed to call Lydia.
* * *
“I think I’m in trouble.” Harper clutched the phone to her ear and looked out her bedroom window at the miserable concrete view. She paced back to the bed, where she picked at a thread of a loose button on the comforter while she explained about the texts.
“They were anagrams, Lydia. Those were my thing. Nathan used to send me anagrams all the time.” Harper tried to ignore memories of finding the little note Avoiding our yell attached to the bathroom mirror one morning.
Darling, I love you. He’d admitted later to finding it on the Web, laughing at how it was the first and last time he’d use the word “darling,” but it hadn’t taken away her joy at the way he had told her the first time that he loved her.
“No one knows that about Harper,” she told her lawyer. She reached for the piece of paper with the solved anagrams. I missed you Harper—it isn’t over. The first of the texts. The second was more menacing: You can run but never be free.
“Okay. I want you to send them to me and I’ll try to find out, discreetly, what Nathan has been up to.
He doesn’t have access to a cell phone in prison, though.
And to be honest, I can’t see him screwing up his chance of parole this close to his review.
If you’re really concerned, though, you should contact the police. ”
“The police? Really?”
“Taylor, nobody wishes more than me that you had stayed around so we could have filed charges against Winston and the chief of police. It was a corrupt few. Don’t let your experience stop you from getting help if you need it.”
Going to the police would involve revealing who she really was.
There would be reports, an electronic paper trail.
Detectives waving giant Miami Police Department badges would conduct the investigation.
And that was assuming she could find any kind of strength to set foot in a police station ever again.
Harper rubbed her forehead. She was in a no-win situation.
She knew what Lydia said was true, but in her gut, she couldn’t believe the texts were a prank.
The carjacking was connected, she knew it.
How could it not be? One thing the trial had taught her: Nathan didn’t need to be close by to hurt her, and if he’d caught up with her now …
After saying good-bye to Lydia, she sent the texts to her and set her phone down on the bed.
There was a small rip in the wallpaper, which was begging her to take hold and pull.
The emotional and physical impacts of the last four years were just beginning to subside.
It was the psychological ones that were likely to make her crazy.
Didn’t she deserve a new life though? What about all those clichéd adages about today being the start of the rest of your life? Or the old chestnut, “Don’t let your past dictate your future.” There must be more than an element of truth to them; every self-help book in the library spouted them.
Harper considered the message she had left for Trent earlier.
Awoken from a playfully erotic dream involving the two of them and a bottle of chocolate sauce, she’d felt an urgent need to take their relationship a step further.
She could sit here for the rest of the day thinking about all the horrors that could be on their way, or she could stop fiddling with the button thread before it fell off and get on with her life.
* * *
By ten o’clock, Trent was back in the studio, his trip to Marathon to visit Kyoko, Junior’s wife, complete. He looked at the bonsai sitting on the corner of his desk, one from Kyoko’s personal collection, and laughed recalling her words.
“How dare you make me wait all these years before asking for a bonsai to give to a girl,” she’d scolded when he’d asked for one of the small trees she nurtured.
Checking his phone, he could see the voice mail alert. Damn reception down in the Keys was not the best.
The first message was from Michael Cooper’s assistant. They wanted to make arrangements for him to travel to LA to meet with the team of the still-unnamed TV show.
The second was from Harper.
“Hey, baby.” She sounded sleepy and he swore he heard the sound of sheets rustling. Maybe he was just getting desperate. His hand had been his only bedtime partner of late and the idea of Harper, naked, soft and warm … mmm.
“I’m sorry our schedules didn’t work out so well this week, but I really enjoyed lunch yesterday. I was thinking maybe you could … umm … well, come over. To my place. On Saturday. To my place … did I say that already?” He smiled, pleased he could fluster her without even being there.
“I thought I’d cook you dinner. I mean, I know you have to work, but you know, later. Or whatever. Anyway. Call me and let me know. Bye, baby.”
Oh yeah. Maybe the drought was coming to an end.