Chapter Twenty-Six
“Ryan?” I didn’t miss the hesitancy in Chloe’s tone.
I also didn’t have it in me to assuage that uncertainty.
Not when a battle was raging and I wasn’t entirely certain I’d be able to beat back my need to find Len Taylor and wrap my hands around his throat until he explained what the fuck his friend meant by her. Then it was debatable if I’d stop there or just put the fucker down.
Instead of answering her, I nabbed my phone and tossed it to Chloe.
“Twelve twenty-four. Call Beck.”
“Ryan—”
“Need a minute, Chloe.”
While she was calling Beck, I went over everything we knew about Len Taylor, which wasn’t much.
He was Blackwell’s investment manager. No priors.
No wife. No children. Current on his mortgage and the rest of his bills.
Heathy bank accounts and investments—as they would be.
No deposits that were unaccounted for. No hefty withdrawals or payments.
Beyond that he had a small roster of clients—all überwealthy, but, from what Fallon could find, all legitimate. There were no red flags that would necessitate Shep to take a look into Taylor’s roster.
The phone through the speakers then went to voicemail.
“Call Pete.”
Chloe disconnected, and a few seconds later the phone was ringing again.
“Yo, what’s—”
“Is there any mention of a Dex in any of the files?”
“No.”
“No variations?” I asked. “Dexter? Dex—”
“Nothing. Why?”
I quickly ran down what Chloe had told me.
“And Poppy’s sure she’d never seen this guy?” Pete asked.
Chloe reached over the center console and wrapped her fingers over my thigh. I wanted to say her touch relaxed me, but it absolutely did not.
“She didn’t get a good look at him, so no, she’s not sure.”
“Aiden was there tonight. We’ll run all the plates in the morning and find out who he is. Chloe, what’s your take on this guy?”
I felt her hand twitch.
After a few long beats of silence, I prompted, “Babe?”
When she still didn’t answer, I called out again, “Chloe?”
“I don’t want to answer,” she whispered.
Chloe was perceptive, she had a clear read on this guy and didn’t want to say because she knew my reaction would be violent. Which said all I needed to know.
“I want this fucker found by morning.”
“We’ll have a name.”
I reached out, tapped the red button on the truck’s screen to end the call, and took a deep breath. After four more, my chest still burned but I didn’t feel like I was breathing fire anymore.
“Is that all he said?”
“Yes.”
Her.
That was cryptic as fuck.
Yet it wasn’t.
“What about him freaked you?”
Her hand once again flexed on my thigh.
“His eyes. They were . . . dead.”
Fuck.
“What about Len Taylor?”
“He’s a lapdog. He’s a dick with wandering eyes. A total creep who weirds me out but doesn’t freak me out, if that makes sense.”
I took another breath that did nothing to quell my burning desire to carve the man’s eyeballs out of his head.
“Maybe I was over—”
“Don’t do that,” I interrupted. “If your gut’s telling you something’s wrong, you listen to it. If something doesn’t sit well, creeps you, freaks you, makes you uneasy, you listen to that and you tell me.”
The silence stretched. I drove. Finally, I heard Chloe sigh. “That guy Dex freaked me out. Now you’re freaking me out. So now I’m thinking I should be more freaked out. And I’m freaked out more because I feel some rage-y energy rolling off of you and it’s making it hard to breathe.”
Rage-y.
How in the hell can she make me want to smile when I want to find Taylor and torture him until he spills his guts?
“You should be all the way freaked out,” I told her. “You know I don’t like you being there—full stop. But tonight proves one of the many reasons why this isn’t a good idea. There are too many unknowns.”
“Ryan—”
“I’m trying,” I interrupted her. An ugly taste filled my mouth, ready to spew in great detail what happens to beautiful women who find themselves entangled with men like Blackwell and Taylor.
“I know you are,” she whispered. “Tomorrow your membership will be approved. I have the next two days off, and when I’m back to work, you’ll be there.”
That was something but not enough.
“And I’m freaked out, which means I’m being careful. I’m listening but not asking questions, just like Catarina told me.”
As fucked up as it was, I wanted Chloe to be freaked. I wanted her so scared she wouldn’t take any chances beyond the already big fucking one she was taking.
“Poppy wanted to break into Muriel’s office.”
Jesus, fuck me.
“But I talked her out of it. I reminded her there were cameras. She backed down, but then she broke down and had an epic crying jag. She wasn’t any better after she talked to Pamela.”
“You need to contain her.”
“I’m trying. But, Ryan, Poppy loves big.
Once you’re in her heart, that’s it. You’re there forever.
Which means she’s friendly, she has a lot of friends, but she only lets in a select few.
She let in Cynthia—they’re tight. That means she’s feeling this deep.
It also means she’s not going to back down.
Not for me. Not for anyone. And I have to admit, as much as this scares me, it’s one of the reasons I love her.
She’s the type of friend who you know that no matter what, no matter how crazy, how scary, how dangerous, she will never leave your side. ”
I was not having good thoughts. Not that I’d had any good thoughts about this from the beginning, but now they’d plummeted down to the pits of hell. “And it’s your job to protect her while she’s going all out putting herself out there for a friend.”
“It’s what friends do,” she muttered.
No, it’s what someone who values loyalty and deep, meaningful relationships does. It’s what I would do for Pete, Mase, Aiden, Gavin, Fallon, and even Jack and Beckett. It’s what those men would do for me and each other, and that now extended to Catarina and Calista.
Chloe was curled into me, wearing my tee, hair still piled on top of her head, where she’d tied it before she’d taken a shower, smelling like my soap, and I couldn’t help thinking about all the times I’d lain exactly where I was, arms empty, wishing Chloe was next to me.
The fuck of it was half of the fantasies I’d had about her, what she would feel like, had nothing to do with sex.
It was this.
Her cuddled next to me, getting ready to drift off to sleep, while knowing she’d be right there when I woke up.
That was the fantasy—the dream that I’d ruthlessly shoved aside, not wanting to believe it was within reach.
The risk of having everything I wanted and losing it was a gamble I’d been too scared to take.
Now I had her exactly where I’d never thought she’d be, and she was caught up in a situation that twisted my insides.
“You know,” Chloe said into the dark. “You’re a noisy thinker too.”
My arm tightened around Chloe. She nuzzled her cheek on my chest and pressed closer.
“What’s on your mind?” she continued.
All the ways I could lose you.
I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I asked, “Are you up for helping me in the office for a few hours tomorrow?”
I felt Chloe nod before she pushed away, and her head came off my chest. “At the Plank?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes.”
I had mixed feelings about this. She was supposed to be on vacation, resting.
But I knew after the week was up, she’d be back to pulling double shifts.
Today while she was running her errands, between going over the intel we had—which was the definition of not enough—I’d talked to the guys and pitched the idea of bringing Chloe on as an office manager.
“Wait. Is this a ploy—”
“We hate paperwork,” I interrupted her. “And personally, I’d rather be waterboarded than sit in the office and check email.
Twice in the last three months, we got payroll in five minutes before the cutoff time.
So this isn’t a ploy or a handout. We need an office manager.
The added benefit to that is when we go out on missions, we won’t have to rotate who stays behind if we have someone we trust in place to run the bar while we’re gone. ”
Chloe settled back onto my chest and asked, “Can you tell me about your missions?”
Well damn, I’d opened that door nice and wide.
“What do you want to know?”
“Where was your last one?”
“I stayed back the last mission. The team went to Dubai to help Calista. The one before that, Aiden and I met the team in Belize.”
“Can you tell me the specifics?”
I gave her a tight squeeze to soften my denial. “I’d rather not.”
When I felt her nod, I started to relax. I quickly found I should’ve stayed on guard.
“Because you don’t like to talk about it, or is it because you don’t think I can handle it?”
Fuck.
“It’s not about what I think you can handle. It’s that I don’t want you carrying the burden of knowing.”
She seemed mollified with my answer and switched gears to another topic I didn’t want to discuss. “Do you think that Cynthia’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think she’s being hurt,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back.
“I need to know, Ryan. I need to understand so I can help Poppy when the time comes.”
Sneak attack using her big heart and loyalty to get details I didn’t want to give. I wouldn’t call it manipulative as such, but it was clever.
“If the time comes, Chloe, we’ll all help Poppy. But for now, let’s concentrate on finding Cynthia.”
“I’m scared for her,” she continued whispering.
“Scared for both of them, but mostly Cynthia. I’ve seen enough true crime shows to know what could be happening to her.
So has Poppy, and it’s killing her. She feels so guilty for not seeing something that I don’t think was there.
But she’s got it in her head she missed something.
And I think she feels a little guilty for thinking that Pamela was overreacting at first.”
Poppy was a wild card. Her dedication to finding her friend could lead her to making poor decisions, or it could lead to hypervigilance that would give us a piece of intel we needed.
But the longer this went on, the more dangerous to the mission she would become.
“I want to warn you, there might come a time when Poppy will need to be locked down.”
“Locked down how?” While I was trying to find a gentle way to explain what would happen, Chloe jumped back in. “You mean locked down like cuffing her to your bed?”
Poppy would never be cuffed to my bed for any reason.
“Fuck no. We’d take her to a safe house and contain her until this was over.”
“Let me guess. I’d be joining her.”
If I had my way, hell yes.
“That’d be up to you.”
She gave me more of her weight and asked, “Because you’re worried I’d be pissed at you or because you know about my dad?”
Good Christ. We needed to consider bringing her in on interrogations.
“Both,” I told her honestly.
I waited for her to ask more. When she didn’t, since she’d brought up her father, I inquired, “How’d your visit go with your dad today?”
Over pizza she’d told me about her day, noticeably leaving out her visit to Leisure Village. The other omission was Poppy talking to Pamela and breaking down about her friend.
“I watched him play checkers.” She sighed.
“There’s no delicate way to ask this—”
“If you’re going to ask if he recognizes me, the answer is no.
I’m Chloe. Just Chloe. Not his daughter.
Not cupcake. Not sweetie. Not anything but Chloe, a stranger that sits next to him and watches him play checkers or cards or watches TV with him.
” I heard the hitch in her inhale before she continued.
“Leisure Village was supposed to be temporary. Just until he got to a place where some of his memories returned and my mom could manage him at home.”
“He doesn’t recognize your mom either?”
“Sometimes he’ll get snatches of a memory.
It happens more with my mom than with me.
But when the memory is lost, he gets agitated.
That’s what happened yesterday. He was confused and fell.
He hit his head on the corner of the table and needed stitches.
Since he doesn’t remember his wife, she had to wait in the lobby while he was taken to the infirmary and stitched up.
There are a lot of worse parts about this, so I can’t say this is the worst-worst, but when I see him do something like rub the pad of his thumb against his forefinger, I know he’s thinking about something because that’s so him.
That’s the old him. He’s still in there.
Or like when the doctor mentioned his sense of humor, and I know he’s in there, it’s just that there are big pieces that he can no longer reach. ”
“Baby.”
She blew out a shuddered breath.
“Can we stop talking about this now?”
“Yeah, Chloe. Rest.”
She was quiet for a long stretch before she whispered, “Death by a thousand cuts.”
Guilt immediately flooded. Not for the few days where I’d acted every bit of the bossy asshole she’d accused me of being, but for the last ten months.
How in the hell had I not seen that Chloe was drowning?
“Next time you go visit, I want to go—”
“Ryan—”
“I can’t be there every time. But I want to get to know your dad, and I want him to get to know the man who’s falling in love with his daughter. Not only do I want that, I need it, and even if he won’t remember, your dad needs it too.”
I felt it before I heard it—the first jerk of her shoulders, followed by a raw groan that sounded like it was both painful and depleted what was left of her energy. Before the sound could fully take root, I swiftly pulled her closer. Chloe took it from there and buried her face in my throat.
Then the full-body sobs came.