Chapter 2 #4
He continued. “So, for the moment, I suggest that we just bury the hatchet and decide that we’ll cooperate with each other, set aside sniping at each other, and see if we can find a middle ground.
I’m not trying to belittle you. I just want to know that you won’t take off and do something stupid that I can’t rescue you from. ”
“And, of course, you had to rescue me from this one, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Actually I didn’t,” he conceded, waving the white flag. “You were doing pretty well on your own.”
“But I hadn’t completely gotten away.”
“No, but you might have. Thankfully we didn’t have to find out.”
She half smiled at that. “You always were decent at giving a person an out.”
“I don’t think I was decent at a lot of things,” he admitted, as he eyed her curiously. “Sometimes I was just a hard-ass. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I was working my way through it, making sure a lot of people paid for that.”
She stared at him in surprise.
He shrugged. “We all have history. We all have a past that needs working on,” he shared, “whether we are choosing to work on it or not.”
“Wow, I didn’t expect you to ever really admit that.”
He laughed. “It’s not as if we really knew each other, did we? We didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking.”
“No,” she agreed, flushing ever-so-slightly. “Communicating seemed to be much more optional than we thought.”
“I don’t even know about optional,” he clarified, “but I will admit the attraction was fierce, and we spent every moment of our time with each other. Yet trust wasn’t there, and that was the one thing I could not, would not live without.”
“I get it,” she muttered. “I do. I mean, I really get it. So you don’t need to keep hounding me about it.”
“Good,” he replied. “You also have to understand that’s also why I’ll be on your case right now because I can’t trust you to do what you’re instructed to do, even while I’m trying to keep you safe. So that’ll be yet another problem.”
She stared at him, and he watched as her gaze fell to her feet.
He added, “I am not the enemy, but I get it. Your dad and that whole oppression thing of having an old-school father like that would not have been easy.”
He couldn’t even imagine. In his own case, he’d lost his parents early, then been dumped and deserted by the rest of his family, so trust was almost impossible for him on any level.
However, for her, she had been the baby daughter, the only daughter of Amir Galanis, a man of great wealth.
With that great wealth came a great deal of power and, along with it, a great deal of potential for verbal sexual abuse.
“It’s also admirable,” he added, “that you tried to help these women, and you’re right. Arlene is absolutely involved, but I just can’t be running around looking for you all over the place either.”
She looked up at him, defiance in her eyes.
“Hey, I just came back from helping to rescue Tricia,” he reminded her, “and that’s not something I want to do again.”
“But she’s okay, right?”
“She will be okay, yes, but she’ll have trauma to deal with for quite a while,” he noted. “However, she’s strong, and she’ll end up on the other side of it. She’s also hooked up with one of the guys in my team,” he added, with half a smile. “So, I think she’ll do just fine.”
Andrea frowned at him. “Tricia doesn’t hook up easily, so he must be wonderful.”
“He probably is very wonderful in her eyes,” he told Andrea. “The last time I checked on them, she was thinking he was doing the job pretty well.”
Andrea smiled up at him, and this time it was a genuinely warm and heartfelt smile.
“I’m happy for her. She’s a truly good person. I couldn’t say that about a lot of the women in my college, but, in Tricia’s case, she really is. And she’s worked hard to get where she is.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Not long, not well, sporadically running into her over the last couple years, but we’ve had several conversations.
She was always so focused on her degree that it was hard to see where and how she would end up with any kind of a balanced life, especially after all this kidnapping trauma.
She was so dedicated to doing what she felt she needed to do, but that’s not always the easiest thing either,” she pointed out.
“No, it sure isn’t.” His phone buzzed, and he quickly checked it.
With a sigh, he stood up. “Now, we do need to move you. Julius and Kane are in place to watch your apartment, even the building’s main doors, to see if your new friends show up.
So we’re not staying right next door tonight just in case they do appear.
If nothing else we’ll find a hotel. A safe house would be better, and I’ve texted for one but haven’t heard back. So a hotel it is.”
Her face scrunched up.
Hayden shook his head. “No. This building is not secure. Think of your need for security being at your father’s level of security.”
Andrea sighed. “Right. I have cameras, locks. My father has doormen, butlers, and armed security guards inside and out as part of his definition of secure.”
“Exactly. What you have here, I could get past in less than one minute. So we’re leaving. Will you be okay with just one change of clothing for now?”
She nodded.
His lips twitched as he watched her hold her tongue.
“We also need to find out who sent you that text to come to the warehouse for Cleo. It worked to get you into their clutches, and that means you were upsetting someone. They went to that much trouble to find you, so coming here to finish you off won’t be much of an issue for them. ”
“I don’t have my personal phone to check who sent it,” she protested, pulling out her second phone. “They grabbed that one. This one is my work phone. I give this number to the homeless women on the street to call me regarding emergencies.”
“Which explains why the kidnappers grabbed the one and didn’t think to check for a second one.
So Tesla can still download your calls and texts from and to that number.
The issue will be if they called you from a burner phone, which isn’t trackable.
Which is what I would do. And this double phone thing? … When did you start doing that?”
“Recently. It was suggested in a forum I belong to as an extra safety measure. Although I have to admit the double phone thing seems to really give people the wrong idea,” she noted.
“It has a very negative overtone, a criminal activity overtone.”
“Yeah, which is one of the reasons why it works so well. The sleazy guard took away the one phone, but he didn’t realize that I had a second one. They never think of the second one, at least when dealing with me, which is perfect.”
He nodded. “But it’s not protection enough.” He glanced at his watch. “We need to leave, and I mean now.”
“Fine.” She slipped on her socks and tennis shoes and stood up, hating that she didn’t have time to wash them, then turned to him. “I know that you’ll be the one in control, but I also won’t be pushed around,” she warned, “and I won’t be leaving the country just because Daddy says so.”
“In other words,” he noted, with a long-suffering sigh, “you’ll be difficult.”
She laughed. “Maybe, but only if you make things difficult for me first.”
And, with that, she headed for the front door.