Page 218 of Hold Me Until Morning

“That’s why you’re the one person I can count on,” Mr. Wagner said. “After this, I want you in Austin to keep your eye on Pruitt. I want to know I can fully trust him before I send my daughter there.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll text you when it’s done and I’m on my way to Texas.”

“Good. Be safe.”

Be safe?

Be safe?

Brooke wanted to screech it, unable to comprehend what she’d heard. Nausea curled her stomach and fear saturated her skin. She pressed to the wall, petrified when footsteps started to thud on the wood planks, coming her way.

She pressed her hand to her mouth, praying to cover the sound of her breaths as Brent rounded the corner and started across the main porch. Her eyes were wide in horror as he passed.

She didn’t dare inhale until he had fully made it down the main porch steps and strode to the work truck parked in the distance, didn’t move a muscle until he started the truck and whipped it around in the dirt.

Then she sagged, her shoulders slumping as she stumbled forward to watch his taillights disappear down the driveway. Both relief and horror clawed at her insides.

Then her stomach toppled over when she heard the regret in the voice that came from behind. “Ahh, Brooke, I wish you hadn’t heard that.”

FIFTY

HAILEY

I squinted through the daze and the dust that billowed through the morning air.

My mind and spirit trapped on an out-of-control tilt-a-whirl.

Spinning.

Spinning.

Spinning.

“Get in the car, Hailey.” The man I’d adored for all my life, one I’d held on a pedestal, the one I’d believed good and right and caring, opened the back door of the black Mercedes where it sat off to the side of the road about fifty feet away.

My father.

His tone was grim and his expression was hard.

My knees wobbled. The world canting, the sky a spiraling vortex overhead.

Pain splintered through my body, the very real one that burned up my left side and the one that felt like my heart had been pulverized.

Crushed.

No longer recognizable.

“I gave you plenty of time to come to your senses, but you’ve run out of it,” he said.

I blinked, immobile, frozen. Still trying to process that my father had actually run me off the road. Trying to process that he was here. That he was doing this, whatever brutality it was he intended.

A shriek ripped free when a hand suddenly latched onto my wrist and jerked me forward.

Pruitt.

Vileness oozed over me in a slick of depravity as he pressed his mouth close to my face, and I felt the barrel of a gun press up into my ribs. “It’s time you listened.”

“Bring her here before someone comes by,” my father ordered, and Pruitt dragged me forward as I thrashed and flailed, my sense of fight or flight finally coming back to me.

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