Page 147 of Wife Number One

I gawked at them. “And you just let her?”

She paused in her rocking over Aloha’s lap, steeling me with a look of disapproval that I’d dared to sass her. “I let her go to her room, yes. Because you devastated that girl tonight, Hawk. She needed a goddamn minute. Just like I do now. So go out there and find her and make whatever the hell you did better and leave me to my orgasm.”

I’d never run out of the clubhouse so fast.

Down the path. Up the stairs, shoving open the door that was never locked.

Why the fuck hadn’t I gotten her a lock? “Kara!”

There was nobody in the living room. The kitchen. I slammed my way into the bathroom only to find it empty, and then into her bedroom.

Her clothes were all cleared out.

There wasn’t anything left.

Not even a note.

She was gone.

42

HAYDEN

Ipaced back and forth, boots crunching over the gravel on the edge of the road, and checked my watch for at least the third time in twenty minutes. The bluff road didn’t get a ton of traffic in the middle of the day, let alone at nearly one in the morning, but I felt like a goddamn sitting duck, waiting for Luca to show.

Impatience had my muscles all locked tight, and it was a minute-by-minute fight to just stand there and wait, when Kara was just a few miles away through the woods, packing her bags, readying to run with me.

At least I hoped she was.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I muttered to myself in the darkness. “What the actual fuck business do you have asking anything of that woman?”

I’d tried convincing myself that anything I’d felt for her hadn’t been real.

But those few minutes we’d stolen in a theater bathroom tonight called me a liar. Those few minutes had told me that the last five years of thinking about her had been beyond my control. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was no forgetting what she’d suffered. No forgetting what I’d put her through or what we’d survived together.

No woman would ever understand. No woman would ever compare.

There was no walking away. I was in this up to my fucking eyeballs.

So I stood on the side of that goddamn road, praying Luca had some sort of plan for getting her out.

And she’d come with me.

I wouldn’t force her. I wouldn’t be that man.

She had to want me as much as I wanted her.

From the darkness, two vehicles approached, slowing down when their headlights lit me up. A black van with the name of one of Luca’s Italian restaurants painted on the side. And behind it, Luca’s silver Porsche.

I nodded at the guy behind the wheel of the van as he got out. I vaguely recognized him as one of the guys Luca had working at our restaurants. “Steve, right?” I held out my hand for him to shake.

The man nodded and offered me a smoke from the pack he pulled from his glove box.

I shook my head and went to Luca’s car, since he seemed to be making no effort to get out of his vehicle. He wound down the window as I approached.

He leaned on his elbow. “When you get to the Slayers’ gate, tell them you have a pizza delivery for Riot. No one will stop you. Once you’re inside and you’ve made the delivery, what you do afterward is on you. There’s a lot of people in there, if sources inside are to be believed. And the Slayers have a ton of land behind those fences. Maybe if you’re lucky, they won’t recognize you in the crowd.”

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