Page 49 of Desire Me
Should she ask? Did she really want to know? Nothing about Saint told her that he wanted to harm her. And yet he’d lied.
What the fuck was the answer?
Stopping in front of the fireplace, her back to Saint, she made her decision. She couldn’t ask. Too much was jumbled in her head, too many emotions, too many memories—and the memories were so, so sweet. They made her weak with their sweetness. They hurt her, deep down where she had no memories of ever being hurt this way before.
So she kept her back turned on Saint, not wanting to see his face or anything that might sway her, and headed for the bedroom.
“Rae!”
She kept going.
“Rae, wait! Let me explain.”
She couldn’t. Not right now. She walked into the bedroom, closed the door, and locked it. And refused to answer Saint for the rest of the night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He’d lost her. He knew it, even if her refusal to acknowledge him through the bedroom door hadn’t given him definitive proof. He’d lost her before he even truly had her, and the thought was like a black hole inside him, tearing into pieces when he still needed to be whole. To keep her safe, if not to keep her.
There was no point in trying to sleep. Rae wasn’t letting him in, and all he would do was toss and turn on the guest bed, so he went to work.
Despite her memories, Rae hadn’t seemed to remember anything before their actual meeting at the bar. If she still didn’t know where she had been staying, they still couldn’t access her belongings, even if they’d had the good fortune not to be thrown out after all these weeks. So that was a dead end.
Rae also hadn’t had a phone on her the night they met—he’d seen all her clothes intimately, and no phone had been present, no bulges in the pockets, nothing but the slim wallet she’d pulled out at the bar, holding just enough cash to pay her bill. Either she hadn’t had a current phone at the time or her phone had been long lost along with all her other things. Even knowing it was unlikely, Saint rummaged through their information and found the phone numbers registered to Rae in Maine. Both her landline and cell phone had shown no activity in the past six months. If she’d been smart—and he knew she was—she’d probably ditched her original cell phone so it couldn’t be used to track her, so the lack of activity wasn’t surprising.
“Another fucking dead end,” he grumbled to himself. Then rolled his eyes. He was fucking losing his mind, talking to himself in the middle of the night. Next thing he knew he’d be offering himself a drink.
Tempting, but he couldn’t afford the haze of alcohol, even to forget his pain for a few lucky moments.
By the time dawn hit, he was seriously reconsidering that decision. He was also still coming up empty. Rae hadn’t emerged from the bedroom or made a sound all night. Before he made a very bad decision, one that involved taking the door off the hinges, he called the PI’s office in Maine, but no one answered. That didn’t stop him from calling again, and again, until someone finally picked just after seven a.m.
“Murphy Investigations, how may I help you this morning?”
The receptionist’s cheery voice scraped along Saint’s nerves, but he ignored the irritation like he was ignoring every other emotion raging inside him and asked for the head of the firm. Ms. Cheerful put him right through.
“Ayuh.”
That was more like it. Murphy sounded like he needed another pot of coffee before he’d actually be coherent. Saint knew the feeling.
“Morning, Murphy. I was hoping for an update,” he said by way of an opening.
“Right, yeah. Hold up just a sec.” The sound of shuffling papers and a drawer slamming came through the phone, then a groan from the man and the squeaking protest of a chair as he settled into a seat. “Yeah, so I pursued a few more avenues, but since I was running into dead ends going the official route, I took myself on down to a bar on the docks last night. Friend of mine hooked me up with a dock worker who knows the family. Hangs out with one of the cousins, apparently.”
“One of Raegan’s cousins?”
“Yeah. There’s three, all sons of the uncle. Raegan is supposedly closest to the youngest one, Nathan. Seems she took care of them a lot when they were little—she’s a few years older, and the uncle was working a commercial fishing boat back then. Wife died when the youngest was born. Raegan helped raise the boy. My contact seemed to think Nathan would most likely know where she was.”
“But your contact hasn’t seen her around. Did he say how long?”
“’Bout five, six months. Said she’d gone back to school, he heard, figured she was just busy. Totally calm about it, not a hint of suspicion. Only suspicion he had was reserved for the uncle.”
“What about him?”
“See, most of ’em down there, working the docks or the boats, they’re hardworking, hard drinking folks. But honest. They’ve all known each other so long, they’ve got no secrets. But they also know the ones that ain’t honest. Seems Raegan’s uncle, Francis Conté, had fallen in with some of the latter.”
Saint’s stomach protested, and he grimaced down at the cold dregs of his fourth cup of coffee in as many hours. “What kind of dishonest people?”
“Loan sharks.”
