Page 42 of The Unknown Colton
She pressed a hand over her heart at the horrific thought and the physical pain it brought her. She didn’t want to lose Troy, but she felt in some ways she already had. She’d lost the Troy that for the past ten years she’d planned a future with; she’d lost the man she’d envisioned as her partner in business and life.
Tears blurred her vision, and she had to blink them away to unlock the door. Her hand trembled, and she still struggled to get the door opened. Then she realized she’d locked it.
It must have already been unlocked.
But how? She was the only one with a key, or so she’d been told. But from the condition of them, it didn’t look as if the locks had been changed recently. Maybe whoever had keys from when it was still the Shelby Hotel had used them to stop in and look at the place.
She hoped that was all they’d done. She wanted to get the place up and running as quickly as possible. She had to if she was going to pay her dad back as fast as she’d promised.
He’d told her to take her time; he’d even offered her more money. But she wanted to do this on her own.
No. She wanted to do this with Troy.
But if he was here, he was probably out in his old truck watching her. Hopefully he was the only one.
A thump and then a tinkle of breaking glass startled her. It came from somewhere inside the hotel.
And she realized she was not alone. Nobody would have broken into a long abandoned hotel to find food.
So why were they here?
What did they want?
* * *
The physical therapist had turned him away today. “You’re exhausted. You need to rest.”
But Troy wasn’t tired because of therapy; he was tired because he couldn’t sleep with Lakin so close and yet so far from his reach. She hadn’t just shut him out of her bedroom; it was as if she was shutting him out of her life, too.
Or maybe he’d shut himself out, just like Hetty had warned him. Being too stubborn and too proud.
He really didn’t want to be Lakin’s hero, like Hetty had accused him of wanting; he just didn’t want to be a burden to her. He wanted her to be happy and, more important, safe.
To ensure her safety, he’d followed her from the RTA office over to the old Shelby Hotel. He waited until she’d parked and gone inside before he pulled into the parking lot. Weeds were growing throughthe asphalt because nobody had been using it. The building looked as abandoned as the parking lot; its windows were all boarded up. The wood siding was weathered and, in some places, rotted. The place needed a lot of work.
But of course, Lakin would see the potential in it. Just as she must have seen the potential in him all those years ago. She was always so positive and hopeful until recently. Until he’d hurt her.
His heart hurt more than his back that he’d done that. He’d let her down in more ways than one. First, he hadn’t told her when he was in the hospital, and second, he didn’t reply to her texts and emails about the hotel.
But Troy loved her too much to saddle her with a cripple, which he might wind up being if he got hurt again. He wanted to be an asset to her, not a liability. He just wasn’t sure how he could help her except to keep her safe right now.
While she’d talked to Eli like she’d promised, Troy wasn’t sure what else her oldest brother was doing to protect her. Ideally the ABI lieutenant would have run Jasper Whitlaw out of town, but Troy was pretty sure he’d seen the man skulking around town still.
Whitlaw drove an old pickup truck like Troy’s, like Billy Hoover’s. And Whitlaw was always somewhere in the vicinity of Lakin, like Troy was. Strangely enough, sometimes Billy Hoover was, too.
Troy didn’t trust their old school bully any more than he trusted the stranger claiming to be Lakin’sfather. With those two never far away from her, not to mention that bored rich RTA client Eric Seller, Troy needed to stick even closer to her.
He pushed open the door to his truck and stepped out onto the cracked asphalt of the old parking lot. He waited for his back muscles to tighten from twisting himself out from under the steering wheel. But he didn’t feel even a twinge of discomfort. Maybe the physical therapy was helping. Maybe he would recover enough to be the partner Lakin deserved to have.
Feeling a little lighter and more hopeful, he studied the hotel for a moment. Instead of seeing the boarded-up windows and weathered wood, he saw the potential that Lakin must have seen. The location was great, and the structure itself looked solid. The roof wasn’t sagging, and the walls were straight. It might not take as much time and money and manpower as he thought to renovate it into something special.
Lakin wasn’t just optimistic; she was smart. And she was gutsy as hell to have gone ahead and bought this property at an auction with no chance for inspections or way to back out of it. But because she was so smart and determined, he knew that she would work hard and make it a success.
He felt a yearning to be part of it, part of her dream, of her future with this business and with a family. With a little girl who looked like that little girl in the photograph Whitlaw had given Lakin.He headed toward the front door, eager to see inside the building.
When he put his hand on the knob, he heard Lakin’s scream.
Chilled, he tried the knob. It didn’t move.
