Page 172 of Sugarloaf Ridge Lies

Fuck, I’ve overslept.

All night I tossed and turned with visions of Skylah. The woman in my dreams, the familiar apparition that’s come to me over the years, hasn’t aged a day. Last night she was so real, as if I’d wake up and she’d be right in front of me.

“Hey.” Liv snuggles into my side and runs her fingernails across my chest. “I didn’t even hear you come to bed.”

“I didn’t wanna wake you.” I kiss her forehead.We need to talk. “So, I had a visitor last night. Len.”

She rubs at her eyes, dazed. “Len?”

“The old copper.”

Her brows bunch.

“Good news is the charges have been dropped.”

Her breath hitches. “For real?”

I should be smiling a mile wide, but I simply nod.

“So, you’re in the clear?”

“Yep. Solicitor will no doubt send me a bill, but yeah.” I share more with Liv about the low-life fucker and the heartbreaking news of what happened to a young girl.

Tears in her eyes, Liv shakes her head. “I went to see him. Geoffrey.”

I choke. “What? When?”

“After you received the summons. I went to his work and asked him to drop the charges.”

Uneasiness stirs in my gut. I rub the side of her arm as my insides heat and bubble. “He could’ve hurt you. The baby.”

She shakes her head. “No. There were people around. It was fine.”

Who knows what kind of people he works with?Birds of a feather flock together...

I shift to face her. Whether it was bravery or naivety that drove her to visit him, she’s lucky nothing happened. “Clearly he knows how to get around that.” A busy night at the pub he was brazen enough to rape a girl, right there in the carpark.

“Okay, but even knowing what I do now, I still would’ve gone. I wasn’t going let him take you away from me, from us. I had to try.”

Wrapping my arms around her shoulders, I kiss her deeply. “I love you, woman, but next time you gotta talk to me. We sort shit out together, yeah?”

“Okay.” Liv grazes her fingers down my cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She has no reason to apologise when all she’s done is prove her loyalty to me, to show what lengths she’ll go to for a future together on the smoothest course. My throat grows thick as I recall the other reason for Len’s visit. Something else Liv has kept from me.Does she feel like she can’t talk to me about this stuff?

“Len came to tell me something else, too. About missing persons’ reports.”

She blinks several times. “Hmm?”

I brush wayward strands of hair from her face. “Why didn’t you come to me with this?”

Her throat bobs on a swallow. “With everything that’s going on, I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I know how hard you’ve tried to find her.”

Oh, sugar.“I want you to feel you can talk to me about anything, ’kay?”

She nods. “I do, it’s just I didn’t believe it at first. When Jean first brought up Skylah, I figured it was a coincidence. But when she sent me all the yearbook stuff, I thought it was more than that. You’d tried for so long to find her, I thought new information might be the key.”

I stare into her stormy blue eyes. “I’m a lucky a son of a bitch havin’ you in my life.”

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