Broken, p.23
Broken, page 23
“I’ve got your money,” he said. He angled his chin toward the belt he’d draped over the back of the desk chair. There was also money on the desk, the five thousand he’d taken from her at the bus station, along with the money he’d found hidden inside her clothes while she slept. Her jeans had inner pockets sewn inside, and there had been another thousand in each of the pockets, as well as tucked inside her shoes. She was a money bag on legs.
Sarah gave him a withering look. “Yes, I figured that much out.”
She didn’t ask him to return it. Didn’t so much as glance at her belt or the cash on the desk. She just kept on folding her clothes until the bags were once more nice and tidy. She’d slipped his shirt in there, too. Nice and subtle, with no change in her expression as she did it.
Why—
The question leaped to his lips but he bit it back. He wasn’t going to ask her. Not right now. Not until he figured out if he could trust anything she said. Not until he figured out if he wanted to try trusting anything she said.
After she finished with her bags, she zipped them closed. He went to take one from her, but she had both of them in hand before he managed to get within two feet of the bed. Cutting a wide berth around him, she dumped them by the door and then retreated deeper into the room.
She didn’t go to the bed, though. She went to the closet and rose on her toes, grabbing one of the pillows and blankets stashed on the top shelf. Without looking at him, she took them to the couch and settled down.
Quinn frowned. “Take the bed. I’m not going to sleep much.” “I’m fine,” she said, her voice cool. And she still didn’t so much as glance his way.
“Take the bed,” he repeated.
Finally, she turned her head. Her brown eyes flashed as she glared at him. “I don’t want to take the damn bed.” Then she settled down on the couch, turned her back to him, and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.
Scowling at her, he stormed to the bed and grabbed a blanket and pillow. He was tired as hell, but he doubted he’d sleep. He might have tried lying down on the other side of the king-sized bed after she fell asleep, because if she moved around any, he’d wake up.
What if she tried to slip away . . . ? Something inside him wanted to scream at the thought.
He ignored it. Maybe if he tried hard enough, he could ignore that screaming, and the pain that kept slicing through him.
He threw the pillow on the ground, dropped the blanket on top of it. Then he braced his back against the door and slid down. Stretching his legs out in front of him, he stared at Sarah’s back.
“I’M done.”
Gritty-eyed, Quinn looked up as Sarah slipped out of the bathroom. She stared at him, her face a cool, empty mask. Her eyes met his briefly and then picked a point over his shoulder.
Done. They could go.
Make the drive to Chicago, where he would turn her over to her husband and then he’d never see her again. Fuck—his hands flexed, itching to grab her and pull her against him. Cradle her close. Never let go.
Stick to what your heart tells you.
A muscle jerked in his jaw. If he listened to what his heart was telling him, then he would do just that. Never let her go. The part of him that refused to let her go wasn’t worried about the damage she’d done to his pride. It wasn’t worried about the fact that she was already taken. It wasn’t worried about the lies or anything other than the unbearable thought that he had to let her go.
“Are you going to get up so we can leave or just sit there all day?” Sarah asked.
Stick to what your heart tells you. How in the hell could he trust his heart, though?
Time. He needed a little more time. Just a little more to make sense of everything roaring inside him.
“I want breakfast,” he said flatly, shoving off the wall. He dropped back into the chair in front of the desk and flipped open the pseudo-leather binder that held the hotel information, blank letterhead, and menus. He wasn’t hungry, but it would kill another hour if they ate something before heading out. Maybe he could use some of that time to smooth out a bit of the chaos.
“What do you want?” he asked after he’d skimmed the menu. He watched her in the mirror as she stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
“Coffee.”
Quinn frowned. “Anything to eat?”
“I’m not hungry. Just coffee.”
Coffee.
He ran his tongue along his teeth and spun around in the chair, staring at her. “There’s a gym here. You want to do your run?”
Pushing up on one elbow, she looked at him as a smile curled her lips—it was a rather satisfied-looking smile. Actually, it was more like a smirk than a real smile, he decided.
“No. I don’t want to go for a run.” Another one of those odd, indescribable looks flashed through her eyes as she lay back down.
“No more. No more running. No more stupid exercising. I’m done.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw her hands moving. Fingers flexing, then curling into tight fists.
“You ever going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked quietly.
Sarah closed her eyes. “You’ve already decided you know what’s going on. Why should I waste my breath? Order your breakfast, Quinn. Order my coffee. Then let’s get this show on the road.”
Sighing, he turned back to the desk and reached for the menu that didn’t have anything on it that he really wanted. He placed the order and then hunkered down over the desk and started trying to unravel some of the knots in his soul.
He wasn’t ready to leave yet. Even the thought of turning Sarah over to her husband made his skin crawl.
In his gut, there was a voice screaming Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.
“How did you know you could trust him? How did you know you should?”
“There wasn’t ever much of a question. Part of me trusted him pretty much from the beginning. Otherwise . . . Look, this is complicated, and very personal, but I never consciously made a decision to trust him. I just did. I just knew I could. I knew I should.”
His heart, his gut, they were screaming. Demanding he trust. Demanding he stop what he was doing before he made one huge, motherfucking mistake. In his head, there was scathing laughter, mockery, and voices of self-doubt that told him he’d already made one motherfucking mistake by trusting her. Wanting her. Loving her.
Quinn found himself staring at the blank letterhead in the front of the information binder. Without understanding exactly why, he located a pen and pulled a sheet of the letterhead out.
“IF I’ve got it timed right, you’ll get message number nineteen within the next five minutes,” Quinn murmured, flipping the phone closed and looking up at Sarah.
She sat across from him at the diner table and ignored him, much as she’d done all morning, ever since they’d left St. Louis. Quinn laid her cell phone on the chipped Formica tabletop and spun it around.
Her gaze jumped to it, then moved away, just as quickly.
That look again—
Hell, that look confused the hell out of him. He’d seen something similar to it before—anticipation. It reminded him too much of the rush that always hit right before an op back when he’d still been in the army. The rush he got when he located some of the dangerous bastards who’d skipped out on bail.
Excitement. Anticipation. Mixed with fear.
The fear bothered him. No matter how mad he was, he wasn’t going to put her in the hands of a man who’d hurt her—of course, she wouldn’t tell him a damn thing, either.
She’d managed to go the entire morning without saying a single word to him. The silence hurt. He hadn’t expected that. He’d thought the worst of the pain had come when he’d flipped open that file and seen the face of the woman he’d fallen in love with. The married woman he’d fallen in love with. He hadn’t thought anything could hurt worse than the lies she’d told him.
But her silence did.
She wouldn’t talk to him. She didn’t offer any sort of explanations, reasons, excuses. He’d been expecting something, he guessed. Tears, maybe, either real or fake. Some sort of story to explain why she’d done what she’d done, why she’d run. An apology. A smile.
Something.
But she gave him nothing.
Quinn, who’d always wanted silence over empty words, would have given anything to have her just talk to him. About anything. About everything.
Hell, she could even keep up the lies she’d been telling him . . .
Be honest, man. How many lies has she actually told you? She lied about her name, and that’s pretty much it. You never asked if she was married—
A lie of omission. Still counts as a lie, he told himself. Still counts.
The phone chirped out a tune that had become extremely familiar.
Quinn gave the phone a dirty look and then glanced up at Sarah. “So who do you think it is this time?” he asked. “Is it the impatient bastard? Or the other one?”
He didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He tapped his fingers on the table and grabbed the phone. “It’s gonna be the impatient bastard. The other one’s only sent two messages.
“Whaddya know . . . ?” Quinn flipped the phone open and showed her the number on the display. “Impatient bastard. This makes message number nineteen. Must be going for some sort of record here.” Sighing, he read the message. “Whoever it is, he wants you to call him. Now.”
Sarah gave him a disinterested look. “If the messages are bothering you so much, either let me use the phone or turn it off.”
“You want to call him, you tell me who he is and why he keeps calling.”
She gave him that same, withering stare. “It’s none of your business who it is.”
“Then he can just keep calling.” Quinn had already tried calling the number himself, but as soon as he spoke, the call was disconnected.
“Do you plan on returning the phone to me?” she asked.
He slid her a glance. “It’s possible you could talk me into it—tell me why you ran away. Tell me what made you do it—the truth—and it’s possible I might give you the phone back. Hell, it’s possible I might give you your money, get up, and walk away—you can try to lose yourself again.”
She stared at him. Her eyes, those warm brown eyes, were cool and mocking. “How very kind of you.”
She wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing. Fuck.
“I don’t get it,” Quinn said, shaking his head. He was confused as hell, and he didn’t like it. He also didn’t like how helpless he felt. He didn’t like the fact that he’d had a damned hard time looking himself in the eye, and he didn’t like all the unknowns in the current situation. Too many of them.
But most of all, he hated the fact that he had already lost her and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“I don’t get it,” he said again, his voice quieter.
“You don’t get what?” Sarah asked, shooting him a dour look.
“You’ve spent the past two years hiding. If you wanted to be away from him that desperately, there’s got to be a reason . . . all you have to do is tell me why. Ask me to let you go.”
She blinked and cocked her head. “Would you do it as easy as that?”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
Because I love you. Because something made you run and I don’t want you running. I don’t want you unhappy. I don’t want you afraid. He hated the thought of her unhappy. Hated the thought of her being afraid—fear was a fucking bitch. Hell, if he wasn’t so damned afraid right now, he might be able to tell her all of that.
Tell her . . . and then watch her disappear from his life.
“Because of you,” he finally said. He wanted to tell her. Wanted to force the words from his throat, but they wouldn’t come. Might have something to do with the fist-sized knot lodged just above his trachea. He swallowed around it and tore his eyes away from her face.
God, that heart-shaped face, those big brown eyes, they were going to haunt him. No matter what happened, for the rest of his life, he was going to see that face every time he closed his eyes to sleep.
He hadn’t thought there was anything in the world that could hurt him like he was hurting now. Not even Elena.
“Will you tell me?” he asked, forcing the words out. Tell me . . . ask me to let you go. She wouldn’t really want to go back to somebody who’d hurt her, would she? She wouldn’t want to go back to somebody she hated, would she? So if she was so ready to go back, it meant she didn’t hate her husband—meant he hadn’t hurt her.
He remembered the flash in her eyes when he’d asked her the first time. She’d told him she’d kill a man who hurt her—he believed her, but it made things that much harder. If she hadn’t run because Morgan had hurt her, then why?
Maybe she was playing some bizarre, incomprehensible game, and Quinn was clueless about the rules.
“Shit.” He dropped his head into his hands and tried to tell himself the burn in his eyes was anything but tears—that the ache in his chest came from something other than his shattered heart.
“Relax, Quinn.”
He lowered his hands and stared at her from under his lashes. “Relax.”
She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. “Yeah, relax. You’re just an hour shy of getting a nice pile of money. Easy money.”
“Easy?” He snorted. “You think this is easy?”
She stared at him levelly. “You didn’t have to hunt me down. I haven’t tried to get away. I more or less fell into your lap. Easy money.”
“Bullshit.” He once more focused his attention on the window. A lot easier to stare out over the expressway than look at her. His mind raced. They were an hour south of Chicago. He was running out of time to get her to talk to him, but damned if he knew how to make her do it.
He hadn’t bothered calling to check in with Martin, and he had yet to call their client to advise him of their impending arrival. Both were things he needed to do, but he wasn’t terribly inclined to talk with Martin, and he definitely wasn’t in the mood to get into a discussion with the man married to Sarah.
Plus, he didn’t want to clue the man in on anything, not until he had a better idea of what was going on. What had made her run.
He scowled, thought back to just how much money Sarah had been carrying stashed on her body. Close to eight thousand cash. “So where’s the rest of the money?” he asked.
She glanced at him and then resumed staring out the window. Gritting his teeth, Quinn fought the urge to slam his fist into the table. He was sick and tired of being treated like he didn’t exist, especially by her.
The waitress appeared at the table, giving them a tired, empty smile. “What can I get for you folks?”
“I just want some ice water,” Sarah said, her voice as tired and empty as the waitress’s smile.
Scowling, Quinn said, “You didn’t eat anything this morning, or last night. Order some food.”
Sarah shrugged restlessly.
“Bring us two burgers, fries.” Quinn waited until she left before he looked back at Sarah. “You need to eat.”
“I’d just as soon have an empty stomach, considering the lovely day you have planned for me.”
“I don’t want to take you to Chicago,” Quinn blurted out. The words echoed between them, and as damning as they were, he couldn’t regret speaking them. He didn’t want to take her to Chicago, to turn her over to somebody else—husband or not. Quinn wanted her. All of her, all to himself.
“Of course you do,” Sarah said, her voice cool and mocking. “You’ve got a job to do. All that easy money is waiting for you.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the money,” he snapped. He reached out and caught her hand, tugging on it even as she tried to resist, tried to pull away.
She curled her lip at him. “Yeah. Sure.”
“I don’t care about the money,” he snarled. “I care about . . .”
You. The word froze in his throat. It wouldn’t come out. “Look, I don’t care about the money. I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to do. Just give me a reason,” he said. “Just tell me why you ran. Just give me the answer to that.”
Sarah stared at him balefully. “And you’ll what?” she asked bitterly. “Forget you ever saw me?”
Then she snorted and jerked on her hand, tried to pull away from him. Quinn wouldn’t let go—couldn’t let go. “What’s going on, Sarah? This doesn’t make sense—if you don’t like your husband, divorce him. Why just disappear like that? Why spend your life in hiding if he didn’t hurt you?”
It didn’t fit—no matter how many times he tried to get the pieces to align in his mind, they didn’t fit. She didn’t fit, not into any of the scenarios he’d constructed in his mind as he tried to explain away what was going on. She wasn’t a money-grubber. She wasn’t the flighty sort who’d just get bored and disappear—she’d put too much work into disappearing and she’d done a damn good job of doing it.
Hell, if fate hadn’t put them on a collision course, would she have been found? He’d spent some time looking deeper into her background over the past two years, using his laptop while she slept in the hotel room and doing a sketchy search. It yielded even sketchier results—for the past two years, it was like Sarah Morgan had fallen off the face of the earth.
He could have gone deeper, but he was having trouble doing so. Part of him suspected he wouldn’t like what he’d find if he searched too deep.
There was one plausible scenario, one that would explain her running, even though it left his heart tied into knots and his gut cold with fury. Had Morgan hurt her? Threatened to? Even thinking about it left Quinn feeling sick inside. Sick and murderous, but it would explain why she’d run, and it did a hell of a lot better job explaining it away than anything else.
But it didn’t fit either. Because the woman he was looking at was a fighter. She had confidence bred down into her bones, the kind of confidence an abused woman couldn’t understand.
Nothing fit and it was driving him fucking nuts—he wanted this to fit. Needed it to fit, needed to understand why.
