How do I feel about her?
“I am. Something I need to know?”
“Yes, sir. I noted her leaving only half an hour ago. She snuck out the back to avoid the reporters.”
White hot anger surges in me so hard and fast, I have to clench my jaw to keep myself in check. It isn’t his fault. He wasn’t told he was on detail for her. His job is to protect me and the hotel, but it was a mistake not to give him explicit instructions.
“Where did she go?”
He hesitates before he responds, likely knowing I’m not going to like his answer.
“I don’t know, sir. Our footage only covers the exit of the hotel. Do you want me to call the police?”
Hell no. I exhale a labored breath. “Find. Her.”
I hang up the phone and shove it in my pocket. I dial Miranda next, but she doesn’t answer. I glance at the alarm clock next to my bed. Seven. I growl at the clock, angry that everyone I need to contact isn’t in immediate reach when I need them.
She saw the footage on TV, I know she did. I shake my head as I pace the living room. I should’ve talked it over with her. Was I too harsh, too aloof, too brooding and angry? I know I could’ve been better. Maybe I took it for granted that her signature on that paper meant I could keep her, like a caged bird. Maybe I took way too much for granted.
I grab my phone and wallet, tug a baseball cap on my head so no one recognizes me, and I go to my car that’s waiting for me.
My phone rings, and I answer it before it rings a second time. Security.
“Found her location, sir. She’s gone home. She’s on her way there, anyway. Hasn’t quite arrived.”
“Where is she now?”
He gives me detailed instructions.
“Do you want me to fetch her, sir? Offer her a ride?”
“No. I’ve got this.”
I hang up the phone, punch the address into GPS, and start to go. I’m supposed to be boarding a plane to Peach City in just a few days, heading back home, and I took it for granted I’d take her with me. I can’t believe it never dawned on me that she’d leave like this. But more surprising to me is the realization that I care as much as I do.
Is she okay? Did something else happen that pushed her away from me? Is she hiding something from me?
I shake my head. Of course she is. We’ve only barely met, and there are things about both of our lives that we haven’t shared with each other.
I’ll have to change that.
I exit the back parking deck, the one where the staff park. Luckily, it’s as I suspected, and the journalists and news crews are only stationed out front this early in the morning. As if I’m going to go marching through the front door of my own hotel, letting those fools snap my picture.
Pulling out onto the street, GPS says we’re closing in on the location I was given. As I drive, I notice the roads give way from opulence and grandeur to simpler surroundings as we near the outskirts of Boulder City. I haven’t been this far from The City That Never Sleeps in years, and as I drive, I feel as if a sort of fog’s being lifted, at this reminder that there’s so much more life outside the walls of my hotel. I feel like I’ve been in hibernation, and I’m waking from a long winter.
Did Katie do this to me?
She comes from humble means, this much I’ve already figured out about her. What else about her do I not know? I sigh.
Fucking everything.
I’ve never wanted to know more about another person, I realize, with a painfully sick twist of my stomach. How goddamn selfish can one person be? I know why I’ve done it, why I’ve kept everyone in my damn life at a distance from me. I know that if I draw close to someone, the chances of getting hurt again are so much higher. I know all this, and yet it doesn’t stop me from sabotaging myself. But I’ve never been tempted with a woman before… not like I am with Katie.
GPS says I’m seconds away from her home. But what if she didn’t go there? I call her cell phone for the twentieth time, only to have it go to voicemail.
And then I see her. She’s got her backpack with her laptop slung over her shoulders and the other bags hang heavily from her hands as if she’s weary from more than just the weight of them.
Is she weary from me?
For one brief moment in time, I’m not angry at her like I was. My heart—God, I still have a heart that beats in this cold chest of mine— squeezes. Katie looks like a lonesome little girl who ran away from home. Her hair is scraggly and messy, all sweaty from her long walk, and yet she’s beautiful to me.