“He’s not just going to go away, Tad. If it was that easy, I’d never have had to run in the first place.”
“You were younger. A lot more vulnerable. Completely alone. You had no training yet, no counseling, to help you stand up to his manipulation. And Lord knows, in North Carolina, you’d had no way to compete with the power he wields. It would’ve been your word against his.”
She stared at him. “You believe me.”
“I thought that was established the second you left with me,” he said. “The second I asked you to go. Either I was going to trust that you were telling the truth and not delusional, or I wasn’t. And either you were going to trust me or you weren’t. There weren’t a lot of options, and no time to find any more.”
She’d had similar thoughts rushing through her mind as they’d driven, but Ethan was right there. She hadn’t been free to speak...
“I’ve never been so thankful to hear a man say he had to pee,” Tad said, smiling over at her. “I’d have figured out a way to get you out of there, even if I had to hold the man at gunpoint, but this way Ethan is none the wiser...”
She nodded. Staring out the front windshield. “I left with you because I believed I’d have a better chance of escaping from you than from him.”
He’d shared her most vulnerable confidences with her father. Brian O’Connor had made sure that arrow landed on her heart during their conversation at the police station that day. He’d let her know he’d had the power to get Tad to “tell” on her.
“You’re free to go anytime,” Tad said, totally serious as he looked over at her. “I swore to myself that I’d get you away from him. That I’d undo what I could of the damage I’d done, but you owe me nothing.”
She had money. Her emergency pack.
“You want some jerky?” she asked him, reaching into the back seat to retrieve the pack on the floor behind her.
She removed the jerky. He took a piece. She chewed one.
“It could be that all that time you were working for my father, you genuinely thought you were saving me.” She told him what she’d realized at some point during that very long day.
“Or that I did what it takes to do a good job. That I was on the payroll and, being off work, needed the paycheck. That, after letting down my peers on that last case, I wasn’t going to be disloyal to another man in uniform. Particularly not the state’s fire chief.”
“On the other hand, it could be that you care more about the end in mind than the means,” she told him.
“Or it could be that I went to California to do a job and fell in love, instead.”
Her heart jumped. Her stomach jumped. She wanted to be happy. She could feel happiness out there, right in front of her.
“He has the power to see that you won’t work as a detective again. Especially now. Taking me away like this...”
“You haven’t been declared incompetent. His paperwork only gave him permission to have you examined. You’d have passed with flying colors.”
“I never intended to let it get that far.”
“I know.”
She turned to look at him. “You did? You do?” She needed the honest-to-God truth, whatever that might be.
“Your knuckles, they were white on the chair. You weren’t giving in to him. You were pandering to him. Patronizing him.”
“I was taking it,” she said. “To do anything different at that point would have been stupid.”
“You had to get home to get Ethan’s things.” He said, nodding toward the bag still on her lap.
She’d needed things for Ethan, either way.
“You told him he was going on the vacation you talked about. You’d prepared him. In your quiet, careful, intelligent and completely sane way, you were taking care of your son.”
Irritated by the tears that sprang to her eyes, she looked ahead and said, “It’s what I do.”
“It’s what I’d like to do, too.”
He reached for her hand. She hesitated.