Page 25

“No.”
He shakes his head. “The guy never gets the benefit of the doubt, right?”
“No.” I narrow my eyes. “If she wants to get away from you enough to lie, then she still really wants to get away from you.”
“Fuck this,” he spits. He steps around me. “I’m leaving.”
“And staying away,” I say, watching him stomp down the steps.
He doesn’t answer.
Ruby pulls into the driveway just then. She gets out quickly, standing in the open door of her car. Which is the opposite of what I told her to do. I roll my eyes. Of course it is.
She’s watching him go. “Ruby,” I say. “Come on.”
She slams the door of her car and hurries up to the porch, pulling the strap of her purse up on her shoulder. “What happened?” she asks, breathlessly.
“I told him to leave and not come back,” I say, grabbing her purse and digging inside for her keys.
“And?”
“And he won’t come back,” I say. I mostly believe that. I think he believed me when I said I have a lot of ways of making his life very miserable.
That doesn’t mean he’s going to go away entirely or sit quietly by while April works through what she wants to do.
Which means, I’m going to have to push this. Make it happen as quickly as possible.
I won’t have Ruby in any kind of danger. Even if it’s just the danger of some guy bad-mouthing her, being a creep while she walks down Main Street, or sending his asshole friends to harass her at the bar.
Noneof that is going to happen.
Her keys are not in her purse, so I slide my hand into the front pocket of her jeans.
“Hey,” she protests, but her voice is breathless.
I pull the keys out, and she says, “oh,” softly.
I wish I could linger over that reaction. This situation is extremely frustrating.
I shove the key into the lock and push the door open. “Where does Chris work?”
“He’s an insurance agent.”
“I know that. Where is his office?”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a long flight from Cara to Ohio,” I remind her, nudging her across the threshold and stepping into the house behind her. I shut the door and lock it, engaging the deadbolt as well.
“You read about Chris on the flight?”
“Among other things,” I say. I also faced the fact that I was going to be living in small-town Ohio for the foreseeable future. “I got a bunch of information from your sister and then did my research on him and April.”
Ruby kicks her shoes off and shrugs out of her jacket. “His office is downtown. The tall building across from the coffee shop.”
I know the building. I spent a lot of time in this town and patronized all of the businesses at one time or another during the time Cian was here winning Scarlett over. I got to know the layout of the town, got to know the names and faces behind the businesses. Which means Chris is an associate, not an owner of the insurance company.
So he works mostly out of an office. He’ll be easy to keep track of. I’m going to need to get a couple of extra guys here. That or someone Chris works with on my side. I need to know what the guy is doing and saying until April and her little boy are safe and stable somewhere he can’t easily get to them.