Find Me (The Found Duet #2)(24)
Author: Laurelin Paige

“Yeah.” I moved to look for my purse and remembered I didn’t have it. “It’s in the office.”

He entered something into his phone and then pocketed it again. “Okay. I just sent it to you via text. You can watch it later. When I’m not around.”

As angry as I was, I was also curious. Was he married or not? And what the hell was he sending me? But I was more shocked by something else. “You have my number?”

“Ye-ah.” He dragged out the word, as if ashamed to admit it.

I sat up straighter, realizing that if the trial had gotten over an hour ago, he hadn’t had time to go to the Eighty-Eighth. “And you knew where I worked.”

Before he could respond, there was a knock on the bubble room door. Liesl entered before I invited her in. “Hey. Sorry to bug. But you’re needed.”

No. I was needed here. Where I was. Needed to be here so I could get to the bottom of the secrets between us. “I’ll be out in a few. Whatever it is, handle it.”

“Alrighty then.”

She hadn’t even completely shut the door when I pressed JC. “How did you know where I worked?” There was urgency in my tone. Norma had worked hard to make sure I had disappeared. It shouldn’t have been that easy to find me.

JC leaned forward, lacing his hands together in front of him on the table. “I hired a detective. A very good detective. He found the basics. Gave me updates now and then. It wasn’t easy for him to get anything, but he managed. I’m sorry if you hadn’t meant for me to find you.”

Thank God it had been difficult. That was the point.

But then I realized what else he’d said. “For you to find me?” He’d thought I was hiding from him? “No. Oh, no. It’s my father I didn’t want coming after me, not you.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah. He jumped his parole and after he’d threatened me…” I didn’t really want to get into the topic of my asshole father. I was already mad enough. “Let’s just say my sister thought it best for me to disappear.”

“Ah. Right. That makes sense.” Was it my imagination, or did he seem to be relieved? “God, I thought…” He shook his head. “Anyway. Don’t worry. You did a good job hiding. Like I said, it wasn’t easy.”

My head was muddled. He’d shown up with no hint of wanting to reconcile and made no effort to make amends and yet he’d gone through hoops to find me. “I can’t believe you went to the trouble of hiring a detective. Why would you do that?”

He looked at me as if I’d asked him the most obvious question in the world. “I didn’t want to lose you.”

He hadn’t said find me. “What do you mean by lose me? When exactly did you hire this guy?”

JC’s face took on a guilty expression. “When you left Vegas. When you said no.”

I blinked at him. I didn’t want to have another reason to be pissed off, but it seemed like I didn’t have a choice in the matter. This was an invasion of privacy, one that wouldn’t have bothered me so much except that I would have told him anything he’d wanted to know about me, and he’d refused it. Instead of talking to me like people did in a normal relationship, he’d gone behind my back to discover what he wanted to know. It was maddening.

And if he had known all along where I was—what my number was, where I worked—then why hadn’t he reached out to me sooner? Why hadn’t he tried to let me know he was okay and give me a goddamn sign that he still cared?

My fury must have been easily readable because he immediately tried to soften me. “It’s not how it seems.” He reached his hands out on the table, toward me even though mine were folded in my lap, out of reach. “I didn’t want to put you in danger, Gwen. Otherwise, I would have gotten something to you.”

I bristled. “Getting a message to me now and then couldn’t have been any more risky than communicating with a detective.”

He held my gaze for several silent seconds. Seconds that heightened both my irritation and my awareness of him, an awareness that hummed in every erogenous zone.

“You’re right,” he said finally. “It was risky to talk to him. I didn’t care. I paid him well enough not to care either. Because I did care about you. I do care about you.” He paused long enough to let that settle in. To let it lay heavily on my skin like the warm steam from a sauna. “I wouldn’t put your safety at risk.”

He cares about me. Still. It made me feel better but not a lot. Was he hinting that he still loved me? Or had I been demoted to a friendly obligation?