she wasn’t anywhere, which meant only one thing.
She’d gone without him. But the pillow had been warm. He had to be only a moment or two behind her. Whipping open the front door, he was just in time to see a taxi vanish down his driveway. He was halfway out the door after her before the slice of January wind reminded him he was butt-ass-naked.
Chapter 20
“To LAX,” Bailey told the cab driver in the still dark morning, and put on her seat belt with shaking fingers. She’d made a tactical error last night, a serious one.
She’d engaged her heart.
There was no use beating herself up over it. She should have moved on that first night, separated from Noah at the Mammoth airport and gone on her own.
But you’d have faced Stephen and those men on your own, too. Twice.
Okay, she couldn’t have separated from Noah then, but certainly yesterday she could have.
Should have.
Instead, she’d gone with him to Catalina, and while she hadn’t had any more luck there than she had in Mammoth, once again he’d gotten her out of a situation she couldn’t have managed on her own.
She owed him so much.
And last night, lying in his arms, happier than she’d ever been in her entire life, she’d realized how to repay him.
By leaving him.
She’d been over it and over it in her head, and there was no other way to protect him. God. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, as if she could rub away this huge disastrous mess that she’d made out of her life.
It was still dark outside, with only the tiniest tinges of pink in the far east.
Was Noah awake? What had he thought when he’d found her gone?
He’d be furious.
He’d worry.
God, he’d worry. She knew it. But she couldn’t let him do this, couldn’t let him take her to Cabo, especially not now that she knew what had happened to him there.
Plus, a small part of her knew…she was falling for him, hard and fast. Too fast. She was afraid for him, desperately afraid. No, there was no other way to keep him safe than to leave him.
Then she realized they were passing her street. “Excuse me,” she said to the driver. “I need to make a quick detour.”
“No detours.”
“Please, just real quick. Can you turn right here?” In tune to his annoyed sighs, she directed him to the house where she’d lived with Alan in style-and in lies.
A lifetime ago.
The place was dark and had a For Sale sign in the driveway. It was being sold as a part of the impending bankruptcy, but hadn’t gone yet despite the fact it’d had some heavy traffic. Looky-Lous, mostly, but it didn’t matter to her. She wouldn’t receive a penny. She didn’t care, she didn’t want a cent of Alan’s tainted money.
She just wanted her life back.
And herself.
She really wanted herself back. Last night she’d felt a glimmer of the old Bailey, and it had been wonderful, so wonderful her heart still ached. “Thank you,” she said to the driver, taking her last look at a house she never wanted to see again. “We can go straight to LAX now.”
As they drove away, she wondered if her life would ever be the same. How much of herself was she going to have to give up? She thought of Noah, how it felt to give him up, and rubbed a hand over her heart.
She was truly alone now. She hated the feeling. She slipped her hands into her pockets. Her fingers closed over her cell phone.
Not completely alone.
She still had Kenny, and suddenly she needed to hear from him in the worst possible way. Pulling out the phone, she turned it on, and read a waiting text message. BAIL, WHERE R U? K
She began to type in her answer, then stopped. Every single time she responded to Kenny, Stephen had caught up with her.
Coincidence?
She might never have even thought about it, but for Noah’s suspicions. He believed that Kenny was somehow using her texts to locate her. And if that was true, if he was in cahoots with the bad guys, then she was playing right into his hands by answering.
She stared at the phone as if for the first time. A little frisson of doubt of Kenny’s innocence went through her.
But if she was being honest, it wasn’t the first time. Truthfully, she’d been fighting with the doubt for days now. She turned off the phone, then stared at it with growing dread as she remembered Noah’s words.
Don’t give anyone a way to track you.
With a small cry of pain, betrayal, and a bone-deep despair, she lowered her window and tossed the phone out in the street.
“Hey!” the cab driver yelled back. “You can’t do that!”
“Sorry.” She craned her neck to watch as the phone hit the ground, only to be run over by the car behind her-
Oh, God. The car behind her.
Noah.
The sun was rising now, slanting across the low lying hills on either side of them so that she couldn’t see in past the windshield of his BMW.
She didn’t need to.
He was looking at her, right at her. She could feel the weight of his gaze as she’d felt the weight of very little else, ever.
He’d followed her.
Torn between terror and a huge, almost overwhelming relief, she nearly slipped bonelessly to the floor, but she forced herself to sit there and look at him.
Could he see her?
He’d already seen far more of her than she’d meant him to, and she didn’t mean just her naked body. She’d done everything in her power to keep him at arm’s length, but for the first time in her life, that had been impossible. He’d taken down her carefully constructed walls that she’d built around herself, one brick at a time.
Hell, he’d blasted through them.
But he hadn’t left her to her own defense; he’d hung around, no matter what the cost to him personally. Oh, God, the implications of that alone…
“If I get pulled over,” the crabby cab driver yelled at her, “the traffic ticket is going to come out of your wallet, not mine! The rules are stated very clearly on the back of the seats!” Reaching behind him, he patted his headrest, where indeed, a list of rules had been clearly laid out for any idiot to read. “There. You see?”
“Yes,” she said, still staring at Noah. “I see, and I’m sorry, very sorry.”
“Nothing else out of the cab, or no more ride for you.”
“I promise.”
The cabby sniffed in indignance, and continued driving. Bailey waited with baited breath as they pulled into the huge drop-off loop at LAX. The cabby hit the curb in front of her airline and held out his palm.
She was still pulling the cash out of her purse when the taxi door on her side was hauled open. She’d no sooner handed the cabby his money when two big, warm hands pulled her from the car.
“Hey,” she said to one damn fine chest, covered in a beat-up leather aviation jacket.
“Hey,” Noah said fiercely instead of friendly, then hauled her against him. “Now tell me you’re in one piece
