“True, but keeping it a secret would still be wrong.” Jack swallowed. Why, oh why hadn’t he just fessed up the instant he starting suspecting Madison was Queen Bee? “A lie of omission is still a lie.”
“I agree, but you’ve waited too long. The window of opportunity has slammed shut, my friend,” Wade said.
Jack tried—and failed—to tamp down his annoyance. This couldn’t be good advice. “And when exactly did the window close?”
Wade didn’t hesitate. He had an answer at the ready. “Last night, when you let her sleep in your hospital bed. Think about it, man. Telling her now would only hurt her, and I know you don’t want to do that.”
Hurting Madison was the last thing in the world Jack wanted to do. He’d already done it once, and it had taken a near-death experience to undo that particular mistake.
Still, wouldn’t keeping such a terrible secret hurt her even more?
Jack sighed. “I might not have a choice in the matter.”
“What do you mean?” Wade asked as he exited the interstate and steered the vehicle toward the town highway that led to Lovestruck.
Toward Madison.
Toward home.
“There’s apparently a reporter at the Bee who’s trying to track me down.” Jack swallowed hard.
Wade’s advice about the whole debacle was certainly questionable, but he was dead right about one thing—Jack had waited too long to tell the truth. If he’d fessed up weeks ago, he and Madison might have laughed about it...eventually. No one would find it funny now.
Wade frowned, thought for a minute and finally shook his head. “That’s not ideal, but I stand by what I said. Keep it to yourself. If a hugely popular national television show can’t find you, the Bee doesn’t have a prayer. You’re safe.”
Safe?
Jack wasn’t so sure. In fact, he had a feeling he’d left safe behind a long, long time ago.
Aunt Alice and Madison made it back to Lovestruck less than half an hour before she was scheduled to show up for work at the Bee. Toby scurried after her as she darted to her room, stepped out of the clothes she’d been wearing for twenty-four hours straight and tried to make herself presentable. The dog’s tiny, quivering nose peeked out from beneath her discarded swing dress as she pulled on a pair of black high-waisted trousers and a pink-and black-striped blouse.
“Sorry, little guy,” she whispered, plucking him out from beneath the dress and hugging him tight. His plumed ear twitched as she whispered directly into it. “Toby, you wouldn’t believe the night I just had.”
She spun the dainty little Chinese crested in a gleeful circle and then plopped him down on the bed while she finished getting ready for work. It was funny how drastically things could change in such a short amount of time.
She’d been wrong about Jack. He did have feelings for her. He just hadn’t been ready to tell her how he felt, and that was fine. She of all people could understand the concept of self-preservation, and Jack and his girls had been through a lot. Of course he’d freaked out when she’d told him she was leaving Lovestruck.
But things were okay now. More than okay, actually. They had a date tonight—a real, romantic date—and she didn’t mind a single bit that they’d be spending the evening at Jack’s house with Emma and Ella sleeping right down the hall instead of going to a fancy restaurant or out dancing at one of the nightclubs in New York where her dates in Manhattan so often took place. In fact, she rather liked the idea of a cozy night at home. She just wished it didn’t involve an injury to Jack’s beautiful head.
Goodness, she really had it bad, didn’t she? She couldn’t wipe the smile from her face as she walked to work, and once she got there, she didn’t even mind the fact that Brett had lived up to his word and thrown himself full force into his investigation of Fired Up in Lovestruck.
She poured herself a generous portion of hazelnut coffee into a mug emblazoned with the words Bee Amazing and wandered over to the barn door conference table, which Brett seemed to be using as his makeshift headquarters. Every letter that Fired Up in Lovestruck had written and sent to the Bee had been photocopied and blown up to three times its original size. The copies were lined up in chronological order, from one end of the table to the other.
“Any luck?” she asked, sipping from her mug.
“Not yet.” Brett shook his head. “I’m thinking about bringing in a handwriting expert to take a look at his penmanship.”
“Then what? Are you going to have every reader in town give you a handwriting sample for comparison and see which one fits, like Cinderella and her glass slipper?”
“Very funny.” Brett straightened one of the photocopies a fraction of an inch.
“I’m only kidding. The handwriting thing is actually a pretty good idea. There are some distinctive pen strokes here, especially the way he crosses his z’s with a little dash.” She pointed to the letter where he’d used the word puzzling, drawing an invisible underline beneath the twin letters with her fingertip.
Then she frowned at the familiarity of the dashes. Madison hadn’t thought about those distinctive z’s in weeks, but she felt like she’d seen letters just like them recently. She just couldn’t remember where.
“Everything okay? You practically floated in here, and now you seem upset,” Brett said.
“I’m not upset,” Madison said, taking another gulp of coffee. It tasted bitter on her tongue, though. Something wasn’t right. “I’m happy.”
So, so happy. She loved Jack, and she had a feeling he just might love her, too. She had nothing at all to be upset about...
Except she suddenly remembered where she’d seen z’s like the ones in Fired Up’s letter before, and unless she was mistaken, they’d
