I’d made her promise to call me when she arrived at the office and again when she was leaving work. She had actually complied with both calls.
I looked at my watch.
Her last call had been forty-five minutes ago, and she wasn’t home yet. She lived less than thirty minutes from work. And when I’d called her a minute ago, she hadn’t answered the phone.
I began to pace back and forth.
The installation guy turned around to look at me.
I held up my hands. “Sorry. I’m just a little anxious.”
“I’m almost finished here, and then hopefully, you won’t have to be anxious anymore.”
“Yeah.” Right.
I was always going to worry about Olivia.
Always? Wow. I hadn’t seen that one coming.
My phone rang, and I answered it without even looking at the caller ID. “Where are you?” I demanded.
“Sitting on my deck, drinking a beer. Is there a crime in that?”
“Maddox.” I ran my hand down my face and stepped outside, so I could pace out there. “No. I thought you were Olivia. She left work almost fifty minutes ago. She’s not home yet, and she didn’t answer when I called her.”
“Still nothing back from the police?”
“No. They’re worthless.” I cringed. “I’m sorry, Mad Dog. I didn’t mean that. I’m just…”
“Scared about the woman you love.”
I stopped walking and replayed Maddox’s sentence in my head. “What?”
He laughed. “Come on, dude. Don’t act like you didn’t know.”
“No, I…I don’t—”
Maddox’s laughter died. “Oh, you didn’t know. I thought it was obvious that you’d developed feelings for her.”
“Developed feelings, yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m in love.”
“Think about it. You spent a whole week with her. She slept in your bed every night. She called you for advice about a possibly dangerous situation, and you split so fast that you left a dust cloud behind you. Now, you’re probably wearing a hole in the carpet because you can’t sit still from worrying. And she’s not even a half hour late.”
I swallowed. “I don’t necessarily know that that’s love.”
“Would you worry about me if I were twenty minutes later than expected?”
“No, because you can take care of yourself.”
“And Olivia can’t? Sure, she’s a female, which makes her smaller, but she’s pretty feisty. And didn’t you tell me you’d armed her with pepper spray and a self-defense key chain?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah, but nothing. How would you feel right now if something happened to her?”
A sense of doom settled over me at the thought of her being hurt—or worse, killed. I didn’t want to think about a world without Olivia Mayer in it.
As if a lightbulb went off over my head, I realized the enormity of my thoughts.
I sighed. “Fuck me.”
Maddox burst out laughing. “Man, I wish I could see your face right now.”
“I’m sure it looks like I’m in deep shit.”
“Hey, you’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah, you say that. But Olivia has never once expressed wanting anything more. Not even an official date.”
“Have you?”
“No. I don’t want to scare her away.”
“Look at it this way. If you don’t tell her, you lose her. If you do tell her and she’s not down for it, you still lose her. But if you tell her and she feels the same, you might get everything you want. So, you’re really no worse off by speaking up.”
He’d made a really great point.
“You are so different from when I first met you.”
“Things change, my friend.” I felt like he was referring to us both leaving the Teams. “Sometimes, for the better.”
“You might be right.”
“No might be about it, fucker.”
I laughed.
“Oh, by the way, Addison’s on the phone with Olivia. She stopped and picked you up dinner. That’s why she didn’t answer her phone.”
I growled, “You could have told me that right away, asshole.”
“And let you get away with ignoring your feelings? Dream on.”
“When I see you again, I’m going to—”
“Thank me. I know. And you’re welcome. Gotta go. Bye.”
I looked at my phone. Maddox had hung up on me.
He had it all wrong. I wasn’t going to thank him. I was going to kick his ass because I knew he was right, smug bastard.
And as I watched Olivia pull into the driveway, I had no idea how I was going to tell her that I loved her.
42
Olivia
I leaned back in my chair and looked up at my office ceiling.
Something was up with Tommy.
He had acted weird all night. Not quite standoffish. It was almost as if he was afraid of me. But when we had gone to bed and turned out the light, he’d made love to me like he didn’t want to let go.
I laughed. I didn’t know when my thoughts had changed from fucking Tommy to making love to him. Probably around the time when he’d made me feel protected but not smothered.
He was doing a number on my heart.
And that scared the crap out of me.
I didn’t know what to do about it. I would love it if he moved to Iowa. After all, he’d told me that Virginia didn’t hold much for him anymore. But he’d also told me he could never live in Brook Creek. If he wasn’t going to move to be close to his good friend, then he probably wasn’t going to move.
My cell phone rang at that moment, pulling me from my thoughts.
“Hello?”
It was one of the officers assigned to my case. “We thought you should know that the license plate matched those of Gary Scott. When we went to speak to him and his wife, she broke down and confessed to harassing you.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“She also confessed to killing her daughter.”
I sat up so fast that the back of my chair sprang forward with a loud thump.
“She said she was fighting with Annabelle about her boyfriend. In a fit of rage, she picked up one of the gardener’s tools
