Page 35 of Her Wedding Night

Fuck.

I yank on my jeans, leaving my chest bare to give the intruder a clear hint that I want to go back to bed, then cross the cabin.

“What is it?” I bark as I wrench the door open.

A good friend, a fellow veteran I met through some charity work I signed up for when I moved to Conception Ridge, is standing on my doorstep.

“Gabe,” Nolan Adler says with a careful tightness. “You’re here.”

“Of course I’m here. I live here.”

“Are you alone?” He glances past me, but I’m filling enough of the doorway that I know he can only see the raw beams of the cabin ceiling.

I’m not about to lie regarding Lucy, but I’m not offering information before we’ve had a chance to really talk about what forever is going to look like, either. “Why are you asking?”

He holds up a basic white piece of printer paper, folded into many parts. My face stares back, a photocopy of a photograph. And above it, in bold black writing, is Lucy’s handwriting.If I disappear, find this man.

I grin.

What a good girl she is.

“You want to tell me why my student left this for me? And how nobody at her dorm has seen her since yesterday?”

I scrub my hand over my jaw. “You went to her dorm?”

He lunges forward, shoving at my chest, pushing me a foot back into the cabin. The door swings open, and he follows me inside, but he doesn’t get very far before a sweet voice asks us to stop.

I pivot, and then stumble, my always sure-footedness failing me at the angelic sight of Lucy wrapped in a bedsheet and nothing else, biting her bottom lip.

“Lucy?” Nolan says, an urgent question in his voice.Are you okay? Did he hurt you?

“I didn’t go missing, Dr. Adler,” she says. “Gabriel saved me from them.”

“From who?” Nolan’s not backing down.

The weight of what happened last night crushes my heart all over again. “My son and his fraternity brothers. I should have intervened sooner.”

Nolan gives me a wary look. “I think someone needs to start at the beginning.”

“Yeah. Okay.” I point Lucy to the bedroom. “After we get dressed.”

When we return, Lucy wearing a pair of my sweatpants with the waistband rolled up a few times, Nolan has made himself comfortable on my sofa.

So I sit in the arm chair. And Lucy curls up on my lap.

Nolan’s eyebrows go up, but all he says is, “What happened?”

I let Lucy take the lead. She explains about the invitation to the party, and some things that she thinks she should have realized in hindsight.

That’s where I interrupt. “You couldn’t have known.”

“I was basically invited to a sex party,” she says. “And had I known the details, I would have just declined the invite.”

“And then Ethan would have kidnapped you,” I grind out.

“Maybe.” She bites her lip. “He really did want to pick me up for the party. But everyone else knew what was going on.”

“That’s called a conspiracy to commit a crime,” Nolan interjects gently. “That’s not a point in their favor.”

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