Page 33 of Hunted

“It … can’t be easy. And eighteen months, that’s barely any time at all.”

He was staring straight ahead, deep in thought. Lexi had to make an effort to keep her eyes on the road. “After it happened, I resigned. I couldn’t focus on the job anymore. And there are some people who suspect I was involved.”

“How could anyone think that? It’s insane. I barely know you, and I wouldn’t believe that for a minute.”

He looked at her for an extended beat, taking that in, it seemed.

“But you came back out of retirement,” she prompted when he couldn’t seem to find his voice again.

“Not exactly. I have friends still on the job. My former boss, Darren, is one of the closest. He let me know White was after your father’s formula. Asked me to freelance the case. No one’s gone up against White more times than I have. I agreed. I thought I could handle it. But I’m not doing too great so far, am I?” He gave a sad smile. “It’s bringing everything back.”

“It’s forcing you to grieve. I don’t imagine you have yet. I think you probably pushed your grief down, buried it, tried to just … keep going.”

“It was working fine, up ‘til now.”

“You only think it was working fine. It wasn’t. You’ve been dead inside. Dead people can’t feel. But you’re coming back to life, and that means you have to feel again. That’s what the living do, Romano. We feel. We laugh and we cry, we celebrate and we grieve, we fight and we love. We feel.”

He lowered his eyes, then said, “Turn left at this light. We need to get back on the highway up ahead.”

She did as he said, waiting for him to continue, but her own mind was filling with new thoughts, new fears. One, in particular, that wrapped an icy hand around her heart and chilled it through and through. “Romano?”

“Yeah?”

“You said you only agreed to take this case when you realized White was involved. Will you tell me why?”

He laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. More like a short burst of air being forced from his lungs. “He murdered my family, Lexi. Why do you think?”

Chapter Nine

They passed the Welcome to Pine Lake sign just after nightfall. If Lexi hadn’t known the place so well, she might have let Romano drive right through. Pine Lake was just a stretch of road with a few more houses than other places along the same route. The general store was the focal point. It was a repurposed airplane hangar and carried everything from food to auto parts. An ancient red gas pump tilted drunkenly to one side out front.

Romano pulled the RV off the narrow road but left it running.

“So now what?” Lexi was uneasy, and she knew he could hear that in her voice, but she’d never been very good at disguising her feelings. She just wasn’t sure why she felt as much dread as she did.

“Now, we go talk to your lawyer friend and get our hands on whatever your father was keeping in his safe deposit box.”

“There’s not going to be anything there,” she whispered. But she wasn’t as sure of that as she had been at the beginning of all this. There had to be some reason everyone from international terrorists to secret agents thought otherwise. Still, she wanted to believe it was all a mistake.

She didn’t want to look at Romano. Didn’t want him to see the doubt that must show in her eyes. So she stared up at the gray clouds skittering over the moon like ghosts, a shade paler than the dark sky. “It’s going to snow.”

“Probably.”

“We ought to go up to the house.”

“No.”

“If it snows, we might not be able to. It can come down heavy.”

“Snow melts, Lexi.”

She bit her lip to keep from arguing. Jax hadn’t been fed today. He’d be climbing the walls by now, if those thugs they’d left at her house hadn’t done something to him.

She knew she was worrying about her pet partly because it kept her from thinking about what had been in that safe-deposit box, or why her father had kept it even after breaking every other tie he'd had to his former life.

“Where does the lawyer live?”

Romano had a one-track mind.

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