Page 112 of Untouchable
He might have killed her father. He probably had. It didn’t feel quite true of Caleb, but it felt true of this man.
This could be the real murderer, the absolute bastard who’d taken her father away from her.
This man. In front of her.
Kelly felt a wave of nausea overtake her as she saw again her father’s body on the trail in the woods, his blood soaking into the dirt.
She managed to smile and act like she was listening to the conversation, but all she could hear was a buzzing in her ears.
This party had become hell, filled with these fake, smiling people who were secretly her enemies. Even Caleb with his intelligent mouth and warm eyes and strong hands might be someone she could only hate.
She was surrounded by them—no way to escape—and she kept fighting the nausea as it grew increasingly difficult to act normal.
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be around these people. They weren’t her friends. They would only hurt her.
All she wanted to do was get away, but there was absolutely nowhere to go.
Except the bathroom.
The idea came to her like a gift, and she excused herself to go to the restroom before the growing feeling of panicked claustrophobia completely overwhelmed her.
It was a large individual bathroom, so she locked the door and went over to the sink. She stared in the mirror at her face.
Her hair was still slightly rumpled and falling in loose waves all down her back. Her cheeks had been flushed before, but now they were a little pale. It looked like she’d even broken a sweat.
She wanted to splash water on her face to wash away the helpless feeling and the fuzziness from the champagne, but she was only carrying a clutch purse, so she didn’t have all her makeup with her to redo her face afterward.
So she washed her hands for a long time, trying to relax and pull herself together.
She didn’t want to go back to the party right away, so she checked email on her phone, just for something to do, and she was surprised to see a text message from her mother. From the same anonymous number she always used to contact her.
She pulled up the message and read,Why haven’t you finished this yet?Stop stalling and get it done.
Kelly stared at the words for a long time, sick and guilty and angry.
She deleted the message without answering it and slid her phone back in her little clutch purse, trying to pretend she’d never seen the text.
Trying to pretend she wasn’t so pitifully weak that she would stall in seeking justice for her father’s murder.
Maybe she could have gotten this thing over with sooner if she hadn’t fallen for Caleb so hard.
She was even more rattled and upset than before when she finally left the restroom. She glanced around the large ballroom, looking for his familiar face and body.
She didn’t see him, so she started to circulate, wondering why she couldn’t spot him since Caleb stood out in any crowd. It wasn’t only because he was so attractive. There was something about him that called attention, summoned any eyes in a room.
But he wasn’t in this room, even though she’d left him just a few minutes ago to run to the bathroom. He wouldn’t have left her, and he couldn’t have disappeared.
But she had no idea where he was.
So soon she was flustered on top of all the other tangled feelings, at a loss because Caleb was no longer at the party. When she happened to pass his engaged friend, who was the honoree of the evening, he must have noticed her futile search because he said, “I saw him go off into the anteroom back there.” He gestured toward a door at the far corner of the ballroom.
Kelly smiled her thanks and made her way in that direction, thinking it would have been nice if Caleb had spared a thought for how she was supposed to find him before he skulked off in a corner like that.
He’d probably run into a business associate and had sneaked off to take care of some business in his few spare minutes.
Typical.
The door to the anteroom was partly closed, so she pushed it so she could enter. The room was small and mostly empty—with just some ornate chairs, a couple of mirrors, and some decorative tapestries on the wall.
