Page 43 of I'll Be There
“Sorry—I was in the middle of...something. Everything okay?” Just hearing her voice, so free of all the trauma of today, made him ache. Wow, he needed her—just her calm voice, the way she could find him in the chaos of his life, center him. Make him believe everything would be okay.
“So...we have a small hiccup,” she said.
He caught up with the guys, and they headed down the hallway to the elevator. Pete pressed the button.
“We don’t have a marriage license.”
He stopped. “What?”
“I know—my bad. I think I might have told you I’d get it, but I forgot and...well, Grace pulled some strings and Ivy can get one for us, but you have to be here by five o’clock to sign the application, so...please tell me you’re on your way home.”
He glanced at the clock. Just past three, but Thunder Bay was an hour ahead, so...
“I’ll be there as fast as I can. Nothing’s going to keep me from marrying you on Monday.”
He hung up just as the doors opened.
The silence as the guys tromped in around him made him look up. “What?”
“You can’t go back to Deep Haven,” Reuben said quietly.
“Huh?”
“Not until we know that it’s safe. We don’t know who was after Blue, or if they might be after you, too.”
“He’s dead. And no one is after me—”
Reuben looked at him. Pete shook his head. And even Romeo made a face. “Dude—”
“Listen, if I don’t get back there, I don’t getmarried!”
Micah took a breath. “For once, I agree with the youngsters. You don’t know what trouble Blue is in, and the last thing you want to do is bring it back to Deep Haven. To Liza.”
Conner rounded on him. “Where am I going to go? I need a computer and the internet if I want to crack this phone. We can’t just go to the local library—”
“How about my place?”
Every head swiveled in Seth’s direction. He stood in the corner, near the back, and now lifted a shoulder. “I want to help. Maybe if I hadn’t tackled you, if I’d listened, maybe the shooter wouldn’t have died, and right now you’d have answers.”
“Hewasgoing a little crazy, waving a gun around,” Pete said.
Conner shot him a look.
“I have a house outside Deep Haven. It’s not finished, but it does have internet, and there’s plenty of room to lay low while we figure this out. You can tell Liza to bring the papers upto my place. No one would connect us—and I’ll let you use my computer.”
Silence as they traveled down to the first floor.
“Do you want to finish this, or let it go?” Micah asked quietly as the doors opened.
Conner stepped out into the wide, sunny expanse of the foyer. The sunlight gleamed through the windows, blue sky overhead, warmth on his skin.
If something happens to me, call my brother.
He turned to Reuben. “Can you and Pete find Liza, get that marriage license for us to sign? Micah and I will go to his place and see if I can figure out what’s going on.”
He looked at Micah. “It’s time to finish this.”
Please, let this not be a sign of the times to come.
