Page 96 of Hopeless Romantic
Gray dropped his play money on the table. “My hands are never going to work again.”
Emmitt looked at Levi. “Now do you believe me about not having my other phone?”
Les appeared, holding his side and out of breath.
“Dad?” Emmitt stood. “Are you okay?”
Les nodded. “I was trying to give you space for your Kumbaya moment when I heard someone on the radio. It was your security company,” Les said to Levi. “I guess the alarm went off about an hour ago. The cops arrived to find the back door unlocked.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Levi asked, then remembered putting Beckett’s name on the emergency list. “Jesus, did they call Beckett? Is she okay?”
Because he could just picture her getting the call and charging down there like a loose cannon, with complete disregard for her own safety. Her fearless nature was impressive, but in this situation, it fueled a million different scenarios—none of them good, and all of them what his nightmares were made of.
“Your tall friend, the one who holds his liquor like a girl, is talking to them now. But from what I understood, when the cops arrived, no one was there. Which is why they need you or your mom to come and see if anything is missing and file a report.”
The cops? Jesus.
“Tell them I’ll be there in a few hours,” he called over his shoulder as he raced to the helm, his legs nearly buckling under the heart-pumping panic. “And under no circumstances is anyone to call my mom.”
Levi hadn’t been there when his mom and niece found out about Michelle. No way in hell was he going to allow the police to drag his mom down to what sounded like a crime scene. And Beckett,Christ,Beckett. What if they’d called her first, and she’d gone to the restaurant to check on things?
It was like reliving that night of the accident all over again.
Chapter 19
Beckett’s toes were numb, her nose frozen, and she was trembling from the leftover adrenaline.
It had taken the local fire department, fifty-eight search-and-rescue volunteers, and more than an hour to locate Tommy. With his father MIA, he’d been desperate to find Beckett. So desperate that he’d punched out a window and left the house in the middle of the night. Searchers had walked past him twice, because when he heard them yelling, he’d hidden behind a cluster of boulders.
It wasn’t until Beckett arrived that they understood his inclination would be to run from strangers yelling his name. After getting her dad settled, she convinced him to take his guitar and play some of Thomas’s favorite songs. They’d nearly exhausted the entire Beatles library when Beckett heard a humming in the distance.
The moment she saw his little body, curled into a tight ball with Diesel cuddling him for warmth, she wanted to pull him into her arms to be sure he was all right. But touching Tommy wasn’t an option, so she slowly approached him while singing the song.
She wrapped him in a warm blanket one of the firemen had provided, and after a trip to the emergency room for stitches in his arm, they’d returned home to get some sleep.
To Tommy’s delight, he was given an honorary fire hat and badge. Beckett was given a few sympathetic looks, but Jeffery was given the best gift of all—being the hero who’d found his son.
The nightmare was over, everyone was in bed, and Beckett was too drained to even cry. She just lay on her bed, staring out the window at the stars, wishing she was with Levi.
It bothers me that you’ve been conditioned to believe your needs aren’t as important as other people’s.
It was starting to bother her, too. It struck her as she watched the volunteers search the woods, seeing the number of people caught in the Hayes vortex, putting their lives on hold to deal with a fallout they’d had no part in making. If that wasn’t a metaphor for Beckett’s life, a sign for her to make some changes, then she didn’t know what was.
As it stood now, her future had all the appeal of juggling chainsaws in the middle of a freeway.
Something had to change—Beckett felt it in her bones. She didn’t know how yet, but being an army of one wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
She pulled the blanket up around her neck, closed her eyes, and tried to stop the shivering. Her toes were finally coming back to life when she heard something small bounce off her bedroom window.
A smallping, quickly followed by another.
With a groan, Beckett slid out from under the warm covers and grabbed the sniper-scope Nerf gun she kept under the bed. The last time someone had come knocking at her window in the middle of the night, it had been the neighbor’s boyfriend, looking for a booty call and getting the wrong window.
Instead of a seventeen-year-old prom queen wearing his jersey, he’d come face to face with an overworked almost-thirty-year-old wearing a flannel nightgown and overnight foam curlers she’d bought after bingeingShark Tank.
Beckett looked out the window. Not a teenager, but someone booty-call-worthy. Levi. He stood in her side yard, feet in a wide stance, arms crossed, looking at her. All the earlier drama and chaos faded, and Beckett found herself smiling.
After everything that had transpired in the past ten hours, he could still make her smile.
