Page 40 of Roark
“I’ll be in touch as soon as we find something else. In the meantime, you should stop poking around the cottage.” Pierce directed those words to Tamika. “We don’t know who this guy is yet, so that means we don’t have eyes on him. But he may very definitely have eyes on you.”
“I’m not going to run and hide from some coward who uses fire to fix whatever petty argument that took place all those years ago,” she snapped.
“You don’t know that it was a petty argument—to him, it obviously means more. So much more he’s ready to kill. You’re an arson investigator, so you know about how deadly fires can be. You should also know how personal they are to the people who set them. How that personal connection can dement their mind until they believe whatever evil they’ve concocted in order to keep setting the fires. I’ll tell you again, stay away from the cottage.” Pierce added a very cold glare to his somber words.
Roark took a step until he was standing close to Tamika again. While he figured there was some truth to Pierce’s words, he didn’t like how harshly they’d been directed to her. “Don’t worry, we’re both going to be careful from this point on.” He didn’t touch her again, but he made sure Pierce got his message by giving the agent a very pointed stare.
Again, Pierce didn’t seem ruffled or intimidated by Roark, but he did give up on dispensing anymore warnings. “I’ll be in touch,” he said before walking out of the room, leaving Roark and Tamika to stand alone in silence for a few minutes more.
“Let’s go for a ride,” Roark suggested after the quiet had grown to an irritating point.
Tamika made a huffing sound. “Didn’t you just tell him we were both going to be careful? You think going out into the big bad world for a ride is smart?”
Roark turned to face her. “I think I’m a grown man, and I’ll decide when and where I go. Right now, I need some air, and I’m guessing you do too. I’ll get Vaughn to follow us. Is that okay with you?” He’d changed his directive to a question at the last minute and watched as she picked up on that change and offered him a half smile.
“That’s fine with me,” she said.
Chapter 13
“Do you believe what Cade and Pierce said?”
They were in the car, driving on a particularly curvy road that seemed to cut straight through the hills and valleys.
“I don’t want to talk about that right now.” And he didn’t. Roark’s mind was so full of fire and death that he could barely think of anything else.
Of course, it could be said that now wasn’t the time to be thinking about other things, but Roark desperately needed to. The beginning of a headache was pressing against his temples, and his fingers were sore from clenching and unclenching them repeatedly. He tried rolling his neck, but that did nothing to relieve the mounting stress.
“Okay,” she said, exaggerating the word as she looked out the window. “Why’d you come here, Roark? I know you didn’t pack your bags, leave your office and set up house in the country just because I wanted to meet you.”
If she were trying to change the subject, this question wasn’t the way to do it, but Roark took a second before deciding how to answer her. “I came because I missed my mother.” That was the simplistic truth. So why did it sound like it was a cop-out? “Getting the call from the security company that the fire alarm at the house was going off was something I’d never expected, and I was afraid from the moment I hung up the phone until the seconds when the firefighters told me I couldn’t go inside that she wasn’t alive.”
He gripped the steering wheel, and Tamika reached a hand over the console to rest it on his knee. Roark glanced down at that hand for a moment and then returned his gaze to the road.
“Everything after that is such a blur, but it felt like razor-sharp pain at the time. I needed that pain to stop.” Did that make him weak? Did it mean he wasn’t the leader or the man his parents had always expected him to be? Roark had no idea, just as he didn’t know why he was giving Tamika these answers.
“After my father died, all I could focus on was investigating that fire. I ignored my cases at work or I did the bare minimum on them just so it looked like I was at least touching them every day. But I couldn’t think of anything except finding out what happened to him,” she said.
“Different approaches to grieving,” he replied. “That’s what my Aunt Birdie told my sister when Suri asked why Aunt Birdie wasn’t crying at the funeral home.”
“Tuppence mentioned the grief process to me too. The night before the fire, she said I was in denial. But I don’t think that’s true. I can accept that my father is gone. I just can’t accept how or why.”
“Because a killer wanted him dead.” Roark knew his words sounded cold and distant, and to ease them just a bit, he made a left turn, pulled the car off the road and switched off the engine. Behind them, Vaughn did the same.
Roark got out of the car and went around to the passenger side just as she stepped out. When he took her hand, he wondered if she’d pull away from him. Never before had Roark thought about a woman turning away from him the way he did with her. Perhaps that was because he didn’t approach women nearly as much as his brother did, but whenever he had, the attention had been reciprocated. Up to this point, Tamika hadn’t given him any indication that she wasn’t receptive to his attention, yet that hesitation on his part was still there.
“Let’s walk.” He started toward the left, away from the parked cars.
They walked quietly, both of them enjoying the scene of lush green grass and the misty fog that hovered just inches above the ground, giving the area a haunted and intriguing appeal.
“I don’t get this in the city,” he said, breaking the silence. “The noise and business. Parties and endless meetings. That’s my life there.”
“Those are all the things that make you Roark Donovan. Did you know you were in the top three of the Millionaire Man Match?”
He frowned. “What in the world is that?”
“It’s this matchmaking list composed of millionaires. I found it online when I researched you. There was this great picture of you in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, but your tie was loose, so it gave you a little bit of a bad-boy mogul look. I’ll admit, when I first saw it, I imagined you with that shirt unbuttoned and showing your bare chest.”
She made a growling sound when she finished, and Roark couldn’t help but laugh.
