The suitcases in the hall should have been his first clue.
Somewhere between “What the fuck are you doing home?”and “I’m outta here,” Yasmin had laid out clearly just how little she thought of him and their life.The apartment was too small.(It was all he could afford.) He was going nowhere.(He was just starting out—and building up a solid client base took time.) He had no “options.”(Being a tattoo artist was what he truly wanted to do.) He didn’t buy her enough gifts.(Well, someone needed to pay the gas bill.)
He’d thought they were in it together.He’d thought they were on an adventure, trying to build a future.
To this day, he could feel the reverberations of the door slamming behind her and the room falling into silence.
Cujo nudged him with a shove to his shoulder.“So Harper’s got you rethinking stuff, huh?”
Trent paused and then smiled.
“Yeah.”He took a swig of his beer to compose himself.“So lay off her, okay, dude?Harper and me still have bunch of crap to get through and it’ll be tough enough without you and me going at it.”
***
Sitting on a beautiful patio in the company of an incredibly charming man while sipping a nicely chilled glass of sauvignon blanc was the perfect way to spend a Thursday lunchtime.It had been close to sixty hours, not that Harper was counting, since she had last seen Trent, and when he had swept into the café to whisk her away for food, it was all she could do to keep her hands off him.
“You know I write my own schedule, Harper.If you give me yours in advance, I could likely write mine around it somehow during the week.”Trent held her hand across the table, gently massaging her palm.“We could probably spend a bit more time together.”
Trent’s eyes flashed hot, then closed.He took a deep breath and shuddered.
“Are you okay?”she asked.
He opened his eyes, gave her a devastating grin.“Just thinking about the time we spent in my car.”
“Oh my g… did you really just say that out loud?”she whispered, mortification ripe in her tone.
“You embarrass so easily, darlin’,” he said, laughing.“So tell me what happened in your world.”
They talked as they enjoyed the bread basket, pulling out pieces of the soft focaccia and ripping off chunks to dip into the delicious olive oil that had been brought to their table.
Trent excused himself to go to the washroom and Harper used the time to check her phone.Drea was going to send her shifts through for the coming week.
Opening her text messages, she was thrilled to see one from Joanie:
A- !!!Thank you!!
Wow—congrats—you deserve it!she texted back quickly.
The next one was considerably more disturbing:
Once February uneven brute
Harper felt the blood drain from her face, her hands clenching around the phone.Nathan had attacked her in February, and nobody could argue that he wasn’t an uneven brute.
One message she could reconcile as an anomaly.But two?With strange words, from an unknown number.She tried to remind herself that Nathan was locked up, far away from sunny Miami.He couldn’t be texting her.But deep in her soul, Harper knew the message wasn’t just a random grouping of words.It was an anagram.Her hands started to flare as she looked at the phone, mouth dry with fear.
Grabbing a napkin and a pen from her purse, Harper wrote the letters and worked systematically through them.
Canyon… Canonry… On… Can… You.
You Can Run…
But so many other words were possible.Van Buren County, heck, evenCentury Avenuewas in there, the street where her friend Carrie lived in Matteson.
Scrolling back through her messages, she pulled up the text she’d received when she’d been out shopping with Drea.She was starting to sweat, and a cold shard of icy fear pierced its way through her chest, constricting her breathing.
Atrophied sinister voyeurism:Harper, I missed you.It isn’t over.
