Yeah, and here he is keeping me toasty warm and telling me all his secrets, I argued back.Plus, just how much have we been fucking?
Nate teased me all the time about working my way through the eligible men of West Hollywood. The truth was,theywere working their way throughme. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a relationship—it was that I kept attracting the pump-and-dump types, over and over again.
When I’d been more famous than I was now, in the grosser corners of the internet there were counters that ticked down to my eighteenth birthday. These days I had an added nostalgia factor that seemed to make me a beacon for a certain kind of man. Thewrongkind.
Jack was different. He was an outsider in LA, a man who preferred to hide his face over pushing it in front of cameras. And even better, he’d never once treated me like I was a side character in the epic movie of his own life.
* * *
We spent the next morning looking for more signs of Harper Connelly, but it was difficult because of the flood of traffic on all her socials; people were leaving condolences and comments everywhere. But from what we could see, her activity on all her platforms was dead. She hadn’t even made a formal statement, like Emma Dempsey, or rather, Emma Dempsey’s PR team. Emma’s message was too professional for anyone but a media specialist to have written. It expressed her sorrow and her shock and then asked everyone to fuck off and leave her alone—only more politely.
Just before noon, I squeezed my eyes shut, massaging my fingers into my eyelids. The last few days’ combination of tears and staring at JJ’s laptop screen was threatening to give me a whopper of a headache. “Think I’ll take a shower,” I said vaguely.
“Knock yourself out,” Jack said, reaching over to give me an affectionate squeeze on the thigh.
I was still smiling to myself when I climbed into the tub to stand under the stream—trickle, I should say—of warmish water. But I wasn’t going to complain about it. In fact, Jack’s shower was one of my favorite places,becauseit was his.
I was falling in love with this stupid, rusting tub; I was falling in love with the crappy water pressure; I was falling in love with those mismatched plastic chairs around the card table that did double duty as a desk and a dining table; I was falling in love with…
Whoa.
* * *
I’d just come out of the bathroom when a call came through on my phone. I’d forgotten to turn it off after our research sprint. I let it go to voicemail and then listened to the message. “It’s Mrs. K,” I told Jack, who was pretending not to eavesdrop. “She needs me to call her right away.” I was already dialing, and she picked up only half a ring in.
“Miller, thank goodness,” she said. “Do you know where your father is?”
“Uh, London, I assume?”
“Oh, dear. Then I’ll need you to come home as soon as you can. There’s been a break-in.”
I felt my jaw drop as she explained what had happened, and when I ended the call, Jack was staring at me. “Well?” he asked.
“Someone was in the house who shouldn’t have been,” I said slowly. “I need to get over there, right now. Mrs. K called the cops and the security firm is out there as well.”
Someone had been in the house.
Someone hadwalked into the houseinbroad daylight.
Had they been looking forme?
CHAPTER36
JACK
Miller stayedquiet until we got in sight of the Hills, and then he asked, “What exactly do you think Annie was mixed up in?”
I had a vague working theory, but I also didn’t feel like slandering the dead sister right then. “Could’ve been drugs. Could’ve been money laundering. Hell, it could’ve been anything. But whatever it was, I’d bet Roxanne Rochford has something to do with it, too.”
“Chris Booker might have heard something. He still saw a lot of Annie at the Chateau, and Roxy of course. If he does know something, I could get it out of him.”
“He’s certainly hoping to get something out ofyou,” my mouth said before my brain caught up.
Miller scoffed. “You jelly?” he teased, and then got real big-eyed when he saw that I couldn’t find an answer.
I’d never been the jealous type. Never in my life. I took pleasure when it was offered, or else I paid for it when I needed it, but I’d never had anything serious. Never anything beyond a few nights. It was too dangerous—for me, for them.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you at the Chateau,” I said at last, keeping my eyes firmly on the road. “But I thought he was disrespectful, even though he was trying to help.”
