“Oh, shit,” Mick said, because she was probably right.
“You really want to fix this?” she asked.
“I do,” he told her. “I really do.”
“Then you start,” she told him, and he could tell that she had started to cry, too, “by trusting the extremely competent people you hired to help us figure this out.”
Us. Emily had saidus. Helpus.
“Em, I’m so,sosorry that I didn’t tell you the truth right from the beginning,” Mick said.
“Jules told me about the money,” she said.
What money, he stopped himself from saying, becausehe’d just apologized to her for not telling her the truth. He didn’t want to lie to her again, but... God.
“Were you just never going to mention it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It gave you such comfort, thinking that your mother?—”
“But she didn’t,” Emily countered. “There was no insurance policy. That was just another lie.”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
“I don’t blame you for that one,” she said. “I blame my grandfather?—”
“Don’t, God, Em, he really loved you!”
“...but really, I don’t blame him either, because, yeah. I know he was doing the best he could. And... I think, maybe... you were, too.”
Mick closed his eyes. “I wish I’d done better.”
“Good,” she said. “Do better now. Tell me where you are so we can come and get you. Jules wants to take us back to Los Angeles, where there’s a whole team of people who’ll make sure we’re safe.”
“I’m in Palm Desert,” Mick told her as he looked at Harper’s car parked in the drive of the house that Emily now owned. “I’ll... get myself back to the main road and drop you a pin.” No way was he letting them pick him up within shouting range of the man who they all believed was behind the plot to kill her.
“What’s in Palm Desert?” Emily asked.
“Harper’s here,” Mick said. “At the house in the golfing community that he allegedly bought for my father, who hated both Palm Springs and golf.”
Jules Cassidy’s voice cut in, and Mick realized he’d been talking to Emily on speaker, in front of them all. “Get out of there, Mick,” Cassidy ordered him tersely. “Do not confront him, do not go near the house!”
Emily spoke over him. “Please just go, Mick. Now!”
“As you wish,” Mick whispered, but when he turned to do just that, he realized that two men—one of whom he recognized as being the man Emily had identified as the shooter from the black SUV—had come seemingly out of nowhere, the light from the driveway glinting off their guns.
“Oh shit, two guys,” he said, grunting in pain as the closer man elbowed him in the face and swatted the phone from his hands, crushing it in the street beneath one large booted foot. Head ringing, he spun to try to run, and the other man raised his weapon. But instead of firing it, he used it as a cudgel to hit Mick even harder in the head.
And the night around him popped and sparked and went black.
And... here Jules was again, mired in a situation that abso-fucking-lutely wouldn’t have happened if he were still in the FBI.
Emily wanted to go with them, to ‘help’ rescue Mick.
Were he still a federal agent, Jules would’ve had the authority to insist that any and all civilians immediately stand down—and be placed in protective custody, against their will, if necessary.
But here, in this strange new world he found himself, they were all civilians, himself included. So as Jules used Google maps to look at Devonshire’s Palm Desert house and the properties around it, he tried a simple, “No.”
“I’m not your client,” Emily told him what he damn well already knew. She’d grabbed a pair of jeans and a shirt from Connie’s closet and was now tying the laces of a pair of cross-trainers that she’d no doubt found in there, too,crouched down on the tile kitchen floor. Everything was a little too big for her—Emily was tall, but Connie had been taller—but it worked. “The best you can give me is advice. You think I should stay here. I hear you clearly, thank you so much. But the choice is mine. You can leave me, but I’ll just call an Uber and follow you anyway.”
