Alex sighed. He didn’t like it, but it was sound advice. “Remy pretty much said the same thing.”
Cooper looked at Remy in surprise. “Really? I’ll be damned. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
While Remy and Cooper were snarking at each over who gave better advice, Everly pulled Alex aside. “Maybe when Lacey calms down, I could go talk to her for you and give her another woman’s perspective on the situation.”
Alex would have hugged Everly right then if she hadn’t been standing there in nothing but a T-shirt with her possessive alpha werewolf mate a few feet away. He settled for a heartfelt thanks instead. “I’d appreciate that.”
Now in the clear light of day, he wasn’t so sure Lacey would ever calm down enough to talk to anyone about what she’d seen last night.
Alex hadn’t realized he’d drifted off until his phone beeped at him. He snatched it up, praying it was Lacey texting him back. But it was Remy checking to see if he had heard anything. He shot off a quick text to his friend, saying he hadn’t.
Maybe tomorrow, Remy sent back.
He didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he revisited the advice Cooper, Everly, and Remy had given him about backing off and giving Lacey some space. He knew it was the right thing to do, but there was a surprisingly selfish part of him that wanted to go over to her apartment, bang on the door, and demand an explanation. Not about why she’d been scared—he got that part. What he wanted to know is how she could have driven away from him. Didn’t she feel the connection between them as strongly as he did? Hadn’t it ripped out her guts to walk away?
Alex knew Lacey had some baggage in her past and that she wasn’t the most ardent believer in love, romance, or men, but he was having a hard time reconciling the whole concept of The One with the fact that Lacey had been able to walk away from him so easily. As far as he knew, it hadn’t been like this for any of the other guys in the Pack when they’d found their soul mates. Alex got the feeling it wasn’t like that with Lacey. If it had been, could she have ignored his calls and messages all night?
He was still contemplating that when the doorbell rang, quickly followed by pounding. He wondered for half a second if it was Lacey but dismissed the idea. She wasn’t the type to bang on any door, especially his. But as he crossed the room to answer it, he picked up an unmistakable scent.
Shit. It really was Lacey!
Alex covered the last several feet to the door in a sprint but then hesitated. What the hell was he going to say? He’d wanted to talk to her the whole night, and now he didn’t have a clue where to start.
Taking a deep breath, he yanked open the door to find Lacey standing there. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, her heart was beating a hundred miles an hour, and she looked exhausted as hell. The urge to pull her into his arms was overwhelming, but he controlled himself.
She’s here. Don’t screw it up.
Looking at Lacey, he couldn’t help but think that maybe walking away from him had been as hard on her as it had been on him. Why did that make him feel good and bad at the same time? More important, did it make him an asshole?
“I’m glad you came,” he said. “I wanted to explain…about what you saw.”
She shook her head. “I’m not here to talk about that. I don’t know what you are, and I don’t care. All I want to know is whether you’ll help me.”
Alex felt like she’d kicked him in the balls. He thought she’d come here to talk about what she’d seen—about them. He thought she’d come because she’d missed him as much as he’d missed her.
“Of course, I’ll help you any way I can, you know that,” he said. “Come in and tell me what’s wrong.”
She walked into his apartment, her breath coming even faster, tears welling up in her eyes. “Kelsey is missing.”
He frowned as he closed the door, his werewolf instincts kicking in and making him tense. “What do you mean, she’s missing?”
“She never came home last night.”
Alex let out the breath he’d been holding. “She probably just got tired and stayed at a friend’s place. You told me she’s done that before.”
Lacey shook her head. “This is different. She always leaves me a message when she does that, but not this time. I tried to call her, but she’s not returning my texts or calls. Her friends said they haven’t seen her since last night when she left the restaurant they went to for dinner. They all thought she’d left with someone else. They hadn’t even bothered to check with each other until I started looking for her.”
Lacey’s heart was beating so fast, Alex thought she was going to pass out. The more she talked, the paler she became.
“Calm down, okay?” he said. “There has to be a logical explanation for this. Maybe she just met someone…”
That earned him a sharp look, and he knew without asking that Lacey would never believe Kelsey was simply shacking up with a hot guy she’d met. In Lacey’s world, Kelsey would never do that.
He was about to point out that they needed to at least consider that as a possibility when Lacey spoke.
“I called campus security just to see if they knew anything, and they told me that Kelsey sent the registrar’s office an email this morning saying she was dropping out of school to go to California and become an actress.”
Okay, that changed things. It sure as hell didn’t sound like Kelsey. That horrible feeling settled in the pit of his stomach again. He gestured for Lacey to sit on the couch, then joined her, asking her to go over everything from the beginning.
