Totally fake.
Because when he’d thought no one was watching, he didn’t sing cute nursery rhymes. He brooded.
Of course it was related to what happened with Weisser. She knew the story, what he’d done to find and save her, because the police told her when she gave her statement. But it took three days before Wren could get Elias to tell her in his own words what happened.
They were lying in bed, after he’d given her a near-seizure-inducing orgasm. He thought she was asleep—those toe-curlers tended to knock her out—so he sighed and sat up at the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, head in hands.
“Are you upset because you killed someone?”
He lifted his head slowly. “Thought you were asleep, Scrubs.”
She scootched over to his side, laid her head on his pillow, breathing in his good scent, and wrapped her arms around his waist. He dropped his hand into her hair and gently ran his fingers down the strands, bringing on the tingles.
“So, are you?”
“No, babe. I’m not. He was going to kill you. He knew he was going to prison and made a break for it. If he had just disappeared,” Elias shrugged, “but he didn’t. He took you as a hostage. He could have grabbed anyone, but he took you. Because he wanted to be free and he wanted you dead.”
“You stopped him.”
He turned his head and studied her face in the moonlight. “Are you sure you want to talk about this? You already know what happened.”
“I wantyouto talk about it.”
“I don’t want to upset you.”
“Babe, I’m good. I’m alive, I’m getting married in less than two weeks to an incredible man, then I’m going with him to Hawaii where I will chain-drink Mai Tais on the beach and stuff my face with mahi-mahi at every meal.”
He grinned. “Even breakfast?”
“Yup. Mahi-mahi omelets. Mahi-mahi bacon. Mahi-mahi sausage.”
“I don’t think mahi-mahi bacon and sausage are a thing.”
“Well if they are, I’m filling my breakfast plate.” She shifted and sat up next to him. He wrapped his arm around her. “But first, I think you’re hanging on to what happened, and we only have a two-suitcase limit, so we are not bringing along that baggage. Talk to me, Elias. Get it out.”
He kissed her temple.
“We knew you had to be close by and that we had a better shot of finding you if the drone saw you. I just needed the numeric code to get into your phone. I know you’re a romantic, so the first number I tried was the date of our wedding.”
She smirked. “And it failed.”
“Yup it failed, and my heart stopped dead. And then I tried a second number.”
“The date we met.”
Elias grinned. “Yeah. And I was in. From there it went quick. The last frame of the last video the drone recorded was still on the screen. I scrolled back until the drone was hovering over the yard. We watched him take you.”
Elias paused, his jaw clenched, and Wren knew she’d done the right thing by making him talk it out or it would have festered.
“Bear called in to Ben right then. He knew about the logging road at the back edge of the property, so he and T-Wolf followed it on a hunch. They found an abandoned Beemer. Totally sketch. Not exactly something you go off-roading in.” Elias’ smile held no warmth at his joke.
“But thanks to the drone, we also saw where Weisser carried you into the woods—awayfrom the car. If we hadn’t seen that,we would have assumed he was hiding somewhere in between the house and the logging trail, trying to get back to it.”
“Instead of the SUV he’d stolen and parked on a different logging road.”
He nodded.
“We put Willow on to your scent with the launch pad, then I looked for where Weisser entered the forest. I found it and I tracked him. Then at one point, Willow decided she wanted to go in a different direction from where I was tracking Weisser. She was insistent.”
