“I’ll leave you to get ready,” Erik said. “Jayla and I will be in the living room. We need to discuss next steps.”
Once he left, closing the door behind him, Chloe closed her eyes as her body deflated against the mattress. Her head was still pounding and she felt nauseous. It was tempting to stay in bed all day, bury her head under the covers, and pretend none of this was happening. Jackson hadn’t found her, people hadn’t been injured,and she didn’t have two soldiers in her living room ready to go to war for her.
Her throat clogged as hot tears welled in her eyes and spilled over. Covering her face with her hands, she let out a quiet sob and curled into a ball. She didn’t want to do this again. She didn’t know if shecoulddo this again.
Chloe didn’t know how long she’d lain there, silently crying, before she heard a soft tapping sound on her door.
“Chloe?” Jayla called. “Are you all right?”
Swiping at her swollen eyes, she sat up and winced as her head pounded. Crying hadn’t made her feel any better. If anything, she felt worse. “I’m okay.” Her voice sounded strained even to her own ears. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
“Do you want me to make you some breakfast?”
Just the thought of food had her stomach pitching, and she had to hold back a gag before she managed to choke out, “No thanks.”
“Okay. Erik wanted me to tell you that he got a text message from Lattimer Wilkes. A group text, so you likely got it too. He’s called a meeting.”
Chloe patted her pockets and rummaged through the bed covers. Where was her phone? “Okay. Thanks.”
Hauling herself out of bed with effort, she walked to her bathroom to get ready. The reflection that greeted her was telling. She looked as bad as she felt. Her hair was a tangled mess, her face was pale and blotchy, and her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Butshe needed to pull herself together. Jackson wasn’t going to just magically disappear because she wished he would. His showing up here proved that he wasn’t going to give up. She needed to face this. Deal with it if she ever wanted to reclaim her life. The good news was, this time around, she had powerful backup in her corner.
After giving her teeth a thorough scrubbing, Chloe showered quickly, though it was tempting to linger under the spray of hot water. When she finished, she didn’t bother with makeup or styling her hair; she just left it to air dry. Still feeling a bit queasy, restrictive clothes were out of the question, so she went for comfort, donning black leggings and an oversized Washington Commanders sweatshirt. The nice thing about the heavy garment was that no one would be able to tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Out in the living room, Erik and Jayla were waiting for her, and when she flopped on the couch with a sigh, Jayla immediately handed her a cup of coffee, remarking, “Black, two sugars.” Exactly how she liked it – which the woman shouldn’t have known, unless…
“You’ve been watching me.” Of course, they’d been watching her. If she hadn’t been so shell-shocked the day before, she probably would’ve figured that out sooner.
Her lips twisted into a bitter caricature of a smile. She should be grateful, she supposed, to have someone looking out for her, protecting her, but it still felt like an invasion of privacy. She looked around the room, wondering where the cameras were. One ofthem must have come in here, uninvited, while she was away, and placed them. Had they been out here watching her cry in bed?
Jayla was saying something, but Chloe couldn’t hear her through the sudden rushing in her ears. Her eyes burned, and a choking feeling made it hard to breathe. She struggled to pull herself together, trying to remember what her therapist had told her.Start with five things she could see.
Her coffee cup, someone’s laptop. Before she could move on to the next, Erik was beside her, taking her hands. “Breathe, Chloe. Just breathe.”
His hands were large and warmed her icy fingers. The callouses on his palms were an enticing texture against the softness of her skin. She nodded, sucking air into her lungs as she focused on his face. The turquoise of his good eye, surrounded by dark, enviously thick lashes. His mouth as he formed the words, “That’s it. You’ve got it. Good girl.”
His last statement was a jolt to her system that snapped her out of her panic attack, and she blushed mightily until even her ears were hot because now her heart raced for a very different reason.
Clearing her throat, she pulled her hand away from him self-consciously and turned to look at Jayla, who was holding the laptop toward her in offering. “Here. You can look at all the surveillance feeds. I did my best to preserve your modesty. There are no cameras in the bathroom, and the cameras in your bedroom arestrictly monitoring the door and windows. Visual only on those. No audio.”
Chloe barely looked at the screen, her eyes snapping back to Erik as a thought occurred to her. “Did you install cameras at the opera house?”
He nodded. “I did.”
“So the light…?”
“We have someone who might be Jackson Savoy on camera doing something to it – what, we couldn’t see – but he’s not visible enough to positively ID.”
Of course not. Jackson was a cop. Even if he hadn’t known cameras were watching him, he would have kept his head down to keep anyone who might stumble upon him from being able to get a good look at his face.
“We also have him going into your dressing room.”
The missing lotion. One of his head games.
Pushing all else aside, Chloe stiffened her spine. Jackson needed to be dealt with. That was the priority. “You mentioned something about next steps?”
Chapter Eleven
“The question is,” Jaylaasked Erik. “Do we let Savoy see us with her? It might scare him off if he knows she has a protection detail. Though if he was watching when she found the rose, which is likely, considering what we’ve learned about him, he might already suspect me of being her bodyguard.”
