This time, he saw the movement.
“I see it. I’m hanging up. Don’t open the door until I knock.” He parked the car and popped the trunk. Thirty seconds later he was walking to the room, a T-shirt from the stash of clothes he always kept in his vehicle in one hand, his other resting on his weapon at his waist. He reached her door and rapped his knuckles on it. “Tess? Unlock the door.”
“Um. Zane. I don’t—”
“Unlock the door and then go into the bathroom. I’ll hand you the shirt once I’m inside.”
“Right.”
Zane waited ten seconds, then opened the door and bit back several words that he’d given up using a decade earlier. The place was filthy. He didn’t even want to get the bottoms of his shoes dirty with the germs infesting that carpet. Tessa’s hand and half of her arm stretched out of the bathroom door. He placed the shirt in her hand. “We should call the poli—”
“No. Zane. Please.” Tessa emerged from the bathroom. “I’m certain nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened? You woke up in a filthy hotel room without your shirt on!”
Tessa took a step back. “Please.”
He should call the police. Get the place fingerprinted. Something. But Tessa was on a fine edge. She was in trouble. Big trouble. But she’d called him. He could be a law enforcement officer, or he could be her friend. But if he insisted on bringing the police in, she wouldn’t call him the next time.
And if she didn’t make some changes soon, there would be a next time.
“Let’s go.” She followed him to his car, and they didn’t speak until they were back in a better part of town.
Zane pulled into a parking lot already filling with Saturday-morning shoppers. He cut the engine and turned to Tessa. He didn’t have it in him to be anything but blunt. “You could have been killed.”
“I know.” One tear. Just one. But it broke something inside him.
All the fight in her was gone. Under different circumstances, he would be furious and do anything in his power to help her regain her strength. But in this moment, he hoped and prayed it meant she would be open to what he had to say next. “You need to go to rehab.”
Time froze while he waited for her response.
“Yeah. I do. I need help.”
2
FIVE MONTHS LATER
Zane stalked toward Tessa’s car. The evening had started out great and ended in unmitigated disaster. His relationship with Tessa had deteriorated to the point that they couldn’t even go out to eat with their friends and remain civil. One day they were fine. The next day they couldn’t be in the same room without sparks flying. And not the good kind. He didn’t know what her problem was, but he was done riding this roller coaster.
He reached her car. She glared at him through the window. He spoke, his voice low but loud enough for her to hear him. “We need to talk.”
The glass slid down. “We do. But not here.” Anger poured out of her in a flood that he could almost feel pulling him under.
“The nature trail?”
“Fine.”
Zane’s best friend and fellow US Secret Service agent lived in a nice enough neighborhood, but what it claimed as a nature trail wasn’t much more than a glorified walking path. But it was flat and, at this time of night, probably deserted.
Tessa drove away. He jogged back inside and met four worried gazes. Luke and his fiancée, FBI Special Agent Faith Malone, sat on one side of the living room. Gil Dixon, another Secret Service agent, and his girlfriend, Dr. Ivy Collins, were cozied up in an oversized chair on the other side.
“Is she okay?” Faith managed to ask the question in a way that cast no blame on the way the evening had ended. With Tessa excusing herself and all but storming from the house after Zane asked her a simple question.
“I don’t know what her problem is. But I’m about to find out.”
“Zane.” Luke’s voice carried a warning.
“What?” Zane snapped the question.
