Not even a good-bye.
She lay back down and curled up in a ball on the bed. If she didn’t get up, maybe it would just be a bad dream.
But the dampness on her pillow told her the tears were real.
God, how had she let this happen? How had she let herself think it could work? Sheknewbetter. The mission always came first with men like him. But she’d convinced herself it would be different—thathewould be different. She’d relaxed her guard. Made herself vulnerable. Let herself need someone. She’d let herself rely on him—something she hadn’t let herself do since she was a child.
Which was fine when they were in danger. But it wasn’t so great when they weren’t.
For the second time in her life, a bigger-than-life, I-can-do-anything man she thought she could count on had left her. Ironically for opposite reasons. Her father because he’d turned out to be only too human, and “Dan” because he’d turned out to be too strong. Too much the cold, hard professional “machine” she’d accused him of being. The operator who could turn off his emotions for the sake of the mission. He might care for her, but he wouldn’t let that interfere with what he had to do.
She wanted to hate him for it, but how could she hate the very qualities that made him the man he was?
She’d been right about him in the beginning. Guys like him were good at coming to the rescue. They were who you’d want by your side when the shit hit the fan. But when it wasover, they moved on to the next one just like superheroes. There was a reason it took Superman sixty years to finally marry Lois Lane. Batman was still single.
So now what?
Annie wiped the tears from her cheeks and sat up. This puddle-of-tears, abandoned girl wasn’t her. She was devastated, but she wouldn’t lie here in misery.
She had to pull on her big-girl panties and suck it up. Face reality. He was gone and not coming back.
She might feel weak and helpless at the moment, but she wasn’t. She was a strong, capable, grown woman who knew how to be happy on her own. She might havewanteda life with him, but she didn’tneedit.
But the “girl power” pep talk wasn’t helping right now. Right now she was too raw. Too fragile. Too hurt. But tomorrow she would hone her inner Scarlett and maybe feel a little better, the next day a little more, and so on.
She hoped.
She needed to talk to the one person in the world who would understand. She picked up the phone and put the collect call through.
“Hi, Mom. It’s me.” Even before the last two words were out, tears were choking her throat. She was that heartbroken, disillusioned teenage girl again who’d had the rug pulled out from under her feet.
Ten minutes she would allow herself. Then she would be an adult again. But there was nothing like a mother’s love and understanding to make it feel safe to be a kid again.
Thirty-one
It took an hour. But when Annie finally ended the phone call with her mother, she was feeling considerably better and lucid enough to make a few decisions.
The first was a shower. When she was done, she would begin making preparations to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak.
After bursting into tears and choking through a truncated version of the past few days—and assuring her mother a hundred times that she was physically unharmed and safe—Annie had spent the last half of the conversation talking her mother out of hopping on her stepfather’s private plane to come get her.
Annie loved her stepfather, but his kind of wealth embarrassed her. It embarrassed her mother, too, except—apparently—when it came to her daughter. Annie wasn’t surprised to hear that a private search team had already been mobilized. Her mother agreed to call that off, but stopping her from jumping on the plane was like pulling a meaty bone from a pit bull.
When pointing out the number of wasted and unnecessary carbon emissions from taking a private plane across the ocean didn’t get through to her, Annie had to risk hurting her feelings. She loved her mother and promised to come home soon, but she needed some time on her own, and she wanted tofinish what she’d started. She’d come to Scotland to protest exploratory drilling in the Western Hebrides, and she wasn’t going to leave without doing that. She promised no more Lucy Lawless, but she could join the protests and marches that were being planned for the next week.
Besides, she needed to pick up her stuff and talk to the police. There was a stack of twenties—about two hundred dollars—and a ferry timetable on the bureau beside her clothes, presumably for her to do that.
He’d thought of everything.
Annie had kept her comments about “Dan” brief, not telling her mother any of her suspicions, only that he was in hiding and in some kind of trouble. Her mother had as many questions as she had—none of which she could answer. Annie did tell her that she was almost certain that it didn’t involve anything illegal.
Then had come the one question that Annie was still thinking about. “Do you want me to have Steve try to find him, sweetheart?”
Steve was Annie’s stepfather. As she’d told “Dan,” he was a powerful man with lots of connections.
Annie had hesitated, but only for a minute. “No,” she’d told her mother. She’d already held her heart out on a platter once. She wasn’t going to let it be chopped in pieces again. He’d left. She wouldn’t go chasing after him. Besides her pride, she didn’t want to cause him any more problems. She owed him that for helping her.
Annie was putting the finishing touches on her eye makeup—a salvage effort—when the phone rang. Her mother had said she would call back to check on her. Annie wasn’t surprised to hear “that everything had been arranged.”
