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It was late and she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer when I left to get back to the shack to take out Grace’s kids.
CHAPTER30
Angela
The morning dawnedwith cloudy weather outside my shack’s windows.
I checked my phone—no messages. When I left last night, I’d made Pris promise to text me this morning to let me know she was all right.
She hadn’t.
ME: Just checking to see how you are this morning
Hopefully no message only meant that the alcohol had erased her memory of the promise.
Izzy tugged on my slipper. A firmnofixed that.
PRIS: OK considering
ME: I can come over if you like
PRIS: No thanks I’ve got aspirin
The dancing dots reappeared on my screen.
PRIS: Thanks for everything
ME: Sure
PRIS: Remember can’t tell anyone
ME: Of course
I put the phone down. Lights were on in the big house. It was most likely Marge, the early riser. Boone probably wasn’t down for breakfast yet. So, if I did the dogs quickly and strolled over for a quick bite, I could probably avoid a run-in with the man who had taken over my dreams.
When I’d gotten home last night after staying up with Pris, the shack had been empty. Well, three dogs had attacked me, but there had been no Boone in sight. It had seemed even more empty than the night I’d arrived, particularly the bed.
Maybe it was a good thing, given that when Grace returned in a week I’d be leaving. This way I could look at last night as preparation for the day I left, easing Boone out of my head one night at a time rather than going cold turkey.
Didn’t they say slow withdrawal was better than rapid? Wasn’t that why they sold those nicotine patches for smokers?
How had it snuck up on me that my attraction to Boone Benson had become so strong? This was supposed to be a quick rebound fling on the way to my new life in Florida. Now, I wante—noneeded, a piece of him every day and every night. I’d fallen for my enemy, and he had me trapped by my own addiction to his presence.
Last night had been my first alone in the shack since the night he rescued me. And that’s how I looked at it now—a rescue from Devlin and what I might have had to do to stay safe from Kevin. It scared me now to think how far I might have had to go with Officer Dickhead.
I hadn’t slept well worrying about Pris’s situation either. If Lee was dead, there were only two possibilities. One, he’d left town as Pris had said and gotten himself killed looking into who knows what in who knows where. Or there was the possibility Pris had latched on to—that he’d been killed here, and the killer was local, which meant Pris was also in danger.
Just the possibility of that second scenario meant I’d entered the danger zone as well, and if Lee had died for what he was researching, looking into his disappearance had to be under the radar as well, because we had no idea who could be linked to the killer.
I’d taken the dogs out late last night when I returned, so I changed the normal routine. “You guys can wait until after I shower,” I told Izzy as I shoved her away from my slipper again.
Under the welcome hot water, I analyzed the Lee situation further. If my research yielded where he’d gone, that might mean Pris could stay safe by not following in his footsteps.
This was just like when I’d tracked down the inside man helping the Russian hackers last year. I’d had to do it alone, and surreptitiously. Nobody could be trusted, and therefore nobody could know.
To help Pris, the place to start was obvious—the library in Peterville, where Pris had dropped Lee every weekend before he vanished. I had seven days until Grace and Dirk came back. This shouldn’t take longer than that.
I massaged in the conditioner and went through the possibilities of what Lee might have been doing there…
