Page 121 of Running to You

He needed to shut up and let them talk.

“Thrived?” Michael smirked. “Only people who don’t know you would say that.”

“You have a point?”

“I decided to find her, to put your mind at ease.” To Eliza, he said, “This is no reflection on your character, so please don’t be offended.”

“Don’t say anything offensive,” Sam warned.

Michael ignored him. “Taking off all by yourself, without your mother or your best friend? Without even their blessing?”

Sam asked, “How did you know—?”

“I’m good at ferreting out information.”

Right. CIA.

Still speaking to Eliza, Michael said, “I thought you’d be back in a couple of weeks, a month at most. When you weren’t back after three, I started looking for you.”

“That long ago?” she asked.

Which was the wrong question. The wrong reaction to the news. She didn’t seem surprised he’d been looking for her, only the duration he’d looked.

Michael addressed Sam again. “I put out feelers with my contacts. I have friends in some three-letter agencies that have access to things I don’t. For years, I got nothing. And then last spring, after you went to Salt Lake City, Daniel said he saw you talking to a woman and described her. He told me he thought she looked scared. He also said how you looked a little… Well, Daniel didn’t say desperate, but that was the sense I got.”

Nice. Call him desperate in front of his…well, whatever Eliza was. “Girlfriend” didn’t feel right.

I would have said yes.

Almost-fiancée, then. Assuming Michael didn’t make him look so bad in the next few minutes that she ran screaming from his life.

Michael looked her direction. “I figured it was you and contacted a friend at the FBI in Salt Lake. He got back to me a week or so later. He said a woman named Elizabeth Pelletier had been questioned at the Keller Ranch—”

“You knew? For six months?” Sam’s voice was too loud, and a couple of kids at an adjacent table turned to look. He leaned toward his brother and lowered his voice. “You knew she was trapped in that place, and you didn’t get her out? You just left her there?”

“Sam.” Eliza slid her cool hand over his forearm.

He forced himself not to shake her off. “She could have been killed.” He continued in a vehement whisper. “Do you know what that guy was doing? He was…he was imprisoning those women. He raped them.” The words had him swallowing a rise of fear. He looked at her, and she gave him a small smile—whatever the heck that meant. To Michael, he said, “Eliza could have been—”

“I know,” Michael said.

“Do you?”

Eliza patted his arm. “He helped me, Sam. He saved me.”

She was aware that Michael had known where she was. Apparently, they’d been working together for months. Sam took a breath and tried to blow out his frustration—and most of the questions he wanted answered. Mostly, why hadn’t his brother told him? And why hadn’t she?

As if Michael could read his mind, he said, “She didn’t know it was me. I told her yesterday in the parking lot in Concord. And she had no idea what I was talking about.”

“After he told me,” Eliza said, “I remembered about the man who helped me, but I didn't know it was Michael until yesterday.”

That made sense—a lot more sense than his misplaced anger. She had amnesia. Her life was confusing and full of information she couldn’t process.

Still, he hated that Michael had found her when Sam had failed. Michael had rescued her while he’d been useless and impotent.

He turned back to his brother. “Were you just too busy with all your…machine parts sales to get her out sooner?”

“There were more factors at play—”