Bombshell (Hollywood A-List #1)(91)

Too late for all that.

Maybe not. Maybe if I found her, I could change things. Maybe I had the power to give Nicole everything Brenda couldn’t. Maybe I could finish the job right.

“It’s just that she’s used to small spaces from her mom taking her to work,” Cara said. “So if she’s mad or scared, she could be in a freaking cabinet.”

I stopped, yanking Cara’s hand back.

“What?” she asked.

“You know. When her mother couldn’t get a sitter?”

Eyebrows up, chin raised, in a split second Cara and I were on the same page.

Cara, being the woman of my dreams, had been on the same train of thought. Once we found Nicole, I was making changes, and she was going to be a part of it.





CHAPTER 71


CARA


“Ah! Coffee Chain!” I said. “Do you think?”

“No, but we don’t have any better ideas.” Brad stopped a woman in her twenties holding a paper cup with a blue logo in one hand and a wheelie suitcase in the other. “Hey!”

Her face registered annoyance then shock.

“Oh my God, are you—”

“Yes, I am. Where did you get that coffee?”

She swung her arm back in a general direction, speechless.

He kissed her on the cheek and pulled me away. We got to the end of the hall, looked left, then right, and found a Coffee Chain almost immediately. The sign was big, but the shop seemed eternally distant. We ran. That coffee shop was our only hope. If she wasn’t there, we didn’t have a next part of the plan. We’d have to start searching all over again.

So we ran, crashing into travelers, hopping over suitcases, dodging when we could. Brad was fast, and he pulled ahead. When I got to Coffee Chain, I walked into pandemonium. Brad was behind the counter, bulldozing through the objections of the manager, slapping open cabinets. Someone was calling security. A dozen people were photographing the entire thing.

Despite the chaos, I could tell one thing. Nicole wasn’t drawing ponies in the cabinets.

What had Brad and I been saying that made her run away?

You take her.

No, you take her.

She was five. She had no way of knowing we weren’t trying to get rid of her. She thought she was being pushed off again. She’d get yet another home.

Which was what I was consigning her to if I left.

I put my hands over my mouth and looked at the floor.

I was breaking up a family.

My family.

I looked at my shoes and considered what that meant. How much of a commitment that was, and how the rules changed when the stakes were so high.

A slight pink glow flashed against the floor and one side of my left sneaker. It happened so fast I should have missed it. But I didn’t.

I looked left, to a standing three-panel ad for frothy autumn drinks. And down, to where the panels lifted two inches from the floor and I could see the flashing lights of a certain little girl’s favorite sneakers.

I pulled back the partition, and my heart dropped down while my breath flew up.

Nicole Garcia-Sinclair crouched in the space where the floor met the wall with her arms wrapped around her knees. She picked her head up when the partition disappeared.

“Brad!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. She started crying. I scooped her up in my arms, one arm under her knees, one under her arms.

I didn’t care if she was crying. She could cry all day and night.

“I love you, Nicole.” I held her close and spoke with her tear-soaked face near mine. “I love you. I love you so much.”

Brad came to us and ladled her with kisses, reaching around the both of us, helping me hold her and pulling us all together at the same time.

“Thank God,” he said. “Thank God, and Cara. Thank you.”

The relaxed guy without a care in the world was back, but different. The relief and joy in his smile were as real and honest as another person’s could be. All the other stuff? Well, that was just stuff. That smile was the man I loved, and it was for me and Nicole.

“Daddy,” she sobbed. “Who’s going to take me?”

He didn’t look away from her, but his hand squeezed my elbow.

“We’ll figure it—”

“We both are,” I interrupted.

I cringed at my own words, hoping Brad hadn’t changed his mind. Had I overstepped? Was I promising her something I couldn’t deliver?

But his chest expanded and his shoulders dropped as if he’d taken a deep breath, and I knew I hadn’t overstepped.

Nicole choked back a sob. “Really, Daddy?”

“Yes,” he said. “You belong to both of us.”

The big lump in my throat finally went down when I swallowed.

I’d run away from this, from him, from Nicole, from every child I ever loved, and at that moment the running was done. I’d run right home.

He turned away from his daughter and looked at me. Only me. Joy in his face. Relief. A victory dance and I was the ultimate prize.

For a second his gaze went foggy, as if he was looking inside instead of outside. He squeezed his daughter and kissed her forehead, then took out his phone. Assuming he was calling security to call off the search, I held my hands out for Nicole. He shook his head.

“I have her.”