Wrapped Up in You (Heartbreaker Bay, #8)(68)

She blinked. “Wait. What?”

He shook his head and turned to the door, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him around. Okay, so he allowed her to do it, and she took the smallest bit of comfort in that.

Or she would have, if she wasn’t vibrating with fury and a pierced heart, both nearly bringing her to her knees. “I didn’t send you a text,” she said.

He pulled out his phone and showed her a short conversation between him and . . . her phone.

“What?” he asked when her mouth tightened.

“Brandon has my phone,” she said. “I think he took it when I went down to the basement. He must have texted you back pretending to be me in order to throw you off the trail.”

“That’s pretty ugly.”

She nodded. She knew.

He blew out a breath. “I’m fighting a bad case of déjà vu here,” he said.

Lifting her head, she stared at him as the hits kept on coming. “You don’t believe me,” she breathed.

“I believe in facts, Ivy. Cold, hard facts. And at the moment, they’re stacked the wrong way.”

She couldn’t help it, she gaped at him. “Against me, you mean.”

He just looked into her eyes, his own not giving anything away.

“Wow,” she said, reading him loud and clear, words or not. Heartsick, shaking with it, she turned to the door and opened it. “You need to go now.”





Chapter 24




If you want it bad enough, make it happen



Of course he didn’t leave, Ivy thought. Nope, he just stayed right where he was, looking like everything she’d ever wanted and had never gotten.

He wasn’t giving much away but it wasn’t a big leap to assume he blamed her for what Brandon had done, and she got it. She blamed herself too. But he needed to go, now, before she lost it. “Please leave.”

Kel shut the door, but he didn’t leave. His expression was formidable. Remote.

The cop was in residence.

If someone had asked her yesterday if she could be surprised by anything life had to offer, she’d have said no way. She’d been through too much. Seen too much.

But Kel thinking she might be involved in Brandon’s scheme surprised her. And hurt. It left her feeling extremely raw and vulnerable, two emotions she’d hoped she’d left behind a long time ago. She’d built walls, protective walls, so she couldn’t ever feel vulnerable again.

But Kel had gotten through.

How ironic then that it hadn’t been her to screw it all up.

But Brandon. Not that this was a huge surprise. He’d probably never meant it when he agreed to turn himself in. He’d just needed her to be stupid enough to believe it. Once again, he’d blown up her life, and the worst part was, she’d let him. She’d literally handed him everything he’d needed in order to do it.

She might as well have hurt Arlo herself. So as much as she wanted to demand that Kel get the hell out so she could nurse her emotional wounds in private, she couldn’t until she gave Kel everything she knew so that he could make this right.

Heartsick, she met Kel’s distant gaze. “What do you need from me?”

“Tell me again exactly what happened when he showed up here,” he said.

“He was bleeding. Said he’d been shot.” She swallowed hard, fighting tears. “I tried to get him to go to an ER, but he refused. So I got my first aid kit and did what I could. I told him he had two choices. He could stay and turn himself in, and I’d be there for him, or he could leave and never come back.”

Kel didn’t seem at all moved by any of this. In fact, it was like he was a robot. Zero reaction. “And he said?”

“He said he’d stay,” she whispered. “I ran down to the basement to throw the bloody towels in the washer. While I was down there, I reached to pull my phone from my pocket to text you that Brandon was here and he’d been shot. But it wasn’t there. I didn’t realize until I got back upstairs that he’d taken it.”

He held her gaze for a long beat, but said nothing.

She drew a deep breath and finished. “When I got back, he was gone. And that’s when I knew he’d probably never really considered staying and turning himself in. I think he took my phone with him, which didn’t make sense until I got a PayPal notice on my laptop that my transfer had gone through.”

“What transfer?”

She looked away, she had to. She hated the way he was looking at her almost more than she hated having to admit this part. “He transferred a large chunk of money from my account to his. He had to have used my phone to do it. And then he probably received your text and responded as me to keep you off his tail.”

He stared at her. “He took money from you.”

She nodded.

“How much?”

She closed her eyes.

“Ivy.”

“Twenty thousand,” she said quietly. “It was what I’d been saving for my down payment on the condo.”

He let out a long breath and waited until she looked at him to speak. “Did you call the authorities? Anyone?”

“I contacted PayPal to start a dispute on the transfer,” she said. “I was able to do that from my laptop.”