No One But You (Silver Springs #2)(66)

Hopefully, she’d put them in a safe spot. Which might’ve been the case. No spot could’ve been worse than the closet.

So, overall, she should be feeling grateful, not panicked, she told herself. Her situation might not be as bad as she’d first thought, on the recovery end of things, anyway. She was just overwhelmed by how hard it was going to be to escape and start over—and it didn’t help that she was disoriented and uneasy right now, especially when she passed Dawson’s room and found the door standing open and the bed made.

She checked the bathroom. He would’ve showered before bed. He was particular about his hygiene. But she couldn’t detect any recent moisture or anything else that might suggest a shower had recently taken place.

He had to be downstairs, she decided, must’ve fallen asleep on the couch. But when she reached the living room, it was empty. So were the kitchen and laundry room.

“Dawson?” Despite trying not to let herself be spooked so easily, she could hear a tremor in her voice.

After searching the ground floor again and peering out the windows, she returned to the foot of the stairs and gazed up at his parents’ room. Surely he wasn’t in there. But where else could he be? He had to be home. His truck was in the drive.

Her stomach cramped as she crept slowly back up the stairs and tried the knob.

Locked. Thank the Lord. Except that did nothing to explain where he might be. It was pitch-black outside. He couldn’t be working...

You have to stay on your guard. We both do. Those words came back to her as she tried his cell phone. He’d been talking about Sly.

She listened to see if she could hear his phone buzzing or ringing in the house but heard nothing.

“Answer, damn it,” she muttered, but he didn’t pick up. And when she tried again, his voice mail came on for the second time.

This is Dawson Reed. Leave a message.

Had he caught a ride into town? Was he sitting in The Blue Suede Shoe? He’d gone there last night, hadn’t he? And it was a weekend. Maybe he came in from work, realized she was sleeping and left.

But she felt certain, because of Sly, he’d leave a note or something in case she woke up.

She was afraid her ex-husband had driven out, waited for it to get dark and ambushed Dawson while he was coming in from the fields...

She covered her mouth as a vision of what that might look like flashed before her mind’s eye. That told her what she really thought when it came to what Sly was capable of, didn’t it?

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” She hurried back downstairs and began rummaging through the “junk” drawer she’d reorganized in the kitchen. She’d seen a flashlight in there...

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find—and it worked. The beam wasn’t as strong as she would’ve liked, but she also had her phone. Although hesitant to leave Jayden after what’d happened last night, she was only going out on the farm. Everything seemed fine at the house, except that Dawson wasn’t in it. She’d lock up and keep an eye out while she checked the fields. She couldn’t leave Dawson out in the dark alone; he could need help.

“You better not have done anything,” she told Sly, even though he wasn’t around. Had he come out here and caused trouble just as they’d anticipated? What else could’ve happened?

She remembered how quickly Sly had reached for his gun while her house was burning, and that was right in the street! If Chief Thomas hadn’t shown up when he did, her ex might’ve drawn his weapon—and used it.

The weather was cold enough that she pulled on the coat she found hanging on one of the hooks in the mudroom—the one Dawson had loaned her before.

Please be okay... After the fire and how belligerent Sly had behaved at the house, not to mention her nightmare and what had happened at this farm a year ago, she was having a difficult time not imagining the worst. What if she found Dawson lying in a pool of his own blood?

Or worse... What if she couldn’t find him at all? What if Sly had killed him and dragged him off to some remote burial site where his body would never even be recovered?

Sly wouldn’t do that, she told herself. But she’d seen crazier things happen in the true crime shows she watched.

The door, when she closed and locked it behind her, sounded overly loud. She feared Sly would jump out of the darkness at any moment and choke her, or kill her in some other way. If he got away with it, he’d have full custody of Jayden without even having to fight for it. Then he could make sure Jayden was no longer “babied,” that he was brought up to be a “man” according to Sly’s definition. Sly wouldn’t even have to worry about how he’d raise Jayden on his own, since his mother would do most of the work for him.

The hair on the back of Sadie’s neck stood on end as she swung the beam of the flashlight across the yard. What she saw in that white circle seemed innocuous, but it was what she didn’t see that scared her. What was moving around outside it?

She dearly hoped it wasn’t her ex-husband.

Drawing a deep breath for courage, she left the back porch and headed to where she’d been with Dawson earlier. He might’ve stopped working there to fix the watering system or repair the barn, which meant he could be almost anywhere. But he hadn’t planned to stay out very much longer. Given that, she guessed he wouldn’t have taken on a new project, that he’d try to finish what he’d been working on and then quit.