Gone (Deadly Secrets #2)(77)

Raegan drew back and looked up with shimmery eyes. “Oh, Alec.”

“We’re going to find her.” He framed her face again, lowered his head, and pressed his warm lips against her cool ones. “We’re going to find her and bring her home.”

She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back.

All he wanted to do was get lost in her, but they didn’t have time. Releasing her, he closed his hand over hers and tugged her down the road toward his truck. “We need to get out to the highway where we can get a signal and call Bickam. I want Charlene picked up before she decides to run or ODs. She’ll be itching to spend that money I gave her.”

Raegan’s feet shuffled to keep up with his longer steps. “What if she takes off after we leave?”

“We’ll wait at the bottom of the road until the Feds show up. There’s no other way out of here except the hills. And if she decides to go that way, she won’t make it far.”

He turned and smiled at her, and when she smiled back—a warm, happy, hopeful smile—his heart turned over and he knew that finally, finally, everything was about to be right.

He was getting his family back. And nothing and no one was going to stop him.



“Shit.” John Gilbert stared down at the burner cell phone buzzing beside him on the ripped plastic bench seat as he drove. Only one person had the number to his new phone.

He ignored the call. He had enough cash left from his first payment to get him all the way to Seattle. There he could find a forger to create documents that would take him across the border. As for money to get to the border, well, he was a man who could always find a way. Charlie, the bitch, had been a total bust in the money department, but at least she’d helped him steal this beater F150.

Shifting against the seat, he reached for the knob on the radio. The phone buzzed beside him again.

Son of a bitch. He slowed the truck and pulled to the gravel shoulder. Staring at the phone, his heart beating hard, he debated his options, then decided the less they knew the better. If he didn’t answer, they’d know he’d run. If he answered, they’d think he was still around doing their shit work.

He lifted the phone to his ear. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Mr. Gilbert,” a terse voice said on the other end of the line. “You haven’t been answering your phone.”

He refrained from saying sorry because he wasn’t. “I didn’t hear it.”

Silence, then, “A man named Alec McClane checked in to the emergency room the other night with a gunshot wound. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Gilbert’s heart raced like a filly in heat streaking away from a stallion. “No. I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

“Mm hm. Your job was to keep one nosy female reporter off a story that could be detrimental to our interests.”

“By any means necessary,” he huffed. “That’s what I was told. I done exactly what I was told to do.”

“Firing a weapon in broad daylight on a busy downtown street is not what we told you to do. And at your son, no less.”

Anger burned a path straight up Gilbert’s cheeks. “He ain’t my son. He never was.”

“Our employer wants to meet with you to discuss your progress. Ten o’clock tonight. There’s a dock at the end of North Sever Road. Don’t be late. And don’t think about running, Mr. Gilbert. We know where to find you.” The line clicked dead in his ear.

Blood pulsed in Gilbert’s veins, making his hand shake against the phone. He was dead meat if he went to that meeting. A dock off a deserted road, late at night? No fucking way.

Lifting his gaze, he looked out the cracked windshield and tightened his hand into a fist around the phone, a new wave of rage roaring through him.

This was Alec’s fucking fault. He should have killed the bastard with that bullet instead of injuring him. He’d wanted Alec to suffer and now that was coming back to bite him in the ass, just like the no-good kid he never should have taken in had come back to bite him more times than he could count.

The phone’s casing cracked beneath his fingers. Realizing his knuckles were white, he let the phone drop to the seat beside him.

Fuck his employer. Fuck what the bitch wanted. He was done. He shoved the truck into gear and pulled out onto the highway. He was leaving this fucking town for good.

As soon as he did one last thing.

He whipped a U-turn and headed back to Portland.



Alec kicked the apartment door closed and pulled Raegan into his arms. She moved into him without hesitation and lifted her mouth to his, opening to his kiss with the same heat and need and hope thrumming all through his veins.

They’d waited thirty minutes for Bickam to show up at the trailer park. Alec had never been as happy as the moment he’d seen the Feds hauling Charlene out of the trees in handcuffs. She’d tried to run—as he’d expected—but she hadn’t gotten far. And she was spitting daggers at him when she saw him standing there watching. Alec had wanted to sit in on her questioning, wanted to know exactly what she’d omitted when she’d spilled her story to him, but Bickam had quickly shut that down and sent him and Raegan home with the promise he’d call as soon as he had any information.

Any information . . . That could come tonight, or tomorrow. But for the first time in years he had hope that it would come. Until it did, all he wanted to do was savor every moment of this life he should have been living these last three years. This amazing, wonderful, perfect life he was never walking away from again.