Broken (33 page)

He wasn’t ready to leave yet. Even the thought of turning Sarah over to her husband made his skin crawl.

In his gut, there was a voice screaming
Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.

His heart, his gut, they were screaming. Demanding he trust. Demanding he stop what he was doing before he made one huge, motherfucking mistake. In his head, there was scathing laughter, mockery, and voices of self-doubt that told him he’d already
made
one motherfucking mistake by trusting her. Wanting her. Loving her.

Quinn found himself staring at the blank letterhead in the front of the information binder. Without understanding exactly why, he located a pen and pulled a sheet of the letterhead out.

“IF I’ve got it timed right, you’ll get message number nineteen within the next five minutes,” Quinn murmured, flipping the phone closed and looking up at Sarah.

She sat across from him at the diner table and ignored him, much as she’d done all morning, ever since they’d left St. Louis. Quinn laid her cell phone on the chipped Formica tabletop and spun it around.

Her gaze jumped to it, then moved away, just as quickly.

That look again—

Hell, that look confused the hell out of him. He’d seen something similar to it before—anticipation. It reminded him too much of the rush that always hit right before an op back when he’d still been in the army. The rush he got when he located some of the dangerous bastards who’d skipped out on bail.

Excitement. Anticipation. Mixed with fear.

The fear bothered him. No matter how mad he was, he wasn’t going to put her in the hands of a man who’d hurt her—of course, she wouldn’t tell him a damn thing, either.

She’d managed to go the entire morning without saying a single word to him. The silence hurt. He hadn’t expected that. He’d thought the worst of the pain had come when he’d flipped open that file and seen the face of the woman he’d fallen in love with. The
married
woman he’d fallen in love with. He hadn’t thought anything could hurt worse than the lies she’d told him.

But her silence did.

She wouldn’t talk to him. She didn’t offer any sort of explanations, reasons, excuses. He’d been expecting something, he guessed. Tears, maybe, either real or fake. Some sort of story to explain why she’d done what she’d done, why she’d run. An apology. A smile.

Something.

But she gave him nothing.

Quinn, who’d always wanted silence over empty words, would have given anything to have her just talk to him. About anything. About everything.

Hell, she could even keep up the lies she’d been telling him . . .

Be honest, man. How many lies has she actually told you? She lied about her name, and that’s pretty much it. You never asked if she was married
—

A lie of omission. Still counts as a lie, he told himself.
Still counts.

The phone chirped out a tune that had become extremely familiar.

Quinn gave the phone a dirty look and then glanced up at Sarah. “So who do you think it is this time?” he asked. “Is it the impatient bastard? Or the other one?”

He didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He tapped his fingers on the table and grabbed the phone. “It’s gonna be the impatient bastard. The other one’s only sent two messages.

“Whaddya know . . . ?” Quinn flipped the phone open and showed her the number on the display. “Impatient bastard. This makes message number nineteen. Must be going for some sort of record here.” Sighing, he read the message. “Whoever it is, he wants you to call him. Now.”

Sarah gave him a disinterested look. “If the messages are bothering you so much, either let me use the phone or turn it off.”

“You want to call him, you tell me who he is and why he keeps calling.”

She gave him that same, withering stare. “It’s none of your business who it is.”

“Then he can just keep calling.” Quinn had already tried calling the number himself, but as soon as he spoke, the call was disconnected.

“Do you plan on returning the phone to me?” she asked.

He slid her a glance. “It’s possible you could talk me into it—tell me why you ran away. Tell me what made you do it—the truth—and it’s possible I might give you the phone back. Hell, it’s possible I might give you your money, get up, and walk away—you can try to lose yourself again.”

She stared at him. Her eyes, those warm brown eyes, were cool and mocking. “How very kind of you.”

She wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing.
Fuck.

“I don’t get it,” Quinn said, shaking his head. He was confused as hell, and he didn’t like it. He also didn’t like how helpless he felt. He didn’t like the fact that he’d had a damned hard time looking himself in the eye, and he didn’t like all the unknowns in the current situation. Too many of them.

But most of all, he hated the fact that he had already lost her and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

“I don’t get it,” he said again, his voice quieter.

“You don’t get what?” Sarah asked, shooting him a dour look.

“You’ve spent the past two years hiding. If you wanted to be away from him that desperately, there’s got to be a reason . . . all you have to do is tell me
why
. Ask me to let you go.”

She blinked and cocked her head. “Would you do it as easy as that?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

Because I love you. Because something made you run and I don’t want you running. I don’t want you unhappy. I don’t want you afraid.
He hated the thought of her unhappy. Hated the thought of her being afraid—fear was a fucking
bitch
. Hell, if he wasn’t so damned afraid right now, he might be able to tell her all of that.

Tell her . . . and then watch her disappear from his life.

“Because of you,” he finally said. He wanted to tell her. Wanted to force the words from his throat, but they wouldn’t come. Might have something to do with the fist-sized knot lodged just above his trachea. He swallowed around it and tore his eyes away from her face.

God, that heart-shaped face, those big brown eyes, they were going to haunt him. No matter what happened, for the rest of his life, he was going to see that face every time he closed his eyes to sleep.

He hadn’t thought there was anything in the world that could hurt him like he was hurting now. Not even Elena.

“Will you tell me?” he asked, forcing the words out.
Tell me . . . ask me to let you go.
She wouldn’t really want to go back to somebody who’d hurt her, would she? She wouldn’t want to go back to somebody she hated, would she? So if she was so ready to go back, it meant she didn’t hate her husband—meant he hadn’t hurt her.

He remembered the flash in her eyes when he’d asked her the first time. She’d told him she’d kill a man who hurt her—he believed her, but it made things that much harder. If she hadn’t run because Morgan had hurt her, then why?

Maybe she was playing some bizarre, incomprehensible game, and Quinn was clueless about the rules.

“Shit.” He dropped his head into his hands and tried to tell himself the burn in his eyes was anything but tears—that the ache in his chest came from something other than his shattered heart.

“Relax, Quinn.”

He lowered his hands and stared at her from under his lashes. “Relax.”

She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. “Yeah, relax. You’re just an hour shy of getting a nice pile of money. Easy money.”

“Easy?” He snorted. “You think this is
easy
?”

She stared at him levelly. “You didn’t have to hunt me down. I haven’t tried to get away. I more or less fell into your lap. Easy money.”

“Bullshit.” He once more focused his attention on the window. A lot easier to stare out over the expressway than look at her. His mind raced. They were an hour south of Chicago. He was running out of time to get her to talk to him, but damned if he knew how to make her do it.

He hadn’t bothered calling to check in with Martin, and he had yet to call their client to advise him of their impending arrival. Both were things he needed to do, but he wasn’t terribly inclined to talk with Martin, and he definitely wasn’t in the mood to get into a discussion with the man married to Sarah.

Plus, he didn’t want to clue the man in on anything, not until he had a better idea of what was going on. What had made her run.

He scowled, thought back to just how much money Sarah had been carrying stashed on her body. Close to eight thousand cash. “So where’s the rest of the money?” he asked.

She glanced at him and then resumed staring out the window. Gritting his teeth, Quinn fought the urge to slam his fist into the table. He was sick and tired of being treated like he didn’t exist, especially by her.

The waitress appeared at the table, giving them a tired, empty smile. “What can I get for you folks?”

“I just want some ice water,” Sarah said, her voice as tired and empty as the waitress’s smile.

Scowling, Quinn said, “You didn’t eat anything this morning, or last night. Order some food.”

Sarah shrugged restlessly.

“Bring us two burgers, fries.” Quinn waited until she left before he looked back at Sarah. “You need to eat.”

“I’d just as soon have an empty stomach, considering the lovely day you have planned for me.”

“I don’t want to take you to Chicago,” Quinn blurted out. The words echoed between them, and as damning as they were, he couldn’t regret speaking them. He didn’t
want
to take her to Chicago, to turn her over to somebody else—husband or not.
Quinn
wanted her. All of her, all to himself.

“Of course you do,” Sarah said, her voice cool and mocking. “You’ve got a job to do. All that easy money is waiting for you.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the money,” he snapped. He reached out and caught her hand, tugging on it even as she tried to resist, tried to pull away.

She curled her lip at him. “Yeah. Sure.”

“
I don’t care about the money
,” he snarled. “I care about . . .”

You.
The word froze in his throat. It wouldn’t come out. “Look, I don’t care about the money. I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to do. Just give me a reason,” he said. “Just tell me why you ran. Just give me the answer to that.”

Sarah stared at him balefully. “And you’ll what?” she asked bitterly. “Forget you ever saw me?”

Then she snorted and jerked on her hand, tried to pull away from him. Quinn wouldn’t let go—couldn’t let go. “What’s going on, Sarah? This doesn’t make sense—if you don’t like your husband, divorce him. Why just disappear like that? Why spend your life in hiding if he didn’t hurt you?”

It didn’t fit—no matter how many times he tried to get the pieces to align in his mind, they didn’t fit.
She
didn’t fit, not into any of the scenarios he’d constructed in his mind as he tried to explain away what was going on. She wasn’t a money-grubber. She wasn’t the flighty sort who’d just get bored and disappear—she’d put too much work into disappearing and she’d done a damn good job of doing it.

Hell, if fate hadn’t put them on a collision course, would she have been found? He’d spent some time looking deeper into her background over the past two years, using his laptop while she slept in the hotel room and doing a sketchy search. It yielded even sketchier results—for the past two years, it was like Sarah Morgan had fallen off the face of the earth.

He could have gone deeper, but he was having trouble doing so. Part of him suspected he wouldn’t like what he’d find if he searched too deep.

There was one plausible scenario, one that would explain her running, even though it left his heart tied into knots and his gut cold with fury. Had Morgan hurt her? Threatened to? Even thinking about it left Quinn feeling sick inside. Sick
and
murderous, but it would explain why she’d run, and it did a hell of a lot better job explaining it away than anything else.

But it didn’t fit either. Because the woman he was looking at was a fighter. She had confidence bred down into her bones, the kind of confidence an abused woman couldn’t understand.

Nothing
fit
and it was driving him fucking nuts—he wanted this to fit. Needed it to fit, needed to understand
why
.

He stroked his thumb over the inside of her wrist, focused on that, the way his skin looked darker, rougher, compared to hers. “I’m tired of asking you questions, tired of you ignoring me. But I can’t
not
say this—if he’s hurt you, if he’s threatened you, if for some reason you’re not safe with him—just say the word. I’ll get you away. I won’t let him hurt you. Just tell me. Just let me help.”