Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
My heart started to pound.
Audrey had nothing to do with her parents. She hated them almost as much as Tunnel did.
There was no love lost between them, and Audrey would never, ever voluntarily put herself into the same breathing space as them, let alone move with them. Speaking of moving…
“Why are they moving?” I asked in alarm.
“Exactly,” Tunnel agreed. “Why the fuck are they moving?”
I bit my lip.
“What do I say to her to get her to go with some strange man that she doesn’t know?” I asked. “You know her just as well as I do. She won’t do it willingly.”
He cleared his throat. “Fender already has the permission to share that I’m alive. You, well you just tell her the truth about Josh. I know you’ve given her the runaround about it, but if she knows the full story, then she’ll willingly come up here. Just tell her it is for her protection and that it’s so she’s not followed to you.”
All of that was true. I wouldn’t be lying to her.
“Okay,” I finally agreed. “I’ll call her now. Is there anything else you want me to tell her?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll talk to her myself once she gets here.”
A smile took over my face. “That makes me happy, Tun.”
I hated the thought of having this knowledge about Tunnel being here, and her not aware.
We’d both made many drunken promises, over the last six years, and I hated the thought of keeping something of this magnitude from her.
“All right, baby,” Tunnel said. “I gotta go. I have to figure out what in the hell is going on to make my parents bolt right when we have the best lead yet.”
“What lead?” I whispered, staring blankly at the screen in front of me.
“Josh,” Tunnel said, confirming my fears. “He thought he could play ball with the big boys, but he’s about to find out how wrong he was.”
And for some reason, that made my heart pound.
“Alrighty then,” I said breathlessly. “Will I see you when I get off of work?”
He grunted in reply. “Spent enough nights without you, Minnie. I don’t want to spend any more time alone.”
With that he hung up, and I said ‘I love you’ to dead air.
But I knew that he felt it, just as he knew I felt the same way.
Sighing and tossing a look beside me at Dr. Tommy Tom, who hadn’t even acted like he wasn’t listening to the entire encounter, I stuck my tongue out at him.
Today I’d given him a reaming for withholding information about my dead husband not being so dead, and he’d only smiled.
Now, here he was, unabashedly listening to my conversations with my now very much alive husband, and he was listening in like he had something to do with my husband’s miraculous reincarnation, so to speak.
Glaring at the man who continued to just smile at me, I searched through my latest calls and hit go beside Audrey’s name. I’d called her a few days ago to let her know where we were, and she’d called me the next night to make sure I was settling in all right.
“Hello?” Audrey answered.
I immediately frowned.
“Audrey, what’s wrong?” I asked instantly, sitting up in my seat.
“Nothing,” Audrey lied.
We both knew when the other lied. We’d been doing it so often to each other over the course of our friendship that it was almost second nature to know.
Our ‘yes, I’m all right’ had always meant ‘no, I’m not all right. I’m hurting and it’s hard to breathe.’ But we always said we were all right, because admitting that we weren’t felt like we entirely way too close to the breaking point.
Audrey sighed. “I’m in trouble.”
I relaxed a small amount.
She wouldn’t admit that if she was in danger.
“What’s going on?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.
I noticed that Tommy had relaxed once again, too, going back to leaning casually in his seat as he listened to me instead of being on alert.
“I made a mistake.” She didn’t sugar coat it. “I got this package. It was delivered to my place by mistake, but it was addressed to my parents. Instead of opening it, or throwing it away like I should have, I delivered it to their place while I was visiting some friends in Benton. I was going to just drop it off on their doorstep, but when I got there, a guy was outside. He’d fallen and had hurt himself pretty badly. His arm was dripping blood from a gaping wound on his forearm and training just kicked in. I helped him stop the bleeding, and in return for staying as long as I did, my mother and father arrived home.”
I sighed.
“And they decided you were useful, and requested you to help them in some way,” I groaned.
“Yep,” she said.
I’d been getting that for the last five years. Calls to ‘check on my welfare’ that were also requests for me to come work for them at their company.