“Really?” I smile, fingering the smooth fabric that lays against my neck.
“He was always thinking of you.” Her voice is sad, holding the same pain my own heart feels with his loss.
“I miss him every day,” I confess, sighing.
“Me too.” She smiles sadly before taking a deep breath and saying brightly, “Let’s get this done, go back to the hotel, and have manicures.”
Laughing now, I move to take the photographs off of the bulletin board. I smile and set aside the one of Peter and me from last summer. That one I will take home with me. My hand shakes as I pull the pin out of the one containing my mother, stepfather, and me at my high school graduation. Instinctively, I tear it into little pieces.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” Aunt Kitty asks, brushing away a tear that was unknowingly falling down my cheek.
“It was a picture of him, Mom, and I,” I murmur, putting the pieces of torn paper into her open palm. She kisses my temple wordlessly and dumps the pieces into the trash can.
Aunt Kitty leaves the room and finds a large trash can. Between the three of us, it doesn’t take long to go through the small room and pack everything I want to take with me.
“Look what I found!” JoJo says, surprised, from where she shifted the dresser away from the wall to see if anything had fallen behind it. “It must have been pushed underneath.”
Standing back up and smiling, she holds my laptop in her hand. I go to take it from her, but she pulls it away and says, “I’ll need to have it checked first.”
“Right,” I mutter.
“I’ll call this in,” JoJo says, setting the computer slowly on top of the desk and pulling out of her phone.
I move over to the suitcase to help Aunt Kitty refold my clothes and pack them neatly.
By the time we’re done neatly packing my suitcases, a tall thin man wearing a weathered leather jacket and worn jeans arrives. JoJo greets him warmly and introduces him as “Stroke,” an operative from a London-based agency they often partner with. He takes the laptop and places it into a metal suitcase before leaving as quickly as he arrived.
As I walk out of the room behind JoJo and Aunt Kitty, rolling my suitcase behind me, my new cell phone rings in my pocket. Stopping, I quickly pull it out, expecting to see Finn’s name “Boss Man” flashing on the screen. Instead, it’s an unknown caller. My heart races, wondering who’s trying to call me.
“Hello,” I answer, my voice cracking slightly.
“Hey, sweetheart.” The sound of Peter’s voice releases all the tension in my body.
“Hey, Peter,” I breathe, continuing to follow the others, who have now stopped and are both looking back at me in concern.
“Are you and Mom behaving yourselves?” He laughs in my ear.
“Yes,” I tell him drolly. “We just cleaned up my ransacked dorm room, and we are now heading back to the hotel for much-needed manicures.”
“What?” he says, with a distinct edge to his voice. “Your dorm room was ransacked? Was anything taken?”
“Yes, it was, and no, not that we could see,” I explain as we reach the sidewalk. JoJo is standing next to me and, although she looks relaxed, I can tell she’s keeping a watchful eye. Aunt Kitty is hailing us a cab. “And no, I don’t know what the bitch was looking for.”
Chapter Eight
~ Finn ~
“You’ve put your sister in danger?” my mother’s voice accuses me angrily as I answer her call.
“I would never intentionally put Riley in danger,” I snap, my back straightening in my office chair.
“I just spoke to your grandmother.”
I groan, realizing my mistake in telling Grandpa what happened when he called this morning, concerned about the report he’d heard on the news reporting the explosion and fire. We’ve always been close, but after all these years, I should’ve known he would tell Grandma everything. Although it’s admirable that they don’t keep secrets from one another, it can be damn annoying at times.
“Then she would’ve told you that it wasn’t my fault. What should I have done?” I ask sarcastically. “Left Lily there?”
“Of course not,” she snaps. “But you should’ve thought about your actions and how it would affect people around you.”
“Which is why Trevor is with Riley and not here helping me deal with my destroyed warehouse,” I growl, wondering why I even bothered to pick up the phone. After knowing the woman for 35 years, I should have anticipated her reaction. “You do realize my company was attacked, right?”
“Your sister is more important than your damn company,” she snaps at me acidly.
“I know,” I fire back. “Riley is fine. I talked to her earlier. And she completely understands.”
“If anything happens to your sister, I’m blaming you,” she says before ending the call in a huff.
I throw the phone down onto the desk.
It begins ringing.
Seeing that it is the owner of Pride Security, Derek Lion, I don’t hesitate to answer it, hoping they have some updates for me.
“What have you discovered?”
“Good news. With our help, the FBI have arrested the bomber, and he’s talking. Mayer not only hired him for this job, but he was also contracted to set fire to Mayer’s house. Most likely for the insurance payout.”
“Do they have enough to arrest Mayer?”
“Yes. The agent I spoke with, an Agent Farris, said they are just waiting on the judge to issue the arrest warrant. They know he’s on a plane flying back from Paris to Boston, and they’ll pick him up at the airport.”
“Thank God!” I exhale, feeling the weight of the danger he posed fall away. The two women I love, my sister and my princess, would now be safe.
“Yes,” Lion agrees, then continues firmly, “you don’t need to worry, since we know who the culprit is, but Johnson phoned in earlier to tell us that Miss MacKay’s dorm room had been searched.”
“What?” I throw myself back into my chair, running one hand through my hair.
“Yes. Nothing was missing, so they didn’t find what they were looking for—”
“Who was it?”
“We are fairly certain it was the woman Tiffany Woods who befriended Miss MacKay in London. While she was tearing the room apart, she brought back Miss MacKay’s bags from Paris.”
“So thoughtful of the bitch,” I mutter.
Mr. Lion chuckles in my ear before continuing, “We are having Miss MacKay’s laptop checked out by a specialist there in London, but there is still the question of Mayer’s wife and how she enters into the equation.”
“Have you learned anything new?” I sigh deeply. Even though my mother drives me insane on a good day, I know she’d never intentionally harm me. “The woman hasn’t spoken to Lily in over three weeks!”
“For the past ten days, Mrs. Mayer has been at an exclusive spa and retreat in Arizona. According to their literature, they don’t have Wi-Fi and discourage contact with the outside world. As to her involvement in Miss MacKay’s kidnapping, I have seen no evidence that she knew what her husband was doing,” he tells me before taking a deep breath. “However, she and Mayer may have colluded in the past in regard to her first husband.”