He drove in silence for the next hour. Kate was fine with that. She preferred the quiet. She needed to think. Maybe the paring knife hadn’t been her best plan. It had been her only plan. Now she had to decide what to do at the border. If she did what she wanted to, she would be signing Jon Harper’s death warrant. But she suspected nothing she did could save him now, anyway.
If she played the role of Collin’s fiancée and they managed to get through customs without being arrested, then she knew what would happen. He couldn’t let her go. If he did, how could she not go to the authorities? How could she live with herself helping bring that much poison into the country?
She had few options, and ultimately none of them would save her or Jon. Gerald had proven that he had friends in law enforcement. She didn’t even know his last name or Phil’s, either. What were the chances that they would be arrested? By the time the law got to that house, all sign of them would be gone. She’d be looking over her shoulder the rest of her life because she didn’t trust that one of them wouldn’t come after her or her girls. She was trapped in this mess because she’d believed Collin and his lies.
“What has he got that I don’t?” Collin asked, dragging her from her thoughts. Kate looked over at him, confused for a moment. “Jon Harper,” he said. “What did you see in him that very first day? I don’t think it was just the likeness to your husband. Whatever it was, you couldn’t stay away from him.”
She heard the truth in his words. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “There was something about him, and once I looked into his eyes... I think it was the pain that I recognized. It was something we shared.”
Collin made a rude noise. “You’ve looked into my eyes, and you didn’t even know that I lied about my age. I’m only thirty-two.”
Did he really think that mattered now? she wondered.
“What about my pain? My suffering? You never saw it in my eyes, did you? I’m terrified of cold, dark, damp places,” he continued without looking at her. “This one nanny...” He stopped to clear his voice. “She used to lock me in the wine cellar when my parents had left me alone with her. It was just a part of the basement in the house that was small and cramped. She would lock the door and turn out the lights. I could hear her outside the door breathing hard. She would get so angry with me I thought that one day she might leave me there and forget about me and that my parents would never find me.”
For a moment, Kate didn’t know what to say, let alone what to believe. Was this true? If so, why was he telling her this now? Because he thought they were both going to die? “Did you tell your parents?”
“They didn’t believe me. She told them I had an overactive imagination. Sometimes she would leave me there for hours. I would huddle in the corner terrified that the little sounds I heard were mice or something bigger moving around in there with me.” He let out a cough of a laugh. “I knew better, but being in that kind of dark, your eyes, your ears, all of your senses play tricks on you.”
He’d said he’d was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and that his parents were well-off, but she’d suspected there had to be more to the story. Kate didn’t want to feel sorry for him. Poor little rich boy.
She thought of her own upbringing. Middle-class family who lived in a modest home, her father worked a steady job with the local utilities company, and her mother stayed home, kept house and raised her. Vacations meant visiting relatives or friends.
When she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, it had devastated her parents. They’d worried that Danny wouldn’t be able to provide for her. But he had—even after the explosion. She’d just never spent the settlement money. Instead, she’d swallowed her pride and moved home for a while because she’d needed her parents’ help with the girls since she had to go to work. As soon as she could, she’d moved out on her own with the girls. She’d figured things out for herself. Collin apparently hadn’t.
“Her name was Katrina,” he said now. “I’ll never forget her. I still have nightmares about her.”
She looked over at him and felt a chill. “What happened to her?” she asked, trying to keep the fear from her voice.
Collin didn’t answer for so long, she knew that her fears had been warranted. “She fell down the basement stairs and broke her neck. They found her by the wine cellar door—and me, just a day after my seventh birthday, locked inside.”
Kate heard the pride in his voice and knew. He’d pushed the woman down those steps and then locked himself in the wine cellar to pay back not only the nanny but his parents for not believing him. She couldn’t speak. She’d already known how Collin would react when backed into a corner. Once they were across the border, she was a dead woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JON HAD WORRIED that something might have happened to his pickup. But there it was parked on the second floor of the parking garage next to the hotel. He looked around, saw no one. There was an SUV parked next to it with British Columbia plates. It took him only a few minutes with the tools behind the seat of his pickup to remove the plates and put them on his truck.
That done, he climbed behind the wheel, started his pickup and drove out of the parking garage. He figured he wouldn’t be that far behind Matthews. If he was right, they were headed back to the Port Morgan border crossing. At least he hoped so. He was counting on it as he drove out of town, watching his speed and his rearview mirror.
He told himself that Kate would be safe—until they reached the border. He’d seen a weakness in Matthews and questioned whether he would be able to kill Kate. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take, though. But he was hoping that weakness would give him the edge once he caught up to them.
Jon just had to reach them before they reached the border. Before Gerald made the phone call he’d overheard him talking about on the phone.
* * *
COLLIN HAD SUGGESTED she try to sleep. “I would imagine you didn’t get much sleep last night at the hotel.”
Kate heard the allegation in his voice. She hadn’t looked at him, hadn’t denied anything, afraid he would see the truth in the heat that came to her cheeks.
But she hadn’t been able to sleep. Instead, she’d stared out into the brutal, bright whiteness through her sunglasses even though there was no sun, reminding herself to lower them when they got to the border checkpoint.
She saw the sign as they drove past the town of Val Marie. It wasn’t far now to the border. Why hadn’t Gerald called? Maybe it was too early. Hadn’t he said something about a shift change? Wasn’t Collin going to call him?
Collin kept driving. She expected him to pull off onto one of the local roads before they got to the border as Gerald had told him to do. Ahead she could see the flashing lights of the border crossing. She looked over at Collin. He had a death grip on the steering wheel.