But I didn’t think about that.
I focused on Rosie’s instructions, which included stealing a car that wasn’t Duke’s as "he’ll have some kind of tracking software in there, the shifty asshole.”
I definitely felt terrible about stealing Anna’s SUV, but I’d already committed to this and I’d either have it returned or get her a new one. It was a small price to pay to make sure they weren’t in danger.
Rosie had walked me through, in great detail, how I could hot-wire a car. It didn’t surprise me in the least that she had this knowledge. As it was, I didn’t have to, since this was a ranch in Montana, in a town where people seemed to still be mostly good—or at least pretended to be. So the keys were in the freaking car. Then again, from what I’d come to gather, Duke’s family was powerful, known and respected around these parts. It would take someone with brass balls to fuck with them.
Or brass ovaries.
Once I’d told her I’d made it off the ranch without incident, she directed me where to go and hung up. No goodbyes, no asking if I was okay. I liked that.
The fact that she’d managed to organize a room in a moderately shitty hotel in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night was nothing short of magic.
There weren’t even any witnesses because to add to it all, the key was in the door of the room she’d texted me the number of.
The room was exactly as I’d expected: small, smelled like cheap cleaning products and damp. Ghosts of my past lurked in every corner, and not just those of my foster parents. No, that first night with Duke, when things had been so drastically different, when I’d been so sure I couldn’t survive him.
But here I was, now making sure he would survive me.
I hadn’t slept, of course.
I’d paced, I’d panicked, I’d considered getting back in the car so I could drive to the ranch and crawl back into bed with Duke.
Almost.
My resolve was too iron clad for that, my heart far too fragile. I knew for a fact if I’d stayed a day longer on that ranch it would ruin me, absolutely fucking level me. There would be no coming back, no rising from the ashes.
Not only that, I didn’t want to testify. I didn’t want to fucking sit in a room and watch a judge hand over a sentence, didn’t want to stare this man in the face and watch him try to wriggle out of it. Duke hadn’t spoken of it much, another way he’d tried to protect me most likely. Didn’t want me to think that all of this was for nothing, that the man might figure out a way to get out of this. He had powerful friends. Rich men with powerful friends made deadly enemies.
If that happened, I knew Duke would take things into his own hands, because that was the steadfast and deadly man Duke was.
But I didn’t want a man—even Duke—to take my problems, to solve them for me.
I wanted to handle this deadly one myself.
This man had taken my only friend, stolen a vibrant, driven and extraordinary person for no other reason than he didn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. He wanted to be invincible.
He’d taken away my cold, empty life. Forced me into one that was full, warm, and one that would haunt me for the rest of my days, along with the guilt of Andre’s death.
It was all his fault that I’d been on the ranch with Duke, that I’d attached myself to him and his family—another casualty.
So I didn’t go back to Duke.
I stayed in my room and prepared myself for what was to come.
A future without him.
“Now, I’m all for abandoning my family in the middle of the night to pick up a movie star who happens to be the key witness in bringing down one of the biggest assholes around, but you gonna clue me in to what we’re actually doing here?” Rosie asked, Aviators on me.
She’d arrived early morning, coffees for both of us in hand. Somehow, she’d known how I took it. That was just another mystery to the woman who’d made the twenty-hour trip in less than eight. I did figure out that she’d “borrowed a friend’s jet.” I wasn’t a stranger to flying in private jets, but I also knew it was hard to procure one in the middle of the night with a moment’s notice. I also knew that if anyone could manage to do something like that, it was Rosie.
She sure as shit didn’t look like someone who’d been torn from her bed and traveled across the country. She was wearing high-waisted leather pants, a black silk shirt tucked in, spike-heeled Valentinos, and her hair was piled into an artfully messy bun. Her cat eye was sharp and her blood-red lips lined to perfection.
She’d also handed me a change of clothes, almost as badass as her own. And she’d known all my sizes, right down to the La Perla bra she’d provided. I was back in designer armor—a Balmain blazer for Chrissakes.
Staring at the clothes on the floor of the motel room was like staring at the corpse of who I’d become at that ranch.
I was careful not to stare too long.
With makeup—again, that Rosie had supplied—applied and clothes still on the floor, we left the motel room and got into a black Range Rover.
It was only then she’d wanted to know what she was doing here.
I sucked in a breath. “This man killed my best friend,” I said in response.
Her face stayed blank. She’d known this of course. But something moved in her eyes, something that wasn’t the open dislike she’d worn the last time we saw each other. She was still wary of me, to be sure. I was wary of me.
“Andre had two brothers,” I continued, looking out the window. “Macho-men in their own right. They run a gym. One of them is a UFC fighter. They’re alpha all the way, and they adored their very openly gay and fabulous brother. They would’ve died for him, same for his parents.”
I’d met Andre’s family of course. They didn’t really like me since I had made sure not to be warm or kind. But I liked them. I liked how accepting and supportive they were of Andre, even though they didn’t understand him. They were staunch Catholics, had emigrated here from Mexico, been through poverty to give their sons a life, and did not hesitate to accept their son.
I was fiercely jealous of the strong family unit he came from, though I’d never admitted such a thing out loud.
I sipped my coffee. “They have a hole in their family because of me,” I said, my voice shaking only slightly. It wouldn’t do to crack right now, to crumble. Not in the car with this woman. Not on the way to do what I was going to do. I’d break down once it was done. I’d entomb myself in my mansion, drink vodka in the bath, not talk to anyone for a month and come out of my chrysalis the cold, unfeeling butterfly I had been before.
Rosie didn’t try to argue with me for taking the blame for Andre’s death like Duke had. She didn’t try to convince me that this wasn’t my fault. This was not a chick to pull punches, and it seemed to me she was someone who understood all the harsh truths of the world. She was definitely not the kind of woman to comfort someone with soft lies.
“I could wait it out at the ranch, for however long,” I continued, still looking out the window, letting the Montana landscape seep further into me. “I could continue to get in deeper with Duke, with his family, keep up the lie, tangle it up so tightly that there would be no way to remove myself without hurting more people.”