The Sheikh's Scheming Sweetheart by Holly Rayner

Author:Holly Rayner [Rayner, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

The garage had its lights out and looked closed when I walked up, but that didn’t seem to matter. The same old man was sitting there in his same old lime chair, sipping pink lemonade as if it were the middle of a scalding summer day.

“It’s ready,” he said, throwing his arm out when I was a few steps away.

I stopped and visually followed the sweep of his arm to my little brown car.

“Thank you!”

“Your boyfriend came by and checked it out too,” he said, and I stared at him.

“My boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Took a look inside before admitting we’d done a good job. Though we didn’t need him to tell us that.”

As I gaped at him, he let out a wheezy laugh. Had it been Brock? Russell Snow? Why?

“What did he look like?”

The old man shrugged, squinted at me, and then muttered, “Asian.”

I sighed. Clearly, this man didn’t care and wasn’t going to help me anymore.

So I went to my car. I checked around the exterior and then interior, scanning for anything out of place. But everything was untouched; even my Kleenex box was shoved in the side of my door as always. I got in. Then, after shoving Russell’s fat envelope into the glove compartment, I started driving out of Nederland right at the speed limit. I headed back to the home I didn’t want to go to while listening to some radio song I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

I was exhausted and yet filled with a useless, frenetic energy; I needed to move. I wanted to go home, to my apartment, where I could sink into my bed and cry. I was starving, but I didn’t, and wouldn’t, stop for food. I deserved to suffer, and I needed to go home.

The drive seemed endless, but I liked it like that—the black mass of trees or rock or water or something in between. The cat-like yellow lights of another car passed me. I didn’t pass anyone. I puttered along at exactly the speed limit, nothing more. I drove to get there; I just didn’t want to arrive. I wanted to drive forever and escape into this dissociated, thoughtless state permanently. I wanted never to think about what I’d done. But it was all too soon that I pulled into the familiar underground parking garage, stopped in my spot, and then remembered.

Car lights still on, I sat there and stared desolately at the half-worn ‘C26’ painted onto the wall.

I had been so busy trying to escape the mistake I’d just made that I’d flown straight into the arms of the mistake I had made years ago: Charlie.

If his message was any indication, he was sitting outside my door, just like all the other times. Maybe he was asleep; maybe he was awake. It didn’t matter.

I sat there in my car, trembling with what I had to do when I got out of it. I laid my fingers against the plastic handle and took a deep breath. Then I

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