Chapter 37

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

LAINEY

The sound of a gunshot makes me jolt.

Fear axes into me, but I don't hesitate…

I open the car door.

"Lainey," Damien says urgently, turning back in the driver's seat, "I'll go in first. We need—"

But I'm already out of the car, running.

When I reach the edge of the shitty fast food restaurant, I glance around the side of the building, keeping my body covered—

Jake is on top of Roark, and he's pounding his arm against the concrete of the parking lot, the gun angled sideways in his grip. The necklace box is sitting on the concrete too. The gun skids away, toward Mrs. Rosings, who's standing there with the confidence of someone who's much more familiar with decrepit parking lots. I'm about to run in and grab it when she casually steps forward and does so instead.

I pull my pepper spray out of my pocket and run toward Jake, who's still struggling to immobilize Roark.

Jake sees me, his eyes rounding with panic, and I realize my mistake when Roark manages to get his hand free and punches my boyfriend in the face.

"No," I scream. Running forward, I bend down and spray Roark in the face just as Damien and Nicole come racing around the side of the building.

Mrs. Rosings announces like the baller she is, "I will shoot you if you make me, but I'd prefer not to deal with such a mess."

Roark roars, trying to lift his hands to his face, but Jake pins them. Jake's nose is dripping blood, and his face has pink spots on it, which means I must have gotten him with some of the spray. But he's okay. He wasn't shot. He's okay .

There are tears in my eyes. Because I'd thought…for a second, I'd thought I'd lost him, and it was as if someone had shut off all the lights and left me in darkness.

Suddenly Damien's taking over for Jake, and Jake's standing up. He runs his hands over me, as if he's worried that I might have spontaneously become injured in between running around the corner and macing his shitty ex-boss. I don't think, I just lift my sleeve to his nose and hold it there to stop the bleeding, my other hand gripping him because I don't want to let him go.

I lean in and kiss the side of his mouth, his chin, and his lips, and my face is burning too—the mace rubbing off—and I honestly couldn't care less.

"You're okay, you're okay."

He laughs, leaning back slightly, one of my sleeves still pressed to his nose.

"Let's not exaggerate," he says in a nasal voice. "Can you promise not to mace me the next time you get pissed off?"

"I wasn't pissed off today," I say, laughing. Crying a little too.

"That's what I'm afraid of." He kisses my cheek, layering his lips over a tear. "Ryan's not here, hellcat."

I glance around, only then registering that Roark must have come alone.

"Is he…"

He runs a hand through my hair, nestling me in close. "I think he's okay. He got out. He cleaned out the museum and left. Roark…he thinks Ryan's trying to take over where he left off."

"And you?" I ask, my heart thumping a faster beat. If Ryan's going off on his own, will Jake want to join him? Was his time in Marshall just a pit stop?

"I need to go to Connecticut."

I look up into his eyes, the hope in them nearly turns me to vapor on the spot. He wants to believe that Ryan brought the watch to Dale. He's hoping the person he'd pinned his world on before he met me won't let him down the way everyone else always has.

I'm hoping so too, because I want to like his brother, and if Ryan has screwed this up, I might just mace him on purpose.

"Will you go with me?" Jake asks.

"Of course."

"I love you," he whispers, kissing me beneath the ear, in a spot that instantly radiates the feeling throughout my body.

"I love you back," I say. "I was so scared something had happened to you." My voice is trembling, and he pulls back slightly to smile at me, leaving my shirt smeared with blood. It's stopped dripping from his nose, so hopefully it's not broken.

"I saw you," he says playfully. "You were pretty fucking scary, charging in with that mace. My life flashed before my eyes."

I know he's joking to defuse the moment, to soothe my fear, and more love for him floods me. "You didn't already know I was scary?"

"Oh, I knew you were scary after you trashed my apartment. Or before, when you were disrespecting Professor X with all of that baby talk."

"Good," I say, leaning in to kiss his jaw, the side of his face. "But what are we going to do about my shirt? It's covered in blood."

He pulls back slightly, then pulls his own shirt off and tugs it over my head.

"The bloody one's underneath," I hiss, before removing it and pulling it out of the top of his shirt. "And you're going to get hypothermia."

"It's barely cold enough for goosebumps, and I didn't want you to have to flash your old boss."

"Yes, thank you for that," Mrs. Rosings says dryly, reminding me that she's witnessed this whole mess of a scene. "However, now we're all getting an eyeful of you ."

"Oh, come on, Mrs. Rosings," Nicole says, looking up from the trunk of the car, which is now open. I was so lost in Jake that everything around us had faded away, but the details are filling back in, like the shading in one of his drawings. "You can't possibly expect us to believe you object to Jake walking around shirtless." Still, she throws him a shirt from his bag in the trunk. "The things I do for the elderly."

I glance at Damien, who's tying Roark up with what looks like mud-brown ribbon.

"Is that…ribbon?"

"Yes," Mrs. Rosings says with a sniff. "I was going to ask you to use it to decorate the chairs for Anthony and Nina's wedding, but that's obviously moot. We'll have to cancel the plans, of course."

"Hang onto it," Jake says, his eyes on me. "And don't cancel everything just yet. The Love Fixers are going to find him a wife. After we go to Connecticut."

"We're going on a road trip?" Nicole asks. "Cool. But I get to choose the playlist. That's a hard rule."

"Be forewarned," Damien says, smiling at her as he finishes tying Roark's hands and feet with the ribbon. "She likes showtunes."

"Are you going to leave me tied up like this?" Roark roars. "It could take hours for someone to find me."

"Oh, I hope it takes way longer than that," Nicole says, approaching him and then wagging her finger in his face. "And I hope you'll think about this, many times , if you ever consider fucking any of us over. And remember…we could have ruined you, but we didn't. Even though you pulled a gun on our boy, we've enabled you to carry on with your sad little life. You're welcome. But guess what? If you so much as steal a stick of gum, I'm coming for you. You start shouting before the count of three hundred? That's not going to work out for you well either."

We bring the cars to an overlook off the highway so we can decide what comes next, picking a corner of the lot far away from the tourists exclaiming over the hazy view of the changing leaves.

Mrs. Rosings wants to go home to check on Anthony, and Nicole and Damien agree to go with her and leave their car with us. Which is to say, I convince them to leave, against their inclination, because I need to do this alone with Jake.

Before they pack into Mrs. Rosings's car to leave, Nicole points to both of her eyes, then swivels her fingers around to point at Jake. "You're bringing it back, lover boy. I like this car. The cushion has an imprint of my ass."

"Far be it from me to rob you of your ass imprint."

She cuffs him on the arm, grinning like the cat that ate the canary and then spat out its feathers. "You like me."

"You like me back."

"I liked you better before that guy made your nose look like a squashed tomato."

"So did I," I tease, wrapping my arm around his shoulders. I can't stop touching him, reminding myself that he's still here, that his body didn't get seriously hurt, even if what happened has messed with his mind. I know the sound of that bullet will stay with me for a long time.

"You'd better be careful," Nicole tells him, waggling her eyebrows. "Lainey may decide to swap you for the bizarro version of you."

"Can we please leave?" Mrs. Rosings says with a groan. "I'm ready to sleep in my own bed tonight. That hotel we stayed in last night was ghastly ."

Actually, at her insistence, it was a four star hotel with a bed more comfortable than the one I have at home, but Mrs. Rosings is nothing if not a woman with impossible standards.

"Are you going to talk the entire way back?" Nicole asks her with a sigh.

"Yes," Jake and I say at the same time.

Surprising me once again, Mrs. Rosings actually laughs and then adds, "But I do love a good showtune."

"That makes two out of three of us," Damien says as he slips in behind the wheel. Mrs. Rosings has made it clear that despite owning the car, she prefers never to drive. That job always falls to whatever paid employee, offspring, or unsuspecting soul happens to be around when she needs to go somewhere.

We watch as the others get in and they drive away.

Once they're gone, Jake turns toward me, wrapping both arms around me. He cleaned up in the bathroom at the overlook, but his nose is swollen, and it looks like he's going to have two black eyes. But he's alive, and he's mine . "I was thinking we could stop at my apartment in Manhattan to get my stuff. If that's okay with you."

"Of course," I say. "I want to snoop shamelessly. It seems only fair."

"Because you already snooped shamelessly when I was Jake Jeffries?" he asks, then leans in to kiss my forehead.

"Yes, I require a thorough snooping."

"What my woman wants, my woman gets."

"Have you tried to text your brother yet?"

His mouth lifts at the corner. "Only about a hundred times. And I called, not that he ever answers his phone. He wouldn't recognize this number. My regular cell phone's at the apartment. For all I know he's using a different number anyway."

"He'll get in touch with you," I say, wanting to believe it for him. Wanting to believe, too, that Ryan brought that watch back to Dale. If he didn't, I know it will hurt Jake, maybe even crack his heart a little—and I'm absolutely not okay with that.

A few hours later, after a forty-five minute struggle to find street parking, he leads me up to his third-floor walk-up with a railroad style layout, one room transitioning into the next in a row. His apartment is much bigger and nicer than the one Claire and I briefly shared in Brooklyn. The furniture looks like an assemblage of thrift store finds, with a mustard yellow table in the kitchen, and a black leather sofa and chair set with antique brass buttons in the living room. The walls are covered in art, but I don't get a chance to thoroughly snoop yet, because a note with Jake's name on it is sitting on the kitchen table.

I glance at Jake as we approach the table.

"It's in his handwriting," he says, his voice rough.