It was always over. It was over the minute you hung up the phone and left Nikki to die.
He sat for the longest time and finally managed to fall asleep. His dreams were filled with visions of Hannah and her teary eyes.
It seemed like an instant later when he felt his phone vibrate, and came awake. There was a horrible pain in his neck. He’d slept at an odd angle, but he hadn’t been able to make his feet move to his bedroom. It had been one thing to listen to Hannah’s cries of pleasure. He wouldn’t have been able to handle her tears.
The phone chirped again. It was, as always, close to him, tucked into the pocket of his pants.
Work was the only place where he hadn’t heinously f**ked up, and he meant to keep it that way.
With a heavy sigh, he pulled out the device to find a text. He looked at the clock. It was almost eight in the morning. Light flooded the room, and Gavin wished he’d closed the curtains.
He could smell coffee percolating somewhere in the kitchen.
When he pulled up the text, he didn’t recognize the number.
Stay away from Hannah. I know everything, Mr. Hot Shot. You can’t bury it. If you don’t let Hannah go, I’ll release all the documents related to your girlfriend’s death and take you down.
Gavin stared at the words, reading them again, dread drumming through him. After the longest time, he stood and walked toward his study. He didn’t need coffee. He needed a lot of mind-numbing alcohol because his f**king past was finally going to catch up with him.
No way would he turn Hannah loose so this creep could get his hands on her. He would never give up her future to protect his past.
He loved her, and she’d never know how much. She’d never know that he’d willingly sacrificed everything for her.
Chapter Eight
Slade walked into Black Oak Oil’s Alaska offices feeling like a new man. He’d left Hannah at the breakfast table, spooning a bit of sugar into her coffee. He’d kissed her forehead and told her he’d be back soon. It had been the perfect picture of intimacy. A man and his wife parting ways for the day.
Of course, Dex had kissed her, too. Maybe not totally conventional, but it worked for Slade.
“Do you want to kill Ward, or do I get the honors?” Dex asked.
He smiled at the threat from his hotheaded brother. Slade could always count on Dex to offer up a good, old-fashioned ass kicking to anyone who deserved it. “How about we figure out if he’s the one who’s been stalking Hannah before we bury him somewhere?” Dex sighed in disappointment. “I hate it when you’re logical.” The site office was small and underwhelming compared to the corporate offices. The place was utilitarian with white walls and concrete floors. Somehow, Slade felt more at home here than he ever did at corporate. He loved fieldwork and had been behind a desk far too long. He preferred roughnecks and spending time on platforms. He felt perfectly comfortable with the employees at River Run, but it was obvious, even from a distance, that Preston Ward III didn’t feel the same.
“This is not protocol.” Preston’s voice rang through the small building. It was worse than nails on a chalkboard.
Dex’s eyes rolled. “Be sure to call me if you change your mind and need someone to kill the son of a bitch. I’m going to get an update from Burke and Cole. Then I’ll do a little snooping of my own.”
Slade nodded. He would handle Preston better than Dex, and they had both agreed it was past time they figured out what was eating at Gavin.
After Dex walked toward the main office, Slade wound his way to the small group of IT
cubicles. Preston Ward stood in the middle of the room, incongruous in his thousand dollar suit, staring down his Harvard nose at the squatty man with the mop of black hair and a face that proudly proclaimed his Inuit heritage. Ben Kunayak ran this place. He was shorter than Preston, but given the mulish set of his mouth, he was also meaner. Slade thought seriously about just stepping back and letting Ben do their dirty work, but then he wouldn’t get the necessary information—or the satisfaction.
Two young men had joined Preston from corporate, both obviously IT employees. Slade thought he recognized the thin, sad-looking, brown-haired man as Lyle Franklin, the head of the help desk. Lyle stood with Preston, but the other twenty-something man, a pencil pusher dressed in a checked shirt with pale hair and fingers flying over his keyboard, sat behind his laptop. Crap, Scott Kirkwood. The little punk who’d tried to have an “important” lunch with Hannah. Bullshit.
With a sigh, Slade let his presence be known.
“Slade, thank god you’re here. You need to fire this man this instant.” Preston pointed at Ben. “He’s rude to his superiors and obviously has no understanding of Black Oak protocol or regulations. I believe the men up here have been using company computers to access p**n ography.”
That’s what had Preston’s panties in a twist? Slade snorted. Of course. These were a group of roughnecks in a city where men outnumbered women five to one and reliable Internet was tough to come by. He would have been shocked if they weren’t accessing online p**n .
“This employee has been allowing it to happen.” Preston’s fingers tapped against Ben’s desk in a rapid, irritating accusation. “In fact, he’s all but defended the practice.”
“I’ve found at least four machines with restricted IP addresses in their browsing histories.” Lyle Franklin had a thin face and obviously believed in sunscreen. “I don’t think bugs caught from p**n sites are the actual reason for our shutdown, but they could certainly cause problems in the future. It shouldn’t be allowed.”
So now the corporate IT department had become the morality police. Great. Slade had the urge to fire all three of them. If he got rid of them, he’d almost certainly be cutting off whatever access this stalker had to Hannah. But that wasn’t going to make the son of a bitch go away, and Slade wanted to nail this bastard for good.
“If Internet p**n isn’t the problem now, let’s focus on what is.” Slade turned to the IT