The Bookstore on the Beach - Brenda Novak Page 0,140
hand and led her to the French doors—and probably would’ve marched her across the yard, too. But once Mary got her moving, Autumn was able to continue, albeit on wooden legs.
“Aren’t you even a little excited to see me?” Nick asked, obviously crestfallen. “When I got to Tampa and you weren’t there, I knew you had to be here and wanted my arrival to be a bit more of a...pleasant surprise.”
Her chest tightened until it was so painful that all she could do was cry. She didn’t even know whether she was happy or sad. She’d prayed for Nick’s return. She’d given everything she had to finding him. And she was relieved and happy for her kids. They had their father back. But what about Quinn? What about their plans?
“Of course,” she managed to say. How else could she answer that question? But she wasn’t sure how she felt. It was as if someone had taken an electric mixer to her emotions.
He got the key from behind the ceramic frog, as he had so many times over the years, and opened the door, stepping back to allow her to precede him.
She went in, but before she could climb the stairs, he caught her hand and pulled her against him for a hug. “God, I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his nose in her hair as he held her tight.
Autumn had missed him, too. She’d grieved for almost two years. But now? She just felt numb, confused. This was not how things were supposed to go. “Nick, what happened to you?” she asked.
He leaned back and framed her face with his hands. “It was unreal,” he said. “The stuff of spy novels, only much less glamorous.”
“Were you...held captive?”
“Yes. But...give me a second before I go into that. I—I need to look at you.”
Guilt caused Autumn to squirm inside. At what point was she going to have to tell him about Quinn? She was looking into Nick’s face, but what she saw was Quinn laughing at the restaurant as he brought her the biggest piece of carrot cake she’d ever seen.
That had only been twenty minutes ago.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—I can’t wait. I have to know. What happened? I searched for you, night and day, for so long. Where were you?”
“I was captured by Russians and accused of being a spy.”
“Were you a spy?”
“No, not really. The Kremlin pretends to support Ukraine’s sovereignty over the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, but it views their friendliness to Western interests as an attempt by the West to isolate Russia. It’s a long story, but I was basically supposed to find out if a Russian spy had infiltrated the SBU. They were worried there’d been a security breach. Instead, when I was visiting Travneve and checking on some guns a certain member of the SBU had purchased from an unknown source, I was captured and taken to a military base—I don’t even know where. I was blindfolded when they took me in and when they brought me back out.”
“How’d you get away?”
“Eventually, they just let me go.”
“Why?”
He spread out his hands. “I don’t know. A guard I became somewhat friendly with thinks it’s because people were still asking questions about me. If they killed me, word could possibly get out that they had no real proof I was a spy and yet they killed me, anyway—and no one wanted to take the heat for making such a permanent decision. Or maybe they finally believed I was only trying to find out where those guns had come from to be sure that there wasn’t a Russian spy in the SBU.”
“I—I hired a private investigator who lives in Ukraine,” she said, wondering if Mr. Olynyk had been one of those who kept asking questions. Or was it someone or something bigger? The FBI?
“Thank you,” he said. “That could be why I’m alive today.”
She couldn’t absorb all of this, needed to sit down. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said, but as soon as they climbed to the apartment, instead of sitting on the bed so they could talk, as she’d envisioned, he walked around the room as though he couldn’t believe he was finally safe and in his old surroundings. But then he opened the closet and saw that his side was empty—that the drawers once filled with his clothes were, too. And, eventually, he came across Quinn’s shoes.
“Please tell me these are Caden’s,” he said softly as he stared down at them.