it be to find one damn woman? And how much are you paying those detectives?”
“Finding her is the easy part,” Loren butted in again. The motherfucker couldn’t keep his mouth closed if someone paid him. “Getting to her before she’s tipped off and takes off is where he’s failing. If he would just do what I told him, we’d be square.”
“I’m not having her kidnapped,” Rich snapped, drawing the attention of the pretty receptionist a few feet away.
When she continued to stare, waiting to hear more, Loren immediately scowled. “Can we help you?”
She quickly looked away, and we made sure to lower our voices before resuming our conversation.
“Maybe it’s time you consider it,” I heard myself say. Normally, I would have agreed with Rich, but that was before Braxton. I didn’t give a fuck about that she-demon we warned him not to marry.
“No,” he said with a finality that left me no choice but to respect.
Loren, however, narrowed his eyes at Rich. “I’m starting to think you still have feelings for her.”
Rich never answered because his attention had been stolen by Braxton coming down the hall. She was alone as she walked with her head down like she was deep in thought as she stared at the freshly waxed floors.
Pick your head up. Give me your eyes.
As if she heard me, that’s precisely what she did. I just wasn’t prepared for the utter look of failure in them. Braxton looked defeated, something I once thought impossible even when I relentlessly pursued it for my own satisfaction. I didn’t know what to do as she came toward us. How could I when I didn’t know what put that look in her eyes?
Loren and Rich were frozen like me when she finally stood before us.
“We can go now,” she announced before turning toward the exit. She walked through it without looking back, expecting, or perhaps not caring whether we followed or not. Braxton moved like she was on autopilot—like she was drifting in the desert without a direction to go in.
We were supposed to be her compass.
There were no words spoken between us before we stood and followed after her.
When Braxton told us we were leaving, none of us expected her to mean California altogether. It was obvious she wanted to put as much distance between her and whatever happened as fast as she could. It took us putting our foot down when reasoning with our girlfriend hadn’t worked. She’d been reacting off pure emotion while Loren, Rich, and I were still scrambling to catch up.
Braxton was no help as we searched for accommodations. The brat sat and brooded in the backseat with Rich while Loren rode up front as I drove around aimlessly for half an hour.
I’d fix her, though.
Eventually, we found a motel near the airport ran by someone who hadn’t recognized us. The innkeeper smiled like he was in on the joke when I asked for one room, and he noticed there were three of us and only one of her.
I wrote his name on my mental checklist and accepted the key to our room.
We were given one on the first floor that smelled like mothballs and smoke even though I’d asked for non-smoking. The small room had wood paneling for walls and shag carpeting in a deep shade of red. There was a box TV on top of an old dresser that I doubt turned on much less worked, a table with two chairs in front of the one window draped by white curtains that had a green, geometric pattern. All I cared about was the king bed centered in the room as exhaustion washed over me for the third time since arriving.
“So,” Loren said after we were all inside, and he’d taken a seat at the foot of the bed. Rich was sitting in one of the chairs staring at his phone as he checked for updates on how well canceling our show had gone while I hovered by the door. I didn’t trust Braxton not to run through it the moment our guard was down. “You have a sister.”
Braxton looked up from the suitcase she was now rifling through to look at each of us. The anger and disappointment in her eyes were momentarily replaced by guilt when she realized we were still in the dark where she’d left us nine, almost ten hours ago.
“I guess I haven’t been very forthcoming.”
Understatement.
“We should have asked,” Rich told her, hefting some of the blame onto our shoulders, which