takes care of everything in the back—and is probably the only person Shannon truly trusts.”
Sudden dark heat burned at the backs of Anahera’s eyes. She looked desperately toward the light at the end of the small street, needing a way out. She couldn’t break down, not here, not now, not with this cop with his hard eyes and his body that made hers threaten to wake.
“I’m going to get the car,” Will said, stepping ahead. “No point in you walking back, too. Wait by the parking sign on the street and I’ll pick you up.”
Always a cop.
Seeing too much.
If he’d pushed, she’d have pushed back harder, her rage a smashing wave.
But he was giving her room, was taking the first steps to the busy street beyond.
“I miscarried twins.” The words she’d never once spoken shoved out of her throat. “I was far enough along that I had the bump, that the doctors could tell me I was carrying twins. But I waited to tell the people at home.” Some London friends had known, but those friends lived in a different world than the people of Golden Cove. “I wanted to surprise Josie and Nikau and the others with a great big six-month bump. And then I never told anyone at all.”
Shifting on his heel to return to her, Will looked at her not with sympathy, not with pity, but with an understanding as desolate as it was angry. “It never fucking stops hurting, does it?”
Jesus, God, someone finally got it. “I keep waiting for it to stop, but no, it never does.” And on days like today, when she’d come up against a pair of twins, the wound dug its way in and twisted.
What would her twins have grown up to be like? Would they have been like Shannon and Aaron Chen, two people so in sync that they each had a specific role in the relationship and in the world? Or would her twins have been so different from each other that it was difficult to even tell that they were siblings? Anahera would never know. “Did you lose a child?”
“He wasn’t mine, but I lost him anyway.” Voice rough and fingers curled viciously into his palms, Will nudged his head toward the street. “Let’s go. The address Shannon gave me is on the outskirts of town. We may as well pick up your laptop before we leave.”
Walking out with him and into the chaos of life, Anahera blinked against the influx of noise. “You’re certain Shannon gave you the right person?”
He handed over a piece of paper. On it was written an address; below that the words: The koru paired with the minuscule ruby embedded in the back is her trademark.
38
“This is it.” Will brought the SUV to a stop on a leafy suburban street, outside a white villa fronted by a manicured lawn and the bare limbs of dormant roses. “Your laptop should be safe enough to leave. This is an exclusive area, no street crime to speak of.”
“Did you already have this place on your list?”
“Yes. We were going to hit it last.”
Anahera glanced at the other side of the street, her eyes on a new build that had been made to match the style of the older homes. A few more years, Will judged, a little more age on the plantings around it, and it would lose that unpolished new shine, begin to truly blend in.
“It doesn’t look like the jeweler advertises.” Anahera turned back to the villa. “How did you find out about her?”
“I’m a detective.”
A hint of a smile on her face. “Touché.”
Will wasn’t expecting the smile, or how beautiful she was when the light hit her eyes. Getting out of the vehicle without replying because he had no idea what the fuck to do with his response to her, he met her by the villa’s small white gate. Her smile was gone, her face back to its usual difficult-to-read state, and her hands stuffed into the pockets of her anorak.
Going through the gate and up the drive lined by those roses that appeared dead, he knocked on the front door. The woman who opened it was sixty and well preserved, her skin a smooth, unblemished white as a result of a liberal dusting of powder and her eyes an acute blue, her silkily white hair pulled back in an elegant knot. She wore a string of small pearls against a long-sleeved knee-length dress in a dark navy wool. “Yes?”