Page 10 of Sin of Love
6
THREE WEEKS LATER
“What do you mean, dead end?”I demand.
“Nowhere to go from here, Mr. Masters. All we’ve got is a clerk recognizing her photo at a gas station near Shaver Lake. Ever been there? Great trout fishing.”
“Lyle.” My voice is a growl.
He coughs. “Sorry. I’m not sure what else to tell ya. Deirdre was one of my favorite clients, and she was sharp as a fuckin’ tack. If she wanted to disappear, fact is she’s probably gone, ya know? I’m kinda surprised I was able to track her this far. We’re lucky she’s got a memorable face.”
Through the phone line, I listen to the private investigator light a cigarette, then blow out smoke. My fingers twitch, aching for a clove or a joint. Something. Closing my eyes, I remember Deirdre’s slender fingers playing with a phantom Zippo lighter. She hadn’t realized she was doing it, but I noticed.
I noticed everything about her.
“And the gas station? Did the cameras catch her leaving?”
Lyle sighs. “To be frank, Mr. Masters, it’s gonna take more than a few greased palms to find out. Most places like that don’t store footage past a week, much less two months. Plus, we’ve got no idea when—or if—Deirdre drove back past. None of the other clerks recognized her, so she didn’t go inside.”
I want to reach through the phone and strangle him for making the worst kind of sense. But if I let good sense stop me, I wouldn’t have gotten this far.
“I don’t care what it takes, Lyle. Do you get that? Whatever it takes. There are two ways into that area and two ways out, and both run past that fucking gas station. I want to know when she drove out of that town. And if she didn’t, I want to know where her car is. Understood?”
“All right, all right.” Another inhale/exhale of smoke. “Lemme see what I can do. You know, this would be a lot easier if someone filed a missing persons report—”
“I know.”
When he realizes I’m not going to say anything else, he coughs that rasping, long-time smoker rattle. “Okie dokie. I’ll call when I have something.”
“I’ll expect updates every forty-eight hours.”
Lyle is professional enough not to protest—then again, I’m funding his early retirement.
“You got it, boss.”
He hangs up.
Tossing my phone to the other end of the couch, I fall back to the cushions and stare at the ceiling. The buzz from my liquid breakfast is wearing off. I smell like I haven’t showered in a week.
Accurate.
I can only imagine what my old therapist—the one I was forced to see weekly after my mom committed suicide—would say if he saw me now. Probably that Deirdre leaving so suddenly, under such a bizarre cloak of mystery, triggered my deep abandonment and codependency issues.
Maybe he’d be right. But after a vicious battle between my heart and my head over the last few weeks, I’ve come to a simple conclusion.
I love her. Every damn thing about her. The dimple in her left cheek that only appears when she’s laughing hard—a rare, precious occurrence. The way her hair has a slight curl underneath, the ringlets only visible when she wears it up. The line between her eyebrows when she’s angry with me, and how she tugs her ears when she’s nervous.
I reveled in her idiosyncrasies. How she ate every meal like she was starving, put on makeup like war paint and muttered to herself while doing it—how, after a few weeks living with me, she hardly wore makeup at all. Her refusal to cuddle while sleeping, but her insistence that her foot touch some part of my body at all times. Her toes like ice cubes on my thigh, my calf, my lower back—and those misty morning eyes.
Those eyes were what I noticed first about her, years before she officially stormed into my life. It was just after my divorce and the subsequent media shit-storm. There were few places I could just relax and be amongst friends, possibly get laid. Luckily for me, Dominic Cross and Charlie Rhodes opened Crossroads around the same time.
A weak smile curves my lips as I remember the moment I first saw Deirdre, stalking around the corner of that dark hallway like a predator in her stilettos. Tripping a little as she lurched to a stop. Gasping as she realized what she was seeing—a woman sucking me off.
Ten seconds.
She watched for ten seconds. I couldn’t see the color of her eyes, but I felt their punch on my face. The weight of them taking in my expressions, though not with lust, exactly. More like objective fascination. Like I was a new species she’d never seen before. It took everything in me not to come right then, and the second she left, I did, imagining it was her mouth swallowing me down.
And then, two years later, when she barged into the back of a strip club to keep me from fucking up my illustrious father’s business merger… She walked the same but looked different. Felt different. Buttoned-up. Chaste. Boring.
