“Dean? The fuck is going on?”
“Where is she?” I demand.
“Clover? She took off with Bobby. Said it was some kind of emergency?”
My phone nearly slips from my fingers in my desperation to get it out of my pocket and I send several messages to Bobby. After a few anxious seconds of waiting, I get a short text response.
He is with Clover and will bring her back once she calms down.
Should I follow them? If they took the only car, then we’ll have to go back to the airfield to pick up the others and I’m not confident Bobby will tell me where they’re going. I’d have to rely on the trackers within the vehicles.
“Dean?” Jack’s worried face floats in front of mine. “You good?”
“I…” Shaking my head, I suck in a deep breath. “I need the security team here. And a car.”
“On it.” Ever a man of few questions, Jack takes my silence as an understanding that I’m not ready to talk about it and gets on his phone to complete my order.
In a daze, I slowly walk back into the bar. It’s emptier than it was when we arrived and Duke is back behind the bar cleaning a pint glass. His hands pause when he spots me and visible tension ripples up his bare arms.
Is he anticipating a fight? Aside from his Russian heritage, I have no concerns about him. When Hailey revealed the truthabout her disappearance, I kept an eye on Duke fearing that Hailey was reciting a practiced story and he was her handler or worse, but when they hugged and talked about the twins, I knew it was real.
He really cares for her. He’s not a threat.
“Here.” Dean slides a beer bottle dripping in condensation across the bar to me as I take a seat. “You look like you need it.”
“I came here hoping for information,” I say as I sit. “I think we got too much.”
“Not the happy reunion you were hoping for, huh?”
“I wasn’t even hoping for that,” I admit. “I was just praying I wasn’t bringing Clover to find a body.”
“You two are…” Duke lifts his bushy brows, and I nod. Then I shake my head.
“It’s complicated. Insanely so now.”
“Sorry. Can’t be easy.”
I stare at the neck of the bottle and track a few droplets rolling down the glass. “What the fuck was all that?”
“Sorry about Hailey,” Duke says quietly. “I know she was… unkind to Clover.”
“Y’think?” I glance at him and scowl. “The things she said to her own sister… I can’t understand.”
“Neither can I,” Duke replies. “But it’s not my job to understand. It’s to support. Hailey had a tough upbringing. She grew up having to be a mother to Clover after their mom died, and their dad was absent but kind. She loved him a lot but she also understood him. So when he suddenly died, it really broke her. We were planning on running away to get married and then come back because she believed he would be more forgiving than understanding, but when he passed, everything went up in smoke.”
“I can imagine.” My life felt like it fell apart when I woke up and learned both my siblings had died in that fire. My motherwas a shell of a woman up until her own death and my father followed not long after. Sometimes, death is too painful to recover from.
“But then that bastard Malcom tried to force himself onto her, kept talking about how a wedding between them would fix everything. I couldn’t protect her. I was just a grunt. But I could save her, so we ran.”
Malcom tried to force himself onto Hailey? My stomach turns and acid burns at the back of my throat like heartburn. “How could she leave Clover with a man like that? Didn’t she know what he would do?”
Duke looks pained. “We were young and scared. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get Hailey away from him, so that’s what I did. She was a mess and I… Clover just didn’t matter. Hailey worded it terribly about Malcom’s interest, but I truly believe she thought that meant Clover would be safe.”
Clover never mentioned Malcom ever trying anything with her, and he’s visited the manor a few times, but she hasn’t said a word. Come to think of it, if all of this is true, then were Clover and Malcom working together? Is that why she lied about the debt and financial difficulties?
My head drops low. Nothing makes fucking sense anymore.
“You didn’t know any of this?” Duke sounds genuinely pained for me.
