“Aaron,” I said, but my shock and receding adrenaline made my voice a harsh rasp. “Aaron.” I tried again. “I think we stumbled on a serious jewelry theft.”
I raised the diamond necklace higher for him to see in the rearview mirror and wasn’t surprised when I received a muttered curse in response.
“Hold on, Blue. Let me call a buddy’a mine.” He lifted his hips to fish a phone out of his back pocket, then left it on his thigh to order voice command to call a person by the name of “Lion.”
“Hey, man. Just on a run, but I got a little situation here I’m wonderin’ if you can shed some light on. Anythin’ goin’ ’round about a jewelry store robbery?”
“You got your head buried in the sand? Twelve stores have been hit in the past two months from downtown Vancouver to Whistler. You got a lead?”
Whoever Lion was, he had a rough, slow drawl like a Canadian cowboy. It was almost sinfully hot.
Aaron looked at me crouched in the back, his eyes dark pits in the shadowed interior of the van. I wondered what he would do. He was clearly an outlaw, and in my generous experience with outlaws, they didn’t have much respect for the law. Would he turn over the evidence or keep the treasure for himself?
A tiny part of me I was afraid to listen to also wondered if he factored me into his mental math. Would a man nicknamed Boner give a shit what some random girl thought about the situation?
I ripped my gaze away from his, unable to bear the intensity of his scrutiny.
And that was when I saw it.
The jean jacket.
I would have recognized it anywhere, even half folded and crumpled between two boxes in the shadowed recess of the back seat. It was distressed in a natural way, born of wear, and not fabricated to look that way. The left sleeve had been barely hanging on until I’d sewn it back together myself with vivid blue thread.
My heart beat a vicious tattoo in my throat, choking me as I leaned forward to pull the jacket into my lap. I must have made some kind of distressed noise because I was vaguely aware of Aaron calling my name.
But I couldn’t focus on him.
Only on the vivid blue thread I was tracing with my thumbnail.
“It was him,” I breathed the words as if they were punched out of me.
“Who?” Aaron’s voice was a sharp exclamation point of sound, but I still couldn’t answer.
The man I’d spent years with. The man I’d told my secrets to.
This was the same man who had stood across from me in Evergreen Gas Station with a gun leveled at my belly. The same man who had suggested he knew someone who might think I was worth something. I knew it with a certainty that chilled me through to the bone.
A vicious, full-body shiver rocked through me so hard my thumbnail cut through the blue thread on the shoulder of the jacket owned by Otto Granger, my thieving, scumbag ex-boyfriend.
“Blue!” Aaron growled, swerving to the side of the highway even though the road barely had a shoulder. He clicked his seat belt free and twisted to lean between the front seats to reach me. The touch of his hand on my thigh grounded me like a lightningrod, that electric hatred receding until my head was clear enough to think again.
When I looked up at him, his tanned face was tense with worry, those night-dark eyes scouring my face and body as if searching for visible wounds. I wasn’t sure how to tell him they were so far beneath the surface there was no hope of excavating them.
“Who was it?” he asked, softer this time, as gentle as the thumb rubbing over my denim-clad thigh.
“Otto,” I whispered on a defeated exhale, twisting the jean jacket while I imagined it was Otto’s neck. “My ex-boyfriend.”
Aaron’s brow climbed into his broad forehead. “Your ex-boyfriend just robbed the gas station you work at? You a new employee, or did he know you worked there?”
I didn’t have to answer. He read the truth in the toxic tangle of humiliation and rage stamped like a brand I was afraid would never fade on my face.
The stranger with the absurdly pretty features rocked back to run a hand through his thick mess of dark hair and blew a raspberry between his lips before surmising, “What a motherfuckin’ bastard.”
A short bark of laughter erupted from my throat. “Yeah, pretty much.”
He peered at me from under that errant lock of hair that seemed to perpetually flop across his forehead. “You got bad blood with him? Before now, that is.”
“I came home from work one day, and he’d cleaned out my savings.” It hurt to admit to this beautiful man that I’d been such a fool, but I wasn’t a proud person. I’d never had much to be proud of, not my family, my prospects, or even my looks or personality. I was a pretty average girl with a pleasant face and body who was lucky to be left alone in life. “The night before, we fell asleep talking about our future––you know, marriage,puppies, babies in bassinets––but…” I shrugged, my heart beating loudly in a chest that felt mostly hollow. “Men do that.”
