Ronan

“Why?” My jaw tenses. “Why’d you run off?”

I don’t waste time with simple pleasantries. I didn’t fly to Oakdale, Tennessee to waste time with small talk.

“Ronan, what are you doing here?”

My elegant Camille stands in the door of her mother’s home in plaid pajama pants and a faded gray t-shirt, her dark hair piled into a messy bun and her face stripped of makeup.

“You disappeared,” I said. “You didn’t return my calls. I was concerned.”

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says.

“Don’t lie to me, Camille.” It’s cold as hell outside, but I’m burning. “Did someone threaten you? Is that why you ran?”

Her gaze falls to my shoulders, then to the cement steps under my shoes. “Come in.”

I step inside a quaint split level, welcomed by modest décor and 90s-era furnishings.

“Why haven’t you taken my calls?” I ask.

“I don’t have the disposable phone anymore,” she mutters.

“Where is it?”

“It’s gone, Ronan.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says, her eyes pleading along with her words. She takes a step back, her arms crossed and posture guarded. “Let’s just go our separate ways and not make this into something bigger than it needs to be. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Any trouble?” I laugh, stepping into her space. She refuses to meet my gaze. “I don’t understand. We had a great weekend together. We were looking forward to the next nine weeks. Something had to have changed after I left. What happened, Camille?”

She peers over my shoulder toward the window. “Did you come alone?”

“Oliver’s in the car. Why?”

Her chocolate eyes grow round as her fingers cover her lips. “Oliver.”

“What?” My brows meet. “What about him?”

“He’s always with you.”

“Right. He’s my assigned agent. Required to go everywhere I go.”

“He’s . . . he’s . . .” She runs past me, glancing out the window and taking a closer look. From where I stand, I can tell he’s on his phone. “It’s been him all along.”

“What are you talking about?”

She collapses on a nearby loveseat, her head in her hands.

I take the spot beside her, hooking my arm around her back.

“Your mother,” she says. My heart drops. “She came to my room yesterday morning, just after you left.”

“Oh, God.”

“You shouldn’t be here, Ronan. She made it very clear that I’m not to have anything to do with you.” Camille turns to look out the window again, and we watch as Oliver ends his phone call. “I guarantee you he was just speaking to your mother.”

Her words send a chill to the room.

“When I got home yesterday,” I say, “someone had slid a postcard of the Melrose under my door. And a packet of photocopied journal pages was on my bed.”

She points at her chest. “My journal pages?”

I nod, lips pursed.

“She told me she’d taken precautions. That she knew everything we’d done, every place we’d met. She said she had my journal.”

“Did she threaten you?”

Camille chews her lip. “In not so many words . . .”

“Fuck.” I run my fingers through my hair. Just being here with her is putting her safety in jeopardy, and out of everyone, I’ve seen firsthand the lengths my mother is willing to go to to get what she wants.

I rise.

“Where are you going?” Camille stands.

“I need to buy us some more time,” I say, staring at Oliver through the window.

“More time? No. Ronan. We’re done. I don’t want to be involved in any of this. I don’t want to look over my shoulder the rest of my life.” She places a hand against my chest, and I cover it with mine.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “You think she’s going to let you walk away just like that? After she clearly threatened your life? You think she’ll be content knowing some little twenty-four-year-old has the power to take down the Montgomery name? You clearly don’t know what that woman is capable of.”

Camille’s fingers tremble, and I lift them to my lips, staring into the brown eyes I’ve come to associate with the only true freedom I’ve known in almost thirty years.

“So she’ll kill me anyway.” Her words are flat, weighted with fear and a lead balloon.

“She convinced you to stay away from me,” I say. “But how can she guarantee you’ll never spill her secrets? There’s only one way.”

“Why would she offer me millions of dollars to go away?” Camille asks.

“Because it was a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and in her eyes, you’ll be long gone before you ever see it.”

Camille lowers herself into the sofa, staring blankly ahead. “I’ve been so careful all these years. I did everything I could to avoid the very thing happening right now.”

An ironic laugh leaves her pretty lips, and she pulls in a ragged breath.

“It’s all my fault. I brought you into this. You agreed to a simple arrangement that no one in their right mind would’ve turned down, but you didn’t agree to any of this,” I say. “Which is why I promise you, Camille, nothing is going to happen to you. I’ll make damn fucking sure of it.”

I pull her into my arms again and away from the view of the window, cupping her pretty face in my hands and crushing her trembling lips with mine.

“I’m not done with you yet, Camille,” I remind her. “I’m going to handle this, and when it’s over, we can pick right back up where we left off.”

Her eyes squeeze shut.

“Let me deal with Oliver for now. I’ll call you shortly. Keep your phone near,” I say.

* * *

“How’d it go?” Oliver asks when I climb into the passenger seat of the rental Suburban.

“Not well.” I sigh, glancing out the window. I can’t look at the bastard without wanting to knock him out. “We’re done, Oliver. She wants nothing to do with me.”

“Probably for the best.” He peers over his shoulder as he backs out of her driveway.

“Couldn’t agree more. The last thing I need is some prostitute attached to my name.” I huff. “Don’t know what I was ever thinking.”

“I thought you were crazy for wanting to get involved in that mess in the first place. Tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. I just sat back and let you do your thing. Figured you needed to get it out of your system before you get serious about your future,” he says.

Everything about our conversation is typical and casual, and I have a hard time believing Oliver could betray me like that, but it’s the only logical explanation. He’s been there all along, from the minute I first saw her and for every meeting since. With all those spur of the moment meet-ups and last-minute location changes, someone would’ve had to have tailed me twenty-four seven for the last month in order to catch them all. Oliver makes sense.

“Want to grab a bite?” Oliver asks, smirking. “If we can even find a decent place in this one-stoplight town.”

“I have a headache,” I say. “Not hungry. Just take me back to the hotel. I’ll just hang out there the rest of the day.”

“Seriously?” he asks, turning to look at me. “You’re going to sit inside a musty little room in the Motel 6 the rest of the day?”

I shrug. “May as well. What else is there to do around here? I’m not trying to be seen, Oliver. The last thing we need is for the whole world to know I was in Oakdale, Tennessee for no apparent reason. If they go digging hard enough, they just might link me to Camille, and then what?”

“All right, all right.” He places a palm in the air and pulls into the parking lot of our hotel. “I guess I’ll be in my room then . . . until tomorrow . . . doing nothing. At least they have HBO, I guess.”

His job as my personal Secret Service agent requires him to be by my side at all times, but we’ve been known to break the rules a time or two over the years.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. If you want to drive around town or grab a bite to eat, by all means, go for it.”

He pulls into a parking spot not more than fifteen feet from our respective hotel rooms, and I pull the key from my pocket. We climb out, and he escorts me to my room before heading back to the Suburban. Inside, I watch out the peephole until he drives away, and then I call Camille to come pick me up.

* * *

“I can’t believe I’m doing this. You’re lucky I still have this rental car.” Camille’s delicate hands grip the gray plastic steering wheel of a white Honda Accord.

She pulls away as soon as I’m inside, and we drive back to her mother’s house.

“I’m going to err on the side of paranoid,” she says when we pull into the driveway. “Stay here.”

Climbing out and running to the attached garage, she punches in a code and returns to pull the car in. Oliver would get in so much trouble if anyone knew he ‘lost’ me, and I smirk to myself at the thought.

For the first time in years, I’m one hundred percent untethered and untracked. And it feels fucking amazing.