CHAPTER 17
Allie stared at the closed door, then back at the phone. Indecision wrangled within her. Should she complete the call to her attorney or answer the door? Maybe this was an omen that she wasn’t supposed to turn herself in yet.
No, she couldn’t take the easy way out, tempting though it might seem. She knew exactly what she had to do, and no late-night visitor could deter her from it now that she had found the courage to go through with it.
The doorbell rang again, followed by a heavy, insistent knock. She frowned and gazed back at the phone. At this rate, whoever was out there would wake up the girls and she would have to spend several more hours trying to settle them down again in the heat and misery of this dismal apartment.
Who could possibly be banging on her door at this hour? She knew no one in Las Vegas but Carla Galvez, the downstairs neighbor who watched the girls, and she would have no reason to come over this late.
With a sigh, Allie carefully hung up the phone, with a promise to herself that she would just see who might be here so late at night. Then she would call Twila and set the wheels in motion for her surrender.
She moved to the door and craned to look through the tiny peephole. At first, all she could see was what looked like a broad male chest covered in a maroon T-shirt, then she thought she glimpsed the silver gleam of aluminum crutches to the side.
Her breath rushed from her lungs in a whoosh. Impossible! It couldn’t be. Of course Gage wasn’t the only person in the western United States on crutches—but who else would be knocking on her door?
With hands that trembled, she worked the dead bolt and yanked open the door, forgetting about the security chain. Through the narrow gap, she spied two men, both large, both intimidating.
And both very familiar.
Gage and his partner, Cale Davis, stood on the walkway outside her door. In utter shock, barely able to think straight, she fumbled with the security chain but eventually managed to work it free so she could thrust open the door.
“G-Gage!”
For several seconds she could do nothing but stare at him, fighting a wild urge to leap into his arms.
“Mrs. DeBarillas.” His voice was hard, like shards of glass from a broken window spilling onto a city sidewalk. Hard enough that Allie checked her body’s instinctive sway toward the safety of his arms.
This man didn’t offer safety. Far from it. He was tough and dangerous and bitterly angry.
And he knew her real name, which meant he likely knew everything.
“I…what are you doing here?”
“May we come in, Mrs. DeBarillas?”
With effort, she wrenched her gaze from the heat of Gage’s expression to his partner, who was studying her with far more compassion in his eyes. “Yes. Of course, Agent Davis. Come in.”
She swung the door open wider and stepped aside to let them enter. The apartment immediately seemed to shrink to closet size with two large males taking up so much space.
“Please. Sit down,” she murmured, unable to quell the burn of humiliation at this tiny apartment, the outdated furnishings, the ugly wallpaper.
“We’ll stand,” Gage said.
The coldness of his voice made her wince. How stupid of her to be worried about an unattractive couch when her entire future—and that of her children—was at stake.
“I suppose you’ve come to arrest me.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “We’re here to escort you and your daughters back to Philadelphia.”
“I see.” So he must know everything. Did that mean she was under arrest? Wasn’t this where they were supposed to read her her rights or something?
If only he wasn’t so very hard to read. She wanted to ask him to explain what would happen to her now, but she couldn’t find either the words or the courage.
“Can we… Do I have time to gather our things?” she asked. “We don’t have much.”
“Our flight leaves at midnight. As things stand, we’re going to be pushing it to make it through security. Just grab what you and the girls need right away, and I’ll have someone pack up the rest for you.”
She nodded but couldn’t seem to make her muscles cooperate. “Can I ask how you found me?”
Cale Davis answered. “Gage has been monitoring pharmaceutical transactions. He was notified right away when Lisa Connors filled a prescription for insulin today at a North Las Vegas pharmacy not far from here. It wasn’t difficult to find your address from that.”
She should have realized that would be an obvious way for someone who knew she had insulin-dependent diabetes to trace her. Gage would have thought of it immediately. If she’d been thinking at all, she would have used a different name to fill her prescription when she ran out and used a disguise to pick it up.
Of course, she hadn’t been thinking straight for weeks now. Not since leaving Park City.
At least she didn’t have to figure out how to turn herself in. The choice had been taken out of her hands the moment she picked up the insulin she needed to stay alive.
“It should only take me fifteen minutes or so to pack a few things and wake and dress Anna and Gabriella.”
“Make it ten,” Gage ordered in a stony voice, devoid of any trace of the man who had let her daughters fix his hair and who had shared his secrets with her and held her with such tenderness.
* * *
His left leg ached like a son of a bitch, worse than it had done in weeks.
He supposed it had something to do with the cramped airplane seats and the lack of leg room. Or it could have had something to do with being crammed into a rental car or standing in line for way too long at airport security or being awake for nearly twenty-two hours straight.
Whatever the reason, there wasn’t much he could do about it but endure.
He gazed over Gaby’s head at Lisa—or Alicia, he supposed he should remember to call her—who sat sandwiched between her girls. Cale was on the other side of Anna.
Cale and Lisa/Alicia were talking quietly over a sleeping Anna, and Gage strained to hear what they were saying. Something about her job cleaning hotel rooms at some armpit of a casino, he thought.
It was good of his partner to come along and help him escort her back to Philadelphia. He hadn’t trusted himself alone with her, not with the anger still burning through him like an oil well on fire.
“I’ve never been on a plane before,” a bright-eyed Gaby said suddenly. “It’s super fun.”
Now that was a matter of opinion. Try being six foot two in a seat made for munchkins. She looked perfectly comfortable, though, bouncing in her seat and swinging her legs and playing with the seat-back tray.
He tried to ignore his own discomfort. “It’s more fun in the daytime when you can see the clouds outside the window. Sometimes you can see really tiny cars and people.”
“Will we still be on the airplane when it’s light outside?”
He quickly calculated the time difference and the flight length. Their arrival in Philadelphia would be sometime around 7:00 a.m. local time. “Just barely,” he said. “Maybe when we land you’ll be able to see a little out the window.”
She seemed content with that answer. To his shock, a moment later she slipped her little hand in his. “I’m glad you came to get us, Mr. Gage. I didn’t like that place.”
Though he had only spent fifteen minutes in that miserable hole of an apartment, he hadn’t been crazy about it, either.
What had Lisa—Alicia, he corrected bitterly—been thinking to force her daughters to live in those conditions? He hadn’t seen a playground—or even a strip of grass—anywhere in sight.
He glanced at Alicia DeBarillas. She looked completely worn-out, with dark circles under her eyes and exhaustion filling them. She wasn’t exactly what he would call a glowing picture of health, either. Her skin was pale, and in the three weeks since she left, she had dropped another five pounds she could ill afford to lose.
Despite his anger at her, he was astonished at the powerful urge sneaking through him to pull her onto his lap, press her head against his chest and just hold her while she slept.
He was such a fool. Despite everything, he still wanted to take care of her. To protect her and cherish her and help ease the shadows from her eyes. Tenderness and anger made a strange mix.
He wanted to hold her, but he figured if he did, he’d just end up shaking her to try to put some sense in that stubborn little head. She should have told him what was going on. She should have trusted him.
The fact that she hadn’t told him anything—and that she still didn’t trust him—grated like metal gears grinding together.
Gabriella was still carrying on a one-sided conversation that didn’t appear to require any response from him, he realized, jerking his attention back to her with unexpected amusement. Something about missing her friend Jessica and his mother, of all people, and about how she didn’t get to go to the park like she used to.
He let her jabber on, strangely calmed by this adorable little chatterbox. In midsentence she suddenly gave a huge, jaw-popping yawn, then gazed at Gage with a wide-eyed, where-did-that-come-from? kind of look.
He swallowed his grin. “Here. If we raise the armrest, you can lean against me for a while.”
The little heartbreaker gave him a sleepy smile, then nestled willingly under his arm. He pulled her close, astonished at the sweet peace he found holding this small, warm weight against him.
It might not be Lisa—Alicia—cuddled against him, but it wasn’t bad, either.
* * *
She had been wrong before. Hell wasn’t that hot, miserable apartment in North Las Vegas. It was spending four hours on a plane with the man she loved, the man who had tenderly held her sleeping child through nearly the entire flight.
The man who refused to even look at her.
They were in a rental car now, one that had been waiting for them at the airport. She sat in the back with the girls while Gage’s partner drove. Cale seemed to know exactly where he was going, which was certainly more than she did.
The low drumbeat of fear seemed to grow louder inside her. During the long flight she had been able to ignore it, but now all she could focus on was the terrifying future.
She should have asked the FBI agents on the plane where they would be taking her but she hadn’t, probably because she had been too afraid of how they might answer. Now, as they drove through heavy morning traffic, she was angry at herself for being so willing to bury her head in the sand, all for the sake of a few hours of peace.
The fear drummed louder, until she could hardly think past it. Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. She leaned forward and poked Gage’s shoulder to get his attention.
“Can you tell me what’s going to happen now?” she asked after he turned around, in an undertone so the girls couldn’t overhear. “What will happen to Anna and Gaby when I go to jail?”
He narrowed his gaze at her. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to drag them off on this little half-cocked adventure of yours.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“What would you call it?”
“A nightmare.”
The last three weeks, anyway. The time they had spent in Park City seemed like a wonderful, rosy dream now, full of flower gardens and cool mountain breezes and Gage.
“Will they go with their grandparents?” she persisted.
“I’m just the delivery man. I don’t know all the details.”
“Can you at least tell me where you’re taking us?” she asked, frustrated by his reticence.
“I would think things were starting to look familiar.”
She gazed out the window and was astonished to see familiar landmarks roll past. Very familiar landmarks.
“This is our neighborhood,” she exclaimed. There was the supermarket where she shopped and the preschool Gaby and Anna attended and the church where the girls had been christened.
A few moments later, Cale Davis drove into a residential area and pulled up in front of her own brownstone, the one she and Jaime had bought just after they married and had restored together.
She gazed blankly at the brownstone, then at Gage, who watched her with another of those blasted impassive looks.
“Look, Mama,” Gabriella exclaimed. “There’s our swing and our playhouse and Mrs. Wong’s cute little dog. Anna, look!”
The girls pressed their noses against the window with glee. The joy on their features at the familiar surroundings cut through her with biting pain. She had been so terribly unfair to yank them away from this into a world of uncertainty and constant change.
“I don’t understand. Why are we coming here.”
“This is your house, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But I thought…”
“That we were going to haul you straight off to prison?” Gage asked. “Sorry, Mrs. DeBarillas. Not today.”
Before she could press him to tell her what was going on, he opened the rental door, grabbed his crutches then hobbled out.
The girls bounded out right after them, clearly delighted to be back on familiar ground as they raced across the lawn to touch the wrought-iron gate, the huge sycamore tree out front, Mrs. Wong’s little wiener dog, who had come over to investigate the new arrivals.
Allie followed more slowly, trying to process this strange development. Did she even have a key to the house? She was pawing through her purse to find it when the door opened. Yet another shock wave rippled through her at the sight of her attorney standing in the doorway in one of her black power suits, her peppery hair pulled back in her customary knot and her smooth features set in a welcoming smile.
“Twila! What are you doing here?”
“Agent McKinnon called me from McCarron before your plane took off to let me know your arrival time. I told him I would meet you here. Didn’t he tell you?”
Anna and Gabriella rushed past her and into the house. Allie followed them blindly, only vaguely aware of Gage and Agent Davis right behind her. “No. I…I didn’t realize you knew him.”
“He’s been working for me the past two weeks to help find you. I’ve been worried sick about you and the girls, Allie.”
She gazed from Gage to Twila, trying to make sense of it all. “What do you mean, working for you? You mean he didn’t bring me back here to face charges for violating the custody order?”
Twila turned to Gage, her eyes wide. “You didn’t tell her?”
He only shrugged and said nothing, as apparently he had been doing since he showed up at her apartment in Las Vegas.
“Tell me what?”
Twila grabbed her hands. “You’re not violating any custody order, Allie. You never really were. If you had stayed in town just a few more days you would have known. The appeals court immediately threw out the ruling that awarded joint custody to Jaime’s parents. Their decision came down in record time—the speed of it stunned even me. They gave Joaquin and Irena supervised visitation with the girls, but that’s all.”
She stared at the attorney, not sure if her system could endure any more jolts. “But I ran away with the girls, took them across state lines. I’m a fugitive.”
“No you’re not. You have every right to move wherever you want. It’s a free country, Allie.”
Oh, how she wished she’d had a little more sleep in the past twenty-four hours. Or in the past three weeks, for that matter. Her brain felt fuzzy, drained, and she couldn’t seem to process any of this.
“What about Gage? The FBI? Why did they come after me, then?”
The lawyer frowned at the agents. “Agent McKinnon wasn’t acting in an official capacity. Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t explain that to you. As soon as you disappeared, I sent a private investigator looking for you. At one point in his investigation, word trickled into the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office and Agent McKinnon contacted me with information about your whereabouts. I gather the two of you were acquainted in Utah.”
Allie shot a quick look at Gage, remembering the heat and tenderness of being in his arms, of being wrapped around that strong body. “Yes,” she said, her voice subdued.
“He offered to assist my private investigator. Let me stress again, this was not an official investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agent McKinnon was helping on his own time. It was his idea to contact pharmacies.”
“So I’m not under arrest?”
“Absolutely not,” Twila said.
Allie looked at Gage for confirmation. After a moment he shook his head.
Dear heavens. Her knees wobbled and she had to sink down onto the couch. For two months she had lived with the constant specter of fear and uncertainty hovering over her, always looking over her shoulder for fear she would be caught, that she would lose her girls.
All for nothing.
What a terrible waste of energy, of emotion. All this time she and her girls could have been safe and sound here in the home she and Jaime had created together for their family. Her own job, her own bed, her own little backyard.
But if she hadn’t left, she never would have ended up in Park City. She wouldn’t have met Ruth or Lynn.
Or Gage.
She gazed at the three people in the room, all watching her with different expressions on their faces. She blinked several times, wondering vaguely why their faces were starting to blur together.
Her last coherent thought was that she hadn’t checked her blood glucose levels since dinnertime the night before.