Hazel stared at him in amazement. “You’re not angry?”
“Why would I be?”
Because I did something stupid. Again. Because you can’t possibly trust me anymore.
“You missed class last night,” Ward said, grunting as he dragged the door shut. “But I called your professor, so you can catch up on the reading. Feel free to yell at me later, if you want.”
“Why…?” Hazel glanced between them, puzzled. “I don’t understand.” She had disappeared on them, put herself in danger—nearly wound up in Malcolm’s clutches through her own stupidity. And now she owed Ward five hundred dollars, plus all her other debts.
“We’re just glad you’re okay. When Ward came home…” Dylan cut his eyes to him, brief but affectionate. “He realized something wasn’t right. We called the diner, went by your place. No sign of you. We feared the worst.”
“Like Sadie,” Ward said. “Only…you know.”
Successfully.
Hazel couldn’t find the breath to tell them how wrong she’d been about what went down that night. She was still struggling to wrap her head around the fact that Dylan didn’t chalk this up to another in a long string of bad surprises.
It stretched credulity to feel his warm body beside hers.
“Took us a while to start calling hospitals,” Ward put in after a beat. “When you called—honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to stroll into a jail in my life.” One corner of his lips twitched. “You still up for Jackie D?”
Hazel smiled, shaking her head. “No…but I’ll take that coffee.” Just the thought of alcohol was enough to turn her stomach.
“One espresso, coming up.”
“I’ll have one, too,” Dylan volleyed at his back.
“Make your own,” Ward retorted.
Dylan winced.
Although dog-tired and running on fumes, Hazel picked up on the tension in Ward’s voice. She cocked both eyebrows. “Something wrong?”
“He blames me for what happened. Or did.” Dylan hitched his shoulders. “Frankly, I’m inclined to agree. I shouldn’t have pushed you away like that. You deserved better. I got jealous. I know it’s ridiculous,” he added hastily, “and I do trust you, I just…”
“You played into his hands.”
Dylan held her gaze. “Did he…? We couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone. Ward tried badgering the hospital, but they shut us out since we’re not family. We still don’t know what happened in that room.”
His voice soft, the implicit question stretched over Hazel like a silken shroud.
Did he hurt you?
It was the first of the yes-or-no queries on a checklist that would alter the way Dylan and Ward treated her.
Hazel waited him out, but Dylan seemed unwilling to ask it aloud. He always seemed to tread carefully where she was concerned.
“That makes two of us,” Hazel confessed, unprompted. She hesitated a beat before taking his hand in hers and lightly threading their fingers.
The espresso machine gurgled as Ward set it in motion, the dark, familiar scent of fresh coffee spreading languorously through the loft.
Dylan squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to talk about it. Not if you don’t want to…
Real Housewives
is on,” he offered, shooting her a tentative smile.
Hazel could have kissed him. The thought of curling up on the couch, her head in his lap and her legs draped over Ward’s snagged like a fishhook in her chest. Burying her head in the sand hadn’t worked these many years.
Time to stop running.
“I do,” she said. “I have to talk about it. Because you’re a part of this now.”
Like it or not.
Chapter Twelve
Over the course of two cups of espresso, Hazel told them everything. She cast her memory back to the discovery that Sadie had apparently up and vanished with only the most cryptic of notes to her mother, and the smorgasbord of clues stuck to her mirror. Her throat constricted when it came to what she’d found in the hotel room.
“I don’t know if he was waiting for me or if he ordered the champagne so he and Sadie could celebrate. Frankly,” Hazel confessed, “it doesn’t make any difference.”
“It might if we can prove intent,” Ward argued. He had taken to pacing the breadth of the living room, his socked feet silent on the naked oak floors.
“We won’t. By the time I woke up, he’d already made me out to be some crazy stalker ex. He even got Sadie to support his side of it.”
Dylan tipped forward and rested his face in his hands. “I can’t believe this.”
“Oh great, now he’s getting Dylan on his side,” Hazel drawled. She regretted the joke as soon as Dylan flung a stunned glance her way. Ward abruptly ceased his patrol, both of them white-faced. Hazel groaned and held up her hands. “Kidding, kidding! God, you two really didn’t see this coming, did you?”
“Not with Sadie,” Dylan replied. “Not like this.”
Ward took a step closer to them, arms folded across his chest. “Did
you?
”
Hindsight made all the clues seem obvious, but Hazel couldn’t claim to have enjoyed such clarity of thought when it counted. She reached down to smooth a wrinkle in her jeans. “I should have. I knew what he was like. He never pulled anything like this when we were together, sure, but…it’s familiar territory. He’s not telling me I’m topping from the bottom if I refuse to fuck his buddies while he watches, he’s just saying I’m crazy if I won’t let him assault me.” She offered Ward a shallow smile. “And apparently the cops buy it.”
“We’ll see about that. I’ve been looking into what we were talking about.”
Hazel’s stomach growled loudly, cutting him off. She grimaced. “Sorry. Keep talking, I’ll make a sandwich—”
“Fridge’s empty,” Dylan lamented. “I was supposed to get groceries today… We can order in.”
“There’s always tempura,” Ward agreed.
“Or,” said Hazel, “we could go out.”
The suggestion seemed to baffle them. Dylan was first to wipe astonishment from his features. “You’re up for that?”
“Make it sound like I’m an invalid.” Laughter fled Hazel’s voice as she stood and slowly rounded the coffee table. “Once and for all…” Dylan’s hair was thick and soft, and slid gently through her fingertips until she tightened her grip, tilting his head back and making him meet her eyes. “He didn’t touch me. I’d never let him.”
“It’s not always about—”
“It was this time,” Hazel told Dylan. There had been others, but they were specks of grit on the backs of her eyelids, occasionally scoring the watery whites of her eyes but mostly unnoticed. She didn’t want Dylan’s pity. “I need you to understand that.”
His throat bobbed when he swallowed. “I do.”
He didn’t seem to notice the pull of her fingers as he bent his head to her belly. Warmth pooled in the pit of Hazel’s stomach with the sudden, little known desire to keep
him
safe. Ward was watching them when she peered up, a hand on the back of Dylan’s chair.
“You know that place we went to,” Hazel recalled, “with the dancing and the snotty waiters?”
Ward nodded, lips twitching.
“Think you can get us a table?”
“If I can’t do that, what’s the good of a controlling interest, right?”
He sauntered to dig out his cell phone before Hazel could process the comeback.
“I love how he does that,” Dylan murmured, his breath hot through the thin fabric of her tank top. “Casually dropping in reminders that he’s loaded… Probably thinks we won’t notice.”
Hazel smiled. “Blissful ignorance, right?” Although now she knew better. There was nothing blissful about being kept in the dark.
* * * *
With little effort, Ward obtained a last-minute dinner reservation. He insisted on driving, too, which Hazel and Dylan grudgingly allowed. “You make it sound like I’m dangerous behind the wheel.”
“Let’s just say you take an innovative approach to the rules of the road,” Hazel quipped from the backseat. Before they left, she had changed into a pair of poly-blend pants and a chiffon blouse worn over a spaghetti-strap top, decking herself out in mourning black. The line between lugubrious and formal was a thin one. She wasn’t entirely certain she found herself on the right side of it.
Dylan and Ward were hardly reliable weather vanes. Dylan called her beautiful when she asked if she looked okay.
He would’ve said that if she put on a garbage bag.
“Slander,” Ward huffed. “I’m the picture of safe driving. And courtesy.”
Thirty minutes later, his courtesy depleted and safety set aside through countless exceptions—mostly to do with drivers who according to Ward were a public menace—they slid to a stop outside the restaurant.
The valet opened Hazel’s door unprompted. She had forgotten how upscale this place was. Guilt shivered through her with the reminder that she couldn’t ever afford to eat there on her own money. Then again, debt was the least of her problems.
“There’s a hundred in it if you manage to total the car,” Dylan told the valet in a mock whisper.
Ward scoffed, “Stop corrupting the youth.”
He hung back, though, and Hazel thought she saw him undercut Dylan’s offer with a preemptive tip. He smiled when he caught Hazel’s eye, sliding an arm around her waist. “That face you’re making right now? I know what that means
.
You’re about to say something about me throwing money away. Well, I’m not. It’s an investment.”
“Uh-huh.” Hazel let him steer her into the restaurant without offering resistance. She had no desire to scold Ward for playing fast and loose with his cash. He’d said it himself—it wasn’t earned, he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. If he wanted to waste Benjamins on not-quite-wagers with Dylan, it was his business.
Ward’s influence, unearned as it was, still netted them a warm welcome from the maître d’ and a table with a view of the dance floor, where couples were swaying to the harmonies of an elegant string quartet.
Hazel sat back in her seat to watch. It was hard to reconcile this with the jail cell she’d left behind just hours earlier, the hospital bed before that. The hotel suite. White table cloths that brushed the floor and gleaming silverware were so far above her pay grade they might have been a fantasy. She recognized the Tchaikovsky piece from the violin lessons her mother had forced her to take as a kid. Absent any real talent, she had given up the bow after a few unhappy months. Giving up had been her MO long before Malcolm walked into her life.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Dylan said, voice soft but wary.
Worried I’ll make a scene?
Hazel banished the uncharitable thought. “Yeah… Maybe later you and Ward can hit the floor.”
“Hey, I’m game if he is…”
Seated on Hazel’s left, Ward scowled at the pair of them. “I thought we were going to talk business,” he protested, fiddling with his napkin. “What are we drinking? Champagne?”
Hazel narrowed her eyes. “Funny.”
“You started it.” Ward could make a prayer sound dirty, but in that moment, the heat in his gaze carried a different meaning. ‘
You don’t want us treating you like you’re a victim, then we won’t.’
It didn’t take a dictionary to crack that code.
“You had your lawyers look into the DMCA claim,” Hazel supplied.
That was the deal. After she confessed to him and Dylan that Malcolm was in town and trying hard to insinuate himself into her life, she had asked for their help. Ward often talked about his legal team—mostly with the sardonic slant of ‘how is this my life’ irony. Meanwhile Dylan had the know-how to dig up all the information Hazel could want about Malcolm’s business interests.
She’d thought that leveraging cold, hard cash against Malcolm’s fixation would be enough to induce him to consign the video to obscurity once and for all.
“If we can persuade him,” Ward said, “it’s a simple matter of drafting a letter and threatening legal action. Essentially what you’ve been doing, but with actual consequences.”
“He would have to
want
to litigate a copyright breach,” Dylan put in.
Hazel shook her head. “He’d have to want to issue the DMCA in the first place.” It went without saying that persuading Malcolm of either was impossible. She cut herself off at the sommelier’s arrival, refusing when she was offered wine.
To her astonishment, Dylan and Ward followed suit.
“You don’t have to do that,” Hazel started.
“I’m driving,” Ward replied off-handedly, passing the buck to Dylan.
“Right,” he echoed. “
You’re
driving.”
Affection snagged on the barbs in Hazel’s chest. She only barely curbed the urge to slide her fingers through Dylan’s—or worse, bodily throw herself into his arms and weep like a little kid. “I’ll hazard a guess and say we can’t lean on him financially,” she said, clearing her throat.
“The way it’s set up, his firm has a dozen different subsidiaries working everything from construction to maintenance and industrial development. It might just be the first instance of vertical integration I’ve seen work in real life.”
“Look at you” Ward grinned. “Putting that MBA to good use.”
“Point is,” Dylan went on, “he doesn’t appear to be strapped for funds.”
Too tired to be disappointed, Hazel let out a sigh. “Great.”
“Hold on, I’m not finished. We may not have any levers we can push on the cash flow side, but there’s something to be said for his business practices.”
“He buys land and builds houses,” Hazel recalled. “What’s there to say?”
“That he doesn’t always perform due diligence on the lots?” Dylan’s smile was tepid, but his eyes gleamed with satisfaction. He’d dug for this. He thought it was something they could use. “Two years ago, he settled with tribes in New Mexico after they proved that the land he’d built a private golf course on was part of the reservation. I’m still digging, but so far it seems like that’s not the only corner he’s ever cut.”
“And where there’s a pattern…” Ward swirled the sparkling water in his glass. “It’s something.”
“Yeah.”
Something, but not enough.
Far too attuned to her shifting moods not to notice the catch in her voice, Dylan took Hazel’s hand in his. “Let me worry about this? You should focus on your defense.”
“My—oh.” Hazel laughed mirthlessly. “Of course. Forgot about that. I’m a criminal now.”