The Strongest Steel (19 page)

The suitcases in the hall should have been his first clue.

Somewhere between “What the fuck are you doing home?” and “I’m outta here,” Yasmin had laid out clearly just how little she thought of him and their life. The apartment was too small. (It was all he could afford.) He was going nowhere. (He was just starting out—and building up a solid client base took time.) He had no “options.” (Being a tattoo artist was what he truly wanted to do.) He didn’t buy her enough gifts. (Well, someone needed to pay the gas bill.)

He’d thought they were in it together. He’d thought they were on an adventure, trying to build a future.

To this day, he could feel the reverberations of the door slamming behind her and the room falling into silence.

Cujo nudged him with a shove to his shoulder. “So Harper’s got you rethinking stuff, huh?”

Trent paused and then smiled.

“Yeah.” He took a swig of his beer to compose himself. “So lay off her, okay, dude? Harper and me still have bunch of crap to get through and it’ll be tough enough without you and me going at it.”

*   *   *

Sitting on a beautiful patio in the company of an incredibly charming man while sipping a nicely chilled glass of sauvignon blanc was the perfect way to spend a Thursday lunchtime. It had been close to sixty hours, not that Harper was counting, since she had last seen Trent, and when he had swept into the café to whisk her away for food, it was all she could do to keep her hands off him.

“You know I write my own schedule, Harper. If you give me yours in advance, I could likely write mine around it somehow during the week.” Trent held her hand across the table, gently massaging her palm. “We could probably spend a bit more time together.”

Trent’s eyes flashed hot, then closed. He took a deep breath and shuddered.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He opened his eyes, gave her a devastating grin. “Just thinking about the time we spent in my car.”

“Oh my g … did you really just say that out loud?” she whispered, mortification ripe in her tone.

“You embarrass so easily, darlin’,” he said, laughing. “So tell me what happened in your world.”

They talked as they enjoyed the bread basket, pulling out pieces of the soft focaccia and ripping off chunks to dip into the delicious olive oil that had been brought to their table.

Trent excused himself to go to the washroom and Harper used the time to check her phone. Drea was going to send her shifts through for the coming week.

Opening her text messages, she was thrilled to see one from Joanie:

A- !!! Thank you!!

Wow
—
congrats
—
you deserve it!
she texted back quickly.

The next one was considerably more disturbing:

Once February uneven brute

Harper felt the blood drain from her face, her hands clenching around the phone. Nathan had attacked her in February, and nobody could argue that he wasn’t an uneven brute.

One message she could reconcile as an anomaly. But two? With strange words, from an unknown number. She tried to remind herself that Nathan was locked up, far away from sunny Miami. He couldn’t be texting her. But deep in her soul, Harper knew the message wasn’t just a random grouping of words. It was an anagram. Her hands started to flare as she looked at the phone, mouth dry with fear.

Grabbing a napkin and a pen from her purse, Harper wrote the letters and worked systematically through them.

Canyon … Canonry … On … Can … You.

You Can Run …

But so many other words were possible.
Van Buren County
, heck, even
Century Avenue
was in there, the street where her friend Carrie lived in Matteson.

Scrolling back through her messages, she pulled up the text she’d received when she’d been out shopping with Drea. She was starting to sweat, and a cold shard of icy fear pierced its way through her chest, constricting her breathing.

Atrophied sinister voyeurism
:
Harper, I missed you. It isn’t over.

She’d become so used to not being Taylor that it hadn’t occurred to her until now that if the message was, in fact, from Nathan, he knew her new name. And if he knew that—and her phone number—he probably knew where she was.

“You okay?” Trent asked before she could figure out what the latest text meant. She hadn’t even noticed he’d returned to the table. “You’ve gone pale, darlin’.”

She crumpled the napkin into a ball in her hand and plastered a fake smile on her face.

“What? No. It’s fine. José’s sending me a shift change. Was hoping for a few more hours.”

She swiped the screen closed. She needed to call Lydia.

*   *   *

“I think I’m in trouble.” Harper clutched the phone to her ear and looked out her bedroom window at the miserable concrete view. She paced back to the bed, where she picked at a thread of a loose button on the comforter while she explained about the texts.

“They were anagrams, Lydia. Those were my thing. Nathan used to send me anagrams all the time.” Harper tried to ignore memories of finding the little note
Avoiding our yell
attached to the bathroom mirror one morning.
Darling, I love you.
He’d admitted later to finding it on the Web, laughing at how it was the first and last time he’d use the word “darling,” but it hadn’t taken away her joy at the way he had told her the first time that he loved her.

“No one knows that about
Harper,
” she told her lawyer. She reached for the piece of paper with the solved anagrams.
I missed you Harper
—
it isn’t over.
The first of the texts. The second was more menacing:
You can run but never be free.

“Okay. I want you to send them to me and I’ll try to find out, discreetly, what Nathan has been up to. He doesn’t have access to a cell phone in prison, though. And to be honest, I can’t see him screwing up his chance of parole this close to his review. If you’re really concerned, though, you should contact the police.”

“The police? Really?”

“Taylor, nobody wishes more than me that you had stayed around so we could have filed charges against Winston and the chief of police. It was a corrupt few. Don’t let your experience stop you from getting help if you need it.”

Going to the police would involve revealing who she really was. There would be reports, an electronic paper trail. Detectives waving giant Miami Police Department badges would conduct the investigation. And that was assuming she could find any kind of strength to set foot in a police station ever again.

Harper rubbed her forehead. She was in a no-win situation. She knew what Lydia said was true, but in her gut, she couldn’t believe the texts were a prank. The carjacking was connected, she
knew
it. How could it not be? One thing the trial had taught her: Nathan didn’t need to be close by to hurt her, and if he’d caught up with her now …

After saying good-bye to Lydia, she sent the texts to her and set her phone down on the bed. There was a small rip in the wallpaper, which was begging her to take hold and pull. The emotional and physical impacts of the last four years were just beginning to subside. It was the psychological ones that were likely to make her crazy.

Didn’t she deserve a new life though? What about all those clichéd adages about today being the start of the rest of your life? Or the old chestnut, “Don’t let your past dictate your future.” There must be more than an element of truth to them; every self-help book in the library spouted them.

Harper considered the message she had left for Trent earlier. Awoken from a playfully erotic dream involving the two of them and a bottle of chocolate sauce, she’d felt an urgent need to take their relationship a step further. She could sit here for the rest of the day thinking about all the horrors that could be on their way, or she could stop fiddling with the button thread before it fell off and get on with her life.

*   *   *

By ten o’clock, Trent was back in the studio, his trip to Marathon to visit Kyoko, Junior’s wife, complete. He looked at the bonsai sitting on the corner of his desk, one from Kyoko’s personal collection, and laughed recalling her words.

“How dare you make me wait all these years before asking for a bonsai to give to a girl,” she’d scolded when he’d asked for one of the small trees she nurtured.

Checking his phone, he could see the voice mail alert. Damn reception down in the Keys was not the best.

The first message was from Michael Cooper’s assistant. They wanted to make arrangements for him to travel to LA to meet with the team of the still-unnamed TV show.

The second was from Harper.

“Hey, baby.” She sounded sleepy and he swore he heard the sound of sheets rustling. Maybe he was just getting desperate. His hand had been his only bedtime partner of late and the idea of Harper, naked, soft and warm … mmm.

“I’m sorry our schedules didn’t work out so well this week, but I really enjoyed lunch yesterday. I was thinking maybe you could … umm … well, come over. To my place. On Saturday. To my place … did I say that already?” He smiled, pleased he could fluster her without even being there.

“I thought I’d cook you dinner. I mean, I know you have to work, but you know, later. Or whatever. Anyway. Call me and let me know. Bye, baby.”

Oh yeah. Maybe the drought was coming to an end.

Chapter Thirteen

He picked up the wine and the box containing the bonsai, making a conscious decision to leave his overnight bag in the car. If he were a betting man, he’d put money on needing it, but he didn’t want to freak Harper out with his presumptuousness.

He cast a quick glance up to the open windows of her apartment when he reached the front of the building. He was about to press the buzzer when a tall meathead opened the door.

“Who you here for?” he asked, his don’t-fuck-with-me stare at DEFCON 1.

“What’s it to do with you?”

“I take care of the girls in my building. That’s what it’s to do with me, friend.”

Trent inwardly smiled with relief, but wasn’t going to show Godzilla that. Someone looking out for Harper was a good thing.

“I’m here for Harper. You gonna let me in or should I buzz her?” He didn’t like being at this kind of disadvantage with his hands full.

“You the guy who sent the roses the other day?”

“Yeah, unless some other guy is sending her flowers. Why?”

Godzilla’s face relaxed. “I offered to do my big brother speech on you, but she seemed to think you didn’t need it. Eddie,” he said, reaching out his hand.

“Trent,” he responded, shaking Eddie’s hand briefly but firmly. “Nice to know you got her back, man.”

“I live above her. Can hear her if she shouts.”

“Pleasant thought.” He’d have to remember to ask Harper about Eddie later.

“Yeah, well, I’ll have your ass if you do anything to upset that girl. Consider yourself warned.”

Eddie left the building and let the door slam shut, an audible period on their conversation. Trent turned toward the stairs, noting the aging building was clean, but in need of some maintenance.

He found apartment number eight, and knocked on the door.

“Met your neighbor,” he told Harper when she let him in. “The one who thinks he’s intimidating.”

“Were you?” She kissed him and then quickly led him to the kitchen, where a buzzer was going off. “Intimidated, I mean.”

“I don’t let people intimidate me,” he said, inhaling the rich scent of food cooking. “Now ovens, on the other hand…”

She laughed and pulled a tray of hors d’oeuvres out of the oven and placed it on a rack to cool.

Anything that took more than one pot or a microwave tended to give him nightmares. But Harper seemed to be in her element.

“These look delicious.” He grabbed one, blowing on it as he passed it from hand to hand to cool it down.

“It’s just flaky pastry with mushrooms.”

He popped it in his mouth and winced, quickly reaching for a beer.

“Hot,” he mumbled.

Harper laughed and passed him a glass of ice water.

“Want to kiss it better for me?” he asked, poking out his tongue.

“Eew, no.” He grinned at Harper’s reaction, her nose all scrunched up.

He offered to help but Harper had been adamant about him sitting and relaxing in front of the TV. That he couldn’t do, not when Harper was bending over left, right, and center in the kitchen in that cute little dress. So he hopped up on the little stool under the breakfast bar to keep her company. The little bonsai sat on the counter next to him, the look on Harper’s face when he had given it to her worth the long drive down to Marathon.

Sitting next to it was what looked like a graded high school paper. Just looking at it made him shudder. The day he’d kicked the sand of school off his shoes had been one of the best in his life.

“What’s this?”

Harper looked up from the dish she was rinsing in the sink. Seeing the paper in his hand, her face lit up like a firecracker. “It’s Joanie’s last assignment. She’s the one trying to get her diploma. She got an A minus.”

It was written all over her face, the joy she got out of teaching, and he wondered when she would actually come clean and confirm what he’d already guessed.

“Is she passing yet?”

“Not yet, but I know she’s going to do great,” Harper said, going back to cleaning the dish. He wanted to push. Ask her more. But tonight wasn’t the night.

Though her apartment was a little on the small side, she’d done a great job of decorating the place. It felt homey. Like someone actually lived a life here. Would she ever go back to where she came from? The thought kicked him in the gut. Where was home for her anyway? The other night, she’d mentioned getting on a bus. He was desperate to know more about her.

Harper walked around from the kitchen and stood before him, the gray-and-black-striped jersey summer dress showing off her curves perfectly.

“We have a few minutes before I can plate up our appetizers. Want to go sit on the sofa or something?”