He flashes me a concerned glance and turns it back down. “The answer is yes. I did grow up in a barn . . . partly.”
I just look at him.
“There wasn’t enough space in the house for all us kids when we got too old to share a room, so my uncle converted the tack room into a bedroom for me and my cousin.”
“That explains a lot,” I mutter.
We whoosh into the Treasure Island tunnel at the center of the bridge a few minutes later, and when we come out the other end, Oakland is laid out in front of us. Jonathan’s apartment was never really “home,” but I long for it now. I want more than anything to hit the rewind button and go back to my life before all hell broke loose, when all I had to worry about was paying for my nine hundred dollar a month sofa.
“Where are we going?” I ask again.
“Somewhere safe,” Blake answers without looking at me.
“How long am I going to have to stay there?”
He shoots me an irritated glance. “Until we know you’re safe.”
I feel suddenly heavier as the weight of all of this presses down on me. I start to lift my right hand to rub my face before I remember my shoulder. It reminds me with a sharp twinge that shoots across my back, making me wince. “So, how long do I have to hide? Are we talking days? Weeks?”
His mouth presses into a line. “Maybe months,” he answers without taking his eyes off the road.
“Months? Seriously?” I realize I sound a little hysterical and try to rein it back. “Can I . . . I don’t know . . . see my friends? Or my family? Ever?”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m sorry Sam. No.”
“For months?”
He just stares straight ahead as he navigates us off the bridge and through the maze of highways that merge and split on the other side.
The blend of fear, frustration, and anger brewing inside me feels toxic, like mixing ammonia and bleach. I’m choking on the fumes and struggling for air nearly ten minutes later when we exit the highway in Berkeley.
Blake finally flicks me a glance. “We have to know Arroyo is neutralized before I’ll agree to let you back out into the world. I’m not going to let anything else happen to you.”
I glare at him. “What, something like you?”
He winces as we weave into traffic on the crowded surface streets. Cooper’s black Charger cuts off a white Prius to tuck in right behind us. “I’ve told you, Sam, it wasn’t personal. I was just doing my job. We needed something to get us legal access to Arroyo’s financials in order to prove he’s laundering drug money through his club. We’ve spent three years trying everything else. We’ve tapped his landlines, offered deals to all his known associates, and we put Nichols inside Benny’s undercover for six months. We still came away with nothing. This was the last resort.”
I cross my left arm over the sling on my right and slump deeper into the seat. “I’m a resort. Great.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” I can hear the frustration in his voice, and I’m glad. It’s the first real emotion I’ve seen from him since the VIP room. “I just needed you to agree to have sex with me.”
“So, it was just an act? I must have imagined you grinding your hard-on against my ass in the VIP room.”
He stands on the brakes, skidding us to a stop at the side of the road, and there’s something desperate in his icy gaze that sends a shiver through me.
Chapter Seventeen
COOPER NEARLY SLAMS into the back of us, but Blake doesn’t even seem to notice.
“Damn it, Sam!” he says, pounding his palm into the steering wheel. “It wasn’t an act!” His voice comes out a growl, and just as he opens his mouth to say something else, the electronic ring of his phone comes through the speakers again.
“Everything okay up there?” Cooper asks.
When I look behind us, he’s out of his car, one hand holding the phone to his ear and the other on the butt of the gun in his holster.
“We’re good,” Blake answers pulling back onto the road and hitting the disconnect button on the steering wheel. “Look, Sam,” he says after a long, strained silence. “You know I find you attractive. I haven’t made any secret of that. But as far as what happened in that room, I was just—”
“Doing your job. I know.” I turn to face the window. “Was anything you said true?”
He blows out a sigh. “I’m obviously not a movie guy . . . and, as you already know, my name’s not Harrison Yates, but most everything else . . . yeah.”
I tip my forehead into the window and watch UC Berkeley pass by.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he says.
“Hmm . . . thanks. That really makes up for ruining my life.”
Neither of us says anything else as we wind into the Berkeley Hills—somewhere my family never could have even dreamed of living. I watch the multi-million-dollar homes flit past my window for a while, then close my eyes.
“Home sweet home,” Blake says a few minutes later.
I open my eyes and see we’re slowing near a brown, shingled garage. From the road the front of the garage is the only thing I can see. The land drops off sharply down the hill in front of us, so any house that might be associated with this garage would be well below where we are in the street. Still, I might be able to see it if it weren’t for the dense, twelve-foot hedge to the right of the garage that extends all the way to the corner of the road, obscuring the view of anything beyond it, including the house and San Francisco Bay, forever below us.
Jenkins is already parked at the curb and Cooper pulls up next to us. Blake rolls down his window. “Take a sweep of the perimeter.”
“Got it,” Cooper says.
Blake clicks a button on the console of the Escalade and the garage door goes up. He eases the Escalade into one of the garage bays.
“Wait,” he says when I reach for the door handle. He clicks the button again and waits for the garage door to close. “Okay.”
We spill out of the car and he directs me to an elevator door at the side of the garage. He slips a key from his pocket into a lock, then presses in a code on the panel. The door slides open as soon as he finishes.
We step in, and, when the door on the opposite side of the elevator slides back, it’s into a foyer, which opens on a huge great room, bright and sparsely decorated. What catches my attention immediately is the view out the wall of windows across the room. A mile below us San Francisco Bay and the city beyond is spread out as if it’s on display just for me. The fog has burned off and the water sparkles under a sapphire blue sky. It’s stunningly beautiful.
I glance at Blake, then wander to the window. My eyes follow the lines of the Bay Bridge to the city, where sunlight flashes off the windows of the skyscrapers. To the right, behind the city, the Golden Gate Bridge stretches to the north, and in the foreground, just at the tip of San Francisco, I can make out Alcatraz.
There’s a French door leading to a balcony on this level, and below is an expansive redwood deck. A stone path winds down the hill from the deck to a pool with a bathhouse, at least forty feet below me. The same tall shrubs I saw at the road next to the garage surround the entire place, and even though I know there are neighbors to the left and across the street past the pool below, it’s completely private. A sanctuary.
“Whose house is this?” I ask without turning.
“It’s a government seizure. The owner is a second-string drug runner from Miami. He was just convicted last month and all his U.S. property seized.”
I turn and see Blake is standing near the sofa, watching me. I step away from the window. “Why me?”