I glared at him, ready to take a shot at his annoying ass, but Aidan held strong to my arm.
“We’ll find your female, get this mess sorted out, and then you can go see Mom. She’ll like having you there since you were always her favorite,” Aidan added with a smirk.
They’d always teased that I was Marta’s favorite because she let me have seconds and thirds way more frequently than she did them and when there was an argument between the three of us, Marta always came to bat for me. Hell! She couldn’t be sick, she couldn’t be gone … ever.
My teeth and my fingers clenched and I shook my head to clear some of the dark fog that had been clouding my mind, egging the rage on like fuel to an already burgeoning fire.
“What’s her name? Where does she live?” Brayden asked.
“No,” I told them. “She wouldn’t go back to her place.”
I was just about to try and think of another place she might go when we all heard a chiming sound.
Aidan looked down at his waist where his cell phone was stored. “It’s not mine,” he said, looking over at Brayden.
“That girly sounding alert is definitely not mine. Must be his,” Brayden said, nodding in my direction.
I smirked and replied, “Wrong.”
Moving through the living room to my bedroom I found Zoe’s purse laying on one of the chairs across from the bed. Beneath the purse was her cell phone and the screen was alight with a newly received text message.
Caleb, if you are alive, please call me on Hanna’s phone. Please.
The first thing I did was sigh with relief. Zoe was okay and she didn’t hate me. She actually wanted to talk to me. Waves of tension rolled off my shoulders as I gripped the phone tightly in my hand.
Finally, because I heard new voices coming from the living room, I yelled out.
“I found her!”
CHAPTER 14
Zoe
“Are you out of every bit of your mind?” Hanna screeched, snatching her cell phone from my hand. “Did you just call the bastard stalker that seduced you into his bed and then left you while somebody tried to break in to his apartment?”
To say Hanna was a bit upset at the events of the night was an understatement. Not that I wasn’t still shaking, even after the shower and the Band-Aids on my knees and scrapes on my hands. Because I was, but I hadn’t exactly told her everything. Which, from the way she was ranting and raving might have turned out to be a good thing.
I was sitting on her couch, fluffy shag pillows propped up behind me with a cup of smoking hot tea on the coffee table in front of me. Hanna actually thought a shot of scotch was the cure to everything, but since I wasn’t a drinker, she’d restrained herself enough to make me tea instead. Now, she was pacing back and forth across her zebra-print rug, which made her look all kinds of crazy since the leggings and tank top she slept in were of a leopard print. I was feeling a little too close to the jungle right now, especially considering what I’d just seen in Caleb’s apartment.
“I just want to know that he’s alright,” I replied finally.
“Oh he’s alright, he got the hell out of there before anything bad happened, which I cannot say for you.” The last was said as she pointed the phone to my now-exposed knees since she’d given me a pair of shorts and a T-shirt of her own to wear. Her eyes also went to the bandage I reapplied to my ankle on my own this time. I hadn’t told her how that really happened either.
It’s funny how Hanna was the first person I’d thought of to run to in this situation, but she was the last person I trusted with the truth. She had this thing about overreacting, which I’d seen early on in our relationship. That might also explain why I never told her about my past either. But I had told Caleb. On the first night I’d actually spent any serious time with him, I’d confessed about my family and I’d had sex with him. What did that mean?
“Could you sit down, please? You’re making me dizzy,” I said instead of going back and forth with her about the situation.
“Oh, I’ll sit down alright,” she huffed, coming around the coffee table and dropping herself onto the couch right beside me. “I’ll sit right here and wait for you to tell me why you went to his place anyway. Every time he’s been in the bar he’s sat in the back looking all creepy, just staring at people and eating his food.”
“That’s not a crime,” I pointed out as I reached for the cup of tea.
“No, it’s not, but hanging around in dark parking lots at three in the morning sure is. Showing up when somebody’s trying to buy their groceries and trying to get a free feel is.”
“Actually, it’s not unless I perceive those actions as dangerous.”
That probably wasn’t the right thing to say because Hanna’s eyes almost bulged right out of her face. Her lips, which were usually painted and highly glossed with some of her fabulous MAC gloss, were bare and pressed together into a tight line. That confirmed she wasn’t happy with what I’d just said.
“Look, Hanna, I see your point and I get that from the other side of the fence this all looks pretty bad. But there was something, I don’t know, like a force in the air that just kept pulling us together. No matter how many times I pushed him away, he just kept coming back.”
“That,” she said, poking a finger into my arm, “is not the force, honey. That’s crazy stalker crap and I knew I should have called the police the first time.”
She turned in the chair then so that her whole body was facing me and took the cup of tea out of my hands. Her fingers laced with mine and she looked at me with what I presumed was her very serious face.
“You can tell me, Zoe, I won’t judge. Did he rape you? Is that what all this ‘someone broke in and he left’ drama is all about? Did that asshole make you do things you didn’t want to?”
I’d begun shaking my head at the moment she said she wouldn’t judge because that’s all Hanna Etheridge ever did. The words that followed were just as bad and just as out of line. I slipped my hands from hers, wondering if this wasn’t the wrong place to come after all.
“Because, see, I knew something was off about his ass,” Hanna continued. “That’s why when Dex came into the bar looking for you after I could have sworn the two of you left together, I got worried. Then when I went out into the parking lot and your car was still there, I was like ‘oh no.’”
Her eyes widened and she’d even made an O with her mouth. How’s that for dramatic?
“I told Dex that bastard probably had you. I told him how he’d been on your back for a couple of weeks now.”
“You did what?” I asked, no longer entertained by her skillful or tacky—couldn’t figure out which—acting skills.
“I told Dex you were with that Caleb person.”
“No,” I whispered, too many scenarios going through my head and none of them quite making any sense. “You did not tell him that.”
She nodded. “Oh, yes I did. I told him about that time I saw him all up on you at the grocery store too. And he was plenty pissed. Said he knew where that half-breed lived and he was going to make him and his kind pay. I didn’t know he was biracial or anything. I just thought he was Latino. But Dex and his boys tore out of that place so fast I figured he’d have you home before sunrise.”
I scooted away from her as she spoke. “Caleb was born in Brazil,” I said slowly. “He’s not a … how did Dex know where he lived?”
“Girl, stop with all this, we need to call the police and—”
Her words were interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone. Both of us paused then, staring down at her hand as the phone rang and vibrated again.