by Erin Watt
“I’m Reed Royal, Ella’s…” What am I? Her boyfriend? Her stepbrother? What? “Friend.” Hell, I’m not even that. “Is she here? There’s a family emergency.”
“No, she never showed up.” Lucy’s brow creases with worry. “I called her and she didn’t answer. She’s such a good employee, I thought maybe she was sick and couldn’t call in.”
My heart sinks. Ella’s never missed a day at the bakery even though it requires her to get up at the ass-crack of dawn and work nearly three hours before classes start.
“Oh, okay, she must be home in bed,” I mumble, backing away.
“Wait a minute,” Lucy calls after me. “What’s going on? Does your father know Ella is missing?”
“She’s not missing, ma’am,” I call back, already halfway to my car. “She’s at home. Like you said, sick. In bed.”
I peel out of the parking lot and call Coach. “I’m not gonna make it to practice. Family emergency,” I repeat.
I shut out the shouted expletives from Coach Lewis. He winds down after a few minutes. “All right, son. But I expect your ass to be in uniform bright and early tomorrow.”
“Yessir.”
Back home once again, I find our housekeeper, Sandra, has arrived to make breakfast.
“You see Ella?” I ask the plump brunette.
“Can’t say that I have.” Sandra checks the clock. “She’s usually gone by now. So are you, for that matter. What’s going on? Don’t you have practice?”
“Coach had a family emergency,” I lie. I’m so damn good at lying. It becomes almost second nature when you hide the truth every hour of every day.
Sandra tsks. “Hope it’s nothing too serious.”
“Me, too,” I answer. “Me, too.”
Upstairs, I enter the room I should have checked before racing off. Maybe she crept in while I was trying to find her. But Ella’s bedroom is dead silent. Her bed is still made. The desk is spotless.
I check her bathroom, which also looks untouched. Ditto with the closet. All her stuff is hanging on matching wooden hangers. Her shoes are lined up in a neat row on the floor. There are unopened boxes and bags still stuffed with clothes that Brooke probably picked out for her.
Forcing myself not to feel bad about invading her privacy, I dig through her nightstand—empty. I flipped her room once, back when I still didn’t trust her, and she always kept a book of poetry and a man’s watch in the nightstand. The watch was an exact replica of my dad’s. Hers had belonged to Dad’s best friend Steve, Ella’s bio-dad.
I pause in the middle of the room and look around. There’s nothing here to indicate her presence. Not her phone. Not her book. Not her…oh hell no, her backpack is gone.
I tear out of the room and down the hall to Easton’s.
“East, wake up. East!” I say sharply.
“What?” He groans. “Is it time to get up?” His eyes flicker open and he squints. “Oh shit. I’m late for practice. Why aren’t you there already?”
He shoots out of bed, but I grab his arm before he can dart off. “We’re not going to practice. Coach knows.”
“What? Why—”
“Forget that right now. How much was your debt?”
“My what?”
“How much did you owe the bookie?”
He blinks at me. “Eight grand. Why?”
I do some quick math. “That means Ella’s got about two G’s left, right?”
“Ella?” He frowns. “What about her?”
“I think she ran.”
“Ran where?”
“Ran away. Ran off,” I growl. I shove away from the bed and stalk to the window. “Dad paid her to stay here. Gave her ten grand. Think about it, East. He had to pay this orphan who was stripping for a living ten grand to come live with us. And he was probably gonna pay that to her every month.”
“Why’d she leave?” he asks in confusion, still half asleep.
I continue to stare out the window. Once his grogginess wears off, he’ll put it together.
“What did you do?”
Yep, here we go.
The floor creaks as he whips around the room. Behind me I can hear him muttering curses under his breath while he dresses.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say impatiently. Turning back, I give him the rundown of the places I’ve been. “Where do you think she is?”
“She’s got enough for a plane ticket.”
“But she’s careful with her money. She hasn’t spent hardly any of it while she’s been here.”
Easton nods thoughtfully. Then we lock eyes and speak in unison, almost as if we’re the twins of the Royal household, instead of our brothers, Sawyer and Sebastian. “GPS.”
We call the GPS service Atlantic Aviation owns and that my dad installs in every car he’s ever bought. The helpful assistant tells us that the new Audi S5 is parked at the bus station.
We’re out the door before she even starts to recite the address.
“She’s seventeen. About this tall.” I hold my hand beneath my chin as I describe Ella to the ticket clerk. “Blonde hair. Blue eyes.” Eyes like the Atlantic. Stormy gray, cool blue, fathoms deep. I got lost in that gaze more than once. “She left her phone behind.” I hold up my cell. “We need to get it to her.”
The ticket clerk clicks her tongue. “Oh sure. She was in such a hurry to get away. She bought a ticket to Gainesville. Her grandmother died, you know.”
Both East and I nod. “What time did the bus leave?”
“Oh, hours ago. She’d be there by now.” The ticket lady shakes her head in dismay. “She was crying like her heart had been broken. You don’t see that anymore—kids caring about old folks like that. It was sweet. Felt terrible for her.”
East clenches his fists beside me. Anger radiates off of him in waves. If we were alone, one of those fists would be in my face.
“Thanks, ma’am.”
“No problem, dear.” She dismisses us with a nod.
We exit the building and stop at Ella’s car. I hold out my hand and Easton slaps her spare keys into my palm.
Inside, I find her key fob in the middle console, along with her poetry book and what looks like the title of the car stuck between the pages. In the glove compartment, she’d stashed her phone, which still shows all my unread text messages.
She left everything behind. Everything associated with the Royals.
“We gotta get to Gainesville,” Easton says flatly.
“I know.”
“Are we telling Dad?”
Informing Callum Royal means we could take his plane. We’d be there in an hour. Otherwise it’s a six-and-a-half-hour drive.
“I don’t know.” The urgency to find her has lessened. I know where she is now. I can get to her. I just need to figure out what angle I should take.
“What’d you do?” my brother demands again.
I’m not ready for the wave of hatred he’s going to send my way, so I stay quiet.
“Reed.”
“She caught me with Brooke,” I say hoarsely.
His jaw falls open. “Brooke? Dad’s Brooke?”
“Yes.” I force myself to face him.
“What the hell? How often have you been with Brooke?”
“A couple times,” I admit. “Not recently, though. And definitely not last night. I didn’t touch her, East.”
His jaw clenches. He’s dying to take a swing at me, but he won’t. Not in public. He’d heard the same things from Mom. Keep the Royal name clean, boys. It’s easy to tear it down, so much harder to build it up.
“You should be strung up by your nuts and hung out to dry.” He spits at my feet. “If you don’t find Ella and bring her back, I’ll be first in line to see it done.”
“That’s fair.” I try to stay calm. No point in getting upset. No point in tipping this car over. No point in roaring even though I’m dying to open my mouth and release all of my anger and self-loathing into the air.
“Fair?” He snorts with disgust. “S
o you don’t give a shit that Ella’s in some college town getting groped by drunks?”
“She’s a survivor. I’m sure she’s safe.” The words sound so ridiculous I practically gag as they come out. Ella’s a gorgeous girl, and she’s all by herself. There’s no telling what could happen to her. “You want to drive her car back home before we head to Gainesville?”
Easton gapes at me.
“Well?” I ask impatiently.
“Sure. Why not?” He rips the key fob from my hand. “I mean, who cares that she’s a hot seventeen-year-old by herself, carrying almost two grand in cash?” My fingers curl into fists. “It’s not like some junkie high on meth is gonna look at her and think, ‘there’s an easy mark. That five-foot-something chick who weighs less than my leg isn’t gonna beat me off’”—it’s becoming hard to breathe—“and I’m sure every dude she runs into has good intentions. None of them will drag her down a dark alley and run train on her until she’s—”
“Shut the fuck up!” I roar.
“Finally.” East throws up his hands.
“What do you mean?” I’m practically panting with rage. The pictures Easton painted with his words make me wish I could Hulk out and run to Gainesville, destroying everything in my path until I find her.
“You’ve been walking around like she’s nothing to you. Maybe you’re made of stone, but I like Ella. She…she was good for us.” His grief is almost tangible.
“I know.” The words are wrenched out of me. “I know, goddammit.” My throat tightens to the point of pain. “But…we weren’t good for her.”
Gideon, our older brother, tried to tell me that from the beginning. Stay the hell away from her. She doesn’t need our kind of drama. Don’t ruin her like I ruined—
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like. We’re poison, East. Every single one of us. I slept with Dad’s girlfriend to get back at him for being a dick to Mom. The twins are involved in shit I don’t even want to know about. Your gambling is out of control. Gideon is—” I stop. Gid’s living in his own hellhole right now, but that’s not something Easton needs to know about. “We’re screwed in the head, man. Maybe she’s better off without us.”
“That’s not true.”
But I think it might be. We’re no good for her. All Ella has ever wanted is to live a normal, regular life. She can’t have that in the Royal household.
If I wasn’t completely selfish, I’d walk away. I’d convince East that the best thing for Ella is to be as far away from us as possible.
Instead, I stay quiet and think of what I’m going to say to her when we find her.
“Let’s go. I have an idea.” I pivot and head toward the entrance.
“I thought we were going to Gainesville,” East mutters from behind me.
“This’ll save us the drive.”
We make a beeline for the security office, where I slip a hundred bucks to the rent-a-cop and he gives us access to the camera footage from Gainesville. The guy rewinds the tape to the moment the bus from Bayview pulls in, and my heart seizes up as I scan the passengers. Then it drops to my stomach when I realize that none of those passengers is Ella.
“What the hell,” East blurts out as we leave the bus station ten minutes later. “The ticket lady said Ella was on that bus.”
My jaw is so tight I can barely get a word out. “Maybe she got off at a different stop.”
We trudge back to the Rover and slide in. “Now what?” he asks, his eyes narrowed menacingly at me.
I rake a hand through my hair. We could drive to every bus station on the route, but I suspect that’d be a wild goose chase. Ella’s smart, and she’s used to running, used to skipping town at a moment’s notice and making a new life for herself. She learned it from her mother.
Another queasy feeling twists my gut as a thought occurs to me. Is she going to get a job at another strip club? I know Ella will do whatever she needs to do to survive, but the thought of her taking her clothes off for a bunch of skeezy perverts makes my blood boil.
I have to find her. If something happened to her because I drove her away, I won’t be able to live with myself.
“We go home,” I announce.
My brother looks startled. “Why?”
“Dad has an investigator on retainer. He’ll be able to find her a lot faster than we will.”
“Dad’s gonna lose his shit.”
No kidding. And I’ll deal with the fallout the best I can, but right now, finding Ella trumps everything.
3
As Easton predicted, Dad is livid when we tell him Ella’s missing. I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours and I’m exhausted, too exhausted to face off with him tonight.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me earlier?” my father booms. He paces the massive living room in the mansion, his thousand-dollar wingtips slapping the gleaming hardwood floor.
“We figured we’d find her before it came down to that,” I say tersely.
“I’m her legal guardian! I should have been informed.” Dad’s breathing grows labored. “What did you do, Reed?”
His furious gaze bores into me. He’s not looking at East, or the twins, who are on the couch wearing identical looks of concern. I’m not surprised Dad’s decided to lay the blame at my feet. He knows my brothers follow my lead, that the only Royal who could’ve driven Ella away is me.
I swallow. Shit. I don’t want him to know that Ella and I got involved right under his nose. I want him to focus on finding her, not distract him with the news that his son is hooking up with his new ward.
“It wasn’t Reed.”
Easton’s quiet confession shocks the hell out of me. I glance at my brother, but his eyes are on Dad.
“I’m the reason she’s gone. We had a run-in with my bookie the other night—I owed him some cash—and Ella got spooked. This dude’s not the friendliest guy, if you know what I mean.”
The vein in Dad’s forehead looks like it might burst. “Your bookie? You’re mixed up in that shit again?”
“I’m sorry.” Easton shrugs.
“You’re sorry? You dragged Ella into one of your messes and scared her so badly that she ran away!”
Dad advances on my brother, and I immediately step into his path.
“East made a mistake,” I say firmly, avoiding my brother’s eyes. I’ll thank him later for taking the heat. Right now, we need to calm the old man down. “But it’s done, over with, all right? We should be concentrating on finding her.”
Dad’s shoulders drop. “You’re right.” He nods, his expression hardening. “I’ll call my PI.”
He storms out of the living room without another word, his heavy footsteps echoing in the corridor. A moment later, we hear his study door slam shut.
“East,” I start.
He turns with a deadly look. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for her.”
My throat tightens. “I know.”
“If Dad knew about…” He trails off, warily glancing at the twins, who hadn’t said a word during the entire exchange. “It would distract him.”
“You think the PI will find Ella?” Sawyer asks.
“Yes,” I answer with conviction I don’t feel.
“If she uses her mom’s ID, we can definitely find her,” East assures our younger brother. “If she figures out how to get a fake ID…” His shoulders slump in defeat. “I don’t know.”
“She can’t hide forever,” Seb says helpfully.
Yeah, she can. She’s the most resourceful person I’ve ever known. If Ella wants to stay hidden, then she will.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I eagerly grab it, but it’s not the person I want to hear from. Bile coats my throat when I see Brooke’s name.
A little birdie told me your princess is missing.
“Ella?” East says hopefully.
“Brooke.” Her name burns my tongue.
“What does she want?”
“Nothing,” I mutter, just as an
other message pops up.
Callum must be beside himself. Poor man. He needs someone to comfort him.
I grit my teeth. She ain’t subtle, that’s for sure.
In our mad search for Ella, I haven’t allowed myself to think about Brooke’s pregnancy and the deal I struck with her last night. Now I can’t ignore it, because the messages keep coming.
You have a job to do, Reed.
You made a promise.
Answer me, you little prick!
You want some baby mama drama? Is that it?
Jesus. I don’t need this right now. I choke down my rage and force myself to respond. Relax, bitch. I’ll go talk to him.
“What does she want?” Easton repeats angrily.
“Nothing,” I say again. Then I leave him and the twins in the living room and drag myself to my father’s study.
I don’t want to do this. I really, really don’t want to do this.
I knock on the door.
“What is it, Reed?”
“How did you know it’s me?” I ask as I push the door open.
“Because with Gideon gone, you’re the leader of your merry band of brothers.” Dad throws back his tumbler full of Scotch while reaching for a refill. And I wonder why I can’t get East off the bottle.
I heave a breath. “I think you should call Brooke.”
Dad halts in the middle of stoppering the Scotch.
Yeah, you heard me, old man. And trust me, I’m as shocked as you are.
When he doesn’t respond, I force myself to push forward. “When you bring Ella back, we’re gonna need help. We need someone to provide a buffer.” I gag on my next words. “A woman’s touch, I guess. Ella was tight with her mom. Maybe if Brooke had been around more before, Ella wouldn’t have left.”
My father frowns at me. “I thought you hated Brooke.”
“How many times do you want me to say I’m a dumbass?” I stretch a painful smile across my face.
He remains unconvinced. “She wants a ring and I’m not ready for that.”
Thank God. I guess the booze hasn’t erased all his good judgment.
“You don’t have to marry her. Just…” I lick my lips. This is effing hard, but I press on because I made this deal. I can’t have Brooke telling people that demon spawn is mine. “Just know it’s cool if you bring her back. I get it. We need people to care about. Who care about us.”
