“When you were ten?” she asks, handing me a cup of coffee.
“It was a different time back then, SJ. Plus I lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else, there was always someone looking out for me.”
“Didn’t your mom hire anyone to help?” she asks now.
“She couldn’t afford it,” I tell her and watch her expression change to one of shock.
“But you’re a millionaire.”
“Billionaire,” I correct. “And I haven’t always been. My dad was the one with the money and after he left when I was five, right after Logan was born, we didn’t see or hear from him until we were packed up and shipped to him after my mom died.”
“He didn’t support your mom?”
“No, which is why I got my back up when you said the twins’ Dad didn’t support you.”
“The twins’ Dad doesn’t support me because I don’t want him to know about them,” she tells me.
“I know, I figured that out when you was telling me about it,” I say, wondering if I should continue. “At the risk of ruining a very great day, you can come to me if you ever need anything.”
“I’m not going to argue about the apartments with you anymore, Caleb, so don’t worry about that.”
“Does that mean I don’t have to do the experiment?”
“We had a deal, so yes, you have to do the experiment, unless you want to admit defeat.”
“And have you rub it in my face that you won and I lost?” I say and chuckle.
“I just don’t know how I’d feel about taking your help and leaving my friends to fend for themselves.”
“What would they do if they were offered the help?”
“I don’t know, I guess they’d accept it.”
“Of course they would because their family is what is most important to them,” I try to explain.
“I know, I’m just not good when it comes to guilt.”
“I’ve really enjoyed your company today,” I say, switching the subject.
“What about my company all the times before that?” she asks feigning offence.
“I’ve loved it, but today, you just seemed more relaxed. You didn’t argue or protest me paying for anything—you just enjoyed yourself.”
“I guess I did,” she replies with a small, thoughtful smile.
“We should take the twins out more often if it’s going to make you this pliable.”
“You smart ass,” she chuckles and punches me in the arm.
“Oh it’s like that is it?”
“Bring it,” she chuckles but doesn’t move quickly enough. “Caleb!” she squeals as I pin her beneath me on the couch and start tickling her.
“Say I’m right,” I demand.
“Never!” she manages through her laughter. “Fine, you’re right. You’re right!”
“That’s it, baby, I’m right,” I agree and lower my mouth to hers.
The kiss begins slow and soft, like we have all the time in the world. Gradually picking up the pace as our tongues dance together, eventually getting to the point where we’re devouring each other.
She feels so good, and she tastes fucking great. My hands move of their own accord, finding the hem of her shirt and gliding under it. She moans so softly into my mouth, causing the constricted erection in my pants to do a little jump against her inner thigh.
Her eyes open suddenly and she looks startled, almost scared.
“Are you okay?” I ask breathlessly. Why the hell am I stopping?
“Yeah. Caleb I need to...”
“It’s okay SJ, I understand. I was pushing it anyway. I’m sorry if I scared you,” I say.
“No, it’s fine, it’s just... I need to tell you something.”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” I say and begin to stand.
“But I do,” she starts. I hate that she feels so guilty, like she’s the one who led me on and is now turning me down.
“No you don’t. Don’t worry about it.” I smile and give her a small kiss on the cheek. “I better go, I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow before we start this experiment.”
She looks a little disheartened for a moment before smiling back at me. “Thank you so much for today, the twins are going to be talking about it nonstop for the next year.”
“It was my pleasure. I had such an amazing time. I hope we’ll be able to do it again,” I reply.
“Me too. Goodnight, Caleb,” she says, opening the front door for me to leave.
“Goodnight, SJ,” I respond, bending down and placing a soft kiss on her lips.
I leave with a smile on my face, bounding down the stairs as happy as can be. It isn’t until I reach my car that I realize how deep I’m in with SJ. Yep, Caleb, you’re totally screwed.
Chapter 9
“Good morning, SJ,” Gary says, sounding surprisingly cheerful for a Monday morning. I put my hand up to acknowledge him but continue looking at my phone.
“Hmm?” I think out loud.
“You okay?” he asks and follows me into the staff room.
“Yeah, it’s just my rent hasn’t come out of my account.”
“Don’t gripe about it,” he grunts. “Damn woman, I thought you were about to have a stroke or something.”
I take my purse off and grab my apron. “Thanks for the extra shift by the way, the cash will come in handy.”
“I’m sure you can find a way to repay me for my generosity,” he leers, leaning in close and rubbing his greasy fingers up and down my side. He’s touched me and been suggestive before but today his touch sends a chill down my spine, there’s something different about it. He really thinks I owe him for helping me out, but he doesn’t want a favor in return, no he wants something else.
“Please don’t touch me. I’m not going to have sex with you if that’s what you’re implying,” I say, stepping back from him.
“I’m sure you’d do anything for a bit of cash. Your mother was a whore and I bet the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he sneers, taking another step toward me.
I remember thinking something similar about Caleb the other night and realize now I might have been wrong. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall, sometimes it is picked and taken far away, never acknowledging the tree it came from.
“I am not my mother. Thank you for the overtime, but I will not repay you by sleeping with you,” I reply, trying not to show my fear as I continue backing up. I just need to move a little to the side and I’ll be able to get around him.
“Trust me, sweet cheeks,” he chuckles. I take advantage of his momentary distraction to duck around him. The guy might be a fat, lazy bum, but he can move pretty quickly. His hand shoots out and grabs my arm, twisting it up behind my back. “No one will be sleeping.” His crass statement makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I try to fight him off but he just pulls my arm higher up my back, causing me to cry out in pain. “I’ll tell you what, you can give me a blow job and we’ll call it even,” he says as if it’s a compromise. Pulling my arm up my back again, he forces me to my knees. Oh God, please don’t let this happen.
Tears poor freely down my face, fear has taken over and I begin to beg, “Please don’t make me do this. I don’t want to do this.”
He grabs a handful of my hair and memories of Jake at the bar attack me, fear rips through me as I break into a full on cry. “Shut the fuck up, it’s just a dick in your mouth or would you prefer I put it in your pussy?” I shake my head vehemently, unable to form any coherent words. “Stop the fucking crying and open up then,” he yells.
My body doesn’t cooperate, my jaw locks shut and I can’t seem to make it do what I want. Gary is getting angry. He growls at me before trying to pry my mouth open with his fingers. I try to push him away with my now free arms, but he just pulls harder on my hair. My scalp is burning now and it feels like my hair is being ripped out from the roots, the pain is too much and my mouth opens to scream. He chuckles, gripping ahold of my face on either side, preventing
my jaw from closing. I close my eyes and wait for the inevitable. I can only pray he will go easy on me.
“What the fuck?” he mutters. His hand lets go of my face, but before I can open my eyes to see what is happening, his grip on my hair tightens and I’m yanked down, face first onto the floor. I feel like a rag doll being thrown around the floor.
“Let. Her. Go!” I hear an angry, familiar voice growl.
Caleb.
Gary removes his hand from my hair and I crawl over to a corner, burying my face in my knees as I begin to hyperventilate—the enormity of the situation suddenly hitting me. I hear a dull thud, like the sound of skin hitting skin, and I know one of the men has just received a hefty blow. I can only hope it was Gary and not Caleb.
Blow after blow rains down on the victim. I dare to think what they look like now. I pray continuously. Please don’t be Caleb, please.
I nearly jump out of my skin when a gentle hand cups my knee. “SJ,” Caleb says softly. I lift my head to look at him. His lip is split and a faint bruise is starting to appear on his jaw line. I can’t say anything I just begin crying again. He pulls me into his arms and rocks me gently, comforting me like I would comfort Maddie and Mitch. “Come on, baby,” he whispers. Picking me up in his arms, I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face into his chest. “Let’s get you out of here.”
***
Caleb drives us to Slate Security. He helps me from the car, holding me as we make our way to his office. He hasn’t said a word to me since placing me in his car. The silence is quickly becoming a nightmare as my brain replays the memory of Gary over and over again.
“Debbie, hold all my calls and clear my day completely,” he says to his secretary.
“But Mr. Slate, you have a really important meeting with Marcus from Play Holdings this afternoon,” she hurries to tell him.
“I don’t care, rearrange it,” he replies, closing the door ending the conversation.
He sits me down on the couch, goes over to his drink cabinet and pours a small amount of amber liquid into two glasses.
Holding it out for me to take, I shake my head. “I don’t drink,” I inform him.
“It’ll help, trust me,” he says sincerely. I take the glass and down it in one fluid motion, before coughing it back up again.
“That’s awful. How do you drink that stuff? My throat and chest are burning and I don’t feel any better.” I glower at him.
“You’re supposed to sip it,” he tells me now after I swallowed it all in one gulp.
“Too late now,” I cough again.
Placing his glass on the coffee table in front of me, he sits down next to it and leans forward so his elbows rest on his knees. “I need you to tell me what happened,” he says.
“I don’t know. He’s always been a bit handsy and pushed the boundaries before, but he’s never crossed the line like that. I don’t understand what came over him,” I tell him honestly.
“When you say handsy, what do you mean?” he asks.
“Like he’ll grab my ass or palm my breasts, I usually only have to tell him to stop once.”
“Are you aware that’s sexual misconduct in the work place?”
“Yeah, but I needed the job. I only usually have to put up with it for two or three days a week, but the cafe I work for doesn’t have any overtime hours to spare. I was desperate and took an extra shift at the butcher shop.”
“You don’t need a job that much, SJ,” he say, sounding a little angry. “Whatever the circumstances, you should never be put in that position. Figuratively or literally.”
“I understand, but you know my circumstances, I need to work.”
“I need some help,” he starts hesitantly. “If you’re interested, I’ll pay you of course.”
“Unless you need a maid or someone to make you coffee, I’m not sure what I could do to help you,” I say.
“You’ve been in hiding for a while, I need your expertise.”
“For what?”
“I need to find someone who has gone missing,” he tells me.
“There’s a difference between missing and hiding Caleb,” I reply. He goes to interrupt, but I halt him. “If she were missing, you would be able to find a lot of things to go on. If she’s hiding, she’ll be covering her tracks pretty damn well.”
“Do you think you could help determine which category she falls into?” he asks.
I sigh and agree. “What have you got so far?”
“Thank you.” He smiles and starts arranging papers and photos on his desk. “This is her college ID card, it’s the only clear, face forward picture we have, the rest are grainy CCTV stills.”
I take the card and look at the girl. She’s really pretty. No, not pretty, beautiful. Her long, wavy, auburn hairs, hangs loosely around her face and shoulders. Her make-up is minimal and it makes her blue eyes sparkle like aquamarine gemstones. She wears the tiniest smile, it’s almost unnoticeable, but it’s there.
“This is where she worked,” Caleb’s voice cuts through my thoughts.
“Worked? As in, doesn’t anymore?” I ask.
“She was fired two weeks ago, intoxicated in the work place. These are the stills from the CCTV cameras that cover the streets she used when walking home. After the third camera, she disappeared,” he says, showing me a picture of an empty street.
“Maybe she walked a different way home,” I suggest.
Caleb shakes his head. “No, these are the pictures from every street in a two block radius. She just disappeared.”
“What about the metro?” I ask. “There are a lot of stations around this area, maybe she jumped on a train.”
“Nope, checked all the cameras that cover the entrance to the stations,” he says.
“Jumped in a car then?”
“Possible, but there are only a few blind spots between the cameras out of the seventy plus cameras we pulled the CCTV from.”
“What exactly do you want me to suggest? It seems like you’ve already tried anything I might suggest,” I argue.
“I need someone who can think outside the box,” he explains. “If you wanted to hide in plain sight, what would you do?”
“I’d wear a disguise,” I reply.
“Of course you would!” he exclaims. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
I laugh at his astonishment—I can’t help it. “Calm down, what do we do now?”
“You get the popcorn, I’ll get the movies?”
“Huh?” I furrow my brow.
“Could you help me go back through this footage? Two eyes are better than one?” he asks, giving me a charming smile and puppy dog eyes. “Please?”
“How can I say no to that?” I chuckle and take a seat back on the couch.
***
We spend the next three hours following Evangeline from her place of work until she disappears and then checking all the surrounding cameras to see if we missed something. Caleb goes off to deal with rescheduling his meetings for the week while I decide to approach this from a different angle. I decided to watch the footage from each camera for longer than ten minutes like Caleb and his brother had. I suggested that she may have stopped to pick up a coffee but Caleb shot that down by telling me there isn’t a coffee shop in that particular area. So I thought she may have stopped and talked to a friend, Caleb thinks I’m wasting my time as she doesn’t have any known friends, but you never know. The girl went to college—she must have made a friend.
“How are you getting on?” Caleb asks when he comes back into the office.
“Wait a sec,” I reply while squinting at the screen. “There, that’s her!”
“That’s a little old lady.”
“No, it’s the girl.”
“How do you know?” he asks disbelievingly.
“The ladder on her tights,” I reply certainly.
“Where?” He furrows his brow and looks closer at the screen.
“Here,” I stand and point at the screen.
We go ba
ck to the original footage of a young girl with long auburn hair, wearing a short black skirt, a white shirt and a black suit jacket. Caleb checks out her left leg where I pointed out the ladder in her tights and then turns to me with a flabbergasted expression.
Once he pulls himself together, he clears his throat and speaks again, “So at some point between thirteenth and H, Evangeline transformed into an old lady wearing a knee length skirt, flat shoes, a brown coat that hangs just a bit higher than the skirt and a hat?”
“Yep, what stores are between those two cameras?” I ask.
“I don’t think there are many,” he replies, seeming more confused.
“Oh you genius,” I mutter.
“Huh?”
“Not you.”
“Thanks,” he chuckles.
“Look at the bag she’s carrying. It’s black here when she’s young and has a tartan pattern on it when she’s old, but if you look at the black bag it has a tartan pattern on the buckle strap. The bag is reversible,” I conclude. “She knew she was being followed, no one goes to that much trouble to disguise themselves unless they’re frightened.”
“We aren’t following her. Grayson has someone check up on her from time to time and that’s why he knows she’s been missing for two weeks.”
“Someone was following her and was making it obvious enough to scare her into hiding,” I explain.
Caleb pulls out his phone and presses a few keys, placing it against his ear and waiting. “Grayson, come to my office,” he says and hangs up. “Now we just need to find out where she changed.”
“The Warner Theatre,” I say as if it’s obvious. “So many people go in and out of there, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.”
“You rang, your highness,” Grayson says, entering the room without knocking.
“SJ found her, you need to get the CCTV from The Warner Theatre and all other surrounding stores. She changed her clothes and disguised herself as an old lady,” Caleb continues filling his brother in on what we found. “That’s all I can do now for the rest of the week. I have a bet to uphold.”
Caleb (The Unseen Series Book 1) Page 10
