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But I didn’t think about that.
I focused on Rosie’s instructions, which included stealing a car that wasn’t Duke’s as “he’ll have some kind of tracking software in there, the shifty asshole.”
I definitely felt terrible about stealing Anna’s SUV, but I’d already committed to this and I’d either have it returned or get her a new one. It was a small price to pay to make sure they weren’t in danger.
Rosie had walked me through, in great detail, how I could hot-wire a car. It didn’t surprise me in the least that she had this knowledge. As it was, I didn’t have to, since this was a ranch in Montana, in a town where people seemed to still be mostly good—or at least pretended to be. So the keys were in the freaking car. Then again, from what I’d come to gather, Duke’s family was powerful, known and respected around these parts. It would take someone with brass balls to fuck with them.
Or brass ovaries.
Once I’d told her I’d made it off the ranch without incident, she directed me where to go and hung up. No goodbyes, no asking if I was okay. I liked that.
The fact that she’d managed to organize a room in a moderately shitty hotel in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night was nothing short of magic.
There weren’t even any witnesses because to add to it all, the key was in the door of the room she’d texted me the number of.
The room was exactly as I’d expected: small, smelled like cheap cleaning products and damp. Ghosts of my past lurked in every corner, and not just those of my foster parents. No, that first night with Duke, when things had been so drastically different, when I’d been so sure I couldn’t survive him.
But here I was, now making sure he would survive me.
I hadn’t slept, of course.
I’d paced, I’d panicked, I’d considered getting back in the car so I could drive to the ranch and crawl back into bed with Duke.
Almost.
My resolve was too iron clad for that, my heart far too fragile. I knew for a fact if I’d stayed a day longer on that ranch it would ruin me, absolutely fucking level me. There would be no coming back, no rising from the ashes.
Not only that, I didn’t want to testify. I didn’t want to fucking sit in a room and watch a judge hand over a sentence, didn’t want to stare this man in the face and watch him try to wriggle out of it. Duke hadn’t spoken of it much, another way he’d tried to protect me most likely. Didn’t want me to think that all of this was for nothing, that the man might figure out a way to get out of this. He had powerful friends. Rich men with powerful friends made deadly enemies.
If that happened, I knew Duke would take things into his own hands, because that was the steadfast and deadly man Duke was.
But I didn’t want a man—even Duke—to take my problems, to solve them for me.
I wanted to handle this deadly one myself.
This man had taken my only friend, stolen a vibrant, driven and extraordinary person for no other reason than he didn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. He wanted to be invincible.
He’d taken away my cold, empty life. Forced me into one that was full, warm, and one that would haunt me for the rest of my days, along with the guilt of Andre’s death.
It was all his fault that I’d been on the ranch with Duke, that I’d attached myself to him and his family—another casualty.
So I didn’t go back to Duke.
I stayed in my room and prepared myself for what was to come.
A future without him.
“Now, I’m all for abandoning my family in the middle of the night to pick up a movie star who happens to be the key witness in bringing down one of the biggest assholes around, but you gonna clue me in to what we’re actually doing here?” Rosie asked, Aviators on me.
She’d arrived early morning, coffees for both of us in hand. Somehow, she’d known how I took it. That was just another mystery to the woman who’d made the twenty-hour trip in less than eight. I did figure out that she’d “borrowed a friend’s jet.” I wasn’t a stranger to flying in private jets, but I also knew it was hard to procure one in the middle of the night with a moment’s notice. I also knew that if anyone could manage to do something like that, it was Rosie.
She sure as shit didn’t look like someone who’d been torn from her bed and traveled across the country. She was wearing high-waisted leather pants, a black silk shirt tucked in, spike-heeled Valentinos, and her hair was piled into an artfully messy bun. Her cat eye was sharp and her blood-red lips lined to perfection.
