"Are you going to go down there?" Blaze asked.
"No."
"Really?"
"We were matched two days ago, and she hasn't answered." Axel unwound the wraps off his hands. "She can answer whenever she wants, and she can choose not to."
Blaze leaned against the wall, watching him. "I came up with every excuse in the book when Stella didn't answer. She lost her phone. The app was broken. She saw my face and left the state." He shook his head. "It was none of that. She had her own reasons, and once I knew them they made sense. None of it was about me personally." He nudged the bag toward Axel. "What if she never answers?"
"Then she never answers." It wasn't easy to say. His wolf didn't like it. Instinct kept pulling toward the diner. He had waited a long time for a mate. Knowing who and where she was made waiting harder. But he'd wait anyway.
"One thing," Axel said. "This stays between us."
"Up to you." Blaze pulled his gloves back on, turned to the bag, set his feet, and threw the next combination.
Axel went back up to his apartment and opened his laptop, and the cursor sat in the search field, ready for him to type her name. Reese Walker, Fate Mountain, Oregon. He could have her whole history on his screen in minutes. Old addresses, records, the town she came from, why she'd left her old life and ended up washing dishes in Fate Mountain. It would be almost effortless for him.
He closed the laptop. He'd spent his childhood with caseworkers and foster placements reading about him before they ever met him, and he wasn't going to do that to her.
Chapter
Five
It was Friday in June,and the diner had been packed with tourists since dawn. Reese fed the dishwasher rack after rack and never got more than one tub ahead. The alley door stood propped on its can, and the steam rolled out through it like the building was breathing.
The bus tubs were coming back faster than Reese could empty them. She loaded a fresh rack of glasses on her hip and carried it out to the shelf behind the front counter. With her back to the dining room, she stacked tumblers as fast as she could.
A white van with a ladder rack pulled up outside the front window while she was placing the last glasses.
Everything in her sped up and slowed down at the same time. At the edge of her vision a man built just like Wade crossed to the counter. He took the seat second from the end with his back to her.
Reese's mind raced, considering her escape, her attention on her task wavering. The back door was propped open. She checked that her keys were in her apron pocket. Her car was parked inthe lot behind the restaurant and had a quarter tank of gas. The glass she was setting on the top shelf missed the edge and dropped.
It smashed loudly at her feet on the tile. Dozens of faces snapped toward the sound, and the man at the counter turned with them. He wasn't Wade. The man was at least sixty, balding and sunburned, with reading glasses hanging off his collar.
Nell appeared behind her with a broom and a dustpan. "Thank you," Reese said.
She swept the pieces up carefully, her heart banging wildly in her chest. It wasn't him. The van outside said Deschutes Plumbing on the door, which she could see now that she was looking with her eyes instead of her nerves.
She emptied the dustpan into the garbage and stepped into the walk-in. The cold straightened her out. She had been terrified in public plenty of times, and she knew how to finish a shift with adrenaline raging through her veins.
She couldn't believe how fast the fear had come back. Three months of trying to calm herself down, and one white van had undone all of it in seconds.
She went back to the pit and the racks and finished out the rush. The plumber left, and she forgot about him as soon as his van pulled away. But the adrenaline lingered, and her hands continued to shake. One harmless old man had been enough to send her into panic mode. That was her life now: always watching, always ready to run.
When her shift was over, Reese cashed her paycheck at the bank on Main. Afterward, she sat in her car in the parking lot, her hands on the wheel. She ran through her escape plan again. Therest of her cash was hidden in an envelope at her apartment five minutes away. Her bags were packed and ready. She could be on the highway in fifteen minutes. Bend by dinner. Or the coast. Or south until the names on the signs stopped being familiar.
Then she felt something move low in her belly.
She let go of the wheel. It came again, faint as a moth against a window. She had never felt the baby move before. At sixteen weeks pregnant, she might start feeling movement any day now, the books said. She read them at the town library because she didn't have the money to buy them. Everything she knew about pregnancy came from those books. For the first time, she could feel there was really a baby inside her.
"Okay," she said quietly. "I hear you."
A newborn couldn't live in a Corolla. Reese could grab her bags and run right now. Once the baby came, she couldn't keep running. Wade would still be out there, still looking. She couldn't keep living like this once the baby was born.
She drove home and sat down at the end of the bed next to the bags.
What she wanted was to disappear completely. Not to keep running. Not to keep looking over her shoulder. She wanted her information hidden completely. She wanted to be able to walk into a doctor's office under her own name and hear the baby's heartbeat without worrying that Wade would find her. She needed someone who could protect her if Wade ever showed up. And she knew who could do that for her.
