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“He started to cry after Ron left, which was right after I confronted them. Not so that I’d know. He went to his room. I peeked through a crack in his door...”
Willie didn’t cry. Ever. Like Mike. It was as if they’d made a pact with each other that fateful day a decade ago.
“Does he know you saw him?”
She nodded. “He was pissed as hell. But...then...it was weird. He was like this little kid—like, you know, our Willie. He just started talking to me. Telling me how much you meant to him. How your believing in him was more than he deserved, and that he didn’t want to let you down. That he really wanted to graduate. To make you proud of him. You can’t kick him out, Mike. I really think he means it. I think he might actually make it this time. It was only one beer.”
“I have no intention of kicking him out,” he said. “You should know that by now.”
She stopped, her face relaxing.
“You’re a great man, Mike,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “A great brother. To all of us.”
He nodded. Wanted to hug her. But it wasn’t what they did.
“Get some rest,” he told her instead. “I’m going to do the same.”
“I’m going to head home,” she said. “It’s early enough. And sleeping with my husband is a hell of a lot better than sleeping alone.”
He thought of Kacey. Holding her. The warmth against him.
“But first... You never said where you were. What was the big emergency?”
He searched for the lies he hadn’t yet made up. And thought of Kacey. He could not tell his family about her. He was more certain than ever of that. Kacey needed him right now. Needed their friendship intact.
But he couldn’t lie about her, either.
“I was at the hospital,” he said. “Someone from the Lemonade Stand was attacked tonight and they thought the attacker had something to do with her computer.”
He’d been worried for nothing. The truth had been right there, ready to serve him all along.
Diane offered sincere sympathy, asked if the woman was going to be all right, and headed out, leaving Mike shaking his head. Why in the hell had he been so worried about being with Kacey? Why had he made such a big deal out of nothing?
Ideas were occurring to hi
m.
He didn’t want them.
And chose not to let them in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SHE WAS ONE of the luckiest women on earth. While the embrace of her family—her parents arrived at Lacey’s house Saturday morning—and the decision that Lacey would take some vacation time, drive back to Beverly Hills with Kacey and stay with her there for a few days helped immeasurably, she also had Michael texting her, talking to her when she called both Saturday and Sunday nights.
And she hadn’t been raped.
She might have been. Probably would have been. But she’d been spared.
Because of a man and his dog. A good man. A great dog.
She didn’t want to ever go back to Santa Raquel again. At least not until the police caught the guys. If they caught the guys. So far, they didn’t have much to go on. No matching fingerprints had turned up in the police database. Of course. They were local kids. Not wanted criminals.
The police sketches had been hung around town and were going to be shown around the high school on Monday. Police were hopeful they’d get some good response there.
Kacey hoped so, too.
Every time she heard from Michael, he asked her how she felt. And while she had a suspicion he was asking about her emotions, she told him about the soreness in her upper torso. How it hurt to raise her arms, to get dressed. She was going to have to go into the studio an hour early on Monday for makeup to work magic on her. And when she shaved her legs, she’d found new bruises where the shoes of the kid on her legs had dug into the sides of her ankles.
