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Forget booking first class tickets on the most convenient flight home. We would go to the airport now and camp out until the next flight. I didn’t care if we had to fly home in a cargo plane in the middle of the night. I had to get out of here. I had to get away from the man and woman who had so cavalierly manhandled my destiny and then had the nerve to tell me it was for my own good.
“Oh, come now.” Robert rose and followed me out of the office. “Be sensible. I know my methods were extreme, but surely you see how necessary they were.”
“Emma!” I called, then found her in the kitchen with my mother. Mom was tying on an apron, something that looked absurd over her Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress. Emma was pulling out a bag of flour from the pantry. She looked over her shoulder at me with a grin. “Gram Gram said we could bake cookies.”
If there had been any doubt in my mind before, it was erased. My mother was not the type of grandmother who baked cookies. Not unless she sensed that she needed to make a little girl very, very happy so that it was hard for her mother to yank her away.
She thought I would see how happy Emma was and decide to wait an hour. Let the poor girl make some cookies. She thought she could buy more time for Robert to bring me around. She underestimated me.
“We’re not making cookies, Emma,” I said. “Say goodbye to Gram Gram.”
Emma’s face fell. Shock crossed my mother’s. “Surely we can–” she began.
“No.” My voice cracked like thunder across the kitchen. Emma even clapped her hands over her ears, just like she used to do in the storms that raged over Oahu. “We’re leavingnow.”
We hadn’t brought much with us. Only what we’d packed for the week in Croatia. Upstairs, I grabbed my suitcase out and threw both Emma’s and my clothes into it. I made sure she grabbed her Elsa doll, but I didn’t let her take any of the trinkets she’d bought since we arrived. The tinkling sound of the little bells she’d bought from the souk sharpened the edge of my anger. She shouldn’t have been out shopping in Marrakesh. She should have been with her father.
Ishould have been with her father.
31
LANDON
Along with the information about Robert and Elyna being behind the threats, my dark source also tracked their communication with the person they’d hired to make them and pinpointed their location. Potts was booking my flight to Marrakesh Menara Airport when I got an alert from another one of my sources.
Cami had just bought two tickets back to LAX. Immediately, I pulled up her flight information. She wouldn’t be here until tomorrow morning. She was taking a flight that took twenty hours and had two stops.
“I still need a flight booked for tomorrow morning,” I said to Potts abruptly.
She lowered her head and looked at me over the rim of her glasses. “You’re leaving town just as she’s getting back?”
I shook my head. “No. I just need to get through security so I can meet her at the gate.”
Potts knew me well enough not to think it was a romantic gesture. I just wasn’t willing to take a chance of her trying to run again. God only knew what else Robert and Elyna had done. If they were willing to send their own daughter fake death threats about their own granddaughter, they could have concocted any number of stories about me. Maybe they’d pinned the threats on me somehow. Maybe –
I shook my head impatiently to clear it. It didn’t matter what Robert and Elyna had done. All that mattered was that I knew exactly where Cami and Emma would be tomorrow morning at 11:15 am.
And I would be there, too.
* * *
Igot to the airport an hour early to wait. Impatience jittered through me. My fingers drummed impatiently on any hard surface I could find. The woman at the coffee shop eyed me nervously as she slid my double espresso across the counter and said dubiously, “Have a good one.”
I was going to have a good one.
I was going to get my daughter back.
I didn’t know what would happen with Cami. I didn’t know if the anger that had kept me going for so long would make a resurgence. I didn’t know if, when she stepped off that plane, I would want to kiss her or kill her. I pushed her out of my mind and focused on Emma. I didn’t care what I had to do. No one was ever going to take her from me again.
Bolting down a double espresso didn’t do much for my nerves. I drummed on the surface of the armrest that divided the seats until a small family of three got up and moved away from me. Then I made an effort to calm down. I could stop my fingers from tapping out relentless rhythms, but I couldn’t stop my heart from slamming in my chest as it drew closer to 11:15.
They got in early. At 11:10, the sleek white plane with the blue accents and yellow thrusts glided up. Rocked into position. The covered gangway was extended. I walked over to the window in time to see the flight attendant open the door. I stood there for a few moments. I knew Cami hadn’t bought business class tickets, so she wouldn’t be in the first wave of people deplaning. I had a minute to get my shit together. Figure out what I wanted to say. How I felt.
A minute wasn’t enough.
When I turned away from the window and circled back to where I could see the passengers flooding into the airport, my head was still all over the place. My heart was a turmoil of emotions. Relief, joy, anger.
Then I saw them. I saw Cami first. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, but I caught a glimpse of her pale face and huge dark eyes in a gap between two other passengers. It closed, but as the crowd surged closer, I saw her again. She had the same carry-on suitcase she’d taken to Croatia. She was dragging it behind her with one hand, and the other was gripping Emma’s. Emma looked tired and bedraggled. Her dark hair was in her eyes, and she was clutching her floppy Elsa doll. Her mouth was turned down in an uncharacteristically sullen pout.
