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Admiration for her welled up inside him, surprising him with the intensity of his emotions. Her baby was missing, and she wasn’t stopping until the girl was found.
And neither was he.
“I think we should check the hospitals for anyone who came in with a gunshot wound the night of the wreck.”
“You think he actually would have shown up in a hospital?” Doubt clouded her eyes.
He shrugged. “It’s possible and definitely worth checking out.”
Lacey nodded and slid into the passenger seat of the car.
“Wait a minute,” she called as she jumped from the vehicle.
Mason and Catelyn turned.
“He limped,” Lacey blurted.
“Who? The guy I just chased? I know.”
Lacey waved her hand. “No, no. The guy that attacked me outside the print shop.”
Catelyn lifted a brow. “Really?”
“You didn’t tell us that,” Mason observed.
“I didn’t remember until now. But his shadow at the door—he walked back and forth and I remember thinking he moved funny. Then after he shoved me, I turned enough to catch a glimpse of him running away. He limped.”
Catelyn turned to Mason. “You think this was the same person?”
He lifted his almost-healed shoulder and winced. He hoped he hadn’t reinjured it too much. “It’s hard to say, but I almost wouldn’t doubt it. How many men with limps are coming after us?”
“All right,” Catelyn said. “I’m going to go get this report written. I’ll be in touch.”
Mason and Catelyn said their goodbyes.
Ten minutes later, Mason pulled up in front of her parents’ home. The motion detector porch light flicked on, immediately transporting Mason back to his senior year of high school, when he’d been madly in love with the girl Lacey used to be.
She turned to look at him and he gave her a slow smile. From the light of the moon, he could see a slight flush grace her cheeks. So, he wasn’t the only one tripping down memory lane. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”
“We did.” She stared at him, not moving.
He wondered what she was thinking.
* * *
She should have forced him to listen to her that day. The day she’d gone to him to tell him of the pregnancy. The day he’d implied she had no morals whatsoever. The day he’d crushed her spirit and sent her running home to throw various items into a suitcase, finally giving in to her parents’ demands that she move to a home for unwed mothers.
Her father, now a retired pastor, had been mortified that his only daughter had come home pregnant. There’d been no way the congregation could find out about that. So they’d shipped her off.
It had been the best thing that could have happened to her, although she sure hadn’t thought so at the time.
“I’m not like your mother, Mason.”
He flinched and looked away from her.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have blurted that out.” She wrapped her fingers around the door handle ready to bolt from the vehicle when Mason’s warm hand stopped her.
“I was wrong that day,” he admitted with a frown, as though pushing the words past his lips was done with great effort. “I shouldn’t have said what I did, called you those names….”
