“How could he just disappear?”
Her question sounded so lost. She wasn’t crying, was showing no emotion at all. There was just a slackness in her features, as if everything had drained out of her.
Will had never hated himself as much as he did in that moment, watching Harper break. He’d broken her. And Jeremy, too. They’d been doing just fine until he came along, until he punched his way into their carefully constructed lives and upended everything.
“We’ll find him.” He wanted to touch her, but he couldn’t, didn’t deserve a touch, didn’t deserve to comfort her. He didn’t deserve those three sweet, beautiful, damning words she’d given him such a short time ago. All he had left were the meaningless sounds falling out of his mouth. “I promise.”
“You promise?”
If she’d yelled or screamed or thrown a lamp, maybe he could have pretended he hadn’t heard. But the low hush of her voice said it so much more clearly than her rage could have.
His promises meant nothing.
How could they, when he’d broken the most important one he’d ever made to her? He’d wanted her to come to London with him, so he’d come up with the plan, laid it out for her, convinced her.
And now he’d failed her, because he hadn’t kept Jeremy safe.
*
How could everything have gone so wrong in just twenty-four hours?
Harper was curled into a tight ball of stress in her seat as the jet flew out over the endless ocean. This time, there was no filet mignon, no mousse, no crystal, no china. No laughter. No talk.
And definitely no love.
She’d left Jeremy alone. She hadn’t called him to check in since they’d landed in London. God help her, the truth was that she’d barely even thought about him in almost twenty-four hours. And now he was gone.
What was happening to him right now?
Where was he?
Harper thought she might be sick right there in Will’s elegantly appointed lounge.
He was on his phone. He’d been on it almost constantly since they’d run out of his London flat. They’d slammed their bags shut, and whatever wasn’t in them got left behind. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was back in San Francisco. Somewhere.
God only knew where.
“Yes,” Will said, “he has a cell phone. Unfortunately, my driver found his jacket in a locker at the office with the phone in it.” Will listened to the person on the other end of the line and glanced at her. “Do you have any photos of Jeremy on your phone?”
“I didn’t bring it with me because I don’t have an international calling plan.” Her voice was hollow, but she couldn’t put any life into it. Not when she was so scared. “And I knew he had your number.”
These past few years, her job had been to figure out every single thing that could possibly go wrong for Jeremy, and then do whatever she needed to do to make sure it didn’t happen. But ever since she’d connected with Will, she’d taken her eye off the ball more and more. And now, for this trip, when she should have run through all the possibilities, all the things that could go wrong, she’d done the exact opposite. She’d let Will handle the details for her brother so that she could have fun in her sexy fantasyland.
“I’ve got a couple of pictures I can send,” he said to his caller, “but we were working on a car, and he’s not looking straight at the camera.” He paused. “Yeah. Sure. As soon as I hang up.”
They’d taken off half an hour ago, after Will had awakened the flight crew in the middle of the night and obtained clearance to fly within the hour. He had everyone back in San Francisco looking for Jeremy—his staff, the police, the detective.
But he couldn’t change the fact that they had to sit on this plane for almost ten hours. While Jeremy was out there. Alone.
What if something terrible had happened to him?
What if she never saw her brother again?
“Anything to report?” Will had his phone to his ear again as he signaled the steward, pointing at the coffee service on the sideboard and miming that the man should pour a cup for Harper. Even now, Will was taking care of her, taking care of everything.
“Call the minute you hear anything, find anything.”
She wanted to blame him. For making her come to London. For taking Jeremy out of the grocery store and into that job up in the city. She wanted to scream at him, shout that it was all his fault. If he’d never come into their lives, if he hadn’t seduced Jeremy with his cars and his friendship, if he hadn’t touched her, everything would have been fine. Had she been able to make the blame stick, she’d have done it in a heartbeat. She needed someone else to condemn so badly that she felt bile push up from her stomach.
But she couldn’t blame Will. She’d understood who and what he was right from the beginning. A man who knew what he wanted and hacked through whatever obstacles stood in his way.
This was her fault.