“He says Shane has a plan to get them out of business with my brother.”
Warning bells go up, my fear that she’s setting a trap for Shane with Adrian by going through me. “I have no idea what they are doing with your brother,” I say, deciding to play dumb. “Shane is very protective of me, but I know he wouldn’t be foolish enough to burn your brother.”
“You’re afraid I’m setting you up.” She shakes her head. “I knew you’d think that, and really, I don’t know what I thought you could say to make me feel better.” Tears pool in her eyes, and she opens her book and slides an envelope toward me. “Can you give this to Derek?”
“What is it?”
“Good-bye.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I can’t change who I am, and even if Shane is brilliant enough to convince my brother to move on from Brandon Pharmaceuticals, I’m still a Martina. I’m still the woman in a family of old-fashioned Mexican men who just happen to take everything to the extreme. When they get mad, you die.”
Emotions well in my chest, her love for Derek affecting me. “He needs someone to love him. You can’t leave him.”
“You will regret convincing me to stay later,” she says. “I’m going to spare you that pain.” She swipes her eyes. “I’ve been up all night thinking about this. I asked him to run away with me. I still want him to, but that is a mistake as well. My family would find us.”
“Not if you created new identities. I can help you. I can—”
“No,” she says. “I won’t ask him to walk away from everything for me.”
“I would for Shane.”
She pats the letter. “Just give this to him, please. You read it, not your security people. I don’t want anyone else to read my private thoughts. You’re a woman in love. I’m sure you understand.”
“I do,” I say, tears streaming down my cheeks now.
She starts to get up, and I catch her arm. “If you ever need anything. Come to me.”
“Thank you. I wish—I think perhaps we could have been friends.”
“Me too.” I release her arm, and she leaves.
I reach for the letter, my hand trembling as Cody claims the seat in front of me. “You’re crying. What the hell happened?”
“She’s leaving to save Derek from her brother.” I open the letter. “She wrote him a letter and asked that I read it, and no one else.”
He scrubs his jaw, his hand rasping over the one-day stubble there. “Fuck. Derek’s erratic as it is. I’m worried as hell about how he’s going to react.”
“Me too. I need to read this.”
He nods. And I pull out the rose-scented piece of paper.
My love:
I just need you to know how much you meant to me. You were my escape from the family who enslaves me to their brutality. And yet I became the one to enslave you. I became the danger lurking at every corner, the demon with a blade in her hand, waiting to destroy the man I love.
I am leaving. I am telling Adrian it’s because he killed our brother.
I am never coming back.
You won’t find me, so don’t look.
But you will find the right woman and you will be a good man for her. I order it. Make that my impact on your life. Honor what we have by letting it make you a better man. Do not become a Martina. Make the Brandon name mean something more. Don’t look for me. I know how to disappear.
And don’t worry. Adrian won’t blame you for my disappearance. I’ve left him a letter telling him how much I both love and hate him.
Forever yours,
Teresa
I’m all but bawling when I finish reading it, and Cody shoves napkins at me. “I’m not good with tears, woman. You’re killing me here.”
“Good thing I don’t usually cry, I guess,” I say, wiping my face. “The letter is pretty simple. She loves him. She’s saving him. She’s challenging him to be a better man. I need to see Shane.”
“You need to fix your face. You have mascara dripping down your cheeks, and Jessica is not going to let that slide.”
“I don’t have my purse. I’ll just have to wipe it off and go on upstairs.” I swipe at my cheeks. “Better?”
“Not at all.”
“Dang it.” I stand up. “We’ll stop by the bathroom.”
*
A few minutes later, I’ve cleaned up my face the best I can and returned to the office, but Cody’s right. Jessica will spot a makeup nightmare, and I don’t want to risk questions I can’t answer. I stop by my desk, using the makeup in my purse to repair the damage the tears created, and then head to Shane’s office. Rounding the corner, I find Derek’s office door open, and I swear, I can’t help but dart in the other direction a little faster for fear he will exit and somehow know what is happening.
Luckily, Jessica is focused on her work, looking frazzled, and Shane’s door is open, which allows me to breeze past her, enter his office, shut the door, and lean on it. Shane looks up from his desk, giving me a keen inspection. “What’s wrong?”
“Teresa came to see me.”
“As in Adrian’s sister?”
“Yes.” I cross to his desk, rounding it. He rotates his chair to face me, and I rest a hip on a bank of closed drawers. “She’s leaving him to protect him. Leaving for good. She wanted me to tell her that you had some way to let them be together, but ultimately she’d already made the decision. She gave me a letter to give him.”
“Holy fuck. He’s not going to take this well. Where’s the letter?”
“She made me promise not to let anyone else read it. Just me and Derek. It just says she loves him and she challenges him to be a better man. What do we do?”
He presses his fingers to his temples. “If I tell him now, I risk him going ballistic on Adrian and getting himself killed. If I don’t tell him now, he’ll go ballistic because she’s missing.”
The door bursts open and Derek charges into the room, slamming the door. “Why was Teresa just in the building talking to Emily and now she won’t answer her phone? Yes. I have people working for me too. I know things.”
My stomach knots and I look at Shane, not sure what to do. His lashes lower and lift, and he stands. “That conversation we had about her saying she was going to get you killed?”
“What about it?”
“If you do anything rash, you’ll end up dead and never see her again. You understand that.”
“What the hell is going on?” Derek demands.
“She left. She said it’s the only way to protect you.”
“I don’t believe you. She wouldn’t leave her family. Not without me.”
“She said they’d hunt you down if you went with her,” I say. “I offered to create new identities for both of you, but she said that wasn’t fair to you.” I glance at Shane and remove the letter from my pocket. He nods, and I slide it onto the edge of the desk.
Derek stares at it, as if he’s afraid to read it, but finally curses, dragging a hand through the long layers of his dark hair, and snatches it up. He opens it and reads it, crumpling it in his hand when he’s done, his lashes lowering, his breath gushing out.