“Oh, no?”
“Of course not.” Digging into my pocket, I pulled her ring out and leaned forward so my elbows were resting on my knees. “I told you to never take this one off,” I murmured. “What did the note mean? What do you understand?”
“I understand your wanting to call the wedding off. I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure I’m not the same Rachel anymore.”
I looked up so I could see her face and watched as she turned her head away and brushed at her cheeks. “What?”
“So I won’t put you in the position of having to break up with me . . . I won’t make you be seen as the man that broke up with his fiancée the day after she was rescued.”
“Rachel, I’m not breaking up with you. I don’t want to call off the wedding, why are you saying all—”
“I heard you talking to your parents last night, Logan! Don’t lie to me.”
“I— Shit.” I groaned and sat back in my chair. “I don’t want to call off the wedding. I’m sorry you heard that conversation, but, Rachel, I was mad and confused and thought you were in love with that guy!”
“Trent. His name. Is. Trent.”
“I know what his name is, Rachel, please try to see it from my side. I reacted the wrong way, I wasn’t thinking about you, and I’m sorry about that. I lost my shit when I saw you kissing him and when you immediately left me for him, and then to find out later that he was the one to steal you from our damn house? None of it made sense to me, and it killed me to watch you not know what to say to Byson when he asked if you’d had a sexual relationship with him. I was hurt, and I was pissed, and I was so f**king jealous I couldn’t see straight. So last night I was just lashing out because I was too scared to find out what really happened between you two. I was wrong. I know that. I’m so damn sorry you heard that conversation, but that isn’t what I want, that isn’t how I feel; and I’m ready to listen to you now.”
I took in her closed-off posture and after fumbling for a moment, put the ring on the table near us, closest to her. Rachel stared at the ring for a long time before looking back at me. Those blue eyes of hers were so guarded I had no idea what she was thinking or feeling, and I hated it.
“This ring belongs to you, and the only place I want it is on your left hand . . . and hopefully someday if you’ll still have me, I want it accompanied by another ring. Like before, I won’t push you, but this is yours. If you decide to put it on again, Rachel, you better understand what I’m saying this time. I don’t want you taking that ring off.”
She didn’t move toward the ring, and she didn’t say anything. She just stayed in the same position, staring at me.
“You were still wearing your ring when we found you. So, tell me something,” I said softly, “while you were gone, were you hoping to escape, or to be found . . . and did you ever think about us and our future together?”
“Of course I did.” She sounded like I’d insulted her with my question. Thankfully, after turning away from me, she continued. “I never gave up hope until the day before you came for me. Trent said you . . . all of you . . . stopped looking for me. That you hadn’t been looking for me for a week. I figured you thought I was dead. That was the first time I ever felt like there was no hope. Every day before that I thought about you, thought about how long it probably was until we were supposed to get married. What you were telling people.” She paused and chewed on her bottom lip for a second before rushing out, “I wrote to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trent bought me a journal. I wrote to you the same way I write to my parents. I never stopped thinking about you, or us.” When she looked at me again, her eyes were glassy, and it was taking all my willpower to stay in my chair and not take her in my arms. “Did you?” she asked suddenly.
“Did I what?”
“Did you stop looking for me?”
I shifted forward again and brought my hands close to where her feet rested flat on the seat cushion. “Not the way you’re thinking. I was almost positive I knew where you were. Enough that Mason agreed to go in with me and attempt to rescue you if you were there. I had been taken off the case immediately because I was too close to it. So I did my own investigating. I looked all over the streets and used every resource I had until I got a lockdown on the building. By that time, the department had already figured out from the tests they did on the hair from your brushes, that at the very least, the hair they sent wasn’t yours. Just like the blood wasn’t even human. So they had to begin assuming all the ‘evidence’ was false, and they stopped responding to the men who took you when they called.
“Only problem is that it could have gone two ways: one, they would go crazy trying to get the department’s attention and mess up enough that the department could find them. Or two, they would get so frustrated with the department that they would actually do something to you. From what Mason said, the department was banking on the fact that since they gave you a month before they said they would kill you, and they stopped responding to them right before a month was up, it would make them crazy wondering why the department stopped looking for you all of a sudden in the last hour. The department assumed I still knew what was happening and would find out soon that they had stopped looking for you and would flip, so they began watching me like a hawk. I couldn’t do anything right away, but every day that passed was killing me. And then I found out about the building you were in. So Mason and I finally started the process of figuring out how to get you back. But we needed to be careful with our jobs, losing them would have been the least of our worries for a while if we would have just rushed in. That took another few days.”