Wilder
Page 98“Because he told me when I saw him this morning,” Brandon answered as he popped the combination lock.
“Wait, you saw him?” I asked.
He looked up from the stack of manila envelopes. “Yeah. They let me in a few hours ago.”
“How does he look? Is he okay?” A thousand questions raced through my mind, but those were the most important.
“He looks like his face went a few rounds with an MMA fighter, but he’s okay. And funny, he asked me those exact questions about you.”
“They wouldn’t even tell me where they took him.” A surge of unwanted jealousy turned my words harsh.
“Well, your last name isn’t Wilder, and that changes things,” he said. “He’s going to be okay, Leah. We just have to find this permit. They’ll release him either way, our lawyers are seeing to that, but if he wants to keep his film, we have to find it.”
“We already looked through the box.”
His phone rang, and he cursed. “Shit. Looks like Dad knows. Leah, look through those files again and see if he stuck it in the wrong folder. He swears it was in there. I have to take this.”
He stepped out onto the balcony with his phone, and I pulled out the box, emptying its contents onto the dark blue comforter. There were files for each of our locations that looked exactly like the one Bobby had held while we were in the park yesterday, the same files I’d watched Landon search through earlier. I looked through every one from the start of the trip up through Abu Dhabi. One marked “Personal” caught my eye, so I opened the flap.
Please let him have misfiled it.
I pulled out the stack of papers and thumbed through. His birth certificate, his enrollment papers for Study at Sea, his contract with his father. For being as reckless as he was, Paxton had a better sense of organization than I gave him credit for. A smile ghosted my lips when I ran my thumb over his tutor assignment, my name standing in stark relief against the white paper.
A torn picture fell out of the stack as I lifted it, landing in my lap, photo-side down. On the back in Paxton’s handwriting was etched, “Don’t lose sight of the endgame.”
I flipped it over, and my stomach sank, my throat burning with bile as it rose.
No. No. No way. Not possible.
But that was Rachel. My Rachel…
Paxton’s Rachel.
His thumb brushed the tattoo of three ravens in flight under her right ear, and his mouth was on hers, the two smiling even mid-kiss.
He looked happy, adoring, like the woman he held was the sun in the sky.
He looked at her like he looked at me.
My heart cracked, the feeling so consuming that I could almost hear the rending, the strain as it finally snapped and broke apart.
I barely registered the sound of the sliding glass door opening and closing. “Okay, good news and bad. Good that the lawyers tracked down the permit in the appropriate system, so Pax’s cameras will be released. Also good that Dad got the charges dropped and they’re releasing Paxton now. Bad that my father knows— Hey, are you okay?” Brandon asked when I finally looked up to meet his eyes.
If they were as dead as I felt inside, he had every reason to worry. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.
“They were together?” My voice sounded foreign to me.
“Yeah. She was always over at the house that summer after I graduated with my MBA,” he said.
“She’s my best friend,” I whispered.
His Paxton-like eyes widened, drifting between mine and the picture. “Oh, shit. That’s why…”
“Why what?” I demanded.
“Look, he cares for you. I knew that the minute I saw him with you in Barcelona, and I know you have feelings for him. Don’t do something irrational.”
“Why what?” I repeated, my voice louder, the ugly cry echoed in my hollow heart.
“Why he chose you as his tutor,” he said softly, damning Paxton with each word.
Every muscle in my body locked, unwilling to see how far the rabbit hole went. “I don’t understand.”
Brandon sighed, the asshole-ish look completely wiped off his face. “Why he had us offer a second full ride if you agreed to tutor him.”
So he could get Rachel on board.
“I’m going to get him. Do you want to come? Talk this out? I know there’s more to this. Like I said, Pax really cares about you.”
He cared about me, but I was wholeheartedly in love with him, and suddenly that difference, which hadn’t meant as much this morning, meant the world now.
My gaze dropped to the sheet I’d just been all swoony over, the tutor assignment, but this time, my eyes caught the sentence it had missed before.
“Dear Mr. Wilder, we’re happy to say that your request has been granted.”
I stumbled to my feet. All of it had been to get Rachel on board. Even my suite, which he’d been so adamant that I keep, was to keep her closer to him.
It was all for Rachel.
I was just the placeholder until she got here.
Barely making it to the toilet, I heaved up lunch, wishing the acid in my throat would burn the rest of me into ashes—wishing the hurt would simply cease. But I loved him, my whole heart was in, and now it felt like that heart was rebelling in the only way it could.