"Let's just say I have some cool friends."
Whatever it was that Pietro was washing onto the car, it sprayed down the drain in the floor, and he cleaned up. East kept his eyes glued outside. The dark gray SUV that had been following us was driving slowly down the lane, as if not buying our whole facade of nothing special happening here. My stomach flipped and flopped as my heart did its best to learn the salsa all on its own.
I wanted to look out the window again, but East shook his head at me. Instead, he handed me his tablet so I could see what was coming. They parked the car. "Jesus Christ, how did they find us?”
He shook his head. "I don't know, but we're going to be okay. Help is on the way."
"You sound so certain of that."
"Well, let's just say I have some people who owe me some favors."
The two men parked and exited the SUV, and they were carrying guns. Big ones. Those were semi-automatics. "What are they doing with things like that?"
"Well, I think the general idea is to kill us dead."
"As opposed to killing us just a little?" I raised a brow.
He chortled. "Okay, testy-testy. It's just a little joke."
"You are surprisingly calm. Why are you so calm?"
"Because my girlfriend is badass. And I have a badass special op bloke with me. And I'm pretty good with a gun. And I have some toys that are going to make these guys very disappointed that they fucked with us. So please, give me some credit."
And then I realized the whole time that I'd been acting like I was the badass, it really was East. Yes, he was a badass in the art world and power brokering and being a billionaire, whatever the hell they did. But he really excelled when it came to safety and security, not just the hacking thing.
The two guys outside essentially tried to check out our hiding spot. They checked the windows only to find a whole lot of nothing. And then they tried the doors. When one of them raised his gun up to the lock as if he was going to attempt to shoot his way in, I held my gun in my hand, keeping it trained on the door, ready and looming to do battle.
And then on the tablet, we saw flashing lights coming down the same way that we came, veering off toward the town like we had.
"The cavalry is here," East whispered.
The two men outside ran for their SUV, quickly forgetting us. And it was only then that East relaxed, his back against the wall. He exhaled a long breath.
"Why do you look so relieved?" I asked him.
"Because I had no idea if that was going to work or not. But we live to fight another day."
I stared at him. "So, you were bluffing? You had no idea if this was going to work?"
He shook his head. "I had high hopes. I don't like you being in danger."
"Something tells me that I am in far less danger with you than I have ever been in my entire life."
"And that's all I want. Now, let's lose the guns and get to the hotel."
Chapter Seven
Nyla
"Stick with me babe, and I'll take you to all the best places." East twirled around the tiny office we'd been given with the boxes and boxes of files from the spring of thirty years ago.
"You did promise me that," I said, rolling my eyes.
He laughed as he shook his head. "I'm sorry. I promise, as soon as we find what we need, we'll go tour the city. After all, I did also promise you Milan."
I rolled my shoulders, still wincing a little with the ache where I’d been shot. His eyes grew cloudy then as he watched me. "Oh, stop it. It's fine. It aches a little bit, but I'm okay. Besides, you saved my life, so I can forgive your little shit decisions."
He nodded solemnly, and I could tell that he wanted to argue. But at least we didn't have to go down that road today. "Okay, so I will take this stack,” he said. “These are all the missing persons reports.”
"Okay, I will look at the hospital records for that year. Anyone that didn't have a passport, or went unclaimed, or died in surgery or something." There couldn’t be that many. At least I hoped not.
“It’s so sexy when you talk about hospitals and make lists."
I flashed him a grin as I pulled my hair back off my face and wound it into a messy loose bun.
His eyes went hooded. "God, that’s so blazingly hot."
My brows popped. "What, me putting my hair up into a bedhead?"
"Yes, bedheads are always sexy. But then there is your 'time to get to work' hair. You do that every time. When you're about to get down to it, you pull your hair back and tie it up. I watch as the elastics fight to stay intact and not pop. It’s sexy."
I rolled my eyes. "You know, I have always hated my hair. It's so thick and generally curly and unruly. It didn't help that I didn't have a mum to help me figure out how to tame and manage it. My father, of course, was completely unhelpful. When I was a kid, he just used to cut it, so I had a boy hair cut from age ten to twelve."
East winced. "Oh God, the worst time."
"Oh yeah, the worst. It was bad because I got boobs at ten. Not big ones, but enough so that I looked weird. And there were braces too."
A deep rumbling laugh poured out of him. Then came the howling laughter. "Oh God, can I see a picture?"
I shook my head. "No. You may not since you're laughing."
"I'm sorry, love. I don't understand it though. He was in an international community. Couldn't he have asked someone for help?"
"God only knows. No one else in my family has this hair at all. When I got older, I had Brazilian blowouts often. I wish I’d learned to love my hair though. I just… I don't know. I didn't know what to do with it, so my hair and I, we have a complicated relationship."
"Well, I love it either way.”
"Maybe one day I'll go curly again. It's going to look really awkward for a while there as the curls grow in."
"I'm sure I will love it either way."
"He says now, until he sees me with the wild curls that are going to make me look like Medusa."
"I love curly hair. It gives me something more to play with."
The look he gave me was all warmth and fuzz. I was glad we could do this. We could still be at ease and be relaxed, considering someone had tried to shoot us yesterday. Considering that we had both lain awake all night, pretending we were asleep, wrapped up in each other. We did actually give up the ghost at 4 a.m. and made love, giving us both the needed respite for a couple of hours sleep. But now, now we could pretend as if everything was okay, as if someone hadn't tried to kill us yesterday.
After a few short minutes of shuffling papers, East said, "Can I just tell you how much I miss my computer?"
I laughed. "Oh God, what would you have been without computers?"
He clutched his chest and gasped. "Thank God I never have to find out."
For the next thirty minutes, we searched and searched, and finally, East sat back. "We’ve got nothing on the missing persons. Nobody I’ve come across resembles Henry Warlow, or at least who we know to be Henry Warlow. But I did find something interesting in the police report from that day."