“Jeff.”
Tracy’s voice tore through him like an arrow. Lunging for the phone, he tripped over a pile of books, almost concussing himself in his desperation to reach it in time.
“Tracy? Thanks for calling back so quickly. Does this mean it’s OK for me to come out there? You have no idea how much I’m dying to see him and I . . .”
Tracy cut him off.
For years afterwards, Jeff Stevens would dream about that phone call. He would recall everything. Exactly how the handset had felt in his palm. What his flat smelled like in that moment. The distant, empty echo of Tracy’s voice, how it was her but not her. How she hadn’t cried, or shown any emotion, merely laid out for him the cold, terrible, incomprehensible fact of Nicholas’s death.
My Nick.
My son.
Dead.
“I’m coming, Tracy,” Jeff told her numbly. “I’ll get the next flight out.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“Tracy, I have to. I can’t let you go through this alone.”
“No.”
“I can’t go through this alone.”
“Don’t come, Jeff.”
It was like talking to a zombie.
Jeff’s voice broke. “For Christ’s sake, Tracy. He was my son too.”
“I know. That’s why I called you,” Tracy said logically. “You had a right to know.”
“I love you, Tracy.”
Tracy hung up.
For about a minute, Jeff stood frozen, allowing the shock to pass through his body like an electrical current. Then he picked up the phone and booked himself a flight.
There would be time for other emotions later. An eternity of time in which to mourn the son he never really knew, not properly. Time for all the questions, all the whys and hows that he’d been unable to articulate on the telephone.
Right now he had to get to Tracy before she did something stupid.
IT TOOK ALMOST EXACTLY thirty-six hours from the moment Jeff received Tracy’s phone call in London until he pulled into the driveway of her isolated Colorado ranch.
The last time he came here—the only other time he’d been to the house, in fact—Jeff had been so weak he could barely walk. His ordeal at the hands of Daniel Cooper, the former insurance agent turned rogue vigilante, compelled by a murderous obsession with Tracy, had left Jeff physically broken. But in the end, ironically, Daniel Cooper had done Jeff Stevens a favor. Perhaps the biggest favor of Jeff’s life. OK, so Cooper had tried to crucify him and bury him alive in the walls of an ancient Bulgarian ruin. But he’d also achieved what Jeff had failed to achieve in a decade of searching. He’d brought Tracy back to him, and with her, Nicholas. For that, Jeff Stevens would always be grateful. Tracy had found Jeff and rescued him and saved his life. In return, Jeff had agreed to let Tracy live her life, as an unassuming mom in a small town in the mountains. He would leave her to raise their son with the help of her ranch manager, Blake Carter, because he knew Carter was a better man than he was. And because Blake loved Nick and vice versa.
It was the right decision, Jeff told himself now, failing to fight back tears. Nick was happy. He was!
Jeff had told himself he would have time to make things up to his son once the boy was older. When Nick was a grown man, when the time was right, Jeff and Tracy would sit down with him, together, and tell him the truth. As an adult, Nick could make his own choices. Jeff didn’t know why, but he’d always felt confident his son would forgive him. That Nick would understand, and that the two of them would have a full and warm relationship, making up for lost time.
But now both Blake and Nick were dead.
There was no more time.
Everything was lost.
The pain was indescribable. Jeff spent the entire flight sobbing. Passengers around him asked to be moved. The regret was like a physical weight, a Mack truck parked on Jeff’s chest, snapping each rib one by one before crushing his heart to pulp.