“Driving is good,” he said, sort of steamrolling over me, closing the door on me saying no, like I could have, to begin with. “You’ll see.”
“Okay. I’ll get there as fast as I can.”
“Take your time,” he said, grinning. “It’s a boring job, but Harlan Thomas, he’s the sheriff there, he’s an old friend of an old friend, and he thinks there might be trouble if the two people in question don’t successfully tie the knot. It sounds like the town might be dependent on the nuptials happening, or something else getting worked out.”
“No pressure on the bride and groom, huh?”
“It seems like an antiquated idea to me,” he said, his deep voice, drenching me in calm, so I took what felt like my first breath all morning. “It’s like back in history when two countries sealed an alliance by having their children marry. This is the same thing, except with companies not kingdoms.”
“Well, I’ll make sure it happens, then.”
“Or not,” he countered, his tone and the shrug both suggesting he was leaving it in my hands. “I trust your judgement. Just do whatever should be done. You’ll figure it out.”
Should be done? What the hell? “I won’t let you down,” I said, because either way, that was the important thing.
“I never thought you would,” he said, giving me a warm smile, which was my cue to get the hell out of his office.
I turned to leave and was almost at the door.
“Calder.”
Pausing in the doorway, I looked back over my shoulder.
“No matter if you were first in this morning, you were the one going. Don’t let those guys tell you any different. This assignment had you written all over it.”
I had no idea what that meant. Middle of nowhere? Kids? Small town? How the hell was that me in any realm of the imagination? “Yessir,” I said instead of arguing with him for a second. “Thank you, sir.”
He gave me a fatherly nod of dismissal, and I bolted. Once I reached my car, my phone rang, and I saw Locryn’s face pop up on my screen.
Well, he could go directly to hell. And yeah, I’d allowed him to treat me like a piece of ass, but that didn’t mean I had to let it continue. I could actually live and learn from my mistakes.
Letting the call go straight to voicemail, I climbed behind the wheel of my Land Cruiser and wondered again if maybe Jared insisting I have time in the car, to clear my head, was code for him wanting to make sure I was good and over Locryn Barnes. He didn’t have to worry. It had never been love, just infatuation, and so it had died quickly without nourishment. My heart was whole, not bleeding a bit.
I wish I could have conveyed that to him before he signed me up to make a long-ass drive out to the middle of nowhere.
Maybe it was time to start working on my faulty communication skills.
Two
Long and boring didn’t do the horrific drive justice. Even stopping overnight to make sure I was rested, having done half on Thursday so there was only the other half on Friday, it was still an endless slog from Chicago up I-94, then to another highway and another, eventually to MT 200 that set me on course to Ursa, Montana. The town was twenty minutes out of Whitefish—which, of course, since I had never been anywhere near the entire state of Montana, didn’t help me figure out where I was one little bit. In the file, my boss had made a notation, clarifying that if I reached Canada, I’d gone too far. The man clearly thought he was hilarious.
Not surprisingly, the town of Ursa was every bit as bad as I figured it would be. There were only two lanes through downtown, if it could even be called a downtown, and everywhere I looked were snow-capped mountains, pine trees, and sky that was so blue it made my eyes water. No skyscrapers, no office buildings—just fucking nature. It was horrifying. Whitefish, which I’d passed, was only a few miles from Glacier National Park in Flathead County, which, according to the still stupid GPS, was an amazing place to visit, famous for Going-to-the-Sun Road, Logan Pass and Avalanche Lake. Also, from where I was, apparently, I could throw a rock and hit Canada, which was what had prompted Jared’s oh-so-funny comment in the file.
Super.
I was in complete and utter hell.
Traveling out to the home of Andrea Cahill, on that early Saturday morning, was an adventure. There were no road signs, and I was sure the annoying GPS would have given up, but I had an Iridium Extreme that all the guys in our office carried if we were going off the grid. It wasn’t our regular phone. It was the auxiliary one, but I was glad to have it, or I would’ve been so very lost. Everywhere I looked, there were trees and grass, hills, more trees and more grass. There wasn’t a gas station or a dive bar to get my bearings from.