“I apologize, miss,” the man says, offering an apologetic smile. “We’ve had some security concerns lately, and I fear these two may have been a little overzealous. I hope—”
I cut him off because I can’t believe who I’m looking at. “Raj?”
He frowns, eyeing me speculatively.
Raj Ahuja, the man who’d run the junkyard with my dad all those years ago. The years must not have been kind to him; it looks like he’s aged 20 years in the 10 since I’ve seen him.
“I’m sorry, have we met?” he asks.
“I’m Annabelle C—Annabelle De Luca.” Of course that wasn’t the name I’d just given the guard, so he scowls in my direction. “My dad was John De Luca.”
He knows who I am now and it seems like he expected me to still be 16. “Annabelle?”
I nod. “I didn’t know you still owned this place. I thought after Dad…”
“I bought them out. It didn’t take a lot, the shop wasn’t much.”
I agree, but I look to the guards. “That’s what I always thought until I saw SEAL Team Six over here guarding the entrance.”
Raj gets uncomfortable. “Yes, I…”
Since he doesn’t seem eager to finish that sentence, I do it for him. “Security concerns, I heard.”
His gaze moves away from me to the swing, still swaying ever so slightly. “Your dad used to bring you out here when you were younger, didn’t he?”
I nod, but I’m not sure how much to say. I would’ve expected Raj to be happy to see me—I had loved him when I was a kid, and even into my teens we had remained friendly, always joking around when I came to the shop, which was admittedly less with every year that passed. He has a son a little younger than me, sometimes he’d bring him and we’d play baseball in the open grass by my tree swing.
This Raj still seems tense though, on his guard, not the same Raj I joked around with back then.
“Well, I should probably go,” I say. “I’m sorry to have caused a whole… incident,” I add, gesturing around to the armed giants.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.” He pauses, as if unsure whether or not to go on. “But, Annabelle? It’s not a good idea for you to come back here.”
I frown, taken off guard. Ordinarily I’m good at dodging undesirable feelings, but this is so unexpected that I am slightly offended. “Oh.”
“Nothing personal.”
“It seems personal. I only come…” I want to continue, but stop short. No. This isn’t the Raj I knew, I’m not going to share anything vulnerable with him.
He ages another year or so before my eyes. Sighing, he looks at me like he has to put down his favorite dog. “Go home, Annabelle. And don’t come back.”
Liam
“Follow her.” I watch Raj as he sinks heavily into his seat behind the desk. “Make sure she isn’t reporting back to her stepfather.”
I know which way she went and I don’t want to get too close, so I know I have a minute. “All right.”
“Don’t hurt her,” he specifies, shooting me a look. I can tell he didn’t appreciate the scene he came upon outside. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to explain it to him, so I don’t try.
Then, shoving a stack of papers irritably across the desk, he says, “Not yet, anyway.”
“How long do you want me to stay on her?”
“The rest of the night. Just in case she anticipates this and does something else to throw you off.”
I hesitate. “I really don’t think she was up to anything. When we got out back, she was just swinging and eating an apple.”
I could still smell the apple on her breath when I got so close to her and she inexplicably tried to… do whatever the hell she’d been trying to do.