“It’s all right,” she whispered. She didn’t know why she suddenly felt the need to reassure him. She wasn’t even sure it was the right thing to say.
“It will be,” he promised. “But not yet.” He withdrew his hand, and Olive was certain she wasn’t the only one who felt the loss of his touch. She knew the baby did, too, with a deep instinct she couldn’t put a name to. “And your good intentions may have set us back. I need to know exactly who you spoke to and what was said. And I’d like you to call in for a sub tomorrow.”
Olive’s eyebrows pulled together at this last request. She wanted to protest, but maybe she needed to pick and choose her battles here... at the very least she would wait until they got out of the car.
The realization that they might not agree on how to handle this didn’t sit well.
15
“Are you going to be all right here alone for a while?” He couldn’t ever remember a more hateful question coming out of his mouth, but there was no help for it. As he held the door for Olive to come inside, Levon knew he wouldn’t be able to stay long.
No matter how much he might want to.
His responsibilities pulled him in every direction, but nothing mattered more than keeping Olive safe. Unfortunately, the best way to ensure that right now wasn’t to stay by her side, but to get to the bottom of who was behind that threatening note. He wasn’t willing to wait around now to find out what they were really capable of.
“Okay.” Olive’s face pulled together in a miserable expression, and Levon knew he had disappointed her. Damn it. Could he ever get it right? He had thought she might want this time alone, especially after having him constantly restricting her activities and breathing down her neck all the time—could it be he had gotten it wrong? “I’m tired, anyway,” she continued. “I think I’ll go lie down.”
“Olive.”
She turned back to him as he said her name, and Levon pulled her into his arms. She buried her face in his shoulder, and he cupped the silky back of her head; he breathed in the perfume of his own shampoo, which she had been using. Why did it smell sweeter on her? Why was he suddenly unable to get enough of it?
Their lips were on a collision course before he even knew he was kissing her. It was gravity that pulled him down to her. It was a force that he couldn’t put a name to, even though the startling shape of it was welling up inside him. If he hadn’t known how he felt about Olive—or if he had avoided acknowledging it—there was no more skirting around it now. Not after he had found her on the floor of her classroom; had seen the blood; had experienced a stark vision of what it would be to lose her...
“What’s wrong?” he rasped. She was pulling back, and pulling away from him. Those warm brown eyes o
f hers held a strange curiosity; they seemed to be brimming with an unasked, and consequently unanswered, question. She must have sensed his mind was elsewhere.
He tried to pull her in again, but Olive stopped him. “I’m tired, Levon,” she repeated. The sting of rejection flared in his chest, but he took her hand—her bandaged hand—and the reality of her long day came crashing back over him. He was being selfish.
“Go lie down,” he told her. “I’m going to head back to the school, then to the police.”
Olive nodded. He hated seeing her looking so numb, but felt helpless to come up with a resolution at the moment. He watched her break away from him, and shuffle slowly into the bedroom. He waited until the door was closed.
Then he went to the kitchen island where Olive graded her quizzes, and he took them. She said she hadn’t recognized the handwriting, but he wondered if it was more that she didn’t want to recognize it—didn’t want to acknowledge that the person who wrecked her classroom could be one of her students.
He didn’t head back to the school straightaway. He sat in the armchair beneath the golden glow of the lamp and read. He pulled the piece of paper from his pocket, the one containing the threat against Olive, and read it again. And again. He compared handwriting until it seemed like the words would wriggle free of their sentences and leap off the page, but he fought back against his inability to concentrate. He made the words sit still—just long enough for him to find what he was looking for.
“Franklin.”
He should have known. Of course the villain responsible for the day’s trauma would be the one person most capable of hurting Olive. He didn’t want it to be true, but there was no denying that handwriting—even though Franklin had obviously tried to conceal that it was him by inverting letters and throwing in random capitalization. Maybe Levon owed it to his dyslexia that he could look beyond the message of the words to the superficial shape of them.
He needed to check the new security footage at the school, but he was already certain of what he would find: Franklin, breaking into Olive’s classroom, and likely not alone. This would have been a test, Levon thought. The Reapers wanted Franklin to prove his loyalty by betraying Olive—and, if the boy had any of the affection for Olive that Levon thought he did, Franklin had likely agreed in an effort to scare Olive into ending all interference with the gang—interference that could get her hurt, or worse.
But Levon was getting ahead of himself. He was giving the boy a noble motive, when the reality was that his opinion of Franklin had been colored all along by Olive’s high regard for the boy. Levon needed to focus now, and treat this as he would any other crime scene.
And any other threat.
Levon pocketed the note and rose. Coupled with the footage Clint had sent him earlier, it should be enough for the cops to issue a warrant for Franklin Monroe. He replaced Olive’s assignments where he had found them. Then he placed a call on his way out the door.
“Principal James?” he said as he got back into his car. “It’s Levon. I’m calling about Olive. I need you to meet me at the Harper’s Forge police station so I can fill you in on an event that transpired earlier today... yes, everyone’s safe.” His throat constricted, as if he still couldn’t wrap his own head around the fact that danger had passed over them all for now and left them almost entirely unharmed. For now. “But I want things to stay that way. And that means letting you know that, for the foreseeable future, it’s unsafe for Olive Owen to return to school.”
Olive slept fitfully. She hadn’t even expected that much. But when she awoke, the bedroom was dark, and she was disoriented. It took her twice the usual amount of time to remember where she was.
And whose bed she was in.
Recognition would have been easier if she could locate the man who kept her captive, body and soul, while boasting of only the best intentions.
Levon was nowhere to be found when she collected herself and left the bedroom. As Olive sat in the living room and gazed around the darkened apartment, an unfamiliar sense of loneliness resonated deep within her. It made her vastly uncomfortable; too uncomfortable to sit still, despite a pregnant woman’s inherent inclination to be off her feet. Olive rose again and turned on every light in the main room, the kitchen. Then she sat back down.