“The blonde?”
“Yeah.” He did his best to smile, though it turned out sickly at best. “You want her number?”
“No, thank you.” I swiveled back to my computer. “If that’s all, I have work to do, and I suspect you do, as well.”
“Yes.” He rose and walked to the door.
I did a rapid calculation and erred on the side of getting as much data as possible. I tried for a compassionate tone. “Hang on a moment. I didn’t mean to be harsh. Look, if more time passes and you still have these suspicions, let me know. I’ll see what I can do about it.”
I smiled.
He flinched.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” He gave me a curt nod and hurried out of my office.
The moron was still in the dark, and I’d gotten a direct line to any suspicions he may develop. I needed him to calm down, though he didn’t seem to be the real problem. It was that brat from her class. He was the one raising a stink. But if Veronica had become suspicious too, I needed to do damage control.
I logged into the cell account for Camille’s phone. She had a dozen texts from Veronica, each one more frantic than the last. On top of that, there were a couple more from Mint. And finally, the dipshit managed to text, “Is everything okay?”
Was I so bad at mimicking a normal human being? Clearly, I was. Given the alarmist tone of Veronica’s texts, which included a threat to call the American ambassador in Brazil, I needed to do something, and I needed to do it quickly.
My phone beeped, and my secretary’s voice cut through my musings. “Mr. Lindstrom is here to see you.”
Dad wasn’t on my calendar, but it wasn’t as if I could turn him away. Damn, I didn’t have time for him.
He walked in and shut the door behind him. I’d seen him on the weekend, but he seemed to have aged even more in the five days between then and now.
His tired eyes surveyed me as he took the seat the cretin had vacated. “Have you let her go yet?”
I stifled a sigh. “No, and I’m not going to.”
“You have to.”
“Dad, I appreciate you coming to talk to me about this, but nothing has changed. She belongs with me.”
“Son, please.” He leaned forward, his eyes carrying some of the same intensity I saw in the mirror every morning. “You can’t do this to her.”
“I’m helping her.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You aren’t. You’re helping yourself.”
Frustration crept along the edges of my voice. “Nothing you say is going to changed my mind.”
“Don’t you trust me anymore?” Pain, the identical sort I’d seen when my mother died, bloomed in his eyes. “After everything?”
“I do.” I wrestled with my thoughts and tried to put them in the most logical order. “I always do. You’re the one person who’s never let me down, the only one who has my best interests at heart. But this is different. Camille is different. I can’t explain it.”
“I can.” He scrubbed an age-spotted hand down his face. “You love her.”
I scoffed. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“You may not, but that heart you’ve got inside you, it does.” He leaned back, though the strain in him didn’t lessen. “If you don’t let her go, you’ll never have her. She’ll slip through your fingers like sand.”
What was he talking about? “I already have her. She isn’t slipping through my fingers at all.”
My phone started buzzing on my desk. I snatched it up and entered the code. Fuck. I had a full camera view of Camille jetting across the lawn toward the tree line.
“Son, you have to look deeper. You want her, but you want what’s inside her. Her heart. You’ll never get it while she’s in a cage.” His sigh was bone deep, exhausted.
My palms broke out in a sweat. “Dad, I have some work to attend—”
“No, you’re going to listen to me.” His tone brooked no argument. “The two of you.” He pointed at me. “You belong together.”
Where the fuck is Timothy. My phone buzzed harder as she passed the next security level. I wanted to bolt, to fly to the house and catch her, but I couldn’t.
“Son!” Dad slammed his palm on my desk—the first time I’d seen him this agitated in a long while. Then his expression softened. “When I talked to her in the library, I could see it all, maybe even the same way you do. Her personality, her likes and dislikes, her light to your dark. I—” He stopped and swallowed thickly, then swiped at his eyes. “I even had this brief fantasy of grandchildren—the two of you making a family and being so happy together.”
“Exactly.” He was finally catching on. Movement from the edge of the screen caught my eye—Timothy on an ATV. Relief coursed through me. She wasn’t going to make it to the woods.