Savage is right there with us and once the three of us are inside the building elevator, he breaks the silence. “Blake will be here to discuss the situation in half an hour.”
Kace inclines his chin. I, in turn, want to scream my objection at a meeting that delays my chance to have a real one-on-one with Kace. I do not, however, do so, as memories of my father whisper in my ear—a daisy, a Stradivari, is delicate but fierce. We do not scream. I glance down at my ring, a gift from my mother to represent my bond with my father and do so with the realization that she never fully understood its meaning.
We do not hide.
Hiding is not fierce.
Once we’re at the front door of Kace’s apartment, he stuns me by pulling me in front of him to indicate the security panel. Obviously, he wants me to open the door. He’s continuing to drive home a point that I belong here. That I belong with him. Any other time, I’d revel in this message. Right now, I just want in the door and to get him alone.
I punch in the code, open the door, and hurry inside, shrugging out of my coat to hang it on the coatrack. Kace and Savage don’t immediately follow, but I can hear Kace’s indiscernible murmurs to Savage before both men enter the apartment. Savage shuts the door and locks up. Kace shrugs out of his coat and hangs it up. It all feels robotic and excruciatingly slow.
That is until Kace’s big hand closes around mine, and he starts walking, taking me with him. My heart is racing, our energy like a bouncy ball, volleying back and forth between us. Wordlessly, he leads me up the stairs and we don’t stop until we’re in his office, where the vault is set-up.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, opening the vault door and entering on his own.
I stand there a moment or two, waiting, my heart still racing. I begin to pace and I can’t take it. I enter the vault to find him standing next to a giant drawer that’s open and built into a wall. He’s facing away from me, leaning on the wall, chin to his chest, tension in his broad shoulders.
“Kace?”
He straightens and shuts the drawer before he rotates to face me. He crosses to halt just in front of me, the tension still in his shoulders also rippling along his jawline. “When I visited your father, I was with him for two full weeks.”
“You were? I don’t remember that.”
“I do. Every day of my life, in some way, be it conscious or not, I know he’s there. I connected in a way that I never connected to my own father. He was a man of honor. A man to admire. A man to aspire to please.”
“I know. He was. I—miss him often.” I touch his arm. “Tell me about the daisy in the wind.”
“After only a few days together, he told me that I was the true daisy in the wind, the only true daisy in the wind and that I must not ever forget that. We wrote a song together. It was the first song I ever wrote and I promised him I’d never use it for profit.” He hands me a sheet of music. “It’s called ‘The Daisy in the Wind.’”
I glance down at the song, my chest tightens. I read over the musical notes and glance up at him. “This is special. And it’s going to make me cry because it’s a part of you and him together, but I don’t understand why you’re as upset as you are right now.”
He repeats the text message. “Look for the daisy in the wind. Be careful or you’ll end up dead. Someone knows about the song. Someone knows I’m the daisy in the wind. Not ‘a’ daisy in the wind Aria. The message says, the daisy in the wind. Someone is trying to scare you away from me.”
“He told me the daisies represent our family.” I show him my ring. “That’s why I wear the ring. I didn’t know he called you the daisy in the wind. I wouldn’t know this meant you and why wouldn’t they just say beware of Kace?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that someone is playing a game with us. And our paths crossing again doesn’t feel like such a coincidence any longer.”
“What are you thinking?”
“You said your brother would never have left that letter for you to find. You also think someone has the security code to your building.”
“Which I didn’t change, I just realized, but where are you going with this?”
“I was always going to be at that auction,” he says. “And once you believed your brother might be there, so were you.”