“I was more worried about him,” she replies.
“I second that notion,” Blake interjects, joining us and clearly aware of what’s going on. “You and Isaac don’t need to be alone.” He eyes Harper and then me. “Not after her attack and I speak from experience. I lost a fiancée once. I lived for revenge for years of my life.”
This statement explains a lot to me. Why I’m comfortable with Blake. Why he doesn’t push back at places that would earn him a hard push out the door. I stand up and pull Harper with me. “Can you handle knowing what you know, and standing in front of him like you don’t?”
“You mean will I hurt him? You’ll be there to protect him, right?”
My lips quirk. God, I love this woman. I glance at Blake. “Can we have Savage to stand between us and him?”
“Maybe I better come along,” he says dryly. “Savage loves revenge a little too much, even someone else’s.”
“I’ll take Savage,” I say, sliding an arm around Harper. “Let’s go to the hospital.”
Blake nods and makes a call to alert his team. “Savage already handed off Grayson to Smith. He’s meeting us downstairs.”
Harper and I head for the door, and I help her pull on a jacket. “I’ll take you shopping today,” I promise softly while Blake takes a hint and steps outside.
“I’m not worried about shopping,” she says. “Though at some point we have to talk about my apartment and my things.”
“I’ll pay a mover to pack it up and ship it to us.”
She inhales and lets it out. “Yes. That’s—yes, okay.” She cuts her gaze.
I catch her chin. “What is it??
??
“I’m excited about our new life, I am. It’s just—it’s daunting to realize that everything that was my life is gone. It’s like I spent years of my life building nothing.”
“We can sell this place. We can pick a place that you want. We can—”
“No. Eric, I love this place. I don’t want a new place. I love this apartment. I love you.”
“I want you to feel like it’s yours.”
“It will in time. This has all just been a whirlwind. A crazy whirlwind. I’m starting over. I need to start over. This is the right decision and a happy one, but I can’t revel in that until this storm has passed. I feel like the happiness is hiding in the clouds, right there, out of our reach. And a tornado is waiting to erupt and just destroy everything.”
Hiding in the clouds. Yes. “Hiding in the clouds, within our reach.” Numbers blast through my mind and I count out the digits in that first message, before my lips quirk. “You’re brilliant, baby.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You are.” I kiss her and open the door to find Blake waiting. “I know what the first message means.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Eric
At my announcement that I know what the message we had yet to decode means, I end up trapped at the front door of my apartment with Harper and Blake both staring at me. “What the hell does it mean?” Blake demands.
“Yes,” Harper says. “What does the message mean?”
“It’s a birth certificate number from Chicago, Illinois,” I say and text Blake the way that number breaks down. “I just sent you the exact certificate number.”
“And you know this how?” he asks.
“How I know is simply how my brain works,” I say. “There is no way to explain to you how I came to that conclusion, but I did. That’s a birth certificate from Chicago, Illinois.”
Blake stares at me as if I’ve grown three heads, but Harper—Harper just accepts what I’ve said and moves on. “Who was born in Chicago?” she asks. “Not you, right? Because I’ve heard Isaac talk about being born here.”