Obsession (Explicitly Yours 4)

Beau pulled at the knot around his neck. The sun was unforgiving today. “You should tell her that.”

“I did.” He glanced away briefly. “While you were away. I needed to distract her the night you left for Missouri. She wasn’t doing well.”

“She never does while I’m away.” Beau sighed, nodding back toward the doctor’s office. “Is that why we’re here?”

Warner nodded. “She came to me after your argument. Nothing unusual there, except this time when she tried to call and beg you not to go after Lola, I put my foot down.”

Beau frowned at Warner, his employee who exhibited less emotion than a robot. “And how did that go?”

“She’d told me what you’d said about me having feelings for her, so I said it was true. And I asked her why she wanted to be second in your eyes when she was first in mine.”

Beau couldn’t remember Brigitte ever responding to romantic gestures, though he suspected she didn’t care to share them with him. He almost didn’t want to ask. “What’d she say?”

“We had an honest talk. She was young when she moved here and hadn’t dealt with losing her mother the way a young girl should. She replaced one family with another before she ever had a chance to feel anything.”

Warner was always in the background, but Beau hadn’t realized how closely he must’ve been paying attention to them over the years. “She’s terrified I’ll leave her too,” Beau said, “and she’ll end up alone.”

“She won’t, and I told her so. Said she’s always had two people who would never abandon her, she just needs help seeing that.”

Beau gave Warner a heartfelt nod. He was grateful, for once, to have someone else looking out for Brigitte’s best interest. “Let’s go inside.”

They walked side by side to the therapist’s office, where they sat in the waiting room. Beau had nothing else to say to Warner. He kept quiet, wiped sweat from his temple with his shoulder sleeve.

His phone broke the silence, but he checked the screen and put it back in his pocket.

“You can take it,” Warner said. “We have a few minutes.”

Beau glanced at him and leaned his elbows on his knees. “It’s fine.” It rang again and didn’t stop until Beau finally answered it. “What is it?”

“What do Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have in common?” Detective Bragg asked, sounding more joyful than Beau thought possible.

“A lot, actually,” Beau said.

“They’re all on the way back to Los Angeles. She should be on our turf by tomorrow.”

Beau looked at the ground, bouncing his knee up and down. He’d learned his lesson—finally—when it came to assuming anything about Lola. Yet the promise he’d made himself to walk away was tenuous, something that could easily be broken if he wasn’t careful. A memory nagged at him—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona—but he shook his head quickly to deflect it.

“You hear what I said?” Bragg continued. “She’s coming home.”

That was a blow. Lola might be coming back to California, but if she considered Beau her home, she wouldn’t have left him this way. He massaged his forehead. “We decided to drop this.”

“That was before I knew we were at the end.”

“You were right, though. She wants to be…” It wasn’t a memory nagging him—it was his dream from the airplane. The details were fuzzy, but he could clearly picture Lola in the desert with their daughter. He stilled his leg. “Did you say Arizona?”

“Got a pending motel charge in Tucson just now. That’s why I called.”

The doctor’s office door opened, and a woman spoke. “See you in a few days, Brigitte?”

“I have to go,” Beau said, pulling his phone away.

“Maybe I was wrong.” Bragg cleared his throat. “About her not wanting to be found. Maybe I had it wrong.”

Beau didn’t think it could be that simple. “Congratulations on your second retirement, Bragg. Thanks for all your help.”

He hung up the phone as Brigitte entered the waiting room and stopped when she saw them. She turned a balled-up tissue over in her hand, a watery smile on her face. “You both came.”

Beau stood, and she went directly to him. She hugged him, melting against his body only a second before she pulled back. She narrowed her red-rimmed eyes. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Not yet.”

She shook her head. “Then you’re wildly hungover.”

“It’s been a rough couple weeks.”

B

rigitte frowned, but for once it didn’t alarm him, since it was purely concern. She looked about to speak but then closed her mouth. Beau had gotten off the airplane and had a voicemail from Brigitte—she was going into therapy, for real this time. Careful not to upset her, he hadn’t yet mentioned any details about Lola or his trip, and Brigitte hadn’t asked.

“Your big meeting with VenTech is tomorrow. Shouldn’t you be at work prepping?”

Beau definitely should’ve been with his team, which was locked in a conference room surrounded by Subway sandwich wrappers. Things’d happened so quickly that the staff had been taking turns pulling all-nighters. Beau was having a hard time remembering why he needed VenTech so badly, though, and as a result, had been avoiding the office. That, and he was proud of Brigitte for finally making a good decision.

“I thought maybe my soeurette could use me more,” he said. “And I wanted to congratulate you.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t an easy decision, but with some urging from—”

“Not about that.” He jerked his head fractionally in Warner’s direction.

“Oh.” She looked down between them, but it was hard to miss the pink flush of her pale skin. “I don’t know where I was all these years. I must’ve been blinded by some—thing.”

Beau nodded that he understood. In her reality, she and Beau were linked for life. Whether it was simply familial for her or something more, Beau’d never asked, in case he didn’t like the answer. Her fear of loneliness was strong enough to shut out the truth. Beau was fine being pushed aside so Warner could take his place.

“We’ll have to figure out a new arrangement,” Beau said, loud enough for Warner to hear. “I’m not having my sister’s boyfriend drive me around.”

“Fire me.”

Beau and Brigitte both turned to him. She disengaged from Beau to go hug Warner instead. “But, Brandon, darling, you love what you do.”

Beau made a face. Brandon? He looked between them, suppressing his reflex to stop them from touching. He’d practically pushed Brigitte into Warner’s arms, but seeing them together would take some getting used to.