The Getaway Bride

“Then why is she so afraid of you finding her?”

“I don’t know!” Frustrated, Gabe slammed the side of his fist against the nearest wall, making the framed print hanging there rattle against the plaster.

He took a deep breath, trying to regain his precarious control over his temper. “I would have asked her, but she didn’t hang around long enough,” he said.

Blake rubbed his chin. “I’ll tell you, Gabe, I’ve never seen a case quite like this one. There’s always some reason for people to deliberately disappear. A crime they’ve committed, a secret they’re hiding, fear of danger, something.”

He shook his head. “I can’t find anything in your wife’s past to account for the way she’s been living—alone, with no luxuries, no visible pleasures. It doesn’t make sense.”

“She once told me she’d led a very normal, uneventful life,” Gabe said.

During the past months, he’d replayed nearly every conversation he and Page had had during their time together, searching for any clue as to where she might have gone, or why. He’d remembered nothing out of the ordinary.

Blake nodded. “That’s what my research indicated. Born in Alabama, only child of a couple who married in their late thirties. Her father died in a car accident when she was in high school, and her mother passed away from cancer the summer after Page graduated. Page attended a university in Alabama on a full academic scholarship. She was a good student. No reports of her being in any trouble. The only discordant note on her record was a sexual harassment complaint she filed against a professor during her senior year.”

So far, Blake wasn’t giving Gabe any information he didn’t already know. “She told me about that.”

“Apparently, it was an ugly incident. The guy was eccentric, but popular with his students, and had seemed happily married for years. But whatever evidence Page presented to the administration must have been enough to get him fired. I wondered if maybe that incident had something to do with her actions now, but the professor died four years ago.”

Gabe shook his head. “Page didn’t like to talk about it. She said it was an ordeal that was very painful for her. But she seemed to consider it well behind her. She wasn’t afraid when she told me about it, only sorry that it had happened.”

Page had accepted another scholarship in Houston after her graduation from the Alabama university, he knew. There, she’d worked and studied for two more years, earning her master’s degree in education. She’d sent résumés to several school districts afterward, and had found employment in Austin, specializing in teaching English as a second language.

An Austin native, Gabe had been introduced to Page through a mutual friend almost two years after she’d moved to the area. Nine weeks later, he’d married her. Three weeks after that, she’d vanished, leaving only a bewildering note of regret behind.

Twelve weeks, he thought dismally. The full extent of his time with Page. And yet his life had changed irrevocably in those few traumatic weeks.

“The sexual harassment complaint probably has nothing to do with her movements now,” Blake conceded, breaking into Gabe’s grim musings. “It happened long before she met you. The professor was already dead by the time you and Page married. He shot himself, I understand.”

Gabe digested that unsettling news with mixed emotions. Page hadn’t told him that part. Had she known about the professor’s fate?

“Something made her run out on me the way she did,” he murmured. “It must be something drastic to account for the strange way she’s been living since. But what?”

Blake shrugged, looking almost as frustrated as Gabe felt. “Short of mental illness, I can’t come up with any theory as to why she’s behaving this way.”

“Mental illness?” Gabe stared at the other man. “You don’t think Page is...unbalanced?”

“You have to admit her actions aren’t exactly normal.”

Gabe shook his head. “No,” he said, remembering the Page he’d known and loved. Thinking of the woman he’d seen all too briefly that very afternoon.

She’d looked frightened, but she’d known exactly what she was doing when she screamed for help, detaining him long enough for her to get away. He couldn’t understand why she was evading him, but he didn’t for a minute believe she was demented. He simply couldn’t accept it.

“No,” he said again flatly. “She has a reason for what she’s doing. And I intend to find out what it is.”

“I think you’re right,” Blake admitted. “I worked with her for two weeks, and I would be willing to bet that she’s as sane as you or I. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that something is very wrong in her life.”

Gabe only nodded. Something was very wrong in his life, too, he mused.

He was a married man without a wife.

Blake drew a deep breath, as though bracing himself for Gabe’s reactions to his next words. “Gabe, I followed her here because I figured you’d want me to. But are you really sure it was the right thing to do?”

Gabe spun around to frown at the P.I. “What do you mean, the right thing? That’s why I hired you. I heard you were the best.”

Blake didn’t bother to comment on his reputation. It seemed he accepted it as fact, rather than flattery. “It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to see you or talk to you. Maybe—”

“She’s my wife.”