Conceal

“I’ll send you the details,” Addison chimes in and I nod before I’m out the door.

Thirty minutes later, I’m typing in the passcode and entering the warehouse. I find Willow where I left her. She’s on her laptop, compiling a list of all that she remembers from her husband.

Since her husband’s name was a lie, and she, unfortunately, has no pictures of him, the only thing we can count on is that maybe he told her some truth from his past that we can use to track him.

As of this morning, the answer was nothing. I’m not sure how that is possible, or maybe Willow just hasn’t remembered yet.

She must hear the door because she peeks over her shoulder as I approach.

“Well, that wasn’t a long day at the office.”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” I respond, and she quirks a brow, obviously not buying what I’m selling.

“Families can suck.” I lift my shoulders, but the minute it comes out of my mouth, I realize what I’ve said. “I’m sorry, that was insensitive.”

“It’s fine. At least I had my dad until recently. I wasn’t completely an orphan.” When she says orphan, her mouth opens wide.

“What?”

“Riley,” she whispers.

“What about him?”

“I remembered something he once said in passing. Remember how I told you I never met his family? I remember he once mentioned a home. Living in a home. But the way he made it sound, I thought he was talking about a house, you know. But now . . . thinking back, what if he was talking about a group home? That would make sense since I never met his family, right?”

“It certainly is a place to start.”

“Do you think we might find something?”

“We could. You never know. I’ll get some parameters from you and start looking.” I pause. “Willow?”

“Yes?”

“There is a good chance it might not pull anything up, though. If he lied about his name, who knows what else he lied about. He might not be as old as he says or from where he said he’s from.”

“I know.”

“Okay, then I’ll start looking.” I move to my computer and turn on all the monitors to prepare my search. “I wish you had a picture of him. It would make life easier.” I laugh.

“How so?”

“I have killer face recognition technology.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” I shrug.

“Could you find me?” Her voice drops and she bites her lower lip.

“I’m sure he doesn’t have what I have and can’t. But yes. Because you came into my building, so if I wanted to, I could have searched.”

“Show me.”

“Okay.”

I pull up the screen from my building to the lobby. Then scroll until I find the date and time. I remember that day with the cupcakes, so it’s easy to find.

There on the screen looking right at the hidden camera is Willow.

I type, isolating the image, and then feed it to my software. Within a minute, red lines are tracing her features, scrolling through all the databases.

“Is it safe to do this?” she asks.

“Perfectly safe. Remember how I taught you to reroute your IP to a remote address if you ever used the computer I got you, when you’re not here?”

She nods.

“You’re fine because I have firewalls in place. If, for some reason, your husband was searching for you and hits on your name, he would track this IP address to an island in the South Pacific. I have it rerouted so many times, he’d be chasing his own tail.”

Just as I’m going to explain more, her image pulls up on the computer.

She lets out a deep, audible exhale.

Willomena Craft.

“But . . . my hair. I was wearing a hat. . .” She lifts her hands to her eyes. “I didn’t wear my glasses that day,” she whispers to herself. “Did you ever look for me? If it was that easy . . .”

I know what she’s trying to say, but I shake my head.

“As I told you before, I didn’t want to learn your secrets that way.”

“And how did you want to learn them?” she whispers.

“I wanted you to trust me.”

She stands from her chair and crawls into my lap.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For allowing me to trust you. For proving to me there are good people in the world. Because that’s what you are, Jax. You’re a good person. No matter what anyone else thinks, know that’s how I feel.”

Then as the computer continues to pull up information on her, she kisses me. She shows me who she really is.

The woman I’m falling for.

The woman I think I’ve already fallen for.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Willow

The day turned into a week, and I’ve spent every minute with Jaxson. You would think I would get sick of him or bored at least. Hell, even with my husband, and even though he was lying to be the perfect husband prior to my father’s death, I still needed space from him. But with Jaxson, I don’t.