Ryan flashed a smile. Nothing delighted him more in business than a satisfied client and a job well done. “I’m thrilled.”
“Anything you need, you let me know,” Charlie said, then gestured to the stage.
After sharing the details of the fundraising goal – an announcement met with cheers and claps – Clyde passed the speaking baton to Sophie’s brother. John walked to the podium then gave a short speech about the importance of keeping the streets safe, finishing with a call to support the community center. “Places like this can make a big difference. I believe that if we give young people a chance early on to be involved in something other than gangs, crime, and the trouble they can get into on the streets, we’ll have a safe community and a better Las Vegas.”
John said thanks and nodded crisply, and everyone cheered. Ryan soaked in the atmosphere in the ballroom, and the sense that maybe there were enough people who cared about change. Who cared about this city. Who wanted the best for this town they all called home.
He was filled with pride, too, over Sophie’s work, bringing such a motley crew together all in the name of this cause. He only hoped seeing the support from the crowds would lift that knot of tension she’d been carrying all night. Even as she introduced the orchestra and her ex-husband, then asked the guests to find their seats to enjoy some Beethoven, he could tell she wasn’t herself.
He doubted anyone else could, but it was in the small details, from the way she cleared her throat before she spoke to how she briefly fiddled with her hair on stage. Sophie was not a fiddler. Or a throat-clearer.
All the more reason for him to tie her up to a chair tonight, or maybe blindfold her for the first time. Yeah, he liked the image of that. He suspected that was just what she needed to clear her mind, and rid her body of all that stress.
Great. Now his dick was hard in his tuxedo pants.
He excused himself from his clients, found his way to his seat, and waited for Sophie to join him and his hard-on.
When she did, he brushed his lips to her neck then whispered something dirty in her ear about what he wanted to do to her later. She shivered slightly.
Slightly.
That was all.
Something was wrong with his Sophie.
* * *
She wanted to vomit.
She wanted to hurl.
To crawl under the covers, pull them over her head, and pretend she’d never offered to make that damn jacket.
She should have baked a pie instead. Made a homemade card with construction paper. Knit a scarf.
That damn dog jacket was tormenting her. Its secrets hounded her. She repeated the names—T.J. Nelson, Kenny Nelson—over and over in her head all day.
Then the other names.
John. Ryan. Ryan. John.
Like a pendulum she swung back and forth, seesawing between the two men. She couldn’t last much longer in this state of suspended secrecy. She hardly knew how Ryan had ever managed to keep things locked inside his head. It was painful. It hurt her skull to have this knowledge that she needed to share sealed in her mind.
Her stomach clenched. Evil butterflies swarmed her belly, the nightmarish, haunting kind.
As the orchestra swelled during the gorgeous piece of music, she clutched her belly. When Holden joined in on the piano, she dropped her head to her knees. Ryan rubbed her back and whispered, “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. She clasped her hand over her mouth then whispered, “I need to go to the ladies’ room.”
She took off.
In the bathroom, she washed her hands over and over, as if that would somehow give her the answer. Instead, it only gave her exceedingly clean hands. When she pushed open the door to leave the restroom, she found Ryan waiting in the hallway. The sounds of Beethoven playing from the ballroom could be faintly heard.
“You’re worrying me. Are you pregnant?”
She laughed. Deeply and maniacally. Oh, but it would be easier in some ways if she were.
But as she met his gaze, the pendulum stopped swinging. She had her answer. It came in his presence here, his pursuit of her tonight, his clear and real concern for her. It came in the facts, too. It was his mother’s pattern; it was his family story.
“I lied to you,” she blurted out.
He furrowed his brow. “About what?”
She grabbed the lapels on his jacket and pulled him to the end of the cavernous hallway, standing against the gold-trimmed, scalloped wall as she confessed. “I lied to you about the pattern. I did make it this morning. But it’s not a pattern, Ryan. It’s a code. A hidden code of addresses. And those addresses match names of people who lived there years ago. Do the names T.J. Nelson and Kenny Nelson mean anything to you?”
He froze. His face turned white. His lips parted but no sound came. Then, he managed words, and they sounded dry and cold as he whispered barrenly, “What did you just say?”
She repeated the names.
“T.J. and K,” he hissed, his eyes full of fire. He stepped back, his hands shooting behind him to grab the wall. As if he needed to hold onto something. “How did you know those names?”
She quickly explained what happened that morning, reversing the steps, then calling Jenna, then finding the addresses from years ago. “I don’t know what it means,” she said, her voice rising with desperation. Maybe it was nothing after all. Maybe everyone would have a good laugh at Sophie’s half-baked code-cracking. “I might be overreacting. Maybe I’m just going crazy. It’s possibly nothing at all. But if there’s a chance that it means something, if there’s a chance that these are the two names that John has been looking for—”
* * *
He cut her off.
There was no question in his mind. There was not a chance in hell he’d enlist Sophie in sweeping this under the rug. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t overreacting. He might be shocked to the bones, but he was dead sure of one thing.
There was no way he was keeping this to himself.
“Let’s go get John.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Treasure Island glittered across the Strip.
The glass of the window cooled his forehead as he stared at the hotel across the street from the room at the Venetian. Sophie had rented this suite for the event. The orchestra members had used it as a green room before going on stage, and now for Ryan it was a waiting chamber.
The gold-colored hotel shone brightly back at him. Ryan could still remember when Treasure Island opened twenty-two years ago. He’d been ten and his father had taken him to see the towering structure, one of the Strip’s first spectacle hotels.
To his young eyes, Treasure Island had seemed majestic, a true giant among its neighbors. He’d gazed skyward with that childlike sense of awe, his father’s arm around him as his dad had pointed out the original skull-and-crossbones marquee. They’d wandered down the Strip to a cheap buffet, then returned in time to see one of the nightly pirate battles in Buccaneer Bay in front of the hotel entrance. Canons on the ships had lit up with flames, and swashbuckling pirates had whipped out swords and fenced to the death.
Now the pirate theme had been mostly washed away and the nightly battles had ended years ago, though the manmade lake still edged the property. Ryan had seen so many changes in this city. He’d watched it morph from the Stardust and Circus Circus style hotels to the mega casinos and their star wattage of today. Through it all, the city was his home, and always would be.
And through it all, too, he’d been a fucking mule, carrying secret names in a goddamn dog jacket.
He’d held onto that pattern all through high school, college, the army and beyond. Stowed it safely away because he’d thought it meant something to his mom.
Something real. Something about hope, the future, and another chance.