Chapter 16: Light Left On

Benton's POV

The guards broke the stairwell door on the fourth try.

Dalton was gone from the owner's suite.

The safe stood open, with the original voting agreement missing from it and an empty velvet ring case lying on the carpet.

"The lawyer has copies of everything," I told Odile's guard. "He took the paper out of spite."

"Where would he go?"

"Somewhere he thinks he's the one hunting."

Odile gave me my orders at the elevator, in her chair, with her hand on my sleeve.

"Take her home," she said. "Stay in the cottage. He'll want her alone, and he's afraid of you."

"She told me she's not ready."

"She told you not yet," Odile said. "Those are different sentences, and you know it."

Hallie did not speak in the car.

She sat with her coat closed and one hand on her stomach, and I drove the lake road with both hands on the wheel.

At the cottage I locked the door behind us.

"I'll take the couch," I said.

"The blanket's in the chest."

She went into the bedroom and shut the door.

I sat in the dark with the blanket over my knees and listened to her move.

The tap ran.

The bed creaked, and creaked again, and went quiet, and then creaked.

I had watched her across a kitchen for two years and never once let myself want her out loud.

Now she was twelve feet away, and the want had a voice of its own.

At two o'clock the bedroom door opened.

She stood in the frame in her cream silk robe, with her hair down.

"You're breathing so loudly I can hear it through the wall," she said.

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