Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
It was his father. He was sure of it. The photo had been taken from behind. It had to have been Noelle’s mother who’d taken it. There was no intimacy happening. His father hadn’t known she was there.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Sinclair estate was far more massive than she’d pictured it. And she’d pictured it often, because she’d imagined her mother’s death again and again. She’d seen her as the news articles and live reports had described her: a vindictive, jilted lover, obsessed with the man who had recently broken her heart.
It hadn’t made sense as far as the woman Noelle had known her to be, even though the story had never wavered.
Evan took her hand, leading her through the back gate that had required a code typed into its lock. The same way their cages had required a numerical code so long ago. She shoved that memory aside. Her nervous system was already clashing and clanging. She hardly needed to create more anxiety.
Evan released a breath when the gate clicked open, apparently relieved that the security code hadn’t been changed. He’d told her he hadn’t been to the house in months and security was changed semiregularly, so they’d gotten lucky. Whatever else Evan’s father considered his son, a threat wasn’t one of them.
Noelle’s head turned in each direction as they made their way through the manicured gardens, hurrying around a corner when they saw the back of a gardener, a pair of shears in his hand as he clipped at a bush.
“Are you sure your dad’s out of town?” she whispered as they walked along a pathway beneath the eave of the house.
“He was yesterday,” Evan said. “He texted me from New York. He’s been there for a week.”
Her speeding heart rate decreased slightly. New York was across the country. That made her feel a little more secure, whereas even the gun tucked into a holster at Evan’s waist had not. On the chance that Mr. Sinclair did see them on the security cameras she didn’t have to assume were everywhere on this property—she could see one placed at the corner of the roof, and there’d been another one on the gate—he couldn’t do much about it. He could call the police, she supposed, but Evan was his son and could easily come up with a reason for being here. She, however, was a different story, and she tried her best to stay slightly behind Evan, hiding her face from view of any cameras.
But what she really hoped was that the man was in some meeting on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper and would be none the wiser.
Evan typed another code into a keypad next to a pair of french doors, and those clicked open too. Noelle followed him inside, stepping into a luxurious home office with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves that featured a library ladder that she could see moved on a rail around the entirety of the room, a gargantuan wood desk, and oil paintings she could only assume were originals, lit by gallery lights.
If she wasn’t so damn nervous and upset, she’d have taken a moment to appreciate the room. As it was, she felt a lump of bile in her throat and swallowed it down heavily. This was the room from which Leonard Sinclair had stepped, raising his gun and shooting her mother on the path they’d just walked.
There was a photo of the man himself above a marble fireplace. She stared, her heart thumping swiftly. He was smiling, his teeth white and capped. He was tanned, and though he was no longer in the prime of his life—physically speaking anyway—he was still very attractive. Noelle could admit that, even though to her he was a demon. She saw Evan in him—kind, protective, loving Evan—and it made her feel disoriented and confused. It made her feel like there might be some good in the man smiling down at her. But, no, Evan was not in him. And the only part of this man recognizable in Evan was his genetics.
Evan went directly to the large desk, pulled out the high-backed black leather chair, and opened the drawer on the right. She came to stand next to him as he riffled through the files, exhaling a breath of frustration before turning the other way and going through the drawer on the left.
After a moment he shut that one too. “Nothing here,” he said, pushing backward on the chair and getting up. She followed him to the other side of the room, where he stepped up to a bookshelf and pulled one of the titles halfway out. “I used to hide in that cabinet over there when I was a little boy,” he said, nodding his head backward and then walking to another book on a different shelf and pulling that one halfway out too. “I’d spy on him through the crack. I wanted to know what my father did in here instead of paying attention to me.” He turned to yet another shelf and pulled a third book halfway out and finally one more near the bottom. Noelle heard a small click, and then one of the shelves began to swing outward. “He never even knew I was here,” Evan murmured.