After the Storm(160)
“I’d prefer to round up everyone and meet at Ma and Dad’s within the hour,” Sam said. “Sean, can you get every man you can spare on this? I need you to extend that BOLO to Walt Breckenridge. We can’t let him leave the state. Alert the California state patrol and the city and county police where the bastard lives. I don’t care what the fuck you have to tell them. Just get them on this.”
Donovan nodded, still unable to form a coherent sentence. He simply couldn’t comprehend it all. She thought he’d betrayed her, and yet she’d left Cammie and Travis with him. He knew only too well the lengths to which she’d go to protect her siblings. She thought the worst of him and yet she trusted him with the two people she loved most in the world.
It was incomprehensible.
“Let’s roll, man. I don’t think you should be driving. You head to Ma’s so you can update them and be there when everyone starts rolling in. I’ll get Rusty and the kids over there,” Nathan said.
Then he turned to Skylar. “You’re with me. Swanny, you too. Cammie’s familiar with Swanny and I don’t think she’d feel threatened by Skylar. Edge, you’d scare the shit out of her. You and Joe collect the wives. Try not to scare them any more than necessary and tell them everything will be explained when we all meet up at Ma’s. No need in rehashing this more than once.”
“Come on, Van,” Ethan said quietly. “Let’s go to Ma’s so we can put our heads together and figure out what the fuck is going on. You’ll feel marginally better once you know at least Travis and Cammie are safe.”
CHAPTER 37
THE mood was grim and strained at Frank and Marlene’s home. The moment Nathan and Swanny arrived with Rusty, Travis and Cammie, the children were ushered away by Marlene, who promptly sat them in the kitchen to feed them along with Charlotte, who’d arrived just moments earlier.
Sean strode in, the last to get there, and Donovan knew when he saw the deputy’s face, it wasn’t good.
“We found Rusty’s Jeep,” Sean said grimly. “Wrecked on 79 headed out of town. From the looks of it, she was rear-ended and shoved into the ditch. The passenger door was open. Air bags were not deployed. Her bag was still there with the cash from the hardware store, some jewelry and not much else.”
“What the hell did you say to her, Donovan?” Rusty all but shouted.
The others stared at her in surprise. Donovan was taken aback by the anger and grief in her voice. He understood it, but he wasn’t sure why it was directed at him. Surely she, like Eve, couldn’t believe he had in any way betrayed Eve.
“You didn’t see her or hear her. I did,” Rusty seethed. “She thought, no, she knew that you were handing her over to her stepfather. A trade of sorts. She said that she was merely the means for you to get what you truly wanted. Children. A family that didn’t include her. She quoted what so many of us have said over the years. You have a weakness for women and children but especially children. She believes you want them and not her and that you were offering her up to her stepfather. And yet she left Travis and Cammie in your care because she believed no matter what you’d done to her that you truly loved and cared about them and that you’d protect them with your life.”
“Where the hell would she get an idea like that?” Donovan exploded. “Goddamn it! I wouldn’t have done something like that and surely you can’t believe it.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Rusty said, tears clogging her voice. “All I know was that I was confronted with a desperate, terrified and devastated woman who believed to her soul that she’d been betrayed by the one person she trusted. You.”
Donovan couldn’t even form a response. He was utterly flabbergasted. First, that Eve would ever think such a thing, and second, that a member of his own family would think, even for a moment, that he would do something so despicable.