She followed him down the small hallway. There were three doors in all. A narrow linen closet to her left, a half-bath on her right. Which only left…
Olly’s bedroom.
He opened the door, flipped on the light, and stopped dead in his tracks.
“What the hell?”
Unprepared for the sudden stop, Scarlett bumped into his back. “What is it?” She tried peeking around his broad shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Olly?”
Scarlett froze. That was a woman’s voice. And when she craned her neck further to the side to see, she realized the voice had come from Olly’s bed.
There was a woman lying beneath the covers. She couldn’t see her face for the woman’s shielding hand, but she could tell whoever it was had long, strawberry blonde hair.
Her stomach dropped. Had she been wrong about him? Was he just like every other player out there?
No.
The silent denial was instant. She may not have known Olly long, but Scarlett was a damn good judge of character. And in the few days they’d come to know one another—biblically and otherwise—she was certain the man standing beside her would never hurt her or any other woman that way.
She looked up at him just as Olly’s entire body stiffened beside her. His jaw dropped, and his eyes widened with shock. And with her next breath she heard him say…
“Rose?”
Her eyes flew back to the woman in his bed. Tossing the covers from her legs, the stranger jumped out of bed, and sprinted across the room.
“Olly!” Her hands worked to brush the hair from her face as she ran. “Thank God you’re finally home!”
Scarlett watched the other woman throw herself into Olly’s welcoming arms. And in that instant, she realized she was standing right next to her sister.
13
Olly couldn’t takehis eyes off the woman sitting across from him. Rose was here. She washere.Sitting at his kitchen table sipping on a cup of coffee.
Thank you, God.
Physically, she appeared to be okay. Mentally and emotionally…he still had no idea what the woman had gone through while being forced to live and work at The Mystique.
“I can’t believe it.” Rose shook her head. “I can’t believe you’ve been looking for me this whole time. Or that you were crazy enough to go undercover working for that son of a bitch, Valdez. You could have been killed, Olly.”
I almost was.
“I was trying to make sure you weren’t,” he told her the truth. “And what about you, huh? Hitchhiking all the way back here from Durango? Why the hell didn’t you call me? Or Brooke, for that matter? You had to know one of us would have come to you.”
A sad smile lifted Rose’s full, ruby lips. “I couldn’t take the chance that I was being followed. I didn’t want to risk bringing either of you into danger.”
“What about the police?” Scarlett asked from the chair beside his.
They had yet to share the part about her being Rose’s sister. While Rose had been changing from his shirt—which she’d apparently been using as a nightgown since crashing at his place—into her own sweatshirt and jeans, Olly and Scarlett and waited together in the living room.
It was then the two had decided it best to hold off on the whole secret sibling bomb. At least until Rose had a chance to tell them what happened…and how she came to be in his apartment. For now, they’d gone with a partial truth.
That Scarlett was his friend.
“When we first got word that Dante Valdez had been killed and that his entire operation here in Denver had been shut down by the feds, everyone went nuts. None of the girls knew what was going on, of course, because Valdez never showed his face at The Mystique. As far as any of the regulars knew, Vic was the one in charge.”
“And the others?”