He’s turning my whole world upside down. What’s happening to me?
She took a glass down from her cabinet, panting. After she’d drained a glass of cold water, she stood there, dazed and breathing heavily. Powerful emotion rose in her, bursting through the surface.
She grasped the edge of the counter, shuddering with feeling.
“Get ahold of yourself, Harper. You’re your own worst enemy, I swear.”
She shook again, but this time, she inhaled with effort and brought her ragged emotional state under control.
It’d been her father’s familiar voice in her head. It’s been something he’d say to her with patient exasperation sometimes when she was going through that bad period after returning home with them from West Virginia . . . after she’d reluctantly left Jake behind that last time, after Emmitt’s sentencing . . .
After she’d been told Jake was dead.
She clamped her eyes closed tightly. She was so confused. She’d never missed her father more. Her dad had guided her steadfastly through the most difficult chapter of her life. She missed both of her parents so much. Their absence burned inside her. She struggled to recall what her father used to tell her when she was a child on the occasions when she’d verge on hysteria.
“You know you catastrophize when that anxiety factory in your head starts chugging away. Go back, Harper. Remember what you saw, but see everything this time—not just the things that sets those anxiety red flags to waving around your head, vying for your attention.”
Harper took another swallow of cool water, willing her racing brain to slow. Deliberately, she called up the inflammatory image of Regina in Jacob’s arms.
True, there were signs of rough sex on the brunette’s body . . . but when had Jacob ever left such vivid marks or fingerprints on her—Harper’s—body?
Never.
Regina had stumbled, she recalled, and Jacob had reached out to steady her. Had that been why his hands were on her hips when Harper had walked into the room? In order to stabilize her or even push her away? She recalled how Regina had been wobbly on the night of the opera, too.
And Regina’s laugh: It’d filled Harper with a sense of horror when she’d heard the high-pitched giggle reverberate around Jacob’s office. Now, as she stood in her kitchen on bare, sandy feet and her mind began to calm, that laugh suddenly struck Harper as hysterical.
Intoxicated.
Desperate?
Jacob’s face suddenly leapt into her mind’s eye at the moment when he’d turned and seen her standing in the doorway of his office. He’d looked tense and wild, and not in the out-of-control, delicious way she’d seen in his expression when he was in the grip of lust as they made love. Instead, he’d looked worried.
She pressed her hand to her chest when she felt the uncomfortable jump of her heart.
“Shit,” she said out loud.
She tossed her purse on the counter and began to dig for her phone. No sooner had she closed her hand around it than she heard the wail of sirens in the near distance. She froze, staring in the direction of the sirens . . . and of Jacob’s house. An unpleasant wave of dread swept down her spine. A strange prescience overcame her.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
She hastily found the number for the newsroom on her phone.
“Cassie?” she asked, recognizing the voice of one of the newsroom’s interns. “It’s Harper McFadden. Can you do me a favor and go and turn on the newsroom’s police scanner right away?”
• • •
Harper jogged into the North Lake Hospital ER, searching the waiting area for Jacob’s familiar tall form. She didn’t see Jacob, but she saw Elizabeth sitting tensely in the back row of a seating area all by herself.
“Elizabeth?” she asked breathlessly as she approached.
“Harper? How did you know?” Elizabeth asked, standing awkwardly.
“The newsroom police scanner. They didn’t give any names, but I guessed . . . it’s Regina?” she asked, dread weighing her words.
Elizabeth nodded. Jacob’s assistant looked so frayed, Harper grasped her upper arm for reassurance.
“Let’s sit, okay?” she prompted.