“Good. I’ll get that scheduled as soon as possible. In the meantime, limit your contact with Mr. Montclair. Do you have any trips planned? I know you travel quite a bit.”

“I’m going to stay right here until we find Sutton. Should we start organizing some sort of search?”

“I’ll get back to you on that. I’ve gotten a lot of information in the past hour. I need to go sort through it all and get my boss moving on a few things.” She pocketed her notebook. “We’ll find her, Ms. Brookes. I promise.”

The tears stopped. Brookes swiped a hand across her face. “I hope you do. Before it’s too late.”

“One last thing. Did you happen to make a call to my cell phone yesterday?”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Though now that I see this email from Sutton, I wish I had.”

I'm Coming Home, I'm Coming Home

I’M COMING HOME, I’M COMING HOME

Then

“Ethan, come here!”

He hurried to the other side of the house, drawn by the urgency in her voice. She was in her office. No makeup, hair in a ponytail, spilling down her back. Feet bare, toenails polished red. She looked so young, so carefree. He couldn’t help the spike of love he felt when he saw her. Sometimes he forgot how things were now. For a moment, their reality fled away and he saw her with early eyes, the ones he had before their world went to hell.

“What is it, love?”

“That asshole Wilde is after me again.”

He bit back the sigh. This little drama was getting very old.

Sutton’s office was so empty now. Without the baby’s basket, it seemed practically frigid. They were in the first flush of winter, and the skies were gray and dreary. Looking closer, he could see Sutton was pale, black circles under her eyes. Neither of them slept well anymore. When had they slept together recently? He tried to think back to the luxurious warmth between her legs. It had been weeks.

He needed to rectify this. He needed to fix his marriage. They’d gone through hell and back, and if they had any hope of surviving, they needed to find one another again.

But all Sutton could focus on was some stupid online blogger who kept poking her crazy.

“You need to ignore him.”

“I have been. You know that. But now he’s attacking you.”

A rush of fury. And a little voice in the back of his mind... Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite. “What? Let me see.”

The article was only two hundred words, very succinct. It was titled Who’s Really Writing Ethan Montclair’s Books?

“That bloody arsehole!”

“I know. We have to do something. This is defamation.”