He smiled. “You’re still as feisty as ever. I can have a hotel room booked in five minutes, babe. You’re driving me insane.”

“You’re drunk.”

“On two glasses of wine?”

“No. I’m betting you had a drink before our lunch.”

He smiled again. “Like I said, you’re a smart girl.”

Woman, but whatever. It wasn’t worth arguing over. “We’ve been through this a million times. We want different things.”

“I’m not talking about a relationship. I’m talking about some afternoon delight. We never had a problem in that department.”

No, we hadn’t—other than his distaste for cunnilingus—but now that I’d been with Roy Wolfe? Blaine Foster was a piss-poor substitute.

“Can we get back to the subject, please?”

“You’ll change your mind eventually.”

“I won’t today. Please, Blaine? This is important. Lacey’s wellbeing depends on it.”

He softened then. He truly had been fond of Lacey. “I can’t give you the name, but I can tell you this. It wasn’t a common name like Lisa Smith. Bob Mayes always said Lacey had a memory like he’d never seen. Photographic. Ask her. She’ll remember.”

28

Roy

“I don’t give a rat’s ass who does the service,” Rock said.

“Then you’re overruled, Roy,” Reid said. “Father Jim it is.”

I lost that battle. So what? I’d suppressed the stuff for so long. Did it really matter?

“What about Riley?” I asked.

“Riley’s not here.”

“That’s not what I mean. Now that we know what our father did to her, shouldn’t we step up our efforts to find her?”

“We can’t step it up more than we already have,” Reid said. “We’ve always had the best PIs on it. She doesn’t want to be found.”

My stomach hurt. Not nauseating hurt, though nausea overwhelmed me also.

No. This was a bloody hurt, a sharpness. A feeling of impending doom.

“Are we done here?” I asked.

“Have you told us everything, Rock?” Reid asked.

“Everything about why I was sent to Buffington, yeah.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Only what I went through at that hellhole. It fucked me up. But it made me stronger.”

“Hazing?” Reid asked.

Rock only nodded. “I won’t go into the gory detail. Luckily I escaped most of it because I was big enough at fourteen. But three years later, I was expected to do the same to others.”

I gulped. “Did you?”

“I’m not proud of the monster I became, but my abuse was only verbal and physical. I refused to…” He shook his head.

“Wow,” Reid said. “I’m sorry, Rock. I used to blame you.”

“For what?” Rock bellowed.

“You already know. When you left, Dad needed a new punching bag. Roy was a recluse, hardly ever around. So it was me.”

“I got my fair share,” I added.