Chapter 5 - The Road to St. Joseph
The drive around the southern tip of Lake Michigan took nearly two hours.
The three-car motorcade did not take the interstate. Roman picked the back roads, cutting through the industrialized stretches of Gary and Hammond before reaching the quiet, tree-lined two-lane highways that wound through the dunes of southwestern Michigan.
In the rear of the Suburban, the silence was no longer cold. It was heavy, thick with the weight of the sound that still echoed in both their minds—that fast, frantic thump-thump-thump that had redefined everything between them in a matter of seconds.
Naomi lay across the wide bench seat, her head resting on a soft cashmere throw blanket that Adrian had retrieved from the trunk. Her knees were drawn up slightly, her arm draped over her lower abdomen as if shielding the tiny, seven-week-old life tucked behind her hip bones.
Adrian sat on the floor of the vehicle beside her, his long legs folded awkwardly in the narrow space between the seat and the front console. He had refused to sit on the opposite seat; he wanted to be close enough to watch her face every time the car hit a bump in the pavement.
He held a glass bottle of ginger ale in one hand, offering her small sips every fifteen minutes.
" Drink," he said softly, lifting the straw toward her lips.
Naomi took a small sip, the cool, spicy liquid soothing the dry rasp in her throat. She looked at his face in the dim light of the tinted windows. His suit jacket was gone, thrown over the front headrest. His dark blue tie was lying on the floorboards, and his collar was unbuttoned three inches, revealing the thick, powerful line of his throat.
"You can't keep me there," Naomi said, her voice barely louder than the hum of the tires.
"I can," Adrian replied smoothly. "The property in St. Joseph is in my personal name, not the corporation's. The federal government doesn't know it exists, and your divorce attorney doesn't have the address."
"That's kidnapping, Adrian."
"It's a medical retreat," he corrected, without a trace of iron in his tone. "Recommended by your physician."
"Dr. Vance didn't say I had to be held hostage in Michigan."
"She said complete rest and zero stress," Adrian said, looking down at her eyes. "If you stay in Chicago, your sister will call you every twenty minutes to ask about the court filing. Your lawyer will send you seventy pages of asset releases to sign. And my logistics managers will find a way to reach me through six different secure lines."
He reached out, his long fingers gently tucking a loose lock of dark hair behind her ear.
"In St. Joseph," he added, "there is no cell service within two miles of the point. The landline was disconnected three years ago. There is only the lake, the orchard, and the house."
Naomi looked away, staring at the padded leather door frame. "You hate that house. You haven't been there since your father died."
A tiny, subtle shadow crossed Adrian’s features, quickly smoothed away by his formidable self-control.
"My father built it to hide from the men he owed money to," Adrian said. "I am using it to protect the only two people I care about in this world. The house doesn't matter, Naomi. What happens inside it does."
"And what happens inside it?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly. "We pretend we're a happy family? We pretend you didn't spend three years treating me like a decorative piece of furniture in your Lake Forest mansion?"
Adrian went very still.
He set the ginger ale bottle down in the floor holder, leaned his forearms on the edge of the seat, and brought his face inches from hers.
"I didn't treat you like furniture," he whispered, his blue eyes burning with an intense, raw emotion she had never seen in him before. "I treated you like something I was terrified of breaking."
Naomi’s breath hitched. "What?"
"Do you know what my life was like when I met you, Naomi?" he asked, his voice falling into a low, raspy cadence. "My father had just been buried in a pauper's grave in Cicero. I had twelve million dollars in debt to three different families in Detroit. Every time I started my car, I checked the undercarriage for mercury switches. Every time I ate in a restaurant, I sat with my back to the wall and my hand on a nine-millimeter pistol."
He reached out, his thumb tracing the soft curve of her jawline.
"And then I met you," he continued. "You were working at that small art gallery on Michigan Avenue. You laughed at bad paintings. You wore bright dresses that smelled like lemons. You were completely clean, Naomi. Completely untouched by the filth I was wading through every single day of my life."
He closed his eyes for a second, his chest heaving under his white shirt.
"When I married you," Adrian whispered, "I swore to myself that I would keep that dirt away from your door. I built a wall fifty feet high between my business and my home. I thought if I kept you in that house, if I kept you safe, if I handled the blood and the legal threats by myself without ever bringing them to your dinner table... I was loving you."
He opened his eyes, looking down at her with a devastating, naked honesty.
"I didn't realize," he added, "that behind that fifty-foot wall, I was letting you starve."
Naomi felt a lump form in her throat so large she couldn't swallow. The cold, angry wall she had spent two months building around her heart began to crack, the sharp edges crumbling under the weight of his words.
She had spent three years believing he didn't care—that she was merely a suitable social trophy for the newly respectable chief executive of Vale Maritime. She had never seen the terror beneath his control, the frantic, desperate effort of a man who had grown up in violence trying to create a sanctuary he didn't know how to inhabit.
"Adrian..." she whispered.
The Suburban slowed down, turning off the paved highway onto a long, narrow gravel lane that wound through a thick canopy of cedar and white pine trees.
"We're here," Roman called out from the front seat, his eyes meeting Adrian’s in the rearview mirror. "The perimeter is clear, boss. Two guys are stationed at the gate lane. The rest of the team is taking the secondary house by the road."
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"Good," Adrian said, without looking up from Naomi’s face. "Turn off the engines and leave us."
The heavy vehicle came to a stop. The gravel crunched under the tires one last time, the engine cut out, and the silence of the Michigan woods rushed in to meet them.
