room,” she murmured, gathering up her purse. “Might as well go now.” Her emotive eyes sent Dirk a message that this was merely an excuse, that here was their opportunity to talk in private, outside the hearing of Chet and Vanessa. She smiled at Vanessa. “Don’t let them clear away our plates, please—we won’t be gone long.”
* * *
Dirk pulled out his phone the minute they walked out of the restaurant, but Mei-li shook her head. “Not here. Let’s go down to the lobby,” she said as she led him to a stairwell. When they walked out on the ground floor she glanced around quickly, then pointed to a quiet corner near one of the boarded-up, arched picture windows in the gilded, high-ceilinged lobby. “Over there.”
What Dirk had to say only took a minute, but the call took a lot longer than that because not only did transmission keep breaking up and they had to repeat themselves several times, but Hannah burst into tears as soon as she heard. “Oh, Mr. DeWinter,” she sobbed. “If only I had been there.”
He tried to reassure her. “What could you have done that Vanessa and Chet didn’t do?” Hannah started to respond, but her voice cut out, and Dirk said, “I didn’t hear that.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated, “but something more than just letting kidnappers take the babies without a fight!” Hannah was unforgiving of both herself for not being there and of Vanessa, whom Dirk knew she thought was too young. But Vanessa had come with stellar recommendations, and Dirk had been desperate at the time. She seemed honestly fond of her little charges—and they of her. Linden and Laurel weren’t as attached to Vanessa as they were to Hannah, but still...a bond existed.
“If only I hadn’t broken my leg!” Hannah bemoaned. “If only—”
“Accidents happen to the best of us,” he reminded her. “And old bones break easily, you know that.” He’d often teased a young-at-heart Hannah about not wanting to accept the limitations age was beginning to place on her, and he was hoping to distract her from blaming herself for not being there. Again Hannah’s initial response was staticky, and Dirk had to ask her to repeat it.
“I said, yes, but I’m not usually that clumsy,” she insisted. “I know old bones break easily, which is why I’m always so careful. I just don’t understand how I could have tripped and fallen down the stairs like that.” She didn’t stay distracted for long. “And the way this has turned out, you’d almost think I was deliberately gotten out of the way, although how that could have happened I can’t begin to imagine.” Then she returned to the news Dirk had just conveyed to her. “Oh, Mr. DeWinter, what are you going to do?”
Determination swept through him. “Whatever I have to.”
Dirk thought briefly about sharing with Hannah his fear that ransom wasn’t the motive, but then decided against it. There would be time to tell Hannah when he was certain. And besides, he wasn’t sure how long he would still have cell phone coverage—just their brief conversation had taken far too long and they’d had to repeat themselves several times. So all he said was, “The kidnappers already called me once, but they didn’t make a ransom demand...yet. And this damned typhoon—that’s why I called you now instead of waiting for the girls’ bedtime to call you, when you’d be expecting it. I know it’s super early there, but this typhoon could shut everything down soon, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to reach you until tomorrow or the next day. Assuming service can be restored quickly and doesn’t take days or weeks.”
“I know you’ll do whatever you have to do, Mr. DeWinter,” Hannah said stoutly. “I have confidence in you. If anyone can bring Linden and Laurel home safely, it’s you.” Then her voice broke and she pleaded, “Oh, please bring them home safely, sir, and soon. Please! I don’t even want to think about what they’re going through right now.”
Dirk couldn’t speak for a moment. “Me, neither,” he said finally, then disconnected the call. His eyes closed and he breathed deeply for several seconds, images of his daughters helpless in the clutches of heartless men who could do something like this to innocent little girls flashing through his mind in an endless filmstrip.
A soft hand touched his arm. “Are you okay?” Mei-li asked.
Dirk ran one hand over his face while the other tucked his phone back in his jeans pocket. “Oh, hell, yeah,” he told her roughly. “I’m just fine. My daughters have been kidnapped by a man who wants me dead, my housekeeper thinks I can pull off miracles and you tell me my daughter’s nanny just might be lying about exactly what happened.” He laughed without humor. “Oh, yeah, and I can’t get help from the US consulate or search for my daughters because a Cat-5 hurricane—excuse me, typhoon—has decided to hit Hong Kong a month too early in the season. Have I left anything out?”
Mei-li’s face held nothing but compassion. “I think that encompasses it.”
The backs of his eyes ached suddenly, and he squeezed his eyes shut to hold his emotions at bay. But when he opened his eyes again he knew everything he was feeling was right there on the surface. “They’re not even two years old,” he whispered as despair swamped him. “What kind of monster takes his revenge on little girls?”
Mei-li looked around, then dragged Dirk to a couple of unoccupied chairs a short distance away. She pushed him into the first one, and Dirk let her. Then she pulled the other chair closer to his and sat down. “There’s a story here you haven’t told me,” she said firmly. “You’ve dropped hints, but I need to know everything.”
After a moment Dirk nodded. “Yeah, you do.” He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, holding her gaze with his. “I killed a man.”
Mei-li didn’t allow herself to gasp, even though she’d never imagined this was the secret Dirk was keeping. But after the first shock passed, she accepted it with nothing more than a blink. It made sense. It had to be something momentous. Something life altering. While she’d never killed anyone herself, she knew those who had. Sometimes killing was justified, and until she knew more...she wasn’t going to judge.
* * *
Dirk considered what to add to the bald statement that he’d killed a man. “Nearly twenty years ago now. I was sixteen. He was a year older. We had a...a history of animosity.” That statement didn’t even come close to describing the hostile emotions on both sides that had led to their final confrontation.
“What happened?” The quiet, nonjudgmental way she asked the question immediately reminded him of his court-appointed defense attorney from twenty years ago. And it allowed him to answer with a semblance of detachment.
“Bree was fifteen. We were... I guess you could say we were in love, as much as teenagers understand love.” Words couldn’t begin to encompass what he and Bree had felt at the time, so he didn’t even try. “Lyon Blackwood was...” A spoiled rich kid who thought he was entitled to take whatever he wanted.
“We’d had confrontations before,” he continued after a few seconds. “But what really started the whole thing was I caught him sexually assaulting a friend of Bree’s. The girl didn’t want to press charges, even though Bree and I begged her to—she didn’t want the stigma that would have accompanied it. Minnetonka—Minnetonka, Minnesota, where we lived—isn’t a small town, but something like that gets around. And high school kids can be particularly cruel when a not-very-popular girl accuses the star of the football team of sexual assault.” He
