Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [735]
“She’s been gone too long,” he murmured, an odd sense of emptiness beginning to expand in his chest. “Something’s not right.”
Elise pivoted to face him from the front passenger seat. “It has been a while. I’ll go make sure she’s okay.”
Tegan’s Breedmate got out of the SUV and headed for the terminal where Claire had gone. She came back out not even a minute later, a look of concern tightening her mouth as she hurried back to the car. “She’s not in the bathroom. I checked all the stalls and the area just outside in the terminal. She’s not there.”
“Damn. Get in, babe,” Tegan told Elise. “She can’t be far. We’ll drive until we find her.”
“No.” Reichen opened the back door and climbed out. “I’ll take care of this. I think I know where she might have gone.”
He grasped for the blood bond that had told him she was moving farther away from him, focusing his senses on her like a beacon. The bond would lead him to her, but even without it, he had a feeling he knew where Claire would run to if she was feeling overwhelmed and confused.
Tegan put his window down and fixed his intense emerald stare on him. “You sure you don’t need a hand?”
Reichen shook his head. “Go on without me. I have to go after her.”
Tegan gave him a nod, then reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a cell phone. “Take this. The last two speed dials will connect you to the compound.”
“Thanks,” Reichen said. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”
CHAPTER
Fifteen
Claire’s footsteps echoed hollowly off the bare floors of her grandmother’s house. It had been a long time since she’d last been in the grand old Victorian that stood on the rough shore of Narragansett Bay, but it still felt the same. It still smelled the same, like old wood and furniture polish and crisp salt air. Of course, in the time since she was last here, before she’d left as a young woman to begin her studies abroad in Germany, much had changed. Her grandmother had since passed away, and now the estate was held in trust in Claire’s name, as she was the sole heir and last of her mother’s line. Not even Wilhelm knew about this place. She had kept its existence all to herself, a secret she was glad to have from him now.
The caretakers who’d been hired out of the trust had done a superb job looking after the house and the extensive grounds after her grandmother’s passing. As stipulated in the agreement, a spare key was kept behind a loose foundation brick next to the veranda—the same spot that had been used since the time when Claire’s mother was a little girl growing up in the grand old house. Claire had been counting on that key’s safekeeping when she’d fled the airport in Boston and hopped on the bus that took her down to Newport.
Finding it where it had always been had given her hope that maybe everything would be all right again. Maybe she would still find some peace—find her true home—when all of the dust settled from the upheaval of her life right now.
The trouble with that hope was that she kept picturing Andreas in her future, and that was only setting herself up for disappointment.
She tried to put him out of her mind as she drifted through the ground floor of the house, reacquainting herself with the memories of her distant past. Family portraits and framed art had been taken down and crated to preserve them. The elegant furniture her grandmother had taken such meticulous care of was shrouded in long white dust covers, giving everything a ghostly, forgotten appearance even with all the lights burning. The curtains and blinds were drawn over the windows and the wall of French doors that let out onto the patio that overlooked the ocean.
It was toward those tall French doors that Claire strode now. She pulled them open, all four pairs, and let the briny autumn wind blow in from off the Atlantic. Its call was too strong for her to resist. She stepped outside and crossed the wide bricks of the patio