Free Call My Name (Fallen Angels MC Book 3) by Laura Day

to— I think I’m going to get out of town for a couple of days. Go see Gloria. See what I feel about all of this when I’m not getting— getting threatened and assaulted and followed all damn day long.” She touched his face, and brushed away the wetness that had swelled out of his eyes. “Just give me a few days.”
     
    “I don’t know who I am without you anymore,” he said. “I’m scared to death that they’re going to take you away, and I’m going to be lost all over again, just like when Anna died.”
     
    “I get that,” she said. “But that’s—not actually a healthy way to love someone. You know? And I’m not saying I’m some bastion of emotional health, but the stuff we’re trying to survive right now—maybe it’s too much for both of us.”
     
    “Please don’t go,” he said, reaching out for her, but she slipped away from his hand, something it seemed like she was always doing.
     
    “I need to.”
     

 
    CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     
    She was barely three blocks away before her phone started to ring. At a red light, she glanced at the caller ID: Teddy. She sighed. Mason had probably called him, or something; she couldn’t bring herself to answer.
     
    The night she’d driven out of town, she’d been so distracted that she had no idea how long it would take her to get back to Emily’s clinic. And once she got there, it was something of a crapshoot as to what she’d do. Take a long weekend to get her head on straight? Take a leave of absence and spend some time hanging with Gloria, maybe take a trip to the ocean? They’d done it once before, and there was nothing quite as bizarre and hysterical as watching a dog try to herd waves. It would be a balm for her soul, as people said.
     
    She pulled over for a moment, long enough to set the GPS in her car, and then pointed her hood ornament to the south. Her phone rang again, and she tapped it to ignore the call, forcing herself to focus on the road.
     
    She needed country music. Wasn’t that what people listened to when everything had gone to hell, and they needed a good breakup song? She’d never really gone in for all that twang and misery herself, but she didn’t think she could stand the grungy, industrial hard rock that she’d loved in college right now, either. She turned on her radio to try and find a station that didn’t make her cry harder.
     
    That was when Caroline saw the flashing lights in her rearview mirror.
     
    She thought she might throw up; she thought she might slam her foot on the gas and head for the hills. A year ago, she would have sworn, and pulled her car over to the side of the road, not be convinced that someone had put out an APB on her car and was about to have her taken to jail.
     
    But slamming her foot on the gas wouldn’t work, long-term, and vomiting would just make her car smell awful. She probably had a taillight out or something; she’d been so distracted that she wouldn’t have noticed. She pulled the car to the curb and shut off the engine, her hands in her lap as she waited for the officer to approach with the familiar refrain of “License and registration, please.”
     
    Only that wasn’t what happened. The flashlight shone in her eyes so bright and distracting that she put her hand up, ducking away and trying to focus. “Hey,” she said, her tone sharp and mean, and her heart was beating too fast, too afraid.
     
    “Fancy meeting you here,” Detective Randall said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “On the entrance to the interstate. You wouldn’t be heading out of town, would you?”
     
    “Am I under arrest?” Caroline knew her tone was snippy, the response of a white, middle-class accountant, not the girlfriend of a drug dealing biker, but at the same time, she was well aware of her rights.
     
    “You’re a person of interest in a potential homicide,” he said, and everything froze, every cell and every fragment of time. “We’re going to go to the station and talk.