Free Nightfire by Lisa Marie Rice

this company, Chloe saw. Her brother had created something good, together with Sam Reston and the man still holding her elbow, Mike Keillor. They had created an atmosphere of harmony, as unmistakable as that created by her nuns at the Sacred Heart.
    Chloe had felt her heart lift, even that first day. A new girl, a damaged new girl, from another country. Shy and unused to much contact with people. The transition to London had been so fast she’d barely had time to dread it by the time she’d arrived and discovered she didn’t have anything to dread.
    Just watching the way the nuns treated the girls, the way the girls interacted with one another, it had been such a joy. No coldness, no withdrawal, no hidden cruelty. Just happiness and serenity.
    That’s what she was seeing here. The body language of people who worked in a successful environment and who worked well together, in an atmosphere of respect.
    Next to her, Mike looked so serious. Harry was beaming, Sam had his arm around his wife’s waist, bending down to her and smiling. Only Mike wasn’t smiling. Harry and Sam seemed somehow uncomplicated next to Mike. Reading their body language easily, in Sam and Harry Chloe saw two contented men, happily married, loose and relaxed.
    Mike was harder to read. He didn’t look particularly happy but he didn’t look unhappy, either. He was just serious. And close by her. Like her shadow, always in proximity. Anyone who didn’t know them walking out of the company offices and heading down the big corridor would have assumed that there were three couples.
    Harry and Ellen. Sam and Nicole. And Mike and her. She was a slow walker, but he kept pace with her exactly, as if that were his normal speed, when actually she’d seen his normal speed when he came in, zipping across the huge lobby area in a couple of seconds.
    She had never been so conscious of another human being’s presence. He was so large it felt like he had his own gravity field around him. She had to work, and work hard, to keep from looking at him and—surprisingly—from trying to get even closer. He still held her by the elbow, not a hard grip but one she imagined she’d have to make an effort to break.
    Not for anything in the world would she want to break his grip. She couldn’t even begin to imagine wanting to. His grip felt wonderful.
    So here she was, walking down the corridor, having somehow acquired four new family members, and the fifth—well, he didn’t feel like family so much as a man interested in a woman, utterly focused on her.
    God, who would have thought such a reversal of fortune could happen in only a couple of hours?
    Two hours ago, she’d walked this same hallway, sick with anxiety, trembling with piercing fear and tenuous hope. Completely alone in the world, without a compass or even a heading.
    On her way over in the taxi, she’d game-played how the encounter would work out. When she allowed the tiniest chink to open inside her to let just the smallest ray of hope beam inside, she’d thought that maybe, just maybe, she and Harry could . . . what? Maybe have lunch together? Talk, certainly. She’d imagined it would be awkward, but she didn’t care. She’d been doing awkward for a long time now. All her life, in fact.
    And she’d try to dance around the big 800-pound gorilla—why didn’t their mom’s sister adopt both of them?
    Chloe discovered the answer to that in a diary kept in the safe, tucked away among bank statements as if even in a safe, it wasn’t supposed to be read. In it, Lauren, her adoptive mother, described what she found after the authorities had tracked Lauren down as the sister of Carol Bolt née Tyler, deceased. Lauren had reluctantly flown, alone, to San Diego, the new bride of a man she was slowly beginning to realize had sick desires and a tendency toward violence. But he was rich and powerful and Lauren wanted that. Craved it.
    Unwilling duty brought Lauren to the Open Clinic in San Diego, which she’d