The Collected (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) Read Online Free PDF

brows began to slide together, and a frown appeared on her face.
    She pulled out her phone. No missed calls. No texts. She dialed his number but was sent instantly to voice mail. Instead of leaving a message, she decided to check inside the terminal again in case they’d mixed up where they were supposed to meet. There was no sign of him.
    She called him again. This time when the beep sounded, she said, “Hey, it’s me. Where are you? I’m at the airport. Just waiting. Kinda boring here. So, um, yeah, where are you?”
    __________
     
    L IZ GAVE IT another hour, then decided Nate had either forgotten today was the day she was coming, or something had delayed him. She didn’t want to put too much thought into that last possibility, as, given the nature of Nate’s work, it would inevitably have taken her to scenarios she didn’t want to consider.
    She called him again, and left another message, the fourth. This time she told him she was going to catch a cab and she’d see him at the house.
     Fifty minutes later, a taxi dropped her off in front of the gate to the Hollywood Hills home owned by her brother Jake and lived in by Nate.
    Quinn , she corrected herself. He goes by Quinn, not Jake. She was still having a problem with that. Her childhood was full of wonderful memories of Jake. Until he left, at which point anger and confusion and resentment set in after he basically disappeared from the face of the earth, only to show up again when she was an adult.
    Those abandoned years had been painful, a wound that never seemed able to close completely. Intellectually, she now understood why he’d done what he did, not that she would have made the same choices. But he’d played his hand as best he could, and it was what it was. She got that. She even knew now how much he’d always cared about her, but she was still having a hell of time separating the past from the present.
    One thing she couldn’t ignore, though, was that if he hadn’t come back into her life, she would have never met Nate.
    She walked over to the pedestrian door in the wall that surrounded her brother’s property, and pressed the intercom buzzer.
    No response.
    She pressed again, and received the same non-answer.
    There was a numbered security pad next to the buzzer. She punched in the code Nate had created for her, waited for the click, and entered.
    A driveway took up most of the area in front of the house. There were no cars present, and the door to the garage was shut.
    Though the house was two stories high, the level she was standing in front of was the top, while the lower level, the one where the bedrooms and the gym were located, followed the slope of the hill down.
    There was no doorbell button next to the entrance. If anyone made it that far, it would be only because someone inside had buzzed them through the front gate. There was, however, another security keypad hidden behind a moveable flap of siding directly below the porch light.
    Though Nate had shown it to her and given her a code—different from the one for the gate—she had never used it before. She hunted around for several seconds before she found the right spot, then closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly how he’d said the panel opened.
    In, to the left, and up , she thought.
    She did as she remembered and was pleased when the lower edge of the flap popped out. Moving it all the way up, she exposed the panel. The new code was one she wasn’t likely to forget—the room numbers of the first two hotels they’d stayed in together, starting with the hotel in Paris where everything between them had begun.
    Twenty seconds later she was standing inside.
    “Nate?” she called out.
    The silence was total, and she knew she was alone.
    Just to be sure, though, she left her bag in the foyer, checked the top floor, and headed down the stairs to the lower level.
    “Nate?” she said again.
    The bedrooms and the room that served as the gym were all empty. She entered Nate’s