Blog Tour: The Decision Maker by C. Hallman

I’m supposed to be confident in the decisions I make.

The Decision Maker, an all-new enemies to lovers romance from USA Today bestselling author C. Hallman is now available!

I’m supposed to be confident in the decisions I make.

Everyone counts on me to be sure of myself, never to waiver.

How can I do my job when I feel so lost and confused, trapped between what I know is wrong…

and yet feels so right?

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A cursory search was done of Natalie’s apartment when she vanished. At the time, there was a little more panic—after everything Mason went through to get Teagan back, the fear that their psychotic mother had also targeted Natalie was real. As far as we know, she was just as much in the dark about her mother being alive as Mason was before Beverly showed her face for the first time in years. Mason was terrified his sister had been taken, that somehow their mother’s twisted psyche had resulted in more violence and cruelty.

Right away, that theory died when it became clear Natalie took precautions before leaving. This was not a woman who was kidnapped in the dead of night. Her CIA training told her not to leave anything behind that would lead us to her, but also not to take anything that could be easily traced. Finding she had destroyed her electronic devices and wiped her hard drives drove the point home.

She was on her own and did not want to be found.

Dallas uses the pass key to access her suit. Only Mason and Nat have a whole floor to themselves since there are the two who usually stay at the Hotel all the time. Their jobs as the manager and the decision maker demand all of their time. We step into her apartment, and right away, the familiar scent of Natalie’s perfume overwhelms me. Vanilla with notes of orange, cinnamon, and sandalwood. It’s subtle, something I’ve smelled a million times and never consciously connected to her. Smelling it now sets off a bitter pang deep in my gut. Loss. Regret.

Could I have stopped this from happening somehow?

Big surprise, no such emotions burden Dallas. I’m fairly sure he swore off genuine human emotion before I was born. “Let’s split up. I’ll take the bedroom, bathroom, and office. You can have the rest.” As usual, his word is law, and he marches off to the bedroom without missing a beat.

Fine. I would rather work without him hovering over me, anyway. I start by searching under furniture, tipping the sofa and chairs backward in case there’s something taped beneath them. Anything—an extra device, a notebook, a flash drive. I go through the kitchen cabinets, taking the drawers out, searching for false bottoms. She’s not some innocent rookie. She knows her shit. She knows how to cover her tracks.

I would normally appreciate that—it might even have turned me on in the past. How capable and shrewd she is. Right now, though, it’s a pain in the ass.

“How’s it going?” Dallas asks from where he is going through the bathroom vanity by the sounds of it. I have to bite my tongue rather than announce I totally cracked the case, and simply didn’t feel like filling him in before now. He irks the shit out of me with his superior attitude, but Natalie could be in trouble. She needs us. I can swallow my pride and let this old man think he’s top dog for a little while.

“She’s not lazy. She’s too disciplined to leave anything behind that we could use.”

“You never know,” he insists. “There’s got to be something around here. She was in a hurry when she left—she couldn’t have thought of everything.”

If that’s what he needs to tell himself. “I thought you figured she had Beverly coaching her through all of this. Pulling the strings and all that shit. She would’ve prepared for possibly having to run.”

He’s quiet for a long time. We don’t agree on what we think her motive was for running. He thinks her twisted-as-fuck mother somehow roped her in. I think she was completely in the dark, and Beverly framed her to distract us from what she’s doing behind the scenes. Why she would throw her own daughter under the bus is a mystery, but it’s a mystery why she would try to kill Mason, too. Some things can’t be explained. It’s a waste of time trying.

I look up when Dallas exits the bathroom, standing between it and the kitchen. “Let’s get one thing straight. I wouldn’t put it past Beverly to use Natalie if she is dead set on hurting Mason. It would not only give her insight into Mason’s daily life and how to best get to him, but it would be fucking with him up here.” He taps the side of his head, looking grim. “That doesn’t mean I think Natalie’s guilty. Parent shit… there’s no black-and-white when it comes to that.”

I find it hard to believe Natalie could know her mother was alive and not tell Mason, but I’ll keep that to myself. He can’t know her the way I do if he is willing to entertain that theory.

It’s fucking wrong and unprofessional to let my personal feelings color my interpretation of this, but some things can’t be denied. Nothing matters more to her than family. After losing both parents and their older brother, all Mason and Nat had was each other. Unless Beverly managed to get in her head and poison her, I can’t believe Natalie would do anything to hurt him. I can’t force my imagination to entertain that possibility.

I stare at the backsplash behind the stove, silently going back and forth. Telling myself I need to be objective, but unable to let go of the image of who I believe Natalie to be. As I stare, I see something I’ve never noticed before. I never had a reason to. Who fucked this up? I ask myself, reaching out and running a hand over a section of slate gray and black tile that’s slightly out of alignment with the surrounding tiles. Everything else about this suite is perfect—they spared no expense in upgrading, retrofitting, and making certain that even someone with the most discerning taste couldn’t possibly have anything to complain about. Yet this tile was left all sloppy and off-center?

“Holy shit.” A slight touch and, like magic, the entire section of the wall lifts out. I have to catch it before it slides between the wall and the back of the stove. “Dallas!” I bark, placing the tile and the sheet rock it was attached to on the stove before plucking a small notebook from inside the hollow space behind it.

“Good work.” He steps up beside me, peering at the small, neat handwriting. I would know it anywhere. She’s so precise.

Though it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. “What is this?” I murmur, flipping through the pages. It’s gibberish, words strung together at random.

“Give it here, young buck.” Dallas plucks the notebook from my grip before I have the chance to comply. “It’s code. CIA code.”

“And you can read it?”

“I absolutely can.” He looks as grim as he sounds. “These are coordinates.”

“Locations?”

“It would appear that way.”

And she was hiding it. Using code to keep outsiders like me from being able to find out where she might be headed. A list of safe houses? It’s possible, but whose? And why would she know about them?

A glance at Dallas tells me he’s as perplexed as I am—and as concerned. “This might sound like it’s coming from the wrong place,” he murmurs, tapping the vinyl-covered book against his open palm while staring out the window at a gray, drizzly day. “But I think this should stay between the two of us.”

He pauses for a beat, then looks my way over his shoulder. “Do you read me?”

I do, and I’m surprised we were thinking along the same lines. Mason does not need to know about this until we understand what we’re looking at. I don’t know yet whether we would be protecting him or protecting Natalie. I only know if he were to go chasing after her as conflicted and nearly frantic as he is, it could ruin everything.

Not to mention the fact that his mother could be behind all of it and could be expecting him to fall so easily for the bait she left. There’s just no way of knowing.

“I read you,” I tell him, and though we’ve been on the same team from the beginning, now it feels real. And if we fuck this up, it’s both of our necks on the chopping block.