Redheaded Redemption (Redheads Book 2)

by Rebecca Royce

  “Like this?” Max put a spoonful of something he was cooking in my mouth, and I ate it fast. This was typical with him. He liked my opinion on what he was making, even if he never wanted to discuss with me where we should go on vacation.

  I did like it. “Delicious. Is that…soup?”

  “It is. I think soups are really nice in the winter. I was thinking of adding two. That’s a pumpkin soup.”

  “Outstanding.”

  He grinned. “Awesome.”

  When he smiled that way, I could forget all of the things that worried me about us going forward. This part of Max was easy. I didn’t know how I was going to do without this… I was still here, and already, I could feel the anticipatory ache.

  At what point did we put an end to what we were doing? “Do you hear anything from Michael about the mob?”

  “Nothing new.” He walked back to the kitchen. “He’s working on it.”

  “And you knew someone in that part of the world who could have at some point helped?” I suddenly remembered the conversation from the hospital.

  Max turned off the oven and came around to me. “Hope, if there were anything I could do, I would do it. I hope you know that. The guy I knew, the one who owes me a lot at this point, has vanished. That’s what guys like him do. They vanish. I’m not sure where I would start to find him. If something pops up, I’ll do it, I promise.”

  “I know. I was just…unclear about what that had all meant. Blame the drugs.”

  He grinned. “Do you like to sled?”

  I never got to answer that because his phone rang. He frowned and stared at it. Most people texted these days. Max answered it. “Michael? What’s going on? Okay.” He took the phone from his ear and put it on speaker. “She’s here. She can hear you.”

  “I need you two to get out of there. Your location is compromised.”

  Max blinked, fast. “What? How can that be?”

  “Your sister has been posting about Hope on social media. It’s been seen by the wrong people. I’m sending the guys from a nearby location to come get you. We’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  “Which fucking sister?” His face was all hard lines now, the easiness of earlier totally gone.

  Michael sighed. “Seems like Trina really doesn’t like Hope.”

  No, she didn’t. I closed my eyes for just a second. Well, she’d wanted me gone. She might have arranged a permanent solution and not even known it.

  “I fucking told her,” Max yelled. “We’ll be ready.” He hung up the phone, and we both stood there for a long moment staring at each other.

  This was both the worst and best possible time for me to say what I had to say. We couldn’t take a step forward in this world until we did.

  “Max, do you love me? If you don’t, do you think you ever could?”

  He stepped back like I’d struck him and shook his head. “What?”

  “You heard me.” I wasn’t going to move on this or be put off. “Answer, please, because I’m in love with you.”

  His whole face fell from the angry horror of a second earlier to utter disappointment. “I think I’ve been very clear about this, Hope.”

  I held up my hand. “I want you to say it to me, okay? I’m telling you that I’m in love with you. That it came on…not all of a sudden…not like wham, Hope is in love with Max…but like it was just there one day, something that happened when I wasn’t paying attention. I’m in love with you. Max, can you love me?”

  He visibly swallowed. “No, baby. I’m sorry. I’m not built for love. I’m just not right.”

  I held up my hand to stop him from saying whatever else he would have said. I wasn’t crying. This was too awful for tears. They’d come. Later. When I let them loose. Now isn’t the time. “You are built for love. I’ve seen it. When you’re not guarding yourself. When you’re not paying attention or convincing yourself that you’re not. All of those very good people who love you? They don’t do so in spite of you, they do so because of you. The same reason I love you. You just don’t understand yourself, and that…is dreadful.” I took a long breath. “But that’s neither here nor there. We all get to determine our futures. I’m rambling. Listen, you can’t come with me.”

  He strode toward me so close, he could touch me, but he didn’t. “Hope, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not. Here’s how I see this.” Oh yes, there was the pain. Deep. All-consuming. Threatening to pull me under. Still, I continued. “You have to go back to your restaurant. If you loved me, if we were in love, then that would be one thing. But you don’t. I can’t take one more thing from you. There is a line with friendship, and I’ve long crossed over it. It’s time for you to go.”

  “For the love of god, Hope.” He shook his head. “I can decide when I need to go back to work.”

  “I won’t be responsible for another restaurant of yours failing. I can’t live with it. And okay, I’m also being selfish because I have to stop being in love with you, and I can’t do that with you here. Not with you standing there, being you. All the things about you. Your big caring heart. The way you laugh. How it feels to sleep next to you. The way we watch movies together. How you know the names of every plant we pass outside. Seeing you in the kitchen. Even your stupid bad moods. I can’t stop loving you if you’re there, so you can’t go with me.”

  I looked around for things to grab that I could take with me, but nothing in the house belonged to me. I’d brought nothing but the clothes on my back, and even they had come from the clinic in Germany. Well…that was easy. I’d find a way to get these clothes back to his family. “Listen, I have no right to ask for anything from you. You’ve done nothing but give and give.” I shook my head. “But I need one more favor, okay? I need you to never contact me again. I don’t have a phone, so I’ll have to get a new one, new number. Don’t find it. Never see me again, so that someday, I can live in the world and not think of us, okay?”

  The tears I’d held off flooded down my face. Apparently, the gates had opened and there they were. I sucked in my breath. “You can do that for me, can’t you, Max? You can stay away.” There was a knock on the door. The guards arrived. I looked at Max one last time. He was stiff, unreadable. I had no idea what to make of him. Maybe I never had. “Goodbye. Be safe. I’ll…I’ll always be rooting for you. Thank you. For everything.”

  And I ran. Like the coward I was. Away from him.

  Wherever I was, whoever lived here, they lived in a house where the clocks audibly ticked. I didn’t know how he could stand it. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  I got up. It was the first time I’d moved since I’d been brought to this place, and I took the batteries out of the back of the clock in my room. That was better. A knock sounded, and I opened the door. Then my mouth fell open.

  Michael?

  “I heard you moving,” Michael Li explained as he leaned against the doorframe. “Come eat something.”

  I nodded. “I thought they’d bring me to Layla’s.”

  “We can arrange it if you want to be there. I wouldn’t want to be around people and their loving family if I was feeling like you are. That’s the last place I’d want to be, no matter how much my sister loved me.”

  He made an interesting point. I wiped at my eyes. “I don’t even really remember getting here.”

  “You cried yourself to sleep on the plane. Barely moved when we got you off. I was getting worried, but then I remembered that you’re a survivor, kid.”

  I laughed. “I’m a coward, and I don’t know if I’m a survivor, but thank you.”

  He’d poured cereal for me, so I sat at the counter by the bowl. Michael came by with coffee and placed it in front of me. It wasn’t how I took my coffee, and I wasn’t sure what the cereal was. It looked like cornflakes. I was grateful for anything. Except I couldn’t help but think about the oatmeal or waffles Max would have made. Tears came again, and I pulled them back from where they threatened. How did I have any left?

  “You are
. All of you are.” He walked to the window and looked outside to where the light shone through the window.

  I took a bite of the cereal. “Where am I?”

  “Idaho. My house. I’m almost never here, but it’s mine.” He shook his head. “We have to talk about what to do with you now. Eat your cereal. Drink your coffee, then we’ll work it out.”

  I did as he directed because I needed food. Still, I had barely gotten any down when I just couldn’t eat anymore. My stomach twisted in knots. Maybe I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. Max didn’t believe he could love someone because of whatever shit he’d been through that he wouldn’t talk about. If I’d just hung on, maybe he would’ve come around. I groaned. No, that was how people got themselves in trouble—believing in what couldn’t be. If someone told you who they were, you were obligated to believe them.

  He was an almost forty-year-old man. If he didn’t love me, I had to believe he knew what he was talking about.

  Michael took my bowl and put it in the sink. “The day I had to leave Layla in France unprotected was the second worst day of my life, and I’ve had pretty big ones.”

  I sipped my coffee. “I can wash my own dish.”

  “Yes. Do that. I’m just leaving it in the sink.” He grinned at me. “I’m a little…compulsive when it comes to certain things. Dishes have to go in the sink when they’re done. We’re lucky if I don’t start clearing the table while everyone is still eating.”

  That was a funny image. It made me grin. “Can I ask what the worst day was? Or is it one of those things you don’t talk about?”

  He sat in the chair. “The day after Layla left with Zeke for Washington, I told Bridget how I feel about her. Then she left for Hong Kong.”

  “What?” I practically shouted and almost fell off the stool.

  He held up his hand. “I came to suspect you didn’t know. The secrets you keep from each other in this family could fill up my whole house. I tell you this because I want you to understand that I feel your pain. Not that I’ve felt it, but that I feel it. All the time.” He tapped his fingers on the counter. “It hasn’t yet gotten better for me. It might never. But I’ve been able to live my life, and my concern is that locking you up to keep you safe is just going to make things so much worse.”

  I was still trying to digest that A, he had confessed to Bridget and she’d run away, and that B, Michael had been walking around taking care of all of us in this mess in this amount of pain. What in the fuck was the matter with my sister? Who threw away that kind of love? Not to mention, I was downright convinced she’d been in love with him for forever too. I really needed a phone. Being out of touch was getting old.

  “Should we throw me to the Russians and be done with it?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “But I’ve been considering how we can let you loose, with a discreet guard, and not keep you locked up. So that you can have a life, see a therapist.” He threw that one in there, and I supposed I could be upset if he hadn’t been absolutely correct in my need for one. His being around since I was sixteen gave him some rights to say things to me. “And find some happiness. Max is a moron. I mean, I really liked him. He had you, and he let you go. Idiot.”

  I smiled. That was the kind of thing friends said, and right then, for the first time, Michael felt like my friend. We’d gone through gunfire together. Maybe that had opened some kind of door. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “If you could pick any place out of New York, where would you go?”

  Good question. Max’s words about Portland and how that could have made him close but not too close to his family resonated with me. “I’d like to be able to see Layla. See Noah grow up. Listen to Zeke go on about the wine. I’d prefer to do so without having to live with them, but they are really remote. I need…I need to go back to school. Get some kind of certificate to go with my degree, so that I can do something other than live off my reputation. Maybe raise money for organizations that help people? Not just the very rich amusing themselves. Meet people.”

  “And that would be where?” He asked the question, raising his eyebrows like he already knew the answer.

  “Seattle.” It occurred to me that I’d known the answer this whole time. Of course I should go to Seattle. I loved Seattle. It was a really fantastic city.

  “That would work, if you’re willing to do the hard part.”

  I swallowed. “What’s that?”

  “You’re too recognizable. Hope Radford is wanted by the Russian mob, so Hope Radford has to disappear. Your middle name is Amelia. That was your great-grandmother.” Michael really knew quite a lot about us. “Her maiden name was West. Amelia West. She can go wherever she likes. I’m actually quite good at disappearing people, better at it than I should be. Paperwork can be altered easily, particularly when taking the name of a dead person who already had a social security number.”

  My mouth fell open. “Wow. I…I guess I could go by Amelia.”

  He nodded. Michael had really thought the situation through. “You can. There’s just one more thing.”

  “What’s that?” My tired brain struggled to keep up with him.

  “The red hair. That is why people recognize you. Change your hair, and you can live a more normal life. With security quietly watching. The Russians will be dealt with. Soon. In the meantime, there is this. What do you think?”

  I’d always been a redhead. I’d made a living from it. Matched my sisters. Stood out in public because, for some reason, it had garnered so much attention. It was also why I’d gotten stuck. Somehow, it had become my identity. Was it possible to leave Hope Radford in Maine? To leave behind the woman that had one-sidedly loved a man who couldn’t feel that way about her? Start over?

  “Sure. Let’s do it.”

  Michael touched my shoulder. “I can never get over how brave you are.”

  “I’m not. I’m pretty much a coward.”

  He shook his head. “I wish you could see yourself the way the rest of us see you.”

  There was still just one more thing I had to do as Hope. One final loose end to tie off. “I need a phone. A new number. Can you register it to the new name?”

  “Easily.” He patted my shoulder.

  Later that afternoon when he handed me the phone, he’d programmed a lot of numbers into it. I scanned through, noting Zeke’s was in there. Zeke. Layla. Bridget. But no Max. That was perfect. I’d never learned his digits, just having relied on it being in my phone. This was like a detox. Sort of.

  I could be done with Max soon. After I sent Zeke a message. Michael had discussed my name change with Zeke. They all knew who I was going to pretend to be.

  Hi, it’s Amelia. That was so strange to type. Can you find out how much Max would need to pay off his investors?

  There was a pause, and he answered me. Are you sure you want to do this?

  Final step. Sometime in the future, we can talk about what I did to him, but I need to finish this first. And I didn’t really particularly feel like I needed to explain it to anyone anymore.

  Right before I went to bed, he pinged me with a number. A huge number. More than I currently had in my bank account, but I knew how I could get it.

  Michael had gone to bed hours ago, so I shot him a text he could get in the morning. I need to sell something. Can your guys do it for me?

  Three months later.

  I’d thought it might feel huge, overwhelming. The day that I had the bank anonymously wire the money to Max’s investors so they were paid off, I put an end to a time that was feeling further and further away from me. But it actually didn’t. Selling my mother’s painting hadn’t been as monumental as I thought it would be. September had belonged to the old Hope. It came to represent a time I was leaving far behind.

  Everything about my life was different moving forward. My therapist said the move was probably cathartic. I liked that word. It was a good one. He’d be free to have the life he should have had before I’d come out of nowhere and disrupte
d it.

  The news blasted in the room to give me background noise while I wrote my paper, due at nine in the morning, that I’d just started. I’d forgotten what a procrastinator I was in school.

  Done yet? Bridget texted.

  Nope. I answered her.

  We still hadn’t talked about Michael. I’d kept my secrets, so she was entitled to hers, even if I itched to ask her every time we spoke or texted.

  You should have been working on it all week.

  I rolled my eyes. If I procrastinated, Bridget had always been annoyingly early in getting all of her work done. Her nagging me wasn’t helping.

  “And in other news,” the reporter said. “A sad story today. Shawn Callihan Junior, the son of Senator Shawn Callihan, drowned while out on his boat. Seems the young lobbyist was swimming when he must have gotten a cramp and drowned. His body was recovered earlier today. A spokesperson on behalf of the senator says…”

  I couldn’t hear any more words. Shawn was dead. The asshole who drugged and raped me was dead. My hands shook so hard, I could hardly hold my phone to text. Tears fell from my eyes. Relief. Yes, sweet relief. I should never wish dead on anyone, but I wouldn’t have to see him anymore, wouldn’t have to face the possibility of watching him run for office or even bump into randomly at any point for the rest of my life.

  Shawn’s dead. I texted Bridget and Layla at the same time.

  I just saw, Layla texted back. Was just texting you.

  What? Bridget answered a second later. How are you? Are you okay?

  I’m shocked. I think. That was the best I could do.

  At three in the morning, with my paper badly done, I listened to my ceiling fan when my phone dinged again. Do you think he really drowned? Bridget asked.

  I dialed her number. If she was up and texting, she could talk. “Why wouldn’t I think he drowned?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems…strange. He drowned. After all this time. Was he out on the boat alone? Swimming by himself?”

  No one had mentioned a thing about it being strange. “Maybe that’s a thing that he did. I mean…people swim.”