by Sylvie Kurtz
The screech of alarm crashed over him in a breaker of noise, jarring him wide awake. A red light blinked on a panel of steady green on his bedside table.
Someone had breached security at the front door.
Chapter Seven
The Harris’s Hawk posed on the Aerie’s front step was dead. Its black-and-brown wings were spread as if it was in flight. Its yellow eyes—once piercing, now glazed—were open. Its gray beak held a tiny brass vial like the ones once carried by messenger pigeons. Bells adorned its legs. Sebastian recognized the bird as Orion, one of Mario’s hunting companions. He’d seen Orion soar through the sky and bring down a pheasant in the woods. To see him dead like that on his doorstep made him want to wring Kershaw’s neck just as he’d done to the bird.
Sebastian ground his back teeth as Kingsley snapped photographs of the hawk against the snow. The bursts of flash made every gory detail too stark.
Patience, once a strength, had all but frittered away over the past week. Do something. Get it over with. The beat of that need gunned like a revving engine as his life fell apart around him. And here he was standing, waiting. Again.
Once Kingsley was done, Sebastian carefully extracted the metal vial with tweezers from the Swiss Army knife he carried in his pocket. Using the tweezers and the tip of the knife, he unrolled the tiny scroll. The message, printed in Old English script, read, “Who’s afraid of the big bad manhunter? Not me. Not me.”
He could practically hear Kershaw’s laughter on the wind. The icy bite of it slashed at his chest. He scanned the area, but could see nothing in the shifting darkness of night.
Kershaw was out there, watching. His presence prickled Sebastian’s skin with the intuition hunter had for prey. “Find him.”
Mercer nodded and started out the door.
“Hang on.” Sebastian turned to Kingsley. “Did Mario open the gates for anyone?”
Kingsley shook his head.
Sebastian’s gaze connected with Mercer. Kershaw would go through anyone to get to him, and Mario wasn’t exactly in his prime. The master falconer wouldn’t have let anyone get to his birds without a fight. And those damn birds were the reason Mario had refused to leave until Kershaw was caught. “Check out the gatehouse. Make sure he’s okay.”
Mercer nodded again, and Reed followed him out.
“Anything show up on the security cameras?” Sebastian asked Kingsley, focusing on the job at hand and not on the fact that he wasn’t the one out doing the hunting.
Kingsley peered at the digital images frozen on the screen on the back of the camera. “Not a flicker.”
“Run the tapes again. He couldn’t have gotten past the sensors.”
Kingsley nodded and left.
“What’s going on?” Cari asked.
Sebastian turned and saw the three women huddled in the hallway and ran a hand over his face. He didn’t need this right now.
Cari was dressed in flannel pajamas patterned like a sky. With her tousled hair and her face free of ghoulish makeup, she looked like the vulnerable girl she was. Paula held on tight to the throat of her gray fleece zippered robe. Her eyes were owl-wide and her mouth hung open in a choked O. Olivia wore a navy sweatshirt over the pale lavender nightgown that skimmed her ankles—his sweatshirt. She looked lost in it. Her eyes were filled with questions. And he found he liked that expectant look better than the vacant one.
“Go back to bed.” He closed the front door to hide the dead bird. “It’s nothing.”
“A dead bird is nothing?” Cari snorted. “Did you notice the thing’s a hawk? Looks like a message to me, Falconer.” She patted the pockets of her pajama bottoms. “I need a cigarette.”
“Smoking’s bad for you,” he said, not quite sure how to deal with a scared teenager.
Cari glanced at the closed door. “Like living here’s going to do much for my life expectancy.”
“Go back to bed.” If he’d had his way, he wouldn’t have had to compromise and neither she nor Paula would be here to complicate the situation. “I’m handling it.”
“Yeah, right.” She rolled the scrunched pack of cigarettes between her palms. “You’re doing a swell—”
“That’s enough,” Paula said, waking from her stupor. “Give me that.” She snatched the cigarettes from Cari’s hand and stuffed them in the pocket of her robe. Putting an arm around both Cari and Olivia, Paula herded them toward the kitchen. “I’ll make some hot milk and we can all calm down.”
“How about a drink?” Cari asked. “I saw some scotch in the living room.”
“Carolina Woodruff!”
“Oh, mother, lighten up.”
Olivia’s gaze wouldn’t let his go. She twisted away from Paula’s grasp. “The man?”
He’d never found achieving the balance between truth and protection hard before. One answer would scare her; the other would anger her. Anger was easier to handle than vulnerability. “The bird probably just flew into a window. Happens all the time.”
Cari snorted. “At night?”
Paula herded. “Hot milk. That’s the ticket. We’ll all feel better and get a good night’s sleep.”
Olivia frowned, fighting the tide of Paula’s will. “Sebastian…”
It was the first time she’d used his name since the accident. He’d always liked the way it sounded wrapped in her voice.
They disappeared around the corner, and Sebastian let out a breath. Using the shovel he kept in the hall closet for spreading salt on winter ice, he scooped up the hawk and placed it in a paper bag. Maybe Kingsley could find some trace of evidence.
He headed down to his office. As he closed the door, pressure opposed him. He looked up, and Olivia’s expectant eyes met his.
“I want to help,” she said.
“The best way to help is to let me do my job.”
“She waited,” Olivia started to say, then her hand went up and plucked the air as if it would help bring the words she sought to her. “And she was leaving.”
“It’s not the same thing, Olivia.”
“I don’t want to just wait.”
He shook his head. “Olivia—”
“The bird…it’s from the man.” She licked her lips and frowned. “The man who wants to hurt her to hurt you.”
He was fighting to protect her. Why couldn’t she just accept that and let him do his job? “That’s a possibility.”
“He wants to hurt her, but I’m not her.”
“Olivia, you’ll get better—”
“Tell him.” She grabbed on to his shirt collar and tugged on it. “Tell him I’m not her. Tell him I can’t hurt you.”
He bowed his head. If she only knew how much power she had—memory or not—over him. “It won’t work, Olivia. He knows I won’t let any innocent person get hurt.”
It had come out all wrong. The pain in her eyes cut him.
“She waited, and she left.” She touched his cheek. Her forehead rucked. She shook her head. “I don’t want to just wait.”
He dragged her palm to his lips and pressed a kiss into it. Her staying was a small victory he wanted to have earned. “I have to keep you safe.” He’d failed his parents. He’d failed his partner as a rookie cop. He’d already failed Olivia once. He couldn’t let anymore harm come to her.
“The house? It’s safe?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, trying not to think of the holes Kingsley had mentioned or of the frozen weight of the dead bird in the bag in his hand. He avoided looking at the accusing bruise glaring at him from the left side of her face.
“Then let me help. Here, in the house.”
Olivia and work were separate. He had to keep them that way. If the lines blurred, how would he come back to himself? “There’s nothing for you to do, except work on getting better.” And be here when it’s all over.
“They help,” she said, jutting her chin in Kingsley’s direction.
Only because he’d had no choice in the matter. “I have all the help I need.”
Kingsley looked up from his monitor. “She can file.”
Sebastian threw him his most deadly stare. Kingsley’s eager-puppy eyes didn’t flinch. He jerked up one shoulder. “What? I can’t keep up with the paperwork. It’ll give her something useful to do.”
Sebastian didn’t want her in his office. She belonged upstairs where the sky and sun lived. Not down here where the stench of evil made the air stale. His free hand flexed at his side. This was still his home. He was still in charge. He handed Kingsley the package with the dead bird, then took Olivia’s elbow. “I’ll walk you up.”
She was silent as they climbed the stone steps. The sound of his shoes and her slippers scritched against the stone like whispers of ghosts.
She let him lead her through the hall, and she let him support her when her toe caught the edge of the hall runner. Their shadows crept ahead of them like phantoms in the backlight from the stairs.
At the entrance to the living room, she grabbed his sleeve and pulled him in. Letting go of his shirt, she paced the oval of carpet patterned with fall leaves with an agitation that sent up flags of warning.
“I don’t know you,” she said, not with accusation, but as a matter of fact. “I don’t know myself.”
“Olivia—”
“I can’t paint. Paula won’t let me cook. You won’t let me leave the house. What am I supposed to do?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Work with Cecilia. Get better.”
“Writing notes to myself so I won’t forget?” She shook her head, then grabbed a white square of paper from the coffee table. One of the many such pieces scattered around the house. She scrunched it and pitched it toward the fireplace. “No, I need more.”
“You were in an accident. You need to take it easy.”
“For how long?” She flung the words at him over her shoulder. Her eyes held the same sad look she’d worn the night she’d left him. Was it only a few days ago?
“This isn’t forever,” he said, knowing instinctively she wasn’t talking about her recovery but her imprisonment. The echo of her plea resonated in his mind. You’re a contained man, Sebastian, and I need to spill over. Did this Olivia still feel the need to spill over, too?
She swiveled to face him, both fists hard at her sides. “How long?”
She was pushing him, and he didn’t like to be pushed. His jaw tightened. “As long as it takes to put Kershaw back behind bars.”
She came toward him one deliberate step at a time, eyed him straight and strong. “How long?”
I need to find my strength, she’d said.
Looks like you found it, sweetheart. And he didn’t like the way it had him scrambling for the upper hand. “A day. A week.”
“A month? A year?” She shook her head and lifted her arms. He could almost see the dead expectations he’d failed to meet rising around her. “And I’m supposed to just sit here and wait for you like she did?”
One Olivia superimposed herself on the other, making a dizzying mirage. Let me go, Sebastian.
No, I can’t. “Be reasonable.”
She stood there before him, so stiff and still he could feel the rumble of the volcano inside her waiting to erupt. “If she could help, would Olivia have just sat there?”
Why was she pushing him? “Olivia would have understood. She would have lost herself in a painting, and she would have left me to my work—no questions asked.” He frowned at the hitch of confusion twisting in his thoughts.
A quarter turn. Her gaze scanned the rough-hewn maple mantel above the stone fireplace, resting for a brief moment on each framed photo. “You’ll get those pieces of your life back, Olivia. Give yourself a chance.”
Then her gaze settled on his favorite picture of her—all of her soft gentleness captured by his lens. That’s it, Olivia. Look at how I see you. “I took that picture in September when we hiked to the top of Monadnock.”
With a swipe of her hand, she tumbled the row of frames. He reached forward trying to catch the fall of the past before it shattered. He caught her wrist to stay the thrust of her unexpected anger. Too late. Frames and glass fractured on the stone hearth in splinters and shards.
Holding her securely in his arms, he turned her toward him. She glared at him with all the fury of that dormant volcano spewing to life. Each word was perfectly enunciated, blistering with heat, blazing with a passion he’d never seen in Olivia. “If that’s who she is, then I do not want to be Olivia.”
The air around her crackled. The sparks in her eyes challenged. The flush of her cheeks radiated the hot fire of her temper.
“Why are you being so difficult?” How could she reject herself out of hand like that without even giving herself time to heal? Adrenaline flamed his blood. Breath jammed in his throat. Fingers sinking deeper into her soft flesh, he meant to push her away, but drew her closer. “You are Olivia. Whether you remember or not, you’ll always be Olivia.”
“No.”
If he could not reach her with logic, he would reach her in the silent language they spoke so well. He bent his head toward hers and crushed his mouth to hers. Rushing sea burst against hot lava. She was his. Always. The sizzling taste of her electrified him. The feel of her against him fed the hunger he’d had to leash since he’d returned. The way her curves molded to his angles was both well-known and strangely brand-new.
“I am not Olivia.” She was breathless, but softening as she always did in his arms.
“She’s you. You’re her.” He barely recognized the guttural noise scraping out of his throat as his own voice. He feasted on her mouth, her neck, her shoulder. He drank in new responses from familiar flesh. His hands claimed, possessed.
“She’s gone.” She met him kiss for kiss, caress for caress, need for need, and he found his lost self again in the woman who was his salvation.
“Olivia.” It was a plea. It was a prayer.
He would not give up on all they’d built, on all they’d meant to each other. It was there still inside her. Had to be. How could it not when she responded to him like this? “I’ll help you remember.” If it took a thousand nights, a million kisses. “I won’t let you forget.”
Holding his jaw with both her palms, she held his gaze with her wide-opened pupils. The heat of her breath shimmered against his mouth. “She’s gone, Sebastian. All gone.”
“No, not all.” He knotted her long hair in his fists. “You look like her.” As if he were a dying man needing oxygen, he breathed in the flowery scent of her shampoo, the sweetness of her skin. “You smell like her.” He tipped her head to one side and savored the pulsing heat at her neck, gorged on it as if it were nectar. “You taste like her.” No, not like her. Different. Damn. Richer, rawer, sharper. Dazed by his discovery, the fever of his desire mutated, but didn’t cool. He wanted her still.
“There is a woman wearing her skin and her hair and her smell, but she isn’t Olivia.” Her voice was a choked whisper.
Melancholy fisted his gut. Breathing hard, eyes closed, he held her, heart drumming against heart, while he tried to recover his control.
If he could want the stranger in Olivia’s skin so fiercely, what did that say about him? About the strength of his love for his wife? About his competence?
Biting back the strangled growl that tore through him, he ripped his body from her beguiling heat and left.
HE HAD NOT COME BACK to the bedroom they shared. She’d watched black night turn into purple dawn and still his side of the bed remained empty and cold. Olivia turned in the flannel sheets to face the sunny window. The peaks of mountains greeted her, strong and tall in the golden sunlight.
She heard him now on the other side of the bathroom door. All the little noises that made up the man—the scrape of razor over cheeks, the swish of brush over teeth, the rush of comb through wet hair. They all seemed so ordinary, so normal.
The steam from his shower carried his scent, bringing back the sensory overload of his kiss. Her sensitive skin still tingled from his
touch. The taste of him had had a wild edge to it that she found she liked. The look of him, raw with need, had set off a chain reaction she hadn’t wanted to stop. In his arms, she’d felt alive, not like the walking dead. Was that how it had been between her and him before, live wire crossing live wire, sparking?
She wanted that electrifying feeling again. She wanted more. But she wanted it for herself, not for the Olivia she couldn’t remember.
She reached for the photo album on the night table. In each of the photographs, she looked for herself in Olivia and saw only a stranger. For days now, Paula had walked her through the pictures of her past, and for days she’d looked through the pictures like an archaeologist and tried to put back the pieces of the life she’d once led.
With a snap, she pushed away the album, flung back the sheets and got up. She strolled through the room like a sleuth looking for a clue. She touched the teal-and-blue swirls in the glass vase that held no flowers. She could not remember why she’d chosen it, where she’d bought it or if she’d ever arranged flowers in it. Palms curved around the glass, she silently begged for a spark of recognition. When she got none, she banged it back into place. A chip broke off the base and skittered across the smooth surface of the dresser.
She fingered the earrings and pendants and bracelets with their shiny gold and precious gems in the teak jewelry box. She tried to remember wearing the pear-shaped amethyst, the oval sapphire, the square emerald, and could not recall their weight against her skin. Holding them now, she commanded a glimpse into their history. When she got none, she shoved the jewels back in the drawer.
She sat in the ash glider by the window and willed herself to remember being here. But the back and forth movement stirred nothing inside her, except the echo of tears she couldn’t shed.
