by Aria Ford
I sighed. I closed my eyes. I felt myself drifting off to sleep, then, because I knew it was okay.
Alex was here and we were going home and it would be safe.
Chapter 14
Alex
I was beside Klaas as we drove back. I could feel my heart pounding with every inch of that trip back. We had Emma, that was true. But we had no idea if Team Two was fighting the kidnappers. And Emma was in serious conditions.
I shouted at Klaas. He had to go faster. Faster. We had to see a doctor, and as soon as we possibly could.
“Mr. Carring,” he said quietly. “This is my job. I don’t tell you how to do your one, do I?”
I wanted to hit him. I think I actually almost did, but thought against it at the last minute. He must have seen me unclench my hand, as he gave a short chuckle.
“I know that’s outta line, sir. But had to be said. You know.”
“I know,” I said, feeling my body suddenly weaker with the stress and the needless arguing.
Whoever it was didn’t say anything, and we were alone together, all three of us. I felt my eyelids heavier now and I closed my eyes, drifting into sleep.
Sleep was short lived, however. Someone—Alex, because I smelled his aftershave—carried me up some steps. Then he bellowed at someone.
“Paula! Get Dr. Harris down here.”
Chapter 15
Emma
I felt bad that he was shouting so unnecessarily and I tried to say it but the words refused to come out. I closed my eyes and let him carry me into another room and put me down on a bed. That made me even sleepier and I felt my eyelids become heavy and I stifled a yawn. Everything still hurt from having been tied so tightly with ropes and so I grunted in pain.
“Dr. Harris?”
I heard good-quality male shoes in the corridor, sticking a little to the tiles in a way that proves they are brand-new shoes. Then I felt a hand touch my head.
“Seems okay to me, sir.”
“For pity’s sake, man! I don’t pay you to stand here. Go have a look!”
I felt the touch probe more gently and then my head was consumed with burning pain.
“She has a fractured skull.”
I heard that sentence, and then I passed out.
I don’t know how long I slept. I only know that I woke much later with no idea where I was. I moved my feet down and they slid on cool fabric. I moved my shoulder back and it slid beneath a coverlet of what was obviously the same kind of cloth, or at least the same kind of cloth. I didn’t say anything but I guessed I was in a bed somewhere in the house. I was proved right.
“Emma? Emma! I’m here. It’s okay. Wake up. Do try to wake up? Doctor said you shouldn’t sleep too much.”
“Thanks.” I was being ironic. I really badly wished to sleep. He heard the irony and chuckled.
“Emma,” he said, his voice sounded raw. “I’m so glad you’re back now. You were kidnapped.”
“I know.” I was tired. Why was he telling me things that I knew? I wanted to shout at him for that alone, but I was too tired.
“You’re here, now,” Alex was saying. His hand stroked my hair and I bit my lower lip and wished he would avoid the tender place. He did so, if closely. “I had to promise the kids I’d bring you in. They’re beside themselves. They keep thinking you’re going to die like…”
“Like.”
I made it a statement, not a question. He sighed. “I thought I told you?”
“No.” I was angry, actually. I simply didn’t have the energy or I would have shouted it at him. But I didn’t, so I didn’t.
“Well,” he said, “I had a wife. You knew that…Jack and Cammi’s mom. Remember?”
I tried to make an affirmative noise, but my whole head hurt, and so I nodded. Yes.
“Well, she was my first wife. I married her. They shot her. Years later, after the company really went big.”
“What?” Even in my complete exhaustion, I had enough energy for that statement. I had no idea his first wife had died. That she had been shot by the same people who took me seemed uncanny. What did they get from doing such horrible things to the wives or friends of Alexander Carring?
“They shot her like they planned to do to you,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t let that happen and I wouldn’t. I came here straight away.”
I felt sobered. They were not just making empty threats. They really had meant to end my life. I felt really scared and I reached for his hand with my aching one and held it fast.
“It’s okay.”
I felt him stroke my hair again and again. He kept on repeating those words and when I did fall asleep I fell asleep with understanding.
It took three days for me to be well enough to get out of bed in the morning. But eventually I managed it. I held his arm and together we made a tour of the sitting room, starting at the crackling fire to the door at the other end of the hall. Then, as we sat side by side in front of the fireplace, me snuggling up closer, he told me.
“When I was married for a few years, I started making serious wealth,” he explained slowly. “I bought other companies. Sometimes, during the mergers, people lost their jobs. Sometimes the people who had owned the companies were not satisfied. Sometimes companies had managers who didn’t like my ideas and so they were retrenched.”
I saw where this was heading. “They resented you.”
He nodded. I felt it even though my eyes were closed. My head was on his chest and even the richness of his voice filled me.
“Yes, they did.” He nodded again, then picked up his story. “Two people at a phone company lost their jobs because of me. I wouldn’t have believed it possible but they made a gang. They were terrible at their work, apparently. But they still got the jobs, and so they should not have hated, but they did.”
I felt my hand tighten at that statement. “They shot your wife? From jealousy?”
I must have sounded absolutely horrified. I was.
He gave another hollow chuckle. “I had actually offered them other things. I tried to get down to the bottom of this, but they weren’t buying.”
“They hated you,” I said softly. I knew, now, that I had been right in what I had heard. The leader would do anything to Alex to get him.
“Right…” I whispered. I wanted to tell him he was right, but I wasn’t sure he had understood me. All I knew was that my head was aching and I felt sick and very sleepy and I knew I was dozing again.
“They wanted to kill me,” I whispered.
The laugh was brief and dry. “You.” He sighed. “They wanted to destroy me first Make me destroy all I had built up.” he sighed. I heard his voice wobble. “I should have done it,” he said, and he really was crying. His face was soaked in tears and I could feel them on my one shoulder and he still rocked, crying. “If I had done as they asked, if I had destroyed everything, they would have immediately left her alone. They said so.”
“No,” I said. I stroked the side of his face. I knew now that was not true. That was not what they had told me. The leader planned to end my life and he always had. He hated Alexander.
“No?” He stopped sobbing.
“Alex,” I said. This time I found the strength to turn a little so that I could face him directly. “I was there. I know they planned to kill her always. They were going to kill me. You didn’t have to give them anything. They would have killed me. They would also have destroyed you.”
“Emma?” he said, and he had shifted so he looked directly into my eyes, long legs folded under him where he sat with his knees on the floor before me.
“Uh?”
“If they had killed you, they would have destroyed me anyway. Emma! How can you not know how I love you?”
I stared. My head ached, but even on a day when I was perfectly healthy that would make no sense. He loved me? Alexander loved me? Alexander Carring?
“You…love me?”
He laughed again. “You silly woman!” he said, ruffling my hair in a teasing ki
nd of manner. “how could you possibly not see that?”
I laughed. He laughed. We kissed. We sat there all afternoon, talking to each other, reassuring each other that we were not going to disappear. That it really was okay now.
We slept together in the big bed. Later, when I woke and the first light touched me, we made love, then we slid out of bed and sat in front of the fireplace.
“I can’t believe you are okay,” Alex said, something he had said over and over again for the last day or so. I laughed.
“Yes, I am okay,” I said, and kissed his cheek.
While we sat there he explained what had happened between my captivity and his finding me. He had called a security firm that helped him find my location: a disused warehouse on the outskirts of town. They had found me. They had sat for a long while deciding how to save me.
“I was all for the suggestion of blowing the place off the map. But then, that would have hit you and that would have been the worst thing. So we just came inside.”
He explained how there were explosives in the cellar at his home. It had been a collection he saw and bought purely for interest, not because he actually wanted them. He and his helper, someone called Klaas, had set them against one wall and blown it in. Then they had come in and saved my life.
“Emma,” he said again, stroking my hair. “Emma, I can’t lose you.”
We dozed again with each other held in a firm grasp. We had made our choice.
Epilogue
We were married in a private ceremony. Alex had wanted it in some exotic place or other, but I wanted it where my friends could be there. So we had it just outside town. The kids had attended. Of everyone there, they were the only ones who seemed as if they had known all along.
“You might have thought they planned it,” we chuckled that night as we lay in bed together.
He laughed. “I know. They kept telling me they always knew. I don’t know how.”
I smiled. “Well, they’re very smart kids, you know,” I paused, kissing him on the side of his face, “and they get some of that from you.”
“Some of it?” He roared with laughter. “All of it, probably.”
He kissed me and we were silent a while.
I snuggled in closer to him, thoughts alive with the memory of our lovemaking from the previous night: how passionate and tender it had been, how loving.
“Emma,” he whispered, breathing into my hair. “I want you. We could…”
I giggled.
He grew quiet and I waited for him to say something. I had such excitement building in me.
“Emma?”
“Mm?”
“What were you going to say?”
I smiled, then. I couldn’t help it. I was so, so elated. “Well,” I paused, unsure of how to begin. I had no idea, but I decided to say it straight. “Well, I’m going to have a baby.”
Deathly hush. Then,
“Emma?”
“Uh huh?”
“You’re really sure?” he said hesitantly. “How do you know? I mean…”
I laughed, then. “How do I know? Alex, don’t be daft.”
He ruffled my hair, breathing his warm breath into the roots of it as he chuckled again.
“I don’t believe it!” he said, and his face was split with happiness. “Emma. Really?” he laughed. “Okay, okay! I surrender. Anyone who didn’t was certainly going to have something happen to them.”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “Emma,” he sighed, “you are so wonderful.”
I smiled. “What will we call her?”
“If she’s a girl? Emma.”
I paused. That hadn’t been the name I was thinking of. I had another idea. A better idea. “I don’t know,” I said hesitantly. I wasn’t sure what he’d think of my idea, but I’d ask him anyway. “I was thinking instead…”
“Ada.”
We said it together. His eyes filled with tears and so did mine. I nodded. “Exactly.”
And so that was what we did. We had Ada. We lived together and we loved and laughed. And later, we started a charity. A shelter for the unemployed, where they could go and find counseling and aid to find them placement in jobs. A place for those who had been disenfranchised by big companies and retrenchments and unfortunate happenings. So no one would have to join gangs and become violent and full of hate. We called it Project Ada.
Now, we have wonderful days. Every day has its own quiet happiness. We sit together in the evenings and we laugh and Cammi surprises us with her innate flair for acting and Jack with his astute mind. Ada is talking now and she, too, makes us smile. My life is full and happy and full of love.
Because there are no limits on the human heart except those we choose to put there. And when we choose to take them off, that is when the magic really happens.
PREVIEW OF ARIA FORDS BOOKS
First Impressions
PROLOGUE
The girl standing in front of me took off her shirt.
I couldn't help staring as the buttons unclasped one by one to reveal the pale white cleavage. It was thrust into an improbably-small piece of underwear and it drew my focus. The girl was beautiful in an explicit, made-up way and I felt my loins stiffen. I watched the pale body under her shirt appear inch by inch.
“Wanna kiss, big boy?” she whispered.
I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away, forcing myself to do so before the sight and sound and scent of her got overwhelming and I couldn't refuse anything.
“No,” I said.
That took all my effort. Feeling drained, I stood and walked to the door. I was shaking when I stood there, drawing in gulps of air. Behind me the music carried on, and with it the scent of cheap cigarettes and the sound of loud laughter and loud, rhythmic music.
“Jerry!” One of my friends called out – Pete. His voice came across the loudness and the music and got into my head. I turned to stare across at him. He was holding a glass of beer. He was already red in the face and smiling.
“Where you going, Jerry?” he called out, repeating the nickname my friends had given me. It grated on me. It was part of my former life.
I sighed. “Pete, I can't.”
I stayed where I was at the door of the Reef Club – really an overstated name for a seedy bar in the worst part of LA.
“Can't what?” Pete asked. His face creased with concern – evidently he wasn't too drunk to notice my desperate frustration.
“I can't do this anymore.”
Pete sighed. “What's wrong, Jared?” he asked. “I mean, really wrong?”
I shook my head, trying to swallow the lump that had unwittingly appeared in his throat. I had drunk quite a lot, and I knew the sudden urgent intensity of my feelings was at least partly to do with that. But it was more than that. The news about Callum had cut me hard. I still couldn't think anything about it without feeling that strange, cold numbness right inside me.
Callum was dead. He would have been twenty. Shot in a gang-related incident on the street. I knew Callum had been involved with the heroin dealers. It was probably why he'd been hanging out with the Marlow Gang in the first place. That didn't matter – no-one deserves to die for having gotten involved with stuff like that. Everyone deserves a second chance. Now he was dead.
He was a good friend. A good man. His life should never have ended that way.
I dragged fresh air into my lungs, wishing something would exculpate the terrible rancid smell of smoke and cheap alcohol and sweat from my mind and nostrils. I hated this place now. Why was I even here? Callum had died living the kind of life I'd been living. It was time.
“I don't want to live like this anymore.”
I focused on Pete's face as he said it. I looked into my friend's wide, bloodshot blue eyes. He swallowed, and nodded.
“Jared, I...I understand,” he began. “We...”
The name of Callum was like a lead weight in the air between us. We didn't have to speak it for both of us to know what we meant.
> “I need to get out of this, Pete,” I said. “Callum would have agreed too.”
That was what he'd said to me the last time I saw him. Which was why it hit me so hard, as such a horrible irony, that he'd died. He wasn't meant to die just when he'd decided we were both going to live a better life.
Pete nodded slowly. The rest of the group – Jake and Bill – they hadn't been as close to Callum as I had. Callum had been restless and different and spoken more to me than he had to the rest of them.
“You're right,” Pete agreed. “He would want that. Good for you. We understand.”
I swallowed. The words meant a great deal to me. I had been afraid to walk away – afraid of losing the social circle I had. Of being on the edge of things the way Callum was. Now I knew: they wouldn't reject me just because I wanted to better myself, and that meant I had to try.
I wanted more than getting drunk and having sex with girls who I didn't know and who didn't know me. I wanted to remember my weekends clearly and make real love. Hell, from a childhood on the streets to an early adulthood of dissolution, I wasn't sure I knew if love even existed.
It was time to find out.
I let out a long sigh. That was it.
I wanted more than that. Callum had wanted more than that. And he'd died trying to find it. But I wasn't planning on dying before I took that brave step out of the life I'd known and into the life I had no idea about but knew sounded good. I wanted it.
I was ready for it.
CHAPTER ONE
Darby
I stood on the edge of the field and hissed at my brother. Around us the Wyoming day cooled to night.
“Alex, I can't go in there.”
My brother sighed. “I know, Darby. But really, you can.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. Why did no-one understand?
“I need to go back. And you know what Uncle's like...we'll all get talked into staying for another week and I can't! I have work to do.”
Well, that wasn't strictly true. It was holiday season and I had taken a week off. I could stay. I just wanted to have some time to myself, in civilization, to catch up on filing and to the administrative stuff for which I never had time. I hadn't banked on being stuck out here.
