“But there’s still someone out there, isn’t there? I mean, that car of yours didn’t end up in Spur Creek all on its own, now did it?”
“Someone hit me,” she repeated, “someone who wanted me either good and scared or stone dead.”
“Then we’d better damned well hope that Ian doesn’t end up running into that person before he figures this out and drags himself back home.”
As the hours passed with no sign of Ian, she regretted her rash statement, along with the advice she’d given Zach that pursuing Ian would have been a very bad idea. She came to regret it even more when Zach found Ian’s cell phone on the floor near his office sofa, where it must have fallen while they’d been...
The thought had regret knifing through her. Had it been the heat and intensity of their lovemaking that had somehow triggered a memory Ian clearly hadn’t been prepared to deal with?
Without the smartphone, with its GPS, there was no way to track him down if need be, as she had thought at first. And no way to prevent him from somehow finding the means to keep going, leaving all of them as bereft as they’d been at the first reports of his death.
The first, but not necessarily the last.
What if she’d been wrong, if he’d really run the truck off the road as Zach had suggested? With every second that ticked past, her anxiety wound tighter, leaving her trembling with imagined scenarios where the driver who’d run her off the bridge burst out of nowhere, shooting from his window at Ian. Or what if Ian had instead regressed to the fugue state he’d been in when he’d first been found. She pictured him pulling over along some lonely stretch of roadside, leaving the door of the pickup open and walking blindly across country, continuing the odyssey he’d begun months before.
Needing the family’s company as badly as they seemed to need her reassurances, she joined them that evening at the dinner table. With the exception of Eden, who was happily oblivious as she alternately shoveled potatoes, pork and peas into her mouth and chattered about a drama involving an escaped hamster in her kindergarten class, everyone else did little more than pick at their meals, each of the adults struggling with worries about what might have happened.
As Andrea watched them, she wondered if Zach’s mother, his brother and Jessie were all struggling against the same fear that gripped her: the worry that somehow, some way, death had reached an icy hand through the encroaching prairie darkness and reclaimed the man who had once miraculously escaped its grip.
Chapter 12
A garish twilight glow crouched along the dark horizon when it finally came to Ian that there was no outrunning memory. No outracing it, either, especially not in a rattletrap old pickup that was already running on fumes. He had a dim memory of pulling off to the side of one of the rutted dirt roads that crisscrossed the ranch in an attempt to pull himself together. But it clearly hadn’t worked, for he was traveling down a paved road now, a narrow two-lane highway, moving toward that bloody splash to the west...
Or could it be the east? Rising on a pulse of panic, the question had him wondering if he’d lost not only his sense of direction but also more time than he’d imagined, if he might be looking at dawn’s lights instead of dusk.
Breathing hard, he clenched the wheel more tightly and pulled over, staring into the dimming light until a few emerging stars convinced him it was just past sunset after all.
The first order of business, he realized, was to figure out where the hell he was and get to the nearest gas station, or he would end up adding the need to call for a ride home to the growing tally of his failures.
Though he knew he should at least set Andrea’s and his family’s minds at ease, it came as almost a relief when he checked his pocket and found he didn’t have the cell phone with him. At least that reassured him that Zach wouldn’t be jumping down his throat at any moment, demanding an explanation for what had tripped him off. Ian’s gut twisted at the thought of how the memories ran together, with both his torturers and the American whose voice he’d heard, all bearing his old man’s face.
Even worse than the thought of looking like a lunatic in front of his family was the idea of trying to explain the way he’d run out on Andrea after making love to her. It came to him in a rush how sad and anxious she’d looked, in the moments before he had finally seduced her, how she’d begged for the chance to “make it up” to him...
To make up the fact that—he reached back through the smoky haze of spent lust and adrenaline, struggling to remember exactly what she’d told him. Something about being sent to him, forced by the fiancé who had been her boss, as well.
He spun it around in his brain, wondering if, despite her show of reluctance, she could have been placed in his path in the hopes that pillow talk would loosen his tongue, coaxing him to reveal whatever the hell it was that this Julian and whomever he was working for were after.
They want the American, the American who watched, Ian thought, cold chills ripping through him at the hazy memory of the man who’d begged to be spared his own beatings. But as unsettling as that thought was, the suspicion that Andrea might have been coerced to sleep with him, forced against her will, turned the blood pumping through his body to ice water in an instant.
Was it possible she could have faked the cries of ecstasy, the quivering clench of her innermost muscles? Or had her reaction been no more than a physical response, one that had left her dealing with despair and shame afterward?
He ground his teeth, telling himself it couldn’t be true and noticing a brighter section of the darkening sky, a glow that had him putting the truck back into gear and heading toward what he suspected must be Marston, since tiny Rusted Spur didn’t have enough in the way of stores and businesses to create much light pollution.
Before he made it far enough to confirm or disprove his hunch, the truck’s engine sputtered once before giving up the ghost. Rolling to the stony shoulder, Ian tried in vain to restart it before climbing out of the cab, hoping like hell he’d find a gas can in the truck’s bed.
He dug through tools, old flashlights and a length of rope to find a spouted red container in the pickup’s rusty toolbox. But he cursed in frustration to realize his wallet was nowhere to be found. Of course, he thought, since he’d never seen the need to carry it around the ranch.
With no other choice, he chose the flashlight with the brightest beam and started walking anyway, hoping he could prevail on someone’s kindness toward a stranger in need. And praying he would be fortunate enough to come across a Good Samaritan rather than the sniper who had already tried once to shoot him—and nearly murdered Andrea on another lonely road.
* * *
An hour after dinner, Jessie was down on the floor of Eden’s bedroom with her daughter, the two of them building weirdly imaginative, though oddly angular “dinosaurs” from LEGO blocks. Though Zach’s mother would have wrinkled her nose at their “unladylike play,” Jessie and her daughter were having a blast making their creations roar before launching them into epic battles. Both of them laughed like loons whenever a tail or claw or head went flying. Barely able to restrain themselves from joining in, Sweetheart and Lionheart played the part of enthusiastic spectators, barking and wagging hairy rumps.
Unable to resist the impulse, Jessie flipped over Eden, freshly bathed and in her pj’s, and tickled her until the little girl squealed. Jessie suspected it was a huge mistake to do so this close to bedtime, but she needed the release as badly as she needed to draw breath.
Ian’s disappearance, worrisome as it was, only added to the stress that had been weighing on her lately—stress and guilt about the secrets she was keeping, the discoveries she’d made. She’d wanted to talk some more to Andrea, maybe even confide about what she’d stumbled across a few days earlier while helping her mother-in-law install a software update on the computer the older woman mostly used for online word games. Jessie was still in sh
ock over the email Nancy Rayford, a computer novice, had inadvertently left open, a message that had instantly caught Jessie’s eye when the name of a target of her investigation jumped out at her.
But there had been no chance to get Andrea’s take on the situation. With the exception of this evening, she’d mostly kept to her room since her return, looking so drawn and pale the one time Jessie had gone up to check on her that she hadn’t had the heart to bother the woman with her troubles.
A tap at the door interrupted the impromptu wrestling match, and Zach came in.
“Daddy!” shouted Eden, springing up and running to him as if she hadn’t just seen him a half hour earlier. “Read me another chapter, please. Me’n the puppies want to hear the one about the funny cow dogs.”
He scooped her up for a hug, but the tightness around his eyes and his single glance at Jessie sent anxiety throbbing through her body.
Is it Ian? Is there bad news?
“I’ll tell you what, Eden,” he said, his deep voice taking on the tones he used to gentle a frightened young horse or soothe an injured calf. Big and powerful a man as he was, he never used his size or strength to command respect, but there was a core of strength there that made nearly everyone, from the ranch’s dogs and horses to the roughest-natured cowboys, obey him without question. “If you’ll pick up your toys while your mom and I go and talk for a while, I promise you, I’ll come and do just that a little later.”
“Two chapters,” said Eden, whose unerring child’s instinct told her she was in a position to bargain. “Two chapters, and bedtime fifteen minutes later?”
“Pick up your blocks, and we’ll see about the rest,” he said, the somberness of his words making Jessie’s stomach flutter.
“Listen to your dad,” she said.
Eden glanced from one parent to the other. “Okay, Daddy. I’ll do it.” She smooched his stubbled cheek. “And then you won’t have to be a grumpy face anymore.”
“Thanks, Glitterbug. You’re the best,” he said, bending to put her down. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”
He held the door open for Jessie and then closed it behind the two of them once they’d stepped into the hallway.
“What is it? Is it Ian?” she whispered urgently.
Zach only shook his head and nodded in the direction of their bedroom. Hurrying to keep up with his long strides, she felt an ominous weight squeeze the air from her lungs, certain that the news was as dire as any of their fears.
Inside their room, she glanced anxiously at the dark windows. Away from the ranch’s security lighting, the blackness would be almost complete, the distant stars and thin sliver of moon offering only the barest scintilla of relief. “If you’re scaring me like this for nothing...”
“I can tell you this much—Ian hasn’t wrecked the truck somewhere on the road to Rusted Spur or Marston. About a half hour after he left, I sent Virgil off in one direction and those cow-patties-for-brains hands who left the keys in the truck’s ignition in another to check the roads—and Marston’s beer joints, too, as long as they were at it.”
“I thought you said Ian’s not a drinker.”
“He’s not—or hasn’t been since the two of us stirred up so much trouble back when we were looking for ways to punish the old man...not that that ever worked out so well for either of us.”
She caressed his forearm lightly, her heart twisting at the thought of the violence that had defined his early years. It made her proud, too, of Zach’s efforts to be a far different type of father than the sorry example who had blighted both brothers’ childhoods.
The question was, was she willing to allow the late John Rayford’s sins to open up a fresh new set of wounds with the publication of her story? But the thought of hiding the man’s low character, of letting her target get away with outrageous behavior didn’t sit well with her, either. Nor could she bear the idea of letting Zach try to remake her into the kind of woman she would never be, even if he did so in the name of love.
“Just wanted to rule out the drinking,” Zach explained, “because whatever he’s remembered—if you’d only seen the look on his face. It was like he was still back there. It was the kind of pain a man might do any crazy thing to numb.”
She nodded, feeling terrible for Ian. “Sometimes I wonder if he’d be better off keeping those demons buried.”
“We both know that’s no good, either, because buried or not, those damned memories have been eating him alive.”
“He’s been a little better since Andrea, don’t you think?”
“Better, yeah—or just more focused on her than his own problems. From what I’ve seen, it’s not entirely one-sided, either.”
She smiled, once again touching him lightly. “So you’re just now noticing that?”
He shrugged and stalked in the direction of the bed he’d had built for them, a bed that she sometimes joked could only be owned by a cattle rancher or a king. Between its massive proportions and its dark headboard shaped to resemble the spreading, hand-carved horns of a bull, it might have been ridiculous if Zach weren’t able to deliver on the virility it promised.
But boy howdy, did her husband ever deliver, in more ways than even he might guess.
“I’m too busy thinking about cattle prices, cowboy grudges and natural gas leases to notice that kind of thing.”
“In other words, you’re a man.”
He shrugged. “A man who also has to keep an eye out for whatever mischief you and that daughter of yours are getting up to.”
“Oh, so she’s mine when she annoys you?” Jessie said, lightly but delicately. For biologically, Eden was related to Jessie, through her own twin sister, and not Zach—not that he’d ever treated her as anything less than a natural daughter.
“And mine whenever she’s an angel,” he said. “Ask my mother if you don’t believe me.”
She snorted, relieved that she hadn’t said the wrong thing after all, but as they sat down on the bed’s edge, she couldn’t help noticing that his smile was strained and his touch distracted when he patted her hand.
Apprehension fluttered in her stomach, but she told herself he had no idea what secrets she was keeping. “So where do you think Ian’s gone?”
He shook his head. “I’m out of ideas, but he couldn’t be too far. He left his wallet behind, for one thing, and Jimmy says there wasn’t much fuel in that old gas guzzler.”
“Ian’s made his way home once. He will again.” Despite her reassuring words, worries wriggled beneath the surface like mosquito larvae in a stagnant puddle.
“I imagine he will when he’s ready,” Zach said, his gaze cooling. “But I didn’t bring you in here just to talk about that.”
“What is it then? You’re making me nervous.”
His scowl did nothing to reassure her. “I need you to finally come clean with me about how this new story of yours affects us as a family.”
“I told you, it’s nothing to worry about,” she said, nervousness pulling the lie from her, though she knew that in the long run, it was only going to make things worse.
“Then what about this—what I found hidden in your office?”
When he pulled a small packet of folded papers from his back pocket and slapped them down on the bed between them, her jittery stomach threatened a full-scale rebellion. As guilty and regretful as she felt, she jumped to her feet to face him, the first words uttered coming out completely wrong.
“My office is my private workspace, so what on earth have you been doing in there, snooping through my research files?”
He unfolded the pages and laid them down, one after the other. And Jessie held her breath as he displayed the four notes she’d found these past three weeks, tucked beneath the blade of her car’s windshield wiper or, once, left on her front seat, though she could have sworn she’d left
the car locked when she went inside the school to speak to Eden’s teacher. After the fourth sheet, Zach stopped, staring at her as he waited for her explanation.
Which meant, she hoped and prayed, that he didn’t have the printout she’d made of his mother’s incriminating email. Didn’t have his finger on the trigger of a weapon that would wound.
Or kill, Jessie thought, laying her hand protectively over her roiling stomach. And wondering if Zach could have been right when he’d suggested that the attacks on Andrea and Ian both traced back to a secret she had no right to keep.
Chapter 13
The darker the sky outside her bedroom window grew, the blacker Andrea’s suspicions became. He’s not coming back. He’s walking. She pictured him blindly stumbling, tripping over rocks and grassy tussocks, saw him tumbling down the side of a ravine and splitting his head. Or maybe he would suffer the same fate he’d saved her from after falling into a creek, drowning between a pair of sandy banks. The thought sent panic churning through her, flooding her brain with vivid memories of the moment her car had rolled over, filling with water so quickly she’d barely had time to snatch a breath of air and hold it.
Heart thumping, she paced the room, remembering his eyes, his voice, his heated touch. What if death was even now cooling those hands, that mouth, the whole of his magnificently sculpted body? If something she had done or said had provoked the flashback that drove him from his home?
Done...or said.
She stopped short, thinking of the way Ian had looked at her when she’d tried to explain to him what Julian had forced her to do. Guess I should pay him a visit then, to thank the son of a bitch for sending you to me.
Was it possible he might recover from his shock enough to do so? That he would go, not to thank Julian as he’d said, in his eagerness to soothe her aching conscience, but to confront him about what was going on?
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