Bridal Reconnaissance

by Lisa Childs

  Physically. But emotionally, she bet he was very capable of hurting her. “Why are you here now?” Why hadn’t he looked for her years ago if she were really his wife?

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “That’s why you’re here? In River City? Just to talk to me?” Not to take her home?

  “Since I talked to Sullivan.”

  “And before?” Why had he found her now, after all this time?

  “We’ll talk about that later, when we have this other situation resolved.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. In her limited memory, we had referred to only her and her son. Nobody else. So she’d been the only one solving anything. Alone. And this man, this stranger, thought he could step in and rearrange her life? She wouldn’t allow that, even if he were her husband.

  Something flared in his dark eyes. “There’s absolutely no doubt now.”

  “No doubt about what?” Curiosity prodded her to ask.

  “You’re Amanda.”

  “The Amanda you searched for?” The one he claimed was his wife.

  He sighed. “For nearly six years.”

  But whatever had flared in his eyes was gone, leaving them dark and unreadable. No soft emotion accompanied his words. No tears of reunion dampened his eyes. He may have searched for her, but not out of love. She wouldn’t delude herself there. She’d already accepted that the only one to ever love her was her son. Her poor heartbroken little boy…

  “Something else is wrong,” he said, somehow attuned to her moods.

  She trembled again, fear of that emotional hurt intensifying. “Christopher doesn’t want to leave. Threw the tantrum of all tantrums and cried himself to sleep on his bedroom floor. Very unlike Christopher. Oh, he can be rambunctious, but usually he’s too controlled to throw tantrums.”

  Like a falling star in a dark sky, something flared again in the stranger’s eyes. “Controlled?”

  “Amazingly so for a five-year-old.”

  “But he doesn’t want to leave?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you?”

  “I thought you talked to Mr. Sullivan. You know he’s getting out.”

  “But that doesn’t mean your life will have to change. You have a new name—”

  She choked on another laugh, the bitterness leaving an acidic flavor in her throat. “He knows where I am. Last night I had a visitor. Someone broke into my van and warned me that I’m not safe. He’s going to get me when he’s released. He wants revenge.”

  The man, Evan Quade, blew out a ragged breath and some words beneath. “An eye for an eye.”

  She winced, catching the phrase despite the fact he’d muttered it. “Yes. And with him, undoubtedly more. He has resources. Money behind him. I’m not safe.”

  She doubted she ever would be again.

  Quade straightened, standing impossibly taller. “I have resources, too, Amanda. I can protect you.”

  She laughed, the pitch of it nearing the high brittle tone of hysteria. But she fought against it. “And who will protect me from you?” She gestured at her door and the broken chain dangling beside it.

  His handsome face grew tauter, as if he clenched his jaw. “I will. For now.”

  “Until this situation is resolved? And then you’ll tell me what you really want with me?” Not a wife. That much was obvious.

  He stepped closer, obliterating the arm’s length that had separated them. To focus on his face, she had to tip her head way back. And she had to stay focused, as if magnetically drawn to his dark gaze.

  “I don’t know why I kept searching all these years, but I did.”

  She winced, accepting her earlier notion, that he hadn’t loved her, as fact. But since he was a stranger to her, why did the knowledge affect her?

  “And now you found me? What do you want?” Not her son. She prayed the words in her heart. Not her son. Looking into his dark eyes, skimming her gaze over his golden skin left her no doubt that he bore some blood relation to her child. But her husband? Christopher’s father? No.

  What was his claim and would he stake it? She should have run. The pounding in her head caused the wince and the grimace that twisted her mouth.

  His fingers brushed over her upturned chin, up her cheek to her throbbing temple. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I’m scared.”

  Of him. The warmth from his muscular body penetrated through his heavy overcoat and across the few inches that remained between them. But more than inches separated them. Nearly six years and her lost memory. “I don’t know you. No matter what you say about being my husband, I don’t know you. And I can’t believe…”

  He sighed and stepped back, his hand falling to his side. “I know. I’m sorry, Amanda, sorry for all that’s happened to you.”

  She didn’t want his pity, would have thrown it back in his handsome face, but his voice vibrated with sincerity. “I can help you if you’ll let me. Don’t leave yet. Talk to the D.A. again. I’m sure Mr. Sullivan’s checked me out. He’ll verify that I am who I claim to be. Your husband.”

  He could give her facts, but she wanted feelings. She wanted to know what had been between them emotionally as well as legally. But more than that, she wanted to protect her son and herself.

  “I have to leave. I told you—”

  “He knows where you live. I’ll take you away from here, Amanda. I’ll take you—”

  “Home?” Heat flooded her face over the longing she’d revealed to this stranger.

  “Home? You never really had one.”

  Her heart ached with the loneliness she never stopped feeling, not even in the presence of her precious little boy.

  “You don’t seem surprised. Do you remember?”

  She shook her head. “No. No memories. But I have some feelings…”

  “Listen to those feelings, Amanda. You’ll realize that you do trust me. You’ll believe that I can keep you and the boy safe. That I am who I say.”

  She closed her eyes, shutting out his handsome face, and listened to her heart. Its mad pounding echoed that inside her aching head. Still, she feared him most.

  “Amanda…”

  “No. I can’t trust you.” Not anyone. Not ever again. Not now that she knew what evil existed in the world.

  “Why not?”

  “Why should I?” she countered and opened her eyes to stare into his.

  The flicker of light danced in the darkness. “Because I’m your husband.”

  “No.” He kept saying it, but she refused to believe, the implications too many. She stepped back, stumbling over a toy. Strong hands closed over her shoulders, preventing a physical fall. But she suspected an emotional one was inevitable.

  “Your name is Amanda Quade.”

  “No.” She bit off the rising hysteria. She couldn’t wake Christopher, not now.

  “You’re my wife,” he insisted.

  She shook her head and tried to step back again, her stocking feet tripping over the hard plastic truck. A wince was all she allowed herself, no scream of pain. His hands clamped tighter on her shoulders, burning through the jersey material of her sweatshirt.

  She couldn’t have been married to a man like this. Not her. She was too ordinary. Too fearful. He was too much. “I don’t believe you. I wasn’t found with a ring on me. Just a watch I already pawned and this necklace.”

  She dragged the name pendant from beneath the neck of her sweatshirt. Diamonds and sweats. Whoever he’d been married to, she doubted the woman would have worn such a combination.

  He chuckled. “That necklace?”

  “What? Is it fake?”

  “Amanda Quade wouldn’t wear a fake.”

  “I’m not Amanda Quade.”

  “You’re not Amanda Smith, either.”

  “If I were a married woman, where’s my wedding ring?”

  His hands slid from her shoulders and he turned away. “I have proof at my house. The marriage license. Pictures. You’ll believe me
then.”

  “If I were to leave with you, I’d have to believe you now. And I don’t.” And she didn’t want to. A husband. A father. He’d have a right to her son, probably more right than she had when a judge took into account her psychiatric history because of the amnesia.

  “You don’t want to believe me. You may not remember who you were, but rest assured, you haven’t changed that much.”

  The bitterness in his voice raised bumps along her skin. She didn’t believe him, anything he said. Because if he hadn’t liked her then, why help her now?

  “I don’t care about my past.”

  The lie burned in her throat, but she swallowed it down. “I don’t have time for the past.”

  “You’re right that we can’t do this now. We need to find this visitor you had.”

  “Why?” She couldn’t follow him, couldn’t focus on anything with the statements he’d made spinning through her aching mind. Amanda Quade. His wife.

  “When he testifies to the threats, we’ll be able to block the release of your attacker.”

  The D.A. hoped for the same thing, but she’d seen a flaw in his logic, too.

  “If you can find him, and that’s a strong if, how will you convince him to testify? He didn’t show me his face. All I saw was a snake tattoo on the back of his hand. And he was big. That’s not enough to find him.”

  Not since they had found no criminal matches for the prints in her van. The D.A. had called earlier that afternoon with the frustrating news, apparently before he’d met Evan Quade. She hadn’t asked him about her strange visitor then, thinking he’d know no more than she had of the mysterious man who resembled her son.

  Quade dismissed her concerns. “We know what prison he was in and whose cell he shared. We can find him.”

  “But he won’t testify. He seemed scared, too, scared of what Weering can do to him.”

  Evan Quade laughed but no amusement softened the deep sound. “I can do more.”

  She shivered and wrapped her arms around her torso. “You and I were never married. I can’t believe that.”

  She, who cowered from shadows, could never have shared a life with a man as dark and powerful as this one.

  His long fingers lifted to the silk tie at his neck, pulling the knot then moving down to release the buttons of his black shirt.

  “What are you doing?” Despite the rising hysteria, she kept her voice low, so as not to wake Christopher. She’d already upset her little boy enough.

  He paused after the second button, revealing only a patch of golden tanned skin and a tuft of black silky-looking hair. Close links of a gold chain clung to his chest. He tugged at the chain until another object bounced against his chest, clinking against a button and winking in the low light from the lamp.

  “I took your mother’s advice when I picked this out. She’s always equated diamonds with love.”

  Looking at the size of the approximately three-carat rock, she guessed that at one time he had loved her a lot, or at least, he wanted her to believe that. And he wanted her to believe they’d been married, that she’d worn this ring.

  Which was the lie?

  “No.” She shook her head and tried to step back again, but he caught her, taking her hand and lifting it against his chest. Then he slid the ring, still hooked to the chain, onto the bare third finger of her left hand.

  Her hand trembled under the unfamiliar weight of the diamond and against the unfamiliar hardness of his muscular chest. Six years and the head trauma she’d suffered weren’t enough for her to have forgotten a man like him. To have forgotten wearing his ring.

  She glanced up at the stone and it winked back at her, catching the faint glow from the lamp. And the pain inside her skull intensified.

  She closed her eyes but behind them the light from the diamond still flashed, blinding her. Dizziness lightened her head and weakened her knees, and she fell into the arms of the husband she couldn’t remember.

  Chapter Three

  A bead of sweat trickled down between Evan’s shoulder blades. The visiting-room door of the minimum-security prison closed behind him, shutting him in with a guard and others who spoke through phones and shatterproof glass to their loved ones. He had no loved ones in prison even though his real father presided there.

  In his last argument with Amanda, when he had pressed his wife to start a family, she’d flung at him that what he really wanted was to find his biological one.

  And she had challenged him to do that. He had never been able to turn down a challenge. But what he’d found… And what he’d lost…

  He’d found a sister, a headstrong challenging sister, and he resented all the years he had not known her. And he’d found an emotionally and mentally broken woman who was his mother. In the course of procuring her psychiatric treatment, his paternity had been revealed. While a teenager his mother had been raped. She had been helping out at a soup kitchen. His father, a homeless ex-con, had taken not only her charity, but her innocence, too.

  Every day since he’d learned the truth, he wondered why she hadn’t aborted him as her parents had wished. Why torture herself with carrying the child of a man who’d hurt her physically and psychologically? And why love that child enough to give him life, and continue to miss him even after her parents had forced her to give him up?

  The guard tapped his shoulder and gestured toward a chair. Evan dragged his feet across the waxed linoleum floor. He wasn’t concerned about this man’s—this animal’s—reaction to him. He worried that his reaction to this animal would make him give in to physical violence.

  After all, he owed his very existence to a man like this.

  He settled onto a vinyl chair that creaked in tired protest of his weight. Through the smeared glass he stared hard at the person across from him.

  Pale blond hair hung limply around a face with skin whiter than a corpse. More than prison pallor. Albino maybe. Etched in the pallid skin jagged scars streaked from beneath his eyes. And his eyes…

  Evan’s stomach pitched with revulsion. One eye was normal but for the extreme paleness of the blue iris. The other eye was scarred and blind; a thick milky film covered the iris, leaving it completely white.

  The man held the phone aloft and pointed through the glass at the one on the wall next to Evan. Evan had to uncurl his fingers from a fist to grab the receiver and bring it to his ear.

  “Your name’s Evan Quade, the guard said. That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  But something glimmered in that one seeing eye, something like amusement. Did this animal know Evan’s name meant nothing to Evan’s wife, either, after what he’d put her through?

  “It will,” Evan responded coldly.

  “Don’t see how.” The man’s thin lips twisted into a parody of a grin.

  “You’re getting out in a couple of days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when you do, you’re leaving town.”

  “I don’t know about that.” The man leaned back and drummed his fingers on the Formica surface in front of him.

  In a practiced imperceptible gesture, Evan dragged in a deep breath of stale air as he sought his calm center. He would not lose control. “Why not? Is something keeping you in this town?”

  “Besides parole, you mean?”

  “Yes, because you know parole can be arranged in another city, another state even.”

  “And you have the connections to know this?” The seeing eye stared intently at Evan.

  Evan lifted a shoulder and let it drop in feigned nonchalance, adopting the prisoner’s casual attitude. “Yes.”

  “So you’re a powerful man?” In a challenging gesture a pale eyebrow lifted above the blind eye.

  “Yes.”

  The man laughed. “And you’re wasting your time with a prisoner who doesn’t even know who you are.”

  “I think you do know who I am. And I’m here because you won’t be a prisoner much longer.”

  “You think I am a threat to someone w
hen I get out?” The twisted grin widened.

  “Do I?”

  “If you’re so powerful, you must be smart, too. Smart enough to know threatening someone could revoke my parole. I would never risk that.”

  “Not even to settle old scores?”

  “Settle old scores? Not even.” The scarred lid closed over the blind eye in a wink.

  Feeling a surge of anger at the animal’s antics, Evan leaned closer, the vinyl creaking beneath his new tense position on the chair. “And now I need you to understand something.”

  Weering’s grin slid into a smirk. “What’s that?”

  Although bile rose in his throat, Evan forced it down so he could get the words out. “You and I are more alike than you think.”

  “Really? This is fascinating.” The snide tone implied otherwise.

  Evan leaned closer yet, so his face was mere inches from the fingerprint-smeared glass. A glance to his side confirmed a visitor pressing her hand against a prisoner’s on the other side. “Oh, there are differences. You think you’re above the law. I am.”

  The smirk spread. “I’ve served my time, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not the one having delusions.”

  “No delusion. Fact.” Evan gritted his teeth, enamel gnashing against enamel. “If someone I care about is threatened, the law won’t stop me from protecting her. Nothing will.”

  “What happened six years ago then?”

  His stomach tensed as if he’d taken a roundhouse kick. “I didn’t know protection was necessary. Now I do.”

  Weering lifted a hand in a placating gesture. “Not from me.”

  “I hope not.” Evan waited a moment, then eased back a few inches from the glass. “I called your parents.”

  Weering’s raised hand trembled, and he dropped it into his lap out of Evan’s sight. “You what? They’re not even in the country. You found them?”

  “It was easy. Big spenders leave a trail. They spent a lot on your lawyers, too. Even spent some money to guarantee you’d be part of the early-release program. I traced some of their political contributions.”

  For a moment, William seemed unsettled, but then his mask of indifference returned. “So? Parents getting their only child out early, what’s wrong with that?”