Bridal Reconnaissance

by Lisa Childs

  Chapter Four

  Evan stared out over the river as he idly ran a diamond necklace through his fingers. “This makes sense.”

  He gestured toward the murky water many floors below the hotel-suite window. The diamonds glittered in the late-afternoon sun and bounced back shards of light at Royce’s reflection in the glass.

  “Hmm?” Royce didn’t glance up from the report cradled in his hand, but he leaned back in the chair at the small cherry-wood table.

  “River City. City named for the river. I’ve lived in Winter Falls a couple of years now and I don’t know why it’s named that. Do you?”

  “Must be a reason… I’ll ask Sarah tonight. And instead of wasting time reading these reports and transcripts, you should tell me what’s in here. We wasted enough time today chasing down that dead end. Martin ‘Snake’ Timmer hasn’t showed up at the warehouse for work in over a week.”

  Evan dragged in a deep breath, refusing to let the frustration overtake him.

  “Tracking his social-security number didn’t show where he’s applied for another job, either,” Royce continued, anger sharpening his tone.

  Someone had paid off the “witness.” Evan didn’t need confirmation of what he knew in his gut.

  Royce sighed. “Damn it! So just tell me what’s in these reports. Finding something in here to link that bastard to other crimes might be the only way to keep him behind bars. You glanced at these, they’re permanently in your mind now.”

  And that was the curse of Evan’s photographic memory. Those words from the trial had already become images in his head, images he wouldn’t forget as Amanda had. As she’d forgotten him, he thought to himself.

  He concentrated on his breathing as he sought calmness, control. He should have broken his neck for what that bastard had done to her.

  “He kept her in that trunk for hours, at least. Maybe a day or more…”

  Royce tossed one file down and grabbed up another. “One of the shrinks says that she’s terrified of the dark. Can’t say I blame her.”

  “She was so dehydrated, she should have been weak. Pliable. That’s what he was counting on…” Evan’s voice trailed off. But that wasn’t what the animal had gotten. She’d fought. For their child. When she’d awoken in the hospital days later, the one thing she hadn’t forgotten was her pregnancy.

  Had she known when she’d left him? Had she known then that she’d carried his child? And if so, why had she left?

  Because she hadn’t loved him, he realized. Hadn’t loved him enough to even remember him now…

  Evan shook off the self-pity and said, “Let’s forget about what’s done already, Royce, and concentrate on now.” The diamond necklace gnawed at his fingers as he wrapped it around his knuckles. “You trust this security firm?”

  Royce nodded, but his eyes narrowed and scrutinized.

  Evan turned away from his too perceptive friend and focused on the river again. “They’ve been watching her?”

  “Yeah, that’s how they knew she’d pawned the necklace this morning. And tomorrow when he’s released, they’ll be watching him. You have it all under control, Evan.”

  Evan laughed, but no humor lifted the heaviness from his chest. “Control? I haven’t had that since I knocked on her door yesterday.”

  “You’re doing everything you can—”

  “Everything she’ll let me.” Despite her loss of memory, she was the same stubborn woman he’d been married to, was still married to.

  Until death did them part, he’d vowed at their wedding. But since then he’d learned the truth about himself, about what he’d come from. After what she’d been through, how would the truth affect her?

  Royce expelled a ragged sigh. “If only we’d gotten Timmer…”

  “Snake slithered away from us.” Evan resisted the urge to smash his fist against the glass in an expression of the anger and frustration churning inside him.

  “But at least we know who gave Amanda the warning. We need to track down where he moved to next. We can still find him in time. We have people watching his daughter’s house to see if he shows up there.”

  Evan groaned over Royce’s positive new attitude. Marital bliss had stolen some of the tough cynicism that Evan had first admired about the ex-FBI agent.

  “You think his message was a warning?”

  “Yeah, Sullivan wasn’t going to tell her the creep was getting out. He figured she’d freak and run off.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ah…” The chair creaked as Royce jumped up and joined Evan at the window. “So you think Weering set this up? Probably paid his old buddy to warn Amanda, so she’d run.”

  Evan nodded. “Control. He wants it over her. Fear. He thrives on that. He wants her scared and he wants to orchestrate her every move. And the bastard’s winning right now.”

  Royce settled a hand on Evan’s shoulder, squeezing. “But he didn’t count on you.”

  He closed his eyes, and an image of the half-blinded convict sneered in his mind. “I’m not so sure.”

  “You mean because he knows things…”

  “Things only people close to me know, Royce.” Things Evan wished he didn’t know himself. If only…

  No, “if only” would have kept him from the family he loved. His sister, his sweet baby niece and the friends he had made when his adoptive parents had disowned him after Amanda’s disappearance, which they had considered too suspicious. They had even shared their concerns with the local police department. If the people who had raised him had thought he could harm her…

  Royce rationalized, “We aren’t the only ones that know about your biological father. There’s a trail. There’s always a trail.”

  He hoped Royce was right. “We have to find Weering’s.”

  “We’re checking the files. If we can link him to other crimes… Damn, why wouldn’t they wait on releasing him?”

  Evan curled his hands into fists. He had tried bribes, threats, but nothing had swayed the bureaucrats. “They’re trying to justify what they’ve done. They refuse to believe they’re releasing someone who hasn’t been fully rehabilitated.”

  “And when he hurts someone? How are they gonna save face then?”

  Evan’s knuckles turned white. “He won’t hurt Amanda…or the boy.”

  The boy. His stomach pitched. His son. He had a son. Their one brief meeting played again and again in his head. The child with the dark eyes full of lively intelligence peering up at him…

  His son.

  But would the kid look up to him if he knew what only Evan’s friends and a soon-to-be released prisoner knew? If not for an act of violence Evan wouldn’t even exist. How would Amanda, a victim of violence, ever accept that her husband was a product of that? Accept he had a rapist’s blood running through his veins?

  “You’re doing everything you can,” Royce said.

  But Royce’s reassurance didn’t calm Evan’s fears. “I can do more. I have to get through to her this time.”

  He turned from the window, grabbing up his camel overcoat from the back of a chair before heading out. Full of fierce determination, he yanked open the door and nearly bowled over the small fragile woman and the little boy standing in the hall.

  “Amanda?” Evan asked, shocked by her appearance at his hotel room.

  “Did you find him yet?” she asked, her eyes full of tentative hope.

  He didn’t need to ask of whom she spoke. Although he hated to dash that hope, nevertheless he shook his head. “No. It was a dead end. Bad lead.”

  Her teeth nipped at her full bottom lip as she nodded, and the hope in her eyes vanished. He expected her to turn and run, instead she stammered, “That’s what Mr. Sullivan said, but… Uh…Ev…Mr. Quade…”

  Regret was added to the burden lying heavy over his heart. Amanda didn’t even know what to call him, this woman who had vowed to love him forever.

  He regretted her lost memory. Only he would ever know of the passion they’d once shared.
The way she’d whispered his name and reached for him in the dark. The way her silky naked skin, slick with sweat from their passion, had slid over his as she’d moved against him in the night.

  He swallowed hard. “It’s ridiculous for you to call me by my last name when it’s one we share.”

  “Our last name is Smith.” Christopher spoke up, his voice soft and his dark eyes wide with curiosity.

  Hell, what was in a name anyways? Evan thought. He would never use the surname that was biologically his. He found himself hunkering down before Christopher, but even on his haunches he was too big to meet the child eye to eye. “You’re smart.”

  Christopher nodded, his curls tousling around his face. “Yup.”

  Evan couldn’t laugh at the boy’s arrogance, not when it was something undoubtedly inherited from him. This was his child. His flesh and blood. “What else do you know?”

  The boy lifted his thin shoulders. “Lots of stuff. My phone number and address…”

  His little rounded chin wobbled, and his bottom lip, full like Amanda’s, trembled. “But it’s not our house anymore.”

  Evan lifted his gaze to Amanda’s face. Her green eyes shimmered with unshed tears. His stomach clenched, and he glanced away at the watch on his wrist. “His all-day field trip end early?”

  From the bodyguard he had hired to follow her, he knew she had intended to leave the house right after he and Royce had. He also knew the van had broken down and required repairs. How much did she have left of the pawn money from the necklace?

  She leaned closer, close enough that her scent washed over him. Peaches and cream wafted from her short tresses. He liked it better than the expensive musk she used to wear. “I lied,” she whispered.

  He nodded and straightened up, putting some distance between them with a step back. Dropping his coat onto the sofa, he turned to Royce. “I don’t think you’ve been introduced. Amanda, this is Royce Graham, ‘The Tracker.’”

  She shivered, probably imagining having a child lost and needing this man to find him. “The FBI agent?”

  Royce sighed. “Used to be. Now I work for myself…and my friends.” He stepped closer to where Evan’s wife and child hovered in the doorway. “Hey, little man, you should see this game I have. I borrowed it from my son. It’s pretty awesome. I have it in my room.”

  Evan appreciated his friend’s interference. Although he had some experience with children, Evan could hardly talk to this one, not with all the emotions battering him. “Christopher, I bet you’d like to see that game. And, Amanda, if Royce takes him in his room, then you and I would have some time to talk.”

  With wide eyes her expressive face telegraphed her fear of being alone with Evan and her reluctance to be parted from her child. Her fingers tousled his hair in an unconsciously loving gesture.

  “Didn’t you come here to talk to me? Do you want him to hear?” Evan prodded gently.

  “What kind of game?” Christopher asked.

  Royce chuckled. “Something with lots of bright colors.”

  “I don’t want him to see anything violent,” Amanda said, her voice quavering.

  Evan hoped he would never have to. “He shouldn’t hear about any violence either, Amanda.”

  She nodded. “You can go with Mr. Graham, Christopher. Mind your manners, though.”

  “It’s golf—the only way I have time to play it,” Royce clarified, taking the boy’s chubby fingers in his and leading him to a door off the living room of the suite.

  At the threshold the little boy glanced back at Evan, a question in his dark eyes. He knows. He knows I’m his father. Staggered by the thought Evan settled heavily onto the sofa as Royce and Christopher exited to the next room.

  “What have you told him?” he asked after the door had closed safely behind the pair.

  “About leaving town?”

  “About me.” Evan was unsure if he had ever intended to tell the boy that he was his son. What did he have to offer him? What kind of father could he ever be? After steadying it with an effort, he plowed a hand through his hair. “But since you brought it up, what did you tell him about leaving town, leaving his school, his house, his friends?”

  She trembled as she crossed the room to the windows overlooking the river. “I said that we had to go. That it was time.”

  “He’s a smart kid. I doubt he accepted that for an answer.”

  “What else could I tell him? He’s five years old. I couldn’t tell him the truth.” She choked and swallowed hard, lowering her voice. “I couldn’t tell him we were leaving for his protection. Like I told you last night, he threw a tantrum, so no, he didn’t accept it. He still doesn’t. He wants to stay.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I can’t!” After the outburst she pressed a fist against her lips.

  Evan stood up and strode over to the windows, too. Despite the inclination to offer comfort, to offer a shoulder on which she could release the tears that were shimmering in her enormous green eyes, he kept a few feet of distance between them. Breathing room. “So why are you here?”

  He knew she hadn’t remembered anything about their past, about him. She still stared at him with a stranger’s wariness, or worse, a victim’s.

  After spending some of the little money she had on the van repairs, was she desperate enough to ask him for more? “What do you need, Amanda?”

  She blinked hard and the tears stayed at bay. “Answers.”

  “You want to know about the past now?” Last night and the day before, she’d said she had no time or interest in it.

  She shook her head and stepped closer to him, delineating the careful distance he’d kept between them. “Not all of it. I want to know about you.”

  Why she’d left him? She would probably ask for the one answer he didn’t have—for the one he’d searched six years for—and due to her memory loss, would probably never know.

  He dragged in a deep breath. “Ask away.”

  Her gaze dropped to his chest to where the ring burned beneath his shirt, reminding him, always reminding him how damn bad love hurt. “I know that…we were…married,” she said after a moment.

  He ignored the painful twitch of the muscle in his jaw and continued to clench it to bone-shattering intensity. “And?”

  “I know who you are. That you’re an influential man with important friends…like Mr. Graham…and others… I’ve talked to the Winter Falls sheriff.”

  The devil prodded him to say, “He’s my sister’s husband. He could be lying for me.”

  “About what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. About my being a good man.”

  “He never called you that.” Beneath her shaggy bangs, her forehead puckered. “In fact, nobody I talked to called you that.”

  He swallowed a groan. “Is that what you want to know?”

  She shook her head again. “No, they called you honorable. That’s close enough. And that’s really what I want.”

  “My honor?”

  “Yes.” She licked her lips, her tongue swiping over her full bottom lip and nearly undoing Evan’s fragile control. “I want your word that if Christopher and I go with you to Winter Falls that you will protect us.”

  Just like the old Amanda, she had managed to stagger him. “What? You’re going to trust me?”

  Touched by her faith, he slid his fingers along her taut cheekbone and into the hair feathering her ear. She flinched under his touch, so he dropped his hand. “No, you don’t trust me.”

  “I want to.” The words were uttered as an anguished moan, and again the tears shimmered. “I really want to, but I can’t remember anything. I can’t remember if I should trust you. I can’t remember you…”

  Feelings pummeled Evan’s restraint. He’d once loved her so much, once shared everything with this woman, all his hopes, fears and passion. And she remembered nothing.

  Nothing of him.

  But since finding her again, he hadn’t acted like the lovesick fool he’d
once been for her. He’d leashed his emotions because he’d known he’d found her with the sole intention of letting her go. But he couldn’t let her go now, not yet, not when a madman intended to hurt her.

  Overcome by an unexpected surge of protectiveness, he then found himself taking her soft mouth in a hard kiss as his restraint snapped. His lips plundered, his tongue delving into the sweet recesses of her mouth when she gasped. One of his hands held the nape of her neck while the other ran over her slender back, grasping at the suedelike material of her jacket.

  When her hands clutched at his hair, he fought for his senses, knowing she probably wanted to pull him off. Instead, her fingers tightened, and her lips returned his kiss, her tongue sliding along his.

  Deep breathing was impossible with the way his heart pounded. Despite the years, she tasted the same, just as sweet with passion. Exactly as he remembered but more…

  He gentled the kiss, his mouth caressing hers as his fingers ran through her short silky tresses. He’d just touched the hard ridge of a scar beneath her hair when she swayed in his arms. Had she fainted again?

  “Evan!”

  The voice that called his name wasn’t hers. She didn’t call him Evan. She called him Mr. Quade. His wife treated him like a stranger.

  She pulled out of his arms as Royce poked his head out of the door to his room. “Sorry, man, but you didn’t hear the phone…”

  Evan fought to clear the passion from his brain as Amanda turned to the window, her back to him and her arms wrapped protectively around her midriff. What had he done? She’d just agreed to try to trust him and he’d destroyed that, destroyed whatever chance he’d had of convincing her to come willingly to Winter Falls.

  When the trial transcripts and medical records flashed behind the eyes he squeezed closed, he knew he would bring her home with him—no matter what resistance she put up.

  “Evan,” Royce said again.

  He shook his head, clearing it of the jumbled words and emotions. “Yeah, phone. Who is it?”

  “Cullen Murphy.” A member of the River City security firm they’d hired. “He found Snake.”