“I really have to pee,” I announced.
“We’re almost there.”
Between two buttes about a half a mile ahead were some yard lights. “Those are the first lights I’ve seen in miles. People actually live out here?”
“That’s the house,” Ash replied, checking the rearview mirror. “I asked them to leave the lights on so we could find it in the middle of the night.”
Ahead was our designated safe house. The Cottonmouths were spewing threat after threat, promising to murder the family of their beloved Tripp’s killer. An eye for an eye, they said. The second we got word that Ash’s name was being thrown around their circle as someone they were checking into, we had to bolt. Ash insisted Tuck and I stay as far away from them as possible until he could handle the situation and get the heat off his back.
“I haven’t seen houses for miles,” I said as the reality of our new lifestyle was finally sinking in.
Our Ford skidded on the gravel and came to a sudden halt.
“Hey, what are you doing?” I said in a loud whisper.
“Marina,” Ash turned to face me in the car. I recognized the disconcerted look on his face and shuddered a little. I hated to see Ash upset. He was the anchor of our family. “We always knew this day would come. We can’t stay in that God-awful town right now. The safety of my family has been jeopardized. I will not have that.”
I looked back at Tucker, who was somehow still sound asleep. I hadn’t yet told Ash, but I was roughly six weeks pregnant. We’d had two miscarriages since Tucker, and I couldn’t put Ash through the stress of another one. He worried about us enough as it was. I decided to hold off as long as possible before I would tell him.
Ash cupped my face in his hands and kissed me between my eyes. “You’re my world, you and Tuck. I don’t know what I do without you.”
“We’ll be fine out here,” I said, offering a smile. “I brought a ton of books. We have internet right?”
With that, we continued towards our new home. Ash didn’t know how long we’d be living at this new place. He said he couldn’t risk our safety, and until he knew we were clear, this would be the safest place for us.
My stomach fluttered a little as we approached the driveway to the house. From far away, all I saw were yard lights. Up close, the house was mammoth and lit up like a Christmas tree. It looked a little daunting in the middle of the night.
Ash pulled up as close as he could to the side door and stepped out of the driver’s seat. He unbuckled Tuck from his car seat and gently hoisted him over his shoulder. I stepped out of the car and stretched. As we made our way closer to the house, even more lights turned on and lit up our walkway. I’d never seen so many motion sensor lights around one house before.
Ash pointed to the trees surrounding the house. “There are wireless cameras in every single tree out here. Just so you know.”
I smiled. I knew he was trying to ease my mind. He wanted me to feel as safe and comfortable as possible out here.
We entered the house through the mudroom door and flipped on the lights. We were greeted with a musty smell, like a seldom-used vacation home or an aging fifth-wheel camper. It didn’t bother me though. It reminded me of vacations to our lake home as a young girl. It was the reassurance I needed to feel like I could make this work.
As we looked for the living room we passed through the kitchen. I stopped in my tracks when I saw its condition. “This stove has got to be from the 1950s. And it’s a foot away from the wall. There’s no refrigerator.” I ran to the sink and turned on the faucet. The pipes clanked and water began to sputter out. “At least we have running water.”
Ash carried Tuck to the living room, where he laid him on a scratchy looking plaid sofa and covered him with his blanket. Adjacent to the living room was a huge sunroom with nothing but floor to ceiling windows on three of the four walls.
“All of the windows on this house are coated in a special film so that you can see out just fine, but no one could see in no matter how hard they tried,” Ash explained, rubbing my shoulder. “You could walk around naked with all the lights on and on one would know. But don’t go doing that.” He put his arm around me and pulled me in. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”
“I’d like to see the rest of the house if you don’t mind.”
“Go ahead. There should be a pull out couch in the living room. That’s where I’ll be for tonight.” We locked eyes and for a brief moment I saw a look of uncertainty on his face. I brushed it off. I had to.
I was a little shocked that he didn’t want to secure the perimeters like he normally would. Then again, this is one of the club’s designated family hiding houses. It’s supposed to be as secure as the White House, only with no secret service men.
Ash left the sunroom, and I could hear him seconds later pulling out the sofa bed in the living room. I noticed a hallway that ran through the middle of the house just past the kitchen. The last door on the left looked older than the rest, so of course I had to check it out first. The door creaked as I opened it and the light automatically flickered on. In front of me was a stunning, polished mahogany dining room table and in each of the four corners of the room were antique grandfather clocks. Each clock was silent and still, and their hands all rested on different hours.
I stood in the dining room awhile longer, examining some figurines that lined the glass shelves of a random curio cabinet, but couldn’t help but feel creeped out. I felt like I had walked into someone’s private life, like I had stumbled upon someone’s secret collection.
Maybe it wasn’t so much as the clocks and figurines that bothered me, as it was the fact that this dining room had no windows and was in a room at the end of a hallway. It just didn’t feel right. I made a beeline for the door when I noticed another door inside the dining room.
I gave into my curiosity and went to what was behind that door. Expecting a closet of some type, I instead was introduced to a completely different room. I stepped into a bedroom that could only be accessed by a dining room at the end of the hall of a huge house out in the middle of nowhere. The light, as expected, switched on as soon as I walked into the room. A single queen-sized bed with a dusty blue comforter rested against the wall. A white, Queen Anne dresser stood across from the bed. I opened the drawers to find nothing but some old undershirts and dingy socks.
There were narrow doors to the left and right of the dresser. It didn’t take long for me to discover that one was an empty walk-in closet reeking of mothballs and behind the other door was a spotless toilet room with a working toilet.
I couldn’t help but feel like I was being watched. I felt safe in the house, but I felt like I was encroaching on someone else’s life. I didn’t like the feeling of knowing the bazaar secrets of a stranger. The peculiarities I had witnessed in the past few minutes already made me feel like it was going to be a challenge to make this place feel like home. The only thing I wanted in that moment was to be fast asleep in Ash’s arms. I needed something that felt like home, because this sure as hell didn’t.
I walked as quickly as I could out of the bedroom, out of the eerie dining room, and back to the hallway. As I passed the vintage kitchen on my right, I noticed something shiny on my left behind swinging doors. I pushed one half of the swinging door open just a peep and couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said aloud. I hated to swear, but I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
Before me was a completely renovated, gourmet kitchen. Stainless steel industrial appliances, swirled granite counter tops, maple hardwood floors, and dark cherry cabinets with crown molding filled this expansive, hidden space. The cupboards, refrigerator and pantry were all completely stocked. I was starting to forget about the creepy dining room. I didn’t ever have to go in there if I didn’t want to anyway.
With a bit of a hop in my step, I left the luxurious kitchen and headed straight for Ash’s temporary sleeping quarters. I tugged off my jeans and swe
ater and crawled under the fuzzy blanket with my snoring-like-a-bear husband. I slipped behind him and gently forced my arm under his, resting my hand on his warm stomach. His stomach moved up, then down, then up again. The steady rhythm of his breathing relaxed me. I buried my nose in the back of his head. I loved the smell of his hair; a mix of his natural musk and my organic, sandalwood shampoo.
Soon I found myself unable to fall asleep. I tossed and turned as quietly as I could on the stiff sofa bed. The dead silence of the old house didn’t help much either. Ash’s snoring was like music to my ears, like listening to the drone of an old box fan to fall asleep on a sticky summer night. Ash was my old box fan.
My mind raced with the realization that he would be leaving us the next day. I tried telling myself it wasn’t so bad. Ash would be gone for five or six days at a time, then return for two or three days. It would always depend on his work assignments. Sometimes he went on club missions for weeks at a time, and I was not allowed to contact him even for emergencies.
“The logistics are all worked out,” he told me in the days leading up to this night.
“There’s not one thing for you to worry about. Think of it as an extended vacation.”
For days I gathered books, magazines and movies for me, games and toys for Tucker, and projects I knew would keep me busy for an indefinite amount of time. I was told we would be here for an unknown amount of time and there was a slight possibility we could be here for a full year if they couldn’t remedy the situation fast enough.
In the shadows of the living room I saw two bright lights dash across the wall. I pushed Ash to wake him up. “Someone’s here. I just saw headlights.”
In half of a second Ash had already sprung up out of the sofa bed and threw on his pants. He grabbed his sidearm out of the interior pocket of his jacket and headed toward the side door where the car had stopped.
“Are you going out there?” I asked.
Ash said nothing, like he always did when he was on high alert.
“What are you doing?” I asked again. “Tell me what you’re doing. You’re starting to scare the shit out of me.”
Ash turned around and shushed me. “Go with Tuck. It’s fine.”
I looked outside. By now the fifty-thousand motion sensor lights had flickered on to reveal a black Crown Victoria parked next to our Ford. Ash was outside by now, standing next to the driver’s side. According to my watch, it was 3:30am.
I watched as Ash was talking to some man. He slowly put his gun back in his jacket. He looked like he was smiling. He seemed at ease.
Fifteen minutes later he was back inside the house. “That was Green.” He said. Green was a local member of a cousin club. He’d helped hook us up with the safe house.
“What the hell was he doing here this time of night?”
“Came to check on us and make sure we got here alright,” Ash said.
“Did you know he was coming? Why would he just randomly stop by a three thirty in the morning?”
“Yes, I knew he was coming. I guess I forgot. Just tired, that’s all,” he said. He had a point. “Let’s try and go back to sleep. We have a lot to go over tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 4
“This is kind of a strange place isn’t it?” Ash said, waking me up. “Good morning.”
“What time is it?” By the heaviness that remained in my eyelids, I hadn’t slept a wink.
“Ten,” he replied. “Thought I’d let you sleep in a little bit. I know you had a rough night last night. I’ve made a few phone calls. You should have internet access in the next day or two. I’ve activated a prepaid cell phone for you to use, though I don’t think the signal’s all that great out here.”
“Why are you going over everything right now? I just woke up. Can’t we at least have breakfast?”
“I have to leave sooner than expected,” Ash replied. He looked away, then over at Tuck who was playing quietly in the corner.
“What?” I normally tried to hide my disappointment, but I couldn’t. “I was hoping we’d at least have the entire day to get to know the house, the area, the safety precautions…”
“We can still do that. We just have to be finished by two.”
“Ash,” I said. “I’m not going to have a car, am I?”
He laughed out loud, something I rarely heard these days. “You’re just now realizing that?” He scooped up Tuck from the corner and walked towards the fancy kitchen. “Your mommy’s a true blonde, isn’t she?”
I loved seeing the silly, goofy side of him. It reminded me of what we had before our life got so crazy. The Ash I grew up with. The Ash from before that night in the country when life as we knew it got flipped upside down.
I followed him through the swinging doors and into the luxurious kitchen of my dreams. The room was flooded with light. The sun coming in through the huge picture window made everything extraordinarily bright, shiny, and sparkly. For two seconds, I forgot why we were even there.
Standing in that room, I didn’t feel like I was in an old, stately, peculiar mansion in the middle of nowhere. I was starting to feel, like Ash said before, like I was on an extended vacation.
“Let’s see. Cheerios and bananas it is,” Ash said as he rummaged through the pantry. Tuck squealed in his high chair.
I started to get up.
“No, Mama. You stay there. I’m cooking for us this morning,” Ash said. He was clearly trying to ease my mind, and I wanted nothing more than to ease his too. It was going to be difficult to be separated from him, but it was nothing compared to the pain of dropping off your wife and child in the middle of nowhere.
“Sounds good to me,” I obliged. “What’s gotten into you this morning? I haven’t seen you this happy in forever.”
He cracked an egg on the side of a skillet. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know that you two are safe. You’re pretty much off the grid here. Untouchable.”
Sometimes I wondered if he was just extremely paranoid or if actual threats had been made against our lives. There were times over the years when it was hard to distinguish. Ash didn’t take killing Tripp lightly. It gnawed away at him from time to time, manifesting itself in night terrors and denying himself happiness.
“So I was giving myself a tour of the house last night,” I began. “There’s a really creepy room down the hall. It’s like a dining room with no windows. It has these grandfather clocks in each corner of the room. Then there’s another door that leads to a bedroom and half-bath.”
“Houses like these, people are constantly changing up and remodeling and adding extra rooms here or there. I’m sure it was just some former owners who wanted a private dining room or something.” Ash tried to come up with some sort of logical reasoning to pacify me. He had more important things to think about anyway.
“Wait until you see it,” I continued. “I just felt like I was being watched in there.” I shivered just thinking about the room. “I hope the upstairs is semi-normal.”
“I’m sure it is,” Ash replied.
“Do you know the history of this place?”
“Nope. Guess it never occurred to me to ask.”
“Can you find out? I’m just curious.”
Ash looked at me as if I had asked him to do me a huge favor. I knew he was busy. I knew he had more important things on his plate, but if I was going to be living here for an indefinite amount of time, I wanted to know as much as possible about it.
“You never wanted to know about the other places we’ve lived.”
“The other places we lived were normal. Let’s see, there was your parents’ basement. Then the cottage on Olive Street. Then the little rental house on Callahan. Then our other apartment on Fourth and Grand. All perfectly normal, boring places.”
“Trust me. This is just another boring place to add to the list.”
I looked at him in disbelief and gave an audible sigh. With Ash, actions always spoke louder than words. The more I spoke, the less of his attention I seemed to recei
ve, especially when he was stressed.
“Look. I’ll try and dig up some dirt on this place when I get a chance,” Ash promised. “I’m not sure I’ll find any, but I’ll ask around.”
“Thank you.”
“You gonna eat your breakfast?” He stared down at the cold plate of scrambled eggs situated in front of me.
I pushed them around with my fork and took a bite. “I appreciate you cooking breakfast this morning. I’m just not that hungry.”
“What’s wrong now?” He shook his head when he thought I wasn’t looking. Growing up in a family of four boys who were raised by their father, he never learned how to truly be patient, especially when it came to women. “Are you going to start crying? You know I hate it when I’m about to leave and you start crying. Here we go.”
Redemption (MC Biker Romance) Page 2
