by Lili Valente
In spite of the nightmare morning, I have to smile. “I love you, you know that?”
Sherry grins. “And I love you, despite the fact that you appear to have been born under the unluckiest star ever.”
“I don’t know. I’m still feeling pretty lucky right now.” I turn to look toward Gabe’s room to see him out on the balcony. I lift my hand and wave, but he stops me with an urgent motion of his arm.
“You need to come look at this,” he calls out, holding up his phone.
I let my arm drop with a sigh. “I’ll be back to spring you in a few,” I tell Sherry.
“Don’t rush,” she says. “We just got out here a few minutes ago. The kids are playing great, and my sister can’t get free until dinner tonight so I don’t have anywhere to be.”
“Thanks.” I squeeze her hand through the gate and hurry up to the room.
I’m not looking forward to telling Gabe about his dad—or learning whatever it is that has him upset—but I can’t wait to be in his arms. Every second away from him feels like a second I’ve wasted. I wish we could escape from the world and spend a week or two alone together, making love, lying in the sun, and doing nothing worthwhile except finishing the job of falling for each other harder the second time than we fell the first.
When I turn the corner on our floor, Gabe is standing in the doorway to his room, dressed in dark blue jeans and a pale blue tee shirt he picked up this morning while he was buying my hat. The shirt molds to his impressive new muscles and emphasizes the ice blue of his eyes. I’ve always thought Gabe’s eyes would be equally at home in the face of an Alaskan hunting dog, or some kind of supernatural predator, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them look quite as menacing as they do right now.
“What happened?” I ask, knowing immediately that he has to go first.
“I need you to see something.” He moves back, holding the door open wide enough for me to move past him into the room.
Inside, the bed is still disheveled and the desk is littered with pieces of hotel stationary with notes written on them in Gabe’s elegant handwriting. Danny once said that Gabe makes eye-contact like a psychopath—I’d told my brother that’s the kind of eye contact I like—but Gabe’s handwriting looks like it flowed from the pen of an eighteenth century schoolteacher. It’s gorgeous and makes me think of heartfelt letters, poems, and things lovers sent each other in another age.
It’s one of the little things that make Gabe Gabe, things I want to unearth like buried treasure, piece by piece. I want to focus on rediscovering all the things I love about him as we move into the future together, but with every passing moment, escaping the past feels more impossible.
“I didn’t mean to invade your privacy.” Gabe plucks my phone from where it’s resting on top of the notes. “But your phone was ringing every ten to fifteen minutes, and I wanted to know if it was the same person. I figured if it was, they either had a legitimate emergency, or might be a threat we’d want to be aware of.”
I nod, pressing my lips together. “It was Isaac, right? Sherry said he was taking a walk on the stalker side.”
“He’s something worse than a stalker,” Gabe says, the ominous note in his voice making the hairs on my arms stand on end. “This is his picture, I assume.”
He holds up the phone. Isaac’s contact information is pulled up on the screen, and the picture of Isaac on the afternoon of his graduation from the police academy grins back at me from the corner.
“That’s him.” My brow furrows as I glance back up at Gabe. Before I can ask him why he wanted to know, he places my phone back on the desk and pulls his from his back pocket.
“When I saw his picture, I thought he looked familiar,” Gabe says, scrolling through something on his screen. “I thought it was because you said I’d met him last summer, but then I remembered where I’d seen his face.”
He holds up the phone. “My private nurse after the surgery, Olia, was from Sweden, but she had a thing for pizza. Wood-fired pizza was her favorite.”
I take the phone from him, holding it at a different angle to reduce the glare from the window.
“We went to the same place every Wednesday afternoon,” Gabe continues. “We weren’t supposed to leave the house without one of my parents, but they have couples therapy on Wednesdays, and Olia was okay with breaking the rules in the name of a sausage pie with extra onions.”
I bring the image closer to my face, trying to see what has Gabe so shaken up. It’s a fairly benign-looking selfie, taken by a fresh-faced older blond woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’s grinning as she leans in close to Gabe. His smile looks more like a grimace, but it’s the sunken places beneath his eyes and the skeletal way his skin stretches across his cheeks that breaks my heart.
“You were so sick,” I say, fighting to swallow past the lump in my throat.
“I was getting better then,” he says, dismissively, obviously not interested in my pity. “Don’t look at me. Look behind me. Over by the counter. He’s not in focus, but you can tell it’s him.”
I shift my gaze, and feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut. My breath rushes out, but it doesn’t rush back in. For a moment it feels like I’ve forgotten how to reason, how to add up two and two to make four. My brain insists this can’t be real, but my gut knows it is.
It knows, and the horrible knowledge races through my veins like a thousand tiny glass shards.
I suck in a ragged breath. “When was this taken?”
“September,” Gabe says in a voice that makes it clear he’s already tracked the timeline and realized this was before I lost the baby, before Isaac flew to Maui to help his “friend,” and ended up staying to be my lover.
“He knew,” I whisper, fingers digging into Gabe’s black phone case. “He had to know it was you. Even though you’d lost weight, I knew right away that—”
“Oh, he knew.” Gabe takes the phone gently from my hand, tossing it onto the desk as if he can’t stand to touch it. “The first time we went in, he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. I explained about my memory loss and asked if I’d known him before, but he said that I looked like someone he used to know. After that, every time Olia and I went in, he stayed out of our way. I’d put him out of my mind, but now…”
“Oh my God.” My knees give out and I sit down hard on the thick, gray carpet. “He knew you were alive. He knew I was so devastated and that I was pregnant, and he still… He let me believe….”
Gabe sits down in front of me, resting his hands on my knees, but he doesn’t say a word, as if he knows nothing he can say right now will help.
“He let me fuck him,” I say, rage rushing in to banish the betrayal, shoving it aside with hot hands balled into fists. “He fucked me, and told me he loved me, and all along he knew that the person I really loved was still alive.”
“I’m sure he would say he did it out of love for you,” Gabe says, in that silky voice that he gets when he’s really angry. With some people, rage makes them rough around the edges, but it makes Gabe smooth, calm, as cold as a frozen lake about to crack under your feet.
I bite my lip. “He did it because he knew there was no way he stood a chance if I knew the truth.”
Gabe leans in, until our foreheads are nearly touching before he whispers, “I want to do horrible things to this man. I want to make him suffer for every minute he made you suffer, and for every second he kept you from me.”
I shiver. My eyes slide closed and for a second I can’t keep from imagining the way I’d make Isaac pay, the way I’d exact my vengeance if I had nothing to lose, and not a trace of morality. But that’s not who I am. Isaac isn’t innocent, but he isn’t a monster, either, and I could never do to him the things I’ve done to my other marks, no matter how much a part of me might want to.
“I can’t,” I say softly, still not opening my eyes. “I hate him, but…I can’t hurt him.”
“Maybe I can,” Gabe says.
I slit my lids, star
ing at his lips through my lashes, trying to tell from the set of his mouth if he’s serious. His mouth keeps its secrets, but when I pull away to look into his eyes, I see the truth.
“You’re not going to hurt Isaac.”
He sighs. “No, I’m not. But we’re not going to be able to play by the rules, Caitlin. Not if we want to be together. I listened to the messages Isaac left.”
I chew the inside of my cheek, holding my breath as I wait for him to tell me the rest of the bad news.
“After the first three messages, demanding you call him, Isaac left a tearful message begging for your forgiveness. He swore he was only trying to protect you. He said you have to leave Giffney right away.”
I frown. “How did he know I was here?”
“He said his mother told him last night,” Gabe says, arching a brow. “She heard it from a girl who works at the pizza place.”
“Kimmy’s friend.” I curse, driving a hand through my hair and fisting it on the top of my head. “I can’t catch a break in this town.”
“That’s what Isaac seemed worried about.” Gabe guides my hand from my hair before I can do myself damage, and pulls me into his lap. “He feels awful for letting you believe I was dead, but says he did it because my parents swore you’d end up in jail if you ever came back to South Carolina.”
My gaze snaps to his face. “What?”
“Isaac promised them he’d keep you in Hawaii,” Gabe says. “And they were nice enough to pay his plane fare in exchange. He confessed everything in message four.”
The angry heat swirling in my chest cools a few degrees. I’m shocked that Isaac was in on this—Isaac, one of the few people in the world I would have trusted with my life—but there’s a bigger threat in those words. “Your parents don’t know about the things we did. Do they?”
Gabe shakes his head just once, back and forth. “I don’t know, but I don’t want to stay to find out. I think we should leave.”
I twine my arms around his shoulders, needing something to hold on to. “But I can’t leave. I’m due in court at the end of the week. The earliest I can leave the state would be next week, and that’s if—”
“I’m not talking about leaving the state,” he says. “I’m talking about leaving the country.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Caitlin
“Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,
—but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I blink, but the look in his eyes leaves no doubt he’s serious.
“I’ve been thinking about this since you left for the funeral,” Gabe says. “I was dead set against the surgery, and was prepared to die. My parents had no leverage as far as I was concerned. Nothing, except how much I cared for you.”
“So you think—”
“The only thing that could have gotten me on that plane was knowing that, if I didn’t, something bad would happen to you,” he says, echoing my thoughts. “And what could be worse than you ending up in jail for crimes I convinced you to commit?”
“Oh God,” I say, throat clenching and a wave of sickness roiling through my belly. “But how did they find out? We were so careful. And our faces were covered and—”
“Like I said, I don’t know,” Gabe says. “I’ve done everything but slammed my head into the wall trying to remember, but I can’t. Maybe I never will, since it happened on one of the last days before the surgery, but I’ve remembered enough to be ninety-nine percent certain my parents got to me through you, and I refuse to let them ruin your life.”
My tongue slips out to dampen my suddenly bone dry lips, while my thoughts race. “What are we going to do?”
“I contacted my old fence in Charleston,” Gabe says. “He knows a guy who is going to set us up with passports and birth certificates under different names. I’ve already taken pictures of the kids and sent them over. I told him I’d get our pictures to him this afternoon.”
I shake my head hard enough to send my hair flying around my face. “No, Gabe. I can’t do that to them. A life spent running isn’t any better than if they ended up in the system. I can’t—”
“It will be a hell of a lot better than if they ended up in the system.” Gabe stands, lifting me in his arms, carrying me across the room. “I’ve already booked a cottage on the coast of Croatia, a lovely country with a stable government, an excellent exchange rate, and no extradition policy for people accused of crimes on U.S. soil.”
“What?” I let out a soft oof of surprise as he lays me on the bed.
He smiles. “We’ll be staying in a beach town by the Adriatic Sea. It will be just like the Italian Riviera, only cheaper.”
“Cheaper,” I echo, mesmerized as he reaches for the bottom of his tee shirt and pulls it over his head. Even at a moment like this, the sight of his bare chest is enough to make my fingers itch with the need to touch him
“We check in on Wednesday.” Gabe lies down beside me, his hand coming to rest at my waist, making my skin tingle beneath the scratchy fabric of my dress. “We’ll have the cottage for the rest of the summer, long enough to decide whether we want to stay where we are and homeschool the boys, or move to the city, where they have an English-speaking school.”
“You can’t be for real.” I stare deep into his eyes, seeing nothing but determination.
“Do I look like I’m not for real?” He lifts one brow as his fingers bunch the fabric of my dress, pulling my skirt higher on my thighs. “I have enough money to cover our expenses for years if we’re relatively frugal. I’ve already transferred a sizeable amount into a Swiss bank account. We’ll have access to the funds as soon as we land.”
“But what about when the kids get older?” I ask, covering his hands with my own, the enormity of this conversation enough to make my head spin without Gabe undressing me at the same time. “We can’t run away to a foreign country forever. What if the kids want to go to college in the states, or—”
“Then they go to college in the states.” He brushes my hands away and finishes bunching my dress around my waist. “And they can come visit us on their breaks. We can run away forever, Caitlin. You and me.” He leans in, kissing me with a tenderness that is every bit as arousing as the way he fists his hand in the top of my pantyhose. “We can go somewhere no one knows our names, and be a family.”
My breath rushes out over his lips. “Gabe, I—”
“I’ve already got our story figured out,” he interrupts, sitting up long enough to strip my pantyhose down my thighs and toss them to the floor before lying back down beside me. “We’ll tell people that you were given custody of your brothers after your parents passed away, and that you and I are married, and Emmie is our daughter.”
Tears spring to my eyes and my throat feels like it’s about to close up, but I don’t know if it’s from gratitude or fear. I reach for Gabe, wrapping my arms around his neck and drawing him closer.
“Are you sure you want this?” I ask as he presses kisses to my throat and my pulse speeds faster. “Your parents don’t want to ruin your life; they just want me to go away. Maybe, if I do, things can go back to the way they were. You can go back to school and have the life you wanted, and—”
“All I want is you.” He pulls back to look me in the eyes, an intensity in his gaze that steals the rest of my words away. “You are the only thing I want, the only thing that makes my life worth living. You are everything to me.”
I blink, sending tears streaming down my cheeks. “You, too. To me.”
Relief flickers in his eyes. “And that’s all we need.”
“But what about jobs?” I ask, still having a hard time wrapping my head around all this. “We’ll eventually need jobs, and I don’t even know what language they speak in Croatia.”
“Croatian,” he says, rubbing my tears into my skin with the pad of this thumb. “And I told you, I have enough money to hold us over for years. That’s more than enough
time to learn a new language.”
“But what about visas and friends for the kids and—”
“We’ll figure it all out,” he says, bringing a finger to my lips. “I don’t care what kind of work I do, or what language I speak. As long as we belong to each other, and I get to tell you I love you every day, I will be the happiest man in the world. You’re my home, Caitlin, and I—”
I silence him with a kiss, too overcome to tell him how much everything he’s said means to me. I have to show him. I have to show him with my body and soul that he is my home, too. He is my friend, my lover, and my saving grace. He is my partner, my other half, and one of the few people in the world I would fight to the death to protect.
He is the dream I didn’t know I was wishing for until it came true, and one lifetime will never be enough to show him how lucky I feel to have been entrusted with his heart.
“I love you so much,” I say between kisses, breath coming faster.
“Nothing can scare me, except thinking of another day without you in it.”
I sigh into him and he inhales, breathing my breath. “You’re pretty romantic, you know that?”
“I’ll show you romantic.” He kisses me hard enough to make my lips feel bruised, before he whispers, “Roll over onto your belly. I want to fuck you from behind.”
I obey without a second of hesitation, rolling over and sweeping my hair to one side, shivering as Gabe draws my zipper down, curls his fingers into the front of my collar, and strips my dress from my body with one smooth movement, leaving me in nothing but my bra and panties. I reach back, intending to unhook my bra, needing to eliminate the barriers to being naked with the man I love, but Gabe brushes my hands away.
“No. This is my job,” he says, kissing his way down my neck as he makes quick work of my bra and underwear.
A moment later he is on top of me, blanketing me with his body, surrounding me so completely there is nothing but him—his smell, his taste, the feel of his strong arms sliding beneath me to cup my breasts, his erection nestled between the cheeks of my ass. I moan, arching back into the burning length of him, amazed that he can feel so hard and so soft at the same time. His need is rock solid as it presses against my tailbone, but his skin is petal soft, fever hot. The feel of that pulsing flesh so close to where I ache for him is enough to send a rush of liquid heat from my body.
