Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Hunter could truly land a chopper nearly any place.
So when Victor spotted the wreckage, Hunter lowered the helicopter toward the snow-covered road. The helicopter hovered. Sent snow billowing and the black of the asphalt was revealed.
Down, down the chopper went. And the battered Ford pickup remained lodged against the old cedar tree, the front of the vehicle smashed to hell and back.
The blades slowed when the chopper landed. Victor jerked off his headset and reached for the door. “Radio the sheriff,” he ordered Hunter. Then he was out the door. He’d pulled his weapon, and he rushed right to the vehicle.
The thud of footsteps told him that someone was hurrying behind him. He turned, threw out his left arm, and caught Melody as she barreled forward. “Fuck, no.”
“Fuck, yes!” Melody tossed back instantly. “That person needs help!”
“That person…” Victor gritted out, “could be the asshole who shot at you last night! The vehicle is too close to the Mage property.” Not really Mage land, not anymore. I own it all. “Get back in the chopper!”
“How about I just get behind you?” Melody returned without missing a beat. “You have the gun. You can keep us safe. Let’s just go.”
Dammit. He pushed her behind him. And advanced. Glass crunched under his shoes as he neared the driver’s side of the truck. He raised his weapon. Peered inside.
More broken glass. A crushed console. Deflated air bag. Red on the airbag. Blood.
But…
No driver.
He spun around.
Melody stood inches away. The helicopter waited. Hunter waited.
But where in the hell is the truck’s driver?
“You don’t have a Christmas tree.” Melody stood in Victor’s den, and her hands twisted in front of her body. Those words hadn’t been the ones that she’d intended to say. She’d planned to go with something like…
When is the sheriff going to tell you who owned that wrecked and abandoned truck?
Where is the driver?
Are you really my fiancé?
And did you truly fuck me so hard that you’d make me scream for you?
Um, ahem. All good questions. Or, at least, she’d thought they were good. After finding the abandoned truck in the woods, Victor had done a fast search for the driver. He’d searched on foot, then from above in the chopper.
There’d been no sign of the missing driver.
Hunter had radioed the sheriff. Jamal Wroth had promised a full search. The sheriff had also promised to follow up with any discoveries that he made about the driver and the shooting at the Mage estate.
Victor and the sheriff had seemed awfully chummy when they spoke. She supposed that was a good thing. Wasn’t it?
They’d traveled back to the heart of Richmond. Victor had assured Melody that her bag would be transferred from the Mage house. He’d brought along a backpack, nothing else. Well, the gun, but nothing other than the backpack and the gun.
“I don’t have a Christmas tree in here because I didn’t exactly feel like decorating,” he told her, and she realized that her question had hung in the air for several uncomfortable moments before he’d finally replied.
“Celebrating wasn’t big on my to-do list.” He sprawled on the black couch and watched her with a predatory gaze.
Predatory as in…he’s looking at me as if he could eat me alive.
She stopped twisting her hands and instead crossed her arms over her chest. “What was on your to-do list?” She knew what was on her list. Going to the estate. Getting inside. Finding out who left me for dead in the snow. And, hopefully, unlocking my past.
“My to-do list. Right.” The fingers of his right hand tapped against the cushions near him. “Teaming up with the Ice Breakers. Finding you. Finding the bastard who took you.” A slight pause. “Making him pay.”
He sounded so lethal when he added that final bit. She got the feeling that when he said “making him pay”—well, Victor wasn’t just talking about jail time.
She crept away from him and headed toward the fireplace. No fire crackled. The room felt cold. No decorations at all. No signs of warmth. A big, beautiful fireplace. A big, beautiful home, one situated in West Franklin. Historic, probably built in the early 1900s.
And how do I know that? Again, random facts that flittered through her head. But she could just look at the design and architecture and know that it dates to the early 1900s.
Corner lot. Gated entry. Big, heavy, wrought-iron gates that were paired with a tall, brick wall.
Security cameras had been perched at all sorts of angles and in all sorts of positions around the house.
The fireplaces appeared to be original—she’d caught sight of several fireplaces in the different rooms they’d passed.
Arched entranceways dominated in the house.
Wide windows. Ceilings that stretched up so very high.
Gorgeous architecture. Really. The beauty of the place made her want to sigh. But…there was just nothing personal there. Nothing that made the house feel like a home.
And being inside, well, she would have never even suspected it was the holiday season. Not a single wreath. No Christmas tree. No presents.
So cold.
“You were in Canada.”
Melody nodded. “Told you that already. Hamilton, Ontario.” At first. But then she’d started inching her way down.
“How the hell did you get back in the US if you didn’t even remember who you were? Not like you had a passport on you. I’ve got your passport locked up in my safe.”
Now that news surprised her. “You do?”
A nod.
She wet her lips. “I snuck in. For the right price, getting a fake ID really isn’t that hard.” A roll of one shoulder as she ambled away from the fireplace. “I got a job waitressing. Saved my cash. Tried to come up with a plan once a few bits and pieces started coming back to me.”
“What was the first thing you remembered?”
“Snow. Blood. Fear.” She licked her lips. “A car coming at me.” The nightmare that replayed so many times when she tried to sleep.
But there were some things you could never escape.
Hunter had vanished after the chopper landed. She had suspicions about where he’d gone. And her first suspicion… “I’m assuming Hunter is accessing my hospital records from my time up north?”
“Of course.”
Of course. “Won’t he need my permission to do that? Shouldn’t I sign a release or something?”
A soft rumble of laughter escaped him. “We have ways to work around that. Don’t worry.”
Too late. She worried all the time. “Every single thing I’m telling you is the truth. I woke up in a hospital bed. I remembered nothing about my past. It was that way for a while. Then the pieces started sliding back to me.”
He rose from the couch. A slow, graceful lift of power. He began to close in on her.
She didn’t retreat. It was his house. Where could she go? And wasn’t she tired of running? “When I realized I was Melody, I thought about staying away.”
He stopped, mid-stalk. “What?”
“I researched her—I mean, I researched me. And each time I considered coming here, to Richmond, I would get terrified. Like my body knew something my mind didn’t want to face. I could have stayed away. I could have just started over. A new life.”
He shook his head. Resumed his stalk.
A wall was behind her, one painted a dark gray. He stopped right in front of her. His hands rose, but he didn’t touch her. Instead, his palms flattened on the wall. “I would have found you.”
Maybe.
“I would never have stopped looking for you.”
Her heart beat faster. Wasn’t that what she wanted? So very badly? To know that she’d mattered enough to someone that the person was looking for her? “How did you know I wasn’t dead?”
A muscle flexed along his jaw. “Some days, I feared you were.” There was pain in his voice.
A dark, savage rage. “But I was going to search until I found you, whether that was you…living, breathing, beautiful…” One hand left the wall and curled under her chin.
“Or you cold and…” He stopped. His nostrils flared.
“I wasn’t giving up until I found your body.
I had to search. You were there one minute, gone the next, and sometimes, I felt like I had lost my mind when I lost you. ”
She ached for him.
“You don’t remember us.”
“No.” So far, she’d remembered nothing personal about him. Couldn’t recall any of their time together.
“You stare at me, and you see a stranger.”
“Not…exactly.”
His eyes narrowed. Such dark, dark eyes. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, I stare at you, and I get terrified.” The same way she used to get terrified when she thought of returning to Richmond. Like my body knows something my mind doesn’t want to face.
Victor backed away as if he’d been burned. “What?”
“When I saw you at the estate for the first time, it was like an electric shock went through me. My first instinct was to run.”
Victor shook his head. “I would chase you. You can’t leave me again.”
“I’m not running.” She wet her lips. His dark gaze followed the movement. The darkness in his eyes seemed to heat. “Because I’m afraid, but at the same time…I-I feel this pull to you that I don’t understand.”
A mocking smile curved his lips. “We always had that pull. You wanted to hate me.”
She had?
“But you wanted to fuck me more than you hated me.”
“You are not reassuring me.” Quite the opposite.
“I want you to kiss me.”
She sucked in a breath. “You said you’d help me solve the mystery of what happened to me.”
“I did say that, and I will. But in order to do that, you have to remember everything. Good and bad. All the stuff in between.”
“And kissing you is supposed to do that? Help me remember, I mean? Spoiler alert, we kissed already. I didn’t remember anything.
I’m not Sleeping Beauty, and your kiss is not going to wake me up.
” But she did want his mouth on hers. She wanted to see what it would be like if she just let go completely and gave in to the strange attraction she felt for him.
An attraction that scared her just as much as it turned her on.