Chapter 2
Northern California
It was late afternoon by the time Alexander and his men returned to Amanda’s.
When they arrived, Alexander went straight to the large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the sea.
Samantha was seated on a white ultrasuede stool, her hands atop a glistening marble countertop.
A nightclub-sized bar filled the area to his right.
Amanda had impeccable taste. Her home reflected that.
“How is she?” Alexander asked Samantha, who turned, her eyes narrowed slightly.
“She is resting comfortably right now. I, however, am becoming irritated with your brother.”
Alexander turned to look at Stephen sitting on another stool, positioned so he could see the entirety of the room and the estate’s front doors. Files and paperwork were spread before him, as well as his iPhone, two-way radio, and Sig. How their lives had come to this was…well, it just was.
“I only asked you a question, Samantha,” Stephen said bitingly as he gestured to Stan, who had appeared just inside the room. Stan nodded and did a quick pivot. Stephen was great under pressure.
God bless his brother.
“A personal question,” Sam said coolly. “Why it’s your business, Stephen, I’m not sure. But no, I’m not seeing anyone.”
Ah, now Alexander understood. Amanda had always said Stephen and Samantha would suit.
This must be the result of his brother’s two-hundred-plus-year fascination with Ms. Gilchrist. Stephen gave a curt nod, but Alexander detected a slight smile too.
Then his brother checked the time on his Breitling Avenger and asked, “Drink, Alex?”
“See if there’s any Macallan.”
Samantha laughed knowingly, and when Alexander walked behind the bar, he saw it. The bottle was right there, already opened. A beautiful, yet utterly masculine, cut crystal rocks glass sat beside it. Bloody hell, sweetheart.
“There’s four cases in the bottom left cabinet behind you,” she told him. “And if you’ll look up, you’ll see the rest.”
He did; at least twenty empty bottles lined one of the open shelves.
Samantha sighed, a clear indication of a chink in her armor.
“She poured you a glass every night. Placed it on the piano.” She pointed at the gorgeous grand piano in the corner of the room on display before the windows.
“And then she played for you.” Sam got up and shook her head, and tears laced the words that followed. “It was heartbreaking.”
She walked behind the bar, grabbed another glass, poured some Macallan for herself and knocked it back.
Impressive. Their eyes locked and as the proverbial ice melted, her shoulders sagged in resignation.
“I can’t believe you’re here. Or you,” she said, looking at Stephen.
“And Amanda told me about Gregor, so him too—Jesus.” It must have just hit her. “He drives one of your Navigators!”
Alexander actually chuckled. If anyone was born to live in the twenty-first century, it was his best friend.
“Gregor loves to drive.” He shook his head.
“There’s not a vehicle he’s come across that he hasn’t mastered in a day.
” Alexander remembered the first time Gregor had driven an automobile, an Aston Martin on the estate in Great Britain.
He’d been so exhilarated, he finished with a doughnut, then jumped out of the car and chest bumped Michael.
“Great.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll alert the creators of the Transporter franchise. Now back to the important stuff—how did you escape?”
“Stephen and my men freed me from prison ten hours before my scheduled execution.” He had to admit, it was a good line, and he relished the look of shock on Sam’s face.
“How did you get caught? Amanda said you were sailing for America that night. She and Callie were convinced you’d killed the men who abducted them.”
Alexander looked at Samantha. The woman didn’t mince words. He took a long pull of scotch before he answered. “I did kill them, Samantha. With my bare hands.” He grew angry just thinking about the men who’d kidnapped his wife and daughter and left them for dead. “After Amanda let go—”
“She said you would blame her for that,” Samantha snapped on her best friend’s behalf.
“Back off, counselor,” Stephen warned. It was a terribly touchy subject. For all of them.
“She said that you’d blame yourself too,” Sam conceded to Stephen.
“Which is it?” Stephen asked. “Her fault? Or mi—”
“Stop with the blame! I was a spy, they sought to hurt me. And they did.”
Alexander knocked back his own drink, then turned away for a moment. That evening was a living, recurring nightmare in his head.
“When she looked at me and said Callie was slipping, I knew she was going to let go. I just knew.” He rubbed his left hand where faint scars remained from that night.
The scratch marks Amanda had made in her desperation to take hold once he’d found them dangling from the cliff’s edge.
And crescent-shaped nail marks on the underside of his wrist from when she’d dug in once he’d grasped her.
“Amanda was terrified you had jumped in after them,” Sam said. “She wasn’t even sure she and Callie would be okay.”
In fact, Alexander had tried to jump in after them and he was about to open his mouth to say as much, but Stephen swore and got up to pour his own drink before refilling Alex’s. “I wouldn’t let him.”
“Amanda and I never had time to test our theories on where, when, and how the portal would open.” He took another pull of scotch. “We had only four months together before I lost her.” His words were laced with regret.
“Alexander.” Samantha waited until he gave her his full attention. “Amanda was devastated she’d been torn away from you. She was so worried that you would try to go through, too, and something awful would happen. Until we found the ledger last summer.”
She shook her head before saying, “When we were still in New York, she would stand in front of that big picture window and stare at the Atlantic as if willing you to sail home to her. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“That bloody ledger. We almost had our hands on it.” Alexander and his men had been searching for it since they arrived. “Stan’s men beat us to it by a day, if not hours.” It was the last piece of hard evidence of who he really was, and from where he really came.
“If you wanted it to be expunged, then it was,” Samantha told him. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?” Alexander repeated.
“Destroyed. The night Zander was born. Once they’d sedated and restrained Amanda, Stan came back to the estate. I didn’t wonder why he was here—Stan’s always been the kind of guy to be there when he’s needed, to do what’s right, no matter the consequence.”
Sam trailed off for a moment and got a faraway look in her eyes that Alexander noted.
Then she came back to herself. “Your wife was on a seventy-two-hour psych hold. We didn’t want anything adding to or setting back her fragile state of mind.
We met at the front doors. I’d already taken the ledger from the safe.
We walked to the beach together and lit that mother up.
Then we collected the ashes and drove the boat ten miles off the coast before we dropped them into the ocean. ”
While he appreciated their thoroughness, he’d give his right arm for Amanda to have not gone through the torment she had in thinking he’d been executed.
It felt like each time she or Callie had encountered tragedy or misfortune over the past year, he’d been so close!
Alexander swore under his breath; blast his bloody timing.
“Wait, let’s go back. How did you get caught?” Samantha asked. “You should have at least made it to America, based on what Amanda told me about those men, that night.”
“After searching the water beneath the cliffs,” Stephen jumped in, “he stood on the rocks beneath the ledge and waited.” Stephen didn’t say for their bodies to wash ashore.
“He didn’t want Amanda and Callie to be alone.
Twelve days and twelve nights he stood sentinel.
The only reason he left was because they’d dragged him away in chains. He begged me not to leave.”
“My brother kept vigil for six more days,” Alexander said. “Then he and our men came to the same conclusion I already had. Amanda and Callesandra had somehow made it through the portal. Together.”
“Amanda said you knew there was something about that cliff that made it different.”
“When I was just a boy, my father showed me the odd pattern that ran up the entirety of the rock wall,” Alexander said, remembering. “He often told me tales, but they weren’t tales after all.” He shook his head. “They were real.”
“What kind of tales?” Sam asked, her glass empty, but still in her hand.
“He’d say that sometimes one of our ancestors would, by a twist of fate, have a terrible wrong righted.”
“So, Rebecca was your wrong—and Amanda righted it.”
“Simply put, I suppose so.”
“You know, Amanda had a fascination with you before she even met you. Did she tell you?”
He tilted his head. Very little surprised him anymore, this, however, did. Warmed his heart too. “No,” he told Samantha, “I had no idea.”
“Without jumping too far ahead,” Sam said, “she found an accounting of your ancestral history, your military rank, your marriage to Rebecca, the birth of Callesandra, the death of your son… But it mysteriously ended in 1774. When Amanda returned to the British Isles with Callie, she eventually told me everything. It wasn’t easy getting the story out of her, and there was the matter of her wrist.”
Alexander’s hand flexed at the mention. He’d tried to hold on to her, even after she’d let go. He’d crushed her wrist in the process. It was now healed, post-surgery, and worked just fine thanks to titanium and the wonders of modern medicine.