Chapter 2
I'm trying not to shiver. It's bad enough that my estranged husband had to come and save me in the middle of a storm on the side of a fucking mountain. I don't want him to know just how deeply uncomfortable I am, even though I'm worried that I might have frostbite on my toes.
I got into a warm, cushy car back in New York, not expecting to have to get out of said car until there was another very warm building waiting for me in Vermont.
But here I am, drenched from head to toe, shivering.
“What about my car?” I ask as Emmett, silent as a grizzly bear, pulls back out onto the highway with me in the passenger seat of his pickup truck.
“We'll come back for it when the storm is over,” he growls. “Are you going to tell me what the fuck you're doing here?”
“What I'm doing here?” I ask. “What about what you're doing here?”
“Yeah, which brings me to another question,” he says as we head down the highway in the direction I was heading before I crashed. Up the mountain. “How the hell did you know where I was?”
I am not going to answer that question, because the answer is that I hired a private investigator with Emmett's money.
He glances sideways at me, fire in his eyes. “You had me fucking followed, didn't you?”
“What was I supposed to do, Emmett? You disappeared in the middle of the night. It's been two years. Was I supposed to just go on wondering where the fuck my husband was?”
His hand tightens on the wheel. Good. He's angry.
He has no fucking idea how angry I've been the last two years, or at least the last year and a half or so, after I realized he wasn't coming back.
After the police gave up on searching for him, and we had all pretty much decided that he ran off with someone else.
I was heartbroken for those six months. And that heartbreak turned into anger.
And then I find out he’s holed up in a cabin in Vermont, like a fucking hermit.
“So, what, you just wanted to come out here and find out what I was doing? he asks.
“No,” I say. “I came out here to bring you—” I look down at my empty lap, down at the floorboard. Of course. I left the divorce papers in my car. Along with the bag I brought so I could grab a hotel on my drive back to New York.
“We have to turn around,” I tell him.
“We're not turning around,” he says without looking at me. “We're almost there.”
“I don't care. I brought you divorce papers. They're in my fucking car, and you’re going to sign them so I can go home as soon as possible.”
The silence that settles in the car is heavy. Thick.
“Divorce papers?”
“Yes, Emmett,” I say, my voice a little less venomous. “Divorce papers. You can't just abandon a woman for two years and think she's not going to serve you with divorce papers.”
His thumb taps nervously on the steering wheel. I haven’t missed the fact that he’s bulked up a lot, even though I’ve been trying not to look directly at him since we got into this truck together. His arms are twice the size they were two years ago. Not to mention the beard, which is new.
“I’m not signing divorce papers.”
My mouth drops open, and a laugh bursts out of me.
A laugh of disbelief. “Yes, you are! You can't just hold me hostage in this marriage while you, what, decide that you're going to never see another human being again for the rest of your life? What the fuck are you even doing up here in the mountains?”
He doesn't answer my question. And just as I’m about to speak again, to try to force him to answer, we pull up in front of a cabin. There's nothing around it for miles, but the lights are on inside.
“How did you know where I was?” I ask. It looks like he left his cabin to come and find me, like he got into his truck and came straight to me. He certainly wasn’t out in this storm to head into town for a grocery run.
How did he know I was stuck on the side of the road?
“The sheriff called me,” he says, turning off the truck. As soon as the heater stops, the cold is oppressive on my wet skin. “Someone saw you slide off the highway. The roads are bad enough they didn't want to send anyone from town, so they asked me to come and get you.”
“The sheriff.” That's all I can say, in disbelief.
Like he has some sort of fucking life out here. Has he been here the whole time? Why the fuck did he leave?
“You owe me an explanation,” I say.
He just ignores me. “Get in the house, Brynne.”