Chapter Twelve
Fear. She saw it clear as day on his face. Just like she saw it clear as day in her fuzzy memories about him leaving on his last mission—running away from the prospect of having a family.
She couldn’t remember if she’d felt fear—when he’d left, when she’d married him, when she’d been attacked.
She didn’t feel it now.
He did, but he was working on putting it away. She could see him start to compartmentalize what she’d said. What she wanted.
“Kirsten.” He said it in that infuriatingly patient tone that wasn’t condescending but somehow felt like she was being condescended to. The poor lady who didn’t remember.
Well, maybe she would, if he’d treat her like the woman she’d once been. Still, she understood this was…complicated. Or at least, she tried to make herself understand. This wasn’t just about her. He had feelings and memories and issues hung up in this too.
“I know it’s asking a lot. Because you remember and I don’t. I might not respond the way you’re used to, and that might hurt. I don’t want to hurt you, but I need… It’s just all so close, when it wasn’t before.”
Except…wasn’t it? She’d been fascinated by Ellis. A little scared of him, but there’d been a pull there—the pull had scared her. She’d turned away from it. Anything that had felt like the answer to all her questions.
She hadn’t been ready for them. She didn’t fully understand what had changed to make her ready, but she felt ready.
Maybe it was as simple as a threat, wanting to feel…
prepared for it. Maybe because now she had a framework for her feelings—for him, for them.
Now she had a reason for the things she’d felt.
And she wanted to remember what it was. All of it.
“I can’t just kiss you.” He sounded strangled.
“Why not? We’ve done a whole lot more than kiss if we were together for so many years.”
He made a choking kind of sound that left her feeling emboldened.
“Yes, and I remember all that,” he said, very firm and stern. “You don’t.”
“Maybe I will if you just kiss me.”
He made a scoffing noise. Not mean, just exasperated. “You did always love a fairy tale, but that’s not how life works.”
She supposed if she remembered loving fairy tales that might sting. As it was, she saw right through him. “Then why are you so afraid to try it?”
He sighed, raked a hand through his hair, leaving it messy. There was the tiniest glint of a silver strand or two amidst the dark blond. She reached out to touch it.
It felt…nice. The bristles against her fingertips, this pocket of air they were sharing warmed by his body heat. There was even something strangely nice or familiar or something about the suspicious way he regarded her while holding himself very still.
Touching him was nice, but he clearly wasn’t going to touch her back. She didn’t think this worked without his participation, without it being in some way like it had once been. She needed him to…touch her, to something.
So she lifted his hands, pressed his palms to her cheeks. She didn’t miss the look of pain that crossed his face. She felt badly for putting it there, but she…she wanted to know what this felt like. It wasn’t just that she thought maybe it would unlock something her brain was hiding from her.
She just wanted to. Which had to be tied up in memory, even if it wasn’t clear in her brain.
“Just kiss me, Ellis.”
He was so still, she thought maybe there was no way to demand this of him. But then he muttered an irritable “Fine,” and he dropped his mouth to hers.
Lips touched. Gingerly. She doubted he’d ever kissed her like that before. Maybe she didn’t know everything about him, or the man he’d been when they first met, but he did not strike her as the kind of man who did things gingerly.
She tried to soften it, soften against him, even while holding him there by keeping her hands over his on her cheeks. He was stiff. Not awkward, exactly, but like he was hiding himself behind a very carefully erected shell.
She sighed against it, against him, wished there was some way to breech what lay beyond. Because she was sure there were memories there. She was certain.
There was a moment, just the briefest second, where she felt a slight relaxing in him. A moment where he was just about to give in to it all.
Then he tensed, pulled back. He did keep his hands on her face, but maybe that’s because she was holding them there.
She blinked her eyes open, looked into the pain in his hazel ones.
There was definitely a reaction in her body to that kiss, even if it had been…careful. But memories? No wave of concrete something. No sudden deck of memories to sort through. Just the same out-of-reach feeling. And a throb deep within. A need.
One she wouldn’t mind exploring with or without memories. But even she could acknowledge that required not being the target of some kind of threat.
Probably.
“You don’t remember anything.” He said it gently, like he was letting her down easy.
But she had the sneaking suspicion he was letting himself down easy. So she kept her hands where they were, holding his against her cheeks. She stayed there in this little bubble of his body heat and just let herself…absorb it all.
She didn’t try to push, just let herself settle in her body like Dr. Leigh was always telling her to do.
The unsteady rhythm of her heart. The way his mouth had felt on hers.
The heat of his rough palms and the way brown and green dappled in his eyes like they couldn’t quite decide what direction to go in.
She knew those eyes. If they had been together so long, she had to know them, deep at the center of something. Maybe in that yearning feeling at the center of her chest, reaching out for something from him.
Him. No tension. No pain. Just him. Smiling. Relaxed. It didn’t come to her in a flash, so much as the wispy vision of something just out of reach.
“There was a place…with a balcony overlooking a beach.” She could see it. She could see him, the blue of it all behind him. “The ocean.”
By the way his muscles tensed, she knew it was a real thing. Not just hope.
“Did we live by the ocean ever?” she asked him, searching his eyes for the answer.
“No,” he said, and his voice was rough. Pained.
But there was something. “Tell me.”
“We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. The only nice vacation I ever took you on. No work. No… Just us. And a balcony. Overlooking the ocean.”
She couldn’t remember it, not like she could remember, say, her first day working at the bookstore or last year’s Christmas party. But there were impressions of moments. The sound of the waves. The simple, settled joy she’d felt with him on that balcony. Dancing. Laughter.
A feeling she only knew how to label as love.
She didn’t let him go. She stayed there, on the fringe of a moment that would have been so many years ago. She wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t projecting, she could feel the love in those moments. She could feel the things she’d felt, even if she couldn’t remember every second of every day.
She opened her mouth to explain that to him, or try, but he beat her to it. That pain he used like a weapon throbbing in his voice.
“I never stopped loving you, Kirsten. But I’m not sure, when you remember, you’ll be able to say the same. I’m telling you that so you understand that it’s not going to be so easy to remember, and whatever good you think you know, it wasn’t all good.”
And there was the answer, this…thing he kept alluding to without coming out and saying it. That things had not been okay between them. He’d left—and he insisted it hadn’t been because he was afraid to be a father, but that was sure stuck in her mind.
His phone chimed. Immediately he moved away, even though she tried to firm her grip on his hands. “It’s Zach. I have to take this.”
She felt the familiar wave of something. Frustration. She didn’t fight it. She let it wash over her. “You always felt like work was more important.”
His eyes cooled. Pain shuttered behind a thick impenetrable wall. “People’s lives are at stake. Your life is at stake. So yeah, this is more important.” He turned away from her, brought the phone to his ear, and walked out the front door.
Kirsten stood where she was, remembering being left exactly here too many times to count.
And wondering why the hell she’d accepted it.
“DR. LEIGH IS CLEAN,” Ellis said when he answered, without any preamble.
He had no preamble. He felt like he’d been wrung into a hundred knots he’d never untangle. Everything inside of him ached. Physically. Emotionally.
Zach’s silence on the other line stretched out. “You sure?”
Was he? “There was absolutely nothing in the session to lead me to believe she’d purposefully leak information to someone who would cause Kirsten harm.
Everything she did was the act of…a therapist who wants her client to be okay.
” More like clients, because she had asked him how he was feeling. She had lumped him in with everything.
Like she was telling the truth and she’d only been keeping him on the sidelines until Kirsten was ready to deal with remembering.
“So, it’s interesting you use the word purposeful,” Zach said, and Ellis didn’t think he was imagining the dark tone. “I went back over my initial investigation into Dr. Leigh before we used her, and when we started, she didn’t have an assistant.”
“She has an assistant?” He’d never met one or dealt with one or heard about one.
“Apparently. You didn’t know?”
“No, but I haven’t been to the office in a while. Kirsten… Jessica had only been going to her office once a month lately. I’ll have to ask if she knew about an assistant. Met her. Do you have information?”
“I’m working on it. Because it’s pretty damn fishy that this assistant we didn’t know about leaves Dr. Leigh’s office the minute your video conversation is over.”
Ellis swore. Fishy didn’t begin to cover it. “Your PI?”
“She’s following her.”
Ellis began to pace. The snow was high and his pants were getting wet, his boots weren’t going to fair much better, but he had to move. Everything was wrong. But it was a lead. God, he hoped it was an answer to this so they could go back to…
But if Kirsten knew now, if she was starting to remember, nothing would ever go back. If anything…it would just all be over.
Ellis had to try to numb the pain of that realization and focus on what Zach was saying.
“I’m running a background as we speak. The PI is going to observe what she can. Even if Dr. Leigh doesn’t have anything to do with this, the assistant might be finding out information under her nose. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Yeah, good.” It was fishy. It was weird. But what if it was another dead end? How long did they stay up here waiting?
Especially if Kirsten was going to keep trying to kiss him.
The sound of something crashing had Ellis reaching for the gun he wore on an ankle holster, so Kirsten didn’t see it and get worried. But he quickly saw it was just snow and ice falling off the eaves of the barn across the way where the morning sun shone down on it.
He swore inwardly, dialed back into the conversation as he tried to get his heart rate back down to normal.
“You’re sure you’ve got eyes on all the ways in and out of here?” he demanded of Zach.
“Yes. The snow would make it nearly impossible for anyone to get up there anyway. You’re safe.”
Ellis believed him, but he sure didn’t like the word nearly in this situation.
“I’ve got to get back to doing a background on this assistant,” Zach said. “I’ll email what I find to you and keep you up-to-date on the PI’s findings. Just stay out of the way. We’ve got it covered.”
Ellis glanced back at the cabin, wondering what Kirsten was up to in there. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep her up here. She’s…” Antsy wasn’t the right word. But what was? And how much of this was really about him being uncomfortable with all the ways she wanted to push the envelope?
Because by God, he’d happily spend the next year doing nothing but kissing her if he thought it was that easy. If he thought someday the memories wouldn’t come screaming back and he’d be unceremoniously and deservedly kicked to the curb.
“At some point, we can’t keep hiding from her life. It isn’t right.” That was why they’d spent the last two years in Hope Town. He couldn’t forget that now.
“Let’s see where the assistant leads us and go from there. I’ll be in touch.”
Ellis ended the call with Zach but stood there in the cold, snow making his pants wet, his feet colder and colder. His nose hurt from it. He scanned the woods around them, took a deep breath of crisp mountain air.
It was such a surreal moment—all this wintry, quiet peace. Everything in his life in a new kind of turmoil.
Two years ago, turmoil had felt like normal. The only way to be steady was to have some kind of professional challenge. Two years ago, he had needed the job, the challenge, the danger.
You were afraid of becoming a father.
He scowled at the thought. They’d never had that fight. He’d never had that thought. So why did that accusation she’d laid at him that she clearly misremembered bother him so much?
Sure, he didn’t really remember his dad.
Some random little snatches of a happy man who gave hugs freely.
But Jason had been a decent enough stepdad.
Maybe not warm or affectionate. Maybe not ever…
connected or bonded in any way. Ellis was sure he’d never made the man proud, and they’d never known what to do with each other after Mom died.
But Jason had kept him, and wasn’t that love…after a fashion? There had been other family members he could have been cast off to. But Jason had kept him, gotten him through high school. Kept him on the straight and narrow.
He’d made a success out of Ellis.
And he’d never once been proud.
Why was he out here thinking about this when there was some mystery assistant who might be feeding his and Kirsten’s whereabouts to someone who wanted them dead? It was damn pointless.
The only thing that mattered was getting to the bottom of this so Kirsten could be safe.
And that wasn’t running away.
It wasn’t.