Chapter 12
Salvador
“There you are,” I say to Jema when I find her in the bedroom. She’s stretched out on top of the covers with a book and wrapped in a robe. “Did you have a bath without me?”
“I was tired of waiting.” She smiles at me as I bend down and place a kiss on her lips.
“I’m sorry I’m late. My meeting ran over and then I had to make some calls.” I take a seat on the edge of the bed as my fingers lazily stroke against her bare thigh. “What did you get up to today?”
“Well, I was in the garden for most of the day, but then I had a memory come back.”
The surprise of her statement makes my finger still. It’s only a heartbeat before I recover and go back to tracing the soft skin across her hip.
“That’s great, kitten,” I say, trying to put some enthusiasm into my voice. This was bound to happen at some point, and I’ve been waiting for it. “Tell me everything. What did you remember?”
“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t a full memory exactly. It was more like an echo of a memory from when I was young. Maybe you could help me remember it. You know how much it hurts my head when I try to chase the thoughts.”
“Of course, what do you want to know?”
“It was something about my childhood. Can you tell me about it? Maybe about my parents and where I grew up?”
“I’m so sorry, Jema,” I say, and I can feel her body tense under my touch. “You grew up in foster care. I tried looking into your parents, but there wasn’t any information on them. You were dropped off at an orphanage when you were a baby, so there wasn’t any history.”
This is mostly true. After interrogating Joey, he gave up everything on Jema.
Once he told me she was in the foster system, all it took was bribing the right people to get her file opened.
I found out her parents OD’d in a drug house when she was a baby.
The fire department found her, and she was turned over to the State.
She bounced around in foster care after that, and that’s how she ended up getting mixed up with Joey.
Telling Jema her parents don’t exist seems kinder than telling her they didn’t give a fuck about her.
“Oh, that’s good, I guess.” She seems weirdly relieved by this news, and when I look at her, she continues. “I mean, that they aren’t out there missing me.”
“Is there anything else you want to know?” I realize that I’m pushing it by asking her this because I don’t actually want her to remember that she’s not mine. She is now, but I have a feeling she’s not going to be pleased that I’ve tricked her into it.
“How’d we meet?”
“What?” The question takes me by surprise, and I don’t have an answer ready for it. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before now, but clearly I should have.
Jema sits up, her eyes watching me closely. “How did we meet? It’s a simple question, right? I mean, from what I see, you work all the time, so it’s not like we could have run into one another if I was, say, working at a diner?”
Her choice of words makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on edge. Does she remember more than she’s letting on? When I cleared out her apartment, I found a uniform for a nearby diner. Could she remember her life before?
“Plus you have all these cooks here, and you never eat out. It’s not like you kidnapped me or anything,” she says with a laugh. “Right?”
There’s a long pause as the silence stretches between us. She blinks once, twice, then her smile begins to falter.
“Kitten,” I say softly as I move closer.
“Meeting you was the single greatest moment of my life.” She swallows hard as I reach up and trace a finger along her jaw.
I’m not sure if she’s testing me, but either way, I decide to tell her a partial truth.
“I was down at the docks inspecting a shipment. You were lost, and we ran into each other.”
“Oh,” she says, and once again she seems weirdly relieved.
“I know you love running from me, and you know how much I love chasing you. If you want to throw in a kidnapping fantasy, I’m more than willing to play along.
” My finger traces lower down her neck and along her collarbone.
I push open the front of her robe and lean forward to place a kiss over her heart.
“I’d do anything to make my wife happy.”
“You really are a wonderful man, aren’t you?” She lets out a contented sigh, and I feel the tense muscles in her body relaxing.
I laugh against her neck before I lick her sweet skin. “No, Jema,” I say, my voice deep and deadly. “I’m nothing close to wonderful.”
“But you’d never hurt me.”
When I pull back, I see the certainty in her eyes. “You’re right, I’d never ever hurt you.”
Her lips part, but she doesn’t get a chance to say anything because Edward is at the door with our dinner.
Chapter 12 Jema
It's been two days since I saw Joey, and part of me wants to forget it happened. I want to pretend it was a crazy dream and that my husband is perfect. The man is sweet to me, and when I do get myself into trouble, it's enjoyable. He’s never really mad or upset with me, so how bad can he be?
I don't want to believe the man in the cellar, but I have this nagging sensation at the back of my mind that he's telling the truth about everything. It's not Salvador that’s giving off red flags; it’s the all-new staff.
People are skittish around him and never make direct eye contact. The way they shift their bodies away and avoid him is odd. It was so strange I started to casually ask the staff questions to try and get them to open up. As soon as I asked how long they worked here, they’d stop talking.
I had to ask a lot of people before someone finally answered simple questions.
It wasn't like I was asking them if my husband kept people tied up in the basement. Their hesitation and sometimes fear made me unable to lie to myself any longer. There’s something going on in this house, and I’m at the center of it.
My bigger issue now is that I am struggling with my moral compass.
I mean, what if Joey is a bad dude and Salvador is a sort of Batman?
I mean, he does have a butler who can be very Alfred-like at times.
Even I know that convoluted daydream is bullshit because people wouldn't shy away from him if that was the case.
The silent part in my mind screams for me to leave it alone, but what if all the memories resurface and guilt overwhelms me? There’s always the option of bringing it up to Salvador. I could simply ask. I don't believe he'd toss me down there too, or maybe that’s what I want to believe.
Salvador said the other night that he wouldn't hurt me. Yeah, I'd picked up on that, but that doesn’t mean everything that he does is so black and white. I still need more information, which is why I’m lingering in the kitchen.
I’ve been waiting for another moment to slip back downstairs.
If I investigate a little more, then I might find a solution to this whole situation.
This would be so much easier if my memories came back. Everything is still so foggy, but I have noticed that with each day that passes, my sense of self becomes clearer.
"Would you like a second breakfast?" Edward asks.
"I'm good. I'm going to head out to the garden soon."
"Don't forget your sunscreen," he says, in the same way Salvador had earlier.
"Did my husband tell you to remind me?"
"He worries over you." Edward's eyes flick to my empty plate. "Are you sure you don't want more?"
"Are you trying to plump me up?" I laugh, and he shrugs.
"You could be eating for two."
He turns away to put things in the refrigerator, and I stare at his back. How could he drop that kind of bomb? One that should have already occurred to me, but in all fairness, I don't have a lot of stable thoughts at the moment.
I press my hand to my stomach but quickly pull it away when Edward turns back around.
He grabs my plate before I can try and do it myself, so I thank him and hop down from the stool.
I make a show of grabbing my things and getting ready to go outside, but the second Edward slips from the kitchen area, I bolt over to the door and pick the lock.
"Yes," I whisper to myself. The excitement over my victory quickly fades as the reality of what I need to handle hits me right in the face.
With each step I take toward the cellar, I can't help but wonder if I'm betraying my own husband. Then again, Joey says it’s all bullshit because I'm not married and still a virgin.
That's one of the reasons I don’t believe Joey.
I'm horny all the time. At this point, I can't even sleep without an orgasm.
I think about Salvador and I'm turned on.
I must have been a nympho before I hit my head.
When I get to the vault door, I key in the code, and it pops open. Joey quickly sits up on the mattress, and I can see the relief written across his face.
"Thank god you’re back. I thought he'd kill me before you had a chance to figure it all out." He sounds so confident, which only makes him that much more believable.
"Don't get excited; he was able to answer all my questions."
"Please, Salvador is a career criminal. Lying is like breathing to him.”
“And it’s not for you?” I ask, and he gives me a coy smile.
"So you are remembering." His teasing is light and playful, and it makes me draw closer. I'm still far enough from him that the chain will keep us separated and he won’t be able to grab me.
"No, not yet, but what you’re saying is making it hard to figure out what is real." I wring my fingers together in front of me.
"You're leaving me down here to die, aren’t you?"
"What if you’re the bad guy? What if you chop up animals or something?"
"Jems, that was one time, and it was an accident."
"What?" I whisper more to myself than to Joey. Then I have a flash of memory of him sitting across from me at the diner calling me Jems.
"It was a joke," he says, and I nod.