About the Author

Nicole Helm grew up with her nose in a book and the dream of one day becoming a writer. Luckily, after a few failed career choices, she gets to follow that dream—writing down-to-earth contemporary romance and romantic suspense. From farmers to cowboys, Midwest to the West, Nicole writes stories about people finding themselves and finding love in the process. She lives in Missouri with her husband and two sons, and dreams of someday owning a barn.

Booklist

Books by Nicole Helm

Mills & Boon

Hope Town Secrets

Kidnapping in Hope Town

Hunted in Hope Town

Bent County Protectors

Vanishing Point

Killer on the Homestead

Fatal Deception

Eyewitness in Danger

Hudson Sibling Solutions

Cold Case Kidnapping

Cold Case Identity

Cold Case Investigation

Cold Case Scandal

Cold Case Protection

Cold Case Discovery

Cold Case Murder Mystery

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

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Hunted in Hope Town

Nicole Helm

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN-13: 9780008949891

Hunted in Hope Town

Copyright © 2026 by Nicole Helm

Published in Great Britain 2026
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises ULC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Dedication

For everyone who dreams about isolated cabins in the mountains.

Chapter One

Jessica Smith did not know very many things. For example, she did not know where she’d gone to high school, if she’d ever broken any bones, where she had been born or any of the normal things a person should know about themselves.

But she did know that she really liked coffee. She knew how to decorate beautifully and creatively for holidays. And she really knew how to sell books.

She also knew, no matter how nice and unthreatening and totally cute he was, Ellis Sutton made her nervous.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad kind of nervous. Jessica couldn’t characterize it as unease. It was just like…when he was there, something in her world didn’t quite stabilize. Something felt…just out of reach.

And he was there a lot.

Like this morning, as she pushed into the Hope Town Bakery with snow swirling around her. It was early, but the bakery had great coffee so it was no surprise Ellis was sitting at one of the tables with a mug and a plate in front of him with a half-eaten cinnamon roll on it.

It was no surprise that he’d lift those hazel eyes to see who was coming in the door and then curve his mouth into a welcoming smile.

It was no surprise that his deep rumbling voice would say, “Morning, Jessica.” And definitely no surprise that he made the chair and table look tiny holding his very large and impressive frame.

But every single time—whether it was here, or at the bookstore, or just on the street—Jessica felt a strange kind of jolt of what she could only describe as surprise when he looked at her or said her name.

She couldn’t say she had gotten used to it, even these two years later, but she had come to expect her reaction to him.

Today though was more. Because something seemed to…flash inside of her. An odd, unsettling memory. No, not a memory. A dream. She must have had a bad dream last night, because she could see in her head so clearly Ellis Sutton with blood all but spurting from his shoulder, his white shirt stained with blood.

So much blood.

She shuddered right there in the entrance to the bakery, like the dream was a terrible memory, when of course it was just a disturbing figment of her imagination while asleep.

“Cold one,” Ellis offered.

Jessica nodded, feeling mute. The sudden memory of such an awful dream created physical reactions she didn’t care for.

Thankfully, the bakery owner, Lia Blair, stepped out to the counter. “Morning, Jessica,” she greeted cheerfully. “The usual?”

Jessica liked having a usual. When her entire past was a blank—no doubt traumatic and terrible, which, hey, maybe was why she was having weird, bloody nightmares—it was nice to have things in Hope Town that felt like roots.

Jessica stepped forward to the counter. “Yes, please,” she managed to say without sounding as strangled as she felt.

Lia began to make the coffee, and Jessica couldn’t seem to help herself. She glanced over her shoulder at Ellis.

He was facing the door, so she just saw the back of his head. He was reading a book—another normal thing. He was their most consistent customer at the bookstore. So much so that Faith, her boss and the manager of the bookstore, had started hiring Ellis to do little projects around the store. He was the only male member of the bookstore’s book club and often had interesting and insightful things to say about whatever book they read.

Jessica looked back at the cash register, where Lia was ringing her up. Jessica paid in cash, like she did every day, then she took her to-go cup with a “Thank you.” When she turned back around to brave the cold and walk down to the bookstore, she did not look at Ellis. She kept her gaze forward.

Some of the other women she was friends with here in Hope Town liked to tease her about Ellis, saying that he had a crush on her. She always just laughed it off. It wasn’t like he’d ever made a move on her.

But if he did, what would you say? Albennie had demanded at the last book club after Ellis had left and Albennie had stayed behind to help clean up. Albennie worked with Lia at the bakery, and Jessica always felt drawn to her because she was…direct. Jessica didn’t feel uncomfortable with Albennie because a person always knew where you stood with her.

Ellis Sutton… Jessica didn’t have a clue. Where she stood with him. What she might say if he asked her out. It all left her feeling so unsettled she just…pushed it out of her mind and didn’t deal with it.

She thought about that flash of an image of him bleeding.

A dream. Just a dream. She should push that away with all her mixed-up feelings.

But she couldn’t seem to.

ELLIS SUTTON WAS TIRED.

He supposed two years of pretending your amnesiac wife was just a nice woman at the local bookstore might do that to a guy. But he had been an FBI agent for years, one who’d done a lot of undercover work. He should be a little mentally tougher.

Some days, he considered ignoring the doctor and the psychiatrist’s recommendations and just telling her.

Your name is Kirsten Sutton. I am your husband. You suffered a traumatic brain injury thanks to my job. We’re both still targets, but Hope Town seems to be okay.

He never did.

Obviously.

What he did do was spend way too much time at the bakery drinking coffee and eating pastries anytime he knew she might stop by. He volunteered his time at the bookstore—building shelves, cleaning, running errands, whatever Faith needed him to do—whenever Jessica was working. Any remaining time he spent doing some freelance security work, exercising to work off said pastries and all that frustration, or keeping careful tabs on the mob boss who no doubt wanted him dead—and would like to take anyone he loved out along the way.

Ellis might not be an FBI agent any longer, but he was determined to keep his body ready for whatever might come their way if that threat ever came to be. So research, exercise, and otherwise acting like an FBI agent even though he wasn’t one any longer all went with the territory.

He wouldn’t fail Kirsten a second time.

He could still remember the first time he’d seen her. She’d been on campus at their alma mater, sitting on the edge of the student union’s fountain. She’d had her head bent toward a friend’s she was sitting next to. They’d looked like they were sharing juicy secrets, and then she’d grinned—at her friend, not him—the sun glinting off her blond hair just right.

Ellis had been a different man then. Determined. Certain. Always so damn certain. And in that moment, he’d been certain that he was going to marry that woman.

It was silly. He could see that now, but in the moment, twenty and filled with purpose, he’d been sure. He’d gone right up to her and asked for her number.

She’d laughed at him. But she’d also given him her number.

It hadn’t been smooth sailing from there, though there’d been a lot more smooth than storms. They’d never broken up in all those years, though they’d fought or had rough patches. When he’d been in Quantico, they’d both been a little miserable and maybe nearing the end of their proverbial ropes with each other.

But then he’d survived it, gotten his first FBI assignment, and he’d proposed. She’d said yes, and that she’d be willing to go wherever he did. Marriage had been pretty good, even with his demanding undercover schedule.

At first.

Toward the end there, they’d been heading toward miserable. Well, she had been. She’d been ready to start a family, like they’d always planned, and he’d wanted to chase glory. One last time.

Now here they were with neither the kids nor the glory. Technically, Kirsten Sutton was dead and Ellis Sutton allegedly worked at an FBI office in Anchorage on a desk assignment, so he wasn’t sure where that left them legally in terms of being married.

But to Ellis, they were married. To Ellis, he’d learned the hard way just how little he cared about glory without Kirsten.

Jessica, he reminded himself.

He couldn’t even let himself think of her as Kirsten Sutton, because he might slip up if he did. She had to be Jessica Smith, even in his memories.

Because Ellis Sutton knew all about how to survive undercover work. Some days, he figured it was the only thing he knew.

Frustrated with the circular thinking, Ellis glanced up from his book only to find Jessica walking out the door, which hadn’t been the plan for this morning. Rolling his eyes at himself, he tucked the book under his arm and hopped up and put his used dishes in their receptacle. He’d meant to have this conversation with her in the bakery. Now he’d have to have it with her on the street.

He glanced up at the counter to find a pair of blue eyes studying him suspiciously. Sammy, the teen who helped Lia out on weekends, must be on Thanksgiving break if she was working on a weekday.

And clocking him for being a creep. He needed to be more subtle. So he smiled kindly at her, and when he left the bakery, he went in the opposite direction Jessica had gone.

Even though it was cold and snowy, he took a long walk down Main Street, cut over behind the storefronts on the other side of the street, and didn’t cut back until he was past the bakery—just in case Sammy Fairhurst was still watching him.

Everyone in Hope Town knew him as Ellis Sutton, but on every legal document he had—rental agreement, driver’s license, et cetera—his name was Mark Jones. If he went out into the broader world of Bent County—rare—he went by Mark. But here in Hope Town he’d gone by his real name in the hopes someday it might…jog some piece of Jessica’s memory.

So he couldn’t raise any suspicion where he might need to explain two identities, even with a random teenager, because things would get…complicated. Even more complicated than they already were, and that was saying something.

Jessica was walking at a quick clip down Main, coffee in hand, honeyed-blond hair dancing in the wind. Just like that day almost twenty years ago, something about her just struck him, tightened his heart in a vise.

And every time he felt it now, he wondered how he’d gotten so deep, so lost, he’d been willing to risk their marriage for a job.

There was no good reason to be wondering that right now. It was irrelevant. She didn’t know who he really was, and until her brain clued her in—if it ever did—he had to pretend he didn’t know her either. Psychiatrist’s orders.

He caught up with her just as she made it to the bookstore front door. She was turning the key in the lock, so once she pulled the key out, he reached forward to open the door for her.

She looked up at him in surprise, though he hadn’t exactly been stealthy in his approach. But she was staring at him like she wasn’t sure if she should let him in.

“Faith said you had some Christmas decor ideas that might need my help,” he offered. “I thought I’d see what you had in mind. See if I need to buy any supplies.”

She inhaled, and he supposed anyone else might not notice the slight shake in that sound. But he noticed everything about her.

“Oh. Well. Right.”

She got nervous around him more often than not, but this was different. He cataloged every different. Always looking for some hint that the past might come back to her.

He was never sure if he wished it would or wouldn’t.

But today she didn’t just look nervous or unnerved in any of her normal ways, she actually looked a little…afraid.

“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned. She hadn’t seemed afraid of him in well over a year.

She nodded. Then she waved it away. “Sorry. I had this horrible dream last night that I didn’t remember until I saw you. It’s just left me feeling a little…off-kilter. Can’t seem to shake it.” She stepped into the warmth of the store, so he followed.

“Horrible dream about me?”

She grimaced, her cheeks going a little pink. “Well, you weren’t being horrible. You’d been shot. It was…awful and bloody.” She lifted her shoulders in a kind of shrug, then shuddered.

Everything inside him froze for a moment. He almost lifted his hand to the spot on his shoulder where he still had a scar from the gunshot wound that had caused him considerable muscle and bone damage.

That had stopped him from saving her from the fall from the second-story balcony, after she’d been thrown off of it.

At the last second, he stopped himself from touching the spot, but he was struggling to find words. To breathe.

He was too busy reliving that night, and the terror and pain and, yes, blood.

Jessica was…dreaming about that? Did that mean she might remember?

He shook that thought—that hope, that dread—away.

“Hey, guys,” Faith greeted them, appearing from the back room. She was carrying a big box, so Ellis took that as an excuse to look away from Jessica and move over to help Faith shoulder the burden.

There were three people in this town who knew he and Jessica had a past. Zach Simmons, also a former FBI agent who’d built Hope Town and was the reason Ellis and Jessica were here. Lane Webb, the original member of Hope Town’s privatized witness protection program who ran the antique store and acted as mayor and a kind of liaison to all the women under protection. And Faith Anderson, the bookstore manager who employed Jessica.

Ellis had needed to fight for that one with Zach. The whole point of any witness protection program was keeping people’s pasts on the down-low, but Ellis knew that Faith would need to understand that if Ellis was lurking around, it was only for Kirst—for Jessica’s safety.

“Thanks,” Faith said. “We need to get as much stock as possible out today. Hoping this stupid snow doesn’t screw up Small Business Saturday for us.”

Ellis tried to make his mouth curve. He wasn’t sure he succeeded, but he managed a few reassuring words about the weather.

And spent the rest of his day trying not to wonder if Jessica’s dream hadn’t been a dream at all.

But an actual memory.

Chapter Two

Jessica loved her little apartment above the empty storefront across from the bookstore. It was like her sanctuary. When everything outside these walls got to be too much, here she was safe.

From what?

The little snippet of a thought stopped her in her tracks this morning. What…was she afraid of?

Her doctor said that she shouldn’t worry about before. That she should focus on her present. After two years of having this big blank for a past, she thought she’d become quite the expert at that.

But the past few days, ever since she’d had that dream with a bloody Ellis, she felt…anxious. She should probably call to set up an appointment with Dr. Leigh. She marched over to her refrigerator, where she kept a magnetic pad of paper and a neatly printed to-do list, and added make an appointment to the list next to all her Christmas preparations.

Get a real tree. Buy more lights. Buy Faith a present.

She’d call the doctor first thing Monday morning when the office opened, then start on her errands. Once she had an appointment, she’d talk through it and, like it always did, her brain would settle and she could go back to focusing on her present.

Feeling a little bit more settled, she got ready for the day. It would be a long, hopefully busy one. Faith did good business for a small bookstore in a tiny postage-stamp town, but the holiday season was one of the most important for the bookstore. And Small Business Saturday was the kickoff to all that.

Bundled up for the cold, complete with snow boots, Jessica opened her front door and stepped into the hallway. At the end, the staircase would take her to the main floor and out the back door of the building. The storefront she lived above was still empty, but Zach had been making noise about renting it out to the “right person.”

Before she pushed out the main floor door, she stopped. There was a kind of…envelope sticking in the crack of the door, like someone had tried to shove it in from the outside.

Confused, she reached out and tugged it out of the spot it was wedged. In dark block letters was typed: Mrs. Sutton.

Jessica could only stare at it for humming seconds where everything inside of her seemed to squeeze tight, like she was bracing for a blow.

Once she managed a breath, she shook her head. Why was she getting upset over an envelope? But the building felt…threatening, all of a sudden. She looked one way and then the other.

Someone had been right outside the door, shoved this envelope into the crack, and she didn’t know who.

She shook her head. Anyone could be outside a building in Hope Town. That was why she had locks and a security system. Besides, that envelope wasn’t addressed to her. There was no reason to feel fear. She was overreacting to a clearly misdelivered note.

Someone had made a mistake.

Ellis was the only Sutton she knew in Hope Town, so either someone had gotten…confused about their relationship, or was making a really weird joke, or this had simply been delivered to the wrong address.

There was no address or postage on the front of the envelope. Just Mrs. Sutton.

Jessica rubbed at the tightness in her chest. It felt like panic. But that was an overreaction to a mistake.

Ellis lived in the building across the street. Someone had just gotten confused with directions. This letter had to be meant for him. Some mistake or confusion. She’d just…take it to him.

Still, she didn’t make the move to go outside. She was struck by a strange thought. It was addressed to Mrs. Sutton.

Did he have a wife?

She realized she was scowling at the idea of it, when she had absolutely no reason to be scowling about that.

Except a married man should not be flirting with you. Not that she’d ever really fully believed Ellis was flirting with her. He was very, very careful around her. Kind. Nice. He’d never touched her. Never asked her out. He’d been there, but it wasn’t flirting. Not really. No matter what anyone else said.

Maybe because he had a wife.

Maybe this was some kind of…jealousy thing? Maybe he did have a wife, and she suspected there was…something between Ellis and her?

Okay, this was ridiculous. She shook her head and forced herself to move to disengage the alarm. She shoved the envelope into her bag and then, on a deep breath, opened the door. She didn’t mean to brace herself for a blow, but she did. Still, none came, except the bright blue of the morning sky.

She glanced all around the mostly empty parking lot, trying not to be paranoid and terrified. There was no one there. Whoever had left that note, mistake or not, was gone.

She locked the outer door, made sure the alarm was reengaged, and tried to calm her too-quick breathing.

Maybe she’d mention to Zach that…

“That what?” she muttered to herself. That someone misdelivered a note to your building?

She tried to shake the ridiculous sense of unease as she crossed the street and walked around to the back of the bookstore so she could enter from the storeroom.

Happenstance. Weird, weird happenstance.

She dropped off her bag, offending note still inside, shrugged off her coat, then stepped into the front room of the store. Even though the doors weren’t open yet, Faith was already flitting around, and Jessica jumped right in to help.

“I think people are actually lining up,” Faith said excitedly about ten minutes before opening.

“Lane did a great job with all that advertising. Hopefully we’ll see all of Bent County today.”

“Here’s hoping,” Faith said.

When they opened the doors, Jessica thought maybe she was right. For a solid two hours, there were streams of people. Not everyone bought stuff, but the store was always packed.

When their usual delivery driver arrived with a couple packages, Faith was deep in a conversation with a family, so Jessica motioned him over to the counter. He dumped the boxes on top.

“Can you sign for this stuff, Jessica?” Steve asked, handing her his little machine.

“Of course.” She took the little stylus he offered and touched it to the screen—she wasn’t thinking about what she was doing, she was mentally calculating how many people had gone through the doors.

Until she’d written out her first name. Except… She blinked down at the screen.

That wasn’t her name.

She stared at the signature. Kirsten. What the hell had prompted her to write that in looping cursive? Was that her middle name maybe? Someone she knew from her mysterious life before?

Kirsten. It had just felt like second nature, but she’d signed for a bunch of packages over the last year and never once…

“Uh… You okay, Jessica?”

She nodded jerkily, coming back to the moment. “Sorry, Steve. I had some kind of…brain fog.” She managed a smile and lied outright to the man. “We’re just so busy. Signed my middle name instead of my first name.”

“That’s okay,” he replied cheerfully. He clicked a button on his little machine. “Just start over.”

This time she signed Jessica Smith very forcefully.

But the idea of someone named Kirsten stuck in her head no matter how busy the store got.

THE SNOW WAS HOLDING, and cars were parked all along Main thanks to the efforts of Lane Webb and the other business owners here in Hope Town advertising their Small Business Saturday events and sales.

Ellis couldn’t help but smile. Jessica would be thrilled. It was obvious she’d come to love working in the bookstore, and it suited her. She’d always loved to read. She’d always loved people.

She’d been a great teacher, but with her soft heart, those tougher case kids had always weighed on her. And she’d been constantly starting over, taking new teaching certification tests when they had to move states for his job.

Why she’d ever agreed to that, he couldn’t understand these days.

He’d ruined her life.

Pushing that depressing thought away, he stepped into the store. Inside it was warm, the buzz of conversation everywhere. Packed. It lightened his mood some. Jessica would be happy. She loved this store, put everything she was into it, and even if she didn’t remember who she’d been, she’d bloomed here.

Maybe he’d live the rest of his life just a spectator to her life, but if she was happy, if she was settled, he didn’t care. He probably deserved it anyway. And she deserved everything good after what she’d put up with, then suffered.

He spotted the shiny halo of her blond hair behind the counter, checking people out, so he pretended to browse even though he spent so much time in here he had every title practically memorized. Hell, he’d read at least half of them too.

Ellis tried to stay out of the way, but the store was small and the crowds were big for the cramped space. He found a little awkward corner to stand in and picked up a random book on Wyoming history he hadn’t paged through before.

It was easy to lose himself in the book. He was an old pro at biding his time, entertaining his mind while keeping a low-level awareness of what was going on around him. Which was why, even though he was reading a passage about Esther Hobart Morris, he was very cognizant of the fact Jessica was just a few feet away helping an older gentleman find a title he was looking for.

When she was done with that, she moved toward him, and he looked up from his book at the same time.

“Oh, Ellis. I’m glad you’re here.” She didn’t smile at him though. There was something…strange about her expression, about the way she was talking to him, even though she’d clearly sought him out. “Give me just a minute.”

She disappeared into the back room then returned—waylaid by Faith, then a customer before she finally made it back to him, standing awkwardly in a corner trying not to get into shoppers’ ways.

“I think this must have been delivered to me by mistake,” she said, handing him an envelope.

Frowning, he took it. What could have been delivered to her—

For a moment there was nothing. No sound. No movement. He certainly didn’t breathe.

Typed in bold black letters was Mrs. Sutton.

Though he hadn’t been an agent for years now, all the old instincts clicked back into place easy and quick. “Where did you get this?”

“It was stuck in my building’s door when I left this morning. I guess someone just…misdelivered it.” There was a beat of a pause. “I didn’t know you had a wife.”

For a full moment, he had no words. He could hardly say he didn’t. But she wouldn’t understand and…

It didn’t matter. The look on her face, her tone of voice—how to explain it?

Someone knew. Someone knew who she was. Besides him. Besides Zach. Besides Lane and Faith. People who wouldn’t play any kind of trick like this.

Which meant she wasn’t safe.

He took her by the arm without thinking the movement through. In his head, there was only a beat of panic. The clear need to move and act. “We have to go see Zach.”

She pulled out of his grasp, stepped away from him. Like she was afraid of him. She should be, he had to remind himself. “I’m not going anywhere. I have work,” she told him firmly.

He had to work very hard not to reach out for her again. “Kir—” He stopped himself in the nick of time. “Jessica…” But what was there to say to her? She didn’t understand this was a threat, and the psychiatrist had warned him about overwhelming her. The traumatic brain injury might have caused some of the memory loss, but some of it was born from a deep psychological trauma, and to dump the truth of that on her might prove too much.

“What did you start to…?” She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. “Something is wrong. I don’t know what, but it is. Just…leave me alone.” She turned away from him and hurried toward the back of the store.

He couldn’t leave her alone. This was a threat. How could he explain that to her without getting into the nitty-gritty of…everything? Without scaring her even more than she already was?

He swore under his breath and looked back down at the envelope. She hadn’t broken the seal.

Maybe…maybe it really was some kind of strange mistake. She’d already touched it. He’d already touched it, and if it was a legitimate threat there wouldn’t be prints or clues anyway.

Better to see what was inside than be too precious. He broke the seal, pulled out a card. It was all white, but on the inside, typed again was a very simple message.

Mrs. Sutton,

It’s good to see you’re doing well.

—A friend

Ellis narrowly resisted the urge to crumple the card in his fist. This was from no friend.

This was a damn threat.

He swore again and surveyed the swarm of people in the bookstore. Jessica was helping a frazzled looking woman who held a toddler on her hip and a baby strapped to her. He scanned the store. It would be impossible to identify threats in this crowd. Too many strangers.

He wanted to drag her out of here. He had a million contingency plans for if the danger followed them here, but he hadn’t considered that someone might just…leave a warning.

He shoved the offensive card in his pocket. A warning meant someone was playing with him. They wanted him to panic.

He wouldn’t.

He needed Zach. He needed help. He was about to pull out his cell phone, when he spotted a familiar face enter through the door.

Lucy. Zach’s wife. In her professional life she was Daisy Delaney, famous country singer, but here in Hope Town she was Lucy Simmons. And while that still was weird to fully absorb sometimes, now was not one of those times.

He had to get Kirsten somewhere safe. So he crossed the room to Lucy, where she had stopped at a display of picture books. Ellis didn’t know how much Zach told her about everything that was going on, but he knew it was enough that she wouldn’t ask a bunch of frustrating questions. She’d help.

“Lucy.”

“Oh, hey, Ellis. Man, business is booming.” She had her own baby strapped to her, and the little girl was fast asleep as Lucy flipped through a picture book.

“Is Zach here with you?” Ellis asked. Demanded, probably, based on the sharp look Lucy gave him.

“No, but he’s just down the street at the bakery with Coop,” she said, referencing their toddler before looking back down at the book in her hands.

“Could you get him to come down here? I need to talk to him, and I can’t leave.”

Her smile flattened out as she looked up from her book, concern replacing cheerfulness. “Yeah, I can text him to come down. Everything okay?”

He tried to smile, but he couldn’t manage. “No, it isn’t.”

Chapter Three

Jessica worked. She focused on the work—and making sure she was always a good distance away from Ellis. He was supposed to stay after closing to help with the holiday decorations, but she wasn’t going to be alone with him.

No way. She’d tell Faith if she had to. She’d feign illness if she had to. There was something…bad there.

Isn’t there something bad at your apartment?

She shook her head as if it would dislodge the paranoia. It had been a mistake. Something between Ellis and his wife. It didn’t involve her, and she would lock all the doors tonight and everything would be fine.

Fine.

But when Zach Simmons walked in, nothing felt fine. Zach ran Hope Town in a way. Lane Webb might be the mayor and head of the chamber of commerce, but Zach handled…the rest.

Jessica had never asked for details. Why a place like Hope Town existed, why she had been brought here, why Zach helped coordinate things like her job with Faith and who her doctor was.

She accepted something bad had happened to her that she didn’t remember, and she let Zach handle the details.

That felt particularly stupid in this moment as Zach crossed over to Ellis and the two began to talk in low, serious tones. It made her extra nervous. Even more than the fierce look Ellis had gotten on his face when he’d grabbed her arm.

He’d never touched her before. Not like that. Not at all, and she realized in the moment that it was kind of odd. Never a handshake or a shoulder pat or an accidental brushing of elbows.

She wasn’t proud of the fact her bodily reaction hadn’t been fear. Luckily, her brain was in charge and knew to back away, rather than follow a strange, bad instinct and lean in.

Jessica worked the cash register, keeping an eye on Ellis and Zach. Zach left for a little while, but Ellis didn’t. He didn’t approach her, didn’t crowd her, but in everything she did, she felt his eyes on her. So while her nerves strummed tight, she worried and wondered…

But not enough to do anything about it.

When Zach returned right about closing time, Jessica felt panic begin to beat at the base of her throat. Particularly when they both took Faith aside and spoke to her in voices Jessica couldn’t hear while Jessica closed out the register.

Faith looked over at her, and there were things Jessica didn’t usually see in her friend’s expression.

Pity. Worry.

Jessica wanted to run away. She wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, but something was wrong and…if Zach was involved it likely dealt with her past. The past her doctor told her not to worry about.

A past that shouldn’t have anything to do with Ellis Sutton, but…this had all started when she’d handed him that letter. That had been left at her building’s door with no postage.

And for these past two years, with absolutely no explanation, Ellis Sutton had always been there at the edges. She’d questioned it at times in the privacy of her own mind but never pressed him or anyone else.

Another mistake.

She’d always promised herself if she came face-to-face with all that she couldn’t remember, she’d be brave. She’d accept whatever it was. She wouldn’t go looking for it—if her brain wanted to protect her from it, so be it.

But she’d promised herself she wouldn’t run if it reared its ugly head.

She’d spent the past two years not remembering, not trying to remember, but preparing herself for remembering all the same.

Because no matter what she’d hoped, some part of her had always known that escaping her past and whatever she didn’t remember was temporary.

Faith came over to her. Jessica was finalizing a few things for inventory on the computer and finished that up before turning her attention to Faith.

“Jessica…” There was a pause, like Faith didn’t quite know what to say. “Come over here and sit on the couch with me. Zach and Ellis have a few things to discuss with us.” She stepped behind the counter and linked arms with Jessica.

Jessica wanted to pull away, run away, but she didn’t. She let Faith lead her to the couch in the kids’ section. She was grateful that Faith kept their arms linked as they sat and Zach and Ellis came to stand before them. Faith was offering support, and it meant something. Jessica needed it to mean something.

Zach pulled over some chairs, and then he and Ellis sat in those, directly across from Faith and Jessica.

“What’s going on?” Jessica asked, because she was afraid they’d let this silence stretch out and she’d start crying or screaming at the tension in her chest. She didn’t look at Ellis for answers though. She looked at Zach.

“We have reason to believe there’s been a threat against you.” Straight to the point. She was grateful for that, even if it didn’t make sense.

“A threat. But I haven’t received any threats.” Except that this all started when she handed that envelope to Ellis.

But that hadn’t been addressed to her, so she couldn’t have anything to do with it. She couldn’t. No matter what was inside that she hadn’t looked at.

Because it wasn’t for her. It was for him or his wife or whatever.

She glanced at him. He sat, his large frame so…tightly held. He clasped his hands together and looked down at them. Like he was holding something together.

She had the strangest sensation, like a flash of a memory. Reaching out and putting her palm at the edge of that sharp jaw.

You’re too hard on yourself sometimes. She could hear herself say it, and yet that self was some kind of stranger.

She wanted to cry, and she hated it because she just didn’t understand any of this.

“This envelope left for you is a concern,” Zach said very seriously. “Can you take me through how you found it?”

She didn’t want to, but Zach had always been a kind of anchor. The person who knew her past. Who was in charge. If he thought it was a threat, she had to do what he asked.

She explained finding it in the door. Not seeing anyone. Nothing going wrong with the security system.

Zach took notes on his phone. Ellis kept staring at his hands.

“I’ve looked at the security footage and no one shows up on it—though they should if they got close enough to stick something into the door. Which is a concern that they can get around my security. Until we have a better handle on where this threat is coming from and why, we think it’s best if you have protection. We’ve agreed that it’s best if we…have you hide for a little while. Just until we figure out who’s behind this letter.”

“Hide,” Jessica echoed.

“I have a place you can go,” Zach said. “You’ll be safe. It’s isolated and I know not ideal for your life, but it’s temporary. While we get to the bottom of this. Just until we get to the bottom of this envelope.”

“You keep saying we. Who is we?”

Zach didn’t look up from his phone, but his fingers weren’t moving across the screen, taking more notes. No, he was biding his time as he tried to determine how to answer this question.

When he finally spoke, it was with a carefulness. And a directness. Like someone giving an order they expected to be rebelled against. “Ellis will go with you.”

Panic clawed further up her chest. “Why Ellis?”

Ellis didn’t speak right away, but when he did his tone was very grave. “I’m former FBI. I have the skills and training to keep you safe while Zach does the work here to find out who’s behind this.”

“Aren’t you former FBI too?” Jessica demanded of Zach.

“Yes,” he agreed. He didn’t say but. He didn’t need to. Jessica answered the but herself.

“You have a family.” So he couldn’t go with her for a lot of reasons. But Ellis… “You want me to go somewhere I don’t know with someone who is essentially a stranger, knowing absolutely nothing about why.”

“I can’t imagine how this must feel,” Ellis said very carefully. “But your doctor was very clear.”

“Yes, she’s always been very clear.” Jessica pushed to her feet, disgusted with this situation. And why was this man talking about her doctor like he was involved. “Let the past be what it is. Focus on the present. Except if there’s some kind of threat, it connects to whatever I don’t remember.” She whirled back to face them, geared her anger and frustration toward Ellis. “Doesn’t it?”

His hazel eyes seemed particularly brown in this light. His expression particularly grave. It made tears prick her eyes without fully understanding the emotional reaction. Because she was angry and afraid, but she didn’t know how to describe this ache. The only thing she knew for sure was it was his fault.

His fault, because that envelope had been addressed to Mrs. Sutton. His last name. And then…and then she’d signed the name Kirsten. And he’d…he’d almost called her that. She knew he did.

Her heart beat overtime. Was she not even Jessica? If she was this Kirsten, was she something to him?

She tried to talk herself down, convince herself she was overreacting, just like she’d done in those early days of trying to settle into a life where her entire past was a blank.

“We just want to keep you safe, Jessica. You can be pissed off about that, confused and angry and hurt,” Zach said. “Whatever you’re feeling is valid, but you have to let us protect you. It’s why you’re here in Hope Town in the first place.”

Jessica surveyed the three of them, tried not to view them all as some kind of traitors. No doubt Zach was telling her some kind of truth. Faith was here as a female friend. As support. And Ellis…

“You want me to leave Hope Town. With him,” Jessica said accusingly. Because it felt a bit like a betrayal, even if that wasn’t fair.

Before Zach or Ellis could respond to that, Faith stood and crossed to where Jessica paced.

“Can you guys give us a few minutes of privacy?” Faith asked.

The men got to their feet. Tall and broad and so infinitely powerful, and they knew everything she didn’t.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And yet…

She didn’t know how to protect herself. She didn’t know anything.

Faith took her by the shoulders gently. “Jessica, I know this is hard,” she said very seriously once they were out of the room. “I don’t know what it’s like not to remember, so I can’t put myself fully in your shoes, but I do know what it’s like to…be a target. To be in danger and need protection. It sucks and it’s scary and…confusing and weird and frustrating. But trust me, please, when I say that Zach’s function in this is to protect you.”

Jessica did believe that. If it was just Zach, she figured she would be going along with it wholesale. Easy and docile as you please.

But it wasn’t just Zach. “And what about Ellis?”

Faith inhaled, studying Jessica’s face. Her smile was sympathetic. “He would never let anything happen to you. I’d bet my own life on that.”

WHEN FAITH CALLED them back over, Ellis felt like he’d already been wrung out. Traversed the seven layers of hell. Who knew there’d be more layers to go?

Jessica still stood, arms crossed over her chest. She glared at him.

Distrust. Anger. Yes, he’d seen all those things in her eyes before. Back when she’d known who she was. When he’d ignored everything he’d promised for his own selfish desires.

It was better than fear, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

After a few beats of silence, she let her arms fall. Her expression was grim but determined.

She’d always been determined. Always stronger than he expected her to be. That expectation had never been fair to her, born of his own issues, and when she’d known who she was, she’d called him out on it.

But she didn’t know, didn’t remember, and that left her even more of a target. One he would secure. He had to think of it in those old, impersonal terms.

Or he might die.

“Zach, if you really think this is the best option, I’ll do it,” she said. Her voice was soft, but direct. Sure.

“I do,” Zach said. “I’ve got connections. I can poke into this, but it’s best if you’re out of the way and safe while I do, and Ellis will ensure that.”

She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t going to be happy.

He’d considered having Zach be the one to take her. Zach’s wife might not know the details of every woman’s life in Hope Town, but she understood what it was that Zach did. She wouldn’t put up a fight. Lucy had shown time and time again her priority was the same as Zach’s: safety for everyone brought into the Hope Town fold.

But the truth was it would be easier for Zach to look into the Caruso family without it ever coming back to connect to Ellis, or even the office he’d been working out of. Zach also had tech connections that Ellis no longer had access to.

It made far more sense for Zach to be the one manning the investigative part of this mission, and Ellis to be the one taking on the protection detail. It also would have killed him to not be the one directly responsible for Kirsten’s safety, so it worked out.

Because as much as he might not know exactly who left that note, he knew where the threat came from. The same crime family that had hurt her, shot him. The same crime family he had almost brought down completely.

But not completely enough. It was why they were here, with these fake identities and this strange pseudo life. They weren’t safe. They were targets.

And he wouldn’t let anyone target him through her.

“We don’t know if someone is watching you.” Or me. “So we’ve arranged some…sleight of hand, so to speak, to get you to the secured safe place. You and Faith will go up to Faith’s apartment after you clean up down here, like you originally planned. Your book club members will be coming over, to make it look like a party of sorts.”

“I don’t want anyone else to be in danger.”

“They won’t be,” Zach said firmly. “You’re the target here. Besides, we have police backup.”

“Isn’t this getting…complicated?” She looked at Zach when she asked this, but Ellis didn’t miss the quick gaze she flicked his way before turning her attention back to Zach.

Zach shook his head. “Not really, but whatever it takes to keep our residents safe. You know Corporal Fairhurst and Deputy Campbell. They normally patrol Hope Town, and their significant others are in your book club, so it won’t raise any suspicion if they’re here too. Besides, the more people, the less likely anyone watching is going to notice our one additional member. Deputy Heather Morris. She’ll be taking on the role of, well, you. When she gets here, you’ll switch clothes. She’ll walk back to your apartment after the party.”

“But—”

Zach held up a hand and Jessica stopped talking. “She’s a trained police officer. She can handle this. When I give you the signal, you’ll leave in a crowd with everyone else. You and Ellis will ride with Corporal Fairhurst to Bent, switch cars and drivers there, and do the same at a ranch outside of Bent. Then you’ll be driven and dropped off at the location.”

“The four of us will be the only ones who know that you’ve gone into hiding,” Ellis told her. “Even Deputy Morris only knows that she’s posing as you for the evening. Only Zach, his partner, and I will know your location.”

Ellis hadn’t been thrilled about involving yet another person, but Zach’s partner was former military, had installed all the security at his and Jessica’s buildings, and apparently knew someone with an isolated cabin they could hide out at. Ellis knew Zach trusted Cam Delaney with anything and everything, so Ellis had to try to extend his own trust.

It was a hard-won thing. Particularly with his nerves strung so tight he thought they’d all just snap at any given moment.

He glanced at Jessica. At Kirsten, because he knew that look on his wife’s face. Though she was trying to look stoic, in control, strong, he could read the vibrating fear underneath.

Because he’d given her too many reasons to fear in their marriage, and in the end, so many of those fears had come to fruition.

They wouldn’t here. Not now. No. If someone was close enough to leave that note, they were close enough to harm. And they’d made their first mistake in giving him a warning.

Because everything he was, everything, would go into protecting her—not for the FBI, not for personal ego or glory—just for her.

Chapter Four

Jessica sat in Faith’s apartment surrounded by people she knew, people who had become her friends over the past two years, and felt like she’d been split into two.

There was the woman who’d lived a life working in this bookstore, participating in this book club, embodying Jessica Smith and trying to be happy with that even if she’d known her entire past was a mystery.

And then there was this other part, where she felt like she was floating above it. Someone else. Someone who knew things just out of reach.

It must be Ellis’s fault. Because he stood in the corner, tall and broad and intimidating, illuminated by the soft white glow of Christmas lights Faith had up everywhere. His eyes only ever left her to glance out the window into the dark outside.

Everyone was being too nice. Even Albennie. Like they knew. But it didn’t make sense because Zach and Ellis had said they wouldn’t. But they knew something, because everyone was treating her like fragile glass even while they pretended to have a little holiday party.

And something about that started to…mesh up with what Faith had said down in the store. Faith said she knew what it was like to be in danger, to be a target. And Albennie had been kidnapped last year. There were all these women who trusted Zach Simmons and his little Hope Town.

Were they all the same? Targets of something? Did they all know who she was, while she was in the dark? She wanted to demand answers, but everything kept happening too fast.

Deputy Morris arrived, and Jessica had to change clothes with her. They weren’t exactly the same size. Heather was a little smaller, but they had about the same color hair, and with some heeled boots and a hood pulled up over her face, there’d be no reason for anyone to know she wasn’t Jessica.

“Now, I just need your keys, then I’ll walk over to your place. You’ll just sit tight until Zach gives you guys the signal.”

Jessica hesitated, but Heather was patient and encouraging and eventually Jessica handed over her keys. After Heather was gone for a while, Gard Fairhurst got a text from Zach that it was time to move on to the next step.

She and Ellis would get into his truck with him and Lia, his girlfriend, and head to his house in Bent. Step one. Jessica didn’t want to, but everyone seemed ready and willing to do Zach’s bidding.

So when the word came, everyone hopped into action. Coats and shoes and bags. Down the stairs from Faith’s apartment to the parking area in the back. In the shuffle of bodies, hat pulled low, Jessica was nudged into the back of a truck. Ellis scooted into the seat next to her.

“We’ll make sure there’s no tail,” Gard said, getting behind the wheel. “When we get to my house, we’ll all go inside and then I’ll take you guys out the back to a waiting car.”

Lia turned around in her seat, gave Jessica a bolstering smile. “It’s all worked out. We’re going to make sure you’re safe.”

Jessica tried to smile kindly at her friend, but this all felt so…overly complicated and…big. Really, really big, like that little envelope with not even her name had death-threat implications.

“This sounds like a lot of people knowing,” Jessica said, quietly under her breath.

“But only pieces,” Ellis responded, just as quietly. “And everyone is police or military or former. It’s better to complicate things, to create a few dead ends.”

She looked at him in the dim light of the back of the truck. “Why?”

His gaze met hers. His words were serious and shut her up. “To keep you safe.”

Because even if she didn’t understand any of this it was clear. Everyone thought she was in some kind of grave danger.

And everyone was going to try to keep her safe. She tried to hold on to that, believe that. But the only thing she could really think about was that name she’d signed this morning, what Ellis had almost called her.

Mrs. Sutton on that envelope.

And the complete blank slate that was her past before Hope Town.

THEY MADE IT to Fairhurst’s house and everyone got out of the truck like any two couples might heading inside for a nightcap. Except Ellis kept his hands deep in his pockets and away from Jessica.

There hadn’t been a tail, and there’d be no real reason to surveil this random deputy’s house over in Bent, but Ellis had worked with Zach to take every precaution.

So they did. Fairhurst showed them out the back, and they crossed his yard and his backyard neighbor’s to the street over where a big, black truck waited.

Cam Delaney greeted them and explained the next steps. A drive to a ranch and the man who owned the cabin, who’d drive them to it.

He agreed with what Jessica had said back in the truck. It felt like too many people knowing. Ellis had argued that with Zach, but Zach had held firm.

This community—Hope Town, my family and friends, Bent County—works together.

Ellis understood teamwork. Even going undercover like he had with the FBI required an extreme level of teamwork, but it was separate from all his personal relationships. This felt sticky because Jessica was friends with Fairhurst’s girlfriend—who was a bakery owner, not a cop. Cam Delaney might be Zach’s security business partner, but he was related by marriage to the guy who owned the cabin and would drive them up.

What might these people say, and to the wrong people?

And yet, he’d gone along with Zach’s plans. Why had he done that? Riding in the truck with the taciturn rancher Cam had introduced them to as Noah Carson, Ellis couldn’t help but question everything.

The truck rolled to a stop in absolute pitch-black—the headlights of the truck the only sense of any kind of light, and only barely illuminating the shadow of a cabin.

“Grab the flashlight in the glove compartment and I’ll show you around,” Noah said, killing the engine and getting out of the truck.

Ellis did as he was instructed, then got out. He flipped on the light, then helped Jessica out of the truck and into the deep, eerie dark. Carefully, he followed the light in Noah’s hand up to the cabin.

It really was a tiny cabin up on a mountain in the middle of truly godforsaken nowhere. Ellis had gotten used to the small-town life, he liked to think. He’d spent some time in a small town when he’d been young, before his dad had died, before Mom had remarried.

But this was…more than wilderness, more than isolation. Not that he couldn’t hack it. He’d trained for any and every situation.

But he had some concerns about his suburb-raised wife.

Still, Noah opened the door, flicked on the lights, and they stepped inside the cabin behind him. It wasn’t so bad inside. The furniture was covered, but there was furniture. There was even a little undecorated fake Christmas tree in the corner. Pictures on the walls, pretty curtains drawn against the night. Not the worst place he’d ever hidden out, that was for sure.

“There’s plenty of supplies, Wi-Fi. Electricity, plumbing all work just fine. There’s a UTV in the stables you’ll be able to see from the porch in the daylight. Gassed up and keys in.” There were also some hidden places in the walls, and a cellar. Noah showed them how to access it all, just in case.

After, he showed them how to use the security system. It wasn’t as involved as Ellis might like, but there were some motion detectors and alarms.

Ellis thanked Noah for the ride, for the use of the small, rustic cabin in the middle of absolutely nowhere. He closed the door behind the rancher, locked it.

He knew he should say something to Jessica, but he hadn’t found the words yet. He hadn’t found his equilibrium yet.

The two of them in an isolated cabin, waiting for safety.

Recipe for disaster, emotionally at least. But it would keep her safe. He’d weather a million more disasters to keep her safe.

Then Jessica dropped her own little bomb. “Who’s Kirsten?”

Chapter Five

There was a look of pure shock on his face that almost satisfied Jessica. Like she’d won some kind of point in some battle between them.

She probably shouldn’t think of it that way since he was allegedly keeping her safe, but he’d seemed so stoic, so sure. It had irritated her.

And now, she’d pierced some of that mask. Though he quickly shored up his reserves. Back to stoic. Back to that…space between them.

“I’m not sure—”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said, focusing on anger because if she didn’t, she felt panic. Fear. “Not here. Not now. You almost called me Kirsten this morning, after I…” She shouldn’t tell him that.

He studied her. “After you what?”

She hesitated.

The bottom line was she was trusting him—or at least him through her trust of Zach—and if she was going to demand answers, then maybe she had to be forthcoming enough for him to understand…

She knew something wasn’t right. Whatever was going on, she needed to know the details because she felt how wrong things were.

“I had to sign for a delivery. I didn’t think. I didn’t… It was like muscle memory. I signed a name—not my name. Kirsten. Didn’t even think about it. Didn’t even… It was just there, like I did it all the time when I’ve always signed my name Jessica. And I wouldn’t have thought too much of it, I would have pushed it away, but then you almost said that name. You said Kir before stopping yourself. It’s not a coincidence.”

“It could be,” he replied.

“But it’s not.” He’d be acting differently. She would feel differently. And while her doctor had said not to push things, to center herself in the present, she’d also told her to feel her feelings. Connect to her thoughts. To wade through what felt real and what didn’t. And deal with both. Not push. Accept.

Something about that had Jessica remembering that dream she’d had of him. Blood gushing from his shoulder. It had felt so real. So, so real. Like a memory.

She looked at his shoulder now. She had convinced herself it was a dream. She had pushed away the terror, the way her heart had ached, because they were bad feelings. Bad…everything.

But what if she felt? What if she let herself remember it? She could still see it clearly. In the memory he had a beard, pain-hazed eyes, and blood gushing from his shoulder. She couldn’t place herself in that memory, so she wanted to believe it was a dream, but now…

Faith and Zach and everyone trusted Ellis to keep her safe. To be alone with her here. It meant something. They were connected somehow. In her past.

Because that dream had happened, and it had felt real.

Because the envelope had said Mrs. Sutton. Sutton. His last name.

Because she looked at him now and felt an array of emotions she couldn’t parse, but they were always there when he was around.

And only him. Like he was the only complicated and confusing figure in this life she actually remembered.

So what about the one she didn’t?

She lifted her gaze from his shoulder to those hazel eyes. “Take off your shirt.”

His eyebrows winged up, and she couldn’t fight the blush that crept into her cheeks. That was not what she meant. “Show me your shoulder.”

He didn’t move, but she didn’t see any bafflement in his expression. He was being too careful. “What about my shoulder?”

But he was hedging. He was hedging and it meant…

“I want to see your right shoulder.”

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Then shook his head. Refusal.

Unacceptable. “If you expect me to stay here, to trust you, to listen to you, show me that I’m not going crazy.”

His expression softened, in that way she recognized. That softening where she always expected him to reach out, to touch her.

But he never did.

The implications of all that could mean felt like a brick on her chest. She could barely catch a breath.

“You’re not crazy,” he said with all that gentleness in his voice, if not in any kind of touch. No, he was keeping himself very much out of reach.

“Then take off your damn shirt, Ellis.”

“Jess—”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t call me anything. Unbutton your shirt and show me your right shoulder. Or I’ll do it myself.” She took a step toward him. She didn’t know why that felt like a threat, why he clearly took it as one, but he did.

He lifted his hand to the top button. He hesitated, but when she took another step toward him, he carefully undid the top four buttons, exposing a swath of skin. A hint of golden chest hair. An impressive ridge of muscle.

She wasn’t looking at his shoulder. She should be. She really should be, but…wow. She knew he was in good shape. It was impossible to miss him running in the mornings in the summer. Impossible to not notice how…fit he was no matter what kind of clothes he was wearing. But she’d never seen this much skin and maybe she’d had a reaction before. She’d just always been able to look away.

Not now. Not when they were alone here. Stuck here. In the middle of nowhere, just each other and—

Thankfully, any inappropriate reaction was suddenly and rudely doused in ice because when he pulled the fabric off his shoulder, she saw what she’d hoped she wouldn’t.

Exactly where she’d dreamed him bleeding was a web of scars. Like he’d been shot there. Like he’d bled there. Like her dream was real and she’d witnessed it.

She felt like she was hyperventilating. Spots. There were spots in her vision and a pain in her chest.

“Breathe,” Ellis was telling her firmly. “Just breathe.”

Okay, maybe she was hyperventilating.

Because if she knew he had a scar there, if she could picture him bleeding there, nothing she thought was true could be. He was no stranger. No…whatever.

He’d been part of this past that was mostly a blank. She looked up at him. The pain in his hazel eyes was so naked, so haunting, but it only mirrored her own.

“Who am I?”

ELLIS HAD BEEN shot before, so he knew the searing, tearing pain of it. This was exactly like that, except there was nothing to do about this pain. No way to staunch the bleeding, pressure away everything leaking out of him.

There was only the pain. And the terror he was messing everything up, all in his quest to keep her safe.

Her eyes were full of tears. Her breathing too quick, too shallow. He’d become an expert in not touching her when he wanted to over the past two years, but he couldn’t stop himself now. He brushed a hand over her hair, kept his gaze on her wide eyes.

“You’re safe,” he told her.

She jerked away from him. “That is not what I asked.” A few tears fell over, but her voice was direct and strong and angry.

Better than terrified.

“I’m not Jessica Smith. I know I’m not. I’ve always known…” She trailed off, clearly questioning everything she knew or didn’t. It just about killed him. “I knew I didn’t remember. I knew things were a blank. I always thought I’d remember someday, if I should. But…” She looked at him again, a safe distance away, holding herself when he’d rather be the one holding her.

“I’m… I’m Kirsten somebody and you know me,” she said, her voice not wavering but the tears in her eyes making everything horrible.

He thought of every time he’d wished she’d say my name is Kirsten since coming to Hope Town. But this wasn’t remembering. It was just putting unfortunate dots together. “Your doctor—”

“Screw my doctor!” she shouted, flinging her hands up in the air, effectively shutting him up. She met his gaze, tears making her brown eyes look darker. “My name is Kirsten,” she said, one of those tears falling over and tracking down her cheek.

He had to fight to speak against the tightness in his throat. Dr. Leigh had said to let her come to her own conclusions, and this wasn’t memory, but it was her own conclusion. “Yes.”

“What’s my last name?”

He couldn’t tell her. It went against what he’d been told. It went against everything he’d fought to do for the past two years. Keep her safe. Keep her…okay. Keep her at a distance. Even if she didn’t remember, she couldn’t know. It would be…

He didn’t have the words for what it would be. He didn’t know how it would feel. Awful, still awful.

But Kirsten had always been good at puzzles, mysteries, understanding people and the way they might say something that meant something else. She just had a…way about her.

Even without her memory, it was clearly still there.

“I’m not… I’m not Mrs. Sutton.” She slapped at the tears on her cheeks. She straightened her shoulders. “I’m not,” she insisted, like it was a challenge. Like she could make it so.

“Okay,” he agreed, because that was what Dr. Leigh told them to do. If she was upset, go along. They didn’t need to go out of their way not to upset her, but confronting her past should happen with a trained professional.

Not him. Not alone in a cabin after a threat on her life.

But if she was standing in front of him saying she wasn’t Mrs. Sutton, then…well, she was afraid she was.

“I need you to explain this to me. From the beginning. I need to understand what is happening.” She was trying to be brave, but her voice wasn’t strong and another few tears trickled down her cheeks.

“We don’t need to explain,” he said softly. “It’s late. Let’s sleep. Let’s—”

“Tell me. Say it. Now. I don’t care what the doctor said. I don’t care about anything. How can you expect me to stay here, to sleep with all these questions? With all this? Just tell me the damn truth.”

“Jessica.”

“No. Now. You will tell me now or I walk out that door. Who the hell am I?”

He would stop her. He didn’t want to have to, but he would. She wouldn’t walk out that door, no matter what his answer was, but because he couldn’t let her walk, and because he loved her more than anything in this life, he had to tell her the truth.

“Your name is Kirsten Elizabeth Sutton, and you are my wife.”

Chapter Six

My wife.

Jessica turned away from him. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t… It felt like something had pierced her through the chest. A kind of pain that echoed out to the rest of her, especially at her temples. She felt a bit like she was going to throw up.

My wife.

“Jess… Kir… I don’t know what to do here. Dr. Leigh said it was best if you remembered on your own.” He sounded pained. Lost.

But not nearly as pained and lost as she felt. Still, there were things she remembered, apparently. “I remember you being shot.”

“You said it was a dream.”

“It was, but it was real. You’ve been shot exactly there.” And there were other things. Little things. Over the past two years, he’d always felt different than everyone else. Those strange impulses to reach out and touch him. The reticence to be around him and yet it had never been fear. Even in the discomfort, it had been something like…

Knowing there was a secret but not knowing what it was. Not wanting to know.

Now she knew. And still nothing made sense. Ellis wasn’t a stranger, but she could stand here and look at him and remember nothing that came before except a bloody shoulder. And maybe a few other things she’d gotten in the habit of convincing herself were her imagination.

Him smiling in a tuxedo, like at a wedding. Him with a beard, talking to her in low, serious tones while her heart ached. A dichotomy of feelings, leaving too many questions swirling around in her head.

Were we happy? Do you love me? Am I supposed to love you? But that was all… Those were things they could circle back to, and they didn’t have anything to do with the threat.

“So, this envelope was addressed to me, and that’s a threat on my life because…?”

He took a deep breath. She could see the pain in his expression, but none of it echoed in his voice. He spoke like she’d expect any law enforcement agent to speak. Stoic and to the point. “No one is supposed to know we’re in Wyoming, let alone Hope Town. They’re certainly not supposed to know Jessica Smith’s real name is… Mrs. Sutton.”

“And it couldn’t be a…misunderstanding?” she asked, but even as she said the words she knew they were stupid.

Of course there was no misunderstanding. Maybe Ellis was always there, but it’s not like he acted like a husband. It’s not like anyone acted like he was her husband.

Something cold stopped her. Did everyone know except her?

She shook her head against that horrible question. No. Maybe some people knew, like Zach, but she didn’t think many. Albennie and the rest wouldn’t have teased her about Ellis if they…knew. They were her friends. They were…

Threat, Jessica, there is a threat against you. Focus.

Except she wasn’t Jessica. She was Kirsten Sutton. Mrs. Kirsten Sutton. Married to…

“So, you were in the FBI and I was your wife?” Even though it made her heart jump to say it, there was something anchoring and steadying about knowing this truth, even if she didn’t remember it. If she could work through the facts, maybe it would start to make sense. She had to hold on to facts, not feelings.

“Yes,” Ellis agreed. “I had been working undercover. With a mob group. They discovered my true identity, threatened you. Hurt you. That was the night I was shot. You suffered a brain injury.”

She lifted a hand to her head, where it hurt. That part was a complete blank to her. All she remembered was the blood on his shoulder. Nothing about herself.

“But…backup arrived, and we managed to put a few of them away with what evidence I’d collected. A few of them wiggled out of it. Putting us both in danger. Making us both a target.”

“A target. Of the mob.” Sure, that was just…a normal thing to accept. Her life for two years had been this little peaceful town and a bookstore, and all along she’d been a married woman and a target of the mob.

“So you’ve just lived…here. Watching me? I don’t understand.” Except it explained…him. Always being just there. Never getting too close.

Or too far.

“I couldn’t… Maybe I should have just let you go into WitSec yourself. But I couldn’t do it. It felt like I was…abandoning you, somehow. So we went with a nontraditional witness protection where we could be together. Maybe if things had been different, we could have done different kinds of therapy. Second opinions. But we were both targets. We had to disappear, and we couldn’t risk you talking with anyone about what had happened.”

“So Dr. Leigh…knows about my past?”

“She’s a retired psychiatrist who worked with the FBI previously, now does some freelance work, usually with former law enforcement dealing with PTSD. She doesn’t have all the case details, but she knows what happened to you. You had to have someone, something, but she was the only one I could trust. I probably wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Zach.”

“How does Zach connect to all this?”

“We had a mutual friend from his days in the Bureau. That friend suggested I contact Zach. I explained the situation, and Zach said Hope Town could accommodate our…whole thing.”

It connected to what Faith had said, the sense of community that she’d felt. Women, targets. All of them. Witness protection. Probably why no one pressed about her past. Why there weren’t questions or curiosities. Everyone in her orbit was in a similar situation, hiding from who they were.

Of course, she didn’t remember who she was. She sat with a thud on the couch, feeling wrung out. Exhausted. But this man stood in front of her. Mrs. Kirsten Elizabeth Sutton. That was her name.

She eyed the man who’d delivered that so stoically…but there was nothing stoic in his hazel eyes.

“You’re my husband,” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked up at him and couldn’t ignore all the other types of questions swirling in her mind. That had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with him. “Do we love each other?”

I HAVE LOVED you every second of every day since I laid eyes on you. He could hardly say that to her. Even if it was true.

“I understand that you want to work through this, but Dr. Leigh really felt like—”

“Dr. Leigh isn’t here. It’s you and me. We were married. Was it a good marriage? Did we love each other? You’re here—you’ve been by my side without being by my side for two years. I need to understand the context of that.”

She had every right to know, but he was afraid to tell her anything. Afraid of going against the doctor’s orders. Afraid, period. Because she didn’t remember, and what might be changed, altered, broken or worse by what he chose to share?

So he hedged. Something he’d had to learn how to do these past two years, because prior to this circle of hell, he had never hedged. Always known. Always moved forward, one certain step at a time.

He needed to find that old person again if he was going to keep her safe, but there were careful land mines to skirt around first.

“I don’t know that I… I can answer on your behalf.”

“Surely you know if your wife loved you or not.”

You’d think. But it wasn’t all that last fraught year. “We did. Love each other. We’d been married about ten years. Together fifteen.”

“But no…kids?”

Even not remembering, that would be a topic. “No. Not…yet.”

“There’s a million things you’re not telling me,” she said flatly.

“It’s fifteen years to wade through.” And as much as he’d wanted to wade through it with her, he had spent the last two being told not to do anything that might disrupt her balance. Her healing.

This felt nothing but wrong, especially with a threat hanging over them.

She looked exhausted. Wrung clear out. She needed rest, not…this. And he needed to connect with Zach, see where everything stood.

“I’m not sure we need to get into all this. Dr. Leigh has always maintained it’s best to let you go along with what you do remember and not push what you don’t. When your brain heals, when you feel safe, she thinks you might remember some things.”

“But you know the answers. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you suffered a traumatic brain injury, K… Jessica.”

“Don’t…switch it up. Just call me… I’ll be Kirsten here. Maybe calling me by my real name will shake something loose. Maybe Dr. Leigh is wrong.”

God, how he wished that were true, but he’d always been told it was wishful thinking. Any desire to push was selfish. He needed to be what she needed, not what he wanted.

His phone trilled in his pocket. The display read Zach Simmons. “Let’s just table this for a minute.” He answered the phone and turned away from her. “Anything?”

“Morris didn’t notice anyone following her, and neither did anyone else. Whoever left that note wasn’t sticking around to see what the results of the threat were.”

“I want to know why they weren’t on the security footage dropping off the note.”

Zach paused, which was how Ellis knew it was bad news. “There was a bit of a glitch. Cam’s looking into seeing if it was…purposeful.”

“Come on, Zach. We know it was purposeful.”

“Yeah, probably, but we still have to make sure, and maybe that’ll give us an idea of where this is coming from.”

Maybe, but he doubted it. “I don’t need to tell you where to start looking.”

“No. But we want to be careful. If someone found you, they were looking. Probably for these past two years. And we don’t know who they used or threatened to get information very few people should know.”

Too many. Even he’d known that when he’d taken the deal. He’d made too many mistakes, thinking with his heart instead of his mind.

But he couldn’t fix that. He could only dedicate himself to the same cause he had for the past two years. Keeping Kirsten safe.

“I’ll do some basic digging into the people we know want to hurt you, see where they are. We’ll go from there. But for tonight, just…”

“Rest. Right. I’ll get right on it.”

“You’re safe up there, Ellis.” There was a pause. “How’s it going with Jessica?”

Ellis sighed, glanced over his shoulder in her direction.

She was scowling at his back.

“As good as it can be,” he muttered.

“Get some rest. I’ll touch base in the morning.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” He ended the call, turned back to her and all that frustrated energy waving off of her.

She looked at him. Eyes serious. Mouth grim. “I remember that feeling,” she said very quietly. “Being pushed aside.”

“I never—”

But she held up a hand, just like she used to do when they were fighting. Ellis wasn’t a stranger to this, flashes of her old self in this strange new shell. There’d been a time when he’d filed every single one away as a sign.

He’d stopped. Had to stop. But now she knew.

And there was danger at their door.

“I do remember things. Maybe they’re jumbled, but I remembered you being shot. I remember…pieces.” She pushed to her feet. “I was remembering before…this.” She said that as if she was trying to convince herself. She probably was.

He wasn’t sure he believed her. Or maybe it was he so desperately wanted to believe her and he’d spent the past two years denying just about every single want.

Except being in her orbit. That he hadn’t been able to deny himself. Now, he realized he should have. A better man would have. Left her to real WitSec. Or left her, period. She deserved better.

But he couldn’t go back and be a better man—a lesson he’d learned the hard way two years ago. He could only go on and be the best man he could be in any given moment.

In this moment, he would do everything to keep her safe. To keep her whole. And once they’d identified and neutralized the threat, well, then they could deal with her knowing.

“If you get some rest, we can go over whatever you’d like in the morning.”

She studied him, suspicious and angry. “I’m going to hold you to that,” she said.

He wanted to laugh.

She sounded very much like his wife right then.

Chapter Seven

Jessica woke up groggy and disoriented. The pretty little bedroom with the comfortable queen bed wasn’t familiar, but unfamiliar was damn familiar, wasn’t it?

Because it all came rushing back as she sat up in the bed.

She wasn’t Jessica. She was Kirsten. Kirsten Sutton.

Except she didn’t really feel like either name right now. She felt like some kind of scrambled in-between thing.

She knew there was some piece of Kirsten in her. Memories locked away, maybe, but they did pop out. And she’d known, this whole time of being Jessica, that her past was a blank. That there was something before this life she was living.

But she had embodied Jessica for two years, and still…knowing it was a lie made it hard to sit here and think of herself as that woman. Jessica Smith. Amnesiac bookseller. But that was a two-year life.

She had been Ellis Sutton’s wife for ten years. They’d been together fifteen years. They had loved each other.

They’d had sex, no doubt, which was an embarrassing thought, but it was just…the truth of the matter. They’d been married. He’d seen her naked. He remembered seeing her naked.

And she remembered him being shot.

She blew out a breath, trying to blow some of these thoughts away with it. She had to work through them, but she needed more information first, and she needed to know what this threat against her was going to entail.

She swung out of bed. The rancher—Noah Carson—who had driven them up here had told them to use whatever they found in the closets or dressers. That anything in this cabin was theirs to use. She wondered what made someone so…open to helping a stranger as she poked through the dresser and closet.

Not much in the way of clothes, mostly sweatshirts and sweatpants and thick socks. It’d do. It was cold this morning. She could use a shower, but she needed to talk to Ellis first. Get an idea of how long this was going to last and what was expected of her.

So she dressed. She redid her ponytail so it wasn’t sleep-frazzled. There was a mirror over the drawers, and she winced at her reflection. Bags under her eyes, makeup from yesterday mostly gone but some smudge of mascara under her eyes. Her hair leaning toward greasy.

Okay, maybe she’d hunt up a shower first thing. On that thought, she left her room, which led into the cozy living room. It was dim, all the curtains drawn. She caught the scent of coffee but didn’t move for it immediately.

The little fake tree in the corner caught her attention. She crossed over to it. There was a string of lights around it, though unplugged. She crouched down and plugged it in. Colorful lights popped on and made her smile.

Life went on even when you weren’t certain, even when you didn’t remember. She had gone through two Christmases as Jessica Smith. She would go through the next one knowing who she really was.

And what are you going to do about it?

Yeah, she didn’t know yet, but she would before the holiday officially rolled around in a month.

She straightened. She felt sturdier this morning. Not happy. Not settled. But…better equipped to deal with the fallout of her real identity. She’d always known she had one. Maybe she hadn’t expected it to come with a husband, but she’d known there were years of her life unaccounted for.

She had always prepared for the moment she would have to face whatever caused her amnesia. A traumatic brain injury caused by a mobster, because her husband was an undercover FBI agent. No, her imagination hadn’t come up with anything like that.

In some ways, it was better. She was just kind of…collateral damage. She hadn’t done anything to deserve her injuries, her memory loss. She wasn’t someone who had failed or cowered. This was Ellis’s deal. She was just along for the ride.

With your husband.

She pulled a face. Okay, still complicated. But something she had to deal with regardless. And since she did, she surveyed the cabin. It was so quiet. Was he still asleep? He couldn’t be. Someone had made coffee.

The door of the little bedroom he’d gone into last night was open. So she moved toward the door, peeked her head in, half expecting to find him asleep in bed.

He stood instead, staring at a wall where he’d taped a bunch of different papers. She’d seen things like this in movies and TV shows. A board with all the pertinent information on a crime. His back was to her, his attention on the wall, giving her a chance to study him from behind.

He wore sweatpants and a T-shirt that seemed to fit him well enough she wondered if he’d somehow packed a bag. He was a tall guy. Broad. Then again, so was the man who’d driven them up here. Ellis’s dark blond hair was a little mussed, but the bed was made as though he hadn’t slept in it at all.

She’d seen him like this before. That she knew with a bone-deep certainty she wasn’t going to talk herself out of.

Fifteen years. They had been together for fifteen years.

And he has seen you naked.

She really needed to stop thinking about that.

“Whenever you feel up to it, I’d like you to go over all this and see if anything sticks out to you.” His voice was low, soft, gentle.

He’d known she was there the whole time. Yeah, that felt very familiar as well. She sighed and moved a little closer, though kept a careful distance from him. He’d clearly used the computer at the little desk in the corner to print out some things, as well as written out others in a surprisingly neat hand.

“You didn’t sleep,” she said, unable to hide her disapproval. This was hours of work, and that bed hadn’t been slept in.

“I tried. I needed to lay it all out.” She felt his gaze on her but didn’t meet it. “You slept.”

“Yes.”

“Good. There’s some coffee in the kitchen, though you might want fresh. I’ll make breakfast.” He moved to go, but…

She touched him. Just lightly. Just on the arm. Just to stop him from hurrying away so she could…say something.

But he stopped on a dime, and her words evaporated. She left her fingertips there against his forearm. Light hair dusted the skin over impressive muscle. Two scars stood out, one a kind of little dot, the other a line.

She felt a million little physical things riot through her. Warmth and relief and a little ache that centered itself low in her gut. Far lower than she was comfortable with.

She pulled her hand away, heat creeping into her cheeks. “You don’t have to wait on me.”

“We’ll take turns,” he said gruffly, then walked away. Leaving her alone in the room with her feelings.

And a wall that outlined a group of mobsters who’d threatened her.

IT WAS JUST a touch. On his arm. And it swept through Ellis like wildfire. It took every last ounce of strength not to reach out and grab her to him. Relief and need.

He hadn’t had sex in two damn years, of course he was a little…bottled up. Particularly when it was his wife touching him, no matter how innocently, which also hadn’t happened in two years.

He’d settle for just holding her, he thought. Just feeling the weight of her in his arms. Her hair against his cheek. If he could just…

He shook his head as if he could shake away the sweepingly painful ache and want inside of him. He jerked open the fridge to survey what was inside. Nothing perishable. Which made sense, but he felt damn stupid closing it again without pulling anything out. But pickles weren’t exactly breakfast fare, were they?

He let out a sigh and closed the door anyway, then poked around the cabinets. He found some oatmeal packets that could be made in the microwave with just water.

She came out of the room and walked into the kitchen. “I’ll make more coffee,” she announced.

He nodded, so they moved silently around the kitchen—her filling the coffeepot, him making oatmeal. Not touching. Not saying anything.

And yet he could remember a million mornings spent together where they would have done just this but talked. Touched. Enjoyed simply…being together.

They filled bowls, poured mugs, and moved to the table. She sat across from him and neither drank nor ate. She just frowned at the food.

“So are we just setting up house up here until they catch the guy?” she asked.

“Undetermined. First, we need to identify who left this letter. The only possible explanation that we can come up with is that it came from one of the guys from the crime family I infiltrated who aren’t in jail. But we need to know which one, why, and what their end goal is if they gave us a warning?”

“How are you going to determine that from up here?”

“I’m not. It’s up to Zach.”

“Then what’s that little crime wall you’ve got going on in your room?”

He chuckled in spite of himself. “Me being a control freak.” Not being able to let anything go.

Except he thought of all the things he’d had to let go over the past two years. Yeah, he’d learned some damn hard lessons.

“Does this put Zach in danger? And Lucy and Cooper and Rylie and—”

He reached across the table and put his hand over hers, even if it hurt a little. She needed some…anchoring. “Zach knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing this a long time. He knows the risks, if there are any for him. And he’ll protect his family. He wouldn’t live and work in Hope Town if he couldn’t.”

She swallowed, pulled her hand out from his. She dropped it into her lap so there was no chance he’d touch her again, clearly. “Right. That whole town… All those women… Former FBI.”

She sucked in a breath when he nudged the bowl toward her. A silent plea to eat something.

She nodded, then lifted the spoon, but just swirled it in the oatmeal. “I just don’t understand. Why would they warn you? If someone dropped that off at my apartment, if this is the threat you think it all is, couldn’t they have taken me out right then?”

The thought of it killed him, but he’d had the same one living in his head since she’d handed him that letter. And he had enough experience with criminals, and the Carusos in particular, to have at least some of a theory. “Whoever it is could have. If the goal was to kill you, they likely would have.”

“You and Zach both said this is a threat to me. Why wouldn’t they want to kill me then?”

“The Carusos see my infiltration of their organization and case against them an insult. So, they’d like me to suffer—which means they’d probably like to draw out any threat to you. But I also have to believe…the life we’ve created for you in Hope Town was safe. Safe enough, they couldn’t really get to you. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think…” He didn’t want to scare her, but they were hiding out—wasn’t that scary enough?

“I don’t think they would kill you if they could get to you, but I think if they could have, they would have taken you. Tortured you to torture me. This was the closest they could get.”

“If I was safe, why bring me up here?”

“Safety is an illusion. It never lasts.”

“That’s dire.”

“That’s life in the FBI.”

She stirred absently at her oatmeal again, still not taking a bite. “Living the dream.”

She said it just like she used to. Wry humor, but not bitterness. She’d supported his dream.

Until she hadn’t. He tried to breathe through the pain, but it just kept doubling him over. Because he couldn’t escape it up here like he could down in Hope Town. He could keep his distance. He could not interact.

“What?” she asked, like she could read his thoughts.

She had been able to once, more or less.

“You’ve said that before,” he managed to explain. “Living the dream. When you weren’t too happy with the demands of my job.”

She seemed to consider this with a lot of gravity, then began to nod. “I may not remember everything, but I am her. Underneath whatever…traumatic brain damage there is or whatever. Believe me, I’ve thought a lot about…the person I was in the places I don’t remember. It felt like two separate people then, but now that I have this name, now that I know…you were part of that past, it feels less like that, and more like… I can reach whoever I was. Under the right circumstances.”

“What would be the right circumstances?”

She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

So do I.

Chapter Eight

After coffee and breakfast—a strange thing to do with another person, especially as natural as it all felt. And unnatural. And exhausting because the mental loop Jessica’s mind was running in never stopped—they went back into the little room with his…crime map wall or whatever.

She stared at the different dates, places, people. It was mostly gibberish. Chicago. A bunch of guys with the last name Caruso, or people with Agent in front of their names. There was nothing recognizable to her, not really.

She frowned because she’d at least kind of hoped that talking about this past she didn’t remember would jog memories after two years of being hidden from her past. She wanted it to be that simple, and even knowing it was foolish, she’d hoped.

But that hope was dashed because none of this made any sense. These men. Her husband. “So, these are the ones in jail,” she said, scanning the list. “Which one shot you?”

“He’s not on that list. The one who shot me is one of the ones who disappeared in the fray that night.”

“So, he’s on this list.” She turned her attention to the list of names of men who hadn’t been arrested or tried. “He’d be your top suspect, right? Come back to finish the job?”

Ellis shook his head. “He’s not on any list because he died last year.”

“Oh.” She huffed out a breath of frustration. “Well, so much for me being a genius investigator.”

He laughed, the sound warm and rich. She realized even in the past two years she didn’t have much memory of him laughing. Even the smiles he’d given her had been polite. Warm, but…not whatever this was that crinkled the skin around his eyes and warmed her from the inside out.

It felt like a coup to make him laugh, and she didn’t know if that was memory over it being a difficult endeavor or just the situation they were in.

“I’m leaning more toward the guys who were tried and weaseled their way out,” he said. “I put them through more, and there’s no risk for them. They’ve already been tried. The guys who disappeared? If Caruso didn’t have them taken care of himself, it’d be a bigger risk for them to threaten me than to just keep laying low.”

There were three names on that list. “But wouldn’t having been tried for something mean they know any retribution could come back to them?”

“That’s not really how the Caruso family works. They’ve gotten away with way more than I ever tagged them on. Besides, they could easily use lower hanging fruit to make the actual threats.”

Threats. She was trying to focus on that, on mobsters and danger, but her mind kept circling back to being married to this man.

“Why were you doing undercover work if it put me in danger?”

She watched him carefully in the silence that followed. He kept his gaze on the wall, but his jaw tensed. Everything about him tensed. And he took his time answering, like he was carefully weighing every word.

That too felt all too familiar.

“It wasn’t supposed to. It’s not like I was coming home at night. I was deep undercover. The only way they tracked me to you was if they had some kind of inside intel.”

“Like an inside person?”

“Possibly, or a way to infiltrate the system.”

“But they’d have to know…what they were looking for to infiltrate any system, right?”

“It depends. How much did they know about there being an investigation into them? And what access did they have to the people, the admin organizing that investigation? These are questions I’ve never been able to answer, and it’ll take too long to go back to the beginning when we have a threat here. Now.”

He probably knew what he was talking about, but it just felt all wrong. How could you figure out the end if you didn’t know the beginning?

But he knew the beginning. And the middle. He knew it all. And even when he answered her questions, she could feel all the things he wasn’t saying. Not that he was lying, but that every answer was so careful, so…vague.

He wasn’t lying. He was just keeping a big part of the picture obscured. Was it simply because her doctor had told him to? Or was it something more?

“Why would you go undercover, be away for an undetermined period of time, if you were married?” Was he trying to get away from her? He’d said they loved each other, but maybe that was some kind of…kindness. Trying to soften any blows for the poor amnesiac woman.

“It was an important case,” he said stiffly. “Based on my record, my boss wanted me. It would have been a big gold star.” He shook his head, a kind of disgusted look on his face she didn’t understand. “I wanted something big to end my undercover career on. It was a mistake, but in the moment, all I could see was glory right within my reach.”

“For what?”

He looked at her then, a frown drawing his mouth down and his eyebrows together. “What do you mean?”

“What’s the glory for?”

“I… Personal satisfaction. A positive note to end that part of my career on. I don’t know.”

“You weren’t trying to impress me?”

He laughed. Bitterly. “You weren’t impressed.”

She looked back at the wall. Something didn’t add up. “That doesn’t feel right. This is all very impressive.”

He shook his head. “Look—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “I know. I know. I don’t remember. I don’t know. But…why were you going to end your undercover career if it meant so much to you?”

He inhaled, a little sharply. Like she’d pressed on a wound. For a long silence she thought he wouldn’t answer. When he did, his voice was…strained.

“We were going to start a family.”

“Oh.” Well. That felt…so private and intimate. She understood now, at least a little, why Dr. Leigh didn’t want her wading through this. It wasn’t just uncomfortable to know she was this woman he’d been planning on starting a family with, it was a mix of other emotions. Embarrassment and discomfort and confusion, along with the underlying and constant frustration she didn’t remember. While questioning every errant thought and feeling—wondering if they were real or fiction.

But remembering would solve it all. She just needed to remember. “What did I do? For work.”

“You were an English teacher. You’d… You hadn’t renewed your teaching contract for the next school year because I was probably going to have to transfer once I retired from undercover work.”

“An English teacher.” She considered it, tried to find some memory in that knowledge.

“High school. That’s why Zach thought you’d be good at working at the bookstore.”

Okay, she supposed that felt right. Even not knowing anything about herself, books had made sense. Stories and characters and themes. Book club night was the night she felt most…comfortable, most real. Sure, not everyone talked about the books they’d read, but she usually got in a few topics before things skewed toward the other women’s personal lives.

But she didn’t remember anything about a classroom or students or what books she might have taught. The blank remained.

“You don’t have to push yourself,” Ellis said gently. “Zach and I are going to handle this threat. You’re safe. All you have to do is let us protect you.”

ELLIS STUDIED HER profile as she absorbed that. He wasn’t exactly expecting her to just say, yeah, okay, as much as he’d like her to.

But he didn’t understand why she looked angry.

She turned on him, dark eyes flashing with temper. A temper he recognized but also knew was rare. Kirsten had always been even-tempered. Slow to anger, and even when it bubbled up, she worked very hard to keep it from exploding.

She’d grown up around explosive adults and had always told him she wouldn’t let herself be like that. She wanted to be fair. She wanted to be kind. And more often than not, she had been.

Often to her own detriment.

“There is a threat to me, and your expectation is that I should just hide away and…let the men handle it?”

“This isn’t about men or women. It’s about—”

“Knowing and not knowing? Remembering and not remembering?”

“Well, yes.” Which was somehow the wrong answer if her fisting her hands on her hips was anything to go by.

“I can’t help it that I don’t remember.”

“I didn’t say you could help it. It’s just… I’m trained to handle this. This is…because of me. Zach and I are going to handle it because that’s our job.”

“And my job is to sit and twiddle my thumbs?”

He sighed, a headache beginning to drum at his temples. He hoped there was some ibuprofen somewhere in this place. “You don’t have a job in this case. Except to stay safe.”

The jut of her chin was stubborn. But she didn’t argue with him. She took a swipe, instead. Oh, it probably wasn’t a swipe to her, but it felt like one to him.

“Tell me something that only we know,” she demanded.

Every time he thought he’d ushered her away from the topic of them, she circled back around. Demanding. Like she deserved answers.

He figured she did but couldn’t be sure if that was an honest feeling or just his desperation for her to be Kirsten again. If everything were up to him, he’d tell her everything. Every second he remembered from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, until that moment she’d woken up in the hospital after too many days in a coma, not remembering.

But it wasn’t up to him. Because he wasn’t a doctor or a psychiatrist or anything but the reason she was in this mess. Maybe if it was guilt stabbing at him, he’d feel less disgusted with himself for giving in.

But it wasn’t guilt. It was want. He wanted her memory back. For her. For him. She’d probably remember and hate him. Push him away. And he’d deserve it.

It would be a damn sight better, living with what he deserved, than rehashing everything he’d done wrong with her when she didn’t remember.

But there was also some glimmer of hope, some piece of the old Ellis not completely dead yet, that thought…if she remembered, if she hated him, at least that was grounds for a second chance.

But she had to remember, and he wouldn’t put her through pain to remember. He couldn’t. So he did what he’d become an expert at for two years. He hedged.

“What would you want to know?”

She gave him that look he knew she’d once given her students when they tried to lie to her about the state of their homework. “If I knew what, I wouldn’t need you to tell me, Ellis.”

“I just don’t know what I could possibly say that would make you remember, and Dr. Leigh—”

“I swear to God I don’t want to hear another damn word about Dr. Leigh.” She threw her arms up in the air, paced away from him, then back. She drilled a finger into his chest. “I want to hear about us. Our life. It’s like memory is this…tangible thing, just out of reach.” She gestured with the hand not currently poking him. “I know it’s there. I know it, but I need help to get there.” She pulled back, poked again. Hard. “You are supposed to be helping me.”

Sure. And maybe after he could stab himself through the heart a few times. He placed his hand over the one currently jabbing into him.

Which was a mistake. Hell, being in the same room with her was a mistake, but touching her—no matter how platonically—and her subsequent catch of breath was a special kind of torture.

Which, in fairness, he probably deserved.

Still, he gently removed her finger from his chest, stepped away from her. “I need to call Zach and get an update. Give me a little while to wade through some of this, and we can circle back to this later.”

He made a move for the door, for safety. He got about three steps into the living room before she followed, clearly not giving him any time.

“This isn’t new to this moment, is it?” she said. “You used to use work as an excuse before too. If you didn’t want to face something head-on. Because you knew what to do with work. But you didn’t know what to do with love that felt complicated.”

He turned and stared at her for probably a full minute. There were just no…words. It was definitely not the first time she’d accused him of that. She sounded like Kirsten, like a woman who remembered.

But she was frowning at him as if her own words didn’t make sense.

“Say something,” she ordered.

“I don’t know what to say.” Which was an uncomfortable truth he’d probably never admitted out loud before, but she kept poking at him, this woman who was only a ghost of his wife. Mixed with a woman he had spent the past two years pretending was just another mission. And something about that, the moment between just the two of them, her knowing too much already, broke some dam he’d been shoring up and maintaining for so long.

“You don’t owe me any sympathy. God knows everything that’s happened to you is all my fault, but I have spent the past two years in agony keeping myself just out of reach. And I managed because you needed it, because your safety and well-being demanded it, but I can’t manage if you insist on dredging up everything we were, because to me, we still are.”

She opened her mouth as if to speak, but damn, he couldn’t let her. He could not let her keep doing this to him. He had to keep her safe.

“So please, for the love of God, give me a damn break.”

Her eyes were bright with tears, but they didn’t fall, and she didn’t argue with him. She gave a little nod. “All right,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “That’s fair.”

“Nothing is fair,” he muttered, pain slicing through him at the fact he’d put those tears in her eyes, and more. So many more.

He turned on a heel and marched outside. Into the frigid cold of a snowy morning. For a moment, he let himself breathe in the sharp, icy air. Let it needle his exposed skin, his lungs. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed.

“I want to hear everything you’ve come up with,” Ellis demanded harshly to Zach’s, “Hello.” No small talk. No beating around the bush. He had to find his FBI mode again or he might just…lose it.

Zach’s pause was loud. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m great. Never damn better.”

“Ellis, we knew going in this might be complicated. It doesn’t have to be you—”

“Tell me.”

Zach sighed. “All right. Well, I don’t have anything concrete, but I’ll tell you my worst suspicions at the moment. I’ve got some concerns about Dr. Leigh.”

Chapter Nine

When Ellis went outside, Jessica let a few tears fall. Bottling them up didn’t do anything, particularly when there was no one in here to witness them. So she let them out, wiped them away, then marched back into the room he was staying in.

She stared at the wall. She wasn’t going to wait around for Zach and Ellis to handle everything. Maybe, in the end, they’d be the ones who figured everything out, who saved the day. Maybe that’s what former FBI agents did.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t get to try—to understand, to figure things out, to remember.

She poked around the little desk with a computer and printer, found a blank legal pad and a pen, and then pulled the chair over so she could sit in it and look at the wall.

It was mostly names, so she sought to put together a kind of timeline. An attempt to make sense of all this nonsense in her own head, in her own time.

He didn’t have the details of the actual night she was hurt up there, and she wanted them. Wanted to know how he’d been shot, since she’d clearly witnessed it if it haunted her dreams. Wanted to know the details of how she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury.

She closed her eyes for a moment, tried to picture it. She could see that dream vision of him, his bloody shirt torn. His face pale. Pain in his eyes. She could see that. No one could have put that in her head, and how could she have dreamed it up if it wasn’t something true that she’d experienced?

Which meant there were other memories inside of her, and maybe they were all that painful, but maybe the answer to all this was in her own mind somewhere.

She opened her eyes and glanced at the doorway. She didn’t jump or screech or even jolt. Somehow, even though he hadn’t made a peep, she’d known he’d be standing in the doorway staring at her. Like she’d lived this kind of moment a million times over.

She probably had.

She would say she didn’t know what love looked like, except she had spent two years existing in the world of Hope Town. She had been around Zach and his wife. She had been on the periphery of Lia entering into a relationship with Corporal Fairhurst. But it wasn’t just romantic love like that. It was Zach and Lucy with their kids. It was Lia with Corporal Fairhurst’s niece, who worked at the bakery. It was Albennie, Lia, and Franny Perkins and their little trio of friendship.

One born of knowing each other. She had spent the past two years seeing what love looked like in all sorts of scenarios, knowing she couldn’t partake because she didn’t know herself.

She saw it—hand in hand with misery—in Ellis’s changeable hazel eyes.

She worried she was fooling herself that something echoed inside of her. Like a memory of whatever love existed before her memory loss. She had no doubt she’d loved him, but she worried any feelings were just…wishful thinking. Wishful remembering.

Maybe, what she felt was just that same misery.

He said nothing, like he was trapped there.

There was no denying he was handsome. If he’d been an FBI agent the entire time they’d been together, he’d no doubt always been this fit. This impressive. But it was the eyes that seemed to hook inside her with a pained, wistful yearning.

“How did we meet?”

He was so quiet and so still for so long she was beginning to think he wouldn’t answer.

“I’m sorry. You told me to give you a break. I just…” She didn’t have any excuse, except this feeling inside of her that didn’t make sense to her.

He moved then, breathed, shifted. “College.” He crossed the threshold and went to sit on the edge of the bed. She turned in her chair to face him. If he was going to answer, maybe this was an okay topic.

“We had a class together?”

He shook his head. “I saw you on the quad. You were talking with a friend. I went up to you and you gave me your number.”

“Just like that?”

There was almost the hint of a smile on his face. “Just like that.”

She wanted to ask him if it was love at first sight, but it felt too intimate an ask, even if she was one of the people in the scenario. And she’d felt the anguish in him when he’d said we still are.

So she could let it go. For now. She turned back to the wall, tapped pen to paper. “I’m trying to make a timeline. Just to make sense of the events in my head.”

“Well, we were both injured two years ago in the attack. It was at our home outside Chicago just about two months before we arrived here in Hope Town. I was in the hospital for a week. You were in a coma for most of that time. We were under protective custody there, so even once I was released, I stayed with you while we determined how to move forward. We were discussing WitSec options when you came to. The doctors thought your memory would start to return after a few days, but it didn’t. And we were running out of time, so we had to move.”

She frowned at him, trying to cast back to that time, but even the hospital was a blank to her. The first thing she really remembered was… Her frown deepened, a headache started to drum at her temples, tension creeping into her neck.

Did she remember her hospital room? His devastated eyes and his arm in a sling? People in suits. Whispers. Confusion. Fear.

She looked down at her pad of paper and added the details to her timeline, but that still didn’t fully make sense of what they were doing, what the threat was…and the mystery, in her mind, of what their marriage had been.

“But what about before?”

“Before?”

“You’d been undercover? You said you weren’t coming home to me, so where were you? Where was I? How long was this going on?”

He paused a moment, looked down at his hands clasped lightly between his legs. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. “It was a three-month assignment. I had about a month left. I was meeting with my contact at the FBI when he was informed there’d been a break-in at our address.”

“So…we hadn’t seen each other for two months?”

“Correct.”

He said that so…detached. Like he probably did in meetings with his FBI coworkers. There was a story here she was missing. Complications, personal complications, he didn’t want to divulge.

Was he hiding something? Should she press? Was it all immaterial because there was a threat against her? She didn’t know how to determine how to get to the bottom of that.

But she wasn’t given the chance to.

“I’d like to talk to you about Dr. Leigh.”

It was a complete turn of subject, and she didn’t understand it. Or like it at all. She fidgeted in her seat. “What about Dr. Leigh?”

“Not about…anything you’ve talked about that you feel is private. Not about your responses. More about what she’s asked you, what she might have pressed on that felt strange or off or just didn’t add up to you.”

“You think she’s…part of it?”

Ellis sighed. “The fact of the matter is, a very small number of people know your true identity and how you came to be a resident of Hope Town. There’s me. There’s Zach. Faith and Lane know some things about our relationship, about my connection to the FBI, but not the details of why you’re in Hope Town or where you came from. I suppose, with my real name, they might have been able to figure out some things, but nothing that would actually bring a threat to our door. Dr. Leigh is really…the only person aside from Zach and I who knows almost the full picture. So we want to make sure there’s no breach there. I just need to know what you talk to her about, and we’ll go from there.”

She thought about her sessions with Dr. Leigh. They weren’t always comfortable. She didn’t always leave feeling happy or settled or supported, but… But she had trusted Dr. Leigh implicitly. About everything. It was terrifying that someone she’d trusted might be a problem, that she might have unknowingly and unwillingly said something to cause all…this.

But Ellis knew everything. He was the ringleader of this whole…whatever it was. He was her husband. “You’re telling me Dr. Leigh didn’t tell you anything about our sessions?”

“The only thing she’s discussed with me is how to approach you. How to be around you. She’s never gotten into the details of your sessions. She—and I—considered that private. Patient-doctor confidentiality.”

How to approach you. Dr. Leigh had spoken of Ellis on occasion, on what he made her feel. Because she asked about all the people Jessica came into contact with. Because Dr. Leigh had been working with her on trusting her own instincts, her own feelings.

It’s the only way you can navigate through the world without memories, Jessica. To develop your own sense of self, your own judgments. Had that even been real?

The thought of this all made panic start beating in her chest again. How could she develop anything when she wasn’t anyone she remembered? When she was married and a target and—

Ellis stood and crossed over to her. He crouched in front of her, putting a light hand over the one clutching her own thigh.

“Kirsten,” he said, calmly and directly.

She managed to look away from his hand on hers and met his gaze. She still wasn’t used to him calling her that, but she’d told him to. Insisted. In this moment, she wished she hadn’t. She wanted to ignore Kirsten and him and a past she couldn’t remember, and pretend everything was simple.

But it wasn’t simple, and she had a role in it. She cleared her throat, surprisingly steadied by his hand on hers.

“I tell her how I’ve been feeling. We talk a lot about…when I’m anxious. What is the source of that anxiety. Obviously, I think it’s what I don’t remember. She’s worked with me on…trusting myself. Making my own mind up about situations and people even though I don’t remember.”

Ellis nodded, still crouching there in what had to be an uncomfortable position. “Okay, good. What about these dreams—like me being shot. Did you tell her about those?”

“Not the one about you being shot. I was going to make an appointment Monday, because everything felt so…unsettled. But I hadn’t done it yet.”

“Were there other dreams you shared with her?”

She thought back. Tried to remember. Probably, but nothing concrete came to mind in this moment. She looked at him helplessly.

“Ellis, she’s been… She’s been a touchstone. A foundation for me these past two years. I couldn’t have settled into a life with such a blank slate without her guiding me.”

His expression was grim. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

ELLIS HATED HOW destroyed she looked. Like he’d ripped out all her foundations and she was left with nothing.

Isn’t that your MO?

“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t—”

“What if we told her I remembered?” Kirsten demanded, sharp and determined.

Enough that Ellis was taken aback. “Why… What?”

She took his hand out from under hers and got to her feet, so he had to as well. He stepped back as she began to pace. Not like a woman who’d had her foundations ripped out, but like a woman with a plan.

“We tell her I remember and see how she reacts. See if she acts weird about it. Wouldn’t that be a sign that she’s involved in something?”

“If she’s involved, if she’s a threat, we wouldn’t want her thinking that you remember. Particularly when you don’t.”

“Why not? If it gets to the bottom of the threat, doesn’t that mean we can protect ourselves from it?”

He’d believed that. Once.

“It’s too risky. It’s—”

“What if we bring it up to her like, like couples counseling. For getting through two years of not remembering we were married. Maybe we say the whole…crime part of it is still fuzzy. I don’t remember how I came to have amnesia. I just remember you. Us.”

She was pacing. Coming up with a plan. Bouncing back quickly from the emotional turmoil of not trusting her therapist anymore.

And the word us pierced through him like any bullet.

“You’d be part of it,” she continued. “You could observe her and ask her questions that way. You could be looking for whatever it is you FBI agents look for.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. If she was anyone else, he would have jumped on the idea right away, but…

“I’m worried pretending like you remember might be difficult for you.”

“Stop worrying about my psychological well-being. I won’t have a psyche to worry about if this is actually a threat and I wind up dead.”

Dark, but true.

“I can’t do this,” she said, sounding agitated but in control. “Just exist in this place where maybe she’s bad, maybe she isn’t. Maybe we’re under a threat, maybe we’re not. Maybe what I dream or feel is a memory, maybe it’s not. I can’t… I need to act. I need to.”

He understood that need better than anyone, and still he hesitated, because acting put her in turmoil.

But she was already there, wasn’t she, whether he did anything or not?

“I’ll need to run it by Zach. We’d need his help and cooperation.” And approval, though he didn’t say that out loud. He couldn’t trust his own judgment on this. He needed an outside party to tell him if he was insane for even considering this. “I’ll need to make a plan. For what we’re trying to get to the bottom of.”

“Good. Good.” She nodded, stopped her pacing. She let out a slow breath like she could relax because he was going along with it. She even tried to smile. “I don’t want to sit around and wait, twiddle my thumbs, be a…a victim. Maybe that’s who I used to be, but—”

“It wasn’t. Never. You’ve always been a…a…champion. Of anyone. Your students. Me.”

She stared at him then, those dark eyes serious. “What about myself?”

He could only stare back at her, that moment he’d left to go on the undercover mission fresh in his mind. She hadn’t come right out and said she wanted a divorce. She hadn’t come right out and said he wouldn’t be welcome back, and because of that he’d been able to convince himself when it was over, he’d fix everything.

But he’d come to accept in the past two years that what he’d chosen would have been the end—with or without the way things went down.

“You were used to putting everyone else first, but I think you were learning how to consider yourself too. Maybe not a champion yet, but you were getting there.”

She nodded, as if she agreed. As if that made sense to her. She turned to look at the wall of people, dates, and everything that had led them here.

“Then I want to get there, whether I remember or not. Talk to Zach. Talk to whoever, but if Dr. Leigh somehow did this to us, I want to be part of getting to the bottom of it.”

Chapter Ten

She made dinner for them that night. Even though it was just putting together some nonperishable items to create a meal, the motions steadied her. And there was something about having someone to cook for that made it even more enjoyable. She wasn’t just keeping herself alive, she was extending that courtesy to someone else.

Ellis had taken the phone call with Zach outside. Spoken in low tones for a long time, then come back in with a red nose and watery eyes from the frigid cold. He stopped short, without fully closing the door behind him, presumably at the sight of her putting food on the table.

“I made dinner,” she explained.

“You didn’t have to go through that trouble,” he said a little gruffly.

“Heating up some canned soup and green beans is hardly trouble.”

“Zach is going to do some poking around. He wants to make sure if we set any bait for Dr. Leigh we’re ready to handle it. If we have some kind of therapy session with her, he wants to find a way to record it without her knowing, and he wants backup ready to come up here in case somehow Dr. Leigh has more eyes on us than we realize. He’ll get back to me tomorrow, and we’ll go from there.”

Eyes. She couldn’t help but look around, suddenly feeling like a million eyes were on her. But that was silly. She forced herself to take a seat at the little table in the kitchen and pointed to the one across from her. “Sit. Eat.”

He hesitated. She understood why when he sat down at the table. Across from her. With the little fake Christmas tree in the corner twinkling its colorful lights.

She was getting damn tired of the way things felt familiar, and yet she didn’t know why. She didn’t like causing him pain, and her questions about their old life seemed to, but…

She had to know things. She just had to ask about the things that popped into her mind. “How did we celebrate Christmas?”

He didn’t look up, but he paused in his eating. She couldn’t see his eyes, but the cast of his mouth was…pained.

It was clear just about everything she did caused him pain, and it twisted her insides into a million knots. But so did everything. Until she could find some understanding in the midst of all this not knowing, everything was going to hurt. She didn’t relish hurting him—whether that was because some part of her, deep underneath all the trauma, knew him, or simply because she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cause pain—she didn’t really know.

She supposed she hoped it was a little of both, and that there was some…solution to be found before this was all over.

He cleared his throat, set his fork down like he couldn’t stomach eating and rehashing Christmas.

“You were very into Christmas. You liked to decorate. Make cookies all month.” There was a fondness mixed in with the pain. She didn’t need to remember or know him to recognize that. “You Christmas shopped all year long. You were always on the lookout for the best presents.”

“What about you?”

He paused for a second, like he was considering his answer. “It was pretty common that I had to work Christmas day. That was why you’d tend to make it a month-long event.”

“No, I mean, did you like Christmas?”

“Kirsten, I’m just not sure—”

But she didn’t want to hear any more about how he wasn’t supposed to talk about this, how Dr. Leigh thought it would be bad for her. Particularly when he and Zach suspected Dr. Leigh.

“Ellis, the more honest you are, the more you tell me, maybe it unlocks something. To me that makes more sense than this idea that never upsetting me is going to allow me to heal. Not knowing is upsetting too. And this subject is pretty innocuous. Did you like Christmas or not?”

He sighed. “I had some painful memories tied to Christmas.”

“Like?”

He picked his fork back up, took a bite of green beans. He did not meet her gaze. “Both my parents died in December, so it was never a happy time for me. You tried to change that.”

She frowned a little. “That sounds insensitive.”

He shook his head, a slight smile curving his mouth. “No. You were never insensitive. You hadn’t had the greatest childhood Christmases either. You just really tried to make something that was ours, aside from the pain.”

Something about that warmed her. The idea of trying to make something good, for them. But it also brought home the fact she didn’t know anything about her family aside from him. “What about my parents? Do they know…?” She couldn’t put words to it. Surely she had some broader life outside of Ellis Sutton.

He must have read her anxiety, because he didn’t hedge his answers here. “You never knew your father. Your mother was not a stable figure in your life and often made choices that… She never prioritized you or your half sister’s safety, so the relationship was…rocky at best.”

“I have a sister?”

“You haven’t spoken in a few years. Same with your mother. Neither one of them could quite be happy for you finding some stability in your life, which they considered marriage and me. It caused friction, and when you started to set boundaries, they became unreachable.”

It brought no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. “Do they think I’m dead?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure. Because they’d gone no contact, I couldn’t get in touch with them before we had to leave Chicago. It’s possible they don’t know anything. It’s possible they saw a news story and think you’re dead. It’s hard to say, but…” He trailed off, tightened up. Focused on eating and never finished that sentence.

“But what?” she demanded, because there was something more there and she deserved to know it.

He sighed, met her gaze. “I think if they believed you were dead, they would have come out of the woodwork. There was a bit of a media cycle around what happened to us. They could have made some money off of playing the grieving family.” He must have noted the horror on her face. “Sorry if that sounds callous.”

She blinked, tried to work around the confusing emotions inside of her. But…she’d asked him for information, and he’d given it. She couldn’t be mad about whatever truths existed out there. “Is it callous if it’s the truth?”

“It took you a long time to learn, to accept you couldn’t save them from themselves. You went through a lot of hurt at their hands. The last few years, you’d tried to harden yourself to it, but it was hard on you. No matter what you try, you’ve got a soft heart.”

She could tell he was trying to be somewhat…detached. Like an impartial observer. But emotion leaked into his voice at the end there, like he couldn’t quite help it.

He looked down, away from her gaze, and exchanged fork for spoon and began to eat his soup. “You should eat,” he said between swallows. “Keep your strength up.”

She might have looked away, picked up her own spoon, but something was…taking shape in her mind. Like a memory. What she might have not so long ago waved off as a dream. A strange, confusing dream.

But now she knew that these might be real. These flashes of a life she didn’t understand or recognize. Just like him with a bullet wound, or him in that tuxedo.

Sitting in a room with blue walls and soft, pastel paintings of forests hanging up. Sitting on the end of an unmade bed. Feeling twisted and torn up about…about… Her family. The family she couldn’t trust.

“We were supposed to be starting a family, and I didn’t want them hurting a child like they’d hurt me. So I finally cut them off.”

He looked up. She saw the intensity in his eyes but also noted that he was holding himself carefully. Again, trying to detach from…whatever was happening.

“You remember that?” he asked carefully.

“I think so? It’s…strange. I can picture certain things, feel certain things, but the bigger picture is missing. I can’t picture what they look like, I don’t know their names, but I can…put myself back into that moment of realizing if I wanted kids of my own, I would have to keep my life separate from theirs.”

She couldn’t read his expression or his thoughts—another familiar feeling, but she could read the strange…guilt in his eyes.

“Ellis, regardless of whether Dr. Leigh is some kind of leak, whether she is working against me or not, she was wrong. Having the framework of my family situation allowed me to remember that moment, remember something. Which means you should share it all. And you shouldn’t worry about it. I know you don’t want to hurt me, and I’m sorry if it does, but I need to know.”

ELLIS WANTED TO believe her. Hell, he wanted to tell her every moment of their lives if it got her to a place where she remembered everything, but…it felt wrong. It felt like a dangerous tightrope. Maybe this story had unearthed a memory, but what if he took a wrong turn? Pushed too hard?

Maybe Dr. Leigh was a liar, working against them, but… He couldn’t get over his fear of hurting her more than she’d already been hurt.

“I think we need to be careful about doing too much,” he said carefully. “You remembered a piece of something today. That’s a positive. Maybe tomorrow—”

“Being a father terrified you,” she said, with a strange triumphant note to her voice. “I remember that too. The fight we had before your last job.”

He had no words for that, because…he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. “What?”

“I remember… I remember arguing with you. You wanted to take that last job because…because I was ready to have a baby, and it scared you.”

Ellis was struggling to work through any of this. But this was the first memory she was claiming to have that was flat-out wrong. There’d been no fight, and he sure as hell hadn’t been scared.

“No, I wasn’t scared. I just…needed the accolades. I needed some intangible thing. It wasn’t fear. It was about my work, my self-worth. Taking the job wasn’t about having kids. We’d always planned to have kids.”

“It was,” she replied stubbornly. Then she tapped her temple. “Don’t lie to me. I remember it.”

“Kirsten, I’m sorry, but that’s not right.”

“It is,” she insisted, while his heart beat in wild, painful rhythm against his chest. He convinced himself it was because…she was wrong, and he didn’t want to hurt her or her progress, but he couldn’t let this idea he’d been afraid stand.

Fear had nothing to do with it.

“I remember the fight,” she said stubbornly. “You said you were taking this last job, and I was furious, because…because you were scared and just kept talking about how important the job was. I told you that you were scared of being a dad, because…because you’d lost yours, and then your stepdad… You didn’t like him?”

“I liked him fine,” Ellis replied gruffly. “You’re misremembering things.” If she was remembering at all. Because that had not been a fight they’d had.

“You didn’t want to be like him, and you were afraid that was all you had in you.”

He wanted to argue with her words, but… Well, they hit a little too close to a soft, bruised place he didn’t like to visit. And whether she was right or wrong, there was one simple fact. “This was not an argument we had.”

“I remember it!”

He worked to keep his voice calm, even, no matter how agitated she got. “I don’t know what to tell you. I certainly don’t remember anything of the sort, and since I’m not the one with a traumatic brain injury, I think I’ll take my own word for it.” It was too harsh, but she’d never accused him of being afraid. She’d never accused him of anything.

They hadn’t even really argued about the mission. She’d said she didn’t think he should go. She didn’t think they were in a good place for him to go.

She’d said he was breaking his promise.

But they hadn’t fought. They never really fought. Someone expressed an opinion. The other one didn’t agree. They both did what they thought was right and…that was it.

He’d told her he had to go. Had to.

She’d said goodbye with tears in her eyes, and he’d thought…maybe that was the end. Not just goodbye for now.

But he’d convinced himself he’d make it up to her. He’d fix it when he got back, when he did what he had to do—a driving, desperate need. He could see now that he’d been wrong, but that’s what he’d thought in the moment.

It hadn’t been fear. The plan had always been to have a family. Why would he suddenly be afraid of something that he’d always wanted? At least with Kirsten.

Why should he believe the woman who had a traumatic brain injury over his own recollections?

But it sat there, a piece of sand, irritating and impossible to remove. Like it was a better label for all those feelings than seeking external validation.

“Are you lying to me because—”

His temper snapped, frayed at the edges, but he held it in. And spoke through gritted teeth. “I am not lying about anything.”

“You’ve been lying to me for two years.”

That accusation landed hard, and for a few humming moments he could only stare at her. Her brown eyes narrowed. Her mouth a hard line.

Lied to her? When he’d done everything…anything and everything to keep her alive and well and safe?

From something that was your fault, remember?

He stood abruptly. “Thank you for making dinner. I’ll handle cleanup.”

She didn’t immediately say anything to that. Not then, and not when he started collecting dishes and heading to the tiny sink. She sat there the entire time he washed every last dish by hand. He could feel her eyes on him.

But she said nothing. She did nothing. And now that the dishes were done, he sure as hell didn’t know what to do. He needed to get some work done, but he didn’t know how to leave this space, this room, without it feeling like some kind of…fight.

It wasn’t a fight. They didn’t fight.

No, she gets quiet and you walk away.

Well, then things were back to normal after all.

Chapter Eleven

She hadn’t really known what to do. He’d left the kitchen, gone to his room. He’d left the door open, so she could have followed him in, demanded…something.

But she was left in anger and confusion.

If he was lying—why? If he wasn’t lying, why did she remember the fight so clearly in her head if it didn’t exist?

She supposed this muddled, impotent, awfulness was why Dr. Leigh had cautioned Ellis not to discuss their past.

Or Dr. Leigh is the reason you received that threatening letter.

The idea of that just made her sick to her stomach. She’d been weak and helpless. She’d been like an infant, and she’d trusted Dr. Leigh wholly and fully, never once considering there might be something menacing behind the woman.

So if there was?

She shook her head. She couldn’t undo the past—not the one she didn’t remember or the one she did. She had to move forward with whatever knowledge and memories she could scrabble together and work from there.

Luckily, she’d been working on that for the past two years. And maybe everything would be ten times easier if she could remember everything, but there was nothing to do about it right now. No magic way to remember things—except make Ellis talk to her about things. She did remember when he started supplying her with background information.

And she remembered that damn fight.

Since I’m not the one with a traumatic brain injury, I think I’ll take my own word for it.

She supposed he had a point there, but then why did she remember it so clearly? Maybe not him, but the words she’d said. The knowledge she was right. He wasn’t running toward glory. He was running away from a family. From being a father. Because he was scared.

She supposed it hardly mattered. There was a threat against her, and maybe him too. She didn’t really remember enough to think they’d go back to being married and having that family they’d planned on.

And none of this matters more than the fact someone threatened your life.

Right. So maybe she should just…go try to get some sleep. Start fresh in the morning. Hopefully Zach got everything he needed to move forward in faking a therapy session with Dr. Leigh.

And if he didn’t, well, maybe she would just take things into her own hands. It’s not like Ellis had eyes on her 24–7. She could have her own session with Dr. Leigh. Do her own…investigating. She could—

It was almost as if having these somewhat rebellious thoughts were broadcast on some kind of radio he was listening to, because all of a sudden he stalked out of his room. He looked angry. She stepped back, but not out of fear. No, she couldn’t describe the things that swept through her as fear. It was something more elemental. More in her body than her brain.

“Normally, I wouldn’t say this. I’d keep it in. I’d keep it to myself. But I told myself if you were okay, I’d be different, I’d be better. Maybe you don’t remember, but you are okay, so I’m going to be straight with you. I have done everything I thought was best,” he said. His tone was quiet, but the kind of quiet that kept anyone else from daring to speak. “I have listened to experts. I have tried to keep you safe. Maybe I was wrong. I’m sure I failed you in a million ways. But I was not lying to you to cause you any harm. Everything I have done the past two years was to protect you from the harm…that was my fault. So you have every right to hate me—as Jessica, as Kirsten—and I know I should just accept that, but I can’t.” His eyes were direct, furious. His mouth a firm, grim line.

And something in her heart just fluttered. A feeling she didn’t fully understand inside herself, but one she thought she understood coming from him. “Because you love me,” she said softly. She could feel it waving off of him, and it curled inside her warm and beautiful and sharp and painful all at once.

He was quiet for a long moment, clearly wrestling with a million similar feelings inside himself, but his gaze didn’t leave hers. “Yes.”

She stepped forward, drawn by something—it had to be memory. It had to be right there, on the fringes, and if she just reached it, she could remember. “I feel something—”

“Please, don’t,” his voice was harsh and decisive, even with the please. “Dr. Leigh made it very clear I shouldn’t discuss love, because you might feel some kind of…pressure to reciprocate. And maybe she’s behind this, but she isn’t wrong that everything about this is delicate. I’m trying to be honest with you, but—”

“No, listen to me, Ellis,” she said, feeling not desperate…something more sure than desperate, but still with a need she couldn’t quite articulate to herself. “I feel something for you. At the edges. I’m not saying this person without memories loves you. I’m just saying, I know there’s something there under all the things I don’t remember. So whatever ways you think you hurt me, it didn’t erase that. Even if I don’t understand it, it’s still there.”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you if that’s better or worse.”

“Maybe nothing is better or worse. It just is.” For better or worse. In sickness and in health. She could feel herself saying those words to him. She could feel, even if it didn’t all make sense. Even if it wasn’t all on the surface. “Being around you, talking about this, it helps me remember, Ellis. I can feel it. I don’t care if it hurts.”

“You’ve had enough hurt. And I caused plenty of it. I promised myself, I promised you, I wouldn’t cause any more, Kirsten.”

Kirsten, Kirsten, Kirsten. She swore if he kept calling her that, the pieces that felt just out of reach would arrange themselves into things remembered. Hurt? Sure, but everything hurt. Not knowing hurt. “If I remember, I don’t care. Hurting is part of healing—you should know that.” She gestured at his arm. “I might not remember everything, but I remember my recovery. There was pain. You must have dealt with your fair share too.”

“It had nothing on the past two years.”

She swallowed at how much she could feel that anguish. Not because she remembered it, she didn’t think, but because it echoed off him and into her. Like she absorbed everything he felt.

“I know you want to remember. I want you to. But there’s a higher purpose here, and we can’t let that get lost in the past. Because we don’t know where this threat is coming from, any safety here is short-lived until we do know. So, let’s get some sleep. In the morning, we’ll talk to Zach and go from there. See if we can’t figure out Dr. Leigh’s connection.”

She inhaled. He was right. She knew he was right, and still she didn’t want to go to bed. She wanted to…move to him. It was a yearning inside her, like she could almost see herself crossing the space, putting her palm to his cheek.

Her mouth to his.

She remembered things when he talked about their past.

Would she remember things if they did things from their past? Like, say, share a kiss?

The idea sent two opposite feelings off inside of her. One a little too eager to jump at that possibility, and one rooted in fear.

She listened to the fear. “All right. Good night.”

ELLIS DIDN’T SLEEP WELL. Not a shock. As much as he’d known being in close quarters with Kirsten would be difficult, especially when she knew bits and pieces of things, he hadn’t counted on…all the different ways.

He hadn’t counted on her wanting to dredge up the past. On her misremembering pieces of it. On her giving him some damn hope that the feelings she had on the edges, as she said, might mean something for them.

He didn’t need hope. He needed to keep her safe.

But he hadn’t been able to focus on work with her accusation of lying sitting there. In the past, he would have shoved it down. Gone to work. Forgotten about it. Moved on.

But he just couldn’t access that old version of himself. Something about the past two years of building a million walls to keep him safe, to keep her safe, made it all so much harder to go back and be the man he’d been.

He hadn’t kept her safe then. So what was the harm now?

Which meant telling her the truth far too often in less than twenty-four hours. Maybe he should have let someone else handle it. Someone stronger. Better.

Maybe he still could.

Instead, he’d snatched maybe a few interrupted hours of sleep, before he gave up and got to work. Once it was a decent hour, he spent an hour on the phone with Zach, working with the laptop he’d borrowed and the subpar internet access to enable a recording Dr. Leigh couldn’t trace and Zach would have access to.

He’d also emailed Dr. Leigh himself, asking to find a time to meet with her sometime today via video chat.

“Let me know when she gets back to you,” Zach told him. “I want to be available while you’re having your session. I’m going to put a private investigator on tailing Dr. Leigh ASAP. We’ve also got eyes on the only access road up to the cabin. We’ll keep them there at least twenty-four hours after this.”

“What does the PI know?”

“Just that I have suspicions the doctor is colluding with some people I don’t trust. They don’t know anything about you or Jessica. Their job is just to collect information about where Dr. Leigh is going and who she’s speaking to.”

“And if Dr. Leigh speaks about us?”

“I’m not hiring random people, Ellis. And I can’t be five places at once. Either we trust a few people to help us, or this threat just hangs there, and we never know where it came from.”

Ellis couldn’t help but wonder if he should have just done this all along. Isolated her in the middle of nowhere after she’d been released from the hospital and called it a day. No threats. No outside world. No life.

It wouldn’t have been fair, but it would have been easier.

But just as he thought that, the email client on his laptop dinged and an email from Dr. Leigh showed up with a time and invitation to a video chat.

“Looks like Dr. Leigh will see us at ten. Can your PI be there in time?”

“She’s already on her way. You sure Jessica is up to this?”

Up to it? He didn’t have a clue what she was up to. She was being so…strong. So sure. But he kept worrying that it was only because she didn’t remember the full picture. She didn’t fully understand what kind of danger they were in.

But he did, which meant they had to act. “No, but she’s determined. I don’t see her backing down.”

“I’m no doctor, but I can’t help but think having some say, some agency in this whole thing is good for her. No one wants to be a powerless victim hiding away.”

Ellis scowled, because that’s what he’d like to be right now. Or at least like her to be, but he couldn’t deny that Zach was probably at least partially right.

“I’ll be in touch. You sure the laptop will record?”

“I’ll make sure of it. Good luck, Ellis.”

“Thanks,” Ellis muttered, then ended the phone call. He sat there for a few minutes, mulling over how he wanted this to go.

Kirsten’s idea that she pretend to remember them was a good one. It allowed him to be involved and observe Dr. Leigh. It’d give him a new perspective into how she dealt with Kirsten when he wasn’t there, and if Dr. Leigh was someone to be concerned about.

Maybe he’d been technically out for the past two years, but he was still a damn good FBI agent. He could sniff out a rat and keep Kirsten safe in the process.

Even though you didn’t last time?

Different. He hadn’t been there. He’d been undercover. Maybe he hadn’t been able to sniff out where the leak came from, but he certainly would have kept Kirsten from being hurt if he’d been home.

He had to hold on to that certainty or everything fell apart, and he couldn’t afford to let her get caught in the cross fire twice.

He’d die first.

He got to his feet. He’d heard her get up a little while ago, and when he stepped out into the main living area, she was in the kitchen, putting together breakfast.

She didn’t look at him over her shoulder or address him, but he could tell she knew he’d stepped into the room because her shoulders got a fraction tenser.

“Dr. Leigh is expecting us to video conference with her at ten.”

“So soon? That’s good.” She gave a firm little nod like she was assuring herself. She put two plates on the table. “Sit.”

“You don’t have to cook for me.”

She walked over to the table with a skillet in hand. She met his gaze. There were dark circles under her eyes like she hadn’t slept any better than he had. But there was a determination in them.

“I do what I please, thank you.”

He almost laughed. It wasn’t the first time she’d said that to him. Did she know that? Remember it? Based on the way she finished plating the food, he didn’t think so.

It was some hash browns and sausages he imagined had come out of the freezer. He hadn’t really been hungry, but he sat down to eat because it would make her eat as well, he hoped. She needed it.

“It snowed quite a bit last night,” she said, when the silence had stretched out for most of the meal.

Ellis didn’t even look at the window. He was calculating the odds of someone getting up here in the snow though—not great. But also not great odds that the two of them could get down if they needed to.

“Zach has a PI watching Dr. Leigh, and some eyes on the road leading up here. We should have a heads-up if anything funny goes down after our meeting with her.”

“How would she…” She shook her head. “I guess the point is we don’t know how any of this happened.”

“Zach is also trying to find a connection between Dr. Leigh and any of the people involved with the Caruso family, but we have to be careful not to involve too many people.”

Especially when it felt like there were already too many extraneous people. He understood Zach’s view. Hoped Zach’s faith in the people he was working with was earned. But the almost-worst had already happened to him, so trust was hard to have faith in.

They ate in silence for the rest of the time. Then Ellis cleaned up while Kirsten disappeared into the bathroom. He was setting up the computer for the video conference when she returned.

She was dressed in the clothes she’d switched with Deputy Morris—the red turtleneck and jeans that were a little short, but definitely more put together than the sweats she’d had on last night. Her hair was a little damp, but he’d heard the hair dryer going, so he figured she’d spent some time doing it. She didn’t have any makeup on to cover the circles under her eyes, but her lips were a deep berry color—she must have had some lipstick in the purse she carried.

He gestured at the couch. “We’ll set up here on the couch. Just our shoulders and above in the frame. If you’re uncomfortable, or you want to end the session, you just reach over and give my hand a squeeze. I’ll make our excuses.”

Kirsten studied the couch, the laptop balanced on a stack of books. She didn’t look nervous, exactly, but she certainly didn’t look eager.

“I’m going to stay as close to the truth as I can,” she said. “Because there are things I do remember.” She said this almost…antagonistically, like she wanted to pick a fight with him.

He refused to rise to the bait.

“That’s good. I’ll just be observing her reactions. Noting her questions to see if they’re off. I might take over the conversation if there’s a path I want her to go down, but at least to start I’m going to let you take the lead. She’s your doctor after all.”

Kirsten nodded and said nothing else. Then they both stood there, awkward and silent for too long. It was just about ten o’clock. Time to get this show on the road.

So he sat down, waited for her to take the seat next to him. There was some space between them. If they were going with the story that Jessica remembered her life as Kirsten, then they should probably be closer.

But Ellis couldn’t bring himself to bridge the gap. He tapped the link on the screen and waited until Dr. Leigh let them into the video conferencing room.

Kirsten was the one who scooted closer, so they were hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, right before Dr. Leigh appeared on the screen.

She was a nondescript middle-aged woman with a thin face and unbrushed hair. She had glasses with thick green frames, but shrewd dark eyes that narrowed immediately.

“This isn’t Jessica’s apartment.”

“No. I didn’t want to do this there,” Kirsten said before Ellis could offer the explanation he’d come up with. “I can’t explain it, but it feels very…confusing. To be somewhere where I was only Jessica, while remembering parts of Kirsten.”

It was a hell of an excuse. Better than his, really.

“And, to be clear, what exactly are you remembering?”

Kirsten looked over at him, offered him a tremulous smile that was mostly acting, he figured. “Ellis, mostly. That we were married. Things about being married to him. I still don’t know what happened to me, and Ellis has been hesitant to fill me in. He said you recommended letting me remember difficult things on my own.”

Dr. Leigh pursed her lips together. “Yes, I felt that was best. Remembering a traumatic event might lead to…distress. I’d much rather you be in a safe, controlled environment with people you trust. Where exactly are you?”

Ellis didn’t like the direction of that question and was all set to stop Kirsten from answering it, but she nodded along, then leaned forward as if to get closer to Dr. Leigh.

Her voice was fierce and determined. “But remembering that we’re married, our past together, it means I do trust Ellis,” she said, ignoring the part about where they were.

Ellis studied the doctor as she took in this information, as she took her damn time deciding what to say about it.

“Can you lead me through remembering?” Not pressing about where they were. Ellis wondered if she didn’t quite believe Kirsten’s memory coming back, which worried him since it hadn’t.

No matter what little pieces she thought she remembered.

Kirsten nodded, then began to tell a story—part fact, part fiction. And she was good at it. Playing the role of a woman remembering her marriage. Mixing her truth with little lies. She was damn convincing. Hell, he was almost convinced.

He supposed she’d had to be convincing the past two years just to…exist as someone who felt nothing but a blank in their past. She’d been trying to move through a world that might know she wasn’t who she was pretending to be, but she still had to…exist in it.

He couldn’t imagine how complex, stressful, and just plain hard that had been…probably because he’d been so focused on his own hardships. On all the ways he blamed himself for what had happened.

“Ellis, how are you feeling?”

It startled him a bit, that the doctor would bring him in, concern herself with him. Was it an honest question? Or one probing to see if she could feed information to the Carusos or whoever was after them?

“I know you’ve cautioned me not to push too hard, not to fill in her blanks for her.” He figured he’d take some cues from Kirsten’s use of the truth and offer some of his own. “I’m trying very hard not to, but Kirsten thinks it helps her remember if I fill her in.”

“He’s very resistant,” Kirsten put in. “I thought maybe talking to you together, you could assure him that if it helps me remember, that it can only be a good thing.”

“Remembering doesn’t have to be a good thing, Jessica,” Dr. Leigh said. “You’ve been—”

“I want you to call me Kirsten.” It was a snap, much like she’d snapped at Ellis when they’d first gotten here. She sucked in a breath, let it out slowly, then spoke more calmly. “I want everyone to call me Kirsten. That’s who I am, even if I don’t remember all of it.”

Again, Dr. Leigh took her time responding. “All right, Kirsten. You’ve been through a traumatic event and injury. Your brain is healing, and maybe that’s bringing memories back, but your brain’s job is also to protect you. You might have physical reactions to being faced with traumatic events your brain is trying to shield you from.”

“I haven’t so far. Nothing like the anxiety I felt early on. This is the least…” She trailed off, clearly searching for a word. And he knew it was a real word. She was being honest here, not playing a role. “I don’t know that I feel like myself, because there’s still so much of myself I don’t remember, but I feel less like a shell. I feel more like…like a fighter, I guess. Instead of someone who wants to hide.”

Dr. Leigh smiled, and Ellis saw only warmth in that smile. Nothing suspicious. Nothing to zero in on. He should be happy he couldn’t see Dr. Leigh as the betrayer, but it was frustrating because he felt like he was back at square one if she wasn’t the leak.

“If you trust Ellis, and I have no reason to believe you can’t, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with exploring things you might remember. You’ll have to work together to make sure you’re not pushing too hard, but if your brain is letting you remember things, maybe it’s ready.”

Ellis had to admit he was surprised. Not just because he wanted something fishy to hold on to, a lead to follow, and there was nothing suspicious about her suggestion. But also because she had been staunchly against sharing anything. For two years she had told him to keep his distance. To be careful. So damn careful.

Was it suspicious? He wanted it to be, but he had a bad feeling it wasn’t at all. “What changed?” he asked her.

“Jessica. Excuse me, Kirsten. My recommendation not to push was based on how little Kirsten remembered, how little she wanted to. In our sessions, she was very averse to trying to relax into what she might remember. She shied away from it—both purposefully and without thinking it through. But if she’s remembering on her own, if she wants to, and is ready to fight for things, then I think it’s best to explore that on her terms. Carefully, but on her terms.”

Ellis was speechless, and he could tell Kirsten was too.

“Look, guys, this is definitely a unique situation. It’s not something I have textbook answers for,” Dr, Leigh said, sounding empathetic and concerned and engaged. “So, in a way, you’ll have to feel your own way through. As with any relationship, open communication is key. I think, given the circumstances, you’ll both be tempted to…hold back, to pretend with each other, to tread lightly. But, to truly move forward, you can’t pretend with each other. You can’t hide. There has to be full trust. Kirsten, that you’re willing to say when it’s too much. Ellis, that you won’t push too hard. And probably more pitfalls as you move through.”

It was strange to find that advice applicable to…well, the marriage they’d had before. Because they had certainly hidden from each other in their own ways. They had a habit of…working around problems rather than through them. Something he hadn’t really realized until after.

So many things he hadn’t realized until after.

“I’d like to meet with you guys twice a week while we move through this,” Dr. Leigh said. “I want to make sure you’re both handling this very traumatic situation in a healthy way. And I’d be happy to schedule one-on-one sessions whenever you feel you need someone to talk to. Preferably in my office.”

Ellis had to clear his throat to speak around the emotion that clogged there—so many different emotions, because this felt real and he’d expected it to be a fraud.

But he still couldn’t tell Dr. Leigh that wouldn’t be happening yet. “I’ll…get in touch with you about working out a schedule.”

Dr. Leigh nodded. “Good.” She asked Kirsten if she had any more questions, and ended the call reiterating honesty and reaching out to her if they got into any rough patches they needed mediated.

Once the video call ended, Kirsten got to her feet. She was clasping her hands, just like she used to do when she was worked up about her mom or sister. An unsolvable problem. Because even when she’d cut them off, that had hurt her. It hadn’t been a solution. It hadn’t solved anything.

She turned to face him, her clasped hands pressed against her heart. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were suspiciously shiny. “Ellis, she’s not behind this.”

He didn’t think so either, but… “Maybe she’s just a good actress.”

“She cares, Ellis. It’s clear as day. And she was trying to help us, not thwart us. She wants to protect me, but from you.”

That’s why, he supposed, he believed Dr. Leigh’s innocence. “Maybe she should,” he muttered.

Kirsten shook her head. “And she wanted to protect you from me. She wanted us both…okay. She wants us to be okay. So maybe we don’t need protecting right now.”

He stood himself, restless energy pumping through him. “Someone threatened your life.”

“So we should figure out who.”

He pointed at the computer. “That’s what we’re trying to do here. Because if it’s not Dr. Leigh, we have to start over.”

“No, we’re not figuring out anything. We’re hiding. Just like Dr. Leigh said. We can’t hide.”

“I’m pretty sure she meant emotionally.”

“Yes, but she’s right. Universally.”

“What are you suggesting? Not hiding? Because that’s not happening. We’re here until it’s safe.”

“So we’re just going to sit in this cabin for a million years waiting for something to happen?” she demanded, anger filling in all the cracks of whatever softer emotions Dr. Leigh had brought out.

“Yeah, that’s kind of how these things work in cases like this. We have to be careful.”

“I’m not a case,” she said, agitated and angry, even if he didn’t understand why. “And I’m done being careful. I’m done hiding. Two years of being afraid and there was no threat. Just…shadows I didn’t know how to navigate. Well, now there’s a threat and I’m going to fight it, because this isn’t a case. It’s my life. A life that got taken from me, even if I lived. It’s too many blanks. These people stole from me. I want it back. I want my life back, and I’m ready and willing to fight for it back.”

She reminded him so much of the woman she’d been. Worked up about the system failing one of her students, or maybe a parent blaming the system for their spoiled kid’s problems. Always so worked up on everyone else’s behalf.

But now she was worked up on her own, and he was just…proud, even though he had no right to be. Even though this road was starting them down a path that might mean she walked away from him. Knowing who he was and what he’d done and hadn’t done.

Her not remembering was torture, but he was beginning to realize her remembering was going to be as well. The kind of torture that might relegate him completely out of her life, not just shoved to the edges.

Which is what you deserve.

“We can fight back. We will fight back, but we also have to protect ourselves,” Ellis managed to say, trying to keep all the emotions swirling inside of him out of his voice. “And we are back at square one.”

She shook her head. “No, it isn’t square one because there are things I remember. There are things just out of reach.” She straightened her shoulders, took a step toward him. “And I know what I want the next step to be.”

He didn’t trust the look on her face, but he wasn’t about to retreat. He was no coward.

Except when it comes to her.

“What step is that?”

“I think you should kiss me.”

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.

Chapter Thirteen

Kirsten sat at the dinner table frowning over the information Zach had sent them about the assistant. “I’ve never seen her in the office, but it’s been a few weeks since I was there.”

“What about phone calls? Emails?”

Kirsten shook her head. “I’ve always dealt directly with Dr. Leigh. She might have mentioned an assistant in passing, but it’s not someone I ever had any contact with. Not something I’ve ever really thought about.”

Ellis didn’t sit. She could feel him wanting to pace, but he remained standing in one place, leaning against the counter in the kitchen. A caged energy pumping off him.

“If this assistant is somehow part of this threat, I have to believe it’s without Dr. Leigh knowing. She…she would have had a lot more questions about me remembering, about where we are, about everything if she was connected to a threat.” She looked up at Ellis hoping for disagreement.

She got nothing but blankness. “Unless the assistant is doing her dirty work.”

Kirsten didn’t like it. It felt so cynical. So unnecessarily complicated, but she also understood that some of her feelings probably stemmed from the kind of naiveté that came from not remembering.

Ellis was an FBI agent or had been one. That meant he understood threats and the lengths people were willing to go to. He understood complicated scenarios. Far more than she did.

“Zach’s private investigator is currently following her,” Ellis continued. “We’ll wait to hear if there’s any kind of connection to the men we know would be a threat. It’s the first step, and then we decide what the second step is once those answers come in.”

She frowned at him. “I don’t like how you said that.”

He expressly did not meet her gaze. “Said what?”

“The men we know. Like there’s ones we might not? Other…possible threats besides these people you investigated that didn’t get put away.”

Ellis blew out a slow breath. He moved into a seat at the table and interlocked his fingers on the surface in front of him, before he met her gaze. It was what she might call a very law enforcement look. There was a detachment at its core, but also an attempt to be…not comforting, exactly. Just very clear.

“The most obvious source of this threat is someone from the Caruso family, but I worked a lot of cases. I’m sure I made a lot of enemies. It’s more of a long shot, but I don’t want to rule anything out. We can’t act on hope. We have to act on facts, and those are very hard to come by at the moment.”

She hated the idea of him having more enemies. Of this being more complicated. Of…feeling like this extraneous thing. Somehow involved, but not part of it.

Was that a real feeling, or an old one? She knew he used work to walk away from her in their marriage, or she wouldn’t have said and felt what she did earlier. So was this just an echo of that?

She studied him, tried to settle into the feelings—just like she had before. It seemed to work, to open up something inside of her. There wasn’t anxiety when she remembered—not when she was around him anyway. It was more a state of calm. Like she felt safe enough with him to remember.

Unless the remembering got too intense, then the anxiety seemed to take over and push the memories and feelings back.

So she tried not to resist the feelings that came, to not let fear of intensity block things. There was clearly a lot of turmoil when it came to Ellis and his job—and she didn’t think it was just because of what had happened. No, there’d been turmoil in him taking the undercover case that had led them here.

“Was it worth it?” she wondered aloud, not sure exactly what she was asking. Nothing so specific. Just…in general, maybe.

“Was what worth it?” he asked, studying her dubiously.

“Your job? The danger? Undercover work away from your wife and putting yourself at risk, when you could have…just had a more normal life?”

He inhaled deeply. And he definitely didn’t look at her, but she could tell he was taking the question in, considering it.

“I put a stop to some bad in the world. Maybe it’s a drop in the bucket. At the time… I did think it was worth it. Necessary. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t worth anything.”

She could feel his inner pain over that, and she knew… Even if she didn’t remember their whole life, or him totally, she knew, deep down. “Yes, it was worth it. Is. Doing good is worth it.”

He looked up at her, and she wondered if he knew she saw every question in his eyes. If he understood she felt an echo of the deep, overwhelming pain she saw reflected there.

Or did he think he was hiding it?

She got to her feet, went with instinct and crossed to him. She leaned down, pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek as she squeezed his shoulder. “I’m going to try to get some sleep.”

She didn’t look back. Didn’t want to. She’d offered him what she needed to, and if it wasn’t what he needed, well… She just didn’t know how to find the balance in that yet. She was still figuring out her own needs or…something.

So she brushed her teeth and changed into the pajamas she’d been using. She crawled into bed and used some of the techniques Dr. Leigh had given her to fall asleep when she was anxious. Count backwards with careful, slow breaths.

She wasn’t anxious exactly. No, there was something more settled about how she felt up here, but she hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.

So the techniques helped, she thought, because she didn’t remember falling asleep when she awoke with a start. She looked around the dark of the room.

Something…something had woken her up. Her heart started to beat hard against her ribs. Someone was…here. Moving around the cabin.

It’s just Ellis. But what noise would Ellis have made to wake her up? What if something had happened? What if—

This had happened before. The realization hit her with the force of a blow. Terror swept through her, and only remembering to count her breaths helped her from panicking.

“It’s just Ellis,” she told herself, out loud. And even though her limbs shook and she wasn’t sure her knees would hold her, she tossed the covers off and sat up.

There were no other noises. No, wait, there was a faint…rustling. Like water running? “Just Ellis,” she whispered. Over and over as she got to her feet, crept closer and closer to the door that would lead out to the main part of the cabin.

She didn’t see light at the crack under the door. No one was out there.

Or is someone out there to hurt you? She squeezed her eyes shut because she was…imagining things that didn’t quite make sense. Maybe she’d had a dream and that had woken her up. Maybe the images were a dream.

A memory?

Did she hear whispers now, or was it a memory? She opened her eyes. The room was still dark. She should crawl back into bed and count until she fell asleep.

But what if something was wrong out there?

Be brave. You have to be brave. It sounded like someone else’s voice. Like Ellis’s. Like he’d told her that before.

She frowned. It had been a moment like this. Darkness. Terror. And him telling her to be brave. Desperately.

It was something about the idea of Ellis being desperate that gave her the strength to push open the door. The living room was dark, but the tiny light above the stove was on, illuminating Ellis.

Relief swam through her, except he turned. He was holding one hand with the other, and blood dripped from his hand to the floor.

She could see it was a minor injury. Rationally, she knew it. But something was happening in her body. She was rooted to the spot. Something painful throbbing at the base of her skull.

Blood gushing out of his shoulder. Lying there, pale as death. The sensation of falling, falling…

But his shoulder wasn’t bleeding. She was on her own two feet.

“I was just trying to get a drink of water without waking you up and screwed that six ways to Sunday by dropping the glass.” He was wrapping a washcloth around his bloody hand. She could hear him, but his voice sounded briefly muffled.

Blood. Whispers. Dark. Being woken up. Fear. Terror. Panic.

Falling.

It all bubbled through her. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t seem to think through all the feelings assaulting her.

“I’m sorry if I scared you. I finally found a bandage, so I’ll be done banging around here in a second.” He lifted it, began applying it to his hand.

She wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t. She had to, but she couldn’t.

“You’ll have to be careful in the morning. I think I cleaned up all the pieces of glass, but you never know.”

He bent down, disappeared behind the counter. Rationally she knew he was wiping the blood off the floor. Irrationally, she felt alone and whimpered as she struggled to pull in a gasping breath.

He immediately popped back into view and began to cross to her. “What is it?” he demanded.

But she had no words for what was happening to her. And she was in the dark. Even as he came to her, she was in the dark.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.” His arms came around her. Held her, tight and strong, one hand moving up and down her spine. She could feel the stubble of whiskers against her temple, feel his breath against her hair. “It’s all right, baby. You’re safe.”

Safe. And she felt it. She would have relaxed into all that safe, all his strength and warmth, but the extreme emotions swaying back and forth seemed to create a kind of emotional whiplash sickness.

She pushed away from him, dashed into the bathroom, and threw up. Retched and retched until there was nothing left.

She clutched the sides of the toilet, too many images swirling in her mind, like some horribly grotesque carnival ride of blood and terror and…

Ellis placed a cloth against her forehead with one hand, held her hair back out of the way with the other. He kept assuring her everything was okay in that low, steady voice, even as her body seemed content to shake itself apart.

She remembered the night he’d been shot. No dream. She remembered…being woken up in the dark. She remembered.

Once she was sure the wave of nausea had subsided, she pushed back and sat against the wall opposite the toilet. Ellis moved with her. So they were both sitting there against the wall in the cramped bathroom. Her breathing like she’d run a marathon, him gently pressing the washcloth to her forehead.

Like she was sick. Like he could make it better.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Against the wave of too many emotions to wade through. She reached up, took the washcloth from him, and tossed it into the tub with one hand, while she clutched his hand with the other.

“They pushed me off a balcony.” She opened her eyes to look at him.

She could see his throat work to swallow in the dim light coming from the other room. Then he inclined his head.

“I…remember. I remember waking up and knowing someone was in the house.” She could see it, in her mind’s eye. No fuzziness. No confusion. She remembered it, second by second. “I got the gun. I did what you always told me to do if there was an intruder. I got my phone. I got the gun. Went into the closet and locked it. I was asleep when they got in, so no alarms had gone off. They must have bypassed the security system.”

Ellis squeezed her hand. “Yeah. They had some high-tech former military guy on their staff. We figured he was the one who did it, but he never stood trial for anything.”

“They broke down the closet door, like they just…knew I was in there. Like I was what they were after. Two men. They were dressed in black, but I could see their faces. I was holding the gun, pointing it right at them.” Emotion at the memory, the helplessness, the terror, clogged in her throat. But she had to get it out. “I couldn’t… It wasn’t that I didn’t want to shoot them. I wanted to shoot all of them. I was just…frozen. Then they grabbed me and pulled me out. They ripped the gun away from me, and I finally…unfroze. I kicked and I fought, but they just kept dragging me.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she was shaking, but she knew she had to get it out. Make it real, so she could move past it instead of letting it be the thing that kept her from remembering, that kept her separate from herself.

Ellis had told her she was safe back there, and she was. Because she wasn’t in that house. Because his arm was around her. He was here. He was hers.

“I think they heard your car come up. Or maybe they had lookouts who warned them.” She took a shaky breath to steady herself. To see it. Because remembering it couldn’t hurt her. It was only what had happened. “They weren’t going to take me to the balcony, but they wanted to see who was coming. I guess…no one knew who it was at first. There was some confusion over if it was one of their own. So they dragged me out to the balcony, and I saw a car. You running out of it and then the gunshot went off and you jerked. Fell.”

It was the part of the dream she’d remembered when she’d remembered nothing else. Him shot. Bleeding. Her reaction to that.

“I thought you were dead. I thought we were both dead.” She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, trying to stem this tide of tears that seemed never-ending. But it was too much to absorb all at once, even if her brain had finally accepted that Ellis was right.

She was safe.

Except they weren’t safe at all. It was coming back for them.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, getting to his feet. He helped her to hers, wrapped his arm around her, and led her back to her bedroom. He nudged her back into the bed, even pulled the covers up over her, like a parent tucking a child in.

“You need to rest. Relax,” he told her very gravely.

Panic started to beat again. He was going to leave her. It would be the dark again. Alone. Targeted.

She reached out to grip his hand. “Please, don’t leave me alone. I… Please.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said softly. “I’ll just sit right here.”

She couldn’t quite make his face out in the dark, but it wasn’t the dark that scared her. It wasn’t this place. She wasn’t fully sure what it was.

She just knew she needed him. And that he was going to sit on the floor or something stupid when… She tugged on his arm. “Please, Ellis.”

On a sigh, she felt the mattress dip. He sat there next to her, her hand still clutching his. She was still shaking a little, and that must have been what broke down that last wall. He lay fully down next to her.

Gingerly, carefully, he drew her into his arms. It felt like she could take a full breath for the first time.

Safe.

She was safe. And wrung out. Exhausted. There were so many things to talk about, to remember, but with the rhythmic, calming sensation of his hand moving up and down her back, she fell asleep.

ELLIS WOKE UP in his bed in Chicago, his wife in his arms, thinking he was going to be late for work if he didn’t force himself to leave this perfect moment. He pressed his nose into her hair, inhaled deeply, and cursed himself for taking this last job.

What was he thinking?

That if you stay, you’re going to have to face the realities of being a father.

And then he opened his eyes. The room was bright with sunlight. The moment gone, but the bolt of fear lodged in his brain.

A dream? A memory? He couldn’t quite make sense of it. He hadn’t been afraid of being a damn father and…

He wasn’t alone in this bed, in the here and now. Not Chicago. Wyoming.

But his wife. Brown eyes met his. Searching for something.

She’d remembered last night. The trauma that had happened to her.

Because of him.

But it meant…if she could remember the horrible things, that there was some hope…

Damn it, hadn’t he learned that hope didn’t do a damn thing?

Maybe she’d remembered that night, but it didn’t mean she remembered everything. It didn’t mean she understood. It didn’t mean there was some magical way to go back to before.

Too much had happened.

She would never know how hard it was for him to sit up, to get up and out of that bed with her in it. A vision of something he’d once had and lost. Because of his own damn choices.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, not able to look at her.

She took a moment, like she was considering it. “A bit like I got hit by a truck. But… I’m glad I went back to sleep. I needed that. I needed…rest.”

“Good. You’re probably starving. I’ll make some breakfast.”

“Ellis.”

He wanted to walk out the door. Ignore whatever she wanted to say, but how could he? She deserved better. So he turned to face her.

She was sitting up, resting her chin on her curled-up knees. “I don’t know that I remember everything, but when I try to think back to certain things, they’re there,” she told him earnestly, though she didn’t look right at him either, more at the wall next to him. “My mom’s name is Nora Braxton. My sister’s name is Erica. You and I got married on June 14.”

She moved her gaze to his. Tears swam in her eyes. “And you were right. We didn’t have a fight about you being afraid to be a father.” She laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “It was…” She gestured at her head. “I used to rehearse the fights I wanted to have with you in my head. And then I was never brave enough to actually have them, but apparently the memory was just…that. Thinking about it. Obsessing about it. And never telling you.”

He hadn’t known that, but it clicked certain things into a new understanding. Because it had always felt like there’d been these…things left unsaid between them. They’d both retreat to their corners. He’d throw himself into work, and she’d apparently rehearse fights she hadn’t ever actually started.

And she remembered. More than he expected, if she knew names and dates. He honestly didn’t even know what to say to that. He hadn’t expected this, and maybe if things were different, he’d have time to reel.

But there was a threat against her, so he needed to deal with this new reality rationally. With his head, not his heart.

“Do you want to talk to Dr. Leigh? I can set up an appointment—”

“No, Ellis,” she replied, looking very disapprovingly at him. “I want to talk to you.”

His chest tightened, hard and painful. He couldn’t quite breathe through it. So he groped around for something that might ease it. “All right. But I should check in with Zach to see what the PI has about the assistant and—”

“Didn’t you learn anything from this?” she demanded. “After everything that’s happened, you’re still going to use work to keep me at arm’s length?”

“Kirsten, this isn’t work.”

“It is. Or if it’s not, you’re using it like work. An excuse not to deal with me.”

Frustration that she wasn’t wrong bubbled through him, because there was a threat, even if he wasn’t ready to deal with her too. “It’s not an excuse to want to do everything in my power to keep you safe, to stop this threat.” He believed that.

Or had, but she was making him unsure, which made him want to double down.

She tossed the covers off of her and moved off the bed in jerky, frustrated moves. She crossed the room to him, and it took every last FBI skill he’d trained for to maintain his ground, not back away.

“Do you know that I was so afraid to lose you, I wouldn’t fight with you?” she demanded.

He didn’t have an answer for that.

“But I lost you in a different way,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“You never lost me. I was right here,” he managed to rasp.

“You were, but you weren’t. Couldn’t be. I understand that. I don’t know that I agree with everything that’s happened, but I understand… I don’t think I could remember until I felt safe, and maybe that could have happened sooner if we’d spent more time together, but maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know. I can’t go back. And I don’t want to waste time trying to…go through what I remember and what I don’t.”

She placed her palms against his chest. Something kept him frozen, rooted to the spot. Bigger than the fear that was whispering at him to walk away. To find something to accomplish. Something concrete. Something real.

“For two years, I haven’t lived my life,” she said to him. “I’ve lived someone else’s. And it didn’t even matter, because here a threat is all the same.”

“It matters,” he managed to reply. “Because you have been safe.”

She shook her head. “I remember. Maybe not everything, I’ll grant you that. But enough. Enough to…know who I was. Know who I am. Enough to know that what you’re so afraid of isn’t true.”

“I’m not afraid.” He couldn’t afford to be afraid.

“You’re afraid I didn’t love you anymore. That our marriage was over. I was mad at you for sure. I was afraid I didn’t know how to make our marriage work when you always ran away, but my God, Ellis. I never, ever stopped loving you.”

KIRSTEN DIDN’T CARE if she remembered everything, because she knew that with a certainty that couldn’t be dispelled by concerns over how she felt.

She had loved this man practically from the moment he’d come up to her in a little college courtyard, cocky and handsome and…

Hers. He’d always been hers.

And she remembered it all. Clear as day. Maybe there were gaps, she couldn’t deny it was a possibility. But everything she reached for came up. Maybe Kirsten felt a bit like a ghost, but it was a real one, with memories and truths and feelings.

Love didn’t go away, even if it had been hidden under a wall these past two years. The wall of her fake identity and Ellis keeping his distance. But it was gone now.

And she didn’t really care about a threat when she remembered how much she loved her husband—even when he frustrated her, ran away from what they needed to work through.

Because she’d done her own version of running away, and that wasn’t going to happen again. She’d rather be thrown off that balcony again.

Though she shuddered at the thought, at the memory. The terror of it all over again. How…disposable she’d felt.

“I think you should talk to Dr. Leigh.” He put his hands over hers on his chest before she could get riled up. “Not because I’m trying to avoid this. But, Kirsten, you had a severe reaction to remembering last night. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

She breathed through her frustration with him, because she didn’t think he was lying. She could feel the concern radiating off of him, but she also knew he was distancing himself.

It was what he did when he was afraid. And there was something about fear he couldn’t admit to himself. Like he had to be brave or nothing mattered.

Because whether he liked it or not, she did remember his issues. With his stepdad and his upbringing. He couldn’t see them or admit them to himself, but she could. She always had.

And probably given him too much leeway because of it. He’d always had to be brave. A solitary figure with no one to lean on. Through his father’s death, his mother’s, and then a teenage boy with just a taciturn stepfather. Neither of them knowing how to deal with each other.

But it made her realize… She’d been so focused on herself, what her family might know or not know. But if Ellis was here, with her, that meant…

“Where does Jason think you are?” she asked.

He blinked at the subject change. “Most people think I took a remote job in Alaska.”

Because he’d left everything behind too. For two years, he’d been here, shadowing her, essentially. No doubt looking out for her. Waiting for signs of danger. But he’d…held himself back and away. Because Dr. Leigh had told him to.

Dr. Leigh had said that she had to be ready. That for most of the past two years she’d rejected reaching out for answers, for her past. No doubt out of fear, but she wasn’t afraid with Ellis. He’d always been her safe place. Even when they had their issues.

“Maybe I’ll talk to Dr. Leigh,” Kirsten said. It wouldn’t hurt to work through remembering with a professional. “But not now.” She turned her hands in his, then pulled them around her, pressing her body to his.

She felt him shudder, before he stiffened, and all the emotions in his eyes shuttered behind that blank FBI wall.

“Someone who hurt you and caused all this is out there. Ready and willing and waiting to hurt you and me again. That has to be my focus. Last time, I was too wrapped up in myself, in the job, in—”

“In running away.”

His mouth firmed, but he didn’t push her away, didn’t drop his arms from her waist when she wrapped hers around his neck.

“Fine,” he bit out, still holding himself back even if he wasn’t creating space between them. “Maybe. Maybe in some subconscious way that’s what I was doing, but I didn’t do it because… I wasn’t trying to. I was just trying to make sense of something, and work always made sense.”

“And I didn’t?”

He studied her with those hazel eyes that had always fascinated her. The things she saw that no one else did, and still the little pockets of secrets he kept hidden. Maybe even from himself.

“Sometimes, the things you needed from me didn’t make sense,” he said very carefully. “Which is still on me.”

Always so willing to take all the blame, but not always willing to mine into why that was.

Now it felt like… Even with this threat it felt like they had the answers within reach. If they could be honest about what they’d messed up, there was still a chance for them. Forget threats and danger.

She remembered her husband. She remembered everything that had been between them. And it didn’t matter how traumatic the past two years had been, how many ways they were screwing up their marriage before that—there was one simple truth at the middle of all of it.

They loved each other.

So she moved to her toes, ready to press her mouth to his. Ready to remind herself in all the ways she preferred.

But his phone began to ring.

“It’s going to be Zach,” he said. “I have to take it. I can’t put that off. Not unless you want to stay up here forever. That isn’t running. It’s what needs to be done.”

She looked around the room. Tempted to consider just…never facing any of this. But he was right. They couldn’t avoid the danger. Couldn’t hide from it forever.

“Fine, but we’re in this together now. Whatever you need to talk to Zach about, I’m going to be there for. And add my own two cents.”

Chapter Fourteen

It was harder than it should have been to disentangle himself from Kirsten. But the fact she remembered…

Well, it made nobility a little shakier. The lines he’d drawn far more…muddled.

Ellis had never been good at muddled.

But Zach would be calling with an update, with information. And the truth was they couldn’t figure out what life looked like now if they didn’t solve the problem of who was out to get them.

Could she really…still love him? Or was she just confused? Maybe she didn’t remember everything about those last few months before he’d left for the undercover assignment.

There was no time to wade through that. Not now. The phone had stopped ringing, but he needed to call Zach back.

“I’ll just step outside.”

Kirsten shook her head. “We’ll do it in the living room and you’ll put it on speaker so we can both hear and contribute,” Kirsten said in that schoolteacher voice of hers. She walked out the door, just like she used to walk into a classroom. In charge and certain.

Except he knew her and knew that was a kind of armor. Especially when she felt neither in charge nor certain.

So he followed her out to the living room. She settled herself onto the couch and, even though he was still a little leery of being close, and what that did to his focus, sat down next to her.

He dialed Zach back, then put the phone on the table on speaker mode.

“I hope you’re calling with some information,” Ellis said when Zach answered.

“Some. We’ve got an ID on the assistant. She has no concrete connections to anything we’ve been looking into so far. I’m emailing all the info I have to you as we speak, along with some pictures the PI got. Everything seems pretty normal on the surface.”

“And under the surface?”

“I’m not convinced she’s who she’s claiming to be,” Zach replied. Ellis could hear the tap of Zach typing while he spoke. “There’s something a little too pat about the woman. It looks exactly like what I’d put together for an undercover plant.”

Ellis didn’t like the sound of that, but he got up to retrieve his laptop. He opened it, clicked the email client. He tried not to scowl when Kirsten reached over and tilted the laptop so she could see the screen too.

It shouldn’t bother him she wanted to help. That she remembered. It was all good.

But he didn’t know how to carry the weight of it all.

One step at a time.

An email from Zach popped up, so he skimmed the contents. The assistant’s name—or fake name—was Sarah Conway. Thirty-two. Education in psychology, but no actual licenses, just degrees. Born in Colorado, spent most of her life there. Moved to Fairmont, Wyoming, in May. Had been working for Dr. Leigh since then, remotely a few months prior, but definitely not the whole time Kirsten had been going to Dr. Leigh.

Was it all a coincidence?

Ellis listened to Zach explain his next steps—keep watch on this Sarah, keep mining information on the Carusos who weren’t in jail—while he opened the picture attachments to the email.

The pictures were fairly clear, but not particularly close-up. Ellis zoomed in on the face in profile walking into a store, then full on coming back out. She maybe looked…vaguely familiar, but nothing concrete. He was probably overthinking the vaguely familiar and—

“Oh my God,” Kirsten said, leaning toward the screen. “Don’t you know who that is?” Kirsten demanded. “The hair is different. The way she’s holding herself. But I’d recognize that mouth anywhere.”

He looked over at her. She was scowling at the screen, something angry in her expression. He looked back at the picture again. Focusing on the mouth of the woman in the picture. And muttered a curse under his breath as a familiar feeling worked its way through him—disappointment and the excitement of a lead twining together.

“Who is it?” Zach demanded.

“Her name is Colleen Fredericks. She worked at the FBI Office in Chicago in public affairs.”

She’d been a friend for a while, but then things had gotten…complicated. He glanced at Kirsten. Mostly because his wife—who liked just about everyone—hadn’t liked her. So Ellis had started to keep his distance.

“Are you sure?”

“I am,” Kirsten said darkly.

“So you’re…remembering?” Zach said, with a carefulness to his tone.

“Yes,” Kirsten said with no equivocations, when Ellis didn’t think they could be unequivocal about it until she talked to Dr. Leigh. Until they really went through everything, but they didn’t have time for that.

They didn’t have time for anything if Colleen Fredericks was somehow involved with Dr. Leigh.

Zach paused, and Ellis could only imagine what was going on in Zach’s head when it came to Kirsten remembering.

“I think we should steer clear of Dr. Leigh until we get to the bottom of this. I’ll look into Colleen—”

“Let me handle figuring out Colleen,” Ellis interrupted. “She was still at the office when this all went down two years ago. Let me track that. You focus on figuring out how she got connected to Dr. Leigh, and who she might be talking to outside that office.”

“All right. My PI is supposed to get me an update by five. I’ll be in touch by then. Let me know what you come up with, if there’s any more I can dig into.”

Ellis agreed and they said their goodbyes.

He stood, too much energy pumping through him. Colleen Fredericks. A woman he knew, but she’d changed her look. She was clearly hiding something. Would he have recognized her if he’d come face-to-face with her? Would Kirsten have recognized her without having her memories back?

He looked down at her, still sitting on the couch. “Well, I guess you remembered in the nick of time.”

Her mouth curved. Her eyes were sad and didn’t meet his, but he couldn’t discount that it was a lead he wouldn’t have picked up on. At least not at first. Maybe it would have come to him eventually, but maybe too late.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered. “Why would she have a fake identity? Be working for Dr. Leigh? She was in public affairs. Not psychology. Not undercover work.”

“But she wasn’t your biggest fan, was she?” Kirsten replied primly.

“I hardly think me blowing her off made her want to…whatever this is. Jesus. If she’s involved in this…” He didn’t even know. It was so incomprehensible. “I don’t think I have that kind of power, Kirsten. And you don’t either.”

“No, I imagine there’s something more complicated at play, but the truth is she did have a thing for you, and she wasn’t happy when you put distance between the two of you.”

Ellis had never been fully on board with Kirsten’s view of the situation, but he was hardly going to get into a fight with his wife over a woman who didn’t matter. It was easier to put the distance between him and Colleen. And Colleen being weird to him after that was just…

“I never told you,” Kirsten said very quietly. “It meant a lot to me. That you listened and didn’t make me out to be some crazy jealous wife. That you believed me and what I saw, or at least let it matter enough.”

It was the kind of blunt, emotional truth they didn’t tend to get into with each other. But he felt like if she was going to give it, he owed her. Hell, he owed her everything. “You never gave me any reason not to believe you.” In spite of himself, he could remember everything about her. All the memories he’d tried to forget while she’d been essentially someone else. Always right there. Always pain.

But here in this moment, with her remembering, some of them didn’t feel as much like pain as they had. “Hell, you made Olivia a baby blanket.” Olivia had been his high school girlfriend, and because her parents were friends with his stepdad, they’d run into each other on occasion. There’d been no jealousy on Kirsten’s part there.

Kirsten smiled. It was warm. Friendly. Her. Not the shell of her that her life as Jessica had been.

And still, he didn’t know how to trust it. How to believe it was this easy. Not that her throwing up last night and falling apart was easy. It just seemed…fast. To spend two years in the dark only to remember almost overnight.

Maybe not overnight. She’d claimed to remember things before this, and he could hardly discount her. It was just…

She stood, crossed to him. He tensed in spite of himself. He was just so used to having to hold himself back, having to protect her from everything he felt. And now she remembered and he didn’t know what to do with all the rules he’d set for himself.

They seemed imperative. And very, very tenuous. Especially when she reached up and cupped his face with her palms. When she studied him with big brown eyes, shiny with tears.

“Ellis.”

“We’ve got so much work to do.” His voice was too rough, so he cleared his throat. “The internet is terrible up here. It’ll take me forever to—”

“Ellis.” She wound her arms around his neck, pressed her body to his. Pleasure and pain. Everything they’d been. Everything they’d lost. Everything he still had to do.

“We’ll do all that work,” she said quietly, moving onto her toes so their mouths were at the same height. “We’ll have to. I just need… We lost so much time.”

Did she have any idea? Did the time feel the same to her? Did she have any idea the excruciating pain of remembering? No more than he could imagine what it was like to forget.

So weren’t they at odds again? Even if she remembered. Different places. Different wants, needs.

Except when she pressed her mouth to his, there was only want. Only one need. And she seemed to share it since she was the one pressing herself to him. Kissing him like the weight of losing him sat as heavy on her as losing her had sat on him.

This was his wife. The wife he thought he’d lost in a million different ways.

But she was right here.

KIRSTEN WASN’T FOOLISH enough to think this was wise. And still, she just…needed it. To feel connected to him like this again. To run her hands over his hair. To feel the scrape of his whiskers against her chin. To taste and be tasted. To touch and be touched.

Maybe they had their problems. She wouldn’t pretend that understanding how much there was to lose solved them.

But it put things into perspective. They could work on relationship stuff. They had time now—well, if they survived whatever this was. Together. Together.

She wanted to be together. She loved him. And a life like she’d been living the past two years was dull. A life with him at the edges was empty, even if she filled it in other ways. It was never enough. It was never this.

He had always been her other half. And she never would have given up on him. Maybe it was wishful thinking to believe he felt the same, but he was still here. After two years of her not remembering, he’d never left. Never pushed. Never hurt.

But he touched her now, and she touched him. They moved to the bedroom, dreamy and soft, like they were both too scared to move faster, feel the desperation ratcheting up.

She’d never be able to imagine what it was like for him. To be so close and at arm’s length, but she could feel an echo of that pain when they came together, when they shuddered in each other’s arms.

He whispered her name like it was a prayer, and she felt like she’d finally come home after so long away.

They lay there, wrapped up in each other, neither speaking. But after a while, she could feel him begin to tense. And she knew him, didn’t she?

“Don’t feel guilty.”

He toyed with the ends of her hair. “Easier said than done,” he muttered.

She turned in his arms, leveraged up on her elbow so she could study his face. “Maybe, but we lost too much time to play victims now. We’re going to make the best of what we have. Because we didn’t before. And now we know better.”

His hazel eyes met hers. Studied her very seriously. “I love you. I think that was the hardest part. Not saying it. All this time.”

Her eyes filled again, but she didn’t want to keep crying all over him, so she blinked them back as best she could. “Maybe it was lost these past two years, but I know. When I remembered, I never thought you didn’t.” But he had thought she didn’t. Or at least, that she’d been done.

Maybe, if she was honest with herself, she could admit that even though she never would have given up on their marriage, she had definitely been at a low point where she hadn’t known how to reach him.

It had felt dire when he’d walked out of that house to take his last assignment. It had felt like an end. Even if she wasn’t going to accept it as one. And he needed to know that part.

“I was never giving up on us, Ellis. I love you. Even if it was lost under my brain injury these past two years, it doesn’t erase it.”

She wasn’t sure he believed her, but she’d work to make sure he got there. She traced his hairline, reveling in touching him again. In being together again. In everything she could remember, feel, believe. It was big and unwieldy, really, all this hope for something they’d lost.

But they had to make it through this threat first—a threat that had worked to keep them apart for the past two years.

“So, we’ll work together to figure out who wants to hurt us knowing that neither of us is going anywhere, even when we’re both safe. I’m promising you that.”

“Kirsten, you might feel differently. You might—”

“We made vows,” she interrupted firmly. “I made a vow to you. Whatever we have to work through, we will. Beginning and end of story.”

His mouth curved ever so slightly, and he pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I never want you to feel beholden to me.”

Her heart ached. Didn’t he understand why he was always so worried about beholden? He’d never felt love from his stepfather, only that duty. Always so cautious, so afraid to believe someone else could feel what he did.

And she’d never said that to him, because she was always afraid he’d get mad or withdrawn or silent.

“I’m not Jason, Ellis. You don’t have to be afraid of me treating you like nothing more than a duty to suffer through.”

He got stiff and tense—oh so familiar. “I’m not afraid—”

“You are,” she said firmly, not letting the bluster keep her quiet. Not letting the tension freak her out.

This man had stayed with her through what could only be described as the worst. And she had survived being thrown off of a balcony. She was done being afraid.

She was living in strength now. “I know fear is touchy for you, but it’s true.”

She didn’t enjoy the look of shocked hurt on his face, but this was something that had to be done. She remembered all her regrets now. She wasn’t going to fall back into old bad habits born of her own issues.

“And I was afraid you’d abandon me like my parents did. We’re not so deep or complex as I think either of us would like to believe. The hard part is acknowledging it, admitting it, and figuring out what to do about it. And I am going to stop being afraid that you’ll leave me like they did.” She pressed her mouth to his. “You didn’t leave me when I didn’t remember. You won’t leave me now. I didn’t give up on you when you left. I won’t now, no matter what I remember.”

She could tell he wasn’t fully on board with this, but she also knew he was considering what she was saying. Even if he’d still knee-jerk refuse fear, he was going to think about it.

“Now, we should get dressed and start looking into Colleen, don’t you think?”

He eyed her dubiously. “Just like that?”

She smiled at him. “For now. I guess the rational place to start would be with the Chicago office. Is there someone there who might tell you why she left?”

“If Colleen is involved in this, it’s possible there were others in the office who are involved too. Who turned or whatever this is. I can’t just call up my old coworkers and see what they know. It’s too dangerous. Zach has already involved more people than I like.”

His fingertips moved up and down her shoulder, just like they used to do when they’d lay in bed together on a lazy weekend day they both had off work. Rare, but always a warm memory.

“What about Boyd Cavalier? You always trusted him. He was your best friend.”

Ellis was quiet for a while. “He was on a different undercover detail when you were hurt. Last I heard he’d transferred to Nashville, but we haven’t been in contact.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t call him up and catch up.”

“Out of the blue?”

“Sure. Friends fall in and out of touch. I think he’d understand why you might have retreated into yourself. He thinks I’m dead and you’re in Alaska, right?”

Ellis was frowning, but he nodded.

She moved out of the bed, began to pull the borrowed clothes back on. “And he would have reached out, right? He didn’t just…never talk to you again after you lost your wife?”

She could feel his eyes on her as she got dressed, but she focused on the task at hand. She wouldn’t settle for anything less than their old life back.

“No, he…tried. I never responded. I didn’t really know how to lie to him. Seemed easier to just cut him off.”

“So, call him up. Tell him the truth.”

Ellis sighed, tossing the covers off and reaching for his own clothes. For a strange moment, Kirsten almost felt…shy about watching him. Like she was Jessica again for a moment, but she only had to reach out for her memories to find them.

To remember she had seen this man in every state of dress and undress. They had explored every inch of each other for years. She knew every scar—well, not every scar. The exit wound on the back of his shoulder had happened right when she’d had her own injury.

He must have had his own serious recovery from that, and she hadn’t been there. Not in her own present mind. It hurt, but Ellis was talking to her in that FBI agent lecture way he had.

“The truth doesn’t solve everything, Kirsten. Not in this instance. Not with lives on the line.”

She knew he believed that. Had probably been trained to believe it. But she couldn’t. “I think, if there’s a very basic lesson to be learned from everything that happened, it’s that…holding ourselves back and not helping each other, not trusting each other to be there when we needed each other, emotionally, has to be some kind of lesson.”

“In our relationship, maybe, but this is essentially an investigation. You can’t trust anyone in undercover work.”

“Except your team backing you up. You trusted Boyd to be your backup during that one case. What was it? The human trafficker? He was your best man at our wedding. We need someone who can look into Colleen without it leading anyone back to Hope Town, don’t we?”

He sighed. “Well, you sure didn’t forget how to be stubborn.”

She smiled at him. “I think I’m going to really lean into it.” She sobered a little. “I can’t go back to who I was two years ago. I don’t think you can either. Things have changed. Life has changed. But there’s still enough of who we were, what we felt, to build something new.”

“Once we take care of this threat.”

“Then call Boyd, Ellis.”

He reached out, put his hands on her shoulders, gave her a squeeze. His gaze was pained, and she could see the ghosts of the past two years in his eyes even if they weren’t the same for her.

“Your life is on the line again,” he said very seriously. “I failed you last time. I can’t again.”

She frowned. Damn him and his superman complex. “You didn’t toss me over a balcony, Ellis.”

“I wasn’t there. I took this case when I shouldn’t have. You can’t talk me out of blaming myself for everything that happened.”

She lifted her chin, leaning into her stubbornness, just like she said. “Fine, then you don’t get to talk me into blaming you when you should blame the criminals.”

He closed his eyes and sighed, but instead of dropping his hands or turning her away or lecturing her more, he simply lowered his forehead to hers. She could hear him swallow and knew there was a lump in his throat.

When he spoke, his words were hoarse. “I’m glad you remember.”

She felt her own lump form, but she swallowed around it, blinked back those tears. “Me too.”

Chapter Fifteen

Ellis didn’t call Boyd right away, much to Kirsten’s irritation. Getting a cursory idea of what Colleen Fredericks had been up to was more pressing to his way of thinking, and he was the law enforcement officer here. He knew.

He wasn’t avoiding something uncomfortable. Even if that’s what she thought.

Really.

According to the web, Colleen Fredericks had left the FBI for private sector work in public relations.

Exactly two weeks after Ellis had first spoken to Zach about Hope Town and moving Kirsten there.

Yeah, he didn’t like that timing.

But according to everything he could find, she still worked for the shoe company and resided in Raleigh. There was no obvious connection between her and the psychiatrist’s assistant Sarah Conway.

Someone would have had to help her create an undercover identity. And that someone no doubt came from the FBI—considering she’d worked in an FBI office, and Zach, the former undercover agent, thought her fake identity looked like one he’d create.

For all Ellis knew, Boyd could have been the one to help Colleen. Back then, Boyd hadn’t told Ellis he was being an idiot for avoiding the woman at his wife’s behest, but Boyd hadn’t exactly thought it was a sensible course of action.

But Boyd had been a single man and fully agreed that he couldn’t understand what priorities were different when you were married.

Of course, Ellis had realized in retrospect these past two years, he hadn’t exactly had his priorities straight then either.

Ellis wished he could have some of that old rose-colored glasses thinking though. The belief good guys were on one side and bad guys were on the other. Instead of everyone being one step away from becoming a bad guy.

He sighed and glanced over at the kitchen where Kirsten was putting together some kind of lunch. She was humming and making them food, because she remembered, and thought she still loved him. Claimed to have been planning to welcome him home after the undercover assignment he shouldn’t have taken.

Maybe he didn’t love the way she kept calling him afraid of things, when that wasn’t the issue at all, but…she was here. She was okay. It was more than he’d been able to hope for lately, even with the threat hanging over their heads.

So he felt honor bound to at least kind of go through with reaching out to Boyd. Carefully. And with some information under his belt first.

He turned his attention back to his computer and set about checking in on what his old friend was doing. He wouldn’t dive in headfirst with a phone call. Couldn’t.

No matter what Kirsten remembered.

Boyd was indeed still in Nashville, still an FBI agent. He’d been involved in another undercover case that had taken down some more human traffickers. Gotten some press for that one last year.

Ellis found himself smiling in spite of himself. His friend was a damn fine agent.

And not your friend anymore.

But maybe Kirsten had a point. When he’d stopped returning Boyd’s calls and emails, he’d been in a dark place. His injury. An assignment gone wrong. And even if Kirsten hadn’t actually been dead, Boyd thought she was, and there had been a death of sorts. Coming out of it two years later might be a bit far-fetched, but Boyd knew how much Ellis had loved Kirsten.

He’d harassed him about it enough.

Ellis didn’t have to lay it all on the line. Certainly didn’t have to give any hints Kirsten was alive. That part of the witness protection story could stay intact.

He could give Boyd a call and see what shook out. Just like the meeting with Dr. Leigh. Testing waters, looking for signs.

Kirsten came over to him with a plate. She’d made a sandwich out of some canned chicken and bread that must have come from the freezer and divvied up a can of fruit between them.

She had her own plate and sat down next to him on the couch. It was all very domestic. All very before.

Except they were holed up in this tiny mountain cabin in Wyoming, isolated from the world. And a threat against them.

He had to remember the threat part. Even if she remembered and this suddenly felt like everything was okay. Even if she said she loved him, and it seemed to make everything else pale in importance. Even if they’d…shared a bed.

What had he been thinking?

Maybe that it’s been a long-ass time since you had a chance to touch your wife.

He sighed, took a bite out of his sandwich. “I’ll call Boyd in a few hours,” he told her.

“Why wait?”

“Because the man has a job?” Granted, FBI agents didn’t always work a nine to five, but still. He needed to…steady himself for essentially lying to his old friend.

Kirsten wrinkled her nose, just like she used to. “I guess that’s a good enough excuse to procrastinate.” She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “What about Colleen?”

He told her about the job and life in Raleigh. “I’ll need to dig deeper on that. See if it’s just a paper trail or if she’s really had a life there. But she left Chicago when we did. I don’t like that for coincidence.”

Kirsten stilled at that, tried to arrange her features in some sort of brave expression, but he knew her too well.

“She doesn’t know where we are, and we don’t know what her endgame is,” he reassured her. “While it’s hard to discount that she’s connected, we don’t know in what ways. If we untangle it, maybe we stop this before anything bad has to happen. It’s all going to be over soon enough. One clue leads to the next. You recognizing her was such a big clue.”

Kirsten nodded. She’d taken maybe two bites of her sandwich, but she set the plate aside like she was done. He frowned, worried that she wasn’t eating. At least she’d slept some, but she needed to take care of herself. She needed—

“Ellis.” She turned her gaze to him, her brows drawn together, concern in her gaze. “What happens when this is over?”

KIRSTEN KNEW SHE’D taken him off guard. Maybe she’d taken herself off guard. Something about remembering made the future feel more…real, more plannable. She’d always been someone who liked to map out where she was going.

Until she hadn’t remembered where she’d been, but now she did.

And she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life stuck up in this cabin waiting for someone else to solve a mystery. Even if the wait was short, there was a whole future out there ahead of her.

One where she remembered who she was.

And who she was married to.

“Maybe we need to figure this out first,” he said carefully. And he probably wasn’t wrong, but…

She stood, needing to move. He still had food on his plate, so she couldn’t clear dishes. She just had to pace.

“I like my life in Hope Town. I like working at the bookstore. I like…” She inhaled deeply, looking at him, trying to find some anchor to what was moving through her. “I don’t know how we go back to Chicago.”

“I’m sure you can stay,” Ellis reassured her. “It’s not a traditional witness protection program. I’ll talk to Zach for you. Once it’s safe, we’ll figure it all out. You don’t have to worry about it yet.”

She noted her we. His you. Oh sure, we’ll figure it out. But not we’ll stay. Just putting it off.

Maybe he didn’t like Hope Town. There was no doubt in her mind that not being an FBI agent anymore would be a struggle for him.

Which begged a few questions. He’d been in the fringes of her life for two years, always there, but she didn’t know much about what he’d been doing, even if he knew every inch of what she’d been doing.

“What about you? How have you been…earning a living?”

“Medical leave at first,” he said, pointing vaguely at his shoulder. “Then savings, for a while. I do some freelance work for Zach’s security company when I need to these days.”

It was hard to imagine that life for Ellis. He’d been so dedicated to his job. So driven by it. She had never actually believed desk work would suit him, but she’d hoped he could find a way to meet that driving need and not throw himself into undercover work once they had a family.

Now they had no family and he didn’t have the job he loved. He’d only been stuck in Wyoming to watch over her, and once this threat was gone, he wouldn’t need to. “You…you probably want to go back to the FBI.”

He took his time with his response, looking down at his plate. “I’m not sure I could if I wanted to. I didn’t leave on the best terms. Once my medical leave was up…they tried to work with me, they gave me the Alaska cover, but I couldn’t actually be there. I had to be here. So I quit. They don’t usually take quitters back.”

She sat back down next to him, needing to reassure him. “But they would. You were such a good agent.” She reached out and put her hand over his in what felt like a natural move. Like there was a part of her—the part she’d forgotten—that hadn’t experienced two years without him. “Once we’re safe, you could…”

He was looking down at her hand over his. Then shook his head, and it broke her heart.

“That job meant so much to you.” And she felt like she’d somehow taken it away from him, even though it wasn’t her fault, she knew.

He shook his head. “Too much. It meant too much to me.” He put his other hand over hers. “Nothing means more to me than you. I won’t let it. Not again. If this is a second chance, I swear to God—”

She pressed her mouth to his before he could finish. Overcome with emotion. Overcome with love. Overcome with the need to have him not…hurt over this.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said firmly. A promise to herself as much as him. “Together.” Maybe he was right, and they could wait on that. Threat first. Future later.

As long as they were together.

But that didn’t seem to ease the look of pain on his face any. “You don’t have to be stuck with me,” he said gruffly. “You need to know that.”

Stuck. She didn’t know how he could think that. “Did you go on that last assignment because you thought I was stuck with you?”

“No, I just needed… I needed…” He couldn’t seem to articulate what he needed. Because it hadn’t been about need. It had been about fear, and he didn’t want to admit that to himself. Even after all this time.

She opened her mouth to say it, then shut it. She didn’t want to do what she’d done before—hide everything that might upset him, but there was a time and a place. She’d already told him what she thought, so why repeat herself when he knew?

“You think I was afraid of becoming a father,” he said stiffly, surprising her by bringing it up.

She held his gaze seriously, determined to meet the moment, not fear it. “I do.”

“That was not a cognizant thought I had.”

“It doesn’t make it untrue,” she told him gently.

He didn’t move away immediately, but she could feel him withdraw. He took his hand off hers, shifted so there was more space between them.

She could let him withdraw. She could fall back into that old habit so easily. But she hadn’t suffered two years of trauma to fall back. She took the hand he’d withdrawn.

“You felt indebted to Jason, but you didn’t love him. If he loved you, he didn’t show it. It’s pretty damn natural if you had some concerns about fatherhood.”

“And I’m telling you, I didn’t think about that.”

“Because you shy away from the things that scare you. You bury them in work. In being…useful and helpful and doing good things, and scary things, so you feel brave there when you’re not inside.”

Carefully he pulled his hand away from hers again, pushed to his feet. He opened his mouth, no doubt to make an excuse to leave. Probably to go work, but something she said must have gotten through to him, because he didn’t end up saying anything.

He shut his mouth and stood there, looking a little lost.

So Kirsten did something she’d never done before. She pushed. “You were both put in an extreme situation, with tragedy at its center, you and Jason after your mother died. But fatherhood doesn’t have to be that way.”

He looked down at her then, angry and hurting. “But what if it is? What if tragedy is all there is?” he demanded.

She swallowed, because she understood that… He had experienced these past two years so much differently than she had. Yes, they’d both suffered, but his was a knowing kind of suffering. A trauma and a tragedy that had a different heft than hers.

And still…here they were. Together. She stood, faced him. “Then at least we have each other. That’s not a tragedy.” She cupped his face. Wouldn’t let him look away. “I love you.”

Some of that tension in him softened. “I love you too.” He swallowed hard. “But I don’t know how to be what you need.”

Need. What did she need? He seemed to think there was something more, and there never had been. “Then just be what I want. Yourself.”

Chapter Sixteen

Ellis hadn’t planned on having to deal with his issues up here. He preferred facing danger head-on and, well, like Kirsten had said. Being brave in his job.

Because maybe he didn’t know how to be brave when it came to his feelings.

It left him feeling…really damn uncomfortable, but there was nowhere to run. Because she kept calling him on the running. If he kept doing it, it just proved her point.

He put his hands over hers, gently removed them from his face. “I think before we go making any…proclamations or decisions, you need to meet with a medical professional to make sure everything is all right.” He squeezed her hands before releasing them. “And we need to neutralize this threat before we can do that.”

She fixed him with that teacher look of hers—stern disapproval as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Which person do you not trust? Kirsten or Jessica?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “They’re the same for me, baby. You were always the same.”

She studied him for a while before speaking. “Then you don’t have to worry, do you? If it’s always me. You love me. I love you. I’m not saying going back into the real world remembering is going to be easy, but I’m not going to borrow hard. We get enough hard honestly, don’t we? We’ll work it out.”

There was something about her being so determined, so sure about them. About a future together. It steadied him, or maybe just smoothed away a doubt he hadn’t fully known was a seed he’d cultivated.

Because, damn, he wanted to believe they’d work it out.

“Call Boyd, Ellis. If he doesn’t answer, you can always try again later.”

He sighed heavily. “All right.”

Kirsten started fussing with plates and cleaning up lunch while he sat back down on the couch in the living room. He opened his phone, went into its settings, and changed the outgoing phone number to one he hadn’t used in a long, long time.

One with a Chicago area code. One Boyd should have in his phone under Ellis’s name. Unless he’d deleted it.

The phone rang twice, then a low voice answered. “Ellis. Hey, man. How’s it going?”

Ellis heard the concern. The surprise. Maybe even a little suspicion in Boyd’s voice. All things he’d expect. All things that made sense.

“It’s…going okay,” Ellis managed. “Better,” he amended. Because there could be some honesty in this, even if not all. And he was certainly a different man than he’d been two years ago when he’d first arrived in Wyoming.

“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” Boyd said, sounding a little more at ease. “Freezing your ass off in Alaska?”

“Yeah, it’s…cold.”

An uncomfortable silence descended, and Ellis knew he had to break it. It would be easiest to just dive into work, but Kirsten working in the kitchen, within earshot, poked at him. Like he owed both these people he cared about some…hard conversations.

“I called because I have a favor to ask, but I wanted to start by apologizing. I know I just…disappeared. I didn’t really know how to deal with anything. Getting away, isolating myself, it was the only way to get through.” It wasn’t a lie. Hell, it was nothing but the truth even if he’d had to leave and isolate to keep Kirsten a secret.

“You went through hell, Ellis. I don’t hold anything against you. You ever make it back to the lower forty-eight, you let me know and I’ll meet you halfway.”

It wasn’t just kindness. It was a true offer of friendship.

“But I sure as hell ain’t going to Alaska,” Boyd added in his usual irreverent manner.

Ellis managed a laugh through a too-tight throat. “I appreciate it.”

“Okay, so what’s this favor, since we don’t need to worry about any bullshit apologies?”

Ellis couldn’t help but wonder why Kirsten and Boyd so easily let him off the hook. Why he should make mistakes and hurt them, no doubt, and they were both so ready to call it a draw.

Almost as though he…saw things wrong. Almost as if he didn’t have to do everything perfectly to earn that relationship.

He shoved that uncomfortable thought away. “I received a threat. I think it’s tied to the Carusos.”

Boyd swore. “What kind of threat? Who have you talked to? What can I do?” It was immediate. No hesitation. What can I do?

No, Ellis didn’t think Boyd had anything to do with Colleen now, but he still had to be careful.

“You’re really the first person FBI-related that I’ve told. I’ve got some concerns about…leaks.”

Ellis waited through Boyd’s pause.

“Leaks,” Boyd echoed. “That’s a pretty serious accusation.” But he didn’t sound offended, or like he thought it was impossible. Maybe a little like he was concerned Ellis had lost it, but not defensive.

“Yeah, it is serious. But I have to be sure there wasn’t one before I reach out to anyone else we worked with. Someone knew enough to know how to threaten me, and they shouldn’t have.”

“I’m glad you reached out, man. I appreciate that you still trust me. So, what can I do to help?”

“I’ll admit, it wasn’t easy. Nothing about this is…particularly easy.”

“Yeah, I get it. Listen, I’m not in Chicago anymore. I’m in Nashville. So I can’t do any local poking, but I can ask around. Make up some connection to the Carusos so I need to look through old files. Not bring you up at all.”

“That might help if you can do it on the down-low. But I was also thinking… Did anyone leave around the same time as me? Someone who might have gotten out of FBI work shortly after everything went down because they didn’t want to be found out?”

“Not any agents,” Boys replied. “I was really the first one of our group to leave after you, and that was just the beginning of this year.”

“Right.” Ellis paused, deciding how hard to push. And the bottom line was…he had to push. This was his shot, and he really believed Boyd wasn’t involved. “What about someone in a different office who might have had access to information? Accountants? HR? Public affairs?” He was leading Boyd, but Boyd didn’t seem to pick up on it.

“I don’t know that I remember exactly. I’d have to think about it. Two years ago? You left. Big deal. The assignment gone wrong certainly rattled a lot of us. If I recall, there was even an investigation. How did the Carusos know… Well, how did they figure you out, right?”

“I…” He should have known there’d be an investigation, but he’d never really thought it through. He’d been so focused on Kirsten, on keeping her safe. “I was recovering then. I didn’t realize there was an investigation.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t involved. They considered me too close, so it was done by what they felt were unbiased sources. I bet if I look back through some of my old stuff, I could get you names of people involved in that. They didn’t find anything, so maybe that’s a lead.”

“Yeah, maybe.” But it wasn’t Colleen. Still, he hadn’t ever looked into that investigation about how his cover had been blown. He’d just assumed…he’d made a mistake and Kirsten had paid.

But what if it was bigger?

“Hey, wait. You know who did leave in that hubbub?” Boyd said. “Colleen Fredericks. That public affairs lady who was all up on you. Remember her?”

Ellis went very still, tried to keep his voice casual. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Not sure how someone in public relations could have the information or leak it, but she did leave right after you. I remember thinking it was weird. Worried she might…”

“Might what?”

“Well, it was just she was always so handsy with you. I thought maybe she figured with Kirsten…gone, she might have a chance with you.”

Ellis really couldn’t wrap his head around any of this potentially being about Colleen Fredericks wanting him, but she was definitely involved, so they had to follow the thread.

“It wasn’t a transfer, if I recall. I think she was going private,” Boyd said, and he did sound like he was thinking back, remembering. Not altogether sure. Not in on it. “But she didn’t go to Alaska, so I figured you were safe.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t really remember. I just knew it wasn’t in your direction. I can poke around though. See what I come up with. I’ll keep it quiet. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Ellis would worry, but Boyd was a good agent. He’d keep it quiet. And if he didn’t… Ellis glanced at Kirsten. She was watching him.

Ellis wouldn’t let anything happen to her. No matter what. Because he wasn’t leaving her side. No matter what.

“Hey, you know who Colleen was real chummy with there at the end?” Boyd said.

“Who?”

“That guy in support. What was his name? Short guy. Really liked a bow tie. West?”

Tom West.

Which was the name of the man who’d facilitated his fake transfer to Alaska.

KIRSTEN WATCHED ELLIS carefully as he said his goodbyes to Boyd. She’d listened to Ellis’s side of the conversation but hadn’t quite been able to follow the full crux of the conversation.

Except Ellis had expected to be rebuffed and had been welcomed instead. She’d known he would be. Boyd had been a real friend.

But something had happened at the end of that conversation that made Ellis still, stiffen. He hit End on the phone. Set it down. And let out a slow breath.

“You found something.”

He didn’t look at her. He was still just standing there. “Maybe.”

“Well?” Since he wasn’t turning to face her she walked into the living room so she could see him, since he still wasn’t responding. “Ellis, tell me.”

“Boyd mentioned Colleen leaving not long after I did. I didn’t really have to lead him there. So, I think it was genuine.”

“Okay, confirming what you already thought. So why are you acting so…” She didn’t have the right words for it. It kind of reminded her of before she remembered. The careful way he held himself always. “Ellis.”

“There was a guy in support named Tom West. He handled travel and, in my case, the fake transfer to Alaska. Apparently, according to Boyd, he’d gotten kind of close to Colleen right before she left. It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily.”

“But it could. If he made the arrangements for Alaska, he knew more than other people. And he could have fed it to her. On purpose or not.”

“He works for the FBI, Kirsten. If he fed it to her, he meant to. And if this is all true…why would these people turn on me? Why would they still be after me through you all this time later? I didn’t do anything to them. I didn’t even succeed in that assignment. I failed.”

“Some people went to jail, you said.”

“Yeah, but not all. Believe me, they didn’t pay. Not really.”

“That’s how you see it. Big picture. Some not all, but I’m guessing the some were pretty pissed about it. I dealt with plenty of students who thought I was the bad guy for punishing them for things they chose to do wrong.”

Some of the tension in him released, a little. His mouth curved. “Students and mobsters.”

“Not so very different,” she finished. Because it was something they used to say to each other.

He lowered his mouth to hers. A brief, soft kiss, but it was the first time she hadn’t pushed him into it, and it made her want to cry. Because here they were, finding their way back to each other.

But there was a black cloud hanging over it. Still, she wrapped her arms around him. To hold on. To believe that this was the rock, the anchor, that would get them through to the other side where a future—a new future—lay.

“You get to be upset that someone might have betrayed you,” she told him when he stiffened against the hug. “You don’t have to lock it all away and focus on the job.”

She felt his chest rise and fall in another sigh. His hand smoothed down her back. “There’s a threat. That has to be the focus. To stop it.”

“But the threat is personal.” She looked up at him, arms still wrapped around his waist. “Or at least it feels that way, right?”

“It doesn’t mean it can be personal. Not when there’s still so much we don’t know, and as much as it feels personal to me, it doesn’t mean it was for them. The information leak could be a lot of things and for a lot of different reasons.” He gave her a little squeeze, then released her, putting space between them.

But it wasn’t running away. He was sitting down on the couch so he could open the laptop. “It feels like it was about me, but I have to remember, a good agent remembers, feelings aren’t facts. What we need are more facts.” He pointed to the computer as if he could find them all there.

Which was a perfect time to introduce what she’d been thinking about all day. Most especially when he’d been on the phone with Boyd. Research was great. Collecting data was obviously important.

But if she knew anything about being an FBI agent from being right by Ellis’s side all these years, it was that at a certain point you had to act. With all those tools, yes, but collecting a bunch of tools didn’t matter if you weren’t ever going to use them.

“I’ve been thinking about something.”

He didn’t look up at first. He was typing away. In investigator mode. She could leave him to it. He was the professional after all. But…

“I know you’re not going to like it.”

He stopped typing, eyed her. But he didn’t stop her or demand to know what she was talking about. He let her get it out in her own time.

“I just think, you’ll know more if I go in to see Dr. Leigh. In person.” Before he could argue with her, which he was obviously going to do, she continued on. “You’ll be with me. If we can work it out to see Colleen there…what might domino from that?”

His expression was fierce, but his voice was calm. She’d always been attracted to that dichotomy. That there was a temper underneath all that impressive calm, but he could use the calm whenever he needed to. So unlike any of the forces she’d grown up with.

“You’re talking about putting yourself smack-dab in the middle of danger,” he said, not outright saying something like I forbid it, but it had that effect all the same.

“I know that’s your MO. Why can’t it be mine?”

His scowl deepened. “Because you’re a civilian, Kirsten. One who’s already been harmed by something that shouldn’t have touched you.”

“But it did. We can’t go back and change that. You can’t even make it right. It will always be wrong, what they did to me. What they did to us. But don’t I have a right to fight back?”

“I am fighting back on your behalf,” he insisted. “And part of that means staying here. Staying safe. We’ve asked for help. We’ve got Zach and his crew and now Boyd helping. There is no point in us wading into danger we don’t know the extent of.”

She would have argued with him, had been prepared to, but something struck her in the way he phrased all that.

He wasn’t talking about handling everything himself. He wasn’t saying she needed to stay put while he ran into danger. He wasn’t running away. He’d said we. He’d said us.

So she sat next to him on the couch and didn’t point all the ways sitting here waiting went against everything he’d ever told her about what he did.

“You’re not going to argue with me?” he asked dubiously. She wouldn’t say he could read her mind, but he knew her well enough.

Still, she rested her head on his shoulder. “You said us. I’m not going to argue with that.”

Chapter Seventeen

The next few days reminded Ellis of his FBI days. The intense research and investigating prior to any undercover assignment. It wasn’t glamorous, certainly not what he’d pictured being an agent would look like when he’d started, but it was the reality of the job.

Information was the real currency in any investigation. And now he had plenty of it. On Colleen and her second identity. On Tom West and what he’d been doing since setting a fake Ellis up in Alaska.

Zach still hadn’t found anything to connect Dr. Leigh directly. Boyd hadn’t gotten back to him yet on the investigation into what had happened. He had more information, but everything remained nebulous.

It left an itch between his shoulder blades, and yet the situation he found himself in beyond all that was not terrible. Aside from all the research and danger, it was a bit like being on vacation with his wife.

She puttered around the kitchen a lot. She dusted the Christmas tree, fashioned little ornaments out of what she could find, and always had the little string of lights glowing. They ate meals together and talked. About their past, and about this case. They mostly avoided talk of the future—or he did.

They shared a bed.

So much of it was easy. Like everything had been frozen for two years. Now, melted, everything could just go back to normal. As if nothing had ever happened.

But so much had, and none of this was normal. Not just the fact that they were under some kind of threat he still hadn’t found the crux of, but being isolated up here on a mountain and in a tiny cabin. It wouldn’t be real life, no matter what happened next.

He found himself regretting that a little bit.

She was in the kitchen again, putting together a meal with canned and freezer items. She was humming Christmas carols.

In a few short weeks it would be Christmas. And for the first time in two years, Kirsten would remember. They might actually spend her favorite holiday together. They might be something again.

Did he really let himself think that was on the other side of this? A second chance? But what better end of this could he hope for?

It was the hope he’d learned to distrust.

Fear. He kept wanting to deny he’d been afraid, that he was afraid. Fear was for men with guns pointed at you. It wasn’t for feelings. It wasn’t for…good things.

But he had a harder time ignoring that fear had been driving him all along. Loving her had pushed him past a lot of fears he would have held on to otherwise, but there was one he hadn’t been able to get through, even if he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself.

Starting a family unlocked so many things he was afraid of—loss, namely.

And he’d lost her, more or less, for two years anyway. But she was here, and she still loved him, and it was a chance.

He didn’t want to lose it because he was so focused on keeping them safe this time.

“What?” she asked him, interrupting his thoughts and making him realize he’d been staring at her pretty intently while he’d been thinking these thoughts.

“You’d make a really good mom.” Maybe it was a terrible way to broach the subject, but he didn’t know a better way to do this.

She stilled and didn’t look at him. “I’ve always wanted to be,” she said. Carefully.

“And it doesn’t scare you? That…you didn’t have a good one. That we don’t know what that really looks like?”

She took her time answering him, studying his face in a way he didn’t know what to do with. But he didn’t look away. He wanted to give her what she needed.

Fear be damned.

“No, not really. Maybe it’s my background in teaching. Maybe it’s loving you. Maybe it’s that she never made sense to me. I tried so hard to take care of both Mom and my sister, to make things okay. And she never did the same. I’m not like her. I couldn’t put anyone in danger the way she put me and Erica in danger. So whatever fears I have, and they certainly exist, they aren’t that I’d be like her. I don’t have to be like anyone. I get to choose my own destiny. I got out of there. I found you. I’ve always believed you and I could make anything work we put our minds to.”

He’d believed that once and lost it somewhere along the way. She made him want to believe it again. And he knew the only way to do that was to do the opposite of what he’d been doing those last few months before he’d gone on the assignment that had threatened everything. Even now.

He’d been pulling in, withdrawing. Thrown too much into work and not enough into her, because putting work into his marriage meant facing all those things he feared.

He’d prefer a gun—then and now—but losing Kirsten made him realize that was really damn stupid. He’d face anything for her.

“Maybe I was afraid. Terrified. I don’t know what to do with fear. I’ve felt it plenty, but it’s always just been…you shove it away and get through whatever you’re afraid of. But the FBI gave me somewhere else to go. Anytime I was afraid, there was somewhere I could go that was black and white, more or less. Life and death. Not…all these screwed up, mixed-up feelings that didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“They had somewhere to go,” she said. A note of hurt in her voice. “You could have talked to me.”

“I know I could have, but at the time I just…didn’t know how. I ran before I even allowed myself to really feel them. Understand them. Because feeling them…meant facing that I always lose the things that matter.”

She didn’t speak right away, so he had to sit in that…that truth. That fear. This thing he’d been avoiding for so long that saying the words felt worse than avoiding. He tended to jump headfirst into loss rather than be blindsided the way he had been for so much of his childhood.

He was about to stand up, tell her to forget it. Find something to do.

But she pulled a chair next to him, slid her hand across his shoulder and into a kind of half hug where she met his gaze.

“I don’t know how to tell you that you won’t lose. Loss is a part of life. And it’s awful.”

It wasn’t comforting, but it was illuminating because…it wasn’t unique, loss. Maybe he’d gone through life thinking he was uniquely targeted, but…all of his work should have taught him otherwise. Maybe he’d lost both his parents young, but he’d been given a lot of love too.

And so many people hadn’t.

“I didn’t want any kid of mine to feel like I did,” he managed to scratch out. “But I guess we all…have to deal with our own challenges.”

Kirsten nodded. She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I happen to think you’ll make an excellent father if you decide that’s what you want.”

It filled him with dread, and terror, and yet…the thought of her with a child. Their child. That wasn’t scary. Doing it with her wasn’t terrifying.

He had to clear his throat to speak. “I guess we have to…figure this out first. Make it safe.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but a notification popped up on his phone. It was the security system he’d tapped into.

Someone was outside.

He shoved to his feet. “Keep the door locked until I come back,” he told her. He reached down and pulled the gun from his ankle holster.

She was standing. “Ellis.”

“I mean it. Trust me. Please.”

She blinked at what were clearly tears in her eyes and nodded.

He slipped out the door, into the cold. Probably should have put a jacket on, but he didn’t have time. Whatever was out here wouldn’t make it to Kirsten. No matter what. He surveyed the gray day around him. The snow was high, the world quiet. No footprints in the snow.

The motion detector had gone off in the back of the house, so once he was sure there was no one out front, he moved around the cabin, gun drawn, stealth his number one priority. They didn’t have cameras on the cabin, just some motion detection. It could have been an animal, but animals hadn’t been setting it off the days they’d been here.

No, Ellis truly believed someone was out here. Zach would be able to check the wildlife cameras, but someone could have avoided those. Though he didn’t know how they avoided a watch person at the lone entrance and exit.

Unless something big had happened.

But Ellis couldn’t think in worst-case scenarios. He had to focus on the present. The cabin was secure, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something out beyond the trees or outbuildings.

Then he heard it, the faint little nothing of a sound, but Ellis knew. He whirled, gun drawn and ready to shoot.

“Freeze.”

And then he followed his own order, because a man with a gun very similar to his, a pose identical to his, had said the exact same thing. To him.

Besides, even with the heavy winter gear, he recognized the intruder.

“Boyd?”

“Ellis?” Boyd seemed as surprised to see him as Ellis was to see Boyd.

It both took them a few seconds to lower their guns. Then Boyd blew out a frustrated breath.

“Hell, I followed the wrong damn trail,” Boyd muttered, taking a few steps toward Ellis, crunching through the snow. “I thought I was tracking down who was in cahoots with Colleen and Tom. Instead, I’m tracking you?”

It felt…off, and yet there was real pleasure in seeing his friend. A strange disorienting dichotomy of seeing a piece of his old life, that life he wanted back especially now that Kirsten was remembering, but he couldn’t forget where he was in the here and now. And what had brought him here.

Boyd studied him critically. “You don’t look quite as bad as you did last time I saw you.”

“Yeah, it’s been a while.”

“I’m freezing my ass off here, Sutty,” Boyd said, using that old FBI nickname. Not exactly clever. “I get how it looks, but… Seriously. You didn’t give me the whole picture, did you?”

Ellis didn’t answer, but Boyd kept on.

“Don’t you know better than to ask an FBI agent to look into something without giving them the whole story?”

Ellis sighed, looking back at the cabin. There was definitely a lot of the story he’d left out. “I guess not.”

“Everything you told me about, I could tell someone else had already been poking through. I thought I was following the bad guys, but apparently I was just following the trail to…you.”

He sounded so disgusted by this, Ellis just…didn’t know how to doubt him. Particularly knowing how adept Boyd had always been on the tech side of things.

Still, was he sure enough to let Boyd inside to understand…everything?

“Whatever you’ve got yourself messed up in, I’m here to help,” Boyd said. Seriously. Earnestly—and that had never been his friend’s strong suit. He even reached out, gave Ellis a little punch on his shoulder—his left one. The one that hadn’t been shot.

Ellis let out a slow breath. Could he really doubt the man he’d been friends with for so many years? Maybe if there was a leak in the FBI it felt like a betrayal, because he’d known and worked side by side with those people, but Boyd wasn’t just Colleen or Tom West.

Case in point, he held out the gun. Handle to Ellis. “This is all I’ve got. Take it. Disarm me however you want. I get it.”

“You can be lethal without a weapon,” Ellis said, but he still took the gun. At least for now.

Boyd grinned at him. “So could you. Once upon a time.”

“Still can,” Ellis muttered, making sure the safety of the gun was on before shoving it into his pocket.

“Then what do you have to worry about, Sutty?”

So many things. Still, if Boyd was telling the truth, that meant Ellis had another person on his side. More help. Could he deny that? Especially if Boyd was handing over his gun of his own volition?

It just wasn’t the behavior of a guilty party.

Besides, no matter what Boyd might think, Ellis was pretty sure these days he was even more lethal without a weapon than he’d been two years ago considering the amount of working out and training he’d done over the past two years, just to keep his mind off Kirsten.

“Follow me,” Ellis said gruffly. He led Boyd back to the front of the cabin and tried the knob. He was impressed and happy that Kirsten had listened to him and locked it. So he gave it the sharp knock she’d know as his.

He heard the lock disengage. He pushed the door open himself, since they’d agreed on that if this scenario presented itself. Kirsten rushed forward, as if she was going to throw her arms around him, then stopped on a dime as Boyd stomped inside.

And then it was Boyd’s turn to freeze. “Kirsten.”

KIRSTEN FELT A little sheepish at the pure look of shock, and maybe a little hurt, on Boyd’s face. She also felt…confused and suspicious.

Why was he here?

But he looked at Ellis as if he’d been personally betrayed. “What the hell is this?”

Ellis closed the door behind them. “WitSec.”

“But I thought she died. I thought…” Boyd shook his head, shoved the snowy hat off his head. “I can’t believe this.”

And he really did seem…confused and shocked and in disbelief. Something he wouldn’t be if he was in on anything threatening them. Kirsten hated to have suspicions about Ellis’s best friend. Particularly when she’d thought she’d known Boyd too. Him being involved with Colleen or any threat would be a deep betrayal she couldn’t fathom.

And still, she was reluctant to trust him fully. Even if Ellis apparently did by letting him in here.

“Boyd’s here to help us,” Ellis told her very seriously.

She really wanted to believe that was true. She needed it to be true.

Ellis looked back at his friend. “It’s my fault, really. I was trying to be vague when I called him. So he followed my trail trying to find the leak instead of whoever might be the leak.”

Kirsten supposed it sounded plausible.

“Are you hungry, Boyd?”

For a minute he just stared at her. It was hard to imagine what he was thinking or feeling. He thought she’d been dead for two years. And they hadn’t been as close as Boyd and Ellis, of course, but they had been friends. Because they both loved Ellis, in their own ways.

He shook his head, not as if he was answering her, but as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Then he crossed to her and gave her a hard hug. “Hell. I can’t believe it.” He pulled back, studied her face. “And I’m glad.”

She had to swallow at the lump in her throat. This was different. Different than remembering, than Ellis always knowing. It was someone thinking she was dead.

And being glad she wasn’t.

He looked back at Ellis, released Kirsten. “This poor bastard has been so gone over you since college, I didn’t know how he survived losing you. This makes a lot more sense.”

Kirsten glanced at Ellis, watching his expression shutter some. Losing was his sore spot. She didn’t want to be his sore spot, but…she certainly didn’t want to miss out on the good because he was afraid of the bad.

She wouldn’t.

“The truth is, Kirsten suffered a traumatic brain injury that affected her memory for most of the past two years,” Ellis explained. “So, part of doing WitSec was to protect that vulnerability. She’s begun to remember these past few days, to…heal, we think. But this threat against her, against us, has complicated things.”

Kirsten wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like the way he called it a vulnerability, when it was more than that. And less than that. All rolled into one.

She didn’t know what to think about the impassive way Boyd seemed to absorb that information, but she had always known Boyd in a social setting. The kind of blank on his face reminded Kirsten of Ellis. It must be an FBI work thing.

“You two sit at the table. I bet I can turn this meal into enough for three,” she said, moving for the kitchen, needing something to do with her hands, needing something to think about that wasn’t the million doubts she had about Boyd, about their safety, about everything.

“Always the Girl Scout.”

She snorted, the old joke a kind of steadying force. She remembered. This was her life, not a borrowed one. Whatever happened, every piece of the future she wanted stemmed on what they could accomplish about this threat right here, right now.

She was no agent, so she set about doing what she could. Feeding everyone. While she worked to add some things to the meal to make it enough for three, Boyd and Ellis sat at the table and discussed details.

“First, we need to get the important things out of the way,” Ellis said. “Could someone have followed you?”

“No one followed me.”

“Are you sure?” Ellis persisted.

Boyd sighed. “I was covering my tracks so I didn’t get blindsided. No one followed me, but…” He shifted in his seat, looking pissed.

“But what?” Kirsten asked from the kitchen when neither of them seemed like they were going to explain the but.

“I wasn’t covering my tracks thinking I wouldn’t want to lead someone to you, because I thought I was headed for the person behind this. Not the target.”

“Which means he might not have been followed in the moment,” Ellis explained. “But it doesn’t mean they can’t be on their way.”

Chapter Eighteen

Kirsten cleaned up the dishes, while Ellis and Boyd went over what they both knew about the case.

Ellis didn’t like thinking about it like a case, because he didn’t want to go back to using work as some kind of shield against emotional hurt, but it essentially was a case. There was danger, and he had to get to the bottom of it, regardless of the personal aspect.

And now, whatever security that had accomplished since they got up here was potentially breached.

“We could set a trap,” Boyd suggested.

A suggestion Ellis had certainly considered but rejected because… “It’s too dangerous. Too many risks. And at the end of the day, it’s an unnecessary risk as long as we don’t know where this is coming from.”

Ellis had been so deep in it with Boyd and the case, he hadn’t realized Kirsten was paying attention from her place in the kitchen.

“Are those risks on my account?” she demanded.

Ellis glanced at her, noticed the battle light in her eyes. “Kirsten.”

“I realize I’m not an FBI agent, but I’m here because I am already in danger. Already a target. Already a victim of these people. You can’t move forward pretending like I’m just some…” She made a few hand gestures, like she couldn’t quite come up with the words.

“You’ve only just remembered,” Ellis said, trying to remain calm and reasonable. He got to his feet, hoping he could explain this in a way she would understand. “You haven’t even talked to a doctor. It’s not that we can’t take any risks, but we have to be careful and rational.”

She pointed around Ellis to the man still at the table. “Boyd doesn’t think so.”

“Boyd is not getting in the middle of a marital argument,” Boyd said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Ellis is lead on this one. I’m just going to follow orders.”

Kirsten scowled at him, and Boyd hunched his shoulders, but he didn’t relent.

Thank God. Ellis didn’t know how he was going to explain this to her in a way that would get her to back down, but it’d be harder if she and Boyd ganged up on him.

“A trap involves risks,” he told her.

“So did bringing me up here. So did going on that last mission. Hell, it was a risk every day I walked into a classroom, Ellis. Life is risk.”

He didn’t like how damn true that was, but nevertheless… “Yes, and we determine how to mitigate those risks. Particularly in dangerous situations.”

She moved around him, took his seat at the table, and pinned Boyd with a look. “What would your idea be for a trap?”

When Ellis tried to say something, she held up a hand, fixed him with her stern teacher look. “We can’t mitigate anything if we don’t discuss ideas,” she told him primly. Then she turned her gaze back to Boyd. “Now. Explain your idea.”

Boyd, clearly uncomfortable with being put in the middle, cleared his throat, but neither that nor the daggers Ellis was glaring his way were apparently enough to stop him. “I would suggest Ellis and I bundle up and pretend like we’re going to leave—not permanently. Hunt or act like we think someone is out there and have an idea to track them.”

“You’d leave me alone in here, and you think that would entice whoever might be out there, if anyone is out there, to come…try to get to me?”

“Maybe.” His gaze moved from Kirsten to Ellis. “It depends on what they’re after.”

Ellis frowned at that. It was clear what they were after. Punishing him for his role in the undercover sting that hadn’t done what it had set out to do, but had killed a few and put some of the Caruso family in jail.

Kirsten looked up at him. “I think it’s pretty clear. They’re after me to hurt you, or there was no point in that stupid warning letter. Except to scare the hell out of you.”

“Or…” Boyd tapped his fingers on the table, clearly thinking through something. “The thing is, the warning makes no sense. They certainly didn’t warn you, Ellis, when they found out your identity and went to your house.”

“No, but…”

“And you’ve been safe for two years, tucked away in this little town, with Kirsten having some memory issues. Why now?”

“These are some of the questions I kind of hoped you’d answer yourself. Far away from here,” Ellis muttered. He was uncomfortable and frustrated and Kirsten had stolen his seat.

“We’ve got potential leaks in Colleen and Tom, but again, why now? Tom set up your Alaska cover.”

“He doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I’m in Alaska.” But that was weak at best, because it wasn’t like Ellis had done a lot of work to maintain an identity in Alaska.

“Maybe,” Boyd agreed. “It could explain the two years of relative safety.”

Ellis didn’t like the way Boyd let that sit there. Maybe. What were the other options?

“But the connection to Kirsten’s psychiatrist has me wondering if there’s something…more complicated in play. Particularly since you’ve never caught wind of a threat to you or Kirsten in those two years.”

Ellis tried to work through it, but whatever Boyd was considering, Ellis couldn’t get there. “What bigger complication could there be?”

Boyd cocked his head, studied Kirsten. “You’ve been thinking about you as the target, Ellis, and I get it. But what if it was Kirsten, all along?”

“Me, but…how?”

“I don’t know,” Boyd said equitably enough that it set Ellis’s teeth on edge. “What do you know, Kirsten?”

KIRSTEN FROZE. IT WAS such a direct question, one she didn’t even know how to answer, but something internally…seemed to shutter away from her reach. Like a thought, or more likely a memory, had been just within her reach and was now gone.

A familiar feeling, all in all, but one she hadn’t had in days. She turned away from Boyd’s dark, steady gaze. It was making her feel…all those old crawling feelings she thought she’d left behind when she’d remembered.

But Boyd kept talking.

“Whoever left that letter wanted her scared. They wanted her running to you, for help. They wanted to force your hand to tell her who she was, or why bother addressing that note to Mrs. Sutton? Why connect with her psychiatrist?”

“Because of me,” Ellis insisted, but Kirsten saw that Boyd was planting seeds of doubt. Ellis might refute them now, but eventually he’d water them and let them grow. Eventually, he’d come around to whatever Boyd was saying, even if it didn’t make any sense.

Boyd shrugged, and Kirsten didn’t like how careless it was. How detached.

“Maybe,” Boyd said. “Unless there’s something Kirsten saw or heard that they want.”

Kirsten shook her head. “I remember now, and I don’t remember anything about… How could I know anything about them? They broke into my house while I was asleep. They threw me over a balcony.”

She didn’t realize she was getting upset until she felt Ellis’s hand on her back, slowly rubbing up and down her spine to calm her. She took a deep breath, leaned into him a little. “This is upsetting. I don’t know anything.”

“Okay,” Boyd said. And he didn’t push it, but Kirsten knew…it wasn’t okay. He had a theory. About her. And he’d keep digging until he proved it right or wrong.

But Ellis changed the subject. They discussed some of the places Boyd had traced the remaining Carusos to. It was purposeful. To leave her out of it. They’d probably reconvene after she went to bed and talk about it behind her back.

She wanted them to. She knew she shouldn’t, but she hated this feeling. That it was back. That nagging, headachy strangeness in knowing something was hiding right here inside of her.

She excused herself into her room, but she didn’t get into bed. She paced, trying to will her brain to remember, while she heard the low tone of men’s voices.

Boyd would take the room Ellis had originally slept in, and Ellis would come in here and sleep with her eventually, just like he’d been doing the past two nights. Just like had begun to feel normal and like old times.

Now there was this discordant note in all that remembering. What was still lost?

The door creaked open and Ellis stepped inside. She stopped her pacing.

“I thought you were going to sleep,” he said, with only a hint of censure in his tone.

“How can I sleep, Ellis?”

“You were the one who wanted to bring Boyd into this.”

She scowled at him and saw through him. He wasn’t saying that to be rude, he was saying that to try to rile her up and take her mind off the topic at hand.

But nothing could.

“What if he’s right? What if there’s something up here I can’t unlock.” She tapped her temple. “What if it’s the answer to everything?”

Ellis took her by the shoulders. His expression was one of sympathy and care. He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s not the answer to everything, baby. It’s too complicated to be the answer to everything. No matter what you remember or don’t, it’s…at most a very small piece of a much bigger and more complicated puzzle.”

“What if it’s a really important small piece?”

Ellis sighed heavily, then pressed a kiss to her forehead. Which eased some of the tension pounding there.

“Boyd and I are going to handle it. Between the two of us, something will shake out. We were a damn fine FBI pair once upon a time. Not too much has changed.”

“But you’re not a pair, Ellis. We’re a trio. I like…making meals for us, even for Boyd. I like bustling around doing things for you guys while you come up with plans or I wouldn’t do it. But if I am even a tiny piece of this, I have to be a part of it. And I don’t want to.”

He chuckled, smoothing a hand over her hair. “It is some comfort to me that you can be a little petulant about that, because I don’t want you to be involved either.”

“But you agree I have to be?”

He sighed, all signs of humor gone. “I don’t know that I agree just yet. I don’t know that I agree with anything just yet, but I think we have to…follow Boyd’s theory for a while. It doesn’t mean I think he’s right, but maybe following it leads us to the right theory. Because we haven’t gotten close yet.”

“You know who’s after you.” Wasn’t that close enough?

“I’m reasonably sure, which isn’t knowing. And we can stop them temporarily because we know who they are, or might be, but we can’t eradicate a threat until we know why. This has to be over, Kirsten. Not just delayed another two years.”

She swallowed at the lump in her throat. Because he was right. Because she knew what she had to do, and he wouldn’t want to do it.

But he knew too.

“You have to lay a trap, Ellis.”

Chapter Nineteen

Ellis didn’t immediately respond because he didn’t want to yell at her, and if he opened his mouth, he thought he might just do that.

Out of fear. Out of terror.

Yeah, he could admit that now. He was terrified, and it pissed him off, because there was nothing to do with that feeling but feel it. Deal with it. Fear couldn’t dictate his choices like they once had, even the fear for her well-being.

So he took his time. To settle, to breathe, to remember that…at the end of this was a brand-new lease on life. He wanted that. Needed it.

“It’s very possible there is no one out there to trap,” Ellis finally said, like that really mattered to what she was saying.

“That would be the ideal scenario, right?” Kirsten replied. “But it’s also possible someone is lying in wait. Boyd could have led someone here, through no real fault of his own. Someone could know where we are, and the more time we give them, the more time they have to hurt us.”

“And you want to put yourself out there as bait?”

“I don’t want to. I think I need to.”

It was all he could do not to pound his head against the wall. “You never need to use yourself as bait. That’s law enforcement 101.”

“Don’t pretend like you’ve never taken a risk that put you in danger.”

“Yes, but that—”

“Don’t say it was your job. You know what my job is? Staying alive. Having a life. You and I both know we can’t hide up here forever. At some point, if we don’t have answers, Zach is going to tell us it’s time to give up.”

“He’s not going to tell us that.”

She fixed him with a hard look. “This isn’t even his cabin, Ellis.”

Ellis didn’t have any quick response to that. He’d been on assignments he had to give up before because the mission had run out of money or information or whatever. And this was Zach’s partner’s family’s cabin in some roundabout way, so they’d likely want and need it back at some point.

But that didn’t mean he had to risk his wife’s life. Again. It also didn’t mean there weren’t other cabins, other places to hide.

But it wasn’t a life—that he knew.

“We’ll sleep on it,” he said instead. “You’re exhausted, and one night doesn’t change anything. If someone’s out there, they’ll have to hunker down against the elements.” He turned her toward the bed, nudged her into a sitting position. “We’ll face everything in the morning rested and renewed with fresh eyes.”

She looked up at him, and there were a million emotions in her gaze, her expression, in her. He wished there was some way to wipe it away for her. So he knelt in front of her. “Kirsten, I get where Boyd is coming from with his theory, but…it just doesn’t add up. What could you have known? I was the one undercover, and we all know that they went at you as a punishment for me infiltrating them.”

“You said it yourself, before Boyd crashed the party. You said I couldn’t go around thinking I remembered everything.”

“You know that’s different.”

He could tell she did not know that, but she didn’t argue with him. “I’m only sleeping on this if you’re sleeping on this, so if you plan to placate me until I fall asleep, then sneak out there and make plans with Boyd without me, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

He smiled in spite of himself, in spite of the situation, because this was the woman he’d loved since almost that first moment. And since he was learning or growing or something, he said it.

“I love you.”

He could tell the words took her off guard, even though he’d been saying them. Even though they had to be written all over his face every time he looked at her.

Her smile was soft and warm. “I love you too, Ellis.” She cupped his face and pressed her mouth to his. “Now let’s get some sleep.”

He didn’t know how he could, but apparently in a warm bed with his wife in his arms it wasn’t so hard. He woke up before she did, while the world was still dark, but it was morning. He heard Boyd moving around out in the main room, so he slipped out of bed.

Hopefully they could get a little conversation in before Kirsten woke up. So he could tell Boyd to lay off the idea that Kirsten didn’t remember something important.

Ellis didn’t think she did. He didn’t, but the what-if nagged him, because nothing about this whole situation fully added up.

Boyd was in the kitchen, poking at the coffee machine with the occasional irritated grunt.

“Never could work an analog machine,” Ellis said in a quiet voice, elbowing Boyd out of the way so he could handle it.

“I do just fine,” Boyd replied, keeping his voice low while Ellis finished up and got the coffee brewing.

Then they stood in what might have been a companionable silence, waiting for coffee, if there weren’t a few big-ass elephants sitting in the room.

“I need you to go easy on her. Especially about her memory. She’s been traumatized in so many different ways. We don’t need to add to it.”

“Is it adding to it if I’m right and just unearthing a trauma that’s already happened?”

Ellis wasn’t sure he had a great answer for that. He didn’t like any of the answers. Because it was traumatic to remember awful things. He’d seen her reaction to remembering him shot, remembering being tossed from the balcony. It was just heartbreaking.

But if something was there…it was there either way.

“Look, Sutty, I’m here to help you. Be safe, get to the bottom of things, and stop whoever sent that threat. It’s not going to be easy or comfortable, or you wouldn’t have reached out for my help. You would have handled it yourself, like the pro you are.”

“If you recall, I just asked you to look into a few things, not show up unannounced.”

Boyd grinned. “Come on now, it’s been a while, but you’re very familiar with the Boyd Cavalier experience.”

He was, and maybe he should have been annoyed, but there was something so familiar about this. Working together. Their different tactics and personalities and how it…matched, complemented.

Which he supposed was the real problem. He knew Boyd wasn’t totally wrong to push this. He just wanted him to be wrong.

They poured their coffee in silence, sat down at the table. When the silence finally broke, it was Boyd who spoke, his voice low and serious.

“I thought about it some, and maybe my theory isn’t quite right, but there’s something to do with her, not you. I believe that.” It was the serious that got to Ellis, because Boyd tended to go lighter and more irreverent, even when things were serious.

Still. “She was a teacher. The only connection to anything remotely criminal was me investigating them.”

Boyd frowned at that. “A teacher,” he said, clearly thinking about that in some deeper way. “In Chicago.”

“I think I’d know if she taught one of the Carusos’ kids or something, Boyd. They all get sent to private anyway.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a Caruso. Just someone connected. I think it’s the thread to pull. Who was she connected to that year, in the school. It can’t hurt.”

Ellis couldn’t argue with it can’t hurt, even if he hated it. “The internet up here isn’t the best, and that’s a lot to sort through.”

“Yeah, what the hell else are we going to do up here?” Boyd looked around. “To my way of thinking, it’s this or set a trap.”

Luckily Ellis didn’t have to make that decision, because Kirsten emerged from their room. There was a confused expression on her face, and she was holding her phone weirdly. Kind of like holding it out to him.

“Dr. Leigh emailed me,” she said, her eyebrows drawn together in confusion.

“The psychiatrist,” Ellis explained to Boyd. “What did she say?”

Kirsten handed her phone to Ellis, who tilted the screen so Boyd could read the email at the same time.

Kirsten,

I wanted to check in on you and make sure everything is okay. Remembering things can be painful and confusing. Sometimes it can be hard to talk in person. If you want to write things out, that’s an option too. I’m here for you either way.

Dr. Leigh

“I don’t think this is right,” Kirsten said. She was wringing her hands, pacing again. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Why?”

“She’s never emailed me before. She would just…call.”

“The time stamp is ten thirty. It was late. Maybe she was worried she’d wake you up,” Boyd suggested, but he was taking it seriously. Ellis knew the question wasn’t doubt, it was working through the possibilities.

“Then she’d wait until the morning and just call. It’s not time sensitive to check in on me. She’d call me in the morning. Either she has some kind of reason to believe something is wrong and is fishing, or…”

“This isn’t Dr. Leigh,” Ellis finished. “It’s someone fishing for information on what you remember,” Ellis muttered. Which meant Boyd’s theory about Kirsten knowing something had a hell of a lot more credence now. “But who?”

“Her assistant might have access to her work email, right?”

Ellis nodded. “Colleen would be the most reasonable culprit in all this.” But he still couldn’t figure out how she was connected. Neither his nor Zach’s nor even Boyd’s investigation had unearthed any connection to anyone they knew of from the Carusos.

“She was pretty pissed off about Ellis telling her she needed to back off,” Boyd said.

“This isn’t just petty revenge because he wouldn’t cheat on his wife,” Kirsten replied, frowning. “I didn’t like the woman, but you’re talking about… It’s too much.”

“Unstable people do unreasonable, unstable things.” Boyd shrugged. “Maybe that’s all this is. A little revenge for thwarting her dating life.”

“Give me a break,” Ellis muttered.

“People have done worse for less.”

It was an incredibly uncomfortable thought. Boyd was right, but that didn’t mean Ellis had to believe something that felt so…silly.

“What about your last year of teaching?” He ushered Kirsten into his seat, then went to pour her a coffee. “Do you remember that at all?”

Kirsten inhaled, looking down at her phone like she couldn’t just set Dr. Leigh’s email aside.

“I guess. More or less. I had five periods, three world lit and two American lit.”

“Did you piss any parents off?”

“Oh, plenty.” She thanked Ellis for the coffee when he brought it to her. “But that’s hardly unusual. Or reason for someone to threaten me.”

“Let’s put a list together. Just to see if we can find any connections.”

“I could do that,” she said cautiously. “But I think I have a better idea.”

Ellis already knew he wasn’t going to like it.

“I think Ellis should call Colleen.”

Ellis was standing behind Kirsten, so he couldn’t see her face, but he could see Boyd’s. And how hard he was trying not to laugh.

“And why would I do that?” Ellis managed to grind out.

“I’ve been dead for two years—that’s what everyone thinks. Maybe with me out of the way, you’re interested. Haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. Whatever works.”

Now Boyd wasn’t trying to hold back his laughter at all. He was letting it loose. He even punctuated it with a knee slap.

Ellis glared. Then tried to keep his tone equitable as he spoke. “She knows you’re not dead, as we’ve established.”

“Which is why she might be intrigued. Intrigued enough to meet you somewhere…isolated.” Kirsten gestured to the cabin around them. “Maybe even with whoever she’s working with or for.”

KIRSTEN WASN’T SURPRISED he didn’t like the idea, but she did think he would have relented once he knew he got to be the bait—not her. He was never going to let her put herself in danger, but he’d put himself.

And she knew Boyd would protect Ellis in whatever ways he could, so it wasn’t too big a risk. Calculated.

“She’s fishing. She wants something. Let’s give it to her.” Kirsten picked up the phone with the offensive email. “You didn’t want me to be the bait. You’re the FBI agent. You can be the bait. And then this stops.” And they could get their lives back. Whatever that looked like. Good or bad.

It was better than this weightless in-between of hope tangled with fear.

“She’s got you there, Sutty,” Boyd said. It surprised her a little that he’d take her side, but only a little.

Boyd was the kind of man who liked to act, regardless of consequences, because he didn’t have the kind of responsibilities that Ellis did.

“And where, pray tell, will the two of you be?” Ellis asked. His jaw tight, but his tone even enough.

Kirsten knew him well enough to know he was livid under that careful facade. He wouldn’t let it out. He would work through it.

No wonder she loved him as much as she did. And because she loved him, she didn’t want to risk him, but she’d lived the life of the spouse of an FBI agent. She was already old hat at worrying about his safety. What was one more assignment?

“Well, you and Boyd can figure out the rest of the plan, can’t you? Tactically or whatever.” She waved offhandedly, in a way she knew would irritate Ellis, and she didn’t want to irritate him exactly, but she wanted him to…act. To risk.

“Let’s at least lay it out,” Boyd said. “See what we can come up with. And if we don’t come up with a good way to go about it, we nix the plan. No harm, no foul.”

Ellis’s jaw worked. He looked from Kirsten to Boyd. Then inhaled deeply. “Fine. But you need to eat some breakfast first,” he told her. When his back was turned, moving into the kitchen to scrounge her up some breakfast, Boyd winked at her.

And she mouthed a silent thank you.

They’d find a plan. They’d find a way out of this.

She had to believe that, because otherwise she might crumble. She wouldn’t crumble now. For Ellis. For herself.

For their future.

Chapter Twenty

Ellis couldn’t believe he’d been talked into this. He thought about hanging up even as the phone rang.

Boyd had Colleen’s cell from when they’d all worked together in Chicago, so Ellis hoped like hell Colleen had since gotten rid of that number. He’d get a voicemail, number not in service, something, and then this would all be moot and they could go back to the idea Kirsten’s teaching career was somehow connected to her threats.

It sounded better than this, even if he thought it was a dead end.

But they’d roped Zach in, to see if he could get a ping on whoever answered, and even more importantly, watch to see if someone tried to ping Ellis’s location in return.

“Hello,” a female voice answered suspiciously.

“Colleen?” Maybe he had a wrong number. Maybe this was all for nothing. He prayed it was.

“Who’s this?”

Ellis cleared his throat. It made him sound nervous, and he supposed he was, but it worked for their little ruse. “Ellis Sutton? From Chicago? We worked together about two years ago.”

There was a long, stretched out silence. “It’s been a long time.”

Ellis let out a breath that he hoped sounded like relief, not the inward curse it really was. “It has. I’m sure your busy, and I don’t mean to bother you, I’ve just been…making the rounds to catch up with everyone.”

She didn’t answer right away, but when she did, she sounded just as Ellis remembered her. Sharp, confident, straightforward.

“Really? Where did I come in at?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, am I twentieth on your list? Have you talked to everyone at the Chicago office before you got down to me? Who was your first call? Just wondering where I rate.”

“Well, uh, Boyd was my first call,” Ellis said, figuring the truth or as close to it as he could get was best.

“Yeah, that tracks. Then who?”

“Well…then you.”

She didn’t say anything to that. The silence stretched out and out, until Kirsten nudged him from behind.

“Uh, Boyd said you’d moved to South Carolina,” he said, purposefully getting the state a little wrong.

Colleen hesitated. “Raleigh, actually. Got away from cops for a while. Into the private sector. Things are more…lucrative here.”

Ellis didn’t like the way she said lucrative, at all. But he had to stuff that reaction down. “Yeah, I get it. Well, no I don’t. I’m still doing desk work. Up in Anchorage though.”

“Yeah, Tom told me you’d gone to Alaska. I guess grief makes people do weird things.”

“Yeah, yeah it does.” And they were talking about Kirsten, but he thought about all the ways he’d run away from the woman he’d loved in his own marriage. Through work. Through distance. Through whatever.

It had been fear, yes, but it had been grief too. A grief he’d never really allowed himself to deal in. All the grief from his childhood he hadn’t wanted to contend with. Running away was better.

But it wasn’t. Not anymore.

“So what’s this about, Sutty?” Colleen asked, clearly a little bored with his silences. “I don’t mean to push you along or whatever, but I’ve got things to do.”

“I just wanted to reach out to everyone I cut off while I was…dealing with everything. Apologize for it, and hopefully make some kind of amends. I really hope you’re doing well, Colleen. You were a good friend for a while.”

“A while.” She laughed bitterly. “You mean until your wife thought I had designs on you and you couldn’t be man enough to tell her to sack up?”

Sack up. That old frustration with Colleen sizzled to the surface quickly. Because she was fun to hang out with. She’d been great at an office party. But she crossed boundaries—because she was the problem, not Kirsten.

This whole bizarre scenario case in point. But he couldn’t say any of that. Well, maybe he could but he didn’t want to go digging into ancient history. He wanted to put an end to it. “I don’t… I don’t like to talk about her, if you don’t mind.” He glanced over at Boyd, who was hunched over his computer, waiting for a message from Zach.

“Maybe I do mind. Maybe I mind a hell of a lot,” Colleen said. “And maybe you’ve got some nerve calling me up out of nowhere.”

“I’m…sorry.”

“Yeah, you should be.” The line ended with a click. Ellis swore under his breath. “Was it long enough?” he asked Boyd.

“Not to get her exact location, Zach doesn’t think.” Boyd typed something, clearly communicating with Zach through some kind of messaging service. “But it was confirmed she was trying to trace you.”

“She’s the one who ended the call. She must have gotten what she wanted. So now what?” Ellis tossed the phone on his table.

“We wait for Colleen to make her way up here,” Boyd replied.

“She won’t be alone.”

“No, but luckily, neither are you.”

KIRSTEN WAS BEYOND NERVOUS, there was no denying that. Ellis and Boyd had a way of preparing for things where they talked in a weird kind of shorthand she didn’t understand, and she felt bad about constantly having to ask what they meant.

But a plan was taking shape, forward motion.

Ellis was mad at her for pushing this. He was mad at Boyd for being here. He was just plain mad, and she couldn’t even blame him.

She was a little mad herself, but mostly at a woman she didn’t understand. Maybe it was the teacher in her, or whatever had marked her childhood, but she wished she could. She wished she could find a reason for Colleen’s behavior. Pathologize it. So she didn’t have to accept that some people just sucked.

“You two will leave the cabin, talking loudly about Kirsten’s fake ailment and how you have a snowmobile not far into the woods,” Ellis was explaining, even though they’d gone over it multiple times.

This was the final plan. They were ready to enact it. Kirsten felt like she was going to shake apart, but she tried to appear brave.

Boyd was checking his guns. “I’ll even fake a call to a doctor or something. Really play it up.”

“They won’t see through that?” Kirsten asked.

“It won’t matter if they do. If they follow us, they want you,” Boyd replied. “If they go for Ellis, they want him.”

“What if there’s enough to split up and go for both of us?”

“We’re prepared. And they don’t think we are. Sometimes, all you need is the element of surprise.”

Kirsten didn’t take Boyd’s confidence at face value. She just couldn’t, but she liked that someone could pretend. It sure wasn’t her.

Ellis crossed to her and handed her a gun. “You know how to use it, and I need you to use it if it comes to that.”

Kirsten swallowed. She didn’t want to take the gun. She didn’t want to shoot anyone. But she remembered the last time, and all she’d suffered because she hadn’t been strong or brave enough or whatever to move beyond her fear and protect herself.

So she took it from Ellis and nodded, not trusting her voice to say anything. She knew how to use it.

And she prayed she wouldn’t have to.

With her free hand, she reached out and gripped his sweater. They would separate now, and she didn’t want to panic, but… “Please, don’t take any unnecessary risks.” As much as she wanted to push this, to end this, actually separating left her feeling sick to her stomach. “We didn’t come this far to lose each other now.”

He brushed his thumb across her cheekbone, then pressed his mouth to hers briefly. “I love you,” he said.

But he didn’t promise.

“Do what Boyd says, okay?”

Kirsten nodded. She trusted Boyd almost as much as she trusted Ellis. She would follow instructions. Anything to get through this and come out on the other side knowing everyone was safe.

Boyd and Ellis were good at what they did. They’d survived every mission this far. She was too clear on the risks, yes, but she also knew that there was a real chance the end was near.

She’d hold on to that chance.

So, all bundled up against the cold, she followed Boyd out into a bright, frigid winter day. Her boots crunched in the snow.

“Showtime,” Boyd muttered. Then pulled a phone out of his pocket. “Hey, yeah, I need a doctor or a nurse or someone, to meet me down where you’ve got those lookouts. Kirsten isn’t feeling well.”

She leaned a little against Boyd to add to the sickly of it all. She wanted to look back at the cabin, at Ellis, but she couldn’t.

She just had to move forward.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ellis was an old pro at waiting. He kept reminding himself of this. How long he’d waited for Kirsten to remember. To be okay.

What was a few interminable hours laying a trap while his wife and best friend potentially walked into a different dangerous situation?

He paced. He looked out the window. He talked himself out of calling Boyd, of following them, of demanding Zach send a brigade of cops up here.

Zach had a few guys waiting close by with the kind of vehicles that could make it up the mountains in all this snow, but they hadn’t wanted anything that might be obvious. This was essentially a sting operation. And they had mitigated every risk, but it didn’t make it easy to relax.

He wanted anyone and everyone involved arrested, questioned. He wanted to end this damn hell he’d been in for two years.

When the motion detector ping went off on his phone, Ellis gave himself a moment to pause, to settle. It wouldn’t be Boyd and Kirsten. It was going to be someone after him, because how could this not stem from his undercover work with the Carusos?

He pulled on his coat, turned the safety off his gun, then carefully eased the front door open, ready for anything. The world was bright—the sun bouncing off the packed snow. The sky blue enough to make his eyes burn.

But there was no one out here in the front that he could see. Since the one access point was covered by Zach’s lookout, and Boyd had gotten around that himself, Ellis moved carefully around the cabin, figuring he’d find whatever intruder or intruders had followed Boyd’s same path.

If they were FBI too, or the Carusos had found more agents to turn, they would likely behave the same way Boyd had. The same training often led to the same decision-making.

Ellis moved carefully, silently, his breathing carefully regulated so he could hear every sound around him. When he got to the corner, he stopped, angled so he could see into the back. At first, he didn’t see anyone, and then out across the backyard, hunched behind the outbuilding, he saw the hint of a boot.

He readjusted his grip on the gun, surveyed the world around him. He couldn’t assume there was just one person. He had to watch his back. And hope Boyd and Kirsten were watching theirs.

Once he was fairly certain no eyes were on him, he began to creep forward. He took his time. He used every year of FBI training and work to make the right choices. No rushing. No knee-jerk reactions. No letting his mind fixate on could bes or would bes. Just careful, rational, measured steps forward.

He didn’t necessarily recognize the figure from the back, since the person was wearing a hood and crouched down, but it was clearly a woman, which meant it had to be Colleen.

“Stand up, Colleen,” he ordered, gun aimed and ready to shoot if she whirled.

She froze. For a moment, it was just that. Her standing there kind of crouched, not moving and not responding. She’d been looking at some kind of screen she had balanced on a tree stump.

Ellis kept his gun trained on her and his ears on high alert, waiting to see if anyone else popped out. But, at least for the moment, it seemed to just be her.

Which worried him. There had to be others. Had they followed Boyd and Kirsten? Were the two people he cared most about in the world in danger even as he stood here dealing with Colleen?

But everything was fine. He hadn’t heard a gunshot. He hadn’t heard anything, and sound could carry out here. He’d know. He had to stick to the plan, or everything crumbled.

“Took you longer than I thought,” he said, trying to go for casually friendly. Keep the situation calm.

“You knew I knew she wasn’t dead when you called,” Colleen said, still crouched. “You think you fooled me or something?”

“I don’t know what to think, Colleen. This whole ridiculous circus is beyond any sane person’s reasoning.”

Very carefully, she straightened. Ellis didn’t want to shoot her, but he held the gun trained on her. He’d hold his fire, at least until he had the full picture. She had a gun, but at the moment it was pointed at the ground. He kept his trained on her while she slowly turned.

“Sane? Or are you just a touch slow, Sutty?” She smirked.

He said nothing. Didn’t react to the insult. Her insults didn’t matter to him.

“So, it’s just you and me. Why? You really that broken up about my disinterest all those years ago?”

Her smirk turned into a sneer of disgust. “Don’t flatter yourself. Why do you think I was interested in the first place? Because you’re so great?” She snorted. “The Carusos knew you were coming before you even got started.” The hold on her gun tightened, but she didn’t lift it. She just smiled. “Thanks to me.”

Which clarified some things, though only a little bit. Still, it was a shock. The whole thing, that had never made any sense to him, hadn’t been about him… It had been about the Carusos doing recon before the assignment?

For nearly two months, he thought he’d been doing prime investigative undercover work, and they had…known. Because of a leak in the office. Because Colleen had set him up as some kind of…mark.

He didn’t know what kind of relief it was, only that he felt some. That this was about him and not Kirsten. That he hadn’t screwed up beyond the telling.

He’d been set up.

Sure, it was a shock too, but he had to keep his feelings under a dull layer of control. Because this wasn’t over yet.

“So what’s this? The Carusos thought they’d send you to finish the job? Seems like a pretty bad choice, all in all. You weren’t even an agent. I think they’d have better lackeys to do their dirty work.”

“Do you think they honestly care about some low-level FBI agent who gave them a few little slaps on the wrists—slaps they knew were coming and set up to work out that way? You’re nothing to them. They wouldn’t look for you if they knew to.”

Ellis tried to hide his confusion, but he knew Colleen saw it because her smirk was back. “Honestly? You’re actually mostly nothing to me since none of your little friends were ever the wiser. You pissed me off, sure, but your sanctimonious wife getting in my way so I couldn’t have the kind of access the Carusos wanted to you? I couldn’t let that stand. She is going to pay.”

Kirsten. It was really somehow about Kirsten. Not in any of the ways they’d predicted. Probably because this was some kind of psychosis on Colleen’s part, not any kind of sense.

“The plan would have been perfect if she hadn’t warned you off me.” Colleen laughed bitterly. “I would have gotten paid a hell of a lot more, and you’d have been dead a long, long time ago. Instead, I had to lay low, make sure nothing came back to me. Move to Raleigh. Play it straight.” She made a frustrated kind of noise. “I waited, but I knew I’d get my chance. You FBI agents all think you’re so special, but I proved it’s nothing to do your own undercover. Had to be a little bit more careful this time. Had to make sure to finish the job. I got close a few times, but there were so many eyes on her. Yours, mostly.” She rolled hers. “It’s pretty pathetic the hold she has on you.”

She’d been a threat for a lot longer than he’d anticipated, and it shocked him and infuriated him he hadn’t seen it, but he tried to take some comfort in the fact Kirsten was safe—she was safe because he’d made sure of it.

Ellis said nothing, and he began to realize there was something…off about all this explanation. In his experience, villains only made long, explaining speeches in the movies, and this was no movie.

She was wasting time.

She must have realized he’d caught on, because her smile curled higher. “But you’ve given me everything I need, Sutty. Kirsten’s going to be dead, and everyone’s going to know it was you who did it.”

BOYD STOPPED ON a dime, so Kirsten did too. Her heart was tripping against her chest, particularly when she saw Boyd flip the safety off his gun. She followed suit, but her hands shook as she did it.

Suck it up, she warned herself inwardly. For Ellis.

“You’re going to put your back to mine. We’re going to move in a slow circle. You see anything—a shadow, a flash, anything—you say my name. We’ll switch places, and I’ll shoot. Got it?”

“Yes,” she managed to say, though her voice was little more than a shaky whisper. Still, she was relieved she wasn’t going to have to shoot. She was just eyes, and Boyd would take care of it.

They were doing this because he’d seen something or heard something or sensed something but didn’t know what it was, and she could look for danger without falling apart. She would.

She had to do what she’d promised Ellis. Do what Boyd said. She moved so they were back to back. She moved in time with him, and even though she didn’t feel steady and her heart hammered so loud in her ears she didn’t hear much else, she searched the tree line, the shadows. She thought of nothing but doing her job…and saying Boyd’s name when she saw the shadow of something far off move.

“Boyd.”

He moved, almost before she’d fully gotten his name out of her mouth. The gunshot went off, loud and painful so close to her ear, but her gaze was still on the trees. And in the shock and fear, she saw another flash. Heard another gunshot.

She didn’t let herself think. She just aimed at the man in the woods and pulled her trigger. She heard something splinter, and a distant thud and crash—hopefully of a body hitting the ground.

“Kirsten!” It was the grip on her arm that finally got through to whatever shock her body had held on to. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her finger was still tight on the trigger. Her breath held—so she let it out in a rush, opening her eyes.

Boyd stood in her vision, though he wavered a little as she worked to focus her eyes. His gaze was fierce, mouth grim. “Breathe,” he ordered.

And she was doing what Boyd said, because she’d promised Ellis she would, so she inhaled, exhaled.

“Let go of the trigger,” he told her, a little more gently this time.

She managed to loosen her grip. Her knuckles ached. Her body pulsed in time with her heart beat.

“Next time you shoot a gun, keep your eyes open,” Boyd said through gritted teeth. He was holding on to his arm like…

Kirsten made a sound of distress, her heart dropping to her toes for a second. Blood seeped out from between his fingers. Boyd shook his head.

“It wasn’t you. You were pointed in the right direction and you got your guy. Just in the future, I’d like it not to be me. So keep the eyes open.”

You got your guy. Kirsten’s gaze began to move toward where she’d shot, but Boyd was pulling her along. “There’s no one else here. I think we should double back to Ellis. I have a bad feeling someone was waiting for him too. He can handle his own, but…”

But he was alone.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The gunshots echoing through the trees sent a little trio of birds straight up into the blue sky.

Ellis couldn’t let himself be distracted by them, not while Colleen still had a gun, but his heart leaped in fear and the driving need to run toward that sound. It had to be Boyd and Kirsten. It had to be…

Them. Shooting. He couldn’t consider any other eventuality. Boyd was handling things there. So Ellis had to handle things here.

“Uh-oh,” Colleen said with a little pout. “Better run and see who it was.”

“I’m going to have to shoot you first.”

Colleen laughed. “You’re a Boy Scout, Sutty. You’re not going to shoot me if I don’t aim. You won’t be able to live with yourself if you kill me when I wasn’t making an active threat against you. You forget, I know you.”

He curled his finger around the trigger, keeping his aim steady and true. She didn’t know him. She never had. But she was right. He didn’t like the idea of killing her if she wasn’t posing an active threat.

But there was something she didn’t understand.

“I don’t have to shoot to kill.” Before he’d even finished the sentence, he pulled the trigger, aiming for her. In the same fluid motion, he charged. As long as the shot caused her to drop the gun, he could tackle her and immobilize her, and then once he found some way to tie her up, he’d find Boyd and Kirsten and make sure the gunshots weren’t…

He didn’t let himself finish the thought. Her hand was too small of a target to know for sure he’d hit exactly where he wanted.

But he’d always been an excellent shot.

He wasn’t sure where the bullet hit, but it had to have been close to where he’d aimed since Colleen screamed out in pain, and even better, dropped the gun. He was halfway across the yard. He’d reach her before she had a chance to pick it back up.

Still, he knew that wouldn’t be her only weapon, and she was still on her feet.

So he ran harder and then leaped, tackling her before she could reach any other weapons or leap for her own gun in the snow. He had her face down in a pile of it, and though she struggled pretty effectively, Ellis kept her under control by using his body weight. He ripped the tie from his coat hood out and used it to bind her arms. It wouldn’t hold forever, but it bought him some time to dig around in her coat pockets.

He wasn’t surprised to find duct tape and zip ties. But he was grateful. He replaced his makeshift tie with her zip tie, then moved down to her feet. She wouldn’t be able to do anything like this.

He rolled her over onto her back. Her face was red and wet. She was gasping for air. Wriggling against her bonds. But thankfully, they held her tight.

“I hope she’s already dead,” Colleen spat at him. “I hope you find her with a damn hole in her head.”

Before Ellis could respond to that, or—even better—walk away, he heard someone behind him. He whirled, ready to shoot.

But it was Boyd. And Kirsten. His knees nearly gave out as Kirsten rushed over to him.

“Colleen,” Boyd said as he reached them. He looked down at her. “Long time, no see.”

“You’ll all be dead soon enough,” she replied, but Ellis didn’t think she was so much certain as refusing to admit defeat.

“Doubt it. We took care of your backup group already.”

“There’s no way you took out five men by yourself, you arrogant…” But she trailed off, realizing her mistake.

“Wow, you really are good at this,” Ellis muttered sarcastically. “Just as good as any FBI agent.” He checked the rest of her pockets, ignoring the way she tried to put up a fight. He pulled out a phone and a knife and more bullets. He checked her boot, found another knife. He handed them all to Boyd.

When he was satisfied she was completely disarmed and not getting out of those ties anytime soon, and certainly not on her own, he got to his feet. And immediately put his arm around Kirsten, walking her away from Colleen. Boyd fell into step on his other side.

“Okay, so we’ve got to find three,” Boyd said in a low voice Colleen couldn’t hear, though she was bellowing enough she wouldn’t be able to hear much of anything. “We took out two. One for me, one for Bull’s-eye over here.”

Ellis looked down at Kirsten in some surprise. “I didn’t freeze up,” she said, leaning into him. “But I did close my eyes.”

He squeezed her tight. “Don’t do that again.”

“So I told her,” Boyd muttered.

“Boyd is hurt, Ellis. He keeps saying he’s fine, but…” Kirsten gestured at Boyd, who Ellis realized had been keeping his left arm out of view.

“It’s nothing,” Boyd said. “I’ve had worse walking down the street.”

Ellis believed him, more or less, but with three men still out there, they needed help. And Boyd would need medical attention. “I’m still calling in backup.”

“Okay, but if the cops show up? Or worse, the FBI? I’m disappearing, and I was never here.”

“Why…?” Ellis shook his head. He didn’t have time to get to the bottom of whatever Boyd was hiding or running away from. He had to get Kirsten to some kind of safety before the three guys still out there got to them. “How the hell did she con five guys into helping her?”

“If she was hooked up with the Carusos, she knows how to find violent people desperate for money.”

Ellis supposed he couldn’t argue with that.

“Couldn’t we just lock ourselves in the cabin and wait for backup to arrive?” Kirsten suggested.

Ellis could lock her up in there. And Boyd. Boyd was hurt. It’d be better if they were maybe in that cellar, safe. But if someone got through him…

He didn’t have time to finish that thought or come up with a plan. He heard it, a second too late. Boyd must have too. Because almost in time with the echoing sound of the gunshot, Ellis felt pain rip through his shoulder and knock him into the cold, icy snow. Hard.

Kirsten’s scream echoed louder than the gunshot.

BOYD HAD GRABBED HER, tossed her onto the ground. She crawled through the snow toward Ellis lying there, but Boyd had a grip on her leg and wasn’t letting her get far enough.

“We have to disable the shooter first,” he shouted at her.

He said it maybe twice, but she couldn’t process the words. Not when it was just like her dream. Her memory. Ellis, blood pouring out of his shoulder. Only here it was making the white snow red.

And he was so still. So still.

“Kirsten.” Boyd managed to get a good enough hold on her leg to drag her back to where he was huddled at the side of the house, a kind of makeshift barrier between the shooter and them.

But Ellis was out there in the snow not moving and—

She tried to suck down a sob.

“He’s okay,” Boyd told her, squeezing her arm hard enough it hurt. “Look at his hand.”

Kirsten searched for his hand, but it was so hard to see past the pool of red in the snow getting bigger and not just start screaming. Then she saw his hand. Very carefully arranged in a thumbs-up position. He was being still on purpose. So as not to draw any more fire.

“There’s two in the trees there. We don’t know where the third guy is, but that’s okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,” Boyd said, his clear-cut and calm instruction doing something to help her find some calm. “You’re going to carefully get to the front door of the cabin. You get inside, then shoot the gun out the front door. It’ll be enough of a distraction Ellis and I will get up and run. Then we’ll all huddle down in the cabin and wait for backup. Okay?”

She had to close her eyes and not think about the amount of blood Ellis was losing. Okay. Okay. Walk to the front of the building, get inside, shoot.

Maybe she didn’t understand how that could possibly work, but she’d do it. If it got them all in the cabin safe and able to take care of Ellis, she’d do anything. She’d trust Boyd to make the right choices to save Ellis.

Bloody, still Ellis.

She shook away the thought, forced her eyes open and met Boyd’s intent gaze. She gave him a nod and then managed to get to her feet and creep along the side of the cabin. She didn’t feel the cold or the gun still in her hands. She didn’t feel anything except the need to do what she’d been told.

She peeked around the corner, surveyed the swath of snow and land. No one. So she grabbed the key out of her pocket, took a breath to steady herself, then rushed forward to the cabin door. She jammed the key in, shaking only a little, and then managed to get it open.

She stumbled inside. Part of her wanted to slam the door shut, curl into a ball, and just cry. Ignoring everything else.

But she would not leave her husband to die. So, she had to follow Boyd’s instructions. Shoot the gun. Be a distraction.

But before she could, someone was in the doorframe. Everything in her seized. It wasn’t Boyd or Ellis, but she knew that face.

She saw a flash from the house. From Chicago. It was the same guy. The same guy who’d broken down her closet door, who’d had a gun pointed at her. The same guy, threatening to end her life once again.

She could hear his chuckle. She heard him say you won’t shoot—then or now, she wasn’t sure—but she didn’t want to figure it out.

She just pulled the trigger.

And she kept her eyes open this time, as the bullet went into his chest and he stumbled back. His gun rattled onto the floor of the cabin as he fell into the snow just outside the door.

She rushed forward to close the door, then remembered Boyd and Ellis. Before she could decide what to do, the man was pushing into a sitting position.

Laughing.

“You think we weren’t prepared?” he said, like he hadn’t been shot. Like he was superhuman or something.

Then it dawned on her that he was wearing some kind of vest. Some kind of protection. He moved, like he was reaching for another gun. Fury and terror pumped through her in equal measure. She shot again.

The bullet missed him completely.

He laughed again, and gunshots echoed from behind the cabin. She wanted to sob, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t let this be the end. She had to focus. She knew how to aim. She knew how to shoot.

She would protect herself and her husband this time. So she aimed at where a vest couldn’t protect. And she shot, three times to be sure.

She wasn’t sure how many bullets hit, but at least one, as the man cried out in pain, reaching for his shoulder.

Not exactly where she’d been aiming, but she’d take it. Especially when Boyd and Ellis came around the corner. They were both bleeding, but not more than they had been.

Working in quick unison, they both crouched on either side of the guy, taking all his weapons off of him, even as he fought and groaned and thrashed.

Then they were both moving for her. Ellis pushed her deep into the cabin with his good arm while Boyd dropped their pile of absconded weapons inside the doorway. Without saying a word, they both moved around the cabin, locking doors, windows, setting up barricades.

Blood dripping down their arms. And Kirsten was in some kind of shock, because she could only stand in the middle of the room and watch them. She’d shot multiple men today. So had they.

But they were…all here. Okay-ish. Alive.

When Ellis finally came up to her, his eyes were serious, worried, but his complexion was far too gray.

“You should sit down,” he told her, and his voice was a little fuzzy, tinny. It was shock or hysteria or something, and she had to get a hold of herself, but all she could think was…

“You were shot again.”

“Survived it last time, I’ll survive this time.” He nudged her onto the couch, but she popped right back up. Something…finally getting through the shock. Survival maybe.

“Both of you sit,” she ordered in what she knew Ellis called her teacher voice. “We need to put pressure on your wounds.” She tugged his good arm until he sat on the couch. “We need to call—”

“I got a message to Zach. The cops are already here handling who we took out. EMS will be here any minute to patch us up.”

Ellis managed to grab her hand with his good arm. Squeeze. “Kirsten. It’s over, and it’s all okay.”

She knew it was true. Finally, really true. The three of them had taken out five guys with guns, and Colleen Fredericks.

Her legs couldn’t keep her upright, so she sank to her knees. Then pressed her forehead to Ellis’s knee and just cried. For two years ago. For now. For everything in between. She let it all go.

Because it was over, and on the other side of this was the future.

Epilogue

Christmas Day

Ellis woke up to the now familiar throb in his shoulder. It was annoying beyond the telling, but it was a price he was willing to pay for where he was now.

Colleen was in jail. Her merry band of hit men either in the hospital still or rotting in jails awaiting trials.

There was no evidence the Caruso family knew or cared where Agent Ellis Sutton was. He’d never been the surprise he thought he’d been, so he wasn’t a target.

He could almost thank Colleen for taking that black cloud out of his life.

Almost.

Because he was at home with his wife. Not their house in Chicago anymore, but the little house outside of Hope Town he’d bought—with Zach’s help—quickly enough they’d been able to move in two days ago.

Just in time for Christmas.

They hadn’t had time to furnish it much beyond a bed yet, but Kirsten had filled it full to the brim of Christmas decorations. She fluttered around him like he’d been shot to the brink of death, not just suffered one little gunshot wound to the shoulder.

But he didn’t mind so much. He didn’t mind anything. Waking up to Kirsten every morning was worth anything and everything.

Boyd had left for Tennessee after a few days recovering from his own wound—a little more than the scratch he’d claimed, but not as bad as Ellis’s.

They’d keep in touch this time. They’d visit.

Because his life wasn’t stuck anymore. He wasn’t hiding anymore. It was a life and he got to live it.

Groaning a little at the pain, Ellis got up and went to find Kirsten. Okay, and a pain pill. Not the one the hospital had prescribed—those made him loopy and it was Christmas. But something over the counter to take the edge off.

He wasn’t surprised that she was in the kitchen. They’d opened their gifts to each other last night—he’d ordered her everything he could think of to stock the kitchen with the things she’d want. She’d had the recliner he’d always wanted—and she’d always refused because of aesthetics—delivered.

When she saw him, she quickly tsked. “Sit down. I’ll bring you your pills and some coffee.” She crossed over to him, no doubt ready to pull him into his chair.

But he didn’t let her budge him. He wrapped his good arm around her, held her still.

“Merry Christmas,” he said, then pressed a kiss to her mouth.

She let the kiss linger, then pulled away, trying to frown disapprovingly at him no doubt, but she was all smiles.

“Merry Christmas. Now sit.” She pushed him into the chair, then fussed about his bandages, his sling, his pain pill. She brought him a plate piled high with a Christmas breakfast fit for a family of ten, not two.

When she came back with her plate, he pulled her onto his lap with his good arm. So, after two Christmases alone and miserable, Ellis Sutton ate this Christmas breakfast with his wife on his lap, the Christmas tree lights twinkling everywhere. Her sigh of contentment was everything he could ever want. Well, almost.

“Maybe by next Christmas we’ll have a baby to celebrate with.”

She didn’t react right away. For a moment, she sat completely still. Then she looked at him, eyes a little shiny. “Are you sure? Because we can wait. We can—”

“I’m terrified. As terrified as I ever was. That didn’t go away. What went away was…the refusal to accept that. To share it. I’ll still worry and be afraid, but you know, maybe a good father should worry. So I am sure, Kirsten. Absolutely sure.”

She wrapped her arms around him, and he knew she was crying a little bit. But that was okay. Just like fear. Just like pain. It was part of life—part of a life well lived, and he wanted to live the best life he could.

And with her by his side, he knew he would.

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