Passion: In Wilde Country: Book Two

by Sandra Marton

  “With the Electric Dance Company,” he said, before he had time to think.

  “The Electric Dance Theater.” She sat up against the pillows, her face alight with joy. “Classical ballet mixed with modern dance. You know. Kind of like the Alvin Ailey…” The rush of words came to an abrupt halt. “You already knew that about me,” she said, looking at him.

  A muscle knotted in his jaw.

  “No.”

  “Yes. You did.” Her eyes glittered with accusation. “You just said so. You said the name of the company.”

  Shit.

  Matteo sat up, pushed back the blankets, pulled up his jeans, and got out of the bed.

  “It’s getting late,” he said. “We need to get started.”

  “Look at me!”

  “I said, it’s getting…”

  She shot from the bed and scrambled after him, yanking her shirt down and her pants up.

  “You know things about me.” He headed for the bathroom door. She set herself between him and it. “What else do you know?”

  “I never said I didn’t know things about you.” His hands closed on her shoulders; he lifted her as easily as if she were a doll and set her aside. “I’m going to get washed.”

  “You are not going to get washed! You are going tell me everything!” She slipped around him, stood in front of him again. “Who I am. Where I live. Why I’m running.” Her chin lifted. “Why you’re running with me, or do you expect me to believe that’s what an ‘acquaintance’ would do for anybody?”

  He stared at her. She was furious. In his heart, he more than understood that fury. He also understood that there was nothing he could do to assuage it.

  “I can’t tell you anything more.”

  “More? More?” She barked out a laugh. “You haven’t told me anything!”

  “And you know the reason.”

  “The doctor’s instructions. Those damn instructions.” She said nothing for what seemed a very long time. Then she cleared her throat.

  “Will you answer one question?”

  He shrugged. “If I can.”

  “Is this… Was this the first time we…we had sex?”

  He considered batting the question aside by giving her a flip answer. No, he’d say. I’ve had sex before. Or, Now, Ariel, a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell. But the expression on her face, a heart-breaking blend of despair and confusion and desperation, tore at his heart.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “It’s the very first time…and I’ve never known anything like it.”

  Her face bloomed with color. She stared at him. Was she going to slug him? Or maybe throw herself into his arms?

  In the end, she did neither.

  Instead, her eyes filled with tears. She took a few quick steps back and sank down on the edge of the bed.

  “I hate this,” she said brokenly. “Not knowing. Not understanding. I hate it!”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” He moved quickly to her, knelt before her and took her hands in his. “I wish I could say some magic words and restore your memory.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m beginning to wonder… What if I never remember?”

  He’d thought of that, too, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

  “You will. I’m sure you will.”

  “See?” She looked at him. “You’re willing to offer some answers. Just not the ones I need.”

  “Ariel. You must be patient.”

  She snatched her hands from his and stood up.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to try and look into the past and see nothing?”

  Matteo rose to his feet. “It must be hell.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what it is. And if you understand that, why do you act as if I’m trying to pry the secrets of the universe from you when I ask, when I beg you to tell me things about myself?”

  “Honey, we keep having this conversation. The doctor said—”

  “The doctor said! I know what he said, but he’s not the one with a blank page for a brain. I feel like—like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, and isn’t that amazing,” she said, on a choked parody of a laugh, “that I can remember a—a dumb movie but not—but not—”

  Matteo reached for her. She jerked back.

  “How about one more question. One more answer. Can you manage that?”

  “Ask your question.”

  She clamped her teeth down on her bottom lip as she stared up at him. He felt like the villain in a bad movie.

  “Why?”

  Matteo blinked. “Why, what?”

  “Why did you come for me? Why did you believe me when I said I didn’t feel safe, that I felt as if somebody was after me?”

  Great. She’d asked the one question he absolutely didn’t want to answer.

  “That’s two questions,” he said, stalling for time.

  “It’s basically one,” she said, chin lifted, eyes locked on his. “Because that’s why you came for me. You knew something might—might happen to me, and you had to protect me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? That’s it? That’s your answer?”

  He turned toward the bathroom. “That’s my answer.”

  “Dammit!” Her voice trembled. “At the very least, I have the right to know who’s after me, and why.”

  For what felt like the thousandth time, he heard Stafford’s warning in his head. She had to regain her memory on her own. Okay. Maybe that was reasonable, but what became of reason when lives were at risk?

  He swung around. Ariel was breathing hard, her hair a wild tangle of golden silk around her beautiful, battered face.

  Her battered face.

  She’d almost been killed.

  He reached for her and gathered her against him. He held her for long minutes, working through what he’d say, how much she could handle, because she was right.

  She was entitled to the truth. Some of it, anyway.

  He rocked her gently in his arms, whispering soft words of reassurance, stroked his hand up and down her spine. Then he framed her face with his hands and drew back so he could look into her eyes.

  “There’s a man,” he said, striving to sound calm. “He wants you out of his life.”

  She looked at him in bewilderment.

  “What do you mean, out of his life? How am I in his life?”

  No way would he tell her the truth. How could he, when the truth, that she was married to a man who was inconceivably evil, was unthinkable?

  “I don’t know.” That was the truth. How a woman like this could have married Anthony Pastore was a mystery.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Believe me, I’d like to know the answer myself. You’re not his type—and he’s certainly not yours.”

  “But I’m in his life.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, caught her bottom lip between her teeth and took a couple of delicate nibbles. Distraught as he was, the sight made his belly knot.

  “And why does he—does he want me out of his life?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “You know him.”

  A statement, not a question. And he couldn’t deny it.

  “Yes. I know him.”

  “Because…?”

  “I knew him, growing up in Sicily. And he’s a—a former client.”

  Still more truths. Pastore was a former client since… Monday?

  Ariel stepped back. He let her do it even though he ached to hold her. Instinct, which had become his guiding force, warned him she needed space.

  He folded his arms, narrowed his eyes and watched her march from one end of the cabin to the other.

  He knew she was working over the details, the admittedly skimpy details, of what he’d told her. She couldn’t be satisfied with them. In her place, he sure as hell wouldn’t be, but he was counting on her to accept that he had, at least, told her something.

  After a couple of minutes, she turned and looked at him.

  “He wants me o
ut of his life.”

  “Yes.”“What you mean is, he wants me—he wants me dead.”

  The words were heart-stoppingly blunt. She deserved an equally blunt response.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And you with me. Because you’re helping me.”

  She was calm. Too calm. Maybe he shouldn’t have told her anything.

  “Matteo? You haven’t explained your role in all this.”

  “I told you. I’m an attorney.”

  “But not my attorney.” Her tone was even.

  He shrugged. “No.”

  “We’re acquaintances,” she said, with a look that said she didn’t believe him.

  “Look, I know how strange this must seem…”

  “Strange?” She strode to the fireplace, squatted before it and added wood to the sputtering embers. “That I’d have nothing in my possession except the business card of an ‘acquaintance’? That my ‘acquaintance’ would rush to my side, check me out of a hospital, drive me through a snowstorm, risk his life for me?”

  “Ariel. We’ve been over this before.”

  She rose to her feet, brushed her hands off on her pants, then planted them on her hips.

  “Indeed we have. And it still makes no sense.” She glared at the flames building on the hearth as if they were her enemy. “Terrific. It seems I know how to make a fire.” She all but marched to the table, dumped out the contents of one of the bags of clothing. “Mine?” she said, holding up a pair of jeans.

  Matteo cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

  She nodded, sorted through the stuff, snatched up a T-shirt, a pair of socks and panties. She looked at him, her eyebrows rising.

  He felt tongue-tied. A little while ago, he’d had some of… Hell. He’d had the best sex of his life. Now the woman who’d been in his arms was looking at him as if they were strangers.

  “I had to guess at the stuff you’d want,” he said, “and the sizes.”

  “For an acquaintance,” she said coldly, “you did very well.”

  She strode into the bathroom and slammed the door. He heard the sound of water running into the sink, and he sank down in the hair-shirt chair, legs apart, and stared at the fire.

  Man, what a mess.

  What he’d told Ariel was true: he wasn’t her lawyer. So what? In a very real sense, he’d assumed responsibility for her as if he were her lawyer, and one of the most basic rules of law was to remain professional in your dealings with a client. In other words, avoid personal involvement.

  Personal, as in taking her to bed.

  He should never have done that.

  As if he could have kept from doing it.

  He’d been involved, for lack of a better word, the minute he’d seen her sitting in that booth, trembling, frightened, the object of her husband’s scorn.

  The truth was, the scene in his office Monday morning, Tony storming in, demanding to know where she was, had only jump-started things. The call from the hospital had been all he’d needed to push him over the edge.

  He’d felt something for her from the beginning, even knowing she was Tony’s wife. That she was married…

  Hell.

  Another complication. What would she think of him, when she finally regained her memory? He’d made love to her, even knowing she belonged to another man…

  The water had stopped running.

  He shut his eyes and imagined what she’d been doing, using a face cloth to wash herself because she couldn’t shower with that cast on. He could have helped her with that, but he figured she’d sooner go dirty than let him touch her right now.

  He closed his eyes.

  Would she have washed her hair, even one-handed? He figured the answer was yes, which meant she was naked, and her hair was curling wetly over her shoulders.

  His cock rose.

  Goddammit! She was upset and angry, and the best he could do was get a hard- on.

  Maybe the best he could do would be to kiss her out of that anger.

  She would respond to his kisses, just as she had a little while ago.

  He could open that bathroom door, take her in his arms, caress her breasts, taste her nipples, slip his hand between her soft thighs and feel her liquid heat against his fingers.

  The bathroom door swung open.

  Ariel stood framed within it. She was wearing the inexpensive clothes he’d bought her. Her hair was loose, damp and wild; her face was free of makeup. Every bruise stood out in vivid contrast to her satiny skin.

  His heart turned over.

  She was the most beautiful woman in the world. She was smart. She was tough.

  And she was his.

  No matter what happened next, she was his.

  “Matteo.” She took a step forward. “Forgive me. You’ve put yourself in jeopardy for me and I—I repay you by doubting your judgment.”

  “The only payment I want,” he said in a low voice, “is your happiness.”

  “I know that.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m so, so sorry…”

  “Never apologize to me. Never!”

  He opened his arms, and she went straight into them.

  * * *

  An hour later, they’d put another sixty miles behind them.

  Only one problem.

  He had no idea where they were going.

  The weather was better, but ominously dark clouds seemed to be reaching out toward them in the western sky.

  He was traveling blind. No GPS. No smartphone. He’d tried to get a map at the place where they’d gassed up and rented the cabin, but the guy behind the counter said they were all out of maps.

  He’d have felt better if he knew this area, but he didn’t. He knew a little about the Catskills, but these mountains were nothing like those. The Adirondacks were rugged. Mostly untamed. They were part of a multi-million acre wilderness dotted here and there with small towns.

  Why had Ariel come here?

  The answer was lost in the misty reaches of her memory, and while the answer might have been illuminating, he doubted if it would have changed anything. Pastore and his men were all that mattered. They were out there, somewhere, and without a plan, a place of safety, she and he were in constant danger.

  They stopped for coffee and breakfast sandwiches at a drive-through. He got a map at a gas station next door. All it did was confirm that there were few roads in the area and those that did exist led to places he’d never heard of.

  He could just as easily determine which would make a good destination by closing his eyes and pointing.

  Ariel took another antibiotic capsule. Her wrist was bothering her this morning. She didn’t say anything about it, but he saw her wince and touch the cast a few times. He convinced her to take a couple of ibuprofen. He wanted to ask if he’d hurt her last night, decided against it, and heard himself blurt out the question anyway, when they were on the road again after breakfast.

  “Your wrist,” he said. “Did I—did I hurt you last night?”

  He felt her looking at him and he turned toward her, but she was wearing the dark glasses he’d bought her and reading her eyes was impossible.

  “No,” she said softly. “You didn’t.”

  “Because if I did—”

  “You could never hurt me,” she said. She smiled. “You’re my knight in shining armor.”

  His throat constricted.

  Yeah, he was that, all right. He had agreed to help Pastore divorce her. Well, he’d changed his mind about that fast enough, but still, that was how all of this had started.

  If he was a knight at all, he was Sir Lancelot, making love to another man’s wife. The other man was no noble monarch, no devoted friend, but still there were such things as ethics and tenets and…

  “Matteo? What are you thinking?”

  He glanced at her and knew, that for all his moralizing, he would make love with her again as soon as they were alone. He wanted her in a way that was new to him, not just in his bed, but in his heart.

  “I
’m thinking that you look tired, cara. Why don’t you put your seat back and nap for a while?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t. She looked exhausted, but what good would it do to tell her that?

  “I don’t suppose…” He hesitated. “I don’t suppose any of this looks familiar.”

  “No,” she said in a small voice. “I wish it did.”

  So did he. He couldn’t keep driving aimlessly. He needed a place to go to ground. More than that. He needed to figure out how to evade a hunter. Everything he’d done so far had been part reflex, part stuff he’d gleaned from spy movies.

  He had no GPS or iPhone to call up a search engine. Well, what did people do in the days before Google and the Internet?

  They asked questions.

  Of whom?

  Of those who had the kind of information they needed.

  Yes, but who knew anything about hunters and evasion and protection?

  Simple. Caleb did.

  His half-brother. Caleb the Attorney who had once been Caleb the Spy, or so said the Wilde bunch. Caleb scoffed when they did, but he always got an uncomfortable look and, according to family lore, he’d even recently said, yeah, okay, maybe he had been a spook.

  Matteo glanced at Ariel. She was awake, eyes open and fixed on the road.

  “Honey?” She turned toward him. “That map I bought. Can you manage it, one-handed?”

  “Sure, as long as you aren’t fussy about me getting it refolded.”

  “Open it up. Find the closest town, or something that looks like a town. We passed a place called Mountain Run a little while ago. Something else should be coming up soon.”

  “I saw the sign.” The map crinkled as she spread it in her lap. “Mountain Run. Population 250.”

  “A metropolis, but I bet it was big enough to have a gas station or a convenience store.”

  “Puhleeze! Not more bad coffee!”

  She looked at him and made a face. As focused on their bad situation as he was, that cute little moue made him want to take his eyes off the road, lean in and give her a quick kiss.