by Dani Collins
“Me, too. Come here.” He held out his arms and she scooted into his lap.
He didn’t know how to process the awe that gripped him. It was too big. Bigger than anything he’d ever experienced.
“Marry me,” he said.
She bit her trembling lips and nodded shyly.
CHAPTER SIX
Present day
FREJA SWAM THROUGH piles of rustling silk to sit up, fighting to catch her balance as the vehicle made a few quick turns. She grasped the armrest on the door to steady herself and flashed a malevolent look at Giovanni.
“I want a divorce.”
“Lock the doors,” Giovanni said to the driver as his incisive glance landed on her hand where she gripped the door.
The hard click of the door locks sounded and the SUV slowed for a light.
“Put your seat belt on,” Giovanni instructed her.
She conjured her filthiest look. She didn’t want him dead, not in her heart of hearts. She wasn’t that kind of person. But with her eyes she urged, Die.
He released a short-tempered sigh and started to unclick his own belt.
She shot up a staying hand to hold him off and resentfully buckled herself. She refused to look at him. Not when he was over there oozing even more sex appeal than ever with that scruffy beard and his massive shoulders straining the fabric of his black hoodie.
She gave the catch of the door a useless, furious pull and let it thunk back into place.
“I know you’re angry,” Giovanni said in a tight voice, as though it pained him to say it. “You have a right to be.”
“Do I?” Her choke of disbelief nearly spat her tongue onto the floor. What a colossal understatement! “It’s so nice of you to give me permission to have feelings. Do you know what I give you permission to do? Only two guesses since it’s only two words.”
“You’re not that surprised to see me, Freja. You knew I wasn’t dead.”
“Oh, that makes it all better then.” She yanked every last inch of her skirt onto her side of the seat, gathering it all into her lap so not one stray bead or thread touched him.
“I was in a coma—”
“Until today?” She was being sarcastic, but concern clawed through her, forcing her to look at him. His color was good and he seemed as vital and healthy as always.
“For a week,” he allowed. “Someone was trying to kill me. Everett—” he nodded at the man before him in the passenger seat “—had to make a decision about whether to let them believe they’d succeeded. There were other factors that kept me in hiding after that.”
One week. That was the only thing that Freja processed. He’d been unconscious for one week. He must have known she’d been in hospital herself, but hadn’t made an effort to come.
She looked out the window again, refusing to let him see her tears. She swallowed back the agony that ached in her throat, ready to choke to death on it before she let him see how badly he could still hurt her.
“If they’d known I was alive, you would have become a target.” Giovanni was using that awful tone that urged her to be reasonable. “I’ll explain when we get where we’re going.”
“Don’t bother. I don’t care,” she lied, looking at her small reflections in the sunglasses he was wearing. “You might not be dead, but anything I ever felt for you is. You feel the same or you would have turned up sooner.”
“I’m here now.”
“Yes, and I was assured it would be a quick, clean, no-fuss conversation to pick you up,” Everett said with a testy smile over his shoulder. “Why did you run?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Fear of kidnapping?”
Despite the insulated interior, the sound of a siren penetrated. Before she could crane her neck to see whether it was the police and if they were in pursuit, the SUV ducked into the underground parking garage of a skyscraper. It stopped beside an open elevator flanked by two lean bodyguards.
Everett and the driver got out. The door was still locked beside her. She tried it despite the fact that the driver stood on the other side, ensuring she wouldn’t get very far even if she managed to exit that side.
“I’m taking you to my safe house,” Giovanni said. “We’ll talk there.”
“No, thank you.” She curled her hand around the strap of her seat belt where it crossed her chest.
The back of the SUV opened and Everett removed Giovanni’s wheelchair, then slammed it shut again.
“Look around you, Freja. You are coming with me. I’d rather it was your choice.”
“Are you listening to yourself? You’re not giving me one.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me, only to trust me that this was necessary. For both of our safety.”
Her vision blurred with instant, furious tears. Helpless anguish. “I can never trust you. Do you realize that? How could you even suggest it?”
“Have I ever hurt you?” he demanded tightly, then swore and looked away, seeming to realize as he said it that he was inviting the vitriol that climbed like bile into her throat. “I meant physically. Look, I’ve been waiting for the right time to resurface. I need to know you’re safe when word gets out that I’m alive. As of today’s debacle, it’s out. Please come with me and let me explain.”
She realized the ache in her other hand was from gripping her phone this whole time. All those people inside this tiny rectangle, all those “friends” who’d been so sympathetic, eating up her grief like bitter chocolate bonbons. Where were they now, when she was in real trouble? Not here.
She fingered her pendant, thinking of Nels. He was a reliable friend, but they weren’t exactly soul mates.
She didn’t have anyone. That’s what she’d come to terms with since Giovanni’s disappearance. For a few short months, Giovanni had encouraged her to believe they were a unit. The kernels of a small and growing family.
That fantasy had vanished as quickly as it had formed.
“I’ll go if you promise you’ll divorce me. I’m not staying married to you.”
A pause, then, “If that’s what you want, but we might have to wait a few weeks.”
“I’m not sleeping with you,” she blurted.
“I don’t expect you to.”
As his flat response struck like an anvil, splitting her down the middle like a chunk of redwood, she realized she had been hoping for more of a fight. Apparently, that’s not what this was.
The void of sorrow that had consumed her since his “death” closed in like a fog. Probably for the best. Giovanni had caused her too much emotional upheaval as it was. They needed closure and a clean break. Then she would finally stop crying over him. She would be able to speak without powdered glass in her throat. To breathe one breath that wasn’t so heavy with loss it nearly crushed her flat.
“Take your money back, too,” she said distantly. “I don’t need it and it’s just one more headache I don’t want to deal with.”
“Anything else?”
Oh, he thought he could take that sardonic tone with her? She blinked fast to see him through her matted lashes.
“Take off that ring. It’s a mockery that you’re wearing it.”
“You want to talk about mocking our marriage with what we’re wearing?” His pithy tone disparaged the meringue confection piled around her. “I promised you I would put it back on and never remove it again. I won’t break that vow. So no, I will not take it off.” He rapped a knuckle on the window and the locks were released. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Giovanni felt the familiar tink of metal to metal, his wedding ring grazing his hand rim as he rolled his wheelchair aboard the customized, unmarked, military-grade helicopter. He anchored his chair into its spot next to her seat.
He had insisted Everett retrieve the ring the minute he was conscious enough to comprehend all that had happened. He’d promised
Freja he would put it back on his finger and never remove when she’d caught him without it. That had been minutes—twenty or thirty at most—before the explosion that had “killed” him.
Freja was watching Everett come in behind them and start to take the seat across from her. Her stiff profile was unnaturally ashen, not a version of her typical ivory skin tone, and not the clean, snowy white of her gown. She looked like bone china—delicate and translucent.
“Everett.” Giovanni jerked his head toward the door.
Everett’s face tightened, but Giovanni didn’t relent. Get me that ring and I’ll do everything you ask. He had. For three months he’d played dead, allowing Everett to identify the mole who’d set him up. That was over now. Giovanni had bought his freedom fair and square.
His promise to stay off grid had been a small bluff in the first place since he couldn’t exactly hike out of the mountains on his nonexistent feet, but he would have turned himself into the most intractable asset anyone could have imagined if Everett hadn’t done as he asked.
If I steal that ring and only that ring, she could become suspicious and deduce that you’re alive.
That had been Giovanni’s goal.
“I’ll catch the next one, then,” Everett said with caustic mockery.
“Collect Freja’s things from her hotel,” Giovanni suggested. “Settle up at the wedding shop. I’m sure they’ll have questions.”
Everett muttered something as he rose, but Giovanni had higher priorities than to worry about Everett’s disgruntled cleanup of the mess his wife had made.
The doors closed and they were alone in the small cabin.
Freja nervously turned the flashy engagement ring she wore.
The dress, the diamond ring, the heart emojis beneath the professional engagement photos... Giovanni had seen all of her effusive posts as the acts of war she intended them to be. Every single one had landed like mortar shells in the middle of his angry, aching heart.
They’d both been wildly happy and gut-wrenchingly miserable in those weeks between their quickie wedding and their final confrontation. He had thought those strained days had been the limits of hell he could endure. He’d been proven so wrong.
“I should have come with you that day,” Giovanni said gravely. Humbly.
Around and around the ring was going, faster and faster. “You sent me to your room to wait like a child.”
He’d been in unstoppable agony over how badly he’d handled that day. Impatience had been driving him. He hadn’t wanted to wait for Everett’s latest reports on the contacts he’d made. He’d wanted all of this over so he could properly devote himself to his marriage.
He’d taken a stupid risk and paid the price.
“I was coming after you. That’s why I survived. I was supposed to meet someone, but it was a setup. The café was completely empty except for explosives, not that I knew it. After our argument, I suspected you wouldn’t wait for me. I started back to the hotel instead of going in. When I turn to leave, they panicked and hit the detonator. Since I wasn’t in the center of the blast, I only suffered a few broken bones and a concussion.”
“And a coma.” She kept her chin tucked as she sent him an appalled look, the first sign of concern he’d seen.
“Induced. They were worried about my spine. Once the swelling went down, they brought me out. By then, Everett had pronounced me dead.”
He waited for her to say she was glad he’d survived, but he had a grim sense he would wait a long time to hear those words, if he ever did.
She folded her hands in her lap, very much the contained, enigmatic Freja he knew so well. She’d been kidnapped by her resurrected husband and she only wore a pinched thoughtfulness around her white lips and had her brow furrowed in thought.
The most hysteria she’d revealed today had been the moment when Everett had approached them as Giovanni had pulled her into the back of the SUV. Her fists had clenched into Giovanni’s hoodie, whether seeking protection or refusing to be torn from him he didn’t know, but he held tight to that instinctive reaction, desperate for it to mean she still felt something for him despite her claims to the contrary.
“I walked into that hotel room and saw the ring and I was so angry.” Her voice panged. “I took it and left. Walked outside and a couple from Tuscany was leaving to catch the ferry back to Italy.” Her voice grew dull and so empty he felt the cavernous chill in his chest as she continued. “When we got to the slip, everyone was talking about the blast. I realized it had happened close to where I’d seen you and tried calling. People were tweeting. There was a picture of a wheelchair lying in the street.”
“Freja.” He tried to take her hand.
She shook her head, elbows tight to her ribs, voice choking up. “I went to the hospital and was told a man with no legs had been brought to it, but he was expected to survive. Then someone else pulled me aside and said you were dead, but they wouldn’t let me see you.”
“If I had been conscious, I wouldn’t have let them do that to you.” Everett had been suspicious of her presence there, unsure who he could trust until he had Giovanni well away from the area and conscious enough to tell him what had happened.
“I guess I went into shock because I was lying in a bed when someone handed me a bag with your clothes and wallet and passport. I remember staring at it, saying I thought it had been the worst thing in the world that you weren’t wearing your wedding ring when I saw you last. That man who’d brought it—he couldn’t have been an orderly. I don’t know who he was, but he was trying to be kind. He said you were wearing it. He swore he’d seen it himself, but said it couldn’t be removed without cutting and ruining it. You would be cremated with it, he said, and he was sure you loved me very much.”
Giovanni closed his eyes. “But you already had it.”
“And all I could think was, You liar.” She gave a broken laugh. “I asked what sort of arrangements I had to make and they were already made. Your things showed up from the hotel and I was flown back to Rome. It was all so very trouble-free,” she scoffed. “But when I unpacked your things, your little kit of fix-it tools wasn’t there. Which didn’t make any sense because I’d seen it on the dresser next to the ring. One of the little screwdrivers had been left out, as if you’d made a last-minute adjustment before you left. Who steals an old, beat-up pair of calipers and a little screwdriver set? Your wheelchair showed up, rim bent and one of the small wheels missing, but the one thing you bring almost everywhere with you wasn’t there.”
“So you knew even before I had Everett get the ring.” He wouldn’t call it a relief, but he had hated that she had been lied to. That she had suffered. “I wanted to tell you, Freja. The minute I woke up and realized, I wanted you to know I was alive. Other lives would have been at risk, including yours. Taking back this ring was the best message I could send while also keeping it subtle enough it could be dismissed as a robbery if you decided to tell anyone.”
She was turning the engagement ring again.
“Will you take that off?” he requested.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m marrying someone else.”
* * *
Less than an hour later, the helicopter descended into a remote valley flickering with the reds and golds of autumn.
“Where are we?” Freja asked.
“Near the Swiss border.”
Seemingly out of nowhere, a structure came into her sightline as they touched down. The floor-to-ceiling windows were overhung with a long platform covered in foliage so the house had been mostly indiscernible from the ground. It was a modern mansion built into the mountainside overlooking the snake of a silver river in the valley bottom.
The rotors stopped and Giovanni went out ahead of her.
A trim middle-aged man with a crisp white tunic over dark blue pants waited with a woman o
f similar age. Their smiles faltered with surprise when Freja emerged in her massive gown.
“Freja, this is Kurt. He’s my physical therapist. His wife, Marie, is a registered dietician and keeps the house.”
“Nice to meet you,” Freja said with as much warmth as she could muster, shaking their hands. “I wonder if I could borrow a change of clothes?” she asked Marie.
“There’s a full selection in the guest room,” Marie said. “And fresh coffee and cake.”
“We’ll serve ourselves,” Giovanni said. “Take some downtime.”
The couple disappeared down a set of stairs to a lower floor of the pseudo-mansion.
“You’ve been staying here this whole time?”
“Yes.”
The location was incredibly beautiful. Private and peaceful with only the sound of birdsong and rustling leaves now that the helicopter had fallen silent. A light breeze carried a hint of autumn briskness, but the air tasted of forests and streams and earthy wildness.
Freja followed Giovanni up the gradual incline of a covered zigzag path. She gave up trying to keep the dress pristine and only picked up the front of the skirt so she wouldn’t trip, letting the rest drag behind her as she followed him to the veranda. A small dining table looked up the valley, and a collection of cushioned outdoor furniture was positioned around an unlit fire bowl.
Giovanni slid open the screen door into the house. The wide entrance easily accommodated his chair. The sill of the door was recessed so he didn’t even bump across it. Inside, the open-plan living area was arranged as most of his properties were, with airy spaces between the furniture. The kitchen had two sinks, one for standing, one for sitting, with room against the lowered counter to accommodate his chair. Since the house was built into the mountainside, the upper cupboards had translucent panels in the doors with lights behind to give the impression of sunlight coming in from that angle.