The Lion's Den (Faraway Book 2) (19 page)

I parked next to his car and took my ice cream with me as I walked to the side door. I knocked. I kept breathing. The feel of his body against mine flooded me again, and I held on to the side of the house to steady myself.

He opened the door and pushed the screen out toward me. His police T-shirt stretched across his chest, and I wanted to touch him. I fought every need and focused on the one screaming for the truth. “Are you okay?” He pulled me inside.

I surveyed the empty house. “Are you alone?”

Vince walked in front of me. He was reading me the way I’d been watching him the last few months. He knew so much more than me. “Yes.”

“Taste this.” I shoved the ice cream toward him and fought back tears burning behind my eyes. Vince stared down at the cup in my hand. “Taste it,” I said, and my voice cracked.

“Mar—”

“Mar.” I started to cry at the name. How could I not have remembered it before? He used to call me Maris.

Vince moved faster than I could stop him. His arms were around me, but I moved back.

“How could I?” I faced him. I faced the unknown, and it was crushing me with need and longing and disgust for what I’d never thought I was capable of. I took a spoonful of the ice cream from the cup and placed it in his mouth the same way he’d fed it to me as I drove us around in secrecy. I watched as he swallowed it, never taking his eyes off me. “You have to help me.” The desperation in my words was too great for me to face.

“How?” he asked, and I wanted to cry.

“I need you to tell me the truth.” The tears came. They ran down my face, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Vince was the one who looked like he was in pain. “I need you to tell me what I have become.”

Vince shook his head, denying my judgements on the horrible wife I’d turned into sometime in the past year. No wonder I couldn’t remember. I was too ashamed to face it.

“What have you remembered?” he asked, his voice tight like the strings of a guitar.

I leaned against the wall behind me, needing something solid to hold me up. “The way your thigh felt against mine on the school bus to Philadelphia.” My eyes searched the room for my sanity. “How every day I inhale when you walk past me to trap as much of you inside my body as I can, because it warms me even when you’re walking away.” Vince stayed silent. His chest rose with every breath. “What your skin felt like beneath my hands.” The ice cream was cold in my hand. “And tonight, I remembered making love to you in the back of my car.”

I waited for the dam to break, for the tears and the screams of horror to come, but they left me staring at him and burning inside.

He took my face in his hands and searched my eyes for something, but he knew so much more about what was inside me than I did. He kissed me, and my head fell back to let him. His tongue in my mouth ignited something inside me. I wanted to climb up him. He forced me back against the wall and ground against me, and I knew to the center of my core what it felt like to make love to this man. He was a part of me.

I raised my hand to his chest and pressed against it.

He released me and took a step back. Self-hatred overcame my need for him. “You’re not a whore.”

I could barely face him. “Says the man I was having an affair with.”

“
WE CAN’T STAY HERE,” VINCE
said. He was watching the cars go by on the street in front of the house. “Someone will recognize your car.”

“Stupid car.”

“Do you remember the cabin?” His voice was soft and filled with patience.

“No.” I only risked one word. My composure was fleeting.

Who am I?

“I’ll drive your car. I’ll answer all your questions when we get there.”

I let the question break through my silence. Tonight I would face my past, even if I couldn’t face myself. “Why there?”

“Because that’s where we used to meet. It can’t be seen from the road.”

The sick feeling of lying crept back into my throat. It sat there the same way it had when I’d found the cash in my tampon box. I followed him to my car. It was dark already, and I hoped no one recognized me with him. Vince moved the driver’s seat back and drove out of his driveway. I waited to see which way he turned, hoping something would come back to me, but nothing did. He made a left after the lake and headed out of town.

“I talked to your wife last week.”

He kept driving. I was sure he heard me, but only because I was more sure of him than I was of myself.

“I swore to her that you weren’t seeing anyone else. That no other woman calls you or comes to visit you at the station.” The conversation replayed in my head and made me sick.

Vince reached across the truck seat and grabbed my hand. Love radiated from his touch and was followed by the realization it belonged to someone else. He was another woman’s husband—not mine. I knew he was watching me, but I stared out the window into the darkness. I preferred it to the darkness in my mind.

My phone rang, and I searched through my bag to find it. “It’s Jenna.” I said before answering the call. “Hi,” I said to her, remembering I was supposed to call her.

“Are you okay?”

“I am. It’s just a headache.”

“You should go back to your doctor. Have you had any others since the accident?”

“No. This is the first one, but I’ll call him tomorrow.”

“Promise me you’re going to go to bed.”

I glanced over at the colonel as he drove down the desolate road. “I promise. I’ll call you in the morning. Good luck.”

I hung up and stared down at my phone. The one I’d saved his number in under Jenna’s name.

The colonel pulled onto a hidden lane and jumped out of the car to open a gate about fifteen feet off the road and in the woods. Once through it, he stopped again and locked it behind us. When he climbed back in the car, he looked at me expectantly, and I shook my head. Nothing. Not one memory came back of ever having been here.

I followed Vince into the cabin. I wrapped my arms across my chest to fight off the cold. Vince walked into the back room and came back out with a police sweatshirt for me to wear.

“I wasn’t expecting you. I’ll get the fire started.”

I put the sweatshirt on and inhaled deeply Vince’s scent from its fabric.

“Would you like a beer or some whiskey?” he asked as he lit the corners of the newspaper he’d just stacked logs on top of.

A shot of heroin.
Was anything strong enough to get me through this conversation? “I guess I’ll start with a beer.” I turned toward the refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen. “Can I get you one?” I didn’t know if he drank, or if he drank beer. How could I know what his dick felt like in me, but not know if he liked beer? I was a whore.

“Yes. Thanks.” He was still kneeling in front of the wood-burning stove, nursing the fire.

I used the bottle opener screwed to the wall and handed him one.

“Let’s go in here,” he said and led me into the adjacent room. It had a coffee table, a bunch of unmatched chairs, and three sets of bunk beds lining the walls.

“What is this place?”

He laughed. “That’s the first thing you asked me the very first night you came here.”

I turned to him, jealous of his memories. “When was that? When did
this
start?” I felt so safe with him. As if he could protect me from whatever I’d become.

“A little over a year ago was the first time.” His eyes bore into me, threatening to swallow me with their intensity. “It was the first time we were here together.”

“Where were we before that? How did this begin? What did I do?” The questions fell from my mouth. He had the answers to the questions I never thought I’d have to ask. He was the one with the information. The one I had sex with who wasn’t my husband. He made me a whore, or I made him one. “Who else have you done this with? Why did I do this?” My voice was thick with the sobs that were forming in my chest. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Come sit down.”

I looked at the couch. I knew we’d had sex on it and probably every surface in this cabin, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I walked around to the front of the couch and sat down. Vince sat on the coffee table facing me. His knees straddled mine, his face only inches from my own. I took a sip of my beer, seeking a little bit of control I’d completely lost, along with the rest of the last year. “Talk,” I said.

He half-laughed at an inside joke I no longer understood. He was privy to our secret banter and the lost intimacy between us. I was jealous. “We met on the field trip.” His leg touched mine the same way it had on the school bus. “I wanted to be near you. From the moment you walked into the classroom and stood all by yourself and ignored every other mother in there, I was attracted to you.” I’d hoped not to speak to anyone, at least not about children, homework, carpool, and the dress code. “I’d never felt that way about another human being.”

I lowered my head. A shallowness caved in my chest. I’d wanted him, too.

“I needed to spend more time with you,” Vince continued. “But you said you weren’t the type to have an affair.” I sighed. I still wasn’t the type. “I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop myself. I finagled a way into your pool club. I made sure I attended parties I knew you were going to, and I followed you to the shore. But you still wanted no parts of me.”

I stayed still and memorized his words.

“And then there was an accident.”

Goosebumps covered my arms. Fear. I felt fear, followed by the urge to pull him close to me.

“Do you remember the accident?”

I reached up and touched his face where the blood had run down it. He rested his head in my hand. “You scared me,” I said with a weakened voice.

Vince closed his eyes. He was truly beautiful sitting with me. He was lovely and kind. But he wasn’t mine.

I dropped my hand from his face, and he caught it by the wrist. He held it in his and traced his fingertips over my palm.

“Was I the reason you left your wife?”

He stopped caressing my hand. “No.” I stared at him, not believing him, and he shook his head. “You were the reason I realized I needed to leave my wife, but even if we were never together, it was right. Lynn and I deserve better than what we had.”

He closed his knees together, pressing our thighs against each other. I rested my hands on his legs. The heat traveled from my hands, up my arms, and down my body. He affected me.

“Did you love me?” Even without remembering, I knew I loved him. I knew it the first day I’d returned to work. I knew it at lunch with him, and I knew it in the car with his wife. I’d been in love with him as long as I’d known him. I didn’t need my memory to know it.

Vince laughed.

“Is loving me funny?”

“Sometimes. Most of the time it’s frustrating. I’m laughing because you made me promise never to fall in love with you.” He rested his hands on top of mine on his thighs. “You tried everything to contain our relationship. To keep it manageable so you’d never be caught. You swore that the only way we could be together was if I never loved you.”

“Did it work?” His answer terrified me. All I wanted was for him to love me, even if it was wrong.

Vince’s hands moved up my arms, his heat settling beneath his fingers, warming me with every inch he touched. I watched as they caressed my shoulders, and I leaned my head back as they threaded in my hair. Vince leaned forward and touched his lips to my neck, setting me on fire. I inhaled deeply, trying to counteract the heat. His lips dragged up to my ear, and I brought my gaze down to meet his.

“No,” he said and kissed me. His lips and tongue moved slowly, tasting me for the second time, and I didn’t let myself think about anything but the way my body felt when he touched me. His tongue drove the warmth of Vincent Pratt back into me. He was everywhere. I could have lost myself in him, but he held me there in every way.

When he released me, I moved my hands to his chest. “Why didn’t you tell me before now? Why not the day you came to see me in the hospital, or at the shore?”

“Because the last time we were together before you . . . fell” He paused and looked down as if he still wasn’t convinced it was an accident. “Right before then, I promised you I’d never ask for another thing from you. I had told you that all you had to do was say the word and we’d be together, but that I’d never push you for more.”

“But you knew how I felt about you? You knew how much you meant to me. Why not just tell me?”

The colonel covered my hands with his own before dropping them on my legs between us. “Because I knew loving me made you hate yourself.”

I couldn’t hide the confusion from my face. Loving him was one of my deepest memories, or feelings, that still remained inside me. It rested right between the shame of letting down my family and trading my children’s happiness for my own. “I’m not the kind of woman who has an affair,” I whispered.

“I know.” He laughed a little, and the darkness lifted around us. “No one knows that better than me.”

“I’m sorry I did this to you,” I said, feeling responsible for the destruction of his family.

“I’m not.”

“How could we . . .”

“I don’t know. I need you to remember it, though. I need you to know how much we loved each other, how much we meant to each other.” He held my face in his hands and kissed me. I didn’t know if it was a memory, or a new emotion, but I loved him, and I knew I’d love him forever. “It’s impossible living without you. I still won’t ask you for a thing. If you’re happy, then this is the way it’ll stay. We’ll work together and be friends, nothing more.”