Hitched and Hunted

“So you say.”

She lowered her voice to a growl. “The closest I ever came was living under your roof and letting you manipulate me into being your special project.”

“I gave you an education you sorely lacked.”

“My education was all part of the game you played with my life.” Anger overcame her lingering sense of shame. “It was all about you, all along. The puppeteer, pulling all the strings—”

His brows converged over his long nose. “Apparently I failed to teach you gratitude.”

“I’m grateful you helped me when I needed a hand.” She softened her voice. “But it should have ended there. It certainly didn’t give you the right to kill the man I loved because you could no longer control me.”

“It was an accident,” he said automatically. The declaration sounded no more believable now than it had when he’d first put it forward as his defense. “My foot missed the brake pedal. I’m very sorry about it.”

Hearing his insincere words of regret sickened Mariah. “I want you to leave me alone, Victor. You don’t need the trouble, I imagine.” He had to be on parole to be out of jail this early. He’d been sentenced three to five years, and he was out after only four.

“Neither do you, I imagine,” Victor countered blithely, his mouth curving in a cruel smile Mariah found horribly familiar. “I wonder, which of us will give in first?”

Before she could respond, he tucked his water bottle in the pocket of his jacket, turned on his heel and left the tent, heading out into the rain.

Mariah turned unsteadily back to the table and laid her hands flat on the hard, cool surface, trying to regain her balance. A soft swishing noise rose in her ears, and for a moment, she was afraid she was going to faint.

“Are you okay?” One of the other volunteers put her hand on Mariah’s arm.

Mariah nodded, her head beginning to clear. “Yeah. Just a head rush. I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” the woman suggested.

“Actually, I’d like to get some air,” Mariah countered, buttoning up her jacket. She pulled a baseball cap from her pocket and put it on, tucking her hair up under the fabric crown. Bringing the bill low over her face, she hurried past the puzzled woman and stepped into the rain.

She started walking east at a brisk clip, toward the subdivision where Jake had gone about an hour earlier to aid a man who’d flagged him down, seeking help for neighbors trapped in their storm-shattered home. He’d been away almost an hour now.

She needed to see him, and not because she needed something familiar and stable to calm her rattled nerves, though that was also true. She needed to know he was okay. If Victor had done anything to him, she wasn’t sure how she’d ever live with it.

Not again.

When she found him, she’d convince him to cut short their plans to help in the rescue and take her back home to Gossamer Ridge and their cozy bungalow overlooking the lake. She’d pick up her son Micah from the lake house where he was staying with Jake’s parents and never leave Chickasaw County again.

She never should’ve come back here in the first place.

When Jake had told her he’d signed them up for their first couples fishing tournament, she’d found the prospect exciting. He’d been the one who’d taught her to fish, who’d cheered her improvements and praised her skills every time she muscled a largemouth bass from around a stump or teased a finicky spawning female away from her eggs with an expert twitch of a lure. She’d worked hard to prove herself a good student, to make him proud, and the idea of fishing a tournament with him had seemed like a huge pay-off for her efforts.

She’d been a good sport about having to stay in a motel a half hour north of Flint Creek Reservoir since Jake had waited till the last moment to sign them up and had missed the chance at rooms closer to the lake. Since this trip was their first without three-year-old Micah, she’d even thought the extra privacy, away from the constant presence of their fellow competitors, might turn the trip into the honeymoon they’d never had the chance to take.

Until he’d told her they’d be staying in Buckley.

As she walked, Mariah also scanned the area for any sign of Victor. But he was nowhere in sight.

For a second, she entertained the welcome thought that she’d simply imagined his presence there, in the same place where she’d last seen him four years earlier. The last twelve hours had seemed like a harrowing nightmare rather than reality, as she and Jake had weathered the destructive storm unscathed, only to wake to find a community broken and mourning the tragic aftermath.

Maybe being in Buckley, this beautiful, horrible place she’d thought she’d left behind for good, had conjured up the phantom of Victor Logan after all this time. Or maybe it was the specter of violent death resurrecting long-buried memories, each broken body pulled from the debris and zipped into a body bag a stark reminder of that day, not so very long ago, when she’d watched paramedics back away from Micah Davis’s bloody, broken body and declare he was beyond saving.

Mariah faltered to a halt, the memories she’d tried to bury so long ago rising like bile to fill her mind with bitter acid.

Victor had run him down like a stray dog in the street. She’d seen it happen, could now remember every sound, every violent flash of motion and color. If she let it, the memory could play out in an endless, horrible loop, over and over until she felt madness creeping over her in greasy black waves.

She pressed her hands over her face, struggling to push away the memory. She had to keep it hidden, even from herself. It wasn’t part of her life now. It couldn’t be. Not if she wanted Micah Davis’s son to have a good life with the decent man willing to be his father, almost no questions asked.

Jake didn’t know anything about her real past.

And if she was lucky, he never would.

“Baby, are you okay?”

She looked up sharply at the sound, half afraid she’d only imagined her husband’s voice. But Jake stood a few feet away at the side of an unfamiliar street. She looked around, realizing she’d reached the damage zone more quickly than expected. She now stood across the street from a house the tornado had lifted off its foundation and set back down sideways. The side of the house now facing her had been ripped away, revealing the ruined interior of what had once probably been a nice family home. Emergency vehicles idled at the curb, lights flashing.

“Mariah?” Jake reached his arm out toward her.

Realizing she hadn’t answered his previous question, she swallowed hard and shook off the strange sense of unreality gripping her. Drenched and muddy, with a ripped-up windbreaker draped over his shoulder, Jake looked solid and real, dragging her into the present once more. He stepped past the emergency vehicles and hurried toward her.

She met him halfway, throwing her arms around his waist and burying her face into the damp heat of his shoulder.

“What’s the matter, baby?” His fingers moved lightly up her spine in a comforting caress.

She couldn’t tell him about Victor, of course, but after what she’d seen over the last few hours, she had plenty of ready-made excuses for her shaken state of mind. “This place is just getting to me.”

He cradled her face between his grimy hands. “I know. But we’re doing good things here.” He gestured toward the house. “We just rescued a family of four. Looks like they’re all going to be okay, but if they’d been stuck in there too much longer—”

“I know we’re doing good things.” She looked into his smoky blue eyes to ground herself. Worry faded from his expression when she smiled at him. Sweet Jake, so willing to believe every word she said as long as the lies she spun maintained the little cocoon of safety and comfort they’d weaved around each other.

What would happen to them if Victor ripped it apart with the ugly truth of her real history?

“Could we take a break? Just for a little while?” She looked around them, eyes open for any sign of Victor. But wherever he’d disappeared to, it wasn’t here.

“Sure, we can do that.” He stroked her hair. “We could go back to the truck for a bit. Maybe dig through the stuff we threw in the cooler this morning and put together an early lunch?”

She smiled at the suggestion, reminded that there was little that could go wrong in Jake’s world that couldn’t be solved with a snack. She wondered what it was like to have lived a life so blessedly free of care.

Jake threaded his fingers through hers, tugging gently. She fell into step with him, feeling better as they moved through the busy search-and-rescue area without catching sight of Victor again. They had almost made it back to the staging area on the edge of the makeshift parking lot when a woman came running toward them down a side street that had seemed to escape any of the storm damage.

The woman caught sight of Jake, her eyes fluttering with relief. “Please, my daughter—” She grabbed Jake’s arm. Mariah saw that the woman’s hands were filthy and scraped raw.

The woman looked terrified. Mariah’s stomach knotted in sympathy as she slipped off her own jacket and wrapped it around the shivering, rain-soaked woman’s shoulders. “What happened?”

“My daughter—our dog just had puppies and hid them before the storm. We couldn’t find them before it hit—” The woman moved her hands away from Jake’s arm and grabbed Mariah’s hands instead. “There’s a creek behind the house. She was afraid they could’ve gotten down there—I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Did she fall into the creek?”

The woman was gasping now, from agitation and the exertion of running for help. “All the rain—the bank just gave way—and now she’s just hanging there, and I can’t get her up.” The woman stopped for a hitching breath. “I don’t know how long she can hang on—and the creek’s up!”