Period.
A rumor had started that her heart had been broken in New York and this was why she’d come west. The sympathetic looks directed her way after this story circulated were almost worse than the men’s relentless pursuit.
Things had calmed down after a few months. People had accepted that the new teacher was “standoffish,” but that didn’t stop them from being friendly and kind and concerned, though she suspected some of this was merely a front for their nosiness. People wanted to know her story and she had none to tell them.
She stopped at the only grocery in town to buy a frozen dinner and the makings of a salad, then drove the back way home. She tried to vary her route every few days, which wasn’t easy. There were only so many ways to reach the small house in a quiet subdivision three miles from town.
The house, painted pale green with buff trim, sat in the middle of the block. It had a one-car garage and a sharply peaked roof, and a covered front porch barely large enough for a single Adirondack chair, which still wore a dusting of snow from the last storm.
She unlocked the door and stood for a moment surveying the room. A sofa and chair, covered with a faded floral print, filled most of the small living room, the television balanced on an old-fashioned mahogany table with barley-twist legs. An oval wooden coffee table and a brass lamp completed the room’s furnishings, aside from a landscape print on the side wall. The place had come furnished. None of the items were things she would have picked out, but she’d grown accustomed to them. No sense changing things around when she couldn’t stay.
She stooped and picked up her mail from the floor, where it had fallen when the carrier had shoved it through the slot. Utility bills, the local paper, junk—the usual. Nothing was amiss about the mail or the house, yet she couldn’t shake her uneasiness. She eased out of the boots and padded into the kitchen in stocking feet and put away the groceries. She wished she had a drink. She had no liquor in the house—she hadn’t had a drink since she’d left New York. It seemed safer that way, to always be alert. But today she’d welcome the dulling of her senses, the softening of the sharp edges of feeling.
She put water on for tea instead, then went into the bedroom to change into jeans and a comfy sweater. Maybe she’d start a fire in the small woodstove in the living room, and try to lose herself in a novel.
The bedroom held the only piece of furniture in the house she really liked—an antique cherry sleigh bed, the wood burnished by years of use to a soft patina. She trailed one hand across the satin finish on her way to the closet. She stopped beside the only other piece of furniture in the room, a sagging armchair, and slipped out of the corduroy skirt and cotton turtleneck. Sensible clothes for racing after six-year-olds. Elizabeth would have laughed to see her in them.
She opened the closet and reached for a pair of jeans. She scarcely had time to register the presence of another person in the room when strong arms wrapped around her in a grip like iron. A hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her scream. Panic swept over her, blinding her. She fought with everything she had against this unknown assailant, but he held her fast.
“Shhh, shhh. It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.” The man’s voice was soft in her ear, its gentleness at odds with the strength that bound her. “Look at me.”
He loosened his hold enough that she could turn her head to look at him. She screamed again as recognition shook her and choked on the sound as she stared into the eyes of a dead man.
Jake Westmoreland watched the woman in his arms closely, trying to judge if it was safe to uncover her mouth. He wasn’t ready to release his hold on her yet. Not because he feared she’d strike out at him, but because he’d waited so many months to hold her again.
She was thinner than he remembered, fragile as a bird in his hands, where he’d never thought of her as fragile before. Her hair was darker too, cut differently, and the bright streaks of color were gone. He’d seen her picture, so he should have been prepared for that. But nothing could have really prepared him for meeting her again, not after the trauma of their last parting. For months, he hadn’t even been sure she was still alive.
“I thought you were dead,” she said when he did remove his hand from her mouth. Tears brimmed in her eyes, glittering on her lashes.
“I was sure Giardino’s goons would go after you next.”
“Your friends got to me first. But they never told me you were still alive. How? The last time I saw you...” She shook her head. “So much blood...”
They told him later he had died, there on the floor of the suite at the Waldorf Astoria. But the trauma team had shocked his heart back to life and poured liters of blood into him to keep his organs from shutting down. He’d spent weeks in the hospital and months after that in rehab—months lying in bed with nothing to do but think about her.
He brushed her hair back from her temples, as if to reassure himself she was real, and not a dream. “Elizabeth, I—”
The pain in her eyes pierced him. “It’s Anne. Elizabeth doesn’t exist anymore. She died that day at the hotel.”
He’d known this, too, but in the moment his emotions had gotten the better of him. He stepped back, releasing her at last. “Why Anne?”
“It was my middle name.” Her bottom lip curved slightly in the beginnings of the teasing smile he’d come to know so well. The old smile he’d missed so much. “You didn’t know?”
“No.” There was so much he hadn’t known about her. “Can we sit down and talk?” He nodded toward the bed, the only place where two people could sit in the room.
A piercing whistle rent the air. He had his gun out of his shoulder holster before he even had time to think.
She stared at the weapon with an expression of disgust. “Are you going to shoot my tea kettle?”
He put the gun away.
“Let’s go into the living room,” she said. She pulled a robe from a hook on the closet door and wrapped it around herself, but not before he took in the full breasts rounded at the top of her black lace bra, the narrow waist fanning out to slim hips—and the scar on her lower back.
“Your tattoo’s gone,” he said. She’d had the words Nil opus captivis at the base of her spine, in delicate script. Take no prisoners. The motto of a woman who’d been determined to wring everything she could from life.
“I had it removed. They told me I shouldn’t leave any identifying marks.”
She led the way into the living room, going first to the kitchen to turn off the burner beneath the kettle, then to the front window to pull the blinds closed. He sat on the sofa, expecting she would sit beside him, but she retreated to the chair, her arms wrapped protectively around her middle.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I still have friends at the Bureau. People who owe me favors.”
“No one is supposed to know where I am. They promised—” She broke off, her lips pressed together in a thin line. He could read the rest of her thoughts in her eyes. This wasn’t the first time the government had broken promises to her. What about all the promises he’d made?
“I never meant to lie to you,” he said. “I was trying to protect you.”
“You didn’t do a very good job of that, did you?”
He clenched his hands into fists. “No. Tell me what happened after I left. I heard you turned state’s evidence.”
“If you’re still with the FBI you should know all this.”
“I’m not with the Bureau anymore.”
She raised her brows. “Oh? Why not?”
“Officially, I was retired on disability.”
“And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, they thought I was too