Page 17 of Hunted in Hope Town

She was scowling at his back.

“As good as it can be,” he muttered.

“Get some rest. I’ll touch base in the morning.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.” He ended the call, turned back to her and all that frustrated energy waving off of her.

She looked at him. Eyes serious. Mouth grim. “I remember that feeling,” she said very quietly. “Being pushed aside.”

“I never—”

But she held up a hand, just like she used to do when they were fighting. Ellis wasn’t a stranger to this, flashes of her old self in this strange new shell. There’d been a time when he’d filed every single one away as a sign.

He’d stopped. Had to stop. But now she knew.

And there was danger at their door.

“I do remember things. Maybe they’re jumbled, but I remembered you being shot. I remember…pieces.” She pushed to her feet. “I was remembering before…this.” She said that as if she was trying to convince herself. She probably was.

He wasn’t sure he believed her. Or maybe it was he so desperately wanted to believe her and he’d spent the past two years denying just about every single want.

Except being in her orbit. That he hadn’t been able to deny himself. Now, he realized he should have. A better man would have. Left her to real WitSec. Or left her, period. She deserved better.

But he couldn’t go back and be a better man—a lesson he’d learned the hard way two years ago. He could only go on and be the best man he could be in any given moment.

In this moment, he would do everything to keep her safe. To keep her whole. And once they’d identified and neutralized the threat, well, then they could deal with her knowing.

“If you get some rest, we can go over whatever you’d like in the morning.”

She studied him, suspicious and angry. “I’m going to hold you to that,” she said.

He wanted to laugh.

She sounded very much like his wife right then.

Chapter Seven

Jessica woke up groggy and disoriented. The pretty little bedroom with the comfortable queen bed wasn’t familiar, but unfamiliar was damn familiar, wasn’t it?

Because it all came rushing back as she sat up in the bed.

She wasn’t Jessica. She was Kirsten. Kirsten Sutton.

Except she didn’t really feel like either name right now. She felt like some kind of scrambled in-between thing.

She knew there was some piece of Kirsten in her. Memories locked away, maybe, but they did pop out. And she’d known, this whole time of being Jessica, that her past was a blank. That there was something before this life she was living.

But she had embodied Jessica for two years, and still…knowing it was a lie made it hard to sit here and think of herself as that woman. Jessica Smith. Amnesiac bookseller. But that was a two-year life.

She had been Ellis Sutton’s wife for ten years. They’d been together fifteen years. They had loved each other.

They’d had sex, no doubt, which was an embarrassing thought, but it was just…the truth of the matter. They’d been married. He’d seen her naked. He remembered seeing her naked.

And she remembered him being shot.

She blew out a breath, trying to blow some of these thoughts away with it. She had to work through them, but she needed more information first, and she needed to know what this threat against her was going to entail.

She swung out of bed. The rancher—Noah Carson—who had driven them up here had told them to use whatever they found in the closets or dressers. That anything in this cabin was theirs to use. She wondered what made someone so…open to helping a stranger as she poked through the dresser and closet.