Page 20 of Hunted in Hope Town

She stirred absently at her oatmeal again, still not taking a bite. “Living the dream.”

She said it just like she used to. Wry humor, but not bitterness. She’d supported his dream.

Until she hadn’t. He tried to breathe through the pain, but it just kept doubling him over. Because he couldn’t escape it up here like he could down in Hope Town. He could keep his distance. He could not interact.

“What?” she asked, like she could read his thoughts.

She had been able to once, more or less.

“You’ve said that before,” he managed to explain. “Living the dream. When you weren’t too happy with the demands of my job.”

She seemed to consider this with a lot of gravity, then began to nod. “I may not remember everything, but I am her. Underneath whatever…traumatic brain damage there is or whatever. Believe me, I’ve thought a lot about…the person I was in the places I don’t remember. It felt like two separate people then, but now that I have this name, now that I know…you were part of that past, it feels less like that, and more like… I can reach whoever I was. Under the right circumstances.”

“What would be the right circumstances?”

She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

So do I.

Chapter Eight

After coffee and breakfast—a strange thing to do with another person, especially as natural as it all felt. And unnatural. And exhausting because the mental loop Jessica’s mind was running in never stopped—they went back into the little room with his…crime map wall or whatever.

She stared at the different dates, places, people. It was mostly gibberish. Chicago. A bunch of guys with the last name Caruso, or people with Agent in front of their names. There was nothing recognizable to her, not really.

She frowned because she’d at least kind of hoped that talking about this past she didn’t remember would jog memories after two years of being hidden from her past. She wanted it to be that simple, and even knowing it was foolish, she’d hoped.

But that hope was dashed because none of this made any sense. These men. Her husband. “So, these are the ones in jail,” she said, scanning the list. “Which one shot you?”

“He’s not on that list. The one who shot me is one of the ones who disappeared in the fray that night.”

“So, he’s on this list.” She turned her attention to the list of names of men who hadn’t been arrested or tried. “He’d be your top suspect, right? Come back to finish the job?”

Ellis shook his head. “He’s not on any list because he died last year.”

“Oh.” She huffed out a breath of frustration. “Well, so much for me being a genius investigator.”

He laughed, the sound warm and rich. She realized even in the past two years she didn’t have much memory of him laughing. Even the smiles he’d given her had been polite. Warm, but…not whatever this was that crinkled the skin around his eyes and warmed her from the inside out.

It felt like a coup to make him laugh, and she didn’t know if that was memory over it being a difficult endeavor or just the situation they were in.

“I’m leaning more toward the guys who were tried and weaseled their way out,” he said. “I put them through more, and there’s no risk for them. They’ve already been tried. The guys who disappeared? If Caruso didn’t have them taken care of himself, it’d be a bigger risk for them to threaten me than to just keep laying low.”

There were three names on that list. “But wouldn’t having been tried for something mean they know any retribution could come back to them?”

“That’s not really how the Caruso family works. They’ve gotten away with way more than I ever tagged them on. Besides, they could easily use lower hanging fruit to make the actual threats.”

Threats. She was trying to focus on that, on mobsters and danger, but her mind kept circling back to being married to this man.

“Why were you doing undercover work if it put me in danger?”

She watched him carefully in the silence that followed. He kept his gaze on the wall, but his jaw tensed. Everything about him tensed. And he took his time answering, like he was carefully weighing every word.

That too felt all too familiar.

“It wasn’t supposed to. It’s not like I was coming home at night. I was deep undercover. The only way they tracked me to you was if they had some kind of inside intel.”

“Like an inside person?”