“She’s with him,” I stated to Aaron. “Let them know that she’s in imminent danger.”
“What?” he asked, but I lifted a hand to silence him when Mark’s muffled voice came across the line.
“How the hell would I have known that?” he barked.
The lines in Aaron’s forehead deepened. “What is he talking about?”
“It’s Remi. She’s talking to him. I don’t think he knows I’m on the phone. He took her, Aaron. He fucking took her.” My stomach turned as I said the words out loud.
Her gentle voice filled the air. “Do you really love me, Mark?”
“I’ve told you over and over that I have always loved you.” His growl elicited a feral response from me.
I needed to get to her, and more, I needed to get my hands on him.
Aaron and I stood there, our eyes trained on the phone as we held our breath and listened to her sweet-talk the fucking piece of shit who had duped us all.
“Let’s promise each other something, then,” she said. “I promise that I’ll never leave you if you promise to never hurt me again. It really scared me when you hit me in the driveway and I woke up in your truck, with no idea where I was or where we were going. Promise me that.”
Flames of rage engulfed me, but I managed to keep it together.
Mark must have responded, but it was too quiet to hear, and for several agonizing minutes, there was nothing but rustling and then the silence of an engine being cut.
Finally, Remi spoke again, giving me the greatest gift she ever could. “What are we doing here? I thought you sold this place when you decided not to open the second Rusty Nail.”
Bingo.
My head snapped up. “Let’s go.”
Remi
From what I’d been told, Mark had given up on his dreams to renovate the seventy-five-year-old brewery into a bigger and better version of The Rusty Nail and ended up selling the property at a loss. But, as we sat parked in front of the abandoned building, it became abundantly clear to me that was yet another on the long list of lies they’d filled my head with after the plane crash.
“You still own it?” I righted myself in the seat.
“I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. It was never going to be the second location I’d always dreamed of, but it did hold some good memories for me.” Mark winked as he leaned across the center console, reclaiming the space I’d put between us. “After all, this is where we had our first kiss.”
My stomach rolled as his evil grin inched closer to my face and his eyes zeroed in on my mouth. “Our first kiss?”
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I’d only been there once before he abandoned the project and we sure as hell hadn’t kissed. Unless…
“Oh, God. Is this where you kept me the first time?”
Realization slapped me hard as the pieces began to fall into place.
His lips brushed across mine, and despite the immense effort to remain stoic, I couldn’t help but gag at the contact.
“You know,” he said, oblivious to my reaction, “if one fucking cop had so much as questioned where I was the morning you went missing, I would have been fucked.” He laughed. “Everyone was so damn ready to accept that you had just panicked and taken off, they never even looked into it. Bowen, Aaron, your dad—no one gave it a second thought when I’d said I was working. And when I shut it all down at this place, they thought I was so torn up about what happened to you that I just couldn’t handle the extra work. The fucking truth was, I just didn’t want to get caught. The last thing I needed was a contractor coming in and stumbling into our special spot.”
I didn’t know what exactly our “special spot” was, and I sure as hell didn’t want to get out of this truck and find out. Scrambling, I pled, “Mark, my head is pounding. Please, can we just go home?”
His grin slipped as his eyes narrowed. “You already know we can’t.”
“Please, I swear, I’ll tell everyone that we’re together. I’ll ask Aaron to move out, tell Bowen I never want to see him again. We can start over, just the two of us, the way it should have always been.”
Victory sparkled in his eyes. “Just the two of us. I like the sound of that.”
“Me too,” I murmured. “It’ll be—” His mouth crashed to mine. Not a gentle brush of his lips, but a full-on assault, his teeth clattering against mine as his tongue forced its way inside.
Acid rolled in my stomach as he worked to deepen his kiss, and as much as I wanted to continue the charade in the hopes that it would buy my freedom, I couldn’t stand the way his lips felt. I jerked away, covering my bruised and busted lips with a trembling hand and shook my head.
