Exposed - My Mountain Man Protector Read online

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  EXPOSED

  My Mountain Man Protector

  By Alexa Ross

  And

  Holly Rayner

  Copyright 2017 by Alexa Ross, Holly Rayner

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.

  All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

  Table Of Contents:

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  CHAPTER ONE

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  Five more seconds and I would’ve been dead.

  I closed my lips, inhaled through my nose slowly, and then exhaled. I tried to exhale away the realization that ripped through my head every few minutes, whenever I forgot just why I was driving. I was driving to escape my husband. My husband who wanted to murder me. My husband who, after I saw him shoot a man, had chased me to my car.

  I’d gotten in my car with five seconds to spare. Five more seconds and I would’ve been dead.

  I glanced at the car screen, feeling my heart fall even though I knew already. No one had texted me. They couldn’t have. I had my phone in airplane mode. I couldn’t have Angelo finding me.

  I pressed my foot harder into the gas pedal. Beautiful landscapes rolled past my side window: an evergreen sea of trees, a good-day blue sky. In my back window a sunshine-yellow car gleamed.

  And yet all I could feel was fear. I pressed on the gas pedal until I was going 85, which was 10 over the speed limit. Any more and I’d have been a cop magnet; I was driving a red Jaguar, after all.

  And if I was stopped and Angelo got called in—or even if I was stopped at all—that would have been it. It all would have been over.

  As worry burrowed through me, I inhaled and then exhaled, and then I did it again. But slowing down my breathing wasn’t enough. I had been driving for three days, had put almost 2,000 miles between me and Angelo, and still it wasn’t enough. Even sleeping in the car for three-hour, toss-and-turn-filled nights wasn’t enough.

  I checked my back mirror for the millionth time but saw nothing. Even if I drove for the rest of my life, it may not have been long enough. I knew Angelo, and I knew that look that had been in his eye. He was determined, and it had been deadly.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I whispered.

  I glanced at the screen again, at my expected arrival time: 50 more minutes. Yup. Only an hour or so more and I should be there—Aunt Frieda’s, my last chance. My fingers drummed on the wheel while my mind scanned through the last time I’d talked to Aunt Frieda. What had it been—a year ago? Two? Our phone chat had been the routine “Merry Christmas, thanks for the gifts, have a happy New Year” one. Had I even asked whether she was still living at the same place?

  My fingers stopped drumming. Why would I have? My aunt and uncle had lived at that chalet in Aspen my whole life. They’d be there. They had to be. I pressed the screen for some music.

  The first song came on, and my heart fell. It was Bob Dylan, his voice twanging and mocking nostalgia at me. Out of all the songs, of course this was the one that had to play. Traitorous tears slid down my face.

  “You pathetic idiot,” I murmured to myself, wiping them away.

  My husband had just tried to kill me, and I was crying about the song that had been playing the first time we’d met. It hadn’t even been romantic, how at my first real college party the curly-haired, tall man had sidled up beside me and quipped, “Guess which song the Rolling Stones were named after?”

  Little did I know as I produced the expected laugh and answer—Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”—that this was already a lie.

  It was just last week that I’d stumbled upon the truth. I’d been flipping through some Rolling Stones trivia book, and there it had been: “The Rolling Stones’ name was inspired by ‘Rollin’ Stone’ by Muddy Waters.” That was right, the band Muddy Waters, not Bob Dylan. I’d found out a lot of things last week.

  How fitting that the first words between Angelo and me had been a lie; only such a lie of a relationship could have resulted. The real question was: how much of our relationship had been real? How much of our whirlwind romance had been just that—a whirlwind? A mashing together of feeling and fantasy and expectation, so that now that I’d been so unceremoniously dumped back into reality, I had no idea what was fact and what was fiction?

  Maybe I’d never know. I blinked back more tears. Exhaled. All I knew now was that the man I’d seen three days ago, the man with the big black gun and the expressionless mask of a face, was not my husband. He was not the man I’d married, who had pulled over on the highway, gotten out of his Mercedes, and held up highway traffic so he could get down on one knee and propose to me.

  No, that man from last week was a stranger.

  I wiped my eyes and touched the screen again, turning off the radio. If I was not clearheaded, I was not going to make it. I needed to be alert, observant. I glanced in the rearview mirror. How long had that sunshine-yellow car been behind me? I returned my gaze ahead of me.

  It had only been a few minutes since I’d last looked back and seen the sunshine-yellow car. I needed to calm down. Soon the landscape became a moving postcard view: beautiful armies of trees, sweeping steeps of rock, tranquil collections of water. It was beautiful, but it was also a purgatory of waiting, an ‘are-we-there-yet’. Whenever I checked, time seemed to drag more. The only thing changing on the projected arrival time was the minutes: 43 more minutes, 40 more minutes, 39 more minutes.

  A century or so later, by the time 39 minutes had changed to 9 minutes and 9 to 1, by the time I had started keeping my eyes peeled for the familiar Tudor-style paragon, what I found wasn’t all that surprising.

  It was there sure enough, rising high and mighty and out of place among the trees, like it had been plopped there from the sky, unaware it was the only place for miles that was connected to the highway. Yes, with trees for a fence and a cliff for a backyard, the closest next-door-neighbor the Shell station miles back, there it was.

  My heartbeat slowed to a soft thump. Finally, I was here. Finally, things could start to be all right.

  Angelo hardly knew my aunt and uncle, and he definitely had no idea where they lived. I could be safe here. I could build my life back up.

  But, as I stepped out of
the car, my last hope fell out too. There was a sign on the door.

  I walked toward it slowly on shaking legs, already knowing yet not wanting to know for sure. By the time I made it to the door, the tears had returned.

  “SOLD.” That was what the pink-scrawled sign plastered over the glossy wooden door said. It was not even one of those realtor ones, where you could find the real estate agent and call them up, interrogate them for information, for where my aunt and uncle were now, for anything. No, it was a scrawled “screw you” to the last of my hope, a laugh in the face of trying. It was a “nice try, but it’s over now.”

  My feet brought me to the backyard, to the cliff my aunt and uncle had always talked about putting a fence in front of for safety but clearly never had. I peered over the edge. The cliff was a sheer face of rock, so high I couldn’t even see the bottom. There was no question about what would happen if I jumped.

  I took another step forward, to the very most edge. Pebbles under my feet tumbled down, down into the doomed depths. I could do it. I could step out farther, join the pebbles, be finished with it all. After all, that was what was going to happen to me anyway, right? I mean, that look in Angelo’s eyes, there was no doubt about it. He’d kill me, and I’d rather die now than give him the satisfaction.

  I put my foot out and stopped.

  There was no choice, and yet there was. There was no chance, and yet maybe, just maybe, there could be. I glared into the depths I couldn’t quite make myself step into. Why not? Why couldn’t I? My life was a failure. My marriage was a failure. Hell, I was a failure. And yet I couldn’t do this.

  As pointless as it was, I still had hope.

  I gave the cliff one last furious look and then turned on my heel and stormed back to the car. As I slumped into the leather seats, nausea swirled through me. I needed to sleep, rest, lie down—soon. If I kept going for much longer, I was going to pass out at the wheel.

  I turned on the car and typed in “hotels.” Five different listings of hope popped up, and I hit the closest, the Inn at Aspen. Twenty minutes for my expected arrival time, the screen said. I stared at it and nodded to myself.

  Twenty minutes. I could do that. I could stay awake, stay sane, for 20 more minutes. I backed up, turned around, and drove off the long expanse of driveway and onto the highway. Now Bob Dylan was aptly singing “On the Road Again,” and I forced myself to smile. Here went nothing.

  With Bob Dylan playing the background and me speeding, I pulled into the hotel parking lot in 18 minutes instead of 20. Just as I was admiring the inn’s half-window, half-wooden wonder of an exterior, there was a flash of yellow in my rearview mirror. A flash of sunshine yellow.

  I turned around to be sure, and there it was, the sunshine-yellow car from before.

  It was here. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, but it had followed me here. It parked a few spots down. I inhaled, exhaled, and waited.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe the car had just happened to go to the same hotel as me. Besides, who would follow someone in a yellow car?

  But the longer I waited, the longer I strained my neck around to watch the yellow car two spots down, the surer I became: This was no coincidence. As I pulled out of my spot and the yellow car roared to life, there was no doubt anymore.

  I was being chased, and I had to get away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I tore back onto the main road. I slammed the gas pedal down so hard that I shot ahead faster than ever before. The world became a blur, and yet the yellow in my rear window wouldn’t disappear. I shot back onto the highway. I weaved past car after car after car, but at the end of my passing spree, the yellow car was still there in my rearview mirror, closer even. I careened off onto the first exit I saw.

  If I couldn’t outdrive this person, I’d have to outrun them, hide somehow.

  After I twisted down one street and then another, my rearview mirror was clear. The yellow car seemed gone, though I was not going to wait around to find out. I continued fleeing. Every time there was another turn, I took it. I needed to find a good spot to park for an extended period, but all the spots were either taken or had a meter.

  Finally, I pulled into a green-roofed plaza, grabbed my purse, got out, and started running.

  Sprinting away as fast as I could wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, but I didn’t have much of a choice. If I was caught, it was over. I crossed the street, passed a series of red stone buildings, and then practically fainted in front of a building when I saw the word “hotel.” My gaze moved to the word before it—“Auberge”—and I stumbled on.

  My aunt and uncle had always moaned about how expensive the Auberge Hotel was, which was ironically still the only place they stayed when they came to downtown Aspen. But I couldn’t afford it, not now when I only had whatever was in my bank account, if Angelo hadn’t found a way to confiscate that yet. There was only 3,400 dollars that I knew of, and who knew how long that was going to have to last me. No, I’d find a different, cheaper, hotel.

  I hurried past squat buildings that were notable only because they weren’t hotels. Finally, I caught the word “lodge” on an orange sign and froze. Molly Gibson Lodge, the white-lettered orange sign read. The building was squat with gray wooden walls, and it would do. It would have to. At this point, I didn’t care if this cost every cent I had. I’d stay here or collapse outside. I couldn’t go on any farther.

  The kind, red-haired clerk behind the front desk seemed to understand just how exhausted I was, and booked me a single room on the first floor, no questions asked.

  I handed over my card and held my breath. When the card terminal beeped with my Visa’s approval, I smiled as if I’d expected that all along. As soon as her manicured fingers handed me my white “Molly Gibson Lodge” key card, I was out of there. I had no time to admire the well-finished wooden lobby with its nice tan leather seats. All I had time to do was stumble down the hallway to my room.

  The room itself was just as beautiful as I’d expected it to be: shiny wooden floors, matching brownish-gray stones, a fireplace with what looked like real wood, and, most important of all, a white paradise of a bed. I collapsed on it and disappeared into its white, fluffy depths.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I woke up back in the factory.

  My husband was kneeling over a crumpled-up man. Dressed head to toe in black, wearing the face of a stranger, there he was: my husband, Angelo. He was holding a big black gun.

  “This is a message from Gabriel,” he said.

  The gun’s blast into the man’s body was the period to his sentence. I gasped, and my husband whirled around. Our eyes met in understanding, and he lunged for me. I ran. Past twists of old machines, all reflecting back my horrified face. Past leaning towers of chairs, hunched over like resigned giants. Every look I threw over my shoulder showed no Angelo.

  After what seemed like forever, I finally made it to the parking lot outside, to my car. I threw myself inside, locked the door, and there he was. Gun still in hand, he yanked on the handle. I slammed my foot on the gas and tore back and away.

  He ran after me, his mouth moving with words that weren’t his. That man was no longer my husband. Maybe he never had been.

  I woke up into white, painful reality. My body was throbbing with hunger, my mind with memories.

  I moaned quietly. How did it get to this, from marrying my college sweetheart to passed out on a hotel bed in Aspen with my clothes on? As the answer began bubbling in my chest, I rose. I could moan about my bad luck later. First, I had to eat.

  When I got up and looked in the mirror, I almost smiled. Sure, my hair was twisted into chocolaty bed head, but I was otherwise good to go. I hadn’t even taken off my shoes.

  As I made my way downstairs, my stomach growled in a way that indicated the tiny free hotel breakfast wouldn’t cut it. I’d have to go to one of the food places I had passed on the way, maybe that deli with the sandwich on its sign, Great Deli or something.r />
  As I lurched along the sidewalk toward the Great Deli food light at the end of my hunger tunnel, I was expecting the place to be some kind of Buddhic, vegetarian hippie fest. When I entered the Grateful Deli’s red door, however, I found something entirely different. On the wall was an homage to the Grateful Dead, complete with a colorful mural of delighted concertgoers in a green-fielded, blue-skied Dead concert, with the band members themselves lit up by spotlights coming out of what looked to be flying saucers.

  I bought a panini from the serene, long-haired man behind the counter, plopped onto a wrought-iron seat outside, and dug into the cheesy goodness.

  “Stuck in the Middle with You” was playing in my head. How fitting.

  It was Angelo, after all, who had told me it was a Grateful Dead song when the band who played it was actually Stealers Wheel.

  I took a big bite and chewed slowly, trying to get the food to throw my harried thoughts into some kind of order. But it was no use. Questions rocketed through my head, more arising the more I ate: My parents—would they be okay? What about my best friend, Lila? What if Angelo systematically executed anyone I’d ever cared about to punish me, to force me out of hiding or to kill myself?