Outside Virden, Illinois

Sleep was almost as good as amnesia. Abigail slept so deeply that she woke refreshed after only a few hours. All memory of the awful night was gone. That was, of course, until she realized she wasn’t in her own bed. It came back to her, a little at a time, the soreness of her body reminding her of Axel’s touch before the nightmare of the hitman’s voice flashed through her mind.

She reached for Axel in the darkness of the bed, but he wasn’t there. For a moment, she was convinced that he’d abandoned her, but then a movement across the room drew her eyes. It took a second for them to adjust to the bit of light coming in through a crack in the window covering, but she recognized the angles of Axel’s body sitting in a chair as he studied the world beyond the window.

“Everything okay?” she asked in a soft whisper as she climbed out of bed, shivering in the cold room.

“Fine.” He held out his hand to her, pulling her into his lap, his body just as naked and cool as hers. “I think it snowed more than they predicted, though.”

She leaned over and pulled the curtain open a little wider so she could look out. He was right. There were drifts in the street that had to be eight feet tall. And the piles of snow in the front yard of Mr. Tuxli’s house were at least two-feet deep, maybe more. It wasn’t over. Snow was still falling, lighter than the night before, but coming down just the same.

“Nobody’s going anywhere today. They don’t send out the snowplows with drifts that high. Too dangerous for the old equipment.”

Axel kissed her neck lightly. “Maybe he froze to death out there.”

“Or he’s equally as stuck somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think he followed us here?”

Axel was quiet for a moment. “I think there’re only a few places we could have gone and he knows that.”

A cold finger brushed against Abigail’s heart. “You think he’s out there somewhere.”

“But he can’t get into the house, Abbie. I made sure of that.”

She pulled her legs up to her chest, lying against his chest in something like the fetal position, his arms warm and strong around her. She should have felt protected. Safe. But all she wanted to do was stare out the window and search for even the tiniest sign of that lunatic who was hunting them.

“Why me? What does he want with me?”

“I don’t know. But it must have something to do with your past, something someone else knows about.”

“I can’t imagine what.”

“Did your father or grandfather have a gambling debt? Did they ever cross paths with someone less than honorable?”

She shook her head against him. “Not that I know of. In fact, Daddy rarely left the farm. He didn’t see the point in it.”

“What about some sort of crime? Did either ever witness anything they shouldn’t have?”

“No.” She sighed. “I don’t think it has anything to do with my parents. The biggest thing either of them ever did was my mom won the local swim contest. But she didn’t go to the regional meet because it was in Springfield on the same day of the chili contest downtown. Her father wouldn’t let her go.”

“What about your grandparents?”

“My great-grandfather bought that land from the man he’d worked for most of his teen years. The man retired to Florida back when Florida was the place to go. My great-grandfather bought up acres from a few surrounding farms, and he turned it into a successful business, teaching my grandfather all he knew about it. My grandfather was intensely proud of his father and made it his mission in life to continue what his father had started. My dad was the same. They never left the place, never did anything that was more exciting than learning about the newest fertilizers, the newest seed types, the newest equipment.” She pulled back a little so she could see Axel’s face in the dim light. “My family is very boring.”

“Do you have aunts or uncles? Cousins? Siblings?”

She shook her head again as she rested against him once more. “My grandfather had two brothers, but they both died in World War II. My dad had a sister, but she was a sickly child who died of pneumonia when she was six. My mom had four brothers, but they’ve all moved away. Three live in Texas, one lives in New York.”

“You’re not close to them?”

“Just the occasional Christmas card. They were never interested in the farm life. They left everything behind when they left the farm.”

Axel was quiet for a moment, his hand moving slowly up and down her bare back. Abigail was a little saddened as she realized—not for the first time—that she was essentially alone in the world. She knew that was why her mother pushed so hard to get her father to agree to send her to Harvard. Her mother wanted her to have more in her life than the farm. Wouldn’t she be disappointed to see Abigail now.

Almost as though he was hearing her thoughts, Axel’s hand paused on her back. “You went to Harvard.”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t finish your PhD.”

Memories of that time flooded over her. She closed her eyes, as though that would block it out. But all it did was make the visions of that time more intense.

Morty was at the center of it all, her sad lover. He was her PhD advisor, a professor of bioengineering who was far more brilliant than people gave him credit for. The device they built together would have revolutionized the prosthesis industry. But he betrayed her, reminding her of what a cold, ugly world existed outside of the farm.

“Did you have a gambling problem? Get yourself involved with someone you shouldn’t have?”

“Don’t you think I would have told you if I had?”

He brushed a piece of hair out of her face. “Maybe something you’ve forgotten about.”

She giggled softly, a sound that was less amused and more sardonic. “Sure. I’m the kind of girl who forgets crossing paths with a cold-blooded killer.” She sat up a little straighter, straddling his lap as they sat there in that armless chair. “I spent all my time around academics while I was in Cambridge. I lived on campus the first four years, then in an apartment one of my professors rented. I hardly went into the city for anything other than the occasional restaurant or club.” She sighed, aware of how all this made her sound. “I didn’t have that many friends. I was younger than everyone else and focused on my studies. Just like my parents, I’m a pretty boring girl. I never did anything interesting.”

“You must have done something to get this man’s attention.”

“I don’t know what it could be! Really, I was just a boring academic, and now I’m a boring farmer.” Abigail ran her hands over his shoulders as he pulled her hard against his hips. “Is it possible he got me confused with some other Abigail Rains?”

“How many Abigail Rainses do you think there are in the world?”

She giggled again, more out of bashfulness than anything else. “Girls like me are a dime a dozen, Axel.”

“Hardly. I’ve never met another farmer who has a master’s degree in bioengineering.”

Abigail tilted her head slightly. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Why didn’t you finish your degree? You were seconds from getting your PhD, weren’t you?”

“I was.” Morty’s face once again flashed passed her mind’s eye. She hadn’t seen him in three years. She thought about him from time to time, wondered if he thought about her. But they hadn’t left things on the best of terms, so she imagined most of his thoughts of her were unpleasant ones. “I quit a couple of weeks before my dissertation review.”

“Why?”

“Because my adviser was trying to sell the device we’d worked on together through my dissertation work to the highest bidder.”

“What device?”

Abigail slid her hands over his naked chest, her fingers pausing over his tattoos. She didn’t want to think about Morty, didn’t want to think about those last days they spent together. She’d never been around a couple on the verge of divorce, but she could imagine that was what it would be like. They couldn’t even move by each other in a hallway without an angry word passing between them. It was awkward and sad, a disgrace to the symbiotic relationship they’d had before. From the moment she met him at the beginning of her graduate studies, she believed they wanted the same thing. But he proved she was wrong when he tried to sell the device.

“My professor, Morty Appleton, grew up with a mother who was mentally unbalanced. She suffered from schizophrenia from the time she was a teenager. His father tried to keep her medicated, but she refused the medicine most of the time because she didn’t like the way it made her feel.” Abigail pulled her hands away from Axel’s chest, feeling a little self-conscious talking about a former lover while sitting in the lap of her new one. “He was obsessed with the idea of finding a way to control schizophrenia without drugging the patient. It became my obsession, too.”

She ran her fingers through her hair as the memories burned through her mind. Listening to Morty lecture in his classroom, seeing the passion in his eyes. The way he kept so closely to himself, refusing to accept kindness from anyone, even the people he considered friends. He was broken in ways she never would have understood before she left the farm. Her heart ached for him from the moment she first stepped into his classroom, and it broke for him when she learned the truth of what had happened to him.

His mother, suffering a psychotic break, came to believe the devil was inside of her ten-year-old son. For some reason, she believed the dark entity was living in his left arm. For that reason, she drugged him and placed his arm in a vise her husband happened to have in the garage for use in his furniture making business and crushed the arm so severely that doctors had no choice but to amputate. That wasn’t the first time she’d hurt her son, but it was the most severe. She was hospitalized afterward. Morty and his father moved away to keep her from ever finding them again. But the scars of his ten years in her care would forever mark his body, his missing left arm a constant reminder of the consequences of a schizophrenic refusing their medication.

“It started out as me working with him as an assistant in all these experiments. We worked to understand which parts of the brain were affected by the disease, and how it could be altered to lessen the symptoms. And then we used all these computer programs to try to train the schizophrenic how to recognize their own delusions. For some people, it worked, but it had little effect on those with a severe form of the disease, like Morty’s mother.”

Abigail wrapped her arms over her chest, aware of the deep concentration on Axel’s face. He was interested in what she was saying. She just wished her story had a happier ending.

“I took some of Morty’s research and began studying it, taking it in a different direction than he’d been going. He was trying to help these people with outside stimulation. I wondered what would happen if we somehow trained the brain cells themselves. Could we change the way a person looked at the world, the way they processed their own thoughts, if we used some sort of stimulation to force the proper brain cells to work at the right time? Could we somehow train a sick brain to work like a healthy one?”

“Kind of like physical therapy teaching muscles how to move again? Like with my knee?”

“Yes. I thought if we could create the proper reaction inside a person’s brain that it would eventually learn how to respond properly on its own, and the person with schizophrenia would be able to understand the difference between reality and a delusion. It wouldn’t cure them, but it would make their brains work a little better.”

“That’s pretty cool,” Axel said, his hands sliding over her hips. “You created a device that could do this?”

“I did. It was just a prototype, but we saw some pretty exciting results with a couple of the patients. We were far enough along that we were filling out the applications to get a patent when I found some emails on Morty’s computer. He was talking to people about the device, listing all the potential uses for it. And it wasn’t just a treatment for schizophrenia. He listed all this insane stuff, like using it as a treatment for amnesia, for other mental diseases, for changing the way a normal person processed simple things, like thoughts and vision and hearing. The implications were frightening.”

“He was suggesting it could be used to control people. For brainwashing.”

Abigail nodded, anger rising in her throat almost as hot as it had when she first saw those emails. “I confronted him, and he admitted it, said the money he’d make off the device would be a gift we could both use. He said we could continue with our research, could bring a similar device to the marketplace. But that would take years, maybe even decades with the way the government regulated new medical devices. Why shouldn’t we benefit in the mean time?”

“You didn’t agree.”

“Of course not!” There were hot tears in her eyes, the frustration with the whole thing still so real to her. “But I couldn’t do anything about it. If I went to school officials, Morty would just lie to them, deny the whole thing. It would be my word against his, and he was a respected professor with tenure while I was just a student. Even if he lost his job, I hadn’t filed the patent yet, so I technically wouldn’t have had any claim to it, so he could still sell it anyway. Anything I did wouldn’t have stopped him. All I could do was leave.”

“You just walked away, let him take the thing?”

Abigail brushed away a hot tear. “I never should have gone there, never should have gotten involved with him. I knew it was a mistake, but—”

“You were lovers.”

He said it like he believed she’d never had another lover. Abigail started to pull away, but he grabbed her wrists and jerked her back, refusing to let her go. searching her face like he thought he could get the answers he wanted just by studying her expression. Maybe he could. Maybe she was as easy to read as a book.

“How long were you with him?”

Abigail turned her face away, pain once more slicing through her chest. She didn’t want to think about Morty. Not now. But Axel jerked her wrists, pulling her attention back to him.

“How long?”

“Four years.”

She thought she saw jealousy flash in his green eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know this man well enough to recognize the little nuances of emotion that barely revealed themselves in his eyes. If she’d figured out one thing about him, it was that he held his thoughts and feelings very close to the chest.

Just what she needed, another man with issues.

“He was your professor?”

“I rented a room in his house, and we worked together in the bioengineering department. It just kind of happened.”

“Just convenience, then.”

“No. We respected each other.”

“Did you love him?”

Abigail didn’t know how to answer that. She’d never said those words to Morty, never dared, because he was so determined not to acknowledge any sort of emotional connection between him and anyone, especially her. He didn’t want to care because he was convinced anyone he loved would end up hurting him in some way. But she had. She’d been naively, deeply, completely in love with him until the moment she saw his true colors.

“I thought I did. But then I realized I never really knew him.”

Axel slid his hand over the back of her neck, digging his fingers into her hair. He twisted her head to one side, his eyes almost scary as he studied her.

“Has it occurred to you that he might have something to do with what’s happening right now?”

She stiffened. “No. Morty wouldn’t hurt me!”

“Maybe it was inadvertent. Maybe he didn’t intend for the blowback to hit you. But it has.”

She tried to pull away, turning her head to the side away from his touch. But he held too tight to make it possible to move very far.

“You’re just jealous.”

He laughed, the sound as frightening as the pain he was inflicting on her scalp. “You think I’m jealous that you’ve had a lover? Do you know how many lovers I’ve had?” He moved closer to her, his lips a breath from hers. “I’ve had dozens of lovers, sweetheart. Women come out of the woodwork to sleep with me. If I walked out of this house right now and knocked on the door of the closest house, I could probably get the woman inside in bed in less than fifteen minutes. You and your past mean nothing to me.”

That hurt as much as she didn’t want it to. She didn’t know this man, and they’d likely never see one another again if they survived this night. Why did it bother her so much that he would say something so hurtful? But somehow it did.

She tried to pull away again, the pain in her scalp when she yanked against his hold making her cry out. He wouldn’t let go, jerking her against his chest again.

“You need to grow up, sweetheart,” he hissed near her ear. “We’re never going to make it through this if you don’t stop focusing on these stupid, inconsequential things. That man out there is real. The guns he has, the bullets he’s shooting, are real, and he will kill you if we give him half a chance. You need to focus on that and nothing else.”

“Don’t you think I understand that? Don’t you think I get it?”

“No, I don’t.” He pulled her face up to his, his lips brushing hers. “I think you believe this is some great romance, something out of a stupid novel. It’s not. We’re in real danger here.”

“I know.”

Tears were beginning to stream down her cheeks. Again. And it pissed her off. She was so tired of the tears, so tired of being weak. She knew he saw her that way and she hated that, too.

He kissed her then, and she was determined to fight him. But she couldn’t. He was so strong, so possessive in his touch. She wanted to be possessed. She wanted to be distracted, and there was no better distraction than him.

Axel let go of her hair after a moment and slid his hands around her waist, grabbing great handfuls of her ass. His grip was rough, painful. He pulled her up and forward, sliding inside of her like her body was made to fit perfectly to his. She cried out against his mouth, pleasure and pain mingling. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, pressing her hips hard against his. How could someone so cruel fill her with such incredible pleasure?

“I don’t need you,” he whispered in her ear. “I can have anyone I want.”

She heard him. And that knife of disappointment, of hurt, slid through her again. But this little spark of hope lit in the back of her mind as she wondered who he was trying to convince, her or him.