Otis had better have a damn good reason for interrupting my time with Kate. Deep down, I hoped he didn’t have a good reason, because that would mean something was really wrong.

Otis was about a decade my junior—an island kid with a little too much drive for laid-back island life. He must have sensed the overworked New Yorker in me when he first found me in Maui. Not long after I’d purchased the boat, he nominated himself as my first mate for as long as I’d have him. He taught me about boats, and I taught him about stocks. He stayed out of my way for the most part. I didn’t need the company, but having an extra set of hands around didn’t hurt, and he’d more than shown me his value. I hadn’t felt the need to tell Kate about him, because if she decided to stay, Otis would be finding a new gig and he knew it.

I went back to the helm and turned the key in the ignition. My phone buzzed, and I fished it out from my pocket. He was calling again. This time I answered.

“Otis, what the fuck do you want?”

“Bryson, buddy.”

The sound of my alter-ego’s name scraped against my nerves in the most unsettling way. For the past twenty-four hours, I’d been Price Lewis again. I wasn’t in a rush to be anyone else. Price was the name on Kate’s lips in the throes of passion. Not Bryson Carr. And certainly not that fucking Alejandro guy.

“Hey, I’m sorry—”

“I told you not to call unless it was important,” I snapped.

I didn’t want to be pulled away from Kate. Not now. Not ever.

“I know. I know. I thought this might be important, though.”

Otis’s slightly squeaky voice dragged me out of the rabbit hole of jealousy I’d fallen into earlier.

“What is it?”

“There’s been some activity around the villa,” Otis said, his words coming quickly. “I’ve been driving by the property a few times a day like you asked. Yesterday was clear, but there’s been a black car with tinted windows parked down the road from the main gate all day. It’s still there.”

“Shit.” I dragged my hand along my unshaven jaw as my thoughts whirled. The boat hummed steadily, breaking through the waves as we neared the place where I’d anchored last night.

“What should I do? Should I see who it is or—”

“No,” I said firmly. “Stay away. Whoever is in the car could be dangerous.”

“I can just play dumb groundskeeper or something. It’s no big deal. How dangerous can they be?”

“Shoot-you-in-the-head dangerous, Otis. You know that as well as I do. Stay the hell away. I’m on my way back to the villa now.” I exhaled a curse when I remembered Chelle. “My sister’s there. Do me a favor and go check on her. I’ll see you there in twenty.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

I ended the call and tried to quiet the wild racing of my heart. An unidentified car was parked on the boundaries of the remote beachside estate I’d chosen for my reunion with Kate. It could be a coincidence and absolutely nothing.

Or it could be my worst nightmare.

I jumped when I felt Kate’s touch. Her hands curled over my shoulders and massaged into the tight muscles there. Nothing was going to get me to calm down right now, though.

“Everything okay?”

I shook my head.

“Who called you?”

“A friend,” I said, my tone intentionally curt to keep this conversation short.

She took the seat on the couch beside me again. Furrowing her brow and crossing her arms, she studied me. “I’m not going to keep begging you to open up to me, Price.”

I avoided her penetrating stare. “Good, because I’m not ready to talk right now. Sit back and let me get us home.” I had to get us back to the villa so I could get to the bottom of the situation and rule out any threats.

She stood, her hands fisted by her sides, the line of her jaw tight before she spoke. “Today was amazing, Price. I felt like I was falling in love with you all over again. Remembering everything that made us great together. Until now, I’d almost forgotten what an asshole you can be when you want to be.”

I sighed and reached for her hand. “Kate.”

“Forget it.” She evaded my touch and walked away, disappearing to another part of the boat.

I couldn’t exactly run after her and get to our destination at the same time. I settled for cussing under my breath, dropping anchor the minute I spotted the villa, and hoping to hell I could turn this day around.

---

Kate marched ahead of me toward the villa. I could tell by her pace and posture that she was gearing up to impose one of her royal silent treatments on me. She could work herself into a pissed off frenzy all she wanted. I wasn’t spending a second of this trip in a stand-off with her. We didn’t have that kind of time.

“Kate. Kate!” I jogged until I caught up with her.

Catching her arm, I turned her toward me. She yanked it back and crossed her arms, a perfect pairing with her pursed lips.

“I know you’re upset,” I began.

Her nostrils flared slightly. “Really. How could you tell?”

“Because you’re indescribably beautiful when you’re pissed off. Also, I’m your husband, and I know your moods before you do.”

“I’m thrilled that you’re so enlightened, Price. Can you also tell that I’m not in the mood to be left in the dark right now? Can you intuit that maybe I’m not interested in being treated like a naïve little woman who can’t be trusted with the truth in order to make life-altering decisions about her future…with her partner? That’s what we had, remember? An equal partnership.”

I bit the inside of my mouth to keep from shouting back. This wasn’t deciding on a house or signing on a loan together. This was life and death. She’d never faced death the way I had, so she couldn’t understand.

“Kate, listen to me—”

“No, you listen to me.” She unfolded her arms and pointed angrily at me. “I can’t live like this. I won’t live like this. You either tell me what happened to you and who’s after you, or the answer is no. I love you and I’d rather die than leave you, but I won’t spend the rest of my life living in fear because you can’t tell me the truth.”

She touched her hands to her chest, over the place where I’d pressed my ear so many times to hear her heart race after we’d made love. Tears glistened in her eyes, and I silently begged her not to cry. Her tears gutted me. They also guaranteed my defeat in any argument.

“You broke my heart, Price. Ever since I came here, I’ve been open with you.” A tear fell as she opened her trembling hands like the pages of a book. “I opened myself to you in every way. Why can’t you do that for me? Why can’t you trust me?”

I raked my hands through my hair, biting down on the truth. It was too soon. I had to wait for her to say yes and commit to our new life together. But what if she wasn’t bluffing? What if she said no because I was intent on keeping her in the dark?

“Kate, I’m trying to protect you. You have no idea what I’m up against here. These people have no humanity. The less you know, the better.”

“I can handle it, Price. For God’s sake, I’ve faced death. Do you understand that? I faced yours, and then for months I looked in the mirror and faced it all over again. Every day I had to make a choice. To keep going or to let the grief destroy me. I know you’ve been through hell. Even when you hide the truth from me, I can still see it in your eyes. Mine was a different kind of hell, but don’t doubt for one second that I lived it too.”

I dropped my gaze to the empty space between us, crushed by her admission. Someone physically ripping my heart out of my chest would have felt better than contemplating that I was the cause for Kate considering taking her own life. But that was grief. All-consuming, viciously painful, a dark plague stronger than any sense of reason. I knew it all too well.

“I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how much.”

“Talk to me, Price.” She took my hand. “I’m begging you for the last time.”

I swallowed hard and squeezed her hand. “I just need to know that you’ll stay with me. I wanted to give you time to think it through. I didn’t want to rush you into making such an enormous decision on the first or second day. You deserve a choice.”

She shook her head, and I was certain my heart stopped beating.

“Please.” I could barely hear the plea as it left my lips.

“Price, if you want me to stay with you and leave everything and everyone else behind, I will. I was ready to say yes when you asked me. But we need to walk into that future together, eyes open, with both of us knowing what challenges we might face.”

Several seconds passed between us. I drew a deep breath of salty air into my lungs, both desperate and terrified to break the silence with the truth.

“I didn’t know that last night in our apartment would be the last time I’d see you. I knew that things might be different when I came back, though.”

She winced, but I continued before she could start probing again.

“I’d told you that I was going to Zurich for a conference. That much was true. But I didn’t really go to network. I went there specifically to meet with one company, Cybermark Enterprises. I’d been watching them since I was day trading at Berg and Lynch. They specialized in data mining and were growing quickly, but not quickly enough to warrant the numbers I was seeing. After I broke off on my own, I kept following them. My system was showing that they should be growing exponentially, yet their stock price kept remaining steady.”

“Maybe your system was wrong. For this one stock, I mean.”

“Believe me, I thought of that. But my system has a ninety percent success rate. You know that. Plus, this company’s prospectus and annual reports seemed to validate my conclusions.” I shook my head. “I just couldn’t let it go. I had to dig deeper and figure out why it didn’t work with my math. When I reached out to them, I hinted about the trends and that I was interested in learning more about them. They offered me a job.”

She lifted her brows. “You went there to interview?”

“Not really. I went there under the guise that I would interview. They met me under the guise that they were going to consider me for a job. We both had other plans.”

My lips tightened as chaos filled my thoughts. Memories of the worst panic I’d ever felt welled up inside me. The roller coaster from hell designed to take me plummeting to my death was permanently etched inside my brain.

“They offered to fly me down to their headquarters in Geneva on a private plane to meet some of their executives. One pilot, one passenger. Single-engine plane.” I shook my head with a grim smile. “It all felt wrong. The pilot could barely make eye contact with me let alone speak English. But I’d come all this way. I had to get to the bottom of it and figure out what was going on with these people.”

“What happened? How did the plane go down?”

“We reached altitude and the pilot mumbled some shit in Italian. He put my hands on the controls and gave me the thumbs up like I was supposed to fly the goddamn plane.”

Her eyes were wide now. “Are you kidding me?”

I shook my head. “Next thing I know, he’s taking his jacket off and opening the door. He was packing a parachute and looking to jump. Guess who wasn’t? Me.”

She let go of my hand and brought both to her mouth. “How did you survive? The plane… The report said it was completely mangled. Burned through.”

“That’s because they filled the thing with so much fuel there wouldn’t be a chance of finding a human body in it afterward or knowing one was missing. Doesn’t matter because I didn’t go down with the plane. I went down with him. I wasn’t letting him leave that fucking plane without me, so I grabbed him. We tussled. The plane started to nosedive, and before I knew it, we were out of it, free-falling. Thank God he pulled the chute because I wouldn’t have known the first thing to do.”

“So you both survived. That’s a miracle.”

I shook my head. “Parachutes aren’t designed to bring two grown men to the ground safely, at least not without serious injuries. We wrestled the whole way down, but I wouldn’t let him go.” I exhaled a shaky breath and brought the heels of my hands across my forehead like I could scrub out the horribly vivid memories. “Fuck. It was awful.”

I walked to the edge of the water, letting the waves wash over my feet and sink into the doughy sand beneath. I’d never told anyone, not even Otis, what happened that day. Not another living soul knew my story. It occurred to me then that perhaps that’s why the prospect of telling Kate had been so difficult. The ugly truth had lived inside me for a year, toxic and festering like a disease. Would telling her ease the pain? Soften the gruesome past?

I felt her arms wrap around my torso, her cheek press against my back. Some of the tension released with her touch. I covered her hands with mine, holding her tightly to me.

“We landed hard on the edge of a clearing. I broke my arm because I’d lassoed it through the shoot straps when he was trying to fight me off. But the way we landed… I was above him and my weight came down in such a way…” I swallowed over the nausea that hit me whenever the pilot’s face beamed into my thoughts. The way the life left his eyes. The way his body tangled awkwardly in the chute. “His neck was broken. He died instantly.”

We were silent for a long time, Kate holding me tightly, me breathing through the anxiety that hit every time I thought about that day.

“He tried to kill you, Price.”

I stared listlessly out into the horizon. “I know. I tell myself that all the time. No matter how many times I have this conversation with myself, though, I never feel better about what happened.”

She circled to stand in front of me, placing her hands on my cheeks. The same fierceness I recognized in her eyes earlier was there, but the context had changed.

“You saved yourself. And maybe it’s cruel to say, but that man got what he deserved. You deserved to live, to come home to me, to have a life and a family. Never doubt that.”

“I knew nothing about him. What if he didn’t even have a choice?”

“Everyone has a choice,” she said softly.

The sentiment resonated deeply. This past year had been a series of choices. One had ripped us apart, and others had brought us together again. I hoped that telling her the truth—well, most of it—tonight had been a good one.

“Now you know. And now maybe you can try to understand why I lie low instead of going to the authorities, which very likely would have gotten me killed, anyway. If they could pay a man enough to jump out of a goddamn plane, risking his own life to end mine, to what lengths would they go to take me out once and for all? When would it stop?” I took her hands from my cheeks and held them between us. “Then I thought about you and Chelle and my family. Kate, I swear to you, I just wanted to keep you safe. I’ve never experienced anything more terrifying than falling out of the sky that day, but if I’d put you in danger and risked your life, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

Her bottom lip quivered as she spoke. “Thank you. For telling me, and for wanting to keep me safe.”

“Baby,” I whispered, reaching down to kiss her before her tears overtook her once more.

But before our lips could touch, a high-pitched scream came from the direction of the villa. A woman’s scream.