Last Chance Hero. Melinda Di Lorenzo

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СКАЧАТЬ can’t go anywhere with you, Dono.” This time, saying his name hurt.

      “If you come with me, I can give you at least a bit of an explanation,” he told her again.

      “You already said that.”

      “I know.”

      “I’m not—” She paused, took a breath, tried again. “I won’t leave this—” God, why can’t I just complete a sentence? Why does it all seem so inadequate? “No. Not with—No.”

      He leaned back, looking frustrated. And something else, too. Maybe a bit disappointed. Or even surprised. Had he thought that after ten years away, she’d jump into his arms? Be so relieved he was alive she’d forget the rest?

      Are you relieved?

      She bit her lip and told herself it was an awful thing to wonder. And she wasn’t even going to answer the silent, self-directed question.

      He leaned forward again, his face tense now. “I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I saw another way. I wouldn’t even have...”

      Even though he trailed off, Jordynn heard what came next. If he’d seen another way, he wouldn’t have come back at all. And it took away a tiny bit of her guilt, making it a little easier to focus on the here and now rather than the past. Easier to find the words and string them together.

      “I can’t even begin to guess what happened to you,” she said. “Or why you would let everyone who loved you think you were dead. But you have to know that you can’t expect to walk in here and tell me I’m not safe and think I’ll just go with you.”

      Donovan lifted his hand to tug on his ear. A heart-wrenching gesture—a habit that meant he was truly worried—that Jordynn had all but forgotten about it. It made her wonder what else she’d forgotten about. How many memories had faded away with the years? How many of them had she deliberately buried? It hurt to think about it. Like a freshly closed wound threatening to open all over again.

      This was just too hard.

      “I can’t do this,” she whispered.

      “You have to, honey. Trust me when I say this wasn’t a random attack.”

      “Trust you?” The concept seemed utterly foreign.

      “Just in this. Please.” There was a note of desperation in his voice. “That man over there? He has some friends waiting for him, and I have no idea how long it’s gonna be before they show up.”

      Her blood went cold. “Over where?”

      He nodded his head toward a space behind him, and Jordynn forced her eyes away from his face. On the other side of the room, bound to one of her mother’s antique dining chairs with some kind of wire, sat the birdlike man from outside. Somehow, she’d almost put him out of her mind. Now the sight of him made her stomach roil, both because of his attack and because of his appearance. The man’s head hung to one side, a mottled bruise already fanning out along his jaw. He’d been gagged. Far more efficiently than Jordynn herself had been, she noted. A strip of sheeting had been wound around his mouth—multiple times—and knotted securely behind one ear.

      Jordynn swallowed. “Did you do that?”

      Donovan nodded shortly. “Yes.”

      “Is he...?”

      “He’s alive.”

      “So...you’re just going to leave him there?”

      “I couldn’t exactly leave him in the front yard.”

      “Who is he?”

      “The less you know, the better.”

      She met his gaze, noting the resignation there.

      Resignation, she thought. But no regret.

      Not for the man tied up, anyway. It made her heart ache even more than it already did. The Donovan she knew was protective, but loving. A little hotheaded and maybe even impetuous, but always compassionate and kind. Reverent of life. Maybe that had all changed when he’d feigned the end of his own. Which was what he must’ve done, she surmised.

      “He would’ve killed you, Jordynn,” he stated then, far too matter-of-factly.

      She suppressed a shiver, because now she wasn’t wondering what she’d forgotten—she was wondering what she’d missed. What parts of him had been irrevocably altered, and how he’d become this larger, darker version of himself.

      Abruptly, like he couldn’t take her scrutiny, he stood and began to pace the room.

      “You should pack a bag,” he said. “Clothes. Toothbrush. That kinda stuff. Enough for a few days, maybe longer. We can always figure out exactly what needs to be done when we get where we’re going.”

      “I have a simpler solution.”

      Donovan paused, tugged his ear again and shook his head. “No.”

      “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

      “The police aren’t an option.”

      She ignored the way it felt so normal to have him practically read her thoughts. “But your dad—”

      “Was the chief when he died, I know. But he thought I was dead, just like you did. All his friends on the force think it. And it needs to stay that way.”

      “And if I say no?” She asked the question so softly that he didn’t seem to hear it.

      “Have you got a car? Or access to one? I had to leave mine behind.”

      Jordynn cleared her throat and repeated her question, this time more firmly. “What if I refuse to go with you?”

      His brows knit together. “I’ll make you come with me, Jordynn, if I have to.”

      A spark of anger flickered. “You’ll make me come with you? Just like you made me believe you were gone?”

      “I’ll do whatever I have to, to protect you.”

      The spark flamed, and Jordynn pushed herself to a sitting position, ignoring the accompanying light-headedness. She wasn’t just mad—she was furious.

      She opened her mouth, poised to tell him what he could do with his protection, but her phone buzzed from the coffee table, momentarily distracting her.

      “Do not answer that,” Dono warned.

      “Just try and stop me.”

      They dived for the phone at the same time. And even though Jordynn was still woozy, she was determined. She went low, sliding under the edge of the table instead of over it. Dono, on the other hand, smashed straight into the wood, his big body landing on it hard. The wood creaked, then shuddered. Jordynn gasped. She guessed what was about to happen with only a second to spare, and she dug her feet into the area rug and dragged herself out the way, just as the table collapsed.

      The СКАЧАТЬ