LITMIR.BIZ

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right, stay here then, Olivia,” he said at length. “I’ll leave you the gun. You can tell your friend the cop I stole the car.” He leaned in. “Come on, Freddy, ride’s off.”

      “No.” She said it quickly, her decision made. “No, I’m coming with you. I’ll go get what I need and lock up.”

      He seemed relieved. Turning, he closed the liftgate as Olivia drew a deep breath and headed back into the house. She closed the door behind her, set her jaw and walked calmly to the telephone stand for a notepad and pen. Then she scribbled a simple note for Bryan.

      Dropping out of sight for a few days. Past lives catching up to me. Everything’s okay so far. Just need some time. I’ll call you in a few days, and that’s a promise. If I don’t—things have gone very wrong.

      Best, Olivia.

      She left the note on the coffee table, with a paperweight on top to keep it from drifting off. Bryan would find it if he decided to come looking for her. He would understand what she meant. “Past lives”—he would know that meant Tommy. He would know to come looking for her if he didn’t hear from her. He would know what to do.

      She’d worked too hard to stay alive all this time to just put her hard-won life into the hands of any man now—even if that man was Aaron Westhaven. She needed to take some precautions of her own, and she didn’t particularly care if her favorite writer liked it or not.

      She hurried to the kitchen to lock the back door and secure the dog door. Back in the living room, she grabbed her handbag and jacket from the closet, then headed out the front, locking the door behind her.

      She paused on the step, looking through the darkest of nights at the sleeping town where she’d built her new life. Shadow Falls had been her salvation. She hoped to God she would be alive to return and reclaim her life there. But she had a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach that nothing was ever going to be the same again.

      Aaron. As he drove, he couldn’t get his head around thinking of himself by that name. It didn’t feel any more familiar to him than Jack or Joe or a hundred other names he could think of. Then again, he’d spent a lot of time in his hospital room running through every male name he could think of, and none of them had sent any sparks of recognition sizzling through his head. None of them.

      Still, he was worried. “Aaron” didn’t seem to fit. The persona of a novel-scribbling loner felt like a suit that was a couple of sizes too tight. And the dreams or flashbacks or visions he’d had of himself with a gun in his hand and a body at his feet certainly didn’t seem to reflect the life of a reclusive novelist.

      And now he had a sidekick.

      Bringing Olivia with him probably hadn’t been the brightest idea he’d ever had. She was bound to be a problem. Oh, she might seem like a staid, boring, highly intelligent professor, but she was clearly something else entirely. She had her own baggage, her own secrets—big, deadly secrets—hiding in her eyes, not to mention lurking in the shadows of her home last night. He’d heard her attacker call her Sarah and demand that she give him “the disks.” What the hell was that about? Was the reserved intellectual actually leading a double life? Who was she really? And why had he come to Shadow Falls to see her?

      It had to be related to what had happened to him. She had to be involved somehow. And sticking with her was the only way to find out how. Staying alive while he did it was imperative, so hitting the road was the only solution.

      Before they’d traveled ten miles, however, she was digging her cell phone out of her oversize handbag.

      “Turn that thing off.”

      She shot him a quick look, probably startled by his deep voice breaking the nighttime silence. “But I have to let the university know I won’t be in for a few days. I’ll just tell them I’m sick. And I have to call Carrie, too.”

      “It’s 3:00 a.m., Olivia.”

      “I was just going to leave messages.”

      “Not yet.”

      She turned off the phone, but she frowned at him, and he knew she was going to argue. He could see her gearing up for it in the way her jaw got a little tighter and her eyes a little more intense. He thought she might be about to lose her temper with him. And he found himself looking forward to it.

      But then she licked her lips, took a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m not going to tell anyone where we are or what we’re doing,” she said, calmly and rationally. “But if I wanted to do that, and I thought it would be best for me, I’d do it. You need to know that about me.”

      Logical. Straightforward. The closest she’d come to losing it had been when she’d thought her dog had been dead on her living-room floor. Threats to her own life seemed to have far less emotional impact on her.

      “You wouldn’t have to tell anyone where you are. You wouldn’t even have to make a call. With your cell phone on, anyone with the know-how can track you.”

      Her brows went up, and she stared at him, the stubborn intellectual gone. There was worry in her eyes now. Maybe even fear. He decided he preferred the stubbornness. He knew what had instigated the change, though. She must be wondering how he’d come by the knowledge he’d just imparted. She had to be, because he was wondering the same thing.

      “I must have done a lot of research—for my writing,” he said, attempting to answer her question before she could ask it. But it rang false to him. It felt like a lie.

      “You never wrote any crime thrillers, Aaron.”

      “Now how can you be so sure about that?”

      She averted her eyes. That was telling, that little thing. Looking away, as if embarrassed or ashamed or lying right back at him. She cleared her throat, lifted her chin a little. “I’ve read everything you’ve written,” she said.

      “Oh.” He fell silent for a moment, trying to come up with an answer that would reassure her. This wasn’t going to work if she was going to turn suspicious of him at every turn.

      What wasn’t going to work? his mind asked him. You don’t even know what the hell you’re doing, pal.

      But he felt as if he knew exactly what he was doing. As if this kind of thing was second nature to him. Running, hiding, going off the radar to get his shit together. To regroup. To strategize.

      He gripped the wheel a little tighter and came up with what he hoped was a reasonable answer. “You’ve read everything I’ve published,” he said. “I could be an aspiring thriller writer with stacks of unpublishable crime novels under my desk, for all you know—or for all I know.”

      Her head came back around, eyes interested, brows raised, fear erased. “That’s true, you might.” And then she smiled, sighed as if in relief, and shook her head in a self-deprecating way. “That’s got to be it. You know all of the things you do because of research you’ve done.”

      “Or books I’ve read,” he said. “Maybe I’m a big thriller fan, even though I write…what would you call it? Sappy, emotional melodrama?”

      “I would never call it that, and you shouldn’t, either. It’s not sappy. It is emotional, but not in that way. It’s…emotional realism.”

      From the back, Freddy released a loud, long snore that sounded like some cartoon sound effect more than a real dog.

      “He’ll sleep for at least an hour now,” she said. “Maybe more, given the tranquilizer.”

      But he was still focused on the earlier conversation. “You’ve read everything? You really are a fan, aren’t you?”

      She lifted her gaze again. It was a little bit soft, as if he were seeing behind the mask she wore. “I’m more than a fan.”

      Alarm bells went off. Was she an obsessed fan? A stalker type? God, that would be an added complication, wouldn’t it? She didn’t seem like that kind, though.

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