LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes bright with tears. His hand tightened as his breath came out in short spurts. He shouldn’t have come here. Why subject Devon to his presence when he’d spared his brother and parents?

      Her golden lashes fluttered, and his heart skittered in his chest. Weakness. That’s what led him here in the first place. He couldn’t succumb to it. Ever. If he had shown any weakness to his captors, they would’ve killed him.

      He dropped his hands from Devon’s waist as if he’d been scorched. She blinked twice, turned and continued to hike up the path to the road.

      When they reached the top, Devon faced him with her hands on her hips. “Have you contacted anyone else in Coral Cove? Do you know you have a brother…Colin? There are people, other people who have been devastated by your—” she glanced at her son “—disappearance.”

      “Let’s get off the side of the road.” He jerked his head toward Columbella House. “I’ve been bunking there. We can talk on the deck.”

      Devon’s brows shot up. “You’ve been staying at Columbella House? Do you know that you have a house down the road? Or rather the house belongs to your parents. You grew up there.”

      “I didn’t know that.” He shrugged. He’d figured he’d grown up in Coral Cove, but no other house or location in this town had drawn him like this one. “Is Colin still here?”

      “No. Coincidentally, he was in town last month, investigating…investigating.” Devon waved her hands in the air.

      Kieran unlatched the gate leading to the back of the house and a wooden deck that perched over the rocks. Nobody from the street could see this deck and Kieran had brushed off the Adirondack chairs and enjoyed several sunsets from this vantage point.

      “Have a seat.” He nudged one chair with his foot. Grabbing a wicker basket from the corner, he said, “Michael, do you want to look at some cool shells?”

      The boy ignored him, but slid a gaze toward his mother. “Can I find a Columbella?”

      “Maybe.” She flicked her fingers toward the basket. “Have a look.”

      Michael slipped his backpack from his shoulders and placed it next to the basket. As he sat cross-legged in front of the basket and pulled out the first shell, Devon seemed to melt into the chair.

      Something about the boy was off. Of course, Kieran didn’t know Michael at all and he might have judged him a little shy or clingy except for the tension that stiffened Devon’s body whenever she looked at her son.

      “So I grew up in Coral Cove and we were engaged.”

      Devon’s attention snapped back to him as she sucked in a quick breath.

      He’d have to work on his social skills if he hoped to have a life in the free world. His tormenters hadn’t valued the attributes of subtlety or nuance.

      “Yes, but not in high school.” She drew up her knees, wrapping her arms around her legs. “We reconnected when we both returned home after graduating from college. I was planning on going to nursing school, and you were going into the military. You had a thing for languages. Do you…?”

      “Do I still speak several languages?” Kieran gripped the flat arms of the chair. “Yeah. I didn’t forget the languages, just the rest of my life.”

      Devon balanced her chin on her knees, watching Michael. “What happened, Kieran? Can you at least tell me that?”

      “A military operation that went south.”

      “Colin was with you, but he was with the FBI.”

      Kieran’s eye twitched beneath his patch. “It was a multi–task force raid on a terrorist group, but someone snitched us off. I don’t remember much about it. The army briefed me after I escaped.”

      “H-how long?” She rolled her head to the side, resting her cheek on her knee as her blond hair swept across her legs.

      He knew just how the strands would feel slipping through his fingers. He raked his hair back from his face and said, “Four years.”

      She gasped and choked. “You were in some kind of prison for four years?”

      “Some kind of prison. Not nearly as nice as what we have going on here.” His lips twisted in a bitter smile. A filthy cot. An earthenware pot for a toilet. Stale bread for dinner. And the beatings, always the beatings.

      He’d never tell Devon any of that. She belonged light years away from all of it. Light years away from him.

      She closed her eyes and a tear slid from beneath her lashes. “I’m so sorry, Kieran. You lost your memory while you were imprisoned? Everything? Every memory?”

      Almost every memory except for a golden warmth that kept him alive.

      “I think I took a particularly bad blow to the head during some kind of beating.” He pointed to his patch. “Probably when that happened. When I came to, I could piece together that I was military and that I was a prisoner of war. Certain memories would float in and out.”

      Devon looked up, a tear trembling on the edge of her lashes. “But no memories of me?”

      How could he explain it to her? He couldn’t remember her face or her name, or even that he had a fiancée. But every day in that damned prison he had a will to survive, some force of goodness and light that shored up his strength, hardened him against the torture, forged a brutal desire to live.

      Left a shell of a man.

      How ironic that he now had to give up the source of his survival because the survival itself had turned him into a monster.

      His jaw tightened. “No. No memories of you.”

      The soft sigh from her lips made him clench his hands and turn his gaze onto the boy, patiently sorting shells, examining each one as if looking for a pearl.

      “Then why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in treatment or something?” She brushed her hair from her face and straightened her spine, pinning her shoulders to the back of the chair.

      Kieran shrugged. “The army wanted to send me to some shrink at Walter Reed. I chose not to go. I want to recover my memories in my own way, in my own time.”

      “But surely the army told you about your brother and the location of your parents? They must’ve told you about growing up in Coral Cove.”

      The army had told him all of that, but the minute Lieutenant Jeffries, his debriefer, had mentioned Coral Cove, Kieran knew he had to come here first. He knew he’d find his guardian angel in Coral Cove, and as soon as he’d spotted Devon his soul had recognized her. The familiar feelings of hope and optimism had flooded his senses.

      “The army also told my parents and my brother that I was dead. They haven’t bothered to notify them otherwise since I was on a top secret mission, even though Colin was on that same mission. I came here first because I wanted to ease into things slowly.” The lie of his last statement came to his lips easily. He’d perfected lying over the past few years—lying and a lot of other skills that had no place in a civilized society. No place in Devon’s life.

      Devon peered at him in the encroaching darkness and whispered, “Do you want me to help you?”

      “Yes.” The word flew from his lips before he had time to swallow it. “No. I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

      Her eyes widened, and then she tilted her head back and laughed. She doubled over and laughed some more, her shoulders shaking. When she raised her head, strands of hair clung to her wet cheeks. Her laughter continued unabated, but she didn’t have a smile on her beautiful face.

      Michael studied his mother with a frown crinkling his face and clutching two shells in his hands. Even he recognized that her laughter was bereft of humor.

      “Go to any trouble?” She wiped the back of her hand across her nose and hiccupped. “We were

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