LITMIR.BIZ

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3

      The bedside clock had passed 2 a.m. when Nick gave up on sleep. He slid out from under the covers and dressed quietly, tiptoeing downstairs in anticipation of Ellie’s imminent feeding. He pulled a bottle of pumped breast milk out of the refrigerator, warmed it in the microwave and went back upstairs.

      Turning off the baby monitor, he sat down in the rocking chair to wait. Sure enough, in about ten minutes, the baby started to stir. He picked her up, inhaling the sweet scent of her. “Good evening, little angel. What say we let Mommy sleep tonight?”

      Ellie, a happy and cooperative baby, readily took the bottle from him, snuggling close against his chest with a trust that took his breath away. He loved Laura with all his being, but the feelings that swelled in his heart as he gazed down at his daughter pushed his capacity for love to new heights he’d heretofore had no idea existed. Adoration mixed with protectiveness, hope for her future, and wonder at the miracle of her existence expanded in his heart to make room for his tiny daughter.

      He changed her as she grew sleepy and rocked her for just a minute or two before her eyes closed. He laid her down gently in her crib and watched her sleep until it dawned on him that he was standing there grinning like a blessed fool.

      Restless, he wandered downstairs. Predictably, his feet carried him to his office. Or more accurately to his laptop computer. He sat down at his desk in the dark and cranked it up. He didn’t stop to question what he was doing. It was time.

      He typed in the name, Nikolas Spiros, and hit the search button. Skipping the tabloids, he read story after story from the business pages chronicling the tragic mental breakdown of Greece’s richest shipping magnate. There were even pictures of him, bearded and wild looking. Abrupt memory flashed of his captors hanging a white sheet in his box and taking pictures of him standing in front of it. Bastards.

      According to the articles, he’d been institutionalized at a private facility. Later stories talked about his withdrawal from public life. His wish to live quietly and not involve himself with business affairs. How in the hell could anyone who’d known him have believed that drivel? He’d loved running Spiros Shipping. Had thrived on it. The company had been his life, dammit!

      He checked his anger. Nikolas Spiros was dead—or at least resting comfortably in an asylum and happy to stay there.

      His shipping company had been sold quietly about a year after his “breakdown.” Such a pleasant word for such an unpleasant thing as kidnapping. An entirely new management group had taken over the company. A bunch of Germans. They’d renamed it—

      His heart nearly stopped right then and there. Spiros Shipping had been renamed AbaCo. The betrayal of it was breathtaking. He’d been kidnapped and held by his own employees! Had they known who he was? Had he been that bad a boss? Surely not. Morale had been great at Spiros before his memory went black. A sense of family had pervaded the firm. Sure, the work had been hard and times were tough, but he’d prided himself in never laying off an employee and paying as much as he could afford to every single worker. Surely so much hadn’t changed after his memories stopped that his employees would have turned on him so violently and completely.

      In shock, he researched the financials of his renamed company. Profits were down, but AbaCo was still in the black. He shrugged. It would have been darned hard not to make money given how financially sound the company had been when he last remembered it. He studied the quarterly earnings reports for the past few years and cracks were definitely starting to show. But nothing that couldn’t be corrected with wise and careful management for a few years—

      Not his company any more.

      At least not in any way that mattered. He had Laura and the kids. And at all costs, this other part of his life had to be kept away from them. The new owners could have Spiros Shipping.

      Best to just stay hidden. A ghost.

      But how in the hell was he supposed to do that with this trial coming up?

      What had happened to Nikolas Spiros? Had he gone mad for real? Had something horrible happened at the shipping company that had driven him over the edge? What would leave such a residue of terror within him?

      The walls of his office started to close in on him unpleasantly—which was a first—and he actually felt a driving need to get out of there. He erased his browsing history and shut down the computer before heading for the kitchen.

      Pulling on a jacket, he turned off the elaborate security system and headed out the back door toward the woods behind the house. Tonight he didn’t feel up to trekking across one of the pastures and challenging his agoraphobia. He’d been taking secret hikes for several months now, trying to desensitize himself to open spaces. It was getting better, but by maddeningly slow degrees.

      He’d been walking for a few minutes when the panic attack hit. It slammed into him like a freight train, sudden and overwhelming. He stopped, breathing as if he’d been sprinting, and glanced around in terror. And then something odd dawned on him. This panic attack was different. It was accompanied by a strange certainty that he was being watched. Great. Was he slipping back into the paranoia of the early days, too?

      He couldn’t help himself. He slid into the darkest shadow he could find and crouched, pressing his back against the trunk of a huge sycamore. He let his gaze roam, his peripheral vision taking in a wide angle view of the woods. The night sounds had gone dead silent. Maybe he wasn’t so paranoid, after all. The crickets never lied.

      Who else was out here? And why?

      The motion sensors at the house would warn of any human-sized intruders … if he hadn’t turned the alarm system off before he came out here. He swore at himself. Laura and the kids were unprotected. He had to get back to the house. Get the alarms back on. Protect his family.

      He stood up and was stunned to discover his feet wouldn’t move. Literally. By sheer force of will, he overcame his panic, ignoring the hyperventilation, ignoring the wild imaginings of being kidnapped again, crammed in another box. His family came first, dammit. He’d die for them!

      His stumbling walk turned into a jog, and finally into a full-out run. Whether he was running toward Laura or away from the bogeyman in the woods, he couldn’t say. But either way, his long legs devoured the distance with powerful strides and his lungs burned with exertion by the time the mansion came into sight. Its Georgian grandeur was dark. Quiet. Undisturbed.

      The silliness of his terror struck him forcefully. His mind was playing tricks on him. It was only his past pursuing him. A figment of his imagination. With a last look over his shoulder into the shadows of the night, he let himself into the house and turned on the security system.

      Shaken to his core, he climbed the stairs quietly. No sense waking everyone because he’d had a panic attack. He put his hand on the doorknob to let himself into the master suite, but he couldn’t bring himself to enter. He was still too wired to lie down beside Laura as if everything was perfectly normal.

      Instead, he headed for another door farther down the hall. A small, walk-in linen closet. About six feet by eight feet inside, its tight quarters felt like a comforting embrace. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor, his elbows on his knees and his head on his arms. He had to get over this. Get a grip on himself. But how? If anything, he was getting worse, not better.

      As understanding as Laura tried to be, she couldn’t begin to comprehend what he’d been through, what the past few years had been like. It was his own private hell, and no one could climb into it with him and lead him out. He was lost, and getting more lost by the day. Oh, the shrinks said all the right things, but they had no more clue what he’d been through, really, than Laura did. They had a little more book learning about it, had a list of suggestions to offer out of some counseling text, but their psychobabble was mostly crap.

      How could everything be so perfect and yet so screwed up? He ought to be insanely happy. But instead, he was marching at a brisk pace toward the mental meltdown he’d been falsely accused of having six years ago.

      There hadn’t been anyone in the woods. A deer or some other creature

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