Finding West (17 page)

I gave a nod. “I’ve never done this without…”

She nodded and lifted her head off the floor to kiss me, to let me know she’s never been this close to anyone before either.

I began a slow rocking of my hips, the slick friction of each pull and push bringing me to the edge of climax faster. I had to slow, to tamp that feeling down and make it last.

Kat grasped my back, her nails digging into my skin
as she kissed my neck, my jaw, my shoulder. There was something desperate about her movements, as if I was a life preserver she was desperately clinging to.

Before too long
she tightened up and came trembling around me with a soft moan. I continued the steady rhythm, fighting against the primal need to start thrusting with abandon. I framed her face with my hands, rubbing the pads of my thumbs on her cheek. “This is the closest I’ve ever felt to anyone before,” I told her.

She covered my hands with her own
, her blue eyes filled with torment as she looked up at me. “I have to tell you something.”

I stilled
, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. “What is it?”

“Drew found your car.”

I was so shocked I barely noticed slipping out of her when I sat up. “Where?”

“About a mile out of town, past Ayashe,” she said
, shifting up onto her elbows. “It was… he said it looked like you slid off the road and drove into a bunch of spruce trees.”

I sat back on my haunches, trying to jumpstart my brain
so her words could make sense, but try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything about a car or an accident.

“He said
the car was totaled but he was able to recover some things, like your wallet,” she said, motioning to the brown plastic bag sitting on the coffee table.

I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. “Did you already look?”

She blinked a few times before nodding.

Here it was, the beginning of the inevitable end. “
So you know my name.” It wasn’t a question, but inside those words was a desperate plea.
Don’t send me back. Not now.

“Yes, your name is
—”

“Luke
Harrington.”

She stared at me, dumbfounded, then her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “
How long have you known?”

“Just this morning.”

She scrambled off the floor and hastened to gather her clothes. “And you didn’t think to tell me? You said I could trust you,
Luke
,” she said.

My real name sounded foreign on her tongue.
I both recognized it as my own yet hated its very existence. “I was going to tell you.”

“When? When you’re back in New York?” She picked the wallet out of the bag and threw it at me.

I caught the square bundle of leather at my chest and immediately recognized its weight and texture. It had been an expensive gift, but from whom I couldn’t recall. I remembered then why it wasn’t in my pocket when Kat had found me; it had always bothered me to drive long distances with a wallet in my back pocket. I’d always taken it out and set it aside so as not to aggravate an old spinal injury.

My eyes flicked up to her face in a moment of clarity. “
I was in a plane crash when I was twenty-two.” I set the wallet aside and looked down at the white scars marking my body, tracing each one with a finger. “My father and I were on our way to Las Vegas in his Cessna to celebrate and drink. I remember flying over the mountains, over the desert, but something went wrong during landing. The next thing I knew, the plane was skidding along the runway and breaking apart.”

My chest constr
icted at the memory of the accident, at the absolute horror of fighting my way back to consciousness only to find my bloodied father—my hero—beside me as he gasped his last breath. “He wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. I mean, he cheated on my mom and left her for a younger woman. But he made sure we didn’t want for anything. He gave us way more than was necessary, even though my mom, I’m pretty sure, was wealthy on her own. And he always made time to see me, his only son.”

When I looked up, Kat was blurry and it was only after a few seconds had elapsed that I realized I was on the verge of tears.

Kat walked over and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, resting her face against my back.

I bowed my head and kissed the hand at my collarbone. “I hated my dad after he died. I was in the hospital for a long time after that accident. It was only after a long time in physical therapy that I was able to walk again. I hated him for putting me there, for making my life hell. And I hated him for dying.”

And in that moment, I realized something about myself that I hadn’t been able to see before: my father’
s death had affected the course of my life. For a long time I blamed him, used his death as an excuse to act like an entitled prick. Funny how it took another accident, one that damaged me in a different way, for me to finally come to that realization.

Kat pressed h
er lips to the back of my neck, lending me some of her warmth as she listened.

The more I talked
the faster the memories returned, as if my mouth and brain were no longer connected. “The thought that got me through physical therapy was that I didn’t want to die without having lived my life, so once I recovered, I did risky and stupid things, things that would have killed me had I not been so damn lucky.” I turned around and faced her. “I had no direction in my life. I was drifting and aimless. Until you.”

She closed her
eyes. “Your memory is back,” she said in a choked voice. “You’re really Luke Harrington now.”

I pressed a palm to her cheek and kissed her soundly. After
ward, I held my forehead against hers, holding her gaze. “You don’t have to worry about him. As far as I’m concerned, I’m West.”

19

KAT

A part of me wanted to believe that West would stay, but I’d be a complete dumbass if I actually put any stock in that. He—Luke—was going to leave Alaska regardless. His real life on the other side of the country waited for him.

I had intended on going through his
entire wallet while he was working at the store, but only got so far as the license. Holding that piece of rectangular plastic, with his handsome face printed on it, there had been no question. West was actually Luke Harrington of East 20
th
Street, New York, New York, and would, according to his date of birth, turn thirty years old on August tenth.

I hadn’t had the stomach to keep looking, afraid of what else I would find. Each
new piece of information I unearthed just took me further and further away from the man I thought I knew.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one who felt that way; West, too, didn’t bother looking inside the wallet. He just placed it back in the plastic bag, took my hand, and led me to the bathroom
. He parked me in front of the mirror and loomed behind with his hands around my waist. “What do you see?” he asked, his eyes burning into mine through our reflection.

“
I see a fool and an impostor,” I said because my heart hurt and I needed someone else to feel it.

His nostrils flared once;
he leaned closer into me. “Look again. Look at me and tell me I’m not your West.”

“You’re not.”

“The person you came to know, that’s still me. Don’t you see that?”

I stared at his face: the
angular jawline, the strong nose, the luminescent gray eyes, and those eyebrows that were perpetually drawn together. I wanted to believe him, but the self-preserving part of me knew it would be dangerous to do so.

He slid one h
and up my stomach and held it against my chest, above my cynical heart. “Whether I’m West or Luke, the basic, irrefutable fact is that I love you.”

I gave a small nod of acknowledgement.

With my hand held in his, he led me into the shower and washed me with care, rubbing sudsy circles around my body with the loofah. He turned my back to the hot stream of water and washed my hair, tilting my face up to his as he massaged his fingers through my scalp with a gentleness I’d never experienced. I watched him wordlessly as he took care of me, as he tried to prove with his actions what his words could not. And in that quiet moment, when glass walls and thick steam shielded us from the rest of the world, I felt myself falling hopelessly in love.

After we dried off, he carried me to my bed and laid me down, stretching his muscular body over mine. I opened up to him and, after applying a condom, he slid into me, reaching me in a place previously untouched.

He rocked
his hips, drawing out each stroke before driving himself into me as deep as our bodies would allow. I gripped his back and clutched him to my chest, the words jumping out of my mouth before I knew what was happening. “I love you.”

He froze, lifting up on his arms to look at me, his chest heaving with exertion or maybe my confession.
Then he beamed: a glorious, blinding smile that wrinkled the skin around his eyes and lit up his entire face. “Say it again.”

For a moment, I was scared I couldn’t. Those words had slipped out by ac
cident; I never meant for them to be said, let alone heard by the one person who could now use them as weapons against me.

“Kat,” he urged
. “Say it again.”

I took a huge, scary, exhilarating leap of faith. “
I love you.”

He closed his eyes
and absorbed my words. Then he lifted me up and sat me on his lap, running his hands up and down my back as he gazed up at me with reverence. “You have no idea how good it feels to hear you say that.”

I ran my fingers through his dark hair and bent down to kiss him, pouring into it
the fear and the ecstasy that rushed through my veins. I started to sway on his lap but he held me by the hips and thrust into me from below. Over and over he reared up, driving into me so deep it expelled the air from my lungs.

“West,” I murmured as my entire body tensed.

He gritted his teeth as his orgasm began. He reached between us and pressed his thumb to my clit, drawing circles and taking me over the edge with him. I pulsed around him while he swelled and surged; he buried his face in my neck, his teeth against my skin as he growled through the climax.

“I
don’t deserve you, Kat,” he said, pressing kisses over my collarbone. He pulled back with a determined look on his face. “But there’s not a chance in hell I’ll ever let you go.”

A little while later he brought the plastic sack into the bedroom and emptied it onto the bed. I waited for him to say something, thinking surely this was a private moment, but he simply held out his open palm, motioning for me to look through his past.

I reached out and picked up the first thing that caught my eye, which was a shiny silver watch
with a black face. “Breitling,” I said, noticing the winged logo inside. I slipped it on my wrist. “Shiny.”

He grinned and reached for it
, rubbing its glass surface with his thumb. “I used to be so proud of this watch and would flash it every chance I got.”

“
Uh, why?”

He shrugged. “Status symbol.”

“Why, how expensive is it?”

He shook his head and chuckled. “You don’t want to know, trust me.”

I jabbed a finger in his side. “Come on. How much?”

“If I remember correctly, it
was about thirty-seven hundred.”

My mouth fell open. “Dollars or pesos?”

He took off the watch and threw it back onto the bed. “See? Told you you didn’t want to know.”

“Okay,
Richie Rich, so what’s next?” I asked, seeing the wallet, a few sheets of papers that looked like a rental car agreement, and a cell phone that had apparently run out of battery. I held up the wallet. “Can I look in here?”

“
Go ahead. I have nothing to hide.”

I pulled out numerous
gold and platinum credit cards and asked, “So, has it all come back to you then? Do you remember everything?”

“
No. I remember a lot but some puzzle piece are still missing, like I have blind spots in my vision,” he said. “I still have no idea what I’m doing in Alaska.”

I pulled out two condoms and a folded piece of paper with a list of names and phone numbers.
“Really?” I asked, holding the list up to the light.

He shrugged with a sheepish smile. “What? Sometimes
my phone runs out of batteries,” he said. “What if I need to get a hold of one of them in an emergency?”

I rolled my eyes
and ripped the paper into tiny shreds, throwing the pieces into the plastic bag.

He tackled me
onto the bed and tickled my sides. “That was a list of important people, Kat,” he said, laughing. “My lawyer, doctor, dentist.”

“Really?” I asked in horror.

He grinned down at me. “Not really,” he said and kissed my nose. He sat up and pulled me with him. “I’m glad you ripped it up. I would have just flushed it or fed it to Josie.”

The dog’s ear perked up from where she lay on the floor.

“She probably would have caught an STD,” I joked weakly, admittedly still a little bothered by how many names had been on that list. I wanted to ask if he’d had sex with all of them but, frankly, was too scared to know the answer.

His expression turned serious.
“Kat, what I said before… about having never done it without a condom—I meant it. Before today, I’d never had sex without any form of birth control. I’d never even wanted to.”

I nodded through the thick lump in my throat.
“What if…” I couldn’t finish the thought, too afraid of tempting fate by saying those words out loud.

West took my hand in his. “Then we’ll figure it out together.”

I decided that avoidance of the issue was the best course of action and turned back to ransacking the wallet. Inside the billfold was a thick wad of one hundred dollar bills and a few smaller bills. “Holy shit,” I said. “You don’t travel light, do you?”

He looked inside and grinned. “Thank God. I can now afford to take my girl
friend out to a fancy dinner.”

I warmed at being claimed as his girlfriend. “
Let’s go eat at The Diner then.”

He
gave me a dubious look. “That’s your idea of fancy?”

“What? They put
those candles on the tables at night,” I said as I made my way to the closet, still ignoring thoughts of STDs and pregnancies and found identities.

The Diner was busy for a Monday night and we had to wait almost fifteen minutes by the door before Franny was able to sit us at a small, café-style table in the back corner. Fifteen minutes is probably nothing in a big city restaurant, but in a place like The Diner, any time you couldn’t walk straight in and find a table is too long.

“Sorry guys, this is all we have open,”
Franny said, wiping down the table with a rag.

“
Can we have a candle?” West asked, pulling my chair out for me. “We’re on a fancy date.”

Franny gave him a
n adoring smile before running to the back room and coming back with a lit candle inside a glass vase. “We don’t usually put one on this table because it’s so small,” she explained.

“Thank you,”
he said, sitting across from me, our knees touching. “It’s perfect.”

I could tell Franny
wanted to talk to me, perhaps ask how my relationship with West was going, but she didn’t dare do it in front of him. Instead she took our order and went on her way. She came back a few minutes later with two glasses of the house wine, mentioning that nobody ever orders it before leaving us again.

“What should we toast?” he asked, lifting his glass
.

Without a word
I clinked my glass against his and took a sip.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he said with some amusement.

I shrugged and set the wine down. “I just didn’t feel like toasting anything.”

“Not even us?”

The concerned look on his face made me sigh in defeat. “I just don’t want to jinx anything by toasting with crappy wine, okay?”

He took a sip of the wine and winced. “You’
re right, the wine is awful,” he said and reached under the table to squeeze my knee. “Toasting is optional tonight.”

I didn’
t tell him about the heavy ball of dread at the pit of my stomach because I myself didn’t understand it. How could I explain it without knowing what
it
was? It was irrational and probably unfounded, but the anxiety was there anyway. I was too happy; the universe would somehow find a way to bring me down in order to regain equilibrium once again.

I changed the subject
instead. “So, now that you know who you are…”

“What’s my next move?”
When I nodded, he sat back and scratched at the stubble on his cheek. “I guess figure out why I’m here. I mean, I obviously came here on my own and rented a car. Maybe I was supposed to meet someone for an adventure trip in the wilderness. I remember going on a lot of those.”

“But Drew said you didn’t have luggage
or gear in the car. He said he checked the trunk and everything.”

We came up with different theories during dinner, a few of which were so wild they might actually have
some semblance of truth. “You found out you were adopted and that your biological parents were Aleuts living in the Alaskan wilderness. You came out here to meet them, but knew you wouldn’t stay, hence you didn’t bring clothes,” I said, finishing the last of my grilled salmon.

He
gave me a skeptical look. “I liked your theory about shearing the coats off hibernating bears better,” he said, pulling out his wallet to put money on the little plastic tray that held our check. He flipped through the wad of bills and frowned. “There must be around two thousand dollars in here,” he said, pulling out a fifty-dollar note.

As he did, a
tiny piece of white paper fell away from the fifty and drifted down to the table. “What is that?” I asked as he picked it up and studied it.

His face paled
; my stomach sank. “Kat…” he started, his eyes already begging for forgiveness.

I grabbed the piece of pap
er from his fingers. On it was the carefully handwritten name and address of one Katherine Hollister of Eight Sommers Lane, Ayashe, Alaska.