I disconnected the phone call.
My mind cataloged the people I could call. Vera. My mom. My brother. Evan. My mom and brother would be useless. Vera never answered calls from unknown numbers. That left Evan. I wavered a few seconds before I decided to call him, but in the end, I did it.
The waiting started once more.
One ring.
“Hello.”
“Evan,” I whispered. His name rolled off my lips like a benediction. A prayer. Even though I still hated him, he symbolized home and my life before Ryker unhinged everything I knew and believed about my life and myself. Evan cheating on me seemed like an inconsequential hiccup in comparison to my current problems.
“Hattie, baby, is that you?”
Stunned that he answered the phone, I nodded my head, forgetting he couldn’t see me.
“Hattie?” he repeated louder. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Where are you?”
Fragmented thoughts tumbled from my mouth. “I don’t know. I ran. I got lost. He found me. There was a bed and breakfast. We fought. Why does he do that? There was a car. I stole it, and now I’m driving somewhere. I don’t know where.”
“What? Hattie, you need to calm down and explain.”
I slowed to a stop and surveyed my surroundings. The road dead-ended twenty feet in front of me at a small terra cotta colored cottage with a thatched roof and a light blue front door. Uneven gray stones were stacked on either side of the cottage, forming a rudimentary fence. Brightly colored clothes hung from a string between two wooden posts.
“Oh shit,” I murmured.
“What?”
“I’m at someone’s house.”
“Don’t go in,” Evan warned, but his words sounded faded and distant as reality slapped me across the face.
I fled the bed and breakfast on the one road that was a dead end. No wonder Ryker didn’t run after me. I couldn’t go anywhere except back to the bed and breakfast, or I could get out and run aimlessly through the jungle again, because I couldn’t drive the car through the dense foliage.
“I’m fucked.” The words were a pained whisper ripped straight from my pulverized soul. Defeat churned savagely in my stomach, and I started to cry. I was so sick of crying. “I thought I won. I can’t believe this. I can’t get away from him, and every time I see him I crumble.”
“Who are you talking about?” Evan yelled, and I jerked in reaction to his harsh tone. I’d almost forgotten he was on the phone.
“Him.” I shoved my sweaty hair out my eyes. “Oh God, Evan, I don’t understand how he does it. He touches me, and I try to fight it, but he overwhelms me and I cave. I’m weak. Hopelessly pathetic. Something is wrong with me…so wrong.” My voice fractured on the last word.
“Hattie, you’re scaring me. What are you talking about?”
“He’s corrupted me. I don’t even know who I am anymore,” I said, my voice sounding dead to my ears. My head dropped to the steering wheel and disjointed sobs streamed out of my mouth one after another.
“Listen to me, Hattie. I will find you. I promise. I’m sorry I hurt you. I will do whatever it takes to get you home safely, and then we’ll start over. Believe me, I will never let you go again. It’s you and me forever.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted my safe, predictable life so much I could practically taste it. Even more, I wanted the life I thought I had before Evan shattered it into a million pieces. “Please, Evan,” I pleaded. “I need to go home. I can’t stand this. I’m so confused.”
“Listen to me. I’m coming for you. I will find you. I will bring you home, and then we’ll start over. Together we’ll create a new life until we’ve erased all of this shit with bigger, better, and more meaningful memories.”
“Oh God, Evan, I don’t know if it’s possible. I’m so fucked up. This is so fucked up.”
“No,” Evan shouted through the phone. “Don’t you dare give up on me or us, not even for a second. You have to believe you’ll make it out of there.”
“I can’t promise anything. I don’t think he’ll ever let me go home again. I think he’s playing me, breaking me until I’m nothing.”
“No, Hattie, don’t give up. You’re strong. I’m strong. We’ll get through this. I just need you to promise me one thing.”
“What?” I whispered, wiping the waterfall of tears from my face with the back of my knuckles.
“That when I find you, you’ll give me a chance to make things right between us, and we’ll be together again. It’ll be just like old times. You’ll see.”
My mind screamed at me to reject him. How could I promise him a second chance when my fate dangled from a fraying rope? When my body wanted Ryker? But that’s exactly what I did. “Okay. If I ever find my way back, I’ll try to give you that.” I sniffed, lifting my head from the steering wheel, and that’s when I saw him. Ryker stood next to the open driver’s window with his arms folded across his chest.
Clumsy from fear, the phone slid out of my hand, and I screamed as the driver’s side door flung open.
“Get out, now.” It wasn’t his appearance that made him so intimidating. It was the way he carried himself…with the grace of a jaguar. The ancient Mayans, who inhabited this area long before the Europeans arrived, believed their kings and nobles were descended from a jaguar. And when I looked at Ryker, I believed it. He had velvet black hair, flinty predator eyes—watchful yet indifferent—and the sleek grace replicating the legends of the mythical jaguar.
“Screw you,” I hissed through my locked teeth. I shook my head defiantly, but my strength withered under the intensity of his stony, gray gaze. Evan’s voice echoed through the static-filled phone cradled between my legs, but the frenzied pounding of my heart drowned out his words.
Ryker picked up the phone and smashed it against the side of the car, then tossed it back into my lap. Before I could complain, he coiled his hand around my arm, yanking me out of the car with ease. My oversized t-shirt slipped from my shoulder, leaving the top of my breast exposed as he pulled me through the open car door. “Fucking hell,” he said, shoving my t-shirt back up my shoulder. “Tell me who you were talking to.”
“No one.” I refused to make eye contact with him. Eye contact was bad. His eyes had a way of sucking all my hard fought defiance from my tattered soul.
“Look at me.” He grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him. The fine hair on my nape stood on end. “Tell me,” he said with a honeyed menace that chilled me to the bone.
I closed my eyes. The silence stretched, heavy and judgmental, as he waited for me to obey. Slowly, like a gathering storm, tremors erupted in my legs, moving to my torso and then my arms. Within sixty seconds, my entire body shook with rage, fear, and dread. I fisted my hands in my shirt to regain control over my body, but it didn’t help. My sanity dangled from a gossamer thread, and my chest heaved in hysterical gasps.