A Hero's Redemption. Suzanne Mcminn
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was free to go. She’d done everything she could.
Acting as if she didn’t care when, for some stupid reason, she did, she flipped on the light over the deep farmhouse sink and set about filling the coffeemaker with water and grounds. The water was still running, but for how long?
Tension tightened her shoulders. The enormity of this storm was hitting her.
“Can I help?”
Calla felt him behind her and turned, found him standing there, in her kitchen, still watching her with those curiously daunting eyes. He was pale, but under that bloodless cold, he was a strong, fit man. She knew that. There were fine etchings of pain in his expression, but determination revealed itself in the hard line of his mouth. He looked effortlessly sexy in the flannel shirt and jeans she’d given him. They fit perfectly.
His voice…It was deep and Southern. Very typically West Virginian. Maybe that was why it had sounded so familiar somehow. She knew she had never met him before.
She would have remembered him. Oh boy, would she have remembered him.
“No. I’m fine. I’ve got it all set.” She gestured at the coffeemaker. “You should sit down. You should probably lie down.” For sure, he shouldn’t be out tramping in the snow. Her heart thumped when she saw him blink rapidly. “Are you going to pass out?”
“No.”
Yep, very determined.
She closed the distance between them, pressed her hands down on his shoulders and guided him back toward the kitchen table. It was nicked, nearly as old as the house itself, surrounded by six cane-back chairs. A carved walnut baby chair sat, long-unused, in the corner. The room, like the house, was rustic, with scarred wood floors, shelves lined with beautiful, antique canning jars she used to store dry goods, a pie safe for a cabinet. Old-fashioned ceramic jars and jugs crowded the mantel of an old stone fireplace.
She’d brought in a supply of wood the day before, and laid in extra in the utility room to keep it from getting wet. The rest lay under a tarp behind the barn, but with the way the wind had been howling all night, she wondered if that had stayed dry.
“Sit down anyway,” she insisted. “I’ve got enough problems as it is.”
He cooperated, which said something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”
Guilt pricked her. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I can’t pick you up off the floor, that’s all.”
His gaze was flat, direct. “You saved my life.”
“Can you tell me what happened, now? What is your name?” Did he know who he was? She’d heard of amnesia, but she’d never encountered it outside the soap operas she used to watch in college. Wasn’t this a soap opera scenario? Trapped in a blizzard with a stranger who couldn’t remember his name.
She might have laughed but for the lump of fear in her throat. You’re with them, aren’t you? His bizarre words from the night before rang again in her mind.
The ones who killed you.
It was all too creepy. She didn’t like it.
She wanted the soap opera scenario where she got stranded on a deserted island and magically had makeup and sexy clothes to wear every day. They’d feast on bananas and speared fish and drink coconut milk till the ship found them. Yeah, she liked that one better…Except for the part where she’d have to have anything to do with a man at all.
He still hadn’t answered.
She hadn’t turned the lantern-style fixture on over the table. The gauzy morning sun filtering through the snow outside didn’t do much to illuminate the room. The single bulb from the light over the sink created shadows across his face, revealing the cut of his jawline, the straight line of his nose, the unsettling darkness of his eyes.
Suddenly she wasn’t thinking how sexy he was, how some wild, bad side of her would like it if she could just spread him on a cracker and eat him up. She was thinking instead about how she wanted to run. Far. And fast.
Even before he spoke, dread thumped, almost painful, in her veins. This wasn’t the fun soap opera storyline. It was the nightmarish one.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he finally said. “I don’t know how I got here.”
Chapter 4
S he looked scared. Dane didn’t blame her. He was a little scared himself, and that was a little bit of an understatement.
But it was growing more and more impossible for him to ignore what appeared to be the fantastical truth. He’d gone back in time six months, to the week of Calla Jones’s murder. How? Why?
Reality stung him from every direction, and yet how could this be reality? He’d considered, for a few blind, mind-boggling moments, running away. Just…running away. He’d gone outside, in the snow. Half-dressed. Out of his head.
He had to start thinking clearly even while the world around him had rocked completely off its foundation. There was a freaking blizzard out there, and Calla Jones in here. His choices were limited, but heading for certain death in the frozen world gone mad outside this old farmhouse wasn’t the best one. He needed time. Time to make a plan.
In the meantime, he wasn’t sharing his secret with Calla Jones. Or his name. Not until he’d had time to think.
He had no idea what was going on. Yet.
Neither did he have much idea how he was going to figure it out, but it all centered around Calla Jones, didn’t it? That realization shot home suddenly, nearly sucking the breath out of his chest. His life had been destroyed the day he’d come out to her farm. She’d been murdered. He’d been blamed. Now he’d somehow ended up right back here on Calla Jones’s farm, six months earlier, where it all started.
And if whatever Twilight Zone craziness was going on rotated around Calla Jones…His nape prickled and he took a sharp breath, felt the pain. His ribs were bruised, at the very least. He was shaky, and not just from his injuries.
“You…You really don’t know who you are? No idea? Nothing?”
She was staring at him like she wanted to back up, maybe scream. Her hair, auburn-streaked, he realized now in the pale light framing her, not mere brown, was tousled—she’d been sleeping on the couch when he’d left the farmhouse. She’d slept in her clothes, he guessed. She wouldn’t have had time to change before she’d come tearing out after him.
The beat stretched between them. The gurgle of the coffeemaker and wind creaking against the farmhouse filled the space.
He avoided a direct response. “I was in an accident,” he said, remembering now that he’d told her that last night. “I don’t know what happened.” That much was true.
“I didn’t see anything out there. I didn’t see a car or anything.”
“Maybe the accident didn’t happen on the road outside your farm. Maybe I was trying to walk back to town.” Really, he didn’t know whether that was true or not. For all he remembered, it could be.
“You need to be looked at by a doctor. I can’t get you to town, and I can’t call for help. The phone’s dead in the farmhouse, and cell phones don’t work out here. Even if I could call, I doubt anyone could get up here right now. The roads are impassable when we have this kind of storm.”
Now she did back up, as if it was hitting her, again, that she was stuck with this stranger. She had to have realized that before, and yet she’d saved him last night and had rushed out again this morning after him. She was “good people,” this Calla Jones he’d been convicted of murdering. Of course, he’d known that. He’d heard her friends extol her virtues at the sentencing hearing.
“I can try to walk back to town,”