Chapter 4

Two weeks later.

“I think you’ll want to read that.”

Adam tossed a newspaper on the table as he carried a giant bag of birdseed out the back door.

I held a cup of coffee to my nose and inhaled deeply. Adam brewed the best coffee, and he always had a pot ready when I woke up, even if he was out and about. I had lived with a man once before, but I was never treated this good with just the simple things. I didn’t have to ask for a drink when he got up to get himself one—he just brought it. Adam was kind, and that kind of thing just can’t be taught.

I took a careful sip and turned the page. My eyes skimmed over an article on page four.

The blurb read no more than ten sentences, stating the police had no leads on a stolen body. Stolen—as if someone would rip through a body bag versus take the whole thing. It sounded to me like they were incompetent law enforcement at its finest, since I now officially moved to a cold-case file.

Adam was whistling to himself as he came back inside and chucked the bag over by the door. I watched in amusement as he peered out the window to watch the feasting. I think that’s what I liked the most about Adam—how pleased he was as he admired the end result of his putting out that seed; he liked taking care of things. He never killed bugs in the house either, but scooped them up, showed them to me so he could watch me scream, and released them on the porch.

“I think it's time we had a talk.” Adam placed his hands impatiently on his waist. I pressed my nose back into the paper, licking my finger and turning a few pages.

Everything stopped when I landed on the last page.

Zoë Winter Merrick, age 29, died September 5. Survived by mother, Abigail, and sister Sunny. Funeral 10 am Monday at Morgan Funeral Chapel.

It was so brief; no accomplishments, no surviving children, not even a respectable age to have lived to. What really got me was that Sunny put herself down as my sister. My fingers were devouring the paper like angry claws.

I felt Adam’s hand on my back, stroking in small circles. He was great on the punch lines, but he knew when to give that needed space and quiet. Sometimes I just didn’t want to say anything. He squeezed my neck in two quick pinches… the “you’ll be okay” kind.

“It’s time we go to your apartment and get your things. Time to close out that life.”

By late afternoon, I had slipped my long legs into a pair of knee-length grey shorts, black tank top, and flip-flops. Sadly, it was becoming my signature ensemble and I normally was a long skirt kind of girl.

I found Adam in the kitchen, so I took a lazy posture at the end of the table. Noticing my need to talk, he set down a glass in the sink and lifted a chair, turning it around so he could straddle it in front of me with his arms crossed over the back.

“What’s on your mind?”

I shrugged.

Adam knew when I was battling a sense of not belonging, an empty feeling I couldn’t explain that never existed before. But there it was, poking at me in quiet moments like a hot branding iron.

“Tell me where you’re from,” he said.

“I came out of thin air.”

Adam squinted as if trying to read me and I chuckled as it was always an inside joke with Sunny. I decided to end the suspense. “I was born on a transatlantic flight somewhere over the ocean. My mom was coming back from Germany and went into premature labor. Flight attendants delivered me during an electrical storm.”

His brown eyes were momentarily suspended on me. Reaching out, he gripped the seat of my chair and dragged it forward so we were even closer. “Go on.”

“We landed in Boston, so I’m American, but I also have Canadian citizenship.”

Adam laughed, shaking his head. “Now that’s a story.”

My mood was already brightening.

“What was your mom doing in Europe?”

“I don’t know; she said she lived there but she never talked about her past. I wish I had asked her more about it.”

Not that I would have gotten answers. When my mom didn’t want to talk about something, that subject was closed and buried. I guessed maybe that part of her life was too painful to remember.

I was a little tickled because it was the first time that we sat down and talked about ourselves. “So what about you, what’s your story?”

“That picture in my room? That’s me and my twin sister.”

I never made the connection. I had looked at it a few times but thought it was a purchased photograph.

“My mother was a career woman who decided to give it all up to become a mother. She met my dad and had us. He was older, didn’t have kids of his own, but he was a respectable man. I knew they had a relationship of convenience, but say what you want, that man did right by her.”

“People have married for less,” I agreed. “Where do they live now?”

“He was a smoker—died of lung cancer when we were kids. The medical bills didn’t leave us with much, so my mother had to get a job up north, and our bohemian life ended.”

I hadn’t even noticed Adam’s fingers were pinching the edge of my shorts as he was lost in his thoughts.

“We were really tight after that, the three of us. I was the man of the family, even as a kid, so I did what I could to help out. I worked all through high school and when our mother died—”

“Your mom died?”

I felt awful. To have lost both parents when you weren’t even out of school was unimaginable.

“It was a reaction to anesthesia. Bell took it hard.” He lifted his eyes to mine. “Annabell, my sister.”

“Did someone take care of you?”

“No, we had no other family. It was senior year when she died so I quit school and we moved into a loft where I worked two jobs to put her through college.”

I felt the need to connect to Adam for his selflessness and touched his hand. “I know she appreciates what you did for her.”

She better have or I’d rightfully kick her ass . The man quit school and by that time, she was old enough to take care of herself. But there he was, looking out for his sister.

“I’ve moved around a lot since then.”

I crossed my legs and leaned an arm on the table. “And you ended up moving here?”

“Yep.” He leaned over my arm and snatched a green toothpick from the holder on the table, rolling it on his tongue.

“Witness protection program?” I sniffed a quiet laugh.

Adam took out the toothpick and held each end between his thumb and index finger. He studied it as if he were looking at the molecular structure of an atom bomb.

Now who was being evasive?

I palmed his forehead and gave it a slow push as I got up from my chair and paced over to the fridge. There were strange meats and cheeses on the shelves that I wasn’t quite sure of, so I dug a little deeper.

Reaching in, I picked up a bowl of what looked like thick, red blood. Adam’s bare feet made sticky noises as he crossed the floor.

“What the hell is this?”

“Dragonfruit.” He snatched it and frowned. “Or at least, it used to be.” He tilted the bowl, giving it a skeptical appraisal.

“Looks like dragon’s blood.”

Adam slid the contents into the trash and I pulled out the jar of pickles from the fridge. When I turned back around, all the color drained from my face.

Adam spun around, holding a knife.

The pickles slid free, crashing to the floor as my hands covered my throat. His eyes flashed back and forth between me and the knife before he tossed it into the sink.

When I stepped sideways, my foot rolled on a pickle and I lost my balance. Everything tilted as I made a hard landing on my side. Adam dove forward, but it was too late. I hit the floor on my hip and came pretty close to smacking my head on the cabinet.

“Goddammit!” he scolded. But I was already in his arms as he lifted me off of the floor and set me on the kitchen counter. “Are you okay?”

I cringed.

He placed a hand over my chest and I looked down at the odd gesture. He felt my heart racing and knew it was more than a clumsy fall. “I’m not yelling at you, I’m yelling at me,” he said.

“I’ll clean it.”

Ignoring me, he bent over and turned my legs in his hands. “No cuts.” Then he checked my arms and lowered his eyes to my hip. “You’ll live.”

“That’s a relief.” So was his concern. It was a strange reaction, but I thought about the men in my past and he just didn’t fall in the same category.

Adam cared.

“What do you do for a living?” I wondered aloud. Something was off about Adam; he wasn’t like anyone I had ever met. High school dropout or not, he had intelligence in addition to agility. Strength combined with such a gentle spirit and warrior eyes that were haunted.

Leaning in with a hard posture, he closed the space between us. “Do you want me to show you?”

Goosebumps scattered across my arms when his hand slid up my leg over the pickle juice and he suddenly lifted me off the counter, carrying me through the house until we came to a door in the living room.

“Open it.”

“The closet?” I stared at the doorknob.

He snorted. “That’s no closet.”

I liked him holding me, so I stalled. “If there are jars full of heads in there, I don’t want to know.”

A frown pushed through his humored expression, carving a few small lines around his eyes. “Do you want to see or not? Be nice or I won’t cook my world-famous enchiladas.”

I clamped my mouth shut.

In the past couple of weeks I learned one hard fact—Adam had a gift with food. I simply had a gift of putting it in my mouth. Eating it was only half the pleasure, watching him prepare it, cook it, and serve it was like foreplay.

“That’s better,” he said, in a voice rich with honey and purr. “How did you get a name like Zoë Winter?”

“My cold, cold heart.”

He squeezed me ever so slightly in protest.

“My father donated his sperm and my middle name.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t have anything nice to say about a man I never met. Like most men, he didn’t stick around.”

Adam dipped down and opened the door; it swung slow and heavy, revealing a completely black room. No windows.

“Flip the switch, my hands are full.”

“You could always put me down.”

The door kicked shut behind him and we stood in the dark. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“I’d rather not know if this is any insight to your vast spandex collection, so if you could just warn me now?”

I heard the smile in his voice. “Then consider yourself forewarned, woman.”

Adam brushed the switch with his shoulder. A red glow illuminated from a series of red lamps that hung from the ceiling over a workbench filled with trays, bottles, and equipment.

“Put me down,” I breathed.

Adam let me go and stood by the door as I walked to the center of the room. The back wall was lined with built-in cabinets and drawers. On the left was a smooth white table with a magnifying glass on it. To my right was a weathered chair with a projector on a table.

“You’re a photographer.”

I walked over to several photographs hanging on a line: an old barn, a lazy cat stretched over a tractor wheel, a man on the street swinging a little boy over his head who looked three shades of tickled. I was peering into the mind of Adam and how he saw the world around him.

“These are so good.”

I turned to look at him and he leaned against the door with his arms folded.

“It’s my life and salt, the only thing that has kept me going. I needed to be able to look through the lens and see something good in the world.”

Leaning against the cabinet on my elbows, I raked my fingers through my hair with a little frustration building up. “You know, sometimes I think that I’m not the only one keeping secrets.”

I dropped my head down and gasped.

A photograph was peering out from behind another and I pulled it out. It was me, lying on the bed with my fists curled up on my chest like a feral thing about to fight. My body was smeared in blood, my shirt was ripped—how could I have survived?

The picture vanished with a snap of a wrist when Adam saw what I found.

“I’m sorry, Zoë. I forgot I had it.” He turned around and cursed under his breath. “I wanted to get evidence of what happened. I never meant for you to see it.” His fingers let go and it flew in an angle across the floor.

I stepped up behind him and hugged my body against his back. “I’m sorry you were dragged into this.”

That’s when he shifted around. “Sorry?”

“Say the word and I’ll go.”

Adam startled me when he pulled me into a hug. “You’re not going anywhere, Z.”

“Z?” I snorted into his shirt. “Since when did we get on such friendly terms?”

“Ready for some chow?” Adam planted a soft kiss on my nose before opening the door.

I reached over to flip out the light.

“I’m starving, so it better be world famous.”

“Zoë?”

“Yes?”

A finger brushed along the curve of my jaw. “Some men do stick around.”