Yours Suddenly

Chapter 10

Roman

The B&B is… quaint.

Like one of those places you go to for your honeymoon. We even visited something like this, my wife and I, during our honeymoon phase.

My wife.

She's here.

How did I find her? I have connections all over the country. I have eyes and legs everywhere .

Does that make me some kind of stalker-ish asshole whose wife can’t ever escape him? Maybe.

But I'll be damned if I lose her.

It's late afternoon, which means it's been nearly forty-eight hours since she ran away and I've been a fucking mess.

I haven't slept since but I'm still as alert as a dog that’s tracking down its prey.

When I enter the B&B’s reception area, the old woman's smile falters when she looks up from her novel. Don’t blame her. I don’t look exactly friendly. The usual first expression that comes on someone's face when they meet me is never a smile. Just like with Alexandra the night I asked her to be mine.

“Good afternoon,” I say. “I'm looking for a woman called Alexandra Trent.”

The woman looks up at me with her mouth slightly open, probably wondering if she should give away information about her guests.

“One second,” she breathes, turning to her old computer.

I feel bad. She’s probably scared something will happen to her if she doesn't cooperate.

“I have an Alexandra Brooke?” she offers.

Brooke?

Anger flares inside of me.

Her name is Trent and, whether she likes it or not, that will forever be her name.

“Yes, her,” I grind out. “What room is she in?” I try to sound friendlier. “Can you please show me?”

The woman hesitates, and I don't have time for this. I turn and walk down the short hallway that leads to the rooms.

There are about five doors, and a very faint layer of dust has collected on the handles of four of them. I don't even bother to knock on the door with the clean handle.

I step into a room that smells of her.

Fuck . I missed that all-consuming scent.

The room perfectly encapsulates what she is: it’s warm, late afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows and pooling on the walls and on the bed she lies on, fast asleep.

“Sir,” a voice says tentatively behind me, and I turn to the woman.

“Don't worry,” I say quietly. “I'm her husband. I'm not going to do anything.”

I take out my phone and show her my lock screen picture of us kissing at our wedding after-party. The old woman looks a little more reassured, but that’s still no reason to let someone into her room, no matter who they say they are. I could be an abusive husband trying to track down my runaway wife.

She leaves, closing the door carefully behind her, and I sit on a chair in a corner, watching her like I sometimes do when we're back home.

Across the room facing me is a mirror. I glance at myself before focusing back on Alexandra, but it's enough to see how disheveled my hair is, how bloodshot my eyes are, how pale I look.

Now that I’ve found her and she's near me, I start to feel a little drowsy for the first time in nearly two days. Fuck, I was so worried. I tried to call her, but she wasn't answering her phone. She had good reason not to.

She has good reason to be here.

I watch her sleep. Her face is swollen, and fuck, I did that. Pain and regret close around my throat, but I push it down. Get a fucking grip. That was my father's favorite phrase. Get a fucking grip on yourself. That's the only way you can be a man and protect your family.

I rest the back of my head on the armchair and feel my eyelids droop slightly. If I sleep, she could slip from me again. Not that it would be hard to find her. There's nowhere on this planet she can go that I won't follow and find her.

Ever since I laid eyes on her in my hotel, she was mine to forever keep. You don't fucking wander into the lion's den and expect to escape… to leave the lion hungry…

A creak of the floorboards. I jerk awake to find her standing before me, her mouth slightly open. For a moment we stare at each other, her eyes bloodshot like she hasn't slept too.

Slowly I stand up, towering over her. She slightly shrinks away from me, and fuck, fuck . I hate that. I fucking hate the expression that's on her face. And it's all because of me.

“Alexandra,” I say finally.

“How did you find me?” she whispers.

“I know my way around this country. I have contacts in every single corner. You can't escape me,” I say.

“I'm not going back with you if that’s why you’re here,” she says.

I take a step toward her, and she takes a step back and it's like somebody has lodged a knife in my heart. I don't let it show on my face, though.

“You're coming back with me. You're my wife .”

“I am not going back with you, not after you humiliated me, in front of all those men and—and that woman. You're crazy!”

Crazy about you, I want to say. Obsessed. Enchanted. All I want to do right now is kiss her, and hold her and never let go.

“I have several meetings to attend back in New York,” I say. “I don't have time for this. Get your things, we're leaving right now for the airport.”

“Like hell I am,” she says, and she runs out the door.

Fuck's sake.

I follow at a safe distance because I don't want the old woman calling the fucking cops on me. I walk down the hallway, past the reception area and out into the warm sunlight.

She’s walking briskly down the driveway of the B&B and then she’s on the town’s main road. She turns left and heads down a street with more quaint little buildings. I don't know how anyone can stay in a small town for longer than a week, I'd go crazy. Too used to the shadows of skyscrapers and alleyways.

Her legs are noticeably shorter than mine so she has to do a little jog to keep a safe distance from me. All I have to do is walk at a medium pace to keep a maintained gap from her.

She walks towards the edge of a forest. Could be cougars and shit in there. As soon as I begin to walk briskly, she runs and I run too, catching up to her in three bounds.

“Alexandra,” I say, seizing her around the waist and lifting her off her feet.

She struggles. “Let me go! Put me down!”

“Baby, please,” I say. “There's nowhere you can hide where I won't find you. This is pointless. You're wasting your energy.”

I put her down and she faces me, tears glinting in her eyes. I wipe both wet trails away with my thumbs before they fall past her cheekbones.

She's looking up into my face so earnestly, so passionately, and I know she wants back me as much as I fucking want her back.

“I want a fucking divorce,” she whispers, looking me right in the eye.

Damn.

I won’t lie, panic erupts inside of me and if I was a little bitch, I probably would have started crying right away. For the record, no other woman has made me feel like this in my twenty-five years of life.

“Over my fucking dead body,” I growl. “You're my wife.”

“How many wives do you have?” she grits out. “At this point, I don't even know.”

I open my mouth to argue that there's no one other than her and that there never will be anyone like her. I move my hands from her face to lightly caress the back of her neck but she winces.

What’s this? I turn her head to the side and I see a bruising there.

“What the fuck happened here?”

She brings her hand to the bruise, purple and spreading on her pale skin. She steps back.

“Alexandra, what happened to you?” I say.

“What do you care?” she snaps. “You haven't spoken to me in over a month! You don't care about me anymore! You don't look at me the same. You come back from wherever at one in the morning smelling like other women! What the fuck do you care, Roman?”

I step forward and gently turn her head to the side again.

Somebody did this.

“Who is it?” I whisper. I can feel the blood pounding in my ears.

She looks down angrily and I lift her chin.

“Who did this?”

She still doesn't say anything.

“If you don't tell me,” I growl, “I'm going back to that town and I'm fucking killing everybody in it. No bullshit.”

The panic grows in her eyes. “I… I got a job at a horse ranch and the owner wasn't happy with the work I'd done, so things escalated and—and —?”

“And what ?” I say.

“He did it by accident.”

“You're a bad liar.” I bring my hand gently to the bruise and she winces.

Her eyes widen at the expression on my face. “What are you gonna do?”

I don't answer her.

“Please don't do anything,” she says. “It's not worth it. I'm fine.”

“You're not fine.”

“I'm fine, really I am —!”

“Why are you protecting this fucker?”

She opens and closes her mouth and then says, annoyance coming back over her features, “Oh that's right, you probably think I'm cheating with him?”

“What?” I say, thrown off.

“That's why you assigned Blake to me and don’t want me leaving the house anymore!” she says shrilly.

“What the fuck?” I say. “That's not why —” I give a frustrated growl, pinching the bridge of my nose as murder pulses in my veins.

“Roman, please calm down.”

“Okay, I'll calm down,” I grit out. “But only if you come back home with me.”

She closes her eyes. “I wanted a break.”

“A break so you could come here and get a fucking broken neck?” I spit. “Nah. We're going back home.”

She looks so resigned and, look, it breaks my heart to see her like this but there's no fucking way I'm going back without her, especially after what happened.

Fuck, it's all my fault. I'll never forgive myself for this.

“We're going to the hospital,” I say. I turn away from her and get on one knee. “Hop onto my back. I don't want you walking, especially after making me chase you. Why would you run when you know you're hurt like that?”

Slowly, she climbs onto my back. She weighs nothing, this delicate daisy. My delicate daisy.

I walk us back to the town. I don't have to ask for directions to get to the hospital, I saw it when I arrived in town from the airport with a Portland associate.

At the hospital reception, I tell them my wife has a bad bruise on her neck and I want, I need, the best care for her. I carry her to the hospital room they assigned her.

She starts to hyperventilate.

“It's just… I don't like hospitals,” she breathes.

I know why. Because of her family.

“I had to go to the hospital… to identify their broken bodies,” she reminds me.

Fuck, she's been through so much and I'm just adding to that.

Maybe… maybe I shouldn't have married her. But I'm too much of a selfish bastard to not have claimed her as mine. Too selfish and greedy to let her go.

I'll make it up to her.

I take out my phone from my pocket as the doctor examines her bruise.

“I have to make a call,” I tell her.

It breaks my heart to see disappointment come over her features. I lean forward and kiss her on the forehead which makes her tense up.

“I'll be back in half an hour, I promise,” I say.

She turns away from me. As I walk out of the room, I promise to make it up to her.