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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Books by Drew Jordan

  About HIDE

  Quote

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  EXPOSE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Notice

  Table of Contents

  Crash

  Hide

  Expose

  All you need is love. And a strong alibi.

  A plane crash brought me to the cabin in the woods with the stranger, but love keeps me here. Nothing can take me from his arms, not even a man from my past. But after a body is found nearby, the police have questions for me. For us.

  All I’ve ever wanted is to stay with the stranger, the man I crave and need but my secrets are starting to unravel. Escape is what the stranger demands and I’ll do anything for him, including leaving the cabin and creating a new identity. I’ll do whatever he tells me to do-with my body, my heart, my soul.

  The last time I loved, I lost. I won’t let that happen again.

  HIDE is the follow up to the bestselling erotic thriller, CRASH, with the series conclusion, EXPOSE (the stranger’s story), releasing in late 2016. For mature readers only.

  The greatest love stories start with blood…

  “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

  In Memoriam

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  The last time I loved, I lost. That won’t happen again. So as I stared down at Michael’s body and watched the blood leave his head and spread like syrup rushing off a pancake, I knew I’d done the right thing.

  He wanted to take me away from the stranger, take me back to Seattle. He wanted to expose my secrets and lock me in a white room with nothing but my thoughts and my guilt and my loneliness. A room like the closet I hid in when I was a little girl and my mother left the apartment for her nightly fuck fests with random men.

  I couldn’t be locked up again and he was not nice for trying it.

  I had done the right thing.

  I turned to the stranger, breathing hard, my frantic and urgent breaths creating a steady stream of vaporous tendrils in the freezing cold air of Alaska. Steam rose from the warm blood spilling across the front porch of the stranger’s cabin. “I’m sorry,” I told him, because I realized he might be angry with me for killing a man on his porch. For bringing this to him.

  The last thing I wanted was the stranger angry with me. That would be completely counterproductive. But my decision to kill Michael had been a desperate impulse, one borne out of panic at the thought of being taken away. Not just because of the hospital. But being taken away from him.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked me. He was studying me carefully with those pale blue eyes, their intensity drawing me in, as they always did. I had lowered the ax, my weak arms unable to hold the weight of it after my one adrenaline fueled swing.

  I had never killed before. There was bile in my gut, and my heart was still racing. The stranger, the man who had saved me after the plane crash, the man who had no name, yet fulfilled me in ways I still didn’t understand, watched me carefully, without judgment. He would understand. He loved me, the real Laney. Not the floral façade, the sweet and innocent and passive me, but the true Laney, the one virtually no one saw. The one sometimes even I had a hard time looking at in the mirror. The Laney who made things happen.

  “He wasn’t going to let me stay with you,” I murmured. “And I couldn’t just tell him no, because he knows things. He knows everything.”

  His eyebrows rose and he reached out and took the ax from me. I gratefully gave up its weight. “Is that what you want, to stay with me?”

  “You know that’s what I want.” I had spent the majority of the twenty-four years of my life searching for someone who would make me his whole world. With the stranger, out here in the middle of the bush, living in total isolation, I was his everything. All he needed. All he wanted. “I want you.”

  “Then let’s get rid of the body.”

  Guilt was a strange emotion. It had a pulse. It squeezed and released. It wasn’t difficult to look at Michael, to stare down at his beautiful face, always wearing an expression of cheerfulness, eyes now vacant, lips slightly upturned, like he had been smiling when I hit him. Michael didn’t deserve to die, but Michael would also forgive me because he was a good man. He would understand that sometimes you have to do what you don’t want to do. That it had been a mistake for him to mire himself in the filthy waters of my family, to wade into the shit-soaked cemetery where all our skeletons were buried.

  So I could look at him and not feel something as obvious as guilt. Yet I couldn’t touch him. That made me feel like I might throw up, my stomach clenched tight. I stood on the porch, shivering from the cold, and watched to make sure no one would suddenly pop out of the wilderness and catch us while the stranger, my lover, went inside to make preparations. The sled dogs whined in the yard, the smell of blood crawling up my nostrils, and most likely exciting them even from fifty feet away. Their chains rattled, their howls grating on my nerves, and for a minute I felt a scream well up inside me and threaten to spill forth so loudly, with such primal despair, that anyone on the river for two miles in either direction would hear me. But I held it in, I swallowed it, and it landed in my stomach like a rotting fleshy golf ball.

  Don’t touch Michael.

  Don’t throw up.

  That’s what I forced myself to concentrate on.

  Don’t think about my stepfather and how disappointed he would be in me.

  Don’t think about Michael’s family.

  Don’t think about my little sister and the web of lies that had surrounded her from the second of her conception.

  Don’t think about the closet of my childhood.

  Don’t think about the hospital, where people who had psychotic breakdowns got locked up in pajamas while doctors patronizingly probed the inner corners of their minds.

  Think about the future.

  Think about cozy nights in the cabin.

  Think about security, in knowing where I belong. Here. With him.

  Think about survival.

  The stranger came out onto the porch, wearing his heaviest and most wind and water resistant coat and hood. He had a backpack over his shoulder and goggles in his hand. “You need to stay here,” he said. “And I need you to build a barrel fire on the porch to melt this snow.”

  To get rid of the blood. I knew that’s what he meant. There was a lot of blood.

  “Okay. Is there bleach in the shed?”

  “Yes. And take the ax and throw it in the river under the ice.”

  My mind was moving slowly. “But won’t someone just find it?”

  “Bleach it, then toss it. The current will drag it downstream underwater in the spring. No one will find it. If they do, they’ll just think they found a tool and they’ll take it home.” He hadn’t put his gloves on yet and his cold fingers reached up and stroked along my cheek. “Do you trust me, Laney?”

  I nodded. I did trust him. He had saved my life three times. This would be the fourth. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Into the woods, like he was going home. I’ll stage a snow machine accident. The animals will take care of the body.”

  For a second I felt the world spin, spots dance in front of my eyes. I had done this. I had created a body. Taken the name from a man and turned him into nothing but a body. I’d taken a name from a man to stay with one who had none. But I couldn’t undo
my actions. And if I could, would I? I nodded, not really feeling the cold. Not feeling anything but a high-pitched manic anxiety, tossed with a sense of sorrow and guilt. And even triumph. I had saved myself. Now the stranger would finish the job.

  “I didn’t plan this,” I told him.

  “I know. You lack discipline.”

  That stung. But it was true. I knew that. I held myself under the water for as long as I could then I always burst forth with a huge gasp, eyes closed, desperate for air, loud and splashing. I was learning to not hold my breath so I wouldn’t have to gasp. But I wasn’t there yet. “I’m not you.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me, a hard press of his cold mouth on mine. “I don’t want you to be me. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t want him to leave. I never wanted him to leave. This was necessary though and I couldn’t complain or freak out or panic. “Be careful.”

  He gave me a smile. “I can take care of myself.” He started down the stairs, skirting the body. From the yard he glanced back. “I wanted you to stay,” he said. “In case you were wondering.”

  I had been. “I love you,” I responded, because loving him was like loving me. We were a mirror, reflecting back at each other, and it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know his name or where he had lived the majority of his life, or who he had loved and lost. I only cared about him with me and how he made me feel like my skin was alive. How my soul made sense for the first time ever and how he challenged me to awaken into everything that I could be.

  It wasn’t a given he would respond in kind and I didn’t need him to. I could see it on his face. In his eyes. But he must have recognized I might need reassurance because he called back as he walked, “And I love you, doll.”

  The words warmed me from the inside out. They weren’t words I heard very often.

  My mother had never told me she loved me. Not once. Grandma Jean had, on rare occasions when she looked at me like she was worried. Fretting. Like she knew she had raised a shit of a daughter and didn’t know how to fix it for me. It was love borne out of fear.

  Dean had loved me, in the convoluted way of a man who wanted to be my father, yet wasn’t, and therefore always held something back. I don’t think that when I was a little girl and he would take me to the park, tuck me into bed, that he felt as a stepfather he had the right to say those words. Then later, well, his love was interlaced with guilt for the fact that he looked at me and got hard. He no longer felt free to love me when that love came with me in his bed at eighteen. But he had never understood he shouldn’t feel guilty when it was my choice. When I was the one who changed everything.

  He would have never gone there, never allowed himself to feel attraction, arousal. Because he was a good man and maybe, he hadn’t actually felt those things for me, until I had convinced him he did. So really, that wasn’t a love freely given.

  Then there was Trent. He had loved me in a selfish way until he hadn’t and I had punished him for it. It made me squirm uncomfortably at how I had humiliated myself with him.

  Never again. Not with the stranger. We were equals. Love given and received for no reason other than kindred spirits.

  The stranger came back from the shed, a tarp in one hand, the bleach in the other. He handed me the bleach, then with his gloves on, he rolled the body onto the tarp and keep rolling towards the house until there was nothing visible beneath the layers of plastic. The porch decking, usually covered in a dusting of blinding white snow, now had a bold splash of vibrant red on it, shocking against the snow. It made me feel sick, the horror threatening to close off my throat and choke me. I dug my nails into the cotton of my pants, digging deep, drawing pain from my legs. Focus. Don’t throw up.

  Own my actions.

  The stranger tugged at the tarp, hauling the heavy body up and over his shoulder.

  I went down into the yard, searching for a washtub or barrel that would work as a fire pit. There was a steel bin that was turned upside down in the tool shed that I hauled out, breathing heavily as I tugged and pulled. The tarp was being tied to the back of the snow machine that Michael had arrived at the cabin on. The stranger’s plan made sense to me. We had to explain the snow machine. Get it away from us. The blood, the DNA, transfer fibers, would all be eliminated by the harsh climate, the predators and scavengers.

  How long would it take for anyone to notice Michael was missing? He had come from Fort Yukon for the purpose of finding me, but had he told anyone? I didn’t know much about his life in Fort Yukon other than that he made his money running an online stock trading site, so that he could live out his wilderness fantasy. He hadn’t lived there long enough to be in tight with the locals and that would work in our favor.

  The stranger waved to me and took off on Michael’s snow machine, heading into the woods on the trail he normally used for his dogs. I didn’t even know which direction Michael lived in, so I wouldn’t have been able to stage an accident correctly. I needed the stranger. Of course, without the stranger, I would have left with Michael. I would have returned to the comfort of an ordinary life, where I was a passive, pale version of me, a doll with soft curls, lipgloss, and fit and flare floral dresses.

  As I fought to tug and shove the bin up the porch stairs, I didn’t miss that version of me. She was a wimp. She had hid, waiting, waiting, waiting. For what, I had never known. I’d found it by accident. I was waiting for this. For the sting of the Alaskan air, for the pinch of the stranger’s fingers on my nipple, for the tangle of hair I no longer brushed, and the freedom to let out the darkest of my dark thoughts.

  For a second I stood there, breathing hard, listening to the retreat of the roar of the snow machine and felt sad that I hadn’t said goodbye to Michael. I should have said a word or two. But it was too late and he wouldn’t have heard me anyway. “I’m sorry,” I said out loud, but then I hated the sound of my voice. It was small and tentative and trembling. I sounded scared. I didn’t want to be scared.

  That was my struggle since I had arrived. Learn to be strong. Learn to take action, then not backpedal.

  I tossed wood from the woodpile into the bin. I splashed gasoline onto it then lit it. I didn’t have the patience for coaxing a fire to life. I wanted a blaze. The wood cooperated because of the gas accelerant and produced a high bright fire, smoke rising up into my face. I turned my head and stared out at the yard, thinking. Michael had slept in the bed in the house. I should wash the sheets later too, just in case.

  The dogs were watching me. They were all tethered to their individual posts and several stood, eyeing me. Two were sitting on their haunches, but their eyes were still trained on me. The whining had stopped. I hadn’t truly bonded with the dogs, even though they were beautiful and I wanted to. There were too many, it was always chaotic, and they were excited to see the stranger, mostly ambivalent to me. They didn’t stand still long enough to let me pet them, and I couldn’t remember each of their names.

  Now I felt like they were judging me. That they had an opinion about what I had done. It hurt my feelings, which was ridiculous and crazy and untrue. But I couldn’t help but feel that somehow I had disappointed them and it made me sad. I wanted the dogs to like me. I wanted to think of them as my dogs too.

  I wanted to belong. I had never found the place I belonged in my entire life.

  Walking past them with the ax, I stopped to say hi to each of them, to rub their heads, reassure them. Reassure me. Their fur felt warm and soft beneath my numb fingers. I’d forgotten my gloves. I stared down at the one whose collar read “Duke” and I wondered if he knew how much his pale eyes looked like his owner’s. His master. My master.

  A shiver ran through me. No. Not my master. My equal. I was getting confused. I kissed the top of Duke’s head and he licked my cheek. His tongue was warm, but abrasive. The thought made me smile. That was also like his owner.

  Standing back up I felt lighter, more confident. I walked down to the river, breathing hard from the exerti
on of hiking through the snow. At the bank I paused, filling my lungs with cold air, and looked left and right. No one. Only once had I seen people on the river besides us, and I had tried to escape the stranger by running to them. Instead I’d fallen through the ice, and the stranger had saved me.

  Searching for a weak spot in the ice, where water pooled, like the stranger had taught me, I moved a few feet to the left. If it were any later in the year, this would be a problem, but it was still fall. The ice was thin, newly formed. The river wasn’t ready to be walked on, as I had discovered. I found a likely spot and using the ax, I hacked at the ice with it in hard, furious motions. My shoulder wrenched, but I didn’t hesitate, I just swung. A strange noise came out of my mouth and I realized it was a sob.

  I broke through the surface and water burbled up. Relief seized me and I shoved the ax down into the hole, cutting the numb flesh of my palm by accident. The ax dropped in and I covered it with snow, packing it down. Once the river started rushing again in spring, it would be carried downstream. Until then, it would be hidden under the ice and snow.

  A second too late, I realized I hadn’t bleached it, but I figured it wouldn’t matter. The water would clean it.

  Standing up, my knees wet, I held my hand out, staring at the blood. It was shaking slightly and I couldn’t seem to control it. The smear of fresh vibrant blood seemed fitting, the pain welcome. I didn’t wipe it. I let it forge a trail through the lines and caverns of my skin and I started back to the cabin.

  The snow had already melted and the blood had disappeared from the porch.

  Gone. Like it had never happened.

  My secrets safe.

  When the stranger returned, I was in bed, reading the mystery novel he had. His one and only book. I kept starting it but then would get distracted by my thoughts. I was determined to have no thoughts at all, so I had put on sweats and wool socks, along with one of the stranger’s thermal shirts, and I was nestled under the covers.

  But the sheets were bothering me. They were soft from many nights of sleeping on them and normally they smelled like the stranger. Like me. Like us together, the sweet scent of our sex lingering.