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  If I wasn’t careful, more would be spilled in our yard right now.

  “I get what you’re saying,” the tall man said. “But if you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the big deal?”

  “Because how the fuck do I know what you’re really here for? Maybe you saw her and thought she’s hot and want to knock me out and spend the afternoon raping her.”

  “That’s really damn suspicious and frankly insane,” the shorter man said. “Hey, Clay, I think we should just leave.”

  I stepped down off the porch, not sure if that would make my lover more upset or not, but realizing even though it made my pulse quicken, I couldn’t let him start serious shit with these men. “It’s okay, baby, I think they meant well.”

  He turned back to look at me, and his gaze pierced me. He was furious. I didn’t know how much of it was directed at me. I did know that if the two men hadn’t been witnesses, he would have ordered me into the cabin and I would have gone. I wasn’t trying to be disobedient. I was trying to be normal. Surely he had to recognize that. The only thing more suspicious than a body in the yard was us acting like we had a body in the yard.

  “Are you sure, Laney?” the taller man asked.

  Hearing my name off the man’s lips was jarring, frightening. I didn’t want him to know who I was, though I wasn’t sure why it would be such a bad thing. It just felt intrusive. Too familiar. I just nodded, waiting for a cue from the stranger. He gave it.

  “Her name isn’t Laney. I’m not sure why you’re calling her that.” The stranger released the man’s arm and took a step back. “Her name is Stephanie.”

  I nodded again, though the name amused me. That was the one he plucked out of the ether? Stephanie? It would not have been my first choice for a fake name. I would go exotic, foreign. But of course that would be suspicious. Stephanie could be a native Alaskan or someone from the lower forty-eight who had found her way north. It was an innocuous name. Stephanies didn’t come with a dark past and a body in the back yard.

  “Okay.” The man seemed to give up. I smiled at him, my attempt at final reassurance. “Sorry to bother you all,” he said carefully.

  “No problem,” I said. “I hope they find the missing girl.” They could look forever and forever, but they were never going to find her. I wasn’t that Laney who had stepped on that plane, desperate for a place to belong, any more. Not even close.

  “Yeah,” said the stranger. “If we see anything out of the ordinary we’ll be sure to let someone in town know. But it’s rare to see anyone in these parts.” He had gotten his control back. He was using his polite voice. “That’s why you two coming up to my cabin had me defensive. I hope you understand.”

  “Sure, sure, I get it.”

  The stranger reached his hand out and the man took it and they shook. There were casual waves, then he stood and watched them leave. I wondered what they would say the second they were out of earshot. I doubted they believed I wasn’t Laney. I wondered what picture of me they had used. It surprised me that I’d been on the news. I had never really thought about that possibility and I was narcissistically pleased by it. Though not if they used a shitty picture. Would my roommate Sammy do that to me? Give them a shitty picture? Because who else would they ask for a picture? Maybe Michael. Before now. When he was in Fort Yukon, expecting me. Looking for me.

  All the pics I’d sent to Michael were cute, because I’d been trying to impress him at the time, so that was reassuring. I didn’t want my ten minutes of fame to be marred by a suck-ass shot of me lying on the couch the day after a party, swollen and hungover and bleary-eyed, which I knew Sammy had a lot of. She liked to group share them with the hashtag “aftermath.”

  But while my thoughts took a detour to my unexpected notoriety, the stranger was clearly having different thoughts.

  “Get in the cabin. Now.” His voice was low, angry.

  I jumped a little, startled. Reminded of all the reasons why he could and should be angry. “Okay. I’m sorry about the men—

  He cut me off. “Please don’t speak right now. I need to think and I can’t think when you talk.”

  So I shut my mouth and went in the house, repeating the ritual of removing my boots.

  When I was bent over, he came up behind me, his hands running over my backside. He didn’t seem angry, his touch gentle, but eager.

  “I just need to feel you,” he said. “And calm down. I thought I was going to kill that man. He kept looking at you and he wanted to take you. He wanted to take you from me, do you understand that?”

  The blood was rushing to my head and I stood back up but he pulled me against him so that I couldn’t see his face. He squeezed me, hard. His words brought tears to my eyes and I clasped my hands around his wrists, to hold on. “You wouldn’t have let him,” I said. “I know that.”

  He had been scared. I could hear his anger at his own fear, sense his confusion. He didn’t really understand what had happened, why he was feeling what he did. I knew. I was touched beyond anything and I reveled in it. He would kill for me. Just like I had killed for him.

  He was right, absolutely one hundred percent right.

  We were a perfect fit.

  One more hard squeeze, then he released me, before shoving me against the nearest wall.

  With two swift yanks he had my pants down and he drove his cock inside me. I gasped, eyes rolling back into my head. I was ready for him, because his territorialism had turned me on. There was plenty of lubrication to allow him to easily slide into my body and I clasped at the wall, bracing myself as pleasure assaulted me.

  “No one is taking you from me. Ever.”

  His explosion came fast and I came too, overwhelmed by excitement at his total loss of control. I had made him do that. Lose control.

  I had never felt more powerful or more grateful in my entire life.

  But Sammy’s word popped into my head.

  Aftermath. It’s never pretty.

  My back slammed into the wall, my inner thighs aching as I focused on staying standing, shocked and aroused by his frantic thrusts. After he came inside me, he rested his forehead on the wall behind me, breathing heavily. I waited, swallowing several times, grateful for his love, devotion, willingness to protect me. It was everything and I wanted to be worthy.

  He had barely pulled out of me before he told me, “If anyone else asks, you’re Stephanie Doyle. You lost your driver’s license a while back, but you’re meaning to get a new one soon.”

  I swallowed again, still breathing hard from sex. I shifted my legs closed when he stepped back away from me. “Why Stephanie Doyle? I already told the woman in town that my name is Laura. And she might have even heard Michael call me Laney. No one is going to believe my name is Stephanie.”

  He didn’t answer me. He just tucked his dick back into his jeans and zipped before going over to his dresser. He reached under the dresser and felt the underside of the bottom drawer before finding what he wanted. He pulled out a plastic folder with a tie and carefully opened it. Then he sorted through it before landing on what he sought and striding over to me. I was bent over, raising my pants back into place.

  The paper he held in front of me was a marriage certificate.

  “This is me. And this is you,” he said.

  It was the marriage decree of one Cody Samuel Doyle and Stephanie Leroux Doyle, dated three years prior. Stephanie was born two years before me in Fairbanks, Alaska. Cody was twenty-nine years old if my math was correct. My eyes snapped up to the stranger. Cody? Was he Cody?

  I remembered his words, spoken so casually, as he watched me taking a bath.

  The last person in this tub drowned.

  His wife had drowned. Or he had drowned her.

  There was no Chelsea and he was not Justin. He wasn’t the man in the newspaper article I’d found in his dresser about a young woman named Chelsea who had died and was survived by her brother Justin. I had always thought that was him, truly. That he had lost his sister and retreated
to the wilderness. But if he was Cody and Cody had a dead wife Stephanie then why was he here, in the woods? And why was I so jealous at the very thought?

  Because I wanted to be first. I wanted to be the first, the only, and the last woman he had loved. I wanted to believe that he felt only need and want for me. No one else. Certainly not now. But not even before. Or that if he had mistakenly thought he loved someone before, he had walked away from her. Divorced her sorry ass. Not that she had been ripped from him through the vagaries of death because that meant he hadn’t quit her. It wasn’t a choice. I wanted to be chosen. More than any Stephanie.

  “Where is the real Stephanie?” I asked. How could I use her name as mine, if he had loved her? That would negate me, cause me to disappear into her. I felt a hot, thick wave of jealousy.

  “She’s dead. Memorize her information if you’re ever questioned.”

  “This won’t work.” I shouldn’t protest, shouldn’t argue, but I was upset, hurt. Jealous of a dead woman. And there were serious flaws in his logic. “If Stephanie is dead it will take someone five minutes to look that up online.”

  The look he gave me made me shiver. “No one knows Stephanie is dead. As far as I know, anyway.”

  Goosebumps raced across the surface of my skin and I opened my mouth to question him then ruled against it. I didn’t want to know. He was right-the past was best left undisturbed because I’d been happier knowing nothing. Now I was both jealous and unnerved. Not scared, because I knew how he felt about me. But unnerved.

  “But all anyone has to do is look at a picture of Laney on the news and look at me and realize we’re the same person. That’s clearly what those men did.”

  “You don’t look the same as those pictures on your phone. People believe what they want to believe.”

  I bit my lip because I thought he was wrong. It wasn’t going to take a genius to unravel this mystery of who I was and where I was from and currently staying. Though he was determined to be stubborn, so I decided it didn’t matter. Laney being missing and found here meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. That was a secret that could be revealed without any real consequence that I could see. The issue was the body in the woods.

  No one was asking about Michael.

  So I let it go. Instead I asked him, “So am I supposed to call you Cody now?” In a way, I could see that it might fit. A Cody could be a woodsman.

  “Yes. Especially if anyone shows up asking any questions.”

  I wasn’t sure that was an admission or not. If Cody was his true identity or not. But if it wasn’t him, who would it be? I tried to think of him as Cody, but he was still The Stranger to me. His name was fluid, irrelevant. His label was simply that of the man who had captured me, body and soul.

  “Do you think someone is going to show up?”

  “There is a fifty-fifty chance that guy went home and did nothing. But my money is on he went straight back to town and told them there is a woman in the woods who tried to run away from her husband.”

  I paused, tensing. So he had realized they were the same men as well. It really was my fault. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just do what I tell you to do.”

  He’d been telling me that since the day he had found me and sometimes I had listened and sometimes I hadn’t. I always regretted it when I didn’t. My cheeks felt hot with shame and anger. I didn’t like feeling stupid.

  “Okay. Of course.” He didn’t like me to touch him, but I reached out and trailed my fingertips along his beard. He jerked away but I followed, persistent.

  “Stop it, Laney.”

  “No.” I stood my ground because I didn’t like how everything was shifting, how everything I had done had set change in motion, had put our isolated existence into jeopardy. Had made me question who he was and if I was really the most important person to ever exist in his life. “Kiss me,” I said. “Not because I ask you to, but because you love me.”

  His expression softened. “You’re too fucking cute, do you know that? I hate that about you because I can’t resist you.”

  That made me smile. He didn’t have all the power. I had some of my own.

  And I wasn’t the only prisoner, held captive here by the pull of his touch, the need for his heart. He was locked to me as well, not wanting to lose what he hadn’t realized he had wanted. It drew wild thoughts to my head, raised my adrenaline to high. I felt manic, like I couldn’t say or do enough to show him how I felt.

  But everything swirling inside me quieted when he gave me what I wanted-a kiss. The stranger had always kissed with a surprising amount of tenderness for a man who was gruff and clipped. His lips were never soft, but his touch was. I melted every time he pressed his mouth onto me and this was no exception. I breathed in his breath and he took in mine and we intertwined tongues and arms and ankles.

  In the outside world he might be Cody and I might be Stephanie, but here, in this cabin we were The Stranger and Crazy Laney.

  He bit my lip, hard. I winced and tasted blood.

  Breaking off the embrace he stepped back and gave me a wink. His pale blue eyes seemed to absorb all the fading light in the room. With his thumb, he wiped the bead of blood off my plump flesh and licked it off his finger.

  My nipples hardened.

  No. I would never leave him. And he would never leave me. We were a rose and its thorns, one needing the other for protection, one sturdy, one all show and no strength.

  With each day though, we were blending more and more into one. He absorbed some of my tenderness and I took on his strength. We made each other better.

  Though I suspected Michael wouldn’t agree with me.

  I was choking on the blood. It was pouring over my head, clogging my nostrils, burning my eyes, filling my mouth more quickly than I could spit it out. Michael, smiling at me, stood in front of me, half of his head missing. I tried to scream but I couldn’t without swallowing blood. I tried to turn my head to see where the blood was coming from, but it blinded me. Reaching for Michael, for help, he just stood there grinning, and I woke up with a start, sitting up in bed.

  Sweat dampened my hair and between my breasts and I was breathing hard. The stranger didn’t stir and I lay back down, letting my heart rate return to normal with several deep breathes.

  I’d never meant to hurt anyone. Not my mother, not Dean, not Victoria. Not Trent or his twat of a girlfriend, Olivia. Not Michael.

  As I lay there listening to the stranger snore softly under his breath, I tried to find the ceiling, but the cabin was too dark. Nothing but shadows. Like my life. A closet full of shadows, as far back as I could remember. Age four, curled in the closet, terrified that monsters would get me. Alone.

  Every time I ventured out of the closet, so to speak, got bold and made decisions, sought love and affection, I created shadows.

  Now, I was the monster.

  Michael’s body danced in front of my eyelids. His eyes had been so empty. The blood so red on the blinding snow. He hadn’t looked startled, worried, like the pilot on the plane that had crashed, bringing me here. The pilot had known he was going to die and it had been written on his face. Michael hadn’t. I took comfort in that. But nonetheless, I still felt the press of anxiety on my chest, the prickle of guilt raising all the hair on my arms as I lay under the thick blanket, warm, cozy. I was naked and for once, I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be covered, to feel cotton on my skin, to make the angles and planes of my body disappear under a protective layer of fabric.

  I felt exposed in the dark. The fucking dark. My worst enemy, right along with its partner, loneliness.

  Reaching for the stranger, I spread my palm over his thigh, just wanting contact with him. He was wearing boxer briefs, but nothing else. He slept hard, deep in slumber, yet I knew if I needed him he would be up in an instant, eyes never bleary, but wide awake and alert. Ready to protect me.

  It wasn’t hard to roofie someone. That had surprised me, how easy it was to slip a tiny pill in Tren
t’s drink at the bar when I went over to say hello and to apologize for blowing up his phone. For sending Olivia some nasty direct messages online. In went the pill. Out went Trent’s self-control. There was no guilt for that. I’m sorry, but I figure if you do something drunk or drugged, then it’s an action you’re already capable of, in some piece of your being. You don’t get loaded and beat on someone if you didn’t really secretly in a dark corner of your mind want to beat the shit out of him. So Trent had wanted to sleep with me, be with me. I know he did.

  That night he certainly proved it.

  He was confused and pissed when he woke up, but he fucked me again in the morning, didn’t he? I guess he figured in for a penny, in for a pound. The memory made me laugh softly in the dark. The pun had been unintentional. But he was all in, literally, and then he panicked, felt guilty. Ran back to Olivia, who by then, already had a picture of me and Trent naked in bed together waiting for her on her cell phone. She had blocked me, but that was easy enough to get around if you got a disposable phone. I had counted on her being too curious not to look at a text from an unknown number and I was right.

  Bye, bye, Olivia. I didn’t intend to hurt her even if she was hawk-nosed and bitchy. She wasn’t the point. So her blubbering sobs were a little hard to listen to, honestly, because I felt somewhat bad. Every war has collateral damage though. Hence the reason my mother had poisoned me. You can’t win the war with negotiations and hand shakes. You have to blow shit up. Sky high.

  That’s how I got Trent back the first time. Though by then I wasn’t even sure I wanted him, exactly. But I had decided I did, and that was enough.

  It all seemed so pale and pointless now. That’s why I felt uncomfortable when I thought about Trent, so embarrassed by my behavior. Because it was pointless. I had wanted to win, nothing more.

  Which I had. I had made him fall in love with me over and over and over… against his will really. Because he kept insisting he didn’t want me, he wasn’t attracted to me, but that was a lie. He was hot for me in every form I took, every persona, every profile. He wanted me.