Blood on the Snow

A thin laugh leaked between the man's lips. His mouth was smiling. His eyes were ice. Bella fixed him with a stare gone wide from shock. She had no idea what on earth was happening.

"Out of money? That why you came crawling back?"

His hardened mouth moved with the slow drag of a film in slow motion. The naked hostility on his face sent a chill of fear through her.

"Mr. Hunter, I don't understand what you're saying..."

"And now you're playing innocent on top of it."

He closed in until his face was right against hers. She flinched and tried to retreat, but before she could so much as shift her weight, a hand clamped brutally onto her shoulder.

"Ah—why are you doing this!"

The grip threatened to grind bone. A groan tore out of her on its own.

"Why am I doing this...?"

He tipped his head a fraction and let out a flat, airless sound. Confronted with that knotted mass of rage, Bella could only work her lips without a word.

He had to be under some enormous misunderstanding. She had no idea who had done what to put a look that savage on his face, but it could not possibly have been her.

"I think you've got the wrong person. I was introduced by Mr. Neil Raymond..."

She murmured it through a face drained white. Under the burn of his stare, her voice shrank and crawled away.

"The wrong person? You think I don't know you...?"

Scorn laced the words, and under it a fury he could not quite hold down.

Bloodshot flared through his eyes. Whatever this was, he seemed past seeing what was in front of him, past hearing it. Bella blinked, lost and bewildered, then twisted with all her strength and tore herself out of his grip.

"I'm sorry, but I must have come to the wrong place."

She could not keep standing under that hostile gaze when she did not even know the reason for it. Hauling her scattered wits back into her body, she snatched up the backpack lying by the sofa.

She had no idea in what state of mind she had caught the elevator. When she came back to herself, she was in the lobby. She had been so badly startled she could barely draw a proper breath.

Crossing the lobby toward the doors, Bella stopped short. She had come down in such a rush there had been no time to grab her coat. Going back up to Dane Hunter's penthouse was not a choice she had.

Heat surged behind her eyes. Walking in, she had never imagined she would end up like this. Jaw set, she looked out through the glass at the snow driving past. From the backpack she pulled the hat, scarf, and gloves she had folded inside and put them on.

The moment she pushed the door open, a white plume of breath forced its way past her lips. She buried her face deep in the scarf. The cold cut straight through the thin clothes and into her. The wind felt as if it were flaying her alive.

Arms drawn in, shoulders hunched, she started walking.

She had not gone many steps when she felt someone close in hard behind her. A gasp—before she could turn, a hand seized her arm. Through the cold freezing the inside of her nose came the scent of a man's cologne.

Why is he doing this to me? The thought reeled, dizzy, through her head.

"Let go of me!"

Her lips trembled as she glared at him. Dane bared his teeth in a soundless laugh. It was a colder sneer than the wind slapping her cheek.

"Be honest. Why are you trying to get near Jude now?"

What...? By now the only thought she had was that this had gone miles past too far.

"Why are you doing this to me!"

She shouted it through clenched teeth. He did not so much as flicker an eyebrow. He only stared her down.

She twisted, fighting to yank her caught wrist free, and when she finally tore loose she lost her balance and staggered. She windmilled an arm for footing, but her scrambling feet slid on snow frozen hard as stone.

"Ugh!"

The instant her body hit the ground, every breath was driven out of her lungs. A sharp, stinging pain bloomed across her forehead. Snow clung to her ruined hair and her cheek, and the vicious wind tore at her on top of it. She lifted her head with effort. Panic had sunk so deep that the world in front of her went black.

"Please stop. I don't know who you are."

White to the lips, Bella said it in a voice that shook.

"I—I lost my memory in an accident..."

"How convenient."

Dane pressed his rage down to the very end of the words and let a thin, hysterical laugh ride them. Then something lukewarm split across Bella's forehead, rolled down her jacket, and dropped to the ground with a soft tick. For an instant bewilderment crossed Dane's face. The eyes that had been all edge gave a small twitch.

She ignored the hand he put out and tried to get up on her own. Bracing a palm against the ground sent a sick throb through her wrist. She hauled herself upright, moisture clinging at the corners of her eyes, and faced him.

"You can ask Neil if you want. I really..."

The excuse, thick with tears, vanished into the driving wind.

"Enough."

His voice had eased, just a little, from a moment ago. He cut her off.

"You're hurt."

Dazed by the words, Bella looked around. Something dropped again from her forehead. On the white snow, a scarlet stain spread. She must have split the skin somewhere when she fell. At the crack in his expression she started to lift a hand to her own forehead. Before she could touch the wound, he caught her wrist.

"Don't touch it."

Holding her arm, he started walking. His face had gone harder and colder than the frozen street around them.

Her vision flickered, winking in and out. Inside her wrecked head a huge sound thundered, as if someone were trampling through it.

All at once, men's voices and a woman's rose inside her skull. Still caught by the arm, she was steered into the lobby, and in the same instant a thick dizziness hit and her sight went black.

Dane sat on the sofa, his face sunk heavy.

After he had sent the doctor into the room to treat her, he kept tipping back the whiskey in his hand. Over the rim of the glass, his eyes carried a cold beyond anything one might have imagined.

"What the hell did you do to her?"

Liam Carlson had appeared in the penthouse at some point and faced him with open suspicion.

"What do you take me for? She slipped on the ice. That's all."

Dane answered with a sharpened gaze and a mouth twisted tight.

Liam, too, had not been able to hide his shock at Zena dropping out of the sky after three years. But when a thing was not his own, a man could watch it without the tilt of feeling.

"Tsk. She's got you rattled again, hasn't she?"

At the jab, Dane's eyes narrowed.

"She's Jude's mother."

The words came low. A crease cut between his brows.

"She threw away her own child and ran off with another man. Of course I'm angry."

Liam shrugged at the answer and set a smile at the corner of his mouth.

"I'm the one who put the two of you together, so maybe I shouldn't be the one to say it—but you misjudged her back then, too. Think about it cold."

"...What?"

The short reply lifted the tail of Dane's brow. Liam settled into the seat across from him with that slick, easy look.

"Leaving the child was rotten. But her leaving with Ryan O'Connor was a result you could have seen coming. It wasn't as if you didn't know the two of them had been lovers for years."

"You're speaking out of turn."

Something strange twisted across Dane's face as he answered.

"You going to tell me I'm wrong? It's a pity, for Jude's sake, but you and Zena were never solid enough to break down the wall of the real world. For whatever reason, she didn't choose you. Looking back, it was a mercy you found out when you did."

Meeting the look Liam drove into him, Dane let out a short, harsh ha. A few seconds passed in silence. Then he brought a hand to his jaw and stroked the remnant of that bitter smile from his mouth.

"You're right. It was a mercy."

He said it without giving Liam his eyes. Liam's brows climbed—oh? Dane's mouth was agreeing with him. His eyes were not. Liam caught it at once.

"Dane, I won't deny you were fond of her. She was still just one more ordinary woman. Jude being in the picture doesn't change that."

Seeing that Dane's glass was empty, Liam tipped the bottle as he went on.

Liam had a keynote the next day at an International Union of Architects event in Mexico City. He left with a word that they would see each other in a few days.

The thin voice that had slipped from fevered lips still circled his ear. His hand clenched hard around the glass. Memories he had tried to wall off in some corner of his mind and forget came roaring back, out of any control.

Dane raked a hand through his hair until it was a wreck and leaned into the back of the sofa.

She had shoved her way into his quiet life one day, wrecked everything, and vanished—and now what was she after?

He hated, viciously, that her mere appearance could yank his feelings around like this. It was only the past. Meeting her again should not have changed a thing.

And still, what held him there against that resolve was the trace of her he could not look away from. Jude, who reminded him of her every time he looked.

A little later the doctor, finished disinfecting and stitching the cut on Zena's forehead, offered Dane a nod and left. Dane tossed back what remained of the drink and got to his feet.

He sat at the desk in the study, head against the chair back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. His right hand tapped the desktop while he thought. Then he picked up his phone.

"This is Dane Hunter."

There was something he needed to confirm.

"Nn..."

Bella, who had been lying without so much as a twitch, jerked at the shoulder. Behind her closed lids her eyes moved in a frantic rush. In a squirming dark where anything might lunge out and it would not have surprised her, someone was chasing her.

Breath climbed all the way to her chin and hammered rough against her eardrums.

What had gone wrong? If she had been sharper, quicker on her feet, would this never have happened?

Yes. She had probably crossed a line she was never meant to cross. The feelings whirling through her seemed to weigh her already exhausted legs down further. Through vision blurring with tears, she saw a road with cars moving on it.

If I can just get that far, I can get help.

She had been staggering along in flight for a long while when her steps faltered. A long rattle of gravel fell away below, dizzying. A steep drop, hidden by thick brush, lay a single step ahead. If she had run on without seeing it, she would have been done for.

"I'm sure she came this way. Where is she?"

"Quick little bitch, I'll give her that."

Murmuring voices and the crack of twigs underfoot carried from a distance. Being found by the people tracking her was only a matter of time.

Carefully she lowered herself and clung to the brush jutting from the steep slope. A dead, dried stem wound her palm like a frayed rope. Thorns drove into a hand already split with broken nails and raw scrapes. A cry nearly escaped; she bit her lip hard and held it back. In that instant the knob of stone barely holding her foot gave way and fell.

Her parched throat felt full of swallowed sand, and every muscle in her body spasmed under extreme tension. The stem she was barely clinging to creaked—tick, tick.

She flung a hand in desperation toward another bush nearby, but it was far too thin to hold a grown woman's weight. Resistance slackened by degrees, and her back tipped backward.

No—don't!

With a snap and a rip the brush tore free, and her body lifted into the air.

She tumbled down the steep slope. A few seconds later a huge, dull impact struck the back of her head. A gasp—the breath that had been blocked slammed out of her lungs in place of a scream. After the shock that rattled her skull came a thin, piercing ring.

Something lukewarm ran along her forehead and seeped into her ear. Her mind went far away.

"Did you hear something over that way?"