What Doesn't Kill Her (Cape Charade #2)(70)

39


Max’s audacity took Kellen’s breath away. She shoved at him. “Damn you! You could have told me you knew I wasn’t Kellen Adams!”

“I didn’t know you weren’t Kellen Adams. Not for sure.” He didn’t grin or gloat. “Not until this moment.”

She would have had to tell him. It wasn’t a secret to be kept between a husband and wife. She had wanted to tell him...but this confession would hurt. She eased away, out of his arms. “What do you know?”

“It’s not a matter of knowing. I’ve suspected, surmised, done investigations. I would like to know, to hear it from you.”

Kellen had been Kellen for so long, she didn’t even know how to explain what had happened, why it happened, how it happened. Briefly, she supposed, was best, and without a display of grief and tragedy. “I was married. He beat me.”

Max tried to put his arm around her again.

“No.” She stopped him with a gesture. “You can’t do that. You can’t be nice to me. Not if you want me to tell the story.” Because she would cry the old tears again.

He took his arm away.

She continued, “My cousin was Kellen.”

“Kellen Rae.”

“Yes. She came to visit. She realized what he was doing to me. She was determined to rescue me.”

Max’s focus never wavered. “Who were you? Tell me.”

“I was—am—Cecilia. I was a coward, afraid to face him. My husband, Gregory Lykke, the only son of a proud and wealthy New England family. Crazy, all of them. Murderous and cruel.” She reminded him, “You met his sister.”

“She deserved that death.”

“Yes.” Kellen nodded. “Gregory suspected I was going to leave him. He tried to kill me and himself. He killed my cousin instead. And himself. I ran.”

“And lived on the streets and eventually saved Annabella, met me and we fell in love.”

“That’s the whole story.”

“And you kept Kellen’s identification papers through your whole ordeal.”

“I had to keep her papers. She was so practical, and those papers proved she had walked on this earth, gone to school, graduated with a degree, been on the verge of life!” She took a long breath. “I didn’t mean for anyone to think I was Kellen. I mean, not forever. At first I was simply trying to get away from the Lykke family, from Gregory’s horrible sister and his weak mother. Then I found you, and I began to feel safe.”

“And I looked at the papers and assumed you were Kellen, and when you found out, you ran. Ettore shot you, and when you recovered consciousness, you used the papers to join the Army.”

“That made me Kellen forever, because lying to the federal government and the US military would result in jail time.”

“Yeah.” He put the truck in first gear and pulled back onto the highway. “Let’s think on that. Then let me check my connections and we’ll see if we can make all this legal.”

She gave a brief spurt of laughter. “Of course. Your connections!”

“One more question—there’s no one else left alive in the Lykke family, right? After Gregory’s sister died, that was it?”

“They’re all dead. A scourge wiped from the earth. They can’t hurt me now.”



40


Kellen hung up the phone after talking to their daughter. “Rae sounds great. Happy and not missing us at all.” She was surprised to feel vaguely hurt about that.

“Rae is a happy, well-adjusted child who has bounced back from every trauma in her young life.” Max sounded comforting, as if he understood her feelings. Spooky, to be so well attuned after so brief an...acquaintance.

Kellen looked across the broad coastal plane to that place on the horizon where the resort rose like a fanciful medieval castle with towers and turrets and colorful waving flags. “There it is.”

The golden stone glowed in the sunlight, and she smiled. She knew from her time as assistant manager that the shoreline swept either way from the resort’s main building: on one side, a long beach with groomed paths making their way down to the sand, on the other, cliffs rising over the Pacific Ocean. Three long wings filled with guest rooms reached out from the central castle structure. The Di Luca family had built here in the fifties, laying out paths for bikes, for walking, for ATVs. On the grounds, guest cottages of various sizes clustered here and there, surrounded by privacy fences.

Now, in August, the resort hummed with people and activities. Buses carried hikers and amateur botanists toward the mountains where they would enjoy guided tours. Whale watching boats left the Yearning Sands dock once a day, weather permitting, and a stream of bicyclists passed their truck going the opposite direction, and all of them had numbers on their shirts.

“Maniacs,” Kellen muttered.

That earned her a startled glance from Max.

“Bikers,” she added for clarification.

Max looked even more confused.

“Never mind,” she said. She was still mentally scarred by those steep downhill runs and narrow, rutted paths with the Cyclomaniacs.

“Where first?” Max asked.

She looked at him.

He laughed; he knew the answer. He headed toward the resort maintenance buildings and her best friends in the world, the people she’d served with in the military, the people she’d hired when she became Yearning Sands’s assistant manager. He parked in front of the three-bay garage, and she was out of the truck before he’d come to a complete stop.