“Merda!” The man shoved her hard and she hit her head on the way in.

Lisa kicked out, not thinking about anything but staying in the light. She had to stay in the light. There were things in the dark, things that hissed and struck. Things that she had nightmares about, but they were real. The screaming wouldn’t stop and her knuckles hit metal as the trunk slammed shut.

She was alone in the dark again and she felt the moment her mind cracked and the nightmare began again.

Chapter Eight

Remy watched her walk away and felt something inside him break.

What the fuck had happened? One minute everything had been fine and the next she’d been telling him… Fuck, she’d said she loved him and wanted to go home with him.

He’d frozen. The idea of Lisa, sweet, beautiful, highly educated Lisa, in his backwater hometown had poleaxed him. She needed a man who could give her a big house and a reliable car. He would put everything he made into his business for years, potentially for the rest of his life. His mom-mom hadn’t had a cushy life with fancy clothes. She’d worked every day of her life. He could still remember how her hands had been rough from labor, how some of his New Orleans relatives had looked at her with distaste and offered to get her a manicure.

Had she been unhappy? He couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t smiling except the day his pop-pop had died. Then she’d wailed her mourning to the world. She’d been unashamed. She’d told him later that she hadn’t hidden her love for her husband. She wouldn’t hide her grief, and yet six months later she would talk to him like he was standing there with her.

A sudden memory hit him as clean and clear as the day it had happened. He’d stood in the room where his mom-mom had been lying in her bed, dying of cancer. He’d held her hand as the hospice nurse had given her pain medications and the light overhead had flickered and flared.

And he’d known. She passed an hour later, his hand in hers, but Remy had felt something infinitely warm cross through him and he’d known what it was. His pop-pop had come to take her home one last time.

What if he could offer Lisa that? What if all this shit about giving her a cushy life meant nothing if what he could give her was a life where he loved her with everything he had? Until the end and beyond. A life where he promised to come for her. To take her home. Forever.

Was he capable of that?