Ambrosia (Nectar Trilogy, Book 2) (2 page)

She woke up early the morning after, relieved that her period was still gone. The pinching sensation was still there but was a dull ache instead of piercing pain.

She decided to spend the day exploring the city. She bought a camera and snapped copious amounts of touristy pictures --- countless pictures of the skyline, the water, the flowers. She wandered through the streets and the Butchart gardens, where she admired lush flowers and plants.  She loved how walkable the city was, that if she stayed she wouldn’t need a car, how friendly it was, but she hated how miserable she’d felt, how empty she was.

Then she wandered into a public library and found herself at a computer, Googling Kovac Capital.

Don’t, Kyla. Don’t look back. Look forward! Survive!

She felt a nagging feeling as she did it but couldn’t stop herself.

Could not.

She found a short press release on a business website dated 3 weeks back naming Tristan Walker as the new company president. It said he’d been with the company ten years and was taking over for Claudio D’Alonzo, who was the new CEO. No mention of a previous CEO. She Googled “Tristan Walker+Kovac” and found several press images of him on Google Images. There was a photo of him in a suit, shaking hands with an older-looking man in a suit and holding a large cheque between them for a children’s hospital charity. She found his corporate headshot with the Kovac logo on the bottom. But that was all she found. He was fairly under the radar. Kovac’s online company activities looked underwhelming. They had a very basic one-page website, listing a downtown Toronto address and listing a Montreal address as their headquarters. There were some blanket statements about the company investing in a variety of business ventures and that was pretty much it. There was virtually no social media presence.

There were way too many
T Walker
phone listings to go through in order to find him,
if
that’s what she wanted to do.

Nothing came up that matched the condo address and she hadn’t a clue what the address to the villa was. She didn’t want the number for his office but asked herself why she wanted his home number. Was she going to call and tell him she was just making sure he was okay and to say that she was sorry, but then plead with him not to look for her? Did she just want to save the number and have it on her, just in case she needed it? She was about to Google Claudio D’Alonzo but decided she needed to let this all go.

I need to move forward!

She wandered out of the library and stopped in front of a bakery window a few blocks down. The Kyla of a few weeks ago would’ve gone in and bought a box of pastries. Kyla of a few weeks ago would’ve enjoyed indulging as part of an adventure in a new place. When she’d moved into Daisy’s apartment the first thing she’d done was scope out the closest bakery.

But Kyla of today felt sadness at just the idea of even the aroma of dessert. She stared at the storefront with a faraway look in her green eyes for a few minutes and then someone walked out with a bakery box and the aroma from the shop wafted under her nose and she had to swallow past a lump in her throat. 

She felt bone tired, soul tired, so took a bus back to the RV park. En route, it passed a long and winding trail littered with dog walkers, runners, and cyclists but while she stared longingly at the path, she didn’t even feel like running.

Back at the little one-bedroom trailer she made a grilled cheese sandwich, ate just half of it, and went to bed early, still feeling out of sorts. Would she ever feel normal again?

~~~

In a dream she saw his face and heard his voice,

“You can’t run away. I’m inside of you. You’re inside of me. If you try to run and actually succeed at escaping for a little while, you’d be miserable. And it’d only be for a little while because I’d find you and bring you back and I’d be angry. Angry Tristan is, I think we’ve established, someone you’d rather not deal with, right? And I’ll be hurt, too. Do you want to keep hurting me?

You’re hurting me, Princess.

His face materialized in her dream. Black eyes, gray face, blood. So much blood.

She jackknifed upright from what felt like a dead sleep. The sheets were drenched with sweat. The RV was air conditioned so why was she so hot? She glanced at the digital alarm clock beside her. 12:04 AM. She groggily staggered out to the little kitchenette, opened the fridge, and got out a bottle of water and downed it. She realized that she didn’t feel any pinching in her veins but the moment that thought fluttered by suddenly there was a funny throbbing in her throat; it was thrumming, pulsing.

She got into the shower and although her body felt hot and sweaty, her teeth began to chatter. Were the withdrawals back again? She was parched. She decided to get out and get another water. Before she opened it, she stretched her neck left and then right, thinking she needed to work out a kink.  Then the same throbbing was in her wrist but it felt stronger. She turned the light on and inspected her wrist, flexing her fingers and rotating it.  She could still see a faint pink mark where Tristan had bitten her the night of the banquet. The throbbing was just below the surface in that same spot. 

The throbbing got stronger both in her throat and in her wrist.  Then she felt it on her hip, down low on her calf. On her shoulder. In her lower back. On her backside. Then her inner thigh. All these spots were all thrumming with the same sensation. Then her whole body started to pulse to a rhythm much like a heartbeat, especially strong in her inner thigh.
It was like it was his heartbeat.
Every time she’d listened to their heartbeats beating in time together it’d sounded just like this, it felt… personal.

She grabbed her inner thigh, “He’s tracking me.”

She said this aloud and dropped the water bottle and froze, horror-stricken. The sound of the bottle rolling across the floor a loud and hollow noise, almost like it was the only noise in the universe. Then after a beat she shook the trance off and she started to pace.

This sensation? She’d felt it twice before. Once, in the woods outside his house, the night she’d run. Then he’d found her. The second time she’d felt it was right after her period started and he couldn’t find her because she was in the panic room. She gulped and heard his voice in her mind, the night she’d run out of the house and he’d caught her.

“Tonight when you ran, I figured out I can track you.”

Was he tracking her from 3000 miles away? Would she feel that all the way here? It wasn’t as if she’d forgotten he’d said that but she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge that possibility until now. She bolted into the bedroom, flicked the lamp on, and sat on the bed, her palm over her mouth, her mind racing.

What do I do, what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?

Hope sprang forth for a nanosecond as she imagined the sensation of Tristan…what it’d feel like to touch him, to smell him, to be held captive by those eyes. Her head rolled back, imagining what it’d feel like to be touched
by
him.

No.

Bad, bad bad idea.

Red flags were flying up all over the place in her head and she couldn’t sit still and wait and wonder. She jumped up and started stuffing her belongings into the duffle bag. She gathered up the toiletries that she’d bought and tossed them in, threw the dirty clothes in a grocery bag and stuffed it in her bag, then stuffed in the rest of her clean clothes. She tied her still wet hair up in a ponytail and put on some yoga capris and a clean t-shirt and then zipped up the bag and grabbed her purse.

His face flashed in her mind and she halted and took a deep breath and her neck went lax as her head rolled back.

His eyes. His gorgeous mouth. Those dimples.

In her mind she saw the two of them tangled together, felt heat rise in her, felt moisture down in her panties.

But then panic rose. She shook it off, pushed her emotions out of the way and pushed forward. The thrumming continued while her veins felt like they were thickening, her blood warming. It was such an odd sensation.

She didn’t know where she was going to go next and didn’t know if he was tracking her from 3000 miles away or 5 minutes away but she was petrified out of her mind. She couldn’t just sit here and wait for him to find her and wait to find out if he would have no choice but to kill her because the gray hulky beast inside him was either still there or would emerge as soon as he found her.

Maybe Tristan already knew the answer, though. Maybe he had found a way for them to be okay.

Or maybe he still wasn’t Tristan. Maybe he was in that black-eyed gray-skinned monster form and hell-bent on finding her and finishing the job he’d started.

Where am I even going right now?

She had no bloody clue. She just felt the urge to move, to get out of this tiny box.

Once she got everything together she pulled her pink Taser out of her purse and held it in her hand, ready to use it. She then burst out of the trailer. She got halfway down the steps and then felt something catch her wrist. The second she did her nose caught a familiar sugary aroma and the throbbing in her body screeched to an audible halt. 

“Going somewhere?” His tone was totally... utterly… flat.

It felt staticky around her wrist, where he touched her. When her eyes scanned his face she thought for sure the wooden deck and the earth beneath it were going to fall away into nothingness. His strong warm hand was on her. Right then nothing existed other than those blue gemstones in front of her. Blue.

Blue.

She paled and her knees started to buckle. She was about to go down. He caught her by the waist.

“Whoa,” he said and gently backed her up and leaned her against the side of the trailer for support. She looked down at his big, strong, perfect hands on her hips and then her eyes travelled up his face, saw scruff on his dimpled chin, his defined jaw, his beautiful full lips, straight nose, sculpted cheekbones, then his eyes --- those eyes. The universe stood still for a moment as their eyes locked and the blue penetrated her soul.

The tension, the heat, the intensity were all palpable. He let one hand go and flattened it above her head on the building for support, clearly affected as much as she was.

He was breathing heavily, looking down into her eyes and then he began exuding something frighteningly intense that she didn’t dare try to name.

“Inside,” he bit off, grabbing the screen door handle and pulling so hard it came off hinges. He tossed it and it hit the deck with a clatter. Kyla was frozen in place, her mouth agape.

Tristan shackled her wrist again with his fingers, pulling her into the trailer with him. Then he let go, locked the inside door and leaned against it, arms folded across his chest, the expression in his eyes hard and on her. He glanced at the Taser in her hand and notched an eyebrow as if to say, “You think that’s gonna do anything?”

Kyla dropped her bag and the Taser on the floor and then her palms clasped her face. She started to back away from him. Not thinking, she backed into the tiny bedroom. He followed, stalking like a predator, but staring coldly at her.

She whimpered when she realized she was backed into a corner, literally, and he was two inches away from her. The backs of her knees touched the bed. She sat. He towered over her, so close that she could actually feel his body heat.

“Well?” he asked expectantly, brows up. He put both of his palms above his head on a cupboard that hung over the bed.

A thousand scattered thoughts flitted through her mind. His presence was overpowering. His scent. His eyes. Her fear. Her pain. His mouth. Her love. His heat. She wanted to be invisible, get away, and lunge into his arms and directly into his skin at the exact same time.

“I…” she didn’t finish.

He waited. He looked angry. No, furious. He looked absolutely beautiful. He wore a pair of faded black button fly jeans, a cyan blue soft over-washed t-shirt that was very close to the shade of his eyes and a black leather jacket with a pair of Chuck Taylors on his feet. He had what looked like more than a few days’ worth of stubble on his face. He looked tired, pissed off, dangerous. And sexy.

“Do you have any idea?” he spat, keeping his voice low, “of the hell that has been my existence since you left?”

Her mouth opened but nothing came out. She began hyperventilating. His icy cold glare scanned up and down her body, then he repeated, “You. Left.”

“You…” she huffed and then struggled for breath.

He looked expectantly at her.

“Almost killed me,” she whispered, finally.

He looked off to the side, flashed a look of disgust, and then swallowed hard. His gaze returned to her, “Yeah. That’s what the evidence suggested.”

The look of disgust, that wasn’t directed at Kyla, it was obvious it was directed at himself. A spark of hope lit but it quickly burnt out.

He scanned her face, “You had to know I’d find you. Thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands of miles away, even. I
would
find you.”

She closed her eyes.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

She shook her head slowly, eyes downcast.