Dirty, Reckless Love (Boys of Jackson Harbor 3)

He grimaces. “You helped me buy my house.”

“Right. I worked in real estate in Jackson Harbor.” I nod. “Mom told me that. Do you like it? The house, I mean? Did I do a good job?”

He smiles, but I can see the worry in his eyes. It’s the same look on my sister’s face when she mentions some current event from the past few years, and I don’t get the reference. “Yeah, it’s great. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

“Like I told the other detective at the hospital,” Mom says, “her memory isn’t—”

“I know. I just need to go through these questions anyway. We never know when something will shake loose.”

Mom nods, and the detective turns his attention to me. “Ellie, tell me about your relationship with Colton McKinley.”

I blink at him. “Wasn’t he my fiancé?”

The detective arches a brow, waiting.

“I’m told he was my fiancé and the father of my child. The child I . . . lost.”

“How did you meet Colton?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

I twist my hands on the table. After looking at my Facebook page last weekend, I can’t stop thinking about the people from my old life, but no one more than Colton. It feels like if I just try hard enough, I could dig him out of my memories, and if I could do that, maybe I’d understand why this happened. What set him off? Had he ever hurt me before that night? “I don’t know.”

The detective drops his gaze to my wringing hands. “Are you scared of your fiancé, Ellie?”

“Yes.”

Mom reaches out and squeezes my leg, and I bite my bottom lip, trying to figure out how to explain this to a man who no doubt takes his memories for granted like everybody else.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” he says. “Tell me more about what you’re feeling.”

“I’m lucky to be alive. My child wasn’t so lucky. I don’t have any memory of the years I lived in Jackson Harbor or of the people I knew there.” Except Levi Jackson. I think I remember making love with Levi. I study the detective’s kind face for a beat. I should tell him everything I know, but I don’t want to share something I don’t understand. “I do know I was with Colton, that I was pregnant, and that Colton and I were supposed to be married.”

“Tell me about that night if you can,” he says. “The night you were hurt.”

I laugh, a dry, hollow sound. “What do you want to know? Two broken ribs, head trauma, bruises everywhere.”

The detective nods. “I have your medical report from the hospital. What about what you remember?”

“Nothing,” I whisper. “The doctor said even if the other memories come back, I may never remember the event itself.”

“Yes, the doctor told me that too,” he says.

Mom frowns. “So why are you asking?”

“Just doing my job, ma’am.” He shifts his attention back to me. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I take a deep breath. “I had a job working for an art dealer in Chicago. We were researching some lost art for a client.”

Mom grins proudly. “My baby girl got an art degree from Loyola. She’s a very talented artist but she never believed it—went into sales instead. I can’t blame her for choosing glitz and glamor over the starving artist life.”

“I didn’t see it that way,” I say softly. My cheeks heat. I don’t like talking about the truth—that I wasn’t good enough to create art of my own. “Curating private collections was a better fit for me.”

“Yes, and you already knew what it was like to live without money.” She waves a hand around the dining room, and I try to take it in with fresh eyes. Sun-bleached wallpaper, the same pink carpet that was here when I was in grade school, now several shades lighter. Mom raised us alone, and the only reason she was able to keep this house was through the magic of bankruptcy court. We could barely make ends meet, let alone remodel. Not much has changed.

“When was that?” Detective Huxley asks. “Your last memory?”