Dirty, Reckless Love (Boys of Jackson Harbor 3)

“Colton gave them back to me.” Her smile wavers. “I successfully hid them for more than two years.”

“You hid them? You didn’t destroy them?”

She gives a wan smile. “I thought of them as an insurance policy of sorts. I didn’t want to ever sell them, but if worse came to worse, I could.” Her smile falls away and she stares off into the distance. “But now there are whispers that they’re available, and I looked last night. They’re no longer where I hid them.”

“Could you have moved them?”

She shrugs. “Yeah. I guess, if I thought I needed to. But, unfortunately, I don’t remember, and I can’t think of a reason why I’d decide moving them was a safe idea or what I might think it would accomplish.”

I don’t care that she forged some paintings—if anything, I admire her even more now that I know she realized the path her life was leading her down and got out. Like me. “The night you were assaulted, could someone have been trying to find the Discovery collection?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.” She shivers and wraps her hands around her mug. “When I got out of

the hospital, I was terrified of everything. But do you know the one thing that scared me more than imagining my fiancé tried to kill me?”

My chest feels tight. I hate thinking about anyone hurting her, but I want to know everything so I can protect her. Every little detail. Every little fear. “What?”

“Worse than the idea of being engaged to a man who would do that was the idea that there’s someone out there who wants me dead—someone I don’t remember enough about to know I should be afraid of.” She shakes her head. “Now that I remember so much, I don’t believe for a second that Colton was responsible. If I ever want to feel safe again, I need to know what happened to those paintings.”

I peel her fingers off her cup and grip her hand in mine, not speaking until she meets my eyes. “Don’t. Please. I’ll look wherever you want me to, but don’t put yourself in danger like that.”

“Not knowing makes me more vulnerable than anything else. If someone discovers those paintings, the others I did for Tate could be exposed as forgeries as well.”

“This is dangerous.”

“But that’s just it.” She pulls her hand from my grasp. “The biggest risk of exposing a forgery comes from the forger herself. Nelson knew I wasn’t comfortable with the deceit, and if he got his hands on the collection and wanted to sell it, his best chance of it not being exposed was in making sure I couldn’t speak out.”

“I’m afraid you’re chasing the bad guy. Putting your life at risk.”

Her face is pale, her shoulders tight. “My life is over if I don’t.”

Ellie

“Why are you bringing me here?” I ask Levi.

He takes his eyes off the road for a beat to look at me. “I thought it might be nice not to go home right away.” He swallows. “Is this okay?”

I smile out at the autumn colors lining the long, private road that leads to his family’s cabin. I remember the cabin well now. Levi and his family had Colton and me out here for countless get-togethers and holidays. “It’s better than okay.”

We grabbed lunch at a food truck on the way back to the car and left Chicago before one. Though I didn’t want to stay there any longer, I didn’t want to go home either. I know Levi doesn’t like that I’m looking for the Discovery collection, but he seems to understand there’s no point in fighting me about it and he didn’t bring it up again on the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

He bypasses the house and follows the road around the lake.

“I remember the cabin, but I’ve never been on this side of the lake before.”

He cuts his gaze to me, then shifts it back to the road. “You have, actually.”

My newest memories are from only a couple of weeks before the assault. How much more am I missing? I can’t help but think the most important memories are the ones I still can’t reach.

Levi parks, we climb out of the Mustang, and I follow him down to the rocky lakeside. The Jacksons brought in sand to make a beach on the house side of the lake, but here it’s rough and a little overgrown. He takes my hand and leads me through some tall grass and over some rocks until the shore drops off into the lake.

There’s a big rock perched at the edge, and he sits and lets his feet hang over the side of it. I join him, pulling my knees to my chest. I can see his family’s cabin across the water, and even though it’s a huge place with more than five thousand square feet, it looks small from here. The afternoon sun burns brightly above us and sparkles off the ripples in the water.

“It’s perfect,” I say. “Thank you for bringing me here . . . again, I guess.”

“I wasn’t ready to go back to reality yet,” he says, but red is creeping up his neck, making me wonder if he brought me out here hoping I might remember more. Is this where we made love?

“I’ve never thought about what’s on the other side of the lake,” I say.