The thoughts, heavily laced with a brutal self-disgust, were just what I needed. My vision cleared as I grabbed my suitcase and purse.
“Anna, please.”
“I’ll leave a text as to where you can pick up the car,” I said through a throat that was closing. “And for Christ’s sake, if it’s true that you ever cared even a little bit about me, don’t say anything else, Evan. Just leave me be.”
Storms in the Sierra Nevadas can be capricious, saber rattling and booming threats over the distant mountains, but never quite launching a full out attack.
As unpredictable as Elizabeth Madaster herself, I thought as I pulled Evan’s sedan out onto the drive.
It was unusually gloomy and dark for this time of day because of the hovering, undecided storm. Or was it? I wondered hazily. What time was it? How much time had passed in this nightmare of an afternoon? A quick glance at the dashboard clock told me it was four thirty.
At least I’ll have daylight for a few hours while I make my escape.
Escape to where, exactly?
I had a quick, vivid image of me driving Evan’s car across the country to my parents’ house… of my mother holding out her arms as I crossed the threshold of the front door, of my father’s concerned face as he patiently listened to my woeful story.
I gasped loudly at the image, my body convulsing, more damned tears spilling down my cheeks. Or maybe it wasn’t the imagined scene that made me cry out and grab the wheel in a death’s grip. It was more the sure, slicing knowledge that it would never happen.
I could never go home again. I could never be comforted. Not in that way. If there was one thing Evan had done by maneuvering his way into my life, he’d made me grow up.
He’d aged me.
I forced myself to focus on the road in front of me, squeezing unwanted tears out of my eyes. The giant pines waved and frothed, stirred up by the storm that hung and rumbled at the top of nearby mountain peaks.
Fairyland doesn’t want you to leave.
I mentally scoffed at that random thought. Not only was Les Jumeaux the direct opposite of a magical place. It could never care about me. I was a glitch here, a curious interloper, a freak meeting of random genes and a vengeful, single-minded man.
What would she think? What would Elizabeth think of Evan’s plan for revenge?
I gripped the wheel even harder, amazed at the thought. It’d popped into my head seemingly out of nowhere.
I passed the fork in the road, forcing my increasingly buzzing, churning mind away from the charged memory that flashed into my head of Evan waiting for the ambulance to pass, of him holding my hand and pulling me into the center of the road—
He’d wanted Noah to see us together there.
Just like he’d tried to keep me from driving into Tahoe Shores, because he knew the locals would recognize my resemblance to Elizabeth.
I pushed aside the volatile thoughts, because it was necessary to drive, to move foot by foot, yard by yard, away from Evan.
I passed the gatehouse, recalling against my will our arrival at Les Jumeaux, how I’d taken the card key and rubbed it against my shorts, Evan’s small, slightly incredulous and yet accepting smile when the card had opened the gate.
I should have known it only required a sprite’s touch.
I braked the car hard at the turn off to the mountain highway, gravel popping beneath the tires. Lightning flashed. Thunder answered in a fury.
The storm had stopped its prevarication. It raged down the mountainside.
> Right or left?
I released my clamped jaw. Right. Turn right.
I started to turn left, done with trusting with my own instincts. I broke so hard, my seatbelt snapped against my chest.
Another car raced by on the mountain road. Not there one second; there the next. Startled, I watched openmouthed as it passed. My first impressions were of speed, and vivid red amongst the muted gloom of the oncoming storm.
The ends of a white scarf fluttered around the female driver’s shoulders as she sped past. She wore the scarf tied around her head like Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn might have in old movies, to keep their hair from blowing about in a convertible.