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"Ahhhh...!"
Amy sat bolt upright, her breath coming in fast gasps as she clutched a hand to her chest.
Her heart was pounding - no, thundering - inside of her. She was breathing so quickly, much too quickly, and felt on the verge of hyperventilation.
She glanced furtively around, her eyes wide but blinking rapidly, lips parting and quivering, then suddenly realized she was in a hotel room.
She was in bed - alone. Oh, God... It had all been only a dream - a nightmare. He wasn't after her.
But it had all happened a little more than eight months earlier... What Amy had just experienced and awakened from wasn't merely a nightmare - for it had really happened...
Still pressing a hand against her chest, the redhead slowly allowed herself to lay back down, sinking into the mattress and pillows. She couldn't shake the memory of the woman - that poor girl who'd been strangled to death right before her very eyes - or of the man - the monster - who had killed her.
She wondered where he was today... Somehow, she knew he wasn't in prison or dead. No... That was one of those things that someone in her position could sense - almost as though psychically. And her gut told her he was still alive and free - roaming somewhere out there... She only wished she knew where 'there' was...
Turning over slightly so that she was partly on her left side, Amy closed her eyes, desperate for sleep. However, she knew that blessed escape was not going to come to her...
After a good ten or fifteen minutes, the redhead rose and snatched up the robe she'd left on the back of the desk chair. She quickly slipped it on, then slid her bare feet into the shoes she'd left at her bedside. Then, she crept across the room and out the door.
She had to go to Adam...
*
He lay in the hotel bed, shifting restlessly, his mind working overtime.
Despite the fact that he was about eighty percent asleep, Adam did not feel rested.
Amy was on his mind - and in his dreams. And in them, he relived her leaving over and over again...
"Don't leave me..." His green eyes were full of anguish as he fixed them intently on her hazel ones, which were rapidly filling with tears. He himself was extremely close to breaking down and crying.
"I...I don't want to..." she said in the softest voice. "But I have to..."
A single tear escaped her right eye, and it splashed on his left arm as he was gripping her hand tightly in his.
Adam gazed into her sorrow-filled face, her eyes full of tragedy. They'd had this discussion many times already, only it had always been her saying she didn't want to go and him telling her she had to...
Adam's eyes snapped open as he heard the nearly frantic knocking at his hotel room door. There was an urgency about the sound, and somehow, instinctively, he knew it could only be one person out there in the hall wanting to get in here and see him...
...Amy.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he rose and went to the door silently, then quickly unlocked it and yanked it open.
It was her.
The redhead instantly threw herself into his arms, and the Canadian realized, with dismay, that she was shaking.
Still holding fast to her with one arm, the blond man wordlessly shut
the door and quickly locked it behind her...