Authors: Jessica Andersen
Soon, though, his numbers started coming back up, and his skin and gums pinked, indicating that the shock was fading. Which left her with the bullet wound.
She followed the bruise tracks with her fingers, probing as deeply as she dared. She found three spots where she was pretty sure she felt something. The bullet had fragmented. Damn it.
Doing the best she could, she pulled on sterile gloves, cleaned and numbed the three spots, then chose
one and used a scalpel to dissect away the skin and muscle. Without clamps or suction, blood welled immediately, obscuring her working field. She cursed and blotted it with a sterile pad, but gave that up almost immediately as pointless. Instead, she resigned herself to working blind, probing with the scalpel, then forceps.
“Come on…come on…” She was breathing heavily, sweating more from nerves than exertion. Then she felt the forceps lock on to something hard and metallic. “Ah! Gotcha.”
She dropped the bloodstained fragment in a specimen jar, used stitches to close the muscle and incision and then repeated the process twice more. By the time she was done, she’d nearly gotten used to the fact that when she cut into him, he bled. Yet although his vitals had stabilized where they needed to be, he hadn’t moved or made a sound. He just lay there, breathing. In and out. In and out.
Forcing herself not to watch the rhythmical fall of his back, she returned to her work, stitching up the last of the three cuts before turning her attention to the recovered fragments. When she pieced the ragged bits of metal together in their specimen jar, it looked as though she’d gotten all of the projectile. The metal was deformed, making it impossible for her to be sure, but without an X-ray, there wasn’t much more she could do.
She cleaned the entry wound as best she could, then closed it as well, leaving a spot at the bottom for drainage. Finally, she hit her patient with a whopping dose of a broad-spectrum antibiotic. That, plus crossing her fingers, was going to have to be enough. She debated over
the painkiller choices she had on-hand, and went with the mildest. He’d be hurting when he awoke—she deliberately thought “when,” not “if,” as though positive thinking would be enough to pull him out of the deep unconsciousness that continued to hold on to him. But it was that very unconsciousness that meant she couldn’t give him one of the stronger painkillers, which had sedative effects.
She needed him to wake up, needed to get a grip on whether the head injury that had blown his pupils to uneven sizes had caused serious damage. If it had, she’d be doing him a major injustice keeping him hidden. But it wasn’t as if she had a CAT scan or an MRI handy.
Her training warred with her conscience. She knew she should take him to the ER, where he could be properly cared for. But at the same time, despite what had happened between them, she had to believe that Romo never would have perpetuated a fraud of any sort—never mind faking his own death—if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.
As a child, he’d lived through scandal and a trial when his businessman father had been framed for embezzlement by a coworker. Thanks to solid police work and an ambitious public defender on her way up the political ladder, Romo’s father had been acquitted, the other man jailed. Gratitude, and that early exposure to justice, had set Romo on his path to a career in law enforcement.
Sara had heard the story for the first time at his funeral. She also hadn’t realized he’d come to Bear Claw via the Las Vegas PD. That it’d taken his funeral for her to learn that much about his past had bothered
her. At the same time, it’d made her wish she could have one last chance to confront him. She’d imagined herself demanding to know what had gone wrong between them, why he’d done what he’d done, even knowing about her past and how badly his actions would hurt her.
Now, though, her sketchy knowledge of his childhood only served to reinforce Sara’s instinct to follow the instructions in his note. He’d gone into police work looking for justice, undoubtedly moving into internal affairs for the same reason. And though he might leave something to be desired on a personal level, she simply couldn’t see him joining the terrorists’ cause.
Having done what she could for him, she leaned back on her heels and considered her options. She couldn’t lift him by herself, and even if she could, she’d risk tearing the heck out of the stitches. So he’d be staying on the floor for the time being. She did manage, through a combination of leverage and no small amount of tugging, to get a thin camping mattress underneath him, helping keep him warm as well as getting him off the bloodstained floor.
“I’ll deal with the cleanup later,” she said aloud, wrinkling her nose. But, the immediate issues dealt with, she became aware that she was a mess, and the room didn’t smell all that pretty. Maybe she should deal with cleanup sooner than later. This was her home, after all.
Trying not to wonder why he’d come to her rather than whoever he’d been working with since his faked death, she moved around the house, closing the curtains and shutting the blinds, lest a casual—or not so casual—
observer chanced to look in the windows. As she did so, small shivers marched their way along her skin, warning her that she hadn’t yet thought through all the ramifications of what she’d done, or the question of what she was planning to do next.
Life or death
, he’d written. If the terrorists knew about him, if he feared they would kill him if he surfaced, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d be looking for him? But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he want Fax, Seth and the few other agents he trusted to know he was alive? Again, why had he come to her?
That made her pause. What if he really
had
been working for—
“No,” she said aloud, refusing to go there. The Romo she’d known would never in a million years have switched sides. She knew that for certain. Everything else was just going to have to wait until he woke up.
Still, partly because she didn’t want him hurting himself if he started thrashing, partly because her head wasn’t quite as sure of him as her heart wanted to be, she pulled a couple of bungee cords from the camping equipment she kept piled in her office closet. Wrapping the cords around his waist and over his wrists, she bound his arms, then did the same with his ankles.
He didn’t stir over the next couple of hours, as she showered and changed, made herself a quick dinner and then freshened the living room as best she could. Finally, near midnight, her body drained of the frenetic, nervous energy that had been driving her up to that point, and she sagged with a sudden onslaught of fatigue.
Romo was stable enough for her to detach the monitors and saline as he moved into the recovery phase of his injuries, when she’d need to be watching for infection or other signs that she’d missed something with the relatively crude care she’d been able to provide. Telling herself it only made sense to stay near him, in case problems arose during the night, she clicked on a night-light in the kitchen to provide a low level of illumination, and bedded down on the couch with a couple of pillows and a thick, soft afghan.
Although she ached with fatigue, her brain kept her restless and wide-awake for far too long. It took almost superhuman effort not to watch him sleep and wonder what had happened to him, what would happen next. It was even harder to keep herself from remembering their times together, both good and bad, all of them tainted with the ache of betrayal and heartache. Eventually, though, she dozed. As she did, she let her hand dangle off the edge of the couch, so her fingertips just brushed the edges of his blanket. Finally, she slipped into a deep sleep.
She awoke hours later, roused by a sound, or maybe just an instinct. Going into doctor mode, she rolled over and moved to rise, opening her eyes as she did so. She froze for a half second at the sight of the empty spot where Romo had been.
Panic sluiced through her and she moved to react, but it was already too late. A man’s figure rose above her, silhouetted in the dim light. She saw the glint of his eyes and teeth, and the shadows of his hands as he reached for her, grabbed on to her, his grip hard and hurtful.
Screaming, she exploded from the couch, but it was
already too late. His hands covered her mouth and pressed her back down into the cushions, cutting off her air. Smothering her.
H
E BORE DOWN
while his enemy grabbed his hands, his wrists, her fingernails digging in as she fought, squirming and bucking against him. And yes, it was a woman, though that didn’t make her any less the enemy. Why else had she kept him bound as she slept? She was one of them. One of the ones who hunted him, who wanted him dead. One of the ones whose faces had haunted him in his nightmares and dragged him back to consciousness.
“Who are you?” he said, his voice rasping with the effort his weakened self was expending to hold on to her, as sharp pain flared in his shoulder.
She whiplashed against him, her legs kicking out and meeting nothing but air.
Not a trained fighter,
his brain cataloged, but he already could’ve guessed that from the way she’d bound him, with cords that had stretched easily under pressure.
He must’ve been weaker than he’d thought, though, because seconds later she got away from him, clawing and kicking. She hit the floor hard, scrambled up and bolted for the door, screaming.
“Damn it!” Heart hammering—and not just from the fight—he lunged and his legs folded beneath him. Landing hard, he reached out with his good arm, snagged her by an ankle and yanked, bringing her down with him. Strength failing, head pounding with a relentless beat, he went with expediency and lay full length atop her, pinning her with his weight.
She struggled, still screaming, though her screams had turned to words. A name.
Romo.
He didn’t know the name, not really, but he was starting to remember the room. They had fallen halfway into a kitchen; a small night-light was on, allowing him to see more details of the homey, feminine space, and triggering the memory of coming to the house earlier in the day, knowing he’d be safe.
But if he was safe, why the hell had she tied him up? And why the hell was he practically naked?
Scowling, he glared down at his captive. She’d gone still and had stopped screaming, but her face was pale even in the diffuse light, her eyes stark and staring. And a hell of a face it was, too, even terrified.
He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes or hair, beyond knowing that they were both light-hued. But the dimness didn’t detract from the elegant lines of her face and swanlike neck, the sculpted arches of her eyebrows and the wide bow of her mouth. Beneath him, her body was lithe and strong—he could feel that strength in the sore places on his shin and arms, and the burn of his injured shoulder where she’d yanked against him in her struggles. But although she was strong, she was also wholly feminine, her curves pressing against him, bringing a stir of memory—this one older and more deeply buried.
As he lay atop her, he belatedly realized that he’d come here, to this woman, because he’d trusted her to help him.
Shame washed through him. Guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t let her up. “I was dreaming. Nightmare. Then I woke up, not sure where I was, and my arms and legs were tied.”
She took a shallow breath and he thought she might scream again. Instead, she said, “Your note didn’t give me much to go on. I was trying not to be stupid. Apparently, the bungees were borderline on the stupid factor.” He gave her credit for guts, though even as she tried to play it cool, her voice shook.
A roil of memories he couldn’t pin down, couldn’t place, had him stilling and loosening his hold, then rolling onto his side, taking her with him. She was free to move away, but she didn’t. Instead, she lay there facing him, her eyes searching his.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice hitching on a suppressed sob. “What happened to you?”
I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am. Who you are. Who we were together.
That was what he should’ve said. Instead, he found himself staring, filling himself with the sight of her. Though he was no longer touching her, he felt her curves as though they’d been imprinted on his flesh, creating new memories to replace the ones that were gone. A wellspring of loneliness surged from nowhere and everywhere at once—an ache of longing and a deep sense of loss.
He reached for her blindly, moving purely on instinct. Incredibly, she met him halfway in a kiss that started soft and gentle. Then her lips parted on a small moan of surrender and he slipped his tongue inside to touch hers, tangle with hers. He stroked her hair, her face. She cupped his cheek in her palm.
And, for the first time since he’d regained consciousness in the forest, he felt as though he was exactly where he belonged.
Sara had seen the kiss coming, and could’ve pulled away if she’d wanted to. Nothing was holding her in place…except her own memories of the two of them together, and the grief she’d felt standing at his graveside. He’d been dead. Now he was alive.
That was why, when he leaned in, she met his kiss. That was why, when he touched his tongue to hers, she returned the move in kind and crowded closer to him so their bodies aligned, though lightly. And that was why, when her blood and body heated at the feel of his bare skin beneath her fingertips and the taste of him on her tongue, she didn’t retreat as she knew she should. Instead, she crowded closer, mindful of his injuries but wanting for a moment—just a brief, beautiful moment—to pretend that the past year or so had been a bad dream.
His taste was sharp with pain and fear, but underneath those flavors was that of the man she’d known, deep and complex, rich and multilayered. Her heart kicked in her chest as she soaked in the sensation of
touching him and being touched, cherished his soft groan, and the softening of his caress to one of pleasure, and acceptance.
She let herself linger a moment more, then ended the kiss. Regret pierced her as she drew away from him—or had he pulled away first? She didn’t know, knew only that now they were lying on her living room floor facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes, and he was there, really there after all these months.
And, she realized with a bite of disquiet, he still had the power to make her forget her better intentions, at least for a while.
Damn him.
Fanning the anger because it was a far safer emotion than any of the others he brought out in her, she sat up and glared at him. “If you tore your stitches, I’m going to leave you leaking.” Which wasn’t the most important issue by far, but was somehow the first thing that had come out of her mouth.
He just looked up at her for a moment, all hard muscles and man, sharp facial angles and clever dark green eyes, with a layer of masculine stubble on his square jaw and the thick dark hair that she’d delighted touching as they’d kissed, as they’d made love.
No,
she told herself,
don’t think about that now, don’t remember those times. The present is far more important than the past, under the circumstances.
But before she could demand an explanation of where he’d been for the past several months, he said, “I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t clear whether he was apologizing a second
time for grabbing her, for disappearing and faking his own death, for kissing her or for potentially having messed up her stitches. Since she wasn’t actually sure which she would’ve preferred, she let it go, asking instead, “What happened to you?”
“I…I’m not sure.” He sat up slowly and started climbing to his feet, dragging one of the blankets with him in the absence of clothing. He was clearly feeling his injuries now that his body was draining of the adrenaline spike that must’ve powered him to this point.
Sara rose and gripped his good arm when he swayed, even though her own legs were far from steady. Forcing herself to focus on the practical stuff when nothing else seemed to make any sense, she said, “Come on. As long as you’re on your feet, let’s get you to the bedroom.” She had a feeling he’d be headed for a collapse once the last of the adrenaline had burned off, and would rather he didn’t wind up on the floor again.
He leaned on her heavily as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. She told herself to ignore the fact that he was mostly naked, that her hands gripped the warm, lithe flesh that had brought her such pleasure in the past. She watched his face as they crossed the spot where they’d made love so long ago. When his expression didn’t change, she cursed him for being an insensitive ass, and cursed herself for caring when they’d been broken up for more than a year, and he’d been dead—in theory, anyway—for nearly half that time.
He hesitated at her office door, and she urged him past it to her bedroom, where he lay facedown on the bed with a grateful, pained sigh. He stayed obediently
still while she checked his wounds, which were inflamed and angry, but showed little sign of additional damage.
“You got lucky,” she said, pulling the blanket up over him. “The stitches held.” Then, feeling unaccountably jittery, she sat on the edge of the bed they used to share, spinning to face him and perch there, cross-legged. He looked at her, expression unreadable, as she inhaled a deep breath and let it out again in a slow, measured exhale that did little to settle her sudden nerves. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I didn’t call an ambulance or the cops, and I didn’t tell anyone you were here because of your note, and because we have enough of a history for me to give you the benefit of the doubt. But also considering our history, I think you’ll agree that I don’t owe you much more than that. So if you want me to keep helping you out, you’re going to have to give me a reason and some explanations, starting now.”
Although he was lying in her bed, injured and lacking the strength to stand on his own, his expression was intense as he reached out to her with his good hand and gripped her fingers in his. “Thank you for not turning me in.”
Something shivered down her spine at his choice of words. “Tell me you’re going to call Fax and Seth now, or whoever you’ve been working for within the PD.”
He grimaced. “I’d like to say yes, but…” He trailed off, his expression clouding. After a moment, he said, “Okay, I’m going to tell you the truth because whatever the details, I apparently trust you more than I do anyone else in the area.”
She frowned, confused. “I…I don’t know what that means.”
He tightened his fingers on hers. “It means that I don’t know your name. I don’t know my own name. I don’t know what we were to each other, or why our relationship—judging from what you just said, anyway—ended. And I damn sure don’t know who shot me, or why.”
Sara felt the blood drain from her face, and imagined she’d just gone very pale. Which was okay, because she had a feeling she was about to faint. “You don’t…”
He shook his head. “Not a clue. I’ve got nothing. Why don’t you tell me what you know about what I’ve been up to lately, and we’ll see if anything jogs a memory.”
A bubble of near-hysterical laughter pressed on Sara’s windpipe. “You…you don’t remember any of it?”
He turned one hand palm-up. “Obviously I remember the walking-around skills, like how to drive, and that it was a damn good idea to cover up with the jacket so nobody would see my back. But that’s survival stuff. I don’t—” He broke off, throat working. “I don’t remember the things that make me an individual.” He tried for a grin. “The only thing I know is that I’ve got good taste in beautiful, capable women who deal well in a crisis.”
“Good taste, maybe, but also a roving eye,” she said quellingly, trying not to let him see how much the words cost her. “But that was more than a year ago. In the interim, you died in a prison riot. I watched your parents bury you.”
Whatever he’d been about to say in regards to his
fidelity—or lack thereof—died on his lips, and his face went blank with shock. “You’re kidding.”
“That’s so not something I would kid about.”
“Why in the hell would I fake my own death?”
Sara hesitated, trying to sublimate her own swirling emotions to the practicalities demanded by the situation. As a doctor, she knew she should let him rest. Retrograde amnesia, whether from a head injury or mental trauma—or both—could pass quickly…or it could prove permanent. If she bided her time, the memories might start coming back on their own, with less shock than she was likely to cause by telling him about the terrorists, the prison riot and his own disappearance. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she had the luxury of time to let him remember on his own. The amnesia fit into her theory that he’d been undercover, explaining why he hadn’t gone to whoever had been overseeing the operation. But it also fit into the less-likely-seeming possibility that he’d been with the terrorists voluntarily, then run from them during the chaos of the manhunt. He hadn’t known which side he was working for, or even what was going on.
In either case, she realized, the terrorists and cops would both be looking for him. And she couldn’t do the logical thing and turn him in to the task force, because al-Jihad’s people had infiltrated the official response at almost every level. Until they knew who Romo had been reporting to, and whether he trusted that contact, keeping him hidden could truly be a life-or-death scenario, as his note had said.
She had to tell him about the situation, she decided,
and hope the information would help him remember who he could trust. But that left the question of where to begin the story.
As if reading the question in her face, he said softly, “Start with the two of us. Why did I come here?”
That was easy. “We were lovers. You even lived here for a few months before we broke up. That was about a year ago.”
“You said I had a roving eye,” he said. “I was unfaithful?”
“Once.” Which had been enough for her. She’d made a point never to give second chances in situations like that. She wasn’t her mother. “It was a long time ago, though, and not really pertinent to what’s going on.”
Rather than dragging him through a one-sided postmortem of their yearlong love affair, she told him about how al-Jihad, Lee Mawadi and Muhammad Feyd had orchestrated simultaneous bombings in shopping malls across Colorado just prior to Christmas several years earlier, killing hundreds, including a large number of children who’d been waiting to see the mall Santas.
She described how, after a lengthy trial during which Lee Mawadi’s ex-wife, Mariah, was briefly suspected of complicity and then exonerated, the three powerful terrorists were convicted for the Santa Bombings and sent to the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw City. There, through the sort of clandestine communication network that tended to exist in supermax security prisons despite the inmates’ isolation, al-Jihad made contact with Jonah Fairfax, who was supposedly doing life without pa
role for killing two federal agents during a raid on an antigovernment cult up in Montana. In reality, he was a deep undercover operative tasked with ferreting out al-Jihad’s contacts within federal law enforcement. In that guise, his handler encouraged him to help al-Jihad and his lieutenants escape. That same handler, Jane Doe, had been working with the terrorists all along. Fax had turned out to truly be one of the good guys, despite Sara’s concerns when her best friend, Chelsea, had fallen for the escaped-convict-maybe-undercover-agent. He and Chelsea’s friends had banded together to foil a terror attack on a local concert, recapturing Muhammad Feyd in the process. The others—including Jane Doe—had remained at large, though, and intelligence suggested they had fled the country.
A few months later, Lee Mawadi had reappeared in the Bear Claw area, gunning for his ex-wife, Mariah. Sara was less clear on the details, except to say that the ex was now engaged to one of the FBI agents on the task force. The two had been instrumental in foiling a planned attack on the prison, though they hadn’t stopped the riot that had killed—supposedly, anyway—Detective Romo Sampson of the BCCPD’s internal affairs department. Who patently wasn’t dead.
Finishing up, Sara told him how over the past few weeks the communication monitors had said things were heating up the way they might before another attack. Nobody knew where the next horror would be targeted, though, or when. She paused. “There was a manhunt today. Two federal agents were killed, maybe
a couple of the terrorists, too…and then you show up here covered in blood.”
His eyes were very dark, though she couldn’t read the emotions in them. “I don’t know whose blood it was,” he grated. “God help me, but I don’t know. I don’t even know whose side I’m on.”
“You’re one of the good guys,” she said automatically. “You must’ve been undercover, working for al-Jihad and his people, while reporting back to someone on the local or federal response team.”
“You sound very sure of that, considering our history.” He paused. “What exactly happened between us?”
Unease was a sluice of cold in her belly. “You sure you want to go there?”
“Yeah.” His smile went crooked. “I can’t imagine…I don’t feel like the kind of guy who would cheat.”
Her heart drummed in her chest, with a relentless, aching beat. “Trust me, you did. Then you came to me the next morning and confessed. You said you’d stopped into a bar, had a few, one thing led to another…and you woke up next to your waitress.”
He winced, but struggled to lever himself up on an elbow, even though the action must’ve hurt like fury. His eyes were steady on hers, his gaze deep and probing, making her very aware of his bare collarbones and throat, and the fact that he was all but naked beneath the blanket. “Did I ask you for another chance?”
Her face felt numb, her whole body felt numb. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation with a dead man who didn’t even know his own name. “I don’t do second chances.”
Something flickered in his expression. “Pity. That was a hell of a kiss.”
She squared her shoulders as anger guttered. “We were great in bed. In the end, that wasn’t enough.” He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but she steamrolled over him, snapping, “And is that the only thing you can think about, after what I just told you?”
“Of course not. But it’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it?”
He was right, of course. They weren’t strangers, but in a sense they were, because he didn’t remember the things she did—assuming she could believe him about the amnesia. She did believe him, though, because no matter how many times she’d called him a cheat and a liar inside her own head, the truth was that he’d never lied. He’d told her about the waitress the next morning. If he hadn’t lied about that, she couldn’t believe he was lying now. Which left them—where?
She shook her head, not sure what came next. “You should get some sleep, let some of this gel.”
“Actually, what I should do is leave,” he said bluntly. “I shouldn’t have come here. I just…It was instinct.”
The fact that she found that even the slightest bit flattering just went to show how thoroughly she’d been into him. And also that she was her mother’s daughter.