AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That wasn’t Xavier’s way. One step at a time was stupid. If it were him, he’d go straight for the big guns, annihilate the threat, and move on. Why waste time dicking around?
But getting to her wouldn’t be easy. She’d take precautions now, after her first attempt had failed. He might have to take out Al at the same time, something that would be infinitely more difficult. And he had to deal with Lizzy.
Tactically, he should remove the threat first, then go after Lizzy. That was what Felice and Al would both expect him to do, to follow training and deal with the immediate threat. But even though he’d been protecting Lizzy all these years, none of them knew that he and Lizzy had been lovers during most of the training and operation phase. Al thought it bothered Xavier because a woman had been killed during the action, and afterward he had become more protective, angrily rejecting the need for the memory wipe that they’d performed anyway. When he and Lizzy had been together, they’d gone to great lengths to keep their relationship private; hookups and affairs did happen between operatives, but because of the extremely sensitive nature of the mission, they’d both thought their connection should be kept on the down-low.
That was then. This was now. When it came to Lizzy, to hell with tactics. She was on the run, she was scared, and Felice would still be searching for her. Xavier wanted to get to her first. Even if she didn’t remember him, even if she was now running from him as much as she was from Felice, he could calm her down and get her to a safe place, convince her that he’d never hurt her. He wanted to know how much she remembered, how much of Lizzy had surfaced. The essence of Lizzy was back; that she had even partial recall was more than he’d ever hoped.
He placed a call, knowing his chops were going to get busted, big time. “I need a tow for the Harley.” He gave his location, and waited for the fun to begin.
There was a pause. “You have an accident?”
He could just say it
had quit on him, but he wasn’t going to put the blame on such a fine machine. “She cut the spark plug wires.”
He heard a muffled snort of laughter. “No shit? Fuck, I’m in love.”
“Don’t get any ideas, dickhead. She’s mine. Just make the arrangements.”
* * *
Sitting in Sean’s sister’s car in the parking lot of a Leesburg, Virginia, twenty-four-hour Walmart, Lizzy watched the people around her, looking for anything suspicious, and furiously thinking.
She had to figure out how X had found her.
She’d ditched her car; that had been the most likely means of tracking her. But he’d still found her within hours. So there had to be a tracker on something she was carrying. But what?
She pulled her purse from the bottom of the shopping bag, took out the cell phone and battery, and stared at them. The phone hadn’t been turned on, hadn’t even been activated. She’d been so careful, was there any way in hell X could have tracked her through this phone? But how else could he have found her so soon?
Maybe “They” had implanted a chip in her skull, or something. Maybe they weren’t tracking her phone; maybe they were tracking her.
Except the idea didn’t trigger even a glimmer of a headache, unlike the memories she’d come to accept as a real part of her unknown life. Still, she spent a few minutes raking her fingers through her hair, feeling her skull for a small raised section. Nada. Finally she shook her hair back and sat there feeling like the fool she would definitely have looked like to anyone who’d happened to see her.
That didn’t rule out the possibility of an implant on her back, but there wasn’t any way she could check herself for that. Or maybe laparoscopic surgery had implanted a chip on her liver, or something like that.
No, no Band-Aid scars on her belly.
She was running out of ideas, and was back to the phone. Except that didn’t make sense. The phone hadn’t been out of her possession since she’d bought it, and had never had the battery installed, much less actually been turned on and used.
She could have tossed the cell phone out the window miles back, just to be on the safe side, but she hadn’t. Watching people come and go at Walmart gave her a better idea, anyway.
She took a long, considering look at her handbag, then sighed. She really liked that bag, and she carried it a lot. She liked it so much, in fact, that she probably hadn’t changed bags in at least a month, which was a long time for her. That made the purse a suspect, too.
She sighed again, then seized the bag and turned it upside down, dumping the contents into the plastic drugstore bag. The purse was leather, butter soft, and just the right size for her essentials, but it wasn’t impossible that it was bugged—unlikely, but not impossible. It had to go. If she had the time she’d search it, take it apart seam by seam, to be certain, but time was not her friend. Every delay held the potential for disaster. She had to keep moving.
She’d slowed X down by cutting his motorcycle’s spark plug wires, but she didn’t kid herself that the delay was anything more than temporary. All she’d done was buy herself a little time—if she was lucky, if he was working alone. If he wasn’t, which was far more likely, then he’d have backup, maybe just around the corner. He could be closing in on her right now.
No, if he’d had backup close by, X would have found her by now and she’d be … what? Dead? In custody?
Beneath him in bed, her legs wrapped around him…
God! She shoved the thought away. She had to be one sick puppy, having sex thoughts about the man who was trying to kill her. Damn those dreams; if she had another one, she might have to punch herself in the face, just because.
She removed the cash—less than sixty bucks—from Sean’s wallet and stuffed it down into the shopping bag, wishing as she did that he was a wealthier man who’d carried more money on him. She considered his credit card, dismissed it as too risky, then dropped his wallet into her purse.
Even though the lit parking lot was an oasis of light in the darkness, she put on the hat and sunglasses. Let people think she was weird, or some politician’s wife up to no good, though why anyone would meet a lover at Walmart she didn’t know. People did weird things every day, especially at Walmart. There were cameras everywhere, and she wasn’t ready to be spotted.
As she walked toward the well-lit store, she fingered the cell phone, searching for some clue as to how X had found her. She ran her fingertips along the phone, the case, even the battery. Her attention was split between the phone and her surroundings, because she couldn’t let anything slip by her, but she wanted to know how. She wanted to know why, too, but at the moment the how was more important.
