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He’d know what was going on. He could fill in all the awful blanks in her memory. The important thing was that she’d remembered him. She loved him more than she could hold in, and now that they were together again she didn’t plan on letting him go until she’d wrung him dry.
And then she was going to kill his ass for what he’d put her through today.
Chapter Twenty-four
Awkward wasn’t the word for it.
Here she was half-naked—literally—with a man she’d just had sex with, but she wasn’t certain exactly what was going on. Shouldn’t she have gotten some of that settled before getting down and dirty with him?
She grabbed up her pants, holding them in front of her as if that would do any good. “Um … I have some wet wipes in my backpack.” She waved her hand in the direction of the hay bale where she’d left everything in her panicked run to the shed.
He didn’t seem to feel any of her discomfort. He slid a hard, muscled arm around her waist and pulled her to him for a minute; she automatically stiffened, but more in unease than rejection. Gradually she relaxed, her cheek resting on his shoulder and her hands pressed flat against his back, feeling the rippling muscles there, the heat that poured off him. Even if she didn’t remember much detail about their time together, everything about him was so familiar, so right, from his smell to his taste to how their bodies fit together. He kissed the top of her head. “I’ll get them. Don’t slide that knife into me while my back is turned, okay?”
She had thought of pulling the knife from where she’d stuck it in the post, because she was uncertain and didn’t know whether or not she needed a weapon. When in doubt, she thought, get the weapon and worry later about looking silly. Did that mean he knew her well, or was that simply what his life was like, that he had to look at everything from the viewpoint of potential for attack?
She was still scrambling for balance when he returned, but she’d left the knife where it was.
“I don’t know what’s real—” she began.
“We are,” he interrupted, giving her one of those darkly intense looks. “We’re real. Just go with that for now.”
“There’s a lot I don’t remember. I didn’t remember you until you were coming toward me. X. I thought of you as Mr. X.”
He considered that. “Close enough. You were going in the right direction.”
“Your name is Xavier?” she asked, just to be certain.
“Yeah, it is.”
She stopped asking questions while she turned her back to clean herself; silly, perhaps, to feel embarrassed after what they’d just done together, but there’d been no time to become accustomed to him again. One second she’d thought he was about to kill her, and the next second her brain was firing erotic images at her. There was no bridge, no link between the past and the present.
She looked at the wet wipe in her hand, and something else smacked her between the eyes: they’d just had sex without using a condom, and she wasn’t on birth control. Was this new? Had she been on birth control before? Simply not worrying about it had felt so normal, as if condoms had never been part of their love life, but she didn’t know for certain. Everything was probably okay this time—her menses were due to start in just a couple of days—but from here on out they’d need to take precautions until she could get back on the pill and it became effective.
That was assuming they were still together, and both of them were still alive, that there was a “here on out.”
Deep down, she didn’t doubt the “together” part. And now that Xavier was with her, for the first time since she’d taken ill she wasn’t frightened and lost. Okay, not as frightened, and still lost, but Xavier wasn’t. She didn’t know what was going on, but he would.
He’d found her. He knew she was in trouble, and he’d found her.
She pulled on her pants, thinking furiously. She could reach only one obvious conclusion, and she’d been smacked between the eyes so often in the past few minutes that she was beginning to feel like a punching bag. Turning, she snapped, “You jerk!”
He lifted his eyebrows. There was a sleepy, self-satisfied look in his dark eyes. “Yeah? How so?”
“How so?” she mimicked furiously. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t have caught up with me at any time. You let me half kill myself on that damn bicycle, instead of stopping me hours ago. That was you who passed me when I was hiding in the weeds, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a good place.”
She felt like smacking him. There wasn’t an ounce of apology in his tone, but then, there wouldn’t be. He’d analyzed the situation, decided on his tactics, and that was that; did he ever second-guess himself? She didn’t know, but she’d bet not.
“I needed a place with no witnesses, in case you didn’t remember me.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her stomach clenching a little as some of the backwash of terror hit her.
“Yeah, wouldn’t that have worked out well, with me trying to wrestle you onto the motorcycle while you fought like a wildcat, screaming your head off,” he said dryly. He hooked his left hand around the back of her neck, drawing her in for a long kiss.
That reassured her as nothing else would have done, but she still wasn’t ready to let go of her ire. As soon as her mouth was free she said, “There were plenty of places—”
“I wanted you tired, to minimize any struggle. Are you tired?”
