AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She loved crab cakes, and cheesecake was one of her favorites, too. He’d remembered. Did she know his favorite foods? Out of the murkiness swam an obvious answer: steak. He wasn’t a picky eater at all, but he loved steak, rare.
Because she was still grumpy, she said, “I get first pick. I might decide I want the steak. I earned it today, calories be damned.”
His lips twitched. “Yes, ma’am. So you remember about the steak?”
“Not specifically, but generally … yes.”
He lowered himself down to sit on the floor beside the tub, taking her by surprise. He no longer towered over her, in a position of obvious authority. They were on the same level, almost face-to-face. She was naked and he wasn’t, which she might have been naive enough to think put her at a serious disadvantage if it weren’t for the way his gaze grew heavy-lidded as he looked at her breasts, and the dark hair between her legs.
He’d be naked too, before much more time had passed; sex between them had always been immediate and demanding. She knew this even without specific memories. They might not get their dinner finished before he was on her. Playing coy wasn’t in the cards, not where he was concerned, not when she didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. It sounded corny, maybe, like one of those fifties movies she’d thought about a few minutes ago, but life was precious. Sometimes it was too short.
And she was so tired of being alone.
“Tell me what happened,” she said quietly.
He reached into the tub and trailed his fingers through the water. “What do you remember?”
“Not enough. It’s as if there’s a big dark hole in my head, and I can remember things around the edges of the hole—until I saw you this afternoon. You come from the two missing years, don’t you?”
Instead of answering, he said, “When did you realize two years were missing?”
“Last Friday.” She clenched her jaw. “I looked in the mirror and saw this face, and knew it wasn’t mine. Everything else came from that.”
“It made you sick.”
“Sick, and with the headache from hell.” Giving him a sharp look, she said, “So I was right: the house is bugged.”
“Everything was bugged. The house, your phones, the car.”
That was so repulsive, thinking of strangers listening to everything she said and did, that she closed her eyes and shuddered. He touched her cheek with his wet fingertips. “This should probably wait until you remember more on your own.”
At that she opened her eyes. “What if I don’t? And why don’t I remember? Was I brainwashed?”
“In a manner of speaking. Not in the classic sense.”
“Why? We were on a … a team together, weren’t we? I can remember training with someone, a woman, but you were there too—”
“Yes, there was a team, of sorts.” His dark gaze bored into hers. “Leave it for now, Lizzy.”
She gave him an impatient glance. “Get real. Like you’d leave it alone, if this had happened to you? People are trying to kill me, and I don’t know who they are or why.”
That wasn’t news to him. She saw it in his eyes, and suddenly she realized. “Wait—if they’re trying to kill me, and you’ve been trying to catch up with me so you can protect me—are they trying to kill you too?”
“Yeah, but I’m better than they are.”
He’d always been so damn cocksure of himself, and the worst part of it was, he had reason to be. She didn’t have any specific memories, other than the one she’d had in the shed, but she knew.
She circled the conversation back around, searching for something he would tell her. Talking him around was going to take time. “How could I be brainwashed to lose two full years of my life? Well, and parts before that, too, because even though I know I worked in Chicago, at a big security firm, my memory is kind of like Swiss cheese.”
“It was a chemical process,” he said, his tone a little remote. “You were the third person it was tried on.”
She’d been a guinea pig. That was almost as repulsive as knowing she’d been spied on like a lab animal—almost, but not quite. For spooky, dirty feelings, having every minute of her life listened to and examined was at the top of the list. “What happened to the other two?”
“One died from a heart attack. The other … the process wasn’t as extensive, covered just a couple of months. He did okay.”
“Is he still alive?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”
