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“What if something happened to you? I’d never know, would I? You wouldn’t come back, and I’d be a sitting duck, because sooner rather than later I’d need a job, a place to live, and then they’d have me.”
“You’d be taken care of. I have people who’ll make sure of that.”
“How would I know them? C’mon, you know that isn’t going to work. The odds are, more of my memory is going to come back and if you think I’d let it slide that someone had killed you, then you’re full of shit.”
“I don’t need you to protect me,” he snapped, then glared at her because he was doing what he’d just told her he didn’t want her to do. “Fuck!” he said explosively.
“If I know what’s going on, I’ll make smarter decisions.”
“Damn it all to hell and back, you never could just let something go, could you?”
“Beats me. I don’t remember.” She gave a little shrug, knowing how much it would annoy him.
“We’re in this situation because you couldn’t handle it before.”
Okay, now she was annoyed. “Say what?” Exactly what couldn’t she handle? Yeah, she’d been terrified a couple of times since her memory had started coming back, but all in all, hadn’t she done okay? She’d escaped an attempt to kill her. She’d shaken the people who’d been spying on her, and if Xavier hadn’t been such a smart-ass and planted three trackers on her, she’d have shaken him, too. And as scared as she’d been, it was nothing compared to the downright terror she’d felt when he was riding the Harley across the field at her. She still owed him for that one.
His lips set in a grim line, he got back into bed and stuffed the pillows behind his back. “You let your emotions get the best of you. The decision was that you couldn’t be trusted, so the options were the memory wipe, or a bullet.”
“Wow, some choice.” She didn’t like what she was hearing. She didn’t like that she’d evidently been weak. She’d handled some tough situations in her job, made some hard calls, and she’d lived with the results. What could have so upset her that she’d been judged unstable enough to be a threat to … whoever they were? “So when I started getting my memory back …”
“You were a threat to everyone.”
“Including you?”
“Including me.”
She was horrified that anything she’d ever done had been a danger to him. She had never thought of herself as a weak person, not even these past three years when she’d been such a dulled-down version of herself. What had been so bad that she’d broken under the strain?
“Tell me,” she said brusquely.
“All right.” He made the decision as incisively as a surgeon would wield a scalpel, though the scowl on his face made it obvious he didn’t like it. “You do need to know. But if you freak out on me, I’ll drug you and keep you locked up somewhere. Got it?”
He would, too. She didn’t doubt him for a second. “Got it.”
He picked up his phone from the bedside table, slapped the battery in, and turned it on. He began tapping the screen; from where she sat on the bed she could see a web page loading. “Remember what I said,” he warned, and turned the phone toward her so she could see the screen.
Lizzy frowned, startled, as she instantly recognized the image. It was a picture of herself, the way she used to be before she’d been given this new face. “That’s me. Why are you showing me a picture of myself?”
“Because that isn’t you. That was First Lady Natalie Thorndike.”
“Get out,” she said, disbelieving. She took the phone and stared at the image, trying to make the connection. Something tickled in her brain, a sense of repulsion, as if she wasn’t supposed to go there. Pain stabbed at her temples and she caught her breath, laid the phone down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply, picking up the phone again.
“Headache,” she managed, trying to breathe deeply and focus on something else. She thought about him, about the years he’d spent protecting her, and before that when he’d trained her for—
Well, that didn’t work. She put both hands to her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. It happens every time a new memory tries to come through. It isn’t as bad as it was the first few times.” Forget the Oscar Mayer wiener song; she had something much better to think about now, which was Xavier naked. Different kind of wiener. She almost laughed at the thought, and the pain ebbed. Opening her eyes, she smiled at him. He was watching her closely, not trying to help, gauging how well she handled the situation.
Deliberately she held out her hand for the phone, and was gratified when he gave it to her. She made herself look again—and felt another one of those clicks of memory. She examined the photo, and now she could see that this was an older version of her former self. The First Lady had looked extremely good for her age, whether from very good facial work or from genetics. Regardless, except for the hint of age on the First Lady, and the hairstyle, she and Lizzy had been identical.
Had been.
Was the First Lady dead? Lizzy didn’t remember anything about her dying, but when she thought about Mrs. Thorndike, it was in the past tense.
“Is she dead?” she asked uneasily.
“Yes.”
