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“If you remember anything about him, you know he isn’t anyone to fuck with.”
“But you don’t think he’s involved in this?”
“Oh, he’s involved. The big question is whether he’s helping Felice, trying to stop her, or just sitting on the sidelines waiting to step in and mop up.”
“What does your gut tell you?”
“I’m not discounting anything.”
She turned in the circle of his arms and looped her arm around his neck, pressing her face to the warm skin of his shoulder. “Do you have pictures of them?”
“At my condo. I can’t go back there yet. Possibly some of my people could come up with some surveillance shots.”
“Just how many people do you have?”
“Enough to have backup whenever I need it.”
As far as detail went, that was fairly useless.
He pinched her ass. “You’ve met some of them, in a way.”
“I have?” Immediately she thought of nosy Maggie Rogers, and the full-blown suspicions she’d felt the day she first started getting her memory back.
“At the barbecue restaurant. The guy you punched and stole his car? Him.”
“Oh, no.” She was immediately assailed by guilt. “He was on our side, and I punched him!”
“He’ll never hear the end of it, either. The others are teasing him nonstop, for getting mugged by the protectee. But it made him feel a little better when you cut my spark plug wires.”
She didn’t feel at all guilty about that. He’d terrified her enough that she thought he deserved a few cut wires, and she said as much, which earned her another pinch on the ass, followed by a rub.
She kissed his chest, loving his closeness, made all the more precious by the long, cold years without him. He could marshal some excellent, commonsense arguments against taking her with him; none of them made any difference to her whatsoever. She wasn’t going to let him leave her behind. The sooner he faced that reality, the sooner they could return to D.C. and take care of business.
“The first thing we have to do is find a motorcycle shop and have a passenger seat installed on the Harley—either that, or we rent a car. It’s too far back to D.C. for me to ride behind you the way I did yesterday.”
“You aren’t going.”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “I love you, and I am.”
Maybe it was saying she loved him that did it. Maybe he’d gone into shock. But he’d fallen silent, and there were no more arguments. She doubted both of those possibilities, because this was Xavier; whatever had changed his mind, her emotions wouldn’t figure into the equation.
She’d hoped they would rent a car, but he opted for the Harley. Not only did he not want to leave it behind, but the helmets provided them with perfect identity concealment. He located a shop that could install a small passenger seat with a backrest on the bike; then he bought her a helmet that almost matched his, so they’d look like o
ne of those motorcycle couples who thought it was cute to dress alike. Even better, the helmets had radio capability, so they could talk.
He disappeared for a little while, leaving her to twiddle her thumbs in the bike shop. She wondered if he’d ditched her, after all, but he returned within the hour, wearing a shirt he hadn’t had on when he left, a button-up chambray shirt that he’d left open over his tee shirt.
Lizzy lifted her brows at him in question, but he ignored her.
She sat down and flipped through a year-old magazine on bow hunting. She was anxious to be on the road, to start the endgame, but she felt as if she’d been through this countless times before, the endless waiting for the action to begin.
By noon, they were ready to head back to D.C. He got on the bike, she parked her butt on the much-more-comfortable passenger seat, and they headed northeast. Before they hit the interstate, though—a much faster route than the hilly, curvy route she’d taken the day before—he wheeled off the road behind an abandoned old service station, and from the small of his back produced a black automatic pistol.
“Here. You’ll need this.”
Cautiously, Lizzy took the weapon, and as soon as her palm closed on the butt of the pistol she was flooded with tactile memory, not just of the weight and shape of a handgun, but the buck of the weapon when she fired, the sound, the smell of cordite and gunpowder. It was a Sig Sauer compact, a nice weapon she’d used before, though the model wasn’t her favorite.
“Thanks,” she said, ejecting the clip and checking it, the movements coming back to her automatically, without conscious thought. She slapped the clip back into place. She didn’t have a shirt or jacket to hide the weapon if she tucked it into her waistband, so she put it on top in her backpack.
