Her Forgotten Betrayal

by Anna DeStefano

  “Packing?” She swallowed as if the word were caught in her throat.

  “To stay with you.”

  She was either relieved or terrified at the prospect of having him move in. Her eyes were still far too big for her delicate features. Her pulse was pounding visibly in her throat.

  “Until we know what’s going on,” he clarified, “I’d feel better if you weren’t alone any more than you have to be. Do you think there’s somewhere here that I could sleep and stay out of your way?”

  He waited for her to reveal the rest, that all she had to do was make a call to the same person he was about to check in with once he got to his place, and she could have a team of officers looking out for her instead of him.

  She inhaled. Her head dropped. She was probably ticking off the pros and cons of saying more to either him or Dawson. Then she reached out to him. Her hand on his arm was the softest touch imaginable.

  “You could be putting yourself in danger because of me,” she said. “What if it turns out there is something going on?”

  Her concern crashed into him. With it came a tidal wave of memories, of a thousand more of her touches. Touches that had once been his whenever he’d needed them. He stared at her bandaged thumb, rage growing that someone might have dared to threaten a defenseless, already injured woman. Let alone Shaw, who was worried about taking advantage of a neighbor. Meanwhile, the government officers she trusted to protect her were lying through their teeth to her. Which, while technically legal, wasn’t right.

  The uncharacteristic thought shocked him. Guilt was a wasted emotion when he was on assignment. He did and said whatever he had to for the job, and that’s just the way it was. But manipulating Shaw this way made him feel like slime.

  “Let’s worry about you for a while.” He stepped away. Taking advantage of her still-healing mind, while her cat rubbed against his leg as if he were a long-lost friend, pricked deeper at his conscience. “We don’t know for sure there’s anything to worry about, so let’s not borrow trouble. It’s the middle of the night. We should try and get some sleep once I’m back. It’ll be hours before it would make sense to call the local authorities, if you decide you want to.”

  “No.” She curled her arms around herself. “I’ll only sound like a paranoid twit. I assure you, I’ve had my fill of that for a while. Don’t call anyone. You’re right. There’s no real proof that anything’s happened, and—”

  Her words hiccupped into silence as he moved close enough to tuck another curling lock of her hair behind her ear. He could smell whatever ultra-feminine soaps and lotions she’d last used. Images of roses and thunder and a winter storm swirled through his mind, strong and delicate and haunting, just like Shaw.

  “It’s happening,” he said, forbidding himself from touching her again, or revealing more until he understood how far he could test her memories. “You’re not imagining the threat you’re feeling, even if it’s only coming from your mind. As long as you think you’re in danger, as long as you’ll let me, I’ll be here, Shaw. Listen to your instincts. Trust me to help you figure out the rest of this. Can you do that?”

  He was driving her toward the decision he needed her to make, so he could sell his continued presence in the mansion to his task force. Which made him nothing more than the same using bastard he’d been on countless other assignments. But tonight, the tools of his trade made him want to howl at the moon.

  “I do trust you.” She didn’t sound as if she particularly liked the realization. Her frown was so adorable he wanted to taste it. “God knows why, but I do.”

  He nodded, inching away, wanting to be closer and refusing to give himself permission. “Lock up behind me. I’ll come back through the front entrance. If you hear anything or anyone else, wait for me before investigating.” It made his stomach turn, the thought of her unwittingly hurting herself again. “While I’m gone, think hard about every scrap of memory you have about your shooting. Until we know what you might be up against, I’m not sure what I can do. But I’ll stick as close to you as I can.”

  …

  Until we know more…

  Shaw shivered at the sentiment she’d been hearing from federal officers since she’d first come to in the hospital. Now it was her neighbor, her old friend, telling her that she was the only one who could fix this for herself. The difference was, Cole had promised to come back.

  She glanced at her electric clock on the table beside her bed. He’d been gone for ten minutes. She closed her eyes and ran her hands through Esme’s fur, her cat contentedly drifting back to sleep at the foot of the bed now that the evening’s entertainment was winding down. But whether or not Esmeralda was at Shaw’s side for the rest of the night, maybe for longer, Shaw would no longer feel alone in this.

  I’ll stick as close to you as I can…

  And as she thought of the sizzling warmth of him—his strong body, strong will, dark coloring, forceful determination, and those bright blue eyes—close seemed to be exactly where her subconscious wanted Cole Marinos to be.

  “Stop it!” she chastised herself. “Stop romanticizing things into something they’re not. Be grateful for the company and make the most of it. Don’t screw this up, Shaw.”

  When he came back, she wasn’t going to cling to him the way she had when he’d left. She was stronger than that. At least, she was determined to be.

  She’d endured her solitary exile on High Lake so far, and she could continue to do so. She’d been told she was a hard-as-nails career woman—even if she didn’t feel much like one at the moment—with advanced degrees in both business and nuclear physics. With every ounce of energy she’d regained, she’d been searching this place for clues to her life, as thoroughly as she’d like to think she’d researched projects at Cassidy Global. Talking to Cole was merely another way for her to ease into her memories.

  She was going to take him up on his offer, and then hope that borrowing his memories would conjure up some of her own. And she was going to keep her romantic notions to herself.

  Her doctors said doing too much might trigger more panic attacks, like the ones she’d endured after the shooting. Well, she hadn’t done anything of consequence since she’d moved into this place, and she was having freak-outs anyway. How much more damage could spending time with her neighbor do? Hang her stress level.

  She slammed closed the photo album she’d started flipping through when she’d first come upstairs. She dropped it back to the pile she’d stacked up beside the bed. It contained images from the years just before her brother, Sebastian, disappeared from her family’s pictorial history. The final few pages in the album held only one or two unsmiling photos of her and the disapproving man her father had evidently been. Then nothing.

  She had no idea why she’d dug out that particular album tonight. But after cleaning up the silverware in the kitchen, she’d felt an almost frantic need to stare at pictures from what had evidently been some of her last days on High Lake Mountain.

  She’d been told dispassionately by Dawson as he’d driven her here that her brother, just a few years older than she’d been, had died in his late teens. Her father had passed five years later, leaving her alone in the world, since her mother had died in childbirth the day Shaw was born. Dawson had suggested she try to focus on her High Lake memories first. It might be a way to ease into recalling more important things about now.

  The flashes of insight she’d experienced since meeting her childhood friend, Cole, certainly seemed promising. And then there were the odd changes in her nightmare after running into him, the few bits she could remember. Had there been a fire of some kind up here? Would Cole know anything more about that than she did? She pressed a hand to her stomach. Just contemplating talking with him about it made her feel sick. Wondering how long it would take for him to come back, or if he might change his mind and not come back, made the queasines
s worse.

  She paced across her bedroom, then back, analyzing everything she didn’t know, going over every disconnected detail, grasping for clues. Despite her vow to get her emotions under control, her chest tightened with the same anxiety that had sent her fleeing into the woods earlier.

  “Knock it off!” She whipped off her robe and nightgown, and tossed them onto the unmade bed beside a now-snoozing Esme. She stomped to her chest of drawers for underwear, then to the closet. “Find something to wear that doesn’t scream ‘damsel in distress’ or ‘please hold me’ before the poor man comes back.”

  They’d been friends. He hadn’t said more, which meant there wasn’t any more to say. Why on earth did it suddenly feel as if she needed him beside her or she’d never get through this ordeal?

  The problem was, every time Cole drew close or looked at her the way he kept studying her, as if he wanted to know every intimate thing she was thinking, it felt like more. Just being with him, she’d sensed more of herself coming back. She kept feeling them, together, in an increasingly un-friends-like way. Her body even now was growing heavy with an awareness that had nothing to do with the last few hours, making her wonder what their friendship had once meant to her.

  Was he being careful with her for some reason, not telling her some part of their history? Was he leery of getting any more involved with her than he already was? Or had it been garden-variety sympathy transforming his features as he’d stared at her until it felt as if she could fall into him, into them, and never want to come out?

  Or maybe her mind was simply fabricating something else that didn’t exist.

  She snatched her frumpiest sweats from a low shelf that ran beneath the rack where her professional wardrobe hung—conservative suits and dresses and separates in earth-tone palettes that made her sad each time she looked at them. They were the clothes of a career-obsessed, lonely woman, a woman she was fighting her way back to being. In contrast, the frayed drawstring pants and hooded sweatshirt she plucked from the shelf were a powdery, calm pink, the material worn soft by years of use.

  The red set currently in the laundry pile had been her mainstay since moving in. Every morning, she wore them as she did yoga and Pilates and meditated. Which had been her practice for years, she’d been told. Since returning to High Lake, the mind-body connection of the rituals hadn’t really helped. But tonight, the pink sweats made her smile at the thought of wearing them the next time she worked out. She pulled them on and took a deep breath. Calmer, she walked back to the bedside table and the portable phone that sat in its base beneath a lamp.

  She made herself grab the handset.

  It was time to face the music. She dialed the number she’d been given, while fishing in the table’s drawer with her free hand. She snagged a hair band and, the connection ringing as she tucked the phone between her chin and shoulder, she wrapped her hair into a high ponytail, her sliced-up thumb throbbing beneath Cole’s bandage.

  “Code,” a bland voice asked at the other end of the line.

  “This is Shaw Cassidy,” she said. “I don’t have a code, but—”

  “Is there an emergency?” the voice asked.

  “No…not exactly.”

  “Hold, please.”

  But I think I’m finally losing it, she mentally added while she waited. And, oh, by the way, I’ve broken the one rule you gave me and babbled to my neighbor. He’s moving in to help me…

  She had to say something to her Marshals Service handler.

  But what?

  She had no idea if she were really in danger, and now she’d involved an outsider in her bizarre little drama. That alone needed to be reported to the inspector, who might or might not consider it cause enough for actually interacting with her in some meaningful way. Or, coming clean about the night’s developments might mean she’d be yanked away from High Lake before sunup, which Dawson had warned her would be the consequence of breaking the rules. Though how he proposed to make her leave, she wasn’t exactly certain. Surely she could refuse to go.

  She walked to the French doors that opened onto the second-story balcony. Hours earlier, she’d run from this place, screaming at shadows. Now…memory or no memory, stalker or no stalker, was she ready to give up on the life she’d hoped would return to her here?

  She pulled back the sheer panels covering the frosty panes of glass. The moon winked at her through shifting trees. The property’s currently leafless, skeletal pecan grove had made for an ominous vista every other time she’d stared at it in the middle of the night. It was almost morning now, and the early light sparkling off the restless, bare trees calmed her. The entire bedroom, as she looked around it again, felt more like home than it had before.

  After the events of the last few hours, she should be more terrified than ever. Instead, she suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of decamping to some other location where she’d have even less of a chance to regain who she was. She wanted back some peace, some control. And yes, a part of her wanted this forgotten place to mean something to her, even if it was giving her the creeps. If nothing else, she wanted her grandmother’s home to be where she got to the bottom of her fears, not where she decided to give in to them.

  Your mind’s telling you you’re in danger, Cole had said. Listen to your instincts. Trust me to help you figure out the rest of this.

  “Ms. Cassidy,” Chief Inspector Rick Dawson greeted her in his clipped, masculine voice. “Is there a problem?”

  The man’s impersonal demeanor had always made disinterested seem as if it would be a giant leap up the charisma scale. But he’d made it clear that if she did finally recall anything of significance, or if there were ever a problem she couldn’t deal with on her own, he was to be her first and only contact.

  Instead, tonight, when her reality had become too terrifying to endure alone, she’d run to someone else.

  She let the curtain drop back into place. “I…I had another dream,” she said. “About the night I was injured.”

  “Have you remembered more?” He was chewing gum, the watery sound of it making her stomach roil even more.

  “Maybe.” She thought of Cole but stopped short of mentioning him.

  She couldn’t seem to go more than a few seconds without the man popping into her mind. It was crazy, but each time he spoke in that deep timbre of his or looked at her with a directness that made her dizzy or, God, touched her, he became the homecoming this creaking old place hadn’t been until she’d woken with him watching over her.

  “I’m not sure what’s real,” she said to Dawson, “and what isn’t. But…”

  “You had another dream.” He sighed, his annoyance plain. “Ms. Cassidy, if there’s no emergency, I have other more pressing matters to attend to.”

  Matters, no doubt, where his witnesses weren’t clingy head cases. “I was wondering if there was any other reason why you moved me up here from Atlanta,” she blurted out, “besides hoping I’d find it easier to remember my life. I mean, am I being protected in some way or being kept this isolated for some other reason? Is there a known threat, beyond whatever happened to me the night I was shot?”

  The connection crackled over his silence. Shaw’s eyes narrowed. Why the hell hadn’t she already confronted this insufferable man with that very question?

  Cole was right. It was time to trust her instincts, more than she did her panic and the half truths she’d started to suspect were being spouted to her by officers who couldn’t care less whether she got better.

  “Inspector Dawson?”

  “Your only concern is to remember as much as you can, as quickly as possible.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Telling you more about your situation could jeopardize your recovery.”

  “And that sounds like a cop-out.” The bite in her tone made her sound like a b
itch, and she liked it. She felt her connection strengthening to the CEO lurking inside her, a woman who’d never have taken no for an answer from an inspector who was supposed to be looking out for her. “I’m asking you directly. Is my life in jeopardy?”

  “Is there any particular reason why you’re wondering, besides your dream?”

  She should tell him. About everything. Including Cole, who technically could be behind all of it, no matter how good she felt when he was near.

  “Being alone out here in the dead of winter,” she settled for saying, “is spooky.”

  “It’s what your doctors think is best.”

  “Only my doctors?”

  Dawson wasn’t telling her everything. She had a feeling Dawson never had. And for the first time, she was certain that it wasn’t entirely for her own good.

  So, in addition to recklessly accepting the help of a neighbor she didn’t remember who was returning any minute, she was feeling increasingly less inclined to trust the federal officer who’d supposedly been appointed to watch out for her.

  Stellar.

  “You know as much about your case as I can tell you,” Dawson said. “I’m sorry. But until you remember more on your own, it’s best to keep you in the dark about the rest.”

  And the hits just kept coming.

  Shaw looked out the French doors again, pulling aside the insubstantial material obstructing her view. Cole was approaching the front of the house. Waning moonlight caressed the size and masculine grace of him, and the familiarity of how he moved. She was relieved to see him coming back. But should she be?

  How much could she really depend on either of these men?

  Still, Cole wasn’t hiding from her, hours away in the city. Or fobbing her off with excuses. He actually seemed to want to deal with what was happening, all the disconnected bits of it. She suspected that kind of charge-through-the-storm approach came as second nature to him. As it did to her, at least for tonight. She’d be crazy not to take him up on his friendly offer, even if at the moment she wasn’t feeling particularly friendly toward anything. It would be a mistake not to trust him, certainly more than she trusted Dawson.