She smiled, hugged him briefly and stepped back. That brief hug was the first time she’d put her arms around his torso, the first time she’d been that close to the strong maleness of his whole body, and she was suddenly burning with awareness. “Why didn’t you come inside? Why stay out here where it’s hot and sultry?”
“That particular hospital holds some unpleasant memories for me. I like being outside better.”
She opened her car. “Get in, I’ll give you a lift to the road.” Eventually, she merged into the far-right lane. “Remember, you promised to let me know when you figure out who you are,” she said as the on-ramp approached.
“Pull over to the side of the road,” he said. “No reason for you to go any farther. I can walk up the ramp.” He hoped his voice didn’t reveal how reluctant he was to leave her side. Hot pangs of loss ate away at his stomach as he grabbed the bag with all the grub she’d fixed him the night before, and turned back for a last look at her. To him she always seemed full of light and now he realized she was achingly familiar in a way no other person was. He fought the idea that it wasn’t just because he could remember no one else. It was her. “Here I am thanking you again,” he said and hoped she blamed his thick voice on his battered throat. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“Another goodbye,” she whispered. “Our third or fourth.”
He was surprised to hear in her voice the same longing he felt inside, to belong, to connect. “Then we won’t say goodbye this time,” he said.
She reached across the space between them with both hands and gently turned his collar up. “That looks better,” she whispered. “Good luck. Be careful.”
“You, too,” he said.
A smile trembled on her lips. Her lips, the same succulent red lips that had been driving him crazy since the first moment he laid eyes on her.
This time, she was the one who initiated a kiss, but this one wasn’t quite as chaste as earlier. This one echoed the same notes of longing her voice had contained and he responded to it at once.
She couldn’t know how much he had anticipated this moment when they kissed for real, she couldn’t possibly guess at the thunderclap her lips set loose in his brain. He kissed her back, again and again, lost in the gentle but blinding tension, the noise in his head deafening him to everything.
What was he doing? He had to act now or he’d chicken out. He tore himself away from her and all but threw himself out of her small car. The door slammed closed behind him as, without another word, he purposefully put one foot in front of the other, not looking back, not daring to linger.
*
KINSEY SAT IN the car and watched Zane’s retreat. Her lips still burned. Damn, that man tasted and kissed just as good as she’d known he would.
Did he realize that he limped? Did he have any idea how the past events had compromised his voice and his endurance? He hadn’t mentioned a thing about the vicious attempts on his life; surely he hadn’t dismissed them.
But what if he had? What if the man who had tried to kill him had been watching them all morning?
Don’t be crazy, she scolded herself. Zane had been a perfect target in the parking lot for hours. He’d slept through her approach. If she’d been the bad guy, he’d be dead.
Unless the parking lot was too public for something like that. What if he was biding his time? What if he sat nearby right now, in one of the cars parked right over there or hovering unseen in the traffic behind her? What if he was just waiting for her to pull away and then he would pick up Zane. And Zane, who had never seen the man’s face, would climb in to meet his doom. That would be it, third time’s a charm, the culprit could be successful.
The premonition was too great to ignore. She put the car in gear. As she drove up the ramp, she checked her rearview mirror. Every other car now seemed to hold a predator. At the sound of her approaching engine, Zane turned with his thumb out. He looked startled when they made eye contact and she slowed down. He opened the passenger door and stared at her.
“What—”
“Get in,” she said.
“But—”
“There’s a truck coming. Please, just get in.”
He did as she asked and she sped up as the truck whizzed around her while blaring its horn.
“Kinsey, what are you doing?” Zane asked.
“I’m driving you to Utah.” She darted him a glance. “You’re in no shape to hitchhike. There are coated aspirin in the glove box and a bottle of water in with your food unless you drank it already.”
“I have some left,” he said. He found the medicine and shook three out into his hand. After he swallowed them he stared at her. “Be honest with me. Are you doing this because of our kisses?”
“No,” she scoffed. “Good heavens, I’m not fourteen.”
He sighed impatiently and she took the hint and started talking. “You were asking about my mother before you were pushed into the street. What you don’t know is that my boyfriend of sorts was also asking about my mother that same afternoon on that same street.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“A sort of boyfriend. Except now I find that he isn’t what he said he was.”
“How does he explain himself?”
“Who knows? He isn’t answering my calls.”
After a lengthy pause, he sighed. “If my head didn’t hurt so much, I’d shake it in befuddlement.”
“There’s a connection of some kind, I mean, between you and the man I know as Ryan Jones. At least I think there is. And my mother, of all people, seems to be at the epicenter of it all.”
“So that’s why you’re driving me to Utah. Listen, why don’t you just foot me a bus ticket like you offered. Sooner or later, my memory will return and I’ll pay you back.”
“Is the thought of my company for a couple of days really so terrible?” she asked with a quick glance.
“You know it’s not that,” he said. “This is just too big a commitment considering...everything.”
“But it’s not, Zane, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Somehow I feel that your destiny is entwined with mine. Let me come with you.”
“What about your job?”
“The gallery doesn’t have anything major planned for two weeks. Marc will be okay, I’m not his only employee. Besides, I just have to do this. I have to protect my mother.”
“By leaving her all alone in New Orleans?”
Kinsey shook her head. “Mr. Fenwick seems kind of attentive.”
He rubbed his forehead without comment.
“You have to understand,” she added. “I spent most of my life in very close contact with my mother and there were no men allowed. Zero, zilch. I thought it was because she’d been so devastated by my father’s death that she’d sworn off love.”
“How did he die, Kinsey?”
“In a bus crash up in Maine. He was coming home from a construction job. His body was burned beyond recognition. Mom said they had to use dental records to identify him. It took a few weeks, so the accounts all list him as unidentified. That seemed like a terrible injustice when I was a kid. Anyway, she finally agreed to take me to the site when I was about fourteen. I’m not sure what I expected to find all those years later, just some kind of remembrance for my dad and the other ten people who died that day. But, of course, there was no trace of the tragedy.” Her heart flip-flopped in her chest. Was she still holding on to that moment of childish disappointment?
“I’m sorry,” he said gently.
She smiled. “It all happened a long time ago. I built him up in my head—there were so few mementos of him, as though Mom couldn’t bear to be reminded—anyway, and now here she is acting coy with another man. It’s a little jarring.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No. It’s her life. She deserves to live it after devoting so many years to me.” She sighed and added, “That’s enough about my history.”
“Well, we sure as hell won’t have much of
a conversation if we depend on what I know of my past to keep us occupied,” he said.
She cast him a thoughtful look. “How does it feel to leave New Orleans? Like a giant weight is being lifted from your shoulders?”
She saw him shrug and it looked good on him, just the way everything else did. A shrug called attention to his shoulders and they looked outstanding encased in the black cotton of his new-to-him shirt. Add the self-deprecating smile that lit his eyes until they glimmered with blue light and she was mesmerized. “Not really,” he said. “In a way, leaving feels like I’m abandoning the only sliver of history I possess.” After a deep sigh, Zane’s fingers braised her thigh. “Correction. It feels like I’m abandoning half the bits of history. You’re the other half and you’re here, and okay, I admit it, I’m glad.”
“Good,” she said.
“And with any luck, we’re leaving a would-be killer behind.”
“Hmm...” she murmured, recalling how spooked she’d been when she’d watched him walk away.
“What’s he look like?” Zane asked.
“Who?”
“Your sort of boyfriend.”
“Tall like you, curly blond hair, brown eyes.” She sighed and added, “Enough about me. I’m starving. Is there any food left in that sack?”
“One sandwich,” he said, digging into the bag and producing it.
“Want to share it with me?” she asked as he unwrapped it for her.
“No, I ate mine an hour or two ago. Then I ate the apple and the banana. This sandwich is yours.”
As she drove and munched, she noticed Zane’s head nodding and encouraged him to get comfortable and close his eyes. “The fastest way to get to Utah from here is to travel up through Shreveport, over to Dallas, and then on to Albuquerque. St. George, Utah, is about a hundred miles northeast of Las Vegas. It’s going to take over twenty-four hours of driving.”
“How do you know all this?”
“We traveled around a lot when I was growing up. Now, get some sleep, okay?”
He finally did as she suggested, and for over three hours, Kinsey drove in peace and quiet. She just hoped it wasn’t the kind of peace and quiet that precedes a storm.
*
ZANE WOKE UP when the car stopped. He looked around as he blinked himself into full consciousness. Kinsey had pulled into the parking lot of a wood-shingled joint promising the best barbecue in Louisiana. Judging from the enticing aromas adrift on the very faint breeze, it might actually turn out to be the truth.
“Feel better?” she asked him.
“Yeah, thanks for the nap,” he said. “Where are we?”
“On the other side of Shreveport. You slept through the worst traffic, but I’m hungry again and I need to walk around. I thought we could get something to eat and then hit the road again.”
“Sounds good.”
The restaurant was bustling and the bar area was filled with people having a raucous time. After the quiet of the past twenty-four hours, this assault of noise and color and vibrancy actually felt good to Zane. After freshening up, they were told to choose a table and found a small booth located near a window.
Kinsey ordered half a rack of ribs and sketched on the back of the throwaway menu while awaiting delivery of their food. The image of their waitress began to emerge, then the bartender’s with the handlebar mustache. Next, with just a few strokes, she captured the images of three men sitting at the bar.
“Who are all those people in the paintings hanging on your walls?” he asked.
“Just people. Faces I saw, people like that bartender and our waitress. A few of them were friends from when I was younger. I went through a stage of looking at old school pictures and then attempting to age people to see what they would look like now.”
Their dinner finally arrived and Kinsey attacked it with gusto. His throat wasn’t quite up to that yet—the sandwich had been hard enough to get down. He settled on sides of soft food that presented fewer challenges, but he got a kick out of her obvious pleasure with the ribs. The amusement suddenly turned into something else when she licked sauce off her fingertips. He found the sight of her tongue teasing her lips spellbinding.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Not a thing.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” She switched to a Wet Wipe to finish the cleanup. It was more efficient but not nearly as entertaining.
“I’ve become obsessed with your lips,” he confessed. She didn’t say anything for a minute and he wondered if he’d alarmed or offended her.
Then those wonderful lips curved into a smile. “I love your eyes.”
“Really?”
“Your mouth isn’t bad, either.”
They stared at each other for a long, quiet moment until the tension between them burned Zane’s skin. He had no memory of his character, of what kind of man he was, although he was willing to bet he was a one-woman kind of guy. His body was telling him Kinsey was that one woman. She wasn’t only real because she was damn near the only person he knew; she was real because he could feel her inside his bones. “Too bad you have a sort of boyfriend,” he finally said.
“Too bad you might have a wife and half a dozen kids,” she countered.
“On the other hand, your sort of boyfriend has disappeared, right? And even if I am married in real life, right now, in my head and heart, I’m free.”
When her eyes narrowed and she frowned, he gently stroked the back of her hand. “I’m just joking around, Kinsey. Don’t look so worried.”
“It’s what you just said about Ryan,” she said, leaning forward. “I’ve been assuming he’s been avoiding me. But now that I think of it, Marc said Ryan left in a hurry after getting a phone call. As far as I know, that’s the last anyone saw of him. What if the same person who’s been attacking you attacked him? And what if they were more successful?”
“So maybe Ryan and I were working together on something and had a common enemy?”
“Exactly. I’m going to call Detective Woods.” She slid out of the booth and walked outside the restaurant. Through the window, Zane saw her dig her cell phone from the small purse she still wore strapped across her chest. He asked for their check and paid it with the twenty Kinsey had loaned him, before walking outside just as she was severing the connection.
“Did he say anything about me running out on him?” Zane asked.
“He was annoyed, but I don’t think he was too surprised. He told me to tell you he heard back from the other three tractor stores, two more in Utah and one in Idaho. Nobody there recognizes you, either. He also showed your picture to the grocer and he confirmed it was you. Anyway, I told Woods about Ryan. They haven’t had any murders where the victim fits Ryan’s description, but he seemed glad to maybe have another piece of the Zane Doe picture.”
“If he can see a picture in all this, he’s a better man than I am. Let’s get out of here. How far away is Dallas?”
“A couple of hours give or take.”
“How do you feel about me driving the car?”
“I feel fine about it. But until we get out of town, why don’t I drive? I actually went this way last year when I attended an art show, so I’m familiar with the roads.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I’d probably get us lost in five minutes.”
“Stick with me,” she said.
“That’s my plan.” After paying the tab and leaving a tip, he had about fifty cents to his name and that was only because he hadn’t eaten much. It was irritating to have no money. He had a feeling being broke wasn’t normal for him. Look at his boots, for instance. They screamed expensive. And there was that comment from Kinsey about the pricey clothes he’d been wearing.
He laughed to himself. For all he knew, he’d spent his last penny on fancy duds to impress some girl or maybe he stole those items or they belonged to this Ryan fellow he was mixed up with.
Who knew?
*
THAT MOMENT IN the restaurant wh
en she and Zane had stared hard at each other had rattled Kinsey more than she cared to admit. Her funky green car really was on the small side and he was a large guy. She was super aware of him being only a few inches away, and repeatedly cautioned herself to remember he may well be attached to someone else.
It was more difficult to rein in her emotions than it had ever been before. How many times had she found a guy interesting, only to discover she and her mom would be pulling up stakes and starting over? Goodbye followed goodbye until she thought she’d grown numb to them. The result of that was a certain resignation. She could live without love.
Besides, what did love lead to? Marriage. And what was the point of a marriage if not to provide a home for children? Face it, babies required a level of selflessness Kinsey wasn’t sure she was up to. In so many ways it seemed to her she’d already raised a child: her mother. She was finally free, why couldn’t she just be happy with that?
The answer was sitting next to her. How had everything changed with the arrival of a man without a name or a past or even a safe future? How had he done it? Did she dare grow more attached to him? Wasn’t that a perfect blueprint for misery?
These thoughts raced through her head. Though she’d only driven a couple of miles since the restaurant, it seemed as though they’d been back in the car for an hour. She was exhausted. Thank heaven the traffic was easing up and Zane could take over.
“There’s a bridge up ahead,” she murmured. “I’ll pull over after we go under it and you can drive.”
“Great,” Zane said as he peered through the windshield. “I wonder what that’s all about,” he added, pointing at the top of the bridge.
Kinsey darted a glance where he gestured. The bridge didn’t seem to have any moving traffic. A lone white truck stood out against the rapidly fading light. It was stationary, parked directly above their lane. Leaning on the railing looking down was the indistinct figure of a man.
“God, I hope he’s not going to jump,” she said as the car neared the bridge.
Suddenly, Zane reached across Kinsey and grasped the wheel, turning the car hard to the right. Kinsey stomped down on the brakes. Overhead, a shower of shrapnel hit the hood and the top of the car before they found the protection of the bridge itself. They hit the sidewalk curb, bounced into a pillar and then back onto the road. Cars whizzed past, honking alarm, apparently unaffected by whatever had fallen. Dead headlamps, ominous popping noises and sluggish steering announced the run-in with the pillar had come with a price. Kinsey yanked hard on the wheel, struggling to control the vehicle, though she could barely see where they were going, thanks to the spiderweb of cracks now crisscrossing the windshield.
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