The Man from Texas

by Rebecca York

  Sexual need. Emotional need. And something more that he couldn’t name, but could only experience with an intensity that made him tremble.

  Heat surged through his body. Not just the heat of erotic contact but heat that burned through his brain, seared his flesh to the bone.

  He was aware of intense pleasure and of more—of his mind wavering on the brink of discovery, his mind finally free and soaring, like a great bird riding an invisible current of wind far above the earth.

  He had stopped thinking.

  There was only physical pleasure. And at the same time a kind of peace that transcended his conscious memory.

  He quickened the rhythm, taking Hannah with him to a high desert plateau where the air was almost too thin to breathe. She clung to him, her body trembling as she approached the summit. And when he felt the inner contractions take her, he let his own control slip.

  She called his name. His real name. “Lucas. Lucas.” And for the first time it meant something to him, as though she were calling him through a doorway into another existence.

  His own climax shook him, a giant earthquake rolling through his body and soul, through his brain. A shock wave so deep and profound that it left him weak and trembling as he collapsed on top of her.

  For a confused moment he thought he was back in the canyon by the pool of water, staring up at the mystical drawings on the wall. The ancient artist spoke to him in a language that he couldn’t understand, telling him things that he already knew.

  He knew! Because once again he was whole. His body and mind connected.

  Hannah’s hand stroked over his shoulders, winnowed through his hair. “Luke?” she murmured.

  Her voice brought him back to reality—the reality of his weight pressing down on her. By a massive effort he heaved himself to the side and lay there panting, his head spinning with images and emotions that left him shaking.

  He tried to say something—to tell her what had happened to him—but his throat wouldn’t work.

  She shifted toward him, rising over his chest. “Are you all right?”

  He heard panic rising in her voice, knew he had to reassure her. “Yes,” he said, although he could still barely speak. He clasped her to him, his arms infused with a strength that had eluded him until now. “I remember.” He managed to get out those two words.

  She stared down at him with a mixture of wonder and disbelief that mirrored the shock and gratitude he was feeling. “You mean you remember your past?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  “Yes.” The confirmation sighed out of him. Then he said it more strongly as he felt the precious knowledge expand inside his chest. “Yes.”

  Hannah found his hand and clasped her fingers with his, holding tight. “Thank God. But how?”

  His own fingers clenched so tightly that he was afraid he might hurt her. With a sound low in his throat, he made a deliberate effort to ease up on his grip. How did you explain a miracle? Could you explain?

  He forced himself to try because he needed to make sense out of what had happened. “I’ve been pushing myself, trying to find some way to get at the memories locked in my brain. Then we were making love, and I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was only feeling the pleasure of it, feeling energy building between us.”

  She cuddled against him, flattened her hand against his chest, feeling the still-accelerated beat of his heart. “Yes.”

  “Then…then my mind went soaring free and when it was over, I was suddenly me again. Lucas Somerville. From Pritchard, Texas.”

  She tipped her face toward him as if she was trying to wrap her mind around the concept.

  “It was being with you. I couldn’t have done it without you.” Leaning forward, he captured her mouth in a long, deep kiss.

  Afterward neither one of them spoke for long moments, each still trying to absorb the new reality. Then he felt Hannah shift in his arms.

  “Are the memories good or bad?” she asked in a small voice.

  He gave a hoarse laugh. “Do you mean am I one of the good guys or the bad guys? The answer is I’m not a dry-gulcher.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me you’re not a criminal, I knew that all along.”

  His next words strove to set the record straight. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean I’m not in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  She leaned forward again, brushed her lips lightly against his. “Whatever it is, we’ll face it together.”

  He played with the ends of her hair as he thought about what he could tell her. Over the years, there were rules he’d never broken. Rules he still shouldn’t break. But he’d dragged her into danger, and he thought he owed her an explanation that made sense.

  “I work for a government agency,” he finally said. “An agency that you’ve never head of.”

  “Try me.”

  “The Peregrine Connection.”

  “You’re right. And that’s a pretty strange name.”

  “The guy who started it was kind of eccentric. During the Cold War, he saw the need for an organization that could slash through red tape like a machete. An organization that could take on jobs that the U.S. government couldn’t acknowledge. So he started the Peregrine Connection with his own funds, then found congressional support among senators and congressmen who shared his vision. Our budget is hidden in various appropriations. All our ops are black. And if we run into trouble, we’re on our own.”

  “Like you are now.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, wondering how bad it really was.

  “Do you know who raided the town house in Baltimore?” she asked.

  “Probably the crime boss who lost the money. Dallas Sedgwick.”

  “The boss…” she breathed.

  The way she said it made him shift toward her, his eyes questioning, the old doubts surfacing even as he tried to hold them back. “What do you know about it?”

  She gulped. “The man from the adobe… When he was dying, he said you were bad, that you worked for a boss, that the man was angry with you—” She stopped short, apparently realizing what she’d given away.

  He gripped her shoulders. “He told you I was a criminal and you told me he hadn’t said anything important? Didn’t we set some ground rules when I first hired you? You promised to turn me in to the authorities if you found out I was on the wrong side of the law.”

  He saw her hands twist together. “I knew it wasn’t true! And I knew it would only upset you.”

  He stared at her, trying to absorb the implications. She’d lied to him, apparently with the best of intentions—to spare him an accusation that would have shattered him.

  She lifted her chin. “We know you’re not a criminal. So let’s get back to what really happened to you,” she suggested.

  He sighed, knowing she was right, even if he couldn’t follow her precise reasoning. He needed to give her the facts, to put her in the picture. “I’ve spent the past two years establishing an underworld identity for the purpose of getting hired by Sedgwick. His money comes from various sources, a big part of which is smuggling people and drugs across the border between Mexico and the U.S. I’d been with him for six months and I was out here on a big drug deal. Only, somebody knew what was going down and crashed the party.”

  He sat up and looked off in the direction of the mountains. “I think I know where we’re going to find a bunch of dead bodies in the desert. I say think because the meeting in the desert is where my memory still fades.”

  “But you know there was a meeting?”

  “I set it up.”

  “I’ve read that sometimes if you’re in an accident and it causes a memory loss, the recollection of the accident and the time just before it may never come back.”

  “Yeah, I read that, too. I read every damn thing I could find on amnesia—for all the good it did me.”

  “Where does the memory cut off?”

  His mind turned inward as he tried to dredge up every scrap of information he could about the event that had damn n
ear driven him over the edge with frustration and self-doubt. “I remember getting to the meeting location. I remember waiting for the contacts to arrive. But I don’t have a clue about what happened after that. I don’t know why I’ve got the money, and how I got away. That part’s totally blank.”

  She pushed herself up beside him, suddenly self-conscious that they were sitting naked in the backseat of an SUV having this conversation.

  After their first night roughing it, Luke had bought a blanket. Reaching for the boxes of supplies, she found the blanket and flipped it open, laying it across her lower body and his.

  He turned toward her. “Cold?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Slipping his arm around her, he pulled her closer.

  Nestling against him, she returned to the previous topic. “But you remember the Peregrine Connection. You remember the Sedgwick assignment.” She stopped and swallowed. “And you remember your childhood.”

  He grimaced. “Yeah. I can understand why I wanted to blank that last part out.”

  “Oh, Luke…Lucas. Was it so terrible?”

  “My mother…” he started, then stopped.

  “Left you—with a man who took out her defection on you.”

  He closed his eyes then opened them again. “Juanita made it bearable. If… When I get back to Pritchard, I need to tell her that.”

  SHE WATCHED HIS FACE, knew that he thought he was speaking the truth. But she understood that it hadn’t really been bearable. Not for a child with the sensitivities of Lucas Somerville. He had felt unloved. Unwanted. Betrayed. Not just by his mother, but by his father as well, although Hannah was sure he wasn’t going to admit that to her. So instead of pressing him, she said, “You will get back.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going to sugarcoat the situation. We’re in danger from Sedgwick’s men. And in danger from whoever it was that double-crossed Sedgwick. Or whatever happened out here. So it would be a hell of a lot more convenient if we had a working vehicle so we could hightail it back to civilization.”

  “So what are we going to do?” she asked, giving herself points for keeping her voice steady.

  “Tomorrow we’re going to the rendezvous point and see if we can figure out what happened. Then we’re hiking back to the river and following it to the nearest phone so I can contact my real boss, Addison Jennings.”

  “Good. Because it will be a long time before I want to visit the desert again.”

  “Your baptism of fire.”

  She leaned her head on his shoulder, unwilling to voice her thoughts. She should be worried. She should be frightened. But all she could think about was Luke.

  She loved him, but she had no idea if he could accept that. Not when the first woman he’d loved—his mother—had walked away from him.

  So she kept silent. For now she’d have to be content with knowing she was a good judge of character, that she hadn’t given her heart to one of the bad guys.

  And after they got out of this mess? Well, she suspected she still wasn’t in for an easy time. He hadn’t said much about the secret agency where he worked—the Peregrine Connection—or his assignments. But she could read between the lines of his brief description. As one of their operatives, he’d been living on the edge—without family ties, without attachments. He’d chosen that life.

  She felt her heart squeeze. Maybe he’d chosen to be an outsider because, coming from his background, that was the only life he was capable of leading. Even when he hadn’t remembered his identity, he’d been finding reasons for not getting close to her. His amnesia. His doubts about her loyalty.

  Now he knew who he was, and he could come up with a whole host of other reasons for keeping his distance. The speculation sent a little tremor through her, and she knew she’d feel a whole lot better if she could hear some kind of commitment from him. Instead, she turned so that her breasts were pressed against his chest, pleased by the reaction it was impossible for him to hide. He wanted her, and that was a good start.

  He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’m telling you we’re in danger—and you want to fool around?”

  She dropped her gaze to where the blanket covered his lap.

  “It appears you do, too.”

  He stroked his finger down her naked arm. “Water first. And food.”

  “Water and food,” she repeated. “I forgot about them.”

  He reached for one of the boxes of supplies, pulled out a water bottle and handed it to her.

  She twisted off the cap and took a long swallow, then opened one of the packages of peanut butter crackers.

  When she saw him watching her, she smiled. “What are you thinking about?”

  “How different this is from last night.”

  “I like it a lot better.” She scooted closer so that her shoulder was against his, watching him bite into a cracker and thinking that this was the most erotic meal she had ever shared.

  THE PHONE RANG on the bedside table, and Addison Jennings’s eyes snapped open. Four in the morning. It must be important.

  “Jennings,” he said as he reached for the phone.

  “This is Jed Prentiss.”

  The name meant nothing to him.

  “You don’t know me,” the voice on the other end of the line confirmed. “But I used to work for the Falcon,” the man continued, using Amherst Gordon’s old code name. “In the late eighties, early nineties.”

  “Go on,” Addison said, pressing the button that would record the conversation and slipping out of bed to the desk where a workstation was connected to the main Peregrine computer. Quickly his hands moved over the keyboard, finding the right file.

  A Jed Prentiss had worked for Gordon. And the dates matched. Yet there was no guarantee this man was Prentiss.

  “I know you’re checking your files,” the caller said. “You’ll see I ran into some problems on a Caribbean Island called Royale Verde.” He cleared his throat. “The disability I acquired eventually led to my resignation.”

  “And…”

  “I have some important information about one of your agents. Lucas Somerville.”

  Addison’s senses sharpened. “Go on,” he said in a neutral voice.

  “The reason he hasn’t contacted you is that he has amnesia.”

  Addison felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. “And how would you know that?”

  “I work for Randolph Security. We have an association with a detective agency in Baltimore. He hired a P.I. to help him discover his identity. You probably know about the raid on his town house. Either it was carried out by you or by the crime boss looking for his missing million dollars.”

  “What guarantee do I have that you’re telling the truth? Or that you’re even who you say you are?”

  “You’ve got a voiceprint of mine on record. Compare it to your recording of this message. The point is, I know your man is trying to figure out who he is. And I know the way your mind works, if you’re following Amherst Gordon’s pattern. You probably think he’s defected. I’m telling you that he’d have reported in if he knew who he was. And I’m asking you not to go after him.”

  “Why are you going out on a limb for him?”

  “Because he’s with my P.I. friend, Hannah Dawson. And if anything happens to her because of you, I’d consider it an act of extreme hostility, if you take my meaning.”

  The line went dead.

  Addison was in the process of sending a message to the Peregrine operations room when the phone rang again.

  This time it was Senator Martinson, the man who had been instrumental in keeping the flow of money coming to the Peregrine Connection. Martinson was a hard-nosed son of a bitch. But he’d been useful. Lately he’d been throwing his weight around.

  “Senator,” Addison said. “What can I do for you so early in the morning?”

  Martinson got right to the point. “I understand an initiative in Texas blew up in your face several weeks ago.”

  Addison’s hand clenched on the phone. �
��Where did you get that information?”

  “It’s my business to keep abreast of your operations.”

  From whom? Was there someone on the Peregrine staff leaking information to the senator? In the old days, the idea would have been unthinkable. Now it looked like a distinct possibility.

  “I’ve backed you to the hilt. I expect you to return the favor. I’m coming up for reelection, and I want to make sure that this doesn’t turn into an embarrassment for my committee. If your little flap down in Texas makes the Washington Post, I’m in deep trouble.”

  “We’re doing our best, Senator.”

  “One of your operatives went bad. Deal with him.”

  “I’ve just received information that there may be extenuating circumstances.”

  “Deal with him. And his woman accomplice. If this comes out smelling like manure, I’m the one who will have to call the hearings to investigate. And you don’t want your dirty linen washed in public.”

  The threat seemed to thicken the air around Addison, making it difficult to breathe.

  They talked for several more minutes, Addison clenching the receiver more tightly as the conversation went on.

  When he hung up, he was feeling sick, physically and emotionally. The Peregrine Connection had been set up to take on assignments that other agencies didn’t dare touch. And they’d operated under the cloak of secrecy. If they didn’t have that, they were as exposed and vulnerable as a beetle lying on its back with its underbelly in the air.

  He’d have to take the steps necessary to change the situation, because the agency was too valuable an asset to lose. But corrections would take time. For the short run, if it came down to weighing the life of one man against the good of the organization, there was only one way to call the play.

  THE BRUSH OF LUCAS’S LIPS against her cheek woke Hannah just before dawn.

  She smiled and reached for him, but he pulled away from her, looking down into her face with a regretful expression.

  “I’m sorry I’ve got to wake you up, but we’ve got a pretty good walk ahead of us. I’d like to get started while it’s cool.”

  Pushing herself up, she rubbed her eyes.