Shadow Woman: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  The harsh fluorescent lights of the pharmacy faded, sound receded, and for a few disconcerting seconds her vision narrowed to him, just him, as if they were alone in the middle of the store. The volatile mixture of reactions was so confusing she reached behind herself to grip a shelf for support as she backed up a step, needing some distance between them. He was too much.

  Her eyes big, her lips going numb, she all but gawked at him as she tried to come to grips with herself. She didn’t react to men this way, not even nice, sweet, stable, gainfully employed men any normal woman would love to meet, and certainly not this—this predator. “Nice” and “sweet” were two words she was certain had never been applied to him. She should run. She should obey her gut instinct and get as far away from him as fast as she could.

  She knew that. She agreed with her gut instinct. But she couldn’t get her feet to move.

  She shivered, her body still battling with the overwhelming, conflicting signals her brain was sending. Maybe she was going to faint, she thought, alarmed by the possibility but unable to look away from him.

  He was a head taller than she, broad-shouldered, tough and lean in boots, jeans, and a denim shirt unbuttoned over a black tee shirt. More than his size, though, was the aura of coiled power about him, even though he was just standing there. His stance, the way he was perfectly balanced so he could go in any direction without hesitation, the powerfully muscled legs so plainly revealed by his tight jeans, all spoke to a man in top physical condition.

  The bone structure of his face was lean and angular, with chiseled high cheekbones and a thin, high-bridged nose that made her think he must have some Native American in his heritage, though it could be Middle Eastern. But it was his eyes that marked him for what he was. He was dark-haired, olive-skinned, and his heavy-lidded eyes such a dark shade of brown that the irises almost blended with the blackness of his pupils. His gaze was direct, coldly intense, and as it focused on her she felt as if she’d suddenly been put in the crosshairs—

  She felt a sharp, warning stab of pain, and that finally broke the spell she’d been under. Swiftly she looked away, concentrating on the label of a shampoo bottle, because she’d look like an idiot if she started humming mindlessly. The pain ebbed and she said, “That’s okay,” not looking at him again because something about his eyes made her feel as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff, about to fall into the unknown.

  His big hand appeared in her field of vision as he reached for a bottle of shampoo. “This stuff makes me feel like an idiot,” he muttered, startling her into glancing at him.

  “Shampoo?” She knit her brows together in a slight frown. “What’s hard about shampoo? Wet, lather, rinse. Don’t tell me you failed Shampoo 101.” The words popped out, and it felt as if someone else was saying them. She knew better; don’t engage with strangers—especially strangers who looked as if they could snap her neck with one hand—don’t be provocative, don’t … She knew there were more “don’ts,” more directives she should be following, but they were fraying, falling apart even as she tried to bring them to mind. She wasn’t a smart-ass; she tried to be polite to everyone, tried not to be intrusive, yet here she was busting this guy’s chops and the weird thing was … it felt almost natural.

  “Passed with flying colors; I was the teacher’s pet,” he returned, his mouth quirking up on one side in a lopsided half-smile that showed he wasn’t at all offended. “But look at this.” He turned the bottle so she could see it. “ ‘Volumizing and clarifying.’ What is it, and do I need it? Will it make my hair stand straight out, and I’ll understand the universe better?”

  She looked up at his dark hair, thick, straight, and slightly unruly, as if he’d combed it by dragging his fingers through it. “I don’t think you need any volumizing.” Pointing down the aisle, she said, “Besides, this is a woman’s shampoo. You need that manly man stuff down there.”

  He looked where she was pointing. “What’s the difference?”

  “Packaging.”

  His gaze returned to her and his lips quirked again. “So I’ll still understand the universe better?”

  Her heart started beating a little harder, a little faster. “No, but you’ll feel more manly while you’re not understanding it.”

  The expression in his eyes changed, lit, and he laughed, kind of, a rough little chuckle as if he didn’t make the sound very often and didn’t know how to let it go. Her heart gave a funny little bump, followed by another skin-prickling chill as she abruptly realized she’d let her guard down. She had to get away from him, had to be safe, because whatever he was, was more than she could handle.

  “Excuse me,” she said, turning on her heel before he could say anything else. She reached the end of the aisle as fast as she could without actually running, darted to the left, set her basket down, and headed for the door. She needed the antinausea stuff in the basket, as well as the aspirin, but taking the time to check out was more time than she had. She’d go somewhere else to get what she needed. She’d go to Walmart. She had to get away from him and she didn’t care if she made a fool of herself doing it.

  Her heart was pounding as she all but sprinted across the parking lot to her car. She used the remote to unlock it just before she reached for the door, threw herself inside, and relocked the doors. Fumbling a little, she pushed the key into the ignition and started the engine.

  No one followed her out of the store.

  Knucklehead.

  She sat for a few seconds, breathing hard, exasperated with herself. She’d panicked for no good reason, just because some big guy had made some casual conversation with her.

  Maybe. Maybe that was all he’d been doing. But maybe there was more, something she didn’t understand and couldn’t remember. How could she tell the difference?

  Answer: she couldn’t.

  She blew out a breath. Oh, well, she needed to go to Walmart anyway, to buy a replacement for her cell phone. She’d still have to pay for her plan with her current cell server, but until she figured out what was going on, she wanted a phone that was more anonymous. Make that two phones, because she needed a burner phone—

  Shit!

  She didn’t have time to hum or read labels. The agony in her head made her whimper as she tried to curl into a ball, but the steering wheel was in the way and she banged her knee, hard. That helped, in a strange way, as if she could process only so much pain at one time, and this new source jerked her focus away from her head. The headache promptly began ebbing.

  Her eyes were watering from the pain, but at least she hadn’t started vomiting again. She wiped her eyes and sank back in the seat, breathing hard and gathering her energy. Okay. She’d just learned another coping strategy. The next time an attack sneaked past her guard, all she needed to do was punch herself in the mouth.

  She didn’t remember him. That was good. That was bad. When she suddenly bolted, running from him as if snakes had sprouted from his head, Xavier forced himself to remain where he was. He didn’t want to panic her into doing something that would trigger a response from Forge’s people. Simply approaching her himself was risky enough, but now he had the answer he wanted.

  She was coming back. He knew it, even though she hadn’t recognized him. She’d still reacted to him, to the almost electric connection they’d always had. The shampoo conversation had been so similar to one they’d once had about deodorant that he hadn’t been able to mask his reaction. You’ll still smell better, but you’ll feel more manly about not stinking. He could still hear her saying that, see her smirk before he grabbed her and kissed it off. She’d had a smart mouth on her that had required a lot of kissing to keep her under control; listening to her these past few years, hearing how dulled down they’d made her, had driven him nuts even though he’d been forced to accept it.

  She was alive, though she hadn’t really been living. He’d had to be content with that. But now things were changing; he’d heard it in her voice, seen it in the sparkle that had lit her eye
s. The situation might hold together for another week, another month, maybe not progress any further than it had already, but he wasn’t betting on that.

  Instead he’d bet that she was going to come roaring back, because that was who she was, and all hell was going to break loose.

  Chapter Eight

  Lizette surveyed the array of cell phones at Walmart. Something was niggling at her, something she needed to think through if she could just figure out whatever the niggling thing was.

  “Need help with a phone?” the barely-twenty-something clerk asked. He was lanky and earnest, and wore glasses that sat crookedly on his nose.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. She’d come in here fully intending to pick up a basic phone, but now that she was here in front of the display she wasn’t certain she’d be accomplishing anything.

  “Are you thinking smart phone, or a more basic model?”

  “I’m really just browsing. Thanks.”

  Did she really need a burner cell phone? The idea was one of those weird thoughts that had popped out of the blackness of those missing two years, but if she applied it to now, what use was it? She had no one to call that she couldn’t call with her normal phone—which she’d destroyed in a sudden panicked certainty that it was bugged. Bugs. That was the point, not secrecy. What she knew about prepaid cell phones wasn’t a lot, but she did know the phone had to be activated online, which meant it was registered in her name. What would she be accomplishing?

  Nothing.

  Okay, that question was answered. What she needed was a phone she knew wasn’t bugged, which she might as well get from her regular service provider, given that she was already paying for a contract. If she kept the battery out of it, then she couldn’t be tracked by the phone’s GPS. Likewise, if the phone was dead, it couldn’t be cloned. A separate bug installed in the phone might be able to pick up her conversations if she was in the room, but first someone would have to have access to her phone, and she could definitely control that.

  She felt as if she’d been lost in a wilderness of ignorance and was slowly beginning to find her way out. Nothing made sense, but order was beginning to assert itself; she wasn’t as panicked now and she could think logically.

  She had walked in the doors hell-bent on getting a prepaid cell phone that she didn’t need, but getting one would send an alert to the mysterious “They,” which was what she wanted to avoid. A true burner was one a third party had picked up and passed on, so it wasn’t linked to her. She didn’t know how she knew this little detail, but she did, and it wasn’t giving her a headache, either. Yay for her.

  She left the store without buying anything, not even OTC meds for headaches and nausea. She obviously didn’t have any kind of virus, because what bug could be stopped by concentrating on songs or other trivial stuff? No, both symptoms were obviously triggered by surfacing memories from the missing two years.

  Something had happened to her, something catastrophic and maybe even sinister, though she had no evidence of the latter. Instead she seemed to have been set adrift in a new life, and left to her own devices.

  Maybe she’d had some kind of weird reaction to anesthesia whenever she’d had the facial surgery. Maybe it was nothing more than that, and all these suspicions about bugged cell phones and being watched were by-products of movies she’d watched in the past.

  She’d be careful because she didn’t know for certain what was going on, she thought as she drove to her cell service provider to get a new phone, but she wouldn’t let this drive her crazy.

  That was the smart thing to do—right?

  For the rest of the day and evening, things were normal enough, at least on the surface. Lizette did what she routinely did, ate soup for dinner, fielded another call from Diana and reported that she was feeling a little shaky but overall much better. She watched TV. She read—or tried to read. The whole time, she was thinking about the creepy-crawly feeling that her house had been bugged—not just the phone, not just her car, but the house, too. If someone really was going to all that trouble, not bugging the house would leave a big hole in the electronic fence, and she simply couldn’t see that.

  But how in hell could she check her house for bugs? She could look at all the lighting fixtures, all the lamps, but wouldn’t that be a dead giveaway if there really were bugs there? Besides that, she’d changed all the bulbs in all the fixtures several times while she’d been living here, and she’d never noticed anything unusual. A really good bugging job would be in the electrical outlets, and she wouldn’t be able to find out for sure unless she had a meter to measure amperage—

  Whoa. Headache. She hummed a little, made it go away. She was getting damned tired of these stupid headaches. What if she had one at a critical time, say, when she was driving? She could plow right into a semi, or a van full of kids, or any number of awful things.

  Okay, nothing she could do about bugs. She’d be better off going to bed and trying to get some sleep, so she could recover from the roller-coaster ride of pain, nausea, and jangly nerves she’d been on for most of the day. The problem with that was, those jangly nerves were still with her. Her face still wasn’t the face she remembered, at least two years were completely missing from her life, and she couldn’t shake the bone-deep sensation that some unknown, malevolent they—whoever they were—were behind the whole thing, not only in stealing part of her life but keeping her in the dark and standing guard to make certain she stayed there.

  That really pissed her off. Why her? What had she done? Was it nothing more than chance, or had she agreed to be a part of a medical study that had gone awry—big understatement there—and this was the result? No, that didn’t explain the new face. Nothing did.

  Until she found out exactly what was going on, she figured jangly nerves would become her new norm, and she’d have to learn how to deal with them. Take that guy in Walgreens today; she’d panicked over nothing, which was embarrassing, but at least he was a stranger and she hadn’t done something stupid like start screaming because he asked her a question about shampoo.

  Thinking about him was a welcome distraction. For a few minutes she allowed herself to wallow in pure female pleasure as she remembered the impact he’d had on her senses. Was he a walking testament to the truth about pheromones, or what? She’d been both turned on and scared at the same time, which was an exhilarating kind of rush all on its own.

  If she hadn’t been such a wienie, maybe he’d have asked for her number. The next big question was, would she have been brave enough to give it to him?

  He wasn’t safe. She knew it instinctively. Even though there hadn’t been anything outwardly threatening about him, she knew he didn’t fit into the mold of a safe, normal, everyday type of man.

  Strange that she could remember his face so clearly. It was those dark, dangerous, intense eyes that stood out the most. A man like him—

  No, she was letting her hormone-driven imagination run away with her, which fit right in with the rest of the day she’d had. She had to laugh at herself. At least thinking about a hot guy was better than worrying about the house being bugged.

  Eventually she wound down enough that she thought she might sleep, and dragged herself off to bed. She was restless, though, and her subconscious went over and over the day’s events, trying to make sense of them, trying to solve the puzzle. Then—finally—she slept.

  And she dreamed. She knew it was a dream, the way she sometimes did when she had almost surfaced enough to wake up, but not quite. Her surroundings looked real enough, and she was herself in this dream, which was a relief, because after the day she’d had she didn’t want to dream about being someone else.

  She’d dreamed about houses before: houses with hidden rooms and steep staircases, other houses she could almost remember as being from the real world, such as the house she’d grown up in; her fifth-grade best friend’s house; even this very house, though with hidden doors and underground rooms that she actually kind of enjoyed, because there was som
ething magical about it. But this … this was a new house, sprawling and meandering, with room after room after room, all white, all airy and strangely peaceful even though as she looked around, she knew she was lost. How the hell was she supposed to get out of here? Every time she thought she’d found the way to the front door, she’d find herself in some other part of the house. She’d look out a window and see the front door off to the left, or the right, but she could never find it.

  Then she realized that he was here—somewhere, lost in the big house the same way she was. He was looking for her and she was looking for him, but walls and doors got in the way. She didn’t feel worried about it, though, just annoyed at the delay. She’d find him, or he’d find her. He always did.

  She should have asked what his name was, when he’d bumped into her at Walgreens. She didn’t normally strike up conversations with strange men, especially men like him, but he’d started it, so she could have kept it going. How hard would it have been? While they’d been talking about shampoo—or had it been deodorant?—she could have said, “I’m Lizette. Who are you?”

  Instead, he didn’t have a name. She supposed she could always call her mystery man Mr. X, which was better than nothing. She even kind of liked it.

  She kept circling through the house, trying to find him. For some reason her path kept going through the largest room of all, a huge room with white walls, white couches and chairs, white billowing curtains. The fourth time she found herself in that big room she got really pissed, and in a fit of temper pushed through a door she hadn’t noticed before—and there he was, in the one room of the house that wasn’t all white. There was color here, reds and blues and greens and browns, like nature itself. There was texture, and smell, as if it were real. He was real enough, just as he’d been in the pharmacy, big and hard and unexpectedly appealing. What a dope she’d been, to have been afraid of him for even a minute. She should have looked into his dark eyes and allowed herself to fall in; she should have trusted him.