Every day when I got home from the office, the first thing I did was drop the jeans and slip on the sweats, curling up on the couch with a favorite reality television show. That was my idea of excitement. Going clubbing, having friends over for a home-cooked meal, drinking a glass of wine—those things gave me the willies. I was a private girl. Down to earth. Not really the socializing type.
And I said that with a hangover the size of Kansas aching behind my eyes. That was Jesse’s fault.
I thought about calling her as I packed. Tell her I was going to be gone for a while. But then I realized she was probably still passed out back at her place, sleeping off the stupidity. I’d just text her from the road.
I finally settled on the usual suspects—jeans, T-shirts, a sports coat—telling myself it was stupid to worry about how I looked to a client I would never see again after our short adventure. But when I saw him standing in the lobby, speaking politely to Lily in that way that really good looking guys have, I wished I’d chosen a little more carefully. Maybe gone to Jess’ and raided her closet. She was the fashionista in our family. She would have had something appropriate for me to wear.
“Rhett,” Lily said, drawing my name out like it was five syllables instead of one. “We were just talking about you.”
“Nothing bad,” Mr. Chandler was quick to insert, this aw-shucks look on his face.
“Gossip is the heart and soul of our business,” I said, gesturing a little impatiently for him to join me at the door. “We should get on the road if we want to have time to speak to anyone today.”
“Once again, it was nice to meet you, Lily,” he said, smiling at her before turning to saunter my way. He had his hands in his pockets again, making him look like a farm boy who’d been transported into a world he didn’t quite understand. But, of course, that look was disrupted by the bad boy jacket he was wearing.
I led the way to the company SUV, unlocking the doors with the fob in my pocket. I felt like I was a bug under a microscope as I settled behind the wheel. I wasn’t even sure he was watching me, I just had that creepy crawly feeling on the back of my neck as if he were.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d worked with the rudest, crudest men God ever put on this earth both in the police academy and later when I was a patrol cop. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been alone with a man before. Not only that, but I’d had three male partners as I made my way up the ranks to junior detective, and I’d worked with a dozen or more clients one on one since coming to Dragon six months ago. It had never bothered me before. Why was it suddenly bothering me now?
I glanced over at him as I put the car in reverse. And then I knew.
I’d never been attracted to any of those guys the way I was to him.
We were both quiet as we made our way to the interstate. Once settled at seventy-five miles an hour, I allowed myself another glance in his direction.
“What should I call you?”
“Richard’s good.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t call you John Doe.”
“They probably would have if not for the security badge.”
“You look more like a John.”
“Think so?”
“Do you ever get this feeling like something’s familiar even if you don’t know why?”
He was quiet for a moment, like he was thinking about it. “Sometimes, I guess.” He reached up and ran his hand over his head. “There was a time in the hospital when I was just waking up, and I heard a child’s voice in the hall. For just a brief second, the name Sabrina drifted in my mind for reasons I can’t even begin to express.”
“Sabrina?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that the name of one of your nurses?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Was there anything else? Some sort of emotion?”
He shook his head, but there was a dark cloud that passed over his face. There was something he wasn’t telling me.
That wasn’t a good start.
“Did you get along well with the staff at the hospital?”
He shrugged. “I suppose. They were all pretty nice, considering the situation.”
“How long were you in the hospital?”
“Counting the time I was in the coma?”
I nodded.
“About five months.”
“Wow.”
I thought about ho2 my dad had he lingered in the ICU for nearly three weeks after he was shot. That was an incredibly long time in my mind. I couldn’t imagine someone being in the hospital for such a long time. Hospitals just … I shivered at the thought.
“You okay?”
I glanced at him. “I’m not a fan of hospitals.”
“Did you lose someone?”
I gritted my teeth, the memory of standing at my father’s gravesite still so fresh that it had the power to bring tears to my eyes if I let it. But I rarely did.
“I was a cop, and I have friends who went into the military. I’ve lost more than my share of people.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged, glancing over at him again. “Do you think you might have been in the military? I bet Waverly could find something if you were.”
“She mentioned that. Said she’d call you if she found something.”
“Waverly’s a whiz at computers. She’ll find something.”
I rounded a curve, guiding the SUV carefully along the fast lane. I liked to drive, liked to be in control. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was an oldest child and I often had to care for my two younger sisters while my dad was at work. Mom was pretty much useless when it came to just about anything. I learned how to cook when I was seven because Mom couldn’t be bothered to set down her bottle long enough to put a couple of eggs into a pot of boiling water. My sisters would probably argue that I’m still not that great of a cook. At least they never starved.
I could feel him watching me again. I reached up and pushed a piece of hair behind my ear, overcome with self-consciousness. My phone buzzed and I nearly jumped out of my skin, jerking the wheel to the left. I caught myself just in time, righting the car before we could slam into the median. Stupid thing to do.
I tugged the phone out of my jeans pocket and glanced at the screen. Jesse.
“Hey,” I mumbled into the phone, wondering where the hell my Bluetooth thing was.
“How you feeling? You better be as hung over as me.”
“Probably worse. You take some aspirin before you went to bed like I told you?”
She hemmed and hawed, telling me what I already knew. She hadn’t.
“You never listen to a thing I say.”
“I was a little drunk.”
“Weren’t we all?” I sighed. “Listen, I’m out of town for a couple of days. If you need anything, call Kasey or Amelia. They’ll take care of you.”
“I know the routine.”
“Yeah, sometimes I wonder.”
“Goodbye, Rhett.”
She hung up before I could say anything else. A few choice words jumped to the tip of my tongue, but I kept them in place, not really wanting to give Richard the impression that I had a foul mouth—even if I did.
We rounded another curve, this one turning to the right, giving me an excuse to glance at Richard. He was watching me—I knew it wasn’t my imagination!—a slight smile on his full lips.
“Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
My eyebrows rose. “Neither.”
“Family, then.”
I nodded. “Sister.”
“Yeah … I got that impression. Not sure why, but …”
“I wonder if that means you have siblings. Or overprotective parents.”
“Maybe.”
There was a little exasperation in his voice. I glanced at him again, thinking it must be incredibly frustration not knowing anything about your own past. I couldn’t imagine it. As much as I hated my mother’s alcoholism and the toll it took on me and my sisters, I wouldn’t give up my m
emories of my father and his buddies, of my school friends and my experiences in high school and then the police academy. If I could pick and choose memories to forget, well, then I might not be averse to forgetting a few things. But to forget everything? Sometimes the bad had to come with the good.
We arrived at the hospital late in the afternoon, about the time the morning nurses were switching out with the afternoon crew. It was a small town—only the hospital and a few restaurants dotted the landscape of downtown.
There was only one motel, too, one of those little no-tell places where doctors went to have an afternoon delight with their office managers. I was a big city girl, so these kinds of places made me uncomfortable. Richard, however, seemed at home with the place, sitting up a little straighter when we hit the city limits.
We weren’t even halfway across the parking lot when a woman called out to us.
“Richard?” She came running over, a great big grin on her face. “I knew it was you!”
She threw her arms around Richard’s neck, giving him a hug that was a little more intimate than one might expect from a casual friend. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as his towering six-feet-something, with short red hair that clearly came out of a bottle and brown eyes that were almost gold in the bright afternoon sunlight. She was wearing scrubs and a stethoscope around her neck. A nurse? Maybe a doctor.
She stepped back and laughed as she studied him. “You look amazing!”
“Thanks.”
She reached up to touch the scar that ran along his eye socket. “They did a pretty good job. Could have been worse.”
He reached up to touch it himself, as though he’d forgotten it was there.
“Excuse me, but who are you?” I asked.
The woman focused on me, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Colleen Michaels. I’m a nurse here.”
“I’m Rhett Dennings, with Dragon Security. We’re investigating Richard’s past, trying to see if we can help him figure out who he is. Would you mind answering a few questions?”
She looked from him to me, as though checking to make sure he understood what it was I was asking. Then she sighed.
“I’ve spoken to all the investigators you’ve sent this way, Richard,” she said softly, almost like she was reluctant to say anything at all. “Didn’t any of them find out who you are?”
“It’s like Richard Chandler doesn’t exist.”
A sadness that was palpable came over her expression. She reached up and stroked his jaw just ever so lightly, like a mother caressing a child. Then she gestured toward the hospital.
“Come inside. I think a couple of the other nurses who worked with you are here, too. We can talk in the cafeteria.”
It only took a few minutes to spread the word—it really was a small town. Four or five other nurses arrived in the cafeteria shortly after us, ready to tell anything and everything they knew about Richard and his time here.
“I was on duty when they brought you into the emergency room,” one petite, blonde nurse announced, staring at Richard like she couldn’t bear to move her eyes from his face. “It was a bad accident. You were covered in glass and blood from head to toe. We had to pick the safety glass out of your wounds as we worked on you. I’ve never been involved in an accident with so much debris.”
Another nurse nodded, also watching him closely.
“The paramedics had trouble keeping your heart going in the bus, but when you arrived you were fully conscious and calling out names and begging for that duffle bag that brought in with you.”
“Duffle bag?” I glanced at Richard. He hadn’t mentioned a duffle bag to me.
The first nurse nodded. “You kept asking about someone named Rebecca. Where was Rebecca? Did they find her? Did they bring her in, too? Was she going to be okay?”
“And Sabrina. You moaned that name over and over again.”
I glanced at Richard. He wasn’t looking at me, but he didn’t seem too focused on the nurses, either. He was chewing his lip and staring at the floor mostly.
“And then they took you up to CT and I didn’t see you again until after you’d fallen into the coma.”
The first nurse nodded. “Me too.”
“Did he say anything else? Maybe another name or a location? Did he indicate where he’d come from or why he was driving through this part of the state?”
One of the nurses—the first one—glanced at me almost like I was an annoying gnat flying around her head.
“No, not really. He had a fractured skull and a fractured eye socket. His jaw was swollen, so most of what he did say was mumbled and incoherent.”
“But did he say anything at all? Anything we could use?”
The nurses looked at each other and shook their head. Nothing.
They talked about spending time with him after he woke from the coma, how he seemed to know basic things—how to walk, talk, feed himself—but he’d lost all memory of himself. One nurse said she’d worked on a similar case and that man had only lost his memory to the point where he was sixteen. He honestly thought he was still sixteen when he first woke. That man regained his memories after three weeks. They’d all thought Richard would regain his memories, too. The fact that he hadn’t suggested to most of them that he never would.
Richard sat forward, his arms crossed over his chest.
“The security badge … was it clipped to my shirt? What kind of clothing was I wearing when they brought me in?”
The first nurse nodded, seeming pleased that she had a chance to answer a direct question. “You were wearing gray coveralls, like a janitor might wear. And the badge was clipped to the breast pocket.”
“Do you remember what happened to the coveralls? They got me new clothes when I left the hospital.”
The nurses looked at each other, all of them shrugging. No, they didn’t remember.
We headed out a few minutes later. We were almost to the door when Richard quite literally ran into a petite young woman also dressed in scrubs.
“Sorry,” he said.
The woman looked up, doing a double-take when she saw his face. She blushed deeply, turning her face away from his.
Intriguing.
“Sara,” he said on a sigh.
“How are you, Richard?”
“Still have no idea who I am.”
She looked up at him, her eyes rounded with something like sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded, rocking back on his heels. “How are you?”
She shrugged. “Never been better.” She smiled awkwardly, her eyes moving to me with open curiosity. “Hello.”
Richard turned to me. “This is Rhett Dennings. She’s helping me find out who I am.”
“I hope you do.”
She smiled again, then moved around us, wandering over to the cashier to pay for a soda.
“Friend of yours?”
“She was just another of my nurses.”
“Why didn’t she come over with the rest?”
Richard shrugged, but I got the impression he knew exactly why. With a face—and a body—like his, it was surprising there weren’t more women like Sara lurking in the halls of this hospital. I could only hope he’d been discreet enough that it wouldn’t prove to be an obstacle to my investigation.
Chapter 3
Richard
“It’s a suite, which in this place I guess means two rooms connected to each other.” Rhett kind of scoffed a little, her nose wrinkled as she looked up at the façade of the faded old motel. “Keep the connecting door open between the rooms.”
“Why?”
“Hayden said you thought someone was following you? He wants me to keep a close eye on you. He’s nearly as OCD about his clients’ safety as he is about his employees’.”
I nodded, looking up at the motel myself. It was a sad, forlorn looking place. Appropriate to the situation, I supposed.
We climbed up the stairs and went into separate rooms—separate save for the wide door between the rooms that Rh
ett immediately opened when she walked inside. The place was clean, but the porcelain was broken on the bathroom sink. It didn’t seem familiar to me, this sort of rundown convenience.
Did I used to stay in five-star hotels? Did I eat steak dinners every night and sleep in silk sheets? Did I have a woman? A life?
Sometimes the not knowing was like trying to dig a hole with nothing but my hands.
I tossed my bag onto the bed and threw myself down beside it, sighing as I stretched out for the first time all day. I closed my eyes, my thoughts moving over the events of the day, meeting Hayden Dubois and Rhett and running into those nurses at the hospital. We went to the police station, but the officer we needed to speak to was on duty and unavailable. Rhett said it wasn’t an issue, that she could track him down in the morning. She didn’t mention what our next move would be after that.
I’d been down this road already. Four times. Each time the investigation stalled out after speaking to the cops. There were no more leads, really. I wanted to believe Rhett would be different, that she’d figure out something the previous investigators hadn’t. But a part of me knew that was unlikely.
I was an enigma. It was really possible I would never know who I was or where I belonged. And that was a scary thought all on its own.
I could hear Rhett on the phone, speaking low to someone. I thought I heard the name Waverly—the computer chick back at Dragon headquarters. She was a beautiful woman. Sexy in an exotic, over the top, sort of way. But I found myself more drawn to Rhett than Waverly, attracted more to the casual beauty of Rhett’s jeans and T-shirt than Waverly’s skin tight blouse and flowy skirt.
And Rhett just happened to have the most intense green eyes I think I’d ever seen—though I wouldn’t know that for sure, would I? I found myself staring into those green eyes, trusting her in a way I hadn’t been able to trust anyone since I woke up in that hospital.
How do you trust people when you can’t even trust your own mind? I would see someone walk into my hospital room and for an instant I would find myself wondering if I knew them, if they were someone from my past, if this lab tech was my ex-girlfriend or that orderly was a buddy from high school. And then there were the times when I knew something without explanation. Like when the doctor was struggling to do calculations on a drug dosage and I was able to come up with the answer just off the top of my head.
DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series Page 18
