Shadow Woman: A Novel Read online

  When she sat back up—because her knees really needed the heat more than her ears did—she opened her eyes and looked around the bathroom, all white marble and polished chrome. There was this big bathtub and a shower, double sinks, and a separate room for the toilet, as well as more thick, fluffy towels than two people could use in a single day. She’d say this for Xavier: when he found a place to hide out for a night, he had much better luck than she did.

  Luck, hell! He was prepared for anything and everything. Having a fake ID and credit cards under a false name was much more effective than lying her way into an unrentable hotel room where she had to sit with the lights out, no sheets, and one crappy towel.

  Xavier. X. The man of her dreams, literally. She was still highly pissed at him for letting her pedal that damn bike for so long before stopping her, furious with him for terrifying her, and yet—he was here.

  Without him, she’d been bereft, and hadn’t known it. Only now that he was back in her life could she look at the interval between then and now and see how drab and joyless it had been. Xavier was the color in the colorless world they’d stuck her in. In spite of everything, she was relieved that she could now remember … some of what had happened. She remembered him most clearly.

  She still didn’t know how things stood. Were they the good guys, or the bad guys? Xavier certainly could break either way. Maybe both; maybe neither. She thought about that, and realized it didn’t matter that he wasn’t a certified White Knight. Her life wasn’t a black-and-white movie from the fifties where good and bad were easily defined and identified. White hats for the heroes, black ones for the villains. The real world was much more complicated than that. Her world was complicated.

  No, complicated didn’t begin to cover it. Her world was a cluster-fuck.

  The door opened and Xavier came in—without knocking, of course, but even though she was a little uneasy at being naked in front of him, she didn’t grab a towel, or otherwise show the modesty that felt out of place between them. He’d seen her like this before. She might not remember exactly when, but she knew it had happened.

  “I ordered food. It’ll be here in forty-five minutes.”

  She looked up at him. The man towered over her, fully dressed, armed—she didn’t know where he’d had the weapon hidden, unless it was in the small leather kit he’d carried in, but she was glad he had the big handgun. Even though logic said they were safe, he’d found her, so it followed that someone else could.

  “What did you order for me?” She was grumpy enough that she wanted him to have ordered something she didn’t like, so she could snap at him.

  “Crab cakes. And cheesecake for dessert.”

  She loved crab cakes, and cheesecake was one of her favorites, too. He’d remembered. Did she know his favorite foods? Out of the murkiness swam an obvious answer: steak. He wasn’t a picky eater at all, but he loved steak, rare.

  Because she was still grumpy, she said, “I get first pick. I might decide I want the steak. I earned it today, calories be damned.”

  His lips twitched. “Yes, ma’am. So you remember about the steak?”

  “Not specifically, but generally … yes.”

  He lowered himself down to sit on the floor beside the tub, taking her by surprise. He no longer towered over her, in a position of obvious authority. They were on the same level, almost face-to-face. She was naked and he wasn’t, which she might have been naive enough to think put her at a serious disadvantage if it weren’t for the way his gaze grew heavy-lidded as he looked at her breasts, and the dark hair between her legs.

  He’d be naked too, before much more time had passed; sex between them had always been immediate and demanding. She knew this even without specific memories. They might not get their dinner finished before he was on her. Playing coy wasn’t in the cards, not where he was concerned, not when she didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. It sounded corny, maybe, like one of those fifties movies she’d thought about a few minutes ago, but life was precious. Sometimes it was too short.

  And she was so tired of being alone.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said quietly.

  He reached into the tub and trailed his fingers through the water. “What do you remember?”

  “Not enough. It’s as if there’s a big dark hole in my head, and I can remember things around the edges of the hole—until I saw you this afternoon. You come from the two missing years, don’t you?”

  Instead of answering, he said, “When did you realize two years were missing?”

  “Last Friday.” She clenched her jaw. “I looked in the mirror and saw this face, and knew it wasn’t mine. Everything else came from that.”

  “It made you sick.”

  “Sick, and with the headache from hell.” Giving him a sharp look, she said, “So I was right: the house is bugged.”

  “Everything was bugged. The house, your phones, the car.”

  That was so repulsive, thinking of strangers listening to everything she said and did, that she closed her eyes and shuddered. He touched her cheek with his wet fingertips. “This should probably wait until you remember more on your own.”

  At that she opened her eyes. “What if I don’t? And why don’t I remember? Was I brainwashed?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Not in the classic sense.”

  “Why? We were on a … a team together, weren’t we? I can remember training with someone, a woman, but you were there too—”

  “Yes, there was a team, of sorts.” His dark gaze bored into hers. “Leave it for now, Lizzy.”

  She gave him an impatient glance. “Get real. Like you’d leave it alone, if this had happened to you? People are trying to kill me, and I don’t know who they are or why.”

  That wasn’t news to him. She saw it in his eyes, and suddenly she realized. “Wait—if they’re trying to kill me, and you’ve been trying to catch up with me so you can protect me—are they trying to kill you too?”

  “Yeah, but I’m better than they are.”

  He’d always been so damn cocksure of himself, and the worst part of it was, he had reason to be. She didn’t have any specific memories, other than the one she’d had in the shed, but she knew.

  She circled the conversation back around, searching for something he would tell her. Talking him around was going to take time. “How could I be brainwashed to lose two full years of my life? Well, and parts before that, too, because even though I know I worked in Chicago, at a big security firm, my memory is kind of like Swiss cheese.”

  “It was a chemical process,” he said, his tone a little remote. “You were the third person it was tried on.”

  She’d been a guinea pig. That was almost as repulsive as knowing she’d been spied on like a lab animal—almost, but not quite. For spooky, dirty feelings, having every minute of her life listened to and examined was at the top of the list. “What happened to the other two?”

  “One died from a heart attack. The other … the process wasn’t as extensive, covered just a couple of months. He did okay.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Did this process kill him?”

  “I didn’t say that, either.”

  She reached out and pinched him, scowling. “I’m getting tired of hearing what you didn’t say. Look at it this way: if I don’t know exactly what’s going on, then I don’t know what to do, and I may make a mistake that will get both of us killed. I have to know what I’m—what we’re—facing. Tactically, keeping me in the dark isn’t a good move.”

  She saw the flare in his gaze, knew that she’d hit on the one argument that was likely to get his attention. Xavier was a born tactician, constantly weighing the odds, studying cause and effect, action and reaction. For every move, he had a counter-move.

  “I don’t want to do anything that might … harm you,” he finally said, shaking his head, and she knew she’d lost this particular argument, for now anyway. “This is uncha