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  Making love with him before had been…fun, passionate in a playful way. What would it be like now? Was the playfulness gone? She thought it must be. His lovemaking would be intense and elemental now, as he was, like getting caught up in a storm.

  She became aware that she could barely breathe, and she forced herself to walk away from his bed. She didn’t want him to mean that much to her. And she was very much afraid that he already did.

  “WHAT DO WE DO?” Frank asked quietly, his clear eyes meeting shuttered black ones.

  “We play out the hand,” the Man answered just as quietly. “We have to. If we do anything out of the ordinary now, it could tip someone off, and he isn’t able to recognize his enemies.”

  “Any luck in tracing Piggot?”

  “We lost him in Beirut, but we know he hooked up with his old pals. He’ll surface again, and we’ll be waiting.”

  “We just have to keep our guy alive until we can neutralize Piggot,” Frank said, his tone turning glum.

  “We’ll do it. One way or the other, we have to keep Piggot’s cutthroats from getting their hands on him.”

  “When he gets his memory back, he isn’t going to like what we’ve done.”

  A brief smile touched the Man’s hard mouth. “He’ll raise mortal hell, won’t he? But I’m not taking any chance with the protected-witness program until he’s able to look out for himself, and maybe not even then. It’s been penetrated before, and could be again. Everything hinges on getting Piggot.”

  “You ever wish you were back in the field, so you could hunt him yourself?”

  The Man leaned back, hooking his hands behind his head. “No. I’ve gotten domesticated. I like going home at night to Rachel and the kids. I like not having to watch my back.”

  Frank nodded, thinking of the time when the Man’s back had been a target for every hit man and terrorist in the business. He was safe now, out of the mainstream…as far as was generally known. A very small group of people knew otherwise. The Man officially didn’t exist; even the people who followed his orders didn’t know the orders came from him. He was buried so deeply in the bowels of bureaucracy, protected by so many twists and turns, that there was no way to connect him to the job he actually did. The President knew about him, but Frank doubted the vice president did, or any department secretary, the Chiefs of Staff or the head of the agency that employed him. Whoever was President next might not know about him. The Man decided for himself whom he could trust; Frank was one of those people. And so was the man in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  TWO DAYS LATER, they took the tube out of Steve’s chest because his collapsed lung had healed and reinflated. When they let Jay into his room again she hung over the side of his bed, stroking his arm and shoulder until his breathing settled down and the fine mist of perspiration on his body began to dry.

  “It’s over, it’s over,” she murmured.

  He moved his arm, a signal that he wanted to spell, and she began reciting the alphabet.

  Not fun.

  “No,” she agreed.

  More tubes?

  “There’s one in your stomach, for feeding you.” She felt his muscles tense as if in anticipation of the pain he knew would come, and he spelled out a terse expletive. Her hand moved over his chest in sympathy, feeling the coarseness of his hair as it grew out, and avoiding the wound where the tube had entered his body.

  He took a deep breath and forced himself to slowly relax. Raise head.

  It took her a few seconds to figure that one out. He must be incredibly sore from lying flat for so long, unable to shift his legs or lift his arms. The only time his arms were moved was when the bandages were changed. She pressed the control that raised the head of the bed, lifting him only an inch or so at a time, keeping her hand on his arm so he could signal her when he wanted her to stop. He took several more deep breaths as his weight shifted to his hips and lower back, then moved his arm to halt her. His lips moved in silent curse, his muscles tightening against the pain, but after a moment he adjusted and began to relax again.

  Jay watched him, her deep blue eyes mirroring the pain he felt, but he was improving daily, and seeing the improvements filled her with heady joy. The swelling in his face was subsiding; his lips were almost normal again, though dark bruises still stained his jaw and throat.

  She could almost feel his impatience. He wanted to talk, he wanted to see, he wanted to walk, to be able to shift his own weight in the bed. He was imprisoned in his body and he didn’t like it. She thought it must be close to hell to be cut off from his own identity as he was, as well as being so completely constrained by his injuries. But he wasn’t giving in; he asked more questions every day, trying to fill the void of memories by making new ones, maybe hoping that some magic word would take him back to himself. Jay talked to him even when he didn’t ask questions, idle conversation that, she hoped, gave him basic information and perspective. Even if it just filled the silence, that was something. If he didn’t want her to talk he would tell her.

  A movement of his arm alerted her, and she began the alphabet.

  When married?

  She caught her breath. It was the first personal question he’d asked her, the first time he’d wanted to know about their past relationship. “We were married for three years,” she managed to say calmly. “We divorced five years ago.”

  Why?

  “It wasn’t a hostile divorce,” she mused. “Or a hostile marriage. I guess we simply wanted different things out of life. We grew apart, and finally the divorce seemed more like a formality than any wrenching change in our lives.”

  What did you want?

  Now that was a twenty-thousand-dollar question. What did she want? She had been certain of her life up until the Friday when she had been fired and Frank Payne had brought Steve back into her life. Now she wasn’t certain at all; too many changes had happened all at once, jolting her life onto a different track entirely. She looked at Steve and felt him waiting patiently for her answer.

  “Stability, I guess. I wanted to settle down more than you did. We had fun together, but we weren’t really suited to each other.”

  Children?

  The thought startled her. Oddly, when they had been married, she hadn’t been in any hurry to start a family. “No, no children.” She hadn’t been able to visualize having Steve’s children. Now…oh God, now the idea shook her to the bones.

  Remarried?

  “No, I’ve never remarried. I don’t think you have, either. When Frank notified me of your accident, he asked if you had any other relatives or close friends, so you must have stayed single.”

  He’d been listening closely, but his interest suddenly sharpened. She could feel it, like a touch against her skin. No family?

  “No. Your parents are dead, and if you had any relatives, I never knew about them.” She skated around telling him that he’d been orphaned at an early age and raised in foster homes. Not having a family seemed to disturb him, though he’d never given any indication that it bothered him while they had been married.

  He lay very still and the line of his mouth was grim. She sensed there was a lot he wanted to ask her, but the very complexity of his questions stymied him. To get his mind off the questions he couldn’t ask and the answers he wouldn’t like, she began to tell him about how they had met, and slowly his mouth relaxed.

  “…and since it was our first date, I was a little stiff. More than a little stiff, if you want the truth. First dates are torment, aren’t they? It had been raining off and on all day, and water was standing in the streets. We walked out to your car, and a passing truck hit this huge puddle just as we reached the curb. We were both drenched, from the head down. And we stood there laughing at each other like complete fools. I don’t even want to think what I looked like, but you had muddy water dripping off your nose.”

  His lips were twitching, as if it hurt him to smile but he couldn’t stop the movement. What did we do?

  She chuckled. “There wasn�€