Forbidden Stranger Read online

  Nina’s smile was small but sincere. “Yuck.”

  “I want you to leave with me, Nina. And I aim to do that as soon as the airtranspo recharges and Mr. Big Bucks over there agrees to make sure his security systems don’t try to scramble the signals and put it into the water.”

  Ewan had considered Al a friend, of sorts, and wasn’t offended by her assessment of him. “Of course. Nina, I always told you that if you wanted to leave, you were free to go whenever you wanted.”

  “Because you knew I wasn’t going to,” she said.

  At that, Al backed away with her hands in the air. “This has the smell of a lovers’ quarrel. I’m out. I’ll be wandering around, looking in your closets and finding the stuff you don’t want anyone else to see.”

  Nina waited until Al had left the kitchen before she turned to go, too. Ewan stopped her with a hand on her elbow, barely brushing her sleeve instead of grabbing. She stopped, but did not turn.

  “I love you,” Ewan told her. “If nothing else, please believe that.”

  * * *

  The memories had not come rocketing back to her all at once, the way she’d always thought they would. Nina couldn’t quite describe them as returning in bits and pieces, either. Her past seemed to be finding its way back to her the way the ocean will push and pull at a wall of stones, plucking some away and bringing back others with its returning waves, until there was nothing left but a pile of rubble. Each rock was another piece of her memory, but while they’d once made a towering wall, now they all lay scattered. All she could do was lift them, one at a time, and try to put them back into place.

  She had loved him. She remembered all of it now. Flashes of Ewan’s flavor. His scent. The way his hands felt as they tangled in her hair, which had been longer then. Past her shoulders. Each of these memories was overlaid by more recent ones, but they melded and blended together until there seemed little difference between them. She had loved him then, just as she loved him in this moment.

  “Did I even have a choice?” Nina ground out the words. Her fists clenched at her sides. She didn’t want to look at him, but forced herself to stare straight into his eyes. “This time around, Ewan. Did I fall in love with you because I wanted to? Or did you manipulate me into it?”

  Ewan’s expression turned bleak. Shadows hollowed his cheeks and shaded beneath his eyes. He shook his head. Defeated. “I don’t know.”

  It was not the answer she wanted from him. She wanted him to tell her the truth—that he’d somehow influenced her into falling for him again. That he’d used the past he’d known and she had not. Watching his face, though, Nina couldn’t convince herself that Ewan had deliberately tried to harm her. So why, then, did her heart hurt so onedamned much?

  “I’m sorry,” Ewan said when Nina didn’t speak.

  Nina took a few more steps back away from him, her hands up in front of her as though to ward him off even though Ewan hadn’t made a single move to touch her. She fought for breath. Fought to swallow the rising sting of bitterness burning in her throat and on her tongue.

  “It’s not enough,” she told him. “Sorry is not enough.”

  “It’s the best I have,” he said.

  She forced away the tears, lifting her chin. “You lied to me. For months and months, Ewan. And I might not remember everything, but I do remember that it’s not the first time you’ve lied to me. You think you’re protecting me, you say you love me, but that’s not love.”

  He looked stricken. “Nina . . .”

  “No.” She held up a hand. “I can’t. Not again. Not anymore. I cannot love you any longer, Ewan. Not when I can’t trust you.”

  “You’re going to leave.” His voice was low and rough and rasping and he didn’t look at her anymore. “I understand.”

  Nina nodded.

  Ewan didn’t answer.

  At the doorway, hating herself for it, she turned. “I just have to know. Why all of this? Why, Ewan?”

  “Because I love you more than anything in this world. Because I wanted you to get well. Even if I knew that when you did remember, you would want to leave me.”

  She didn’t want to. It wasn’t about desire. It was about loss and grief and betrayal, and she didn’t want to walk out the door and leave him behind, but couldn’t see any other choice.

  “I can’t think straight around you,” she said. “I have to go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In the time before his airtranspo returned, Ewan closed up the island house. He spent a few hours making sure Aggie and Jerome knew they didn’t need to come back and arranging for a final bonus payment to their accounts. Spent a few more hours checking in with his team and following up on their progress.

  Then there was nothing left to do but head back . . . “home” didn’t feel like the right word for it. Home had become the island, but without Nina, the island was nothing but a barren slab of rock. Home was not a place for Ewan anymore. Home would always be Nina.

  Still, he had more than one house to choose from, and it seemed like a natural choice to go back to Woodhaven, where he’d first met her. The house that had once seemed perfect for him now loomed large and too empty, but the grounds surrounding it gave him enough room to run and run and run. Every place he ran reminded him of Nina, but Ewan had already realized that everything would for the rest of his life.

  He’d come in from one of those runs to find a series of missed pings on his personal comm. He didn’t recognize the number, but the caller had readily identified herself. Katrinka Dev had tried to get in touch with him eight times in the span of a couple hours. The comm was pinging again when he picked it up.

  “Katrinka,” Ewan said without additional greeting as soon as the screen focused into view. “What do you want?”

  She looked excremental. Haggard, hollowed cheeks, bags beneath her eyes. Her hair had been let to go almost entirely gray. Her expensive synthsilk tunic hung off her bony shoulders.

  Katrina gave him a brittle smile. “It’s done.”

  “What, exactly, is done?” Ewan asked warily, reminded of their last conversation and the threats she’d made. He was expecting her to tell him Jordie had finally died.

  “He’s cured,” she said instead. Her lips skinned back over bright white teeth that seemed too large in her gaunt face. “Although, you’ve probably already heard.”

  Ewan switched the call from his personal to the wall comm and went to the bar to pour himself a drink. Water, first, since he was still sweating from the run. A couple fingers of bourbon after that, which he held but didn’t sip as he waited for Katrinka to continue.

  “Did you hear me, Donahue?”

  “I heard you,” he said calmly. The bourbon spread warmth through his chest. He took another long drink of cool water to counter it.

  Katrinka paced in front of the screen. At a distance, her skeletal frame was painfully obvious. “He’s cured, I said.”

  “I already said I heard you,” Ewan repeated. “But I don’t understand.”

  She faced the screen. “My team found the solution. I had it implanted in Jordie. He’s fine, now.”

  Ewan doubted Jordie would ever be anything close to “fine” again, considering the kid had clearly not been fine to begin with. He frowned. “You can’t know that for sure. Not so soon. Not without lots of tests.”

  “My son is sane, now. The docs said so.”

  That seemed even less likely than him being “fine.” Anyway, sanity wasn’t something Ewan was sure could even be determined, not in the way Katrinka wanted it to be. Ewan tossed back the rest of the bourbon with a grimace and weighed his words before speaking. Katrinka stopped her pacing and waited for him to speak, her expression a twisted mask he couldn’t read.

  “He’s been examined,” she said when Ewan remained silent. “The docs have checked him out. He doesn’t have to be kept in restraints any longer. He’s not trying to hurt himself or anyone else. The new programming worked. He’s going to get out of prison.”