White Lies

by Linda Howard

  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�
�t a lot we could do, looking the way we did. We went back to my apartment, and while our clothes were washing we watched television and talked. We never did make it to the party we’d been going to. One date led to another, and five months later we were married.”

  He asked one question after another, like a child listening to fairy tales and wanting more. Knowing that he was reaching for the part of himself that was lost due to the blankness of his memory, she tirelessly recounted places they had gone and the things they’d done, people they had known, hoping that some little detail would provide the spark needed to bring it all back. Her voice began to grow hoarse, and finally he managed a small shake of his head.

  Sorry.

  She pressed his arms, understanding. “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “It will all come back. It will just take time.”

  But the days passed and still his memory didn’t return—not even a glimmer of a link to the past. She could feel his intense concentration on every word she uttered, as if he were willing himself to remember. Even now, his control was phenomenal; he never allowed himself to become frustrated or lose his temper. He just kept trying, keeping his feelings under control as if he sensed that any emotional upheaval could set his recovery back. Total recovery was his aim, and he worked toward it with a single-minded concentration that never wavered.

  Frank was there the day they took the trach tube from Steve’s throat, and he waited in the hall with Jay, holding her hand. She looked at him questioningly, but he merely shook his head. Several minutes later a hoarse cry of pain from Steve’s room made her jerk, and Frank’s hand tightened on hers. “You can’t go in there,” he said softly. “They’re removing his stomach tube, too.”

  The cry had been Steve’s; the first sound he’d made had been one of pain. She began to tremble, every instinct she had screaming at her to go to him, but Frank held her still. There were no other sounds from the room, and finally the door opened and the doctors and nurses exited. Major Lunning was last, and he paused to talk to Jay.

  “He’s all right,” he said, smiling a little at her tense face. “He’s breathing just fine, and talking. I won’t tell you what his first words were. But I want to warn you that his speaking voice won’t be the way you remember it; his larynx was damaged, and his voice will always sound hoarse. It will improve some, but he’ll never sound the way he did before.”

  “I’d like to talk to him now,” Frank said, looking down at Jay, and she understood that there were things he wanted to tell Steve, even though Steve didn’t remember what had happened.

  “Good luck,” Major Lunning said, smiling wryly at Frank. “He doesn’t want you, he wants Jay, and he was pretty autocratic about it.”

  Knowing just how autocratic he could be, Frank wasn’t surprised. But he still needed to ask Steve some questions, and if this was his lucky day, the questions just might trigger some return of memory. Patting Jay’s hand again, he went into Steve’s room and firmly closed the door behind him.

  Less than a minute later, he opened the door and looked at Jay, his expression both frustrated and amused. “He wants you, and he isn’t cooperating until he gets you.”

  “Did you think I would?” a raspy voice demanded behind him. “Jay, come here.”

  She began trembling again at the sound of that rough, deep voice, so much rougher and deeper than she remembered. It was almost gravelly, and it was wonderful. Her knees felt rubbery as she crossed the room to him, but she wasn’t aware of actually walking. She was just there, somehow, clinging to the railing of his bed in an effort to hold herself upright. “I’m here,” she whispered.

  He was silent a moment; then he said, “I want a drink of water.”

  She almost laughed aloud, because it was such a mundane request that could have been made of anyone, but then she saw the tension in his jaw and lips and realized that, again, he was checking out his condition, and he wanted her with him. She turned to the small Styrofoam pitcher that was kept full of crushed ice, which she used to keep his lips moist. The ice had melted enough that she was able to pour the glass half full of water. She stuck a straw into it and held it to his lips.

  Gingerly he sucked the liquid into his mouth and held it for a moment, as if letting it soak into his membranes. Then, slowly, he swallowed, and after a minute he relaxed. “Thank God,” he muttered hoarsely. “My throat still feels swollen. I wasn’t sure I could swallow, and I sure as hell didn’t want that damned tube back.”

  Behind Jay, Frank turned a smothered laugh into a cough.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Yes. Kiss me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN SHE OPENED the door to Steve’s room the next morning, he turned his head on the pillow and said, “Jay.” His voice was harsh, almost guttural, and she wondered if he’d just awakened.

  She paused, her attention caught as she stared at his bandaged eyes. “How did you know?” The nurses were in and out, so how could he have guessed her identity?

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Maybe your smell, or just the feel of you in the room. Maybe I recognize the rhythm of your walk.”

  “My smell?” she asked blankly. “I’m not using perfume, so if you smell me from that distance something’s wrong!”

  His lips curved in a smile. “It’s a fresh, faintly sweet smell. I like it. Do I get a good-morning kiss?”

  Her heart gave a giant leap, just as it had the day before when he’d demanded that she kiss him. She had given him a light, tender kiss, barely brushing her lips against his, while Frank, in the background, had pretended to be invisible; but it had taken her pulse a good ten minutes to settle down afterward. Now, even while her mind shouted at her to be cautious, she crossed the room to him and bent down to give him another light kiss, letting her lips linger for only a second. But when she started to draw away, he increased the pressure, his mouth molding itself to hers, and her heart slammed wildly against her rib cage as excitement shot through her.

  “You taste like coffee,” she managed to say when she finally forced herself to stand upright again, breaking the contact.

  His lips had been slightly parted, with a disturbing sensuality, but at her words they took on a smug line. “They wanted me to drink tea or apple juice—” he made it sound like hemlock “—but I talked them into letting me have coffee.”

  “Oh?” she asked dryly. “How? By refusing to drink anything until you had your coffee?”

  “It worked,” he said, not sounding at all repentant. She could imagine how helpless the nurses were against his relentless will.

  Despite the fact that she no longer needed to communicate with him in their old way, her hand went to his arm in habit, and she was so used to the contact that she didn’t notice it. “How are you feeling?” she asked, then winced at the triteness of the question, but she was still rattled from the effects of his kiss.

  “Like hell.”

  “Oh.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  To her surprise, she had to stop and count the days. She had become so involved with him that time had ceased to mean anything, and it was difficult to recall. “Three weeks.”

  “Then I have three more weeks in these casts?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “All right.” He said it as if giving his permission, and she felt that he would give them three weeks and not one day longer, or he would take the casts off himself. He lifted his left arm. “I’m minus a couple of needles today. They took the IVs out about an hour ago.”

  “I hadn’t even noticed!” she exclaimed, smiling a little at the note of pride in his ruined voice. She wondered if she would ever get used to its harshness, but at the same time tiny shivers went down her spine every time she heard it.

  “And I refused the pain medication. I want my head clear. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask before, but it took so much time and effort, and my brain was so foggy from the drugs, that it was just too much trouble. Now I want to kno
w what’s going on. Where am I? I’ve heard you call the doctor Major, so I know I’m in a military hospital. The question is, why?”

  “You’re in Bethesda,” she said.

  “A naval hospital?” Astonishment roughened his voice even more.

  “Frank said you were brought here for security reasons. There are guards posted at every entrance to this wing. And this was a central location for all the surgeons they pulled in for you.”

  “Major Lunning isn’t navy,” he said sharply.

  “No.” It was astonishing that he could lose the most basic of memories, those of himself, yet retain the knowledge that Bethesda was a naval hospital and that major wasn’t a navy rank. She watched the stillness of his mouth as he studied the implications of what she had just told him.

  “Then someone with a lot of influence wanted me here. Langley, probably.”

  “Who?”

  “Company headquarters, baby. CIA.” She felt a chill of dread as he continued, “Maybe the White House, but Langley is the most likely bet. What about Frank Payne?”

  “He’s FBI. I trust him,” she said steadily.

  “Damn, this is getting deep,” he muttered. “All these different departments and military branches coordinating just isn’t normal. What’s going on? Tell me about the explosion.”

  “Didn’t Frank tell you?”

  “I didn’t ask for or volunteer any information. I didn’t know him.”

  Yes, that was like Steve. He had always held back, watching cautiously, though she had already married him before she began noticing that particular trait. He used his charm like a shield, so that most people would have described him as outgoing and spontaneous, when in fact he was just the opposite. He had held people away, not trusting them and not allowing anyone close to him, but they never noticed, because he was such an actor. Now she sensed that the shield was gone. People could take him as he was or leave him; he didn’t care. It was a hard attitude, but she found that she liked it better. It was real, without pretense or subterfuge. And for the first time, he was letting her get close to him. He needed her, trusted her. Perhaps it was only because of the extenuating circumstances, but it was happening, and it stunned her.