White Lies

by Linda Howard

  “Jay?” he prompted.

  “I don’t know exactly what happened,” she explained. “I don’t know why you were there. They don’t know either.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “Frank. The FBI.”

  “And whoever else he’s working for,” he added dryly. “Go on.”

  “Frank told me that you weren’t doing anything illegal that they know of. Perhaps you were only an innocent bystander, but you have a reputation for sniffing out trouble, and they think you might know something about what happened to their operation. They had set up a sting, or whatever you want to call it, but someone had planted a bomb at the meeting site. You were the only survivor.”

  “What kind of sting?”

  “I don’t know. All Frank has said is that it involved national security.”

  “And they’re afraid their guy’s cover was blown, but they don’t know, because the players on the other side were disintegrated, too,” he said, as if to himself. “It could have been a double double-cross, and the bomb was meant for the others. Damn! No wonder they want me to get my memory back! But all that doesn’t explain one thing. Why are you involved?”

  “They brought me here to identify you,” she said, absently stroking his arm as she had for so many hours.

  “Identify me? Didn’t they know?”

  “Not for certain. Part of your driver’s license was found, but they still weren’t certain if you were…you, or their agent. Apparently you and the agent were about the same height and weight, and your hands were burned, so they weren’t able to get your fingerprints for identification.” She paused as something nagged at her memory, but she couldn’t bring the elusive detail into focus. For a moment it was close; then Steve’s next question splintered her concentration.

  “Why did they ask you? Wasn’t there anyone else who could identify me? Or did we stay close after our divorce?”

  “No, we didn’t. It was the first time I’d seen you in five years. You’ve always been pretty much a loner. You weren’t the type for bosom buddies. And you don’t have any family, so that left me.”

  He moved restlessly, his mouth drawing into a hard line as he uttered a brief, explicit curse. “I’m trying to get a handle on this,” he said tersely. “And I keep running into this damned blank wall. Some of what you tell me seems so familiar, and I think, yeah, that’s me. Then part of it is as if you’re telling me about some stranger, and I wonder if I really know. Hell, how can I know?” he finished with raw frustration.

  Her fingers glided over his arm, giving him what comfort she could. She didn’t waste her breath mouthing platitudes because she sensed they would only make him furious. As it was, he had already used up his small store of energy with the questions he had asked her, and he lay there in silence for several minutes, his chest rising and falling too quickly. Finally the rhythm of his breathing slowed, and he muttered, “I’m tired.”

  “You’ve pushed yourself too far. It’s only been three weeks, you know.”

  “Jay.”

  “What?”

  “Stay with me.”

  “I will. You know I will.”

  “It’s…strange. I can’t even picture your face in my mind, but part of me knows you. Maybe biblical knowledge goes deeper than mere memory.”

  His harsh voice gave rough edges to the words, but Jay felt as if an electrical charge had hit her body, making her skin tingle. Her mind filled with images, but not those of memory; her imagination manufactured new ones—of this man with his harder soul and ruined voice, bending over her, taking her in his arms, moving between her legs in a more complete possession than she had ever known before. Her own breath shortened as her breasts grew tight and achy, and her insides turned liquid. Another tingle jolted her, making her feel as if she were on the verge of physical ecstasy, and merely from his words, his voice. The violence of her response shocked her, scared her, and she jerked away from his bed before she could control the motion.

  “Jay?” He was concerned, even a little alarmed, as he felt her move away from him.

  “Go to sleep,” she managed to say, her voice almost under control. “You need the rest. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  He lifted his bandaged hand. “How about holding my hand?”

  “I can’t do that. It would hurt you.”

  “It would blend in with all the other pain,” he said groggily. He was losing strength rapidly. “Just touch me until I go to sleep, all right?”

  Jay felt his request go straight through her heart. That he should ask anything of her still staggered her, but his need to be touched was almost more than she could bear. She stepped back to the bed, folding her hand over his arm. At the first touch she felt him begin to relax, and within two minutes he was asleep.

  She stepped outside, feeling the need to escape, though she wasn’t certain exactly what she was escaping from. It was Steve, and yet it was something else, something inside her that was growing more and more powerful. It scared her; she didn’t want it, yet she was helpless to stop it. She had never responded to him like that before, not even in the first wild, heady days of their marriage. It’s just the situation, she told herself, trying to find comfort in the thought. It was just her tendency to throw herself wholly into something, concentrating on it too intensely, that made her feel like this. But comfort eluded her and despair welled in her heart, because analyzing her emotions didn’t change them. God help her, she was falling in love with him again, with even less reason than she’d had the first time. For most of the past three weeks he’d been little more than a mummy, incapable of movement or speech, yet she had felt drawn to him, tied to him; and loving him now was much more dangerous than it had been before. He was a different, stronger, harder man. Even when he’d been unconscious, she had felt his fierce inner power, and her need to know what had happened to him to cause that change was so strong it almost hurt.

  A nurse, the one who had first noticed Steve’s unconscious reaction to Jay’s presence, stopped beside her. “How is he? He refused his pain medication this morning.”

  “He’s asleep now. He tires very easily.”

  The nurse nodded, her bright blue eyes meeting Jay’s darker ones. “He has the most incredible constitution I’ve ever seen. He’s still in a great deal of pain, but he just seems to ignore it. Normally it would be at least another week before we began tapering off the pain medication.” Admiration filled her voice. “Did the coffee upset his stomach?”

  Jay had to laugh. “No. He was rather smug about it.”

  “He was certainly determined to get that coffee. Maybe we can start him on a soft diet tomorrow, so he can begin regaining his strength.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be transferred out of intensive care?”

  “I really don’t know. Major Lunning will have to make that decision.” The nurse smiled as she took her leave, returning to the central station.

  Jay walked to the visitors’ lounge to buy a soft drink, and she took advantage of the room’s emptiness to give herself some much-needed privacy. She was filled with a vague uneasiness, and she couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Or reasons, she thought. Part of it was Steve, of course, and her own unruly emotional response to him. She didn’t want to love him again, but she didn’t know how to fight it, only that she had to. She could not love him again. It was too risky. She knew that, fiercely told herself over and over that she wouldn’t allow it to happen, even as she acknowledged that it might already be too late.

  The other part of her uneasiness was also tied to Steve, but she wasn’t certain why. That aggravating sense of having missed something kept nagging at her, something that she should have seen but hadn’t. Perhaps Steve sensed it too, judging by all the questions he’d asked; he didn’t quite trust Frank, though she supposed that was to be expected, given Steve’s situation. But Jay knew that she would trust Frank with her life, and with Steve’s. So why did she keep feeling that she should know more than she did? Was Steve in dan
ger because of what he had witnessed? Had Steve actually been involved in the deal? She would have had to be naive not to realize that the vast majority of the facts had been kept from her, but she didn’t expect Frank to spout out everything he knew. No, it wasn’t that. It was something that she should have seen, something that was obvious, and she’d missed it entirely. It was some little detail that didn’t fit, and until she could pinpoint what it was, she wouldn’t be able to get rid of that nagging uneasiness.

  STEVE WAS TAKEN out of intensive care two days later and moved to a private room, and the navy guards shifted location. The new room had a television, something the ICU room had lacked, and Steve insisted on listening to every news program he could, as if he were searching for clues that would tie all the missing pieces together for him again. The problem was that he seemed to be interested in all the world situations and could discuss the politics of others nations as easily as domestic issues. That disturbed Jay; Steve had never been particularly political, and the depth of his current knowledge revealed that he had become deeply involved. Given that, it became more likely that he had also been more involved in the situation that had nearly killed him than perhaps even Frank knew. Or perhaps Frank did know, after all. He had had several long, private conversations with Steve, but Steve remained guarded. Only with Jay did he lose his wariness.

  His various injuries kept him bed-bound much longer than he should have been, but he wasn’t able to negotiate with crutches due to his burned hands. His physical inactivity ate at him, eroding his patience and good humor. He quickly decided which television shows he liked, discarding all game shows and soap operas, but even the ones he liked lacked something, since so much of the action was visual. Merely being able to listen frustrated him, and soon he wanted the set on only for the news. Jay did everything she could think of to entertain him; he liked it when she read the newspaper to him, but for the most part he just wanted to talk.

  “Tell me what you look like,” he said one morning.

  The demand flustered her. It was oddly embarrassing to be asked to describe oneself. “Well, I have brown hair,” she began hesitantly.

  “What shade of brown? Reddish? Gold?”

  “Gold, I guess, but on the dark side. Honey-colored.”

  “Is it long?”

  “No. It’s almost to my shoulders, and very straight.”

  “What color are your eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  “Come on,” he chided after a minute when she didn’t add anything. “How tall are you?”

  “Medium. Five-six.”

  “How tall am I? Did we fit together well?”

  The thought made her throat tighten. “You’re six feet, and yes, we did dance well together.”

  He turned his bandaged eyes toward her. “I wasn’t talking about dancing, but so what? When I get out of these casts, let’s go dancing again. Maybe I haven’t forgotten how.”

  She didn’t know if she could stand being in his arms again, not with her responses running wild every time she heard his harsh, cracked voice. But he was waiting for her to answer, so she said lightly, “It’s a date.”

  He lifted his hands. “The bandages come off tomorrow. Next week I have the final surgery on my eyes. The casts come off in two weeks. Give me a month to build up my strength. By then the bandages should be off my eyes, and we’ll do the town.”

  “You’re only giving yourself a month to get your strength back? Isn’t that a little ambitious?”

  “I’ve done it before,” he said, then went very still. Jay held her breath as she watched him, but after a minute he swore softly. “Damn it, I know things, but I can’t remember them. I know what foods I like, I know the name of every head of state of every nation mentioned in the news, I can even recall what they look like, but I don’t know my own face. I know who won the last World Series, but not where I was when it was played. I know the smell of the canals in Venice, but I can’t remember ever being there.” He paused a minute, then said very quietly, “Sometimes I want to take this place apart with my bare hands.”

  “Major Lunning told you what to expect,” Jay said, still shaken by what he’d said. How deeply had he involved himself in the gray world Frank had hinted at? She was very much afraid that Steve was no longer an adventurer, but a player. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. He said your memory would probably come back in dribbles.”

  A slow grin touched his lips, deepening the lines that bracketed his mouth and drawing her helpless, fascinated gaze. His lips seemed firmer, fuller, as if they were still slightly swollen, or perhaps it was because his face was thinner and older. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll have to watch that.”

  His wry humor, especially when he had good reason to occasionally feel sorry for himself, only reminded her again of his hard inner strength and was one more blow against the shaky guard she had set up around her heart. She had to laugh at him, just as she had years before, but there was a difference now. Before, Steve had used humor as a wall to hide behind; now the wall was gone, and she could see the real man.

  She was with him the next morning when the bandages came off his burned hands for good. She had been in there before when the bandages were changed, so she had seen the raw blisters on his palms and fingers when they had looked much worse than they did now. Patches of reddened skin were still visible all the way to his elbows, but his hands had caught the worst of it. Now that the danger of infection was past, the new, tender skin would heal faster without the bandages, but his hands would be too painful for him to use them much for a while.

  When she compared how he looked now to the way he had looked the first time she had seen him, hooked to all those machines and monitors, with so many tubes running into his body, it seemed nothing short of a miracle. It had been only four weeks, but he had been little more than a vegetable then, and now he exerted the force of his personality over everyone who entered his room, even the doctors. His face had been swollen and bruised before; now the hard line of his jaw and the precise cut of his lips fascinated her. She knew that plastic surgeons had rebuilt his shattered face, and she wondered about the changes she would see when the bandages were completely gone and she was able to truly see him for the first time. His jaw was a little different, a little squarer, leaner, but that was to be expected, since he had lost so much weight after he’d been injured. His beard seemed darker, because he was so pale. She was very well acquainted with his jaw and beard, since she had to shave him every morning. The nurses had done it until he became conscious and made it known he wanted Jay to shave him, and no one else.

  He no longer had a thick swath of gauze wrapped around his skull. There was a big, jagged white scar that ran diagonally from the top of his head, at a point directly above his right ear, to the back and left of his skull, but his hair was already longer than that of the average military recruit in boot camp, and it was beginning to cover the scar. The new hair was dark and glossy, having never been exposed to the sun. His eyes were still covered with bandages, but though the gauze pads and wrapping were much smaller now than they had been before, the upper bridge of his nose and the curve of his cheekbones were still covered. The bandages tantalized her; she wanted to see his new face, to judge for herself how well the plastic surgeon had done his job. She wanted to be able to apply his identity to his face, to look into his dark eyes and see all the things she’d looked for in their marriage and hadn’t been able to find.

  “Your hands are tender,” the doctor who’d been caring for Steve’s burns said as he cut away the last of the bandages and signaled for a nurse to clean them. “Be careful with them until all this new skin has toughened. They’re stiff right now, but use them, exercise them. You don’t have any tendon or ligament damage, so in time you’ll have full use of them again.”

  Slowly, painfully, Steve flexed his fingers, wincing as he did so. He waited until the doctor and nurses had left the room, then said, “Jay?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Ho
w do they look?”

  “Red,” she answered honestly.

  He flexed them again, then cautiously rubbed the fingers of his right hand over his left one, then reversed the procedure. “It feels strange,” he said, smiling a little. “They’re damned tender, like he said, but the skin feels as smooth as a baby’s butt. I don’t have any calluses now.” The smile faded abruptly, replaced with a frown. “I had callused hands.” Again he explored his hands, as if trying to find something familiar in the touch, slowly rubbing his fingertips together.

  She laughed softly. “One summer, you played so much sandlot baseball that your hands were as tough as leather. You had calluses on your calluses.”

  He still looked thoughtful; then his mood changed and he said, “Come sit by me, on the bed.”

  Curious, she did as he said, sitting facing him. The head of his bed had been raised to an upright position, so he was sitting erect and they were on the same level. Abruptly she noticed how much she had to look up at him. His bare shoulders and chest, despite the weight he had lost, still dwarfed her, and again she wondered what sort of work he had done that had developed his torso to that degree.

  Tentatively he reached out, and his hand touched her hair. Realizing why he had wanted her to sit there, she remained still while his fingers sifted through the strands. He didn’t say anything. He lifted his other hand, and his palms cupped her face, his fingers gliding lightly over her forehead and brow, down the bridge of her nose, over her lips and jaw and chin before sliding down the length of her throat.

  Her breath had stopped, but she hadn’t noticed. Slowly he laced his fingers around her neck as if measuring it, then traced the hollows of her collarbones out to her shoulders. “You’re too thin,” he murmured, cupping the balls of her shoulders in his palms. “Don’t you eat enough?”