Karen Robards

by Obsession

  She had known it all along.

  As the knowledge burst through the barriers at last, defying every attempt of her subconscious to hold it back, the pain was so intense that she cried out. Her heart lurched. Her stomach dropped. But it was true, she knew it was true, she could feel it deep down inside herself—and he knew it, too. She could see it in his face. In that one split second, it was as if she could see the whole fabric of her life spilling out before her, the narrativeof it undulating like waves of fine silk.

  Then it was gone. All except for the certain knowledgethat she was Jenna. Not Katharine. Never, ever had she been Katharine.

  “Jesus Christ.” His tone made it equal parts prayer and expletive. The distressed sound she made must have terrified him, because his voice turned harsh and his arms tightened around her. She could feel the heat of them, the hard, muscular strength of them, enfolding her in a protective cocoon, cradling her close. He was breathing too fast. She could feel the rapid rise and fall of his chest against her breasts. “They said they’d fixed it this time. They said you wouldn’t be able to remember.”

  “They were wrong. I remember.”

  The pain was so bad that she was dizzy with it. It felt like it was tearing her head apart, ripping her brain in two. Her head spun. Her pulse drummed in her ears. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth in an effort to fight it, curling up close against him, drawing her knees up against his side, pushing her face into the warm curve between his neck and shoulder, clinging like a barnacle to a rock. She lay against him like that, tense, unmoving, battling the pain while he murmured a mixture of curses and reassurances into her hair and held her close. Slowly, slowly, the pain receded. Graduallyher body relaxed, and finally she took a deep breath, inhaling his comforting, familiar smell.

  She knew his smell, recognized it instinctively, had probably subconsciously picked up on it from the momentshe woke up in the hospital. It was a mixture of his own masculine scent with a spicy overlay of Irish Spring.

  “Who’s Katharine?” Her voice cracked a little on the name. Fortunately, no pain accompanied it. “Is there a Katharine?”

  “There’s a Katharine.” His face was impossible to read. “She’s Ed Barnes’s girlfriend. And his personal assistant.She’s been working for us as an informant, and when we had to pull her out, you took her place.”

  “What?” She couldn’t get her mind around it. It hurt to even try. She felt like a newly hatched chick with its beak agape, only she was desperate for knowledge rather than food. “How?”

  “The thing is, you look like her. Dead like her when you come right down to it, although because of the differencein your coloring, it isn’t all that easy to see at first. Your height and general build are the same, althoughshe was about fifteen pounds lighter. Once you got down to her weight, and you got your hair colored and styled like hers and we did a few other things, like fix the gap in your teeth and drill her mannerisms into you, it was hard telling the two of you apart. It’s the facialstructure—and the eyes. She’s got the same beautifulgreen eyes.”

  The compliment went totally unappreciated. At the moment, she didn’t care whether he thought her eyes were beautiful or not.

  “The hypnosis—it made me think I was her.”

  “We thought it would be safer for you. Barnes isn’t stupid, and he has spies and surveillance systems everywhere.You needed to stay in character twenty-four hours a day. There was no way you could give yourself away if you truly thought you were Katharine.”

  “You used me.” The words came out of nowhere, sharp with accusation. The memory behind them shimmeredjust beneath the surface of her consciousness. On some deep level she knew what it was, what he had done, but she could not quite access the details.

  “I made a deal with you.” His tone was flat, unemotional.“You agreed to it. Hell, you welcomed it.”

  The memory popped into her mind with the sudden sharp clarity of a snippet of video unspooling on a dark screen. On a Sunday some six months before, just as it was starting to get dark, she was standing at the sink in the kitchen of her own small house, looking out at a backyard dusted with snow. She was dressed in jeans and an oversized gray sweatshirt that concealed most of her curves. The unruly mop of her auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail that still allowed long tendrils to escape and tickle her nose. Which was a problem, becauseshe was wrist-deep in loam as she struggled to repot a Christmas amaryllis that had grown too large for its container. Gardening, it seemed, was one of her passions. She always had her hands in the dirt, and had the short, clipped nails to prove it.

  Then someone knocked on the kitchen door—only friends and family ever used her kitchen door—and she rinsed her hands and went to answer the summons. When she opened the door, Nick was standing there— Special Agent Nick Houston, FBI—with his hair cut ruthlessly short and his face pale and tired, wearing a puffy green goose-down jacket and jeans with scuffed boots instead of his usual jacket and tie.

  “Hey,” he said by way of a greeting, and he must have read her intention in her eyes because he moved fast enough to prevent her from slamming the door in his face, which she fully intended to do. Instead, he strong-armedhis way into her kitchen, then turned to look at her with the merest suggestion of a mocking smile.

  “Good thing I’m not sensitive,” he said. “Otherwise, you’d have me thinking you’re not glad to see me.”

  At which point she screamed “Get out,” and when he didn’t, she screamed it again and then took off one of the rubber clogs she was wearing and threw it at him.

  He dodged, and the shoe smacked into a cabinet behindhim. Then he grinned at her and held up a hand and said, “Stop! Wait! I’m here to make you a deal.”

  She hesitated, barefoot now, her other shoe in her hand, glaring at him… .

  The pain attacked without warning and the memory vanished just like that, although she knew it was still there, still lurking in her mind just out of reach. Whimpering,she pressed a hand to her temple, doing her best to will the pain away. As she let her mind go blank, it finallydid go away. She lay against Nick’s chest, panting in its aftermath, wanting to know more but dreading anotheronslaught of pain.

  “Okay, forget the whole hide-until-this-is-over thing.” His voice was grim. “We need to get you to the doctor who did this, pronto.”

  She could feel his chest muscles tightening, feel the bunching in his arms and legs as he gathered himself to stand up with her.

  “No.”

  The doctor—he was a psychiatrist. A government psychiatrist. An ordinary-looking man with a little paunch and intelligent eyes. She remembered him, not clearly but well enough to be sure. He had been one of the men in the woods that night with a flashlight. She had been terrified when she had realized they had come for her. She hadn’t wanted to go with them, but she had to.

  This time she felt the pain coming and tensed in dread. Then she deliberately let her mind go blank beforeit could grab hold.

  Tightening her grip on Nick, she waited, shivering, until she was sure it had retreated.

  “Look, you’re scaring me here,” he said. “I was supposedto take you to Dr. Freah and let him sort this out when the investigation was over anyway. I think maybe, under the circumstances, we should be heading his way a little early. Like now.”

  “No,” she repeated, opening her eyes. “I’m not letting anybody do anything to my mind again. No way, nohow.”

  “Jenna …” He sounded like someone who was trying to reason with a stubborn child. But hearing him say her name felt incredibly right. It was as if she had been looking at the world through a distorting prism all this time, and now it had suddenly dropped away so that she could once again begin seeing clearly.

  “I won’t go,” she said, adding, “I’ll fight you every step of the way,” just to make her position perfectly clear, and moved her head back on his shoulder a little so that she could see his face. There was a pinched whiteness at the corners of his mouth and a hardness to
his eyes and jaw that told her his emotions were on edge, too. She didn’t want to try summoning more memories,because she was afraid of the pain. But she wanted to know. She needed to know. “I remember throwing a shoe at you and then you telling me you wanted to make me a deal. What deal?”

  She could feel him hesitating, feel his breathing deepening, feel the tension in his body. His face could have been carved from stone. His eyes slid over her face, and then he glanced away.

  That was how she knew: Whatever the deal was, he didn’t feel good about it.

  “Nick,” she said, and he looked back at her, finally meeting her eyes. “Please.”

  “You want to know about the deal? Fine, I’ll tell you about the deal.” His voice was flat. “Here’s the bottom line: If you would agree to pose as Katharine Lawrence, I’d pull some strings to get your father out of prison.”

  The blow couldn’t have hit her harder if he had shoved his fist into her chest. Her eyes went wide. She sucked in air.

  Snippets of memory swirled through her mind like images in a kaleidoscope. Her father: the voice chiding her teenage self for thinking about getting a nose job. The parent who had raised her single-handedly after her mother had died in a car accident when she was four. The person she had always loved most in the world.

  “My father’s in—” prison, she started to say, but beforeshe could finish, a surge of memory hit her like a torrent of water spilling through a broken dam. A lightning-fast mental picture of her father grinning impishlyat her made her heart lurch. She could see him plain as anything, stocky and not overly tall, wearing his trademark short-sleeved white shirt, red tie, and dark slacks, his thick, gray hair curly as lamb’s wool, his jovial, blunt-featured face wreathed in smiles. He had met her on the threshold of his Baltimore financial servicesfirm that day, hugged her, and then stood back to show her what was freshly painted in tall gilt script on the frosted glass in the top half of the front door: Michael T. Hill and Daughter, LLC. She’d been fresh out of the University of Maryland, armed with an accountingdegree, and this was her first day on the job as his full-time—rather than summer or after-school— employee. She had meant to work for him for just a littlewhile, to help him out and get some experience under her belt. But adding her organizational ability and work ethic to his talent for finding and charming clients proved a potent formula. The firm thrived and grew, and four years later she was still there, working flat out, a lot of twelve-hour days, a lot of weekends, a lot of holidays, whatever it took to get the job done. A couple of relationships fell by the wayside—she didn’t really have the time to devote to them—but at its apex, Hill, LLC (she had talked her father into shortening the name) had sixteen employees and an annual billing of more than a million dollars. They were on their way.

  Then one golden summer evening the wolf appeared at the door, in the form of Special Agent Nick Houston, FBI. Of course, she hadn’t known that he was the wolf at the time. She hadn’t known he was an FBI agent, either.She’d thought he was a client, because that was what her father told her. The first time she had set eyes on Nick was early on a Saturday evening some two years ago. She had been at the office for about an hour, totally alone in the empty building as she worked to finishup a corporate audit that had to be completed by that Monday morning before going to meet some clients at a nearby Morton’s for dinner. Seated in her private office with the door closed, frowning over some figures that didn’t want to add up, she heard noises in her father’s adjoining private office, which, since he took weekends off as religiously as some people went to church, was unusual. When she went to investigate, she discovered her father, who usually spent his Saturdays playing golf, seated at his desk in front of his computer—which was equally unusual, because he barely knew how to work it—with a handsome stranger standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. Her father wore his golf clothes: a bright yellow polo shirt and madras slacks. The other guy—mid-thirties,close-cropped blond hair, tall, lean build—was dressed in gray dress pants and a navy blazer, white shirt, and gray striped tie. Practically the Fed uniform, but, of course, at the time she hadn’t known enough about Alphabet Soup World to even begin to suspect.

  They both looked up when she appeared in the doorway. Her father’s expression made her think of a little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He looked guilty, alarmed, and definitely not glad to see her, which was so unlike him that her antenna instantly went up. The other guy’s expression was inscrutable.

  “Jenna. I thought you weren’t working this weekend.” Wetting his lips, Mike Hill glanced over his shoulderat the other man, who had straightened and was looking at her with a spark of unmistakable masculine appreciation in the depths of his mild blue eyes. It was only then that she realized that she was dressed for her dinner date in a sleeveless little black dress that showed off her curves—and no shoes. She hated heels, and had kicked off her pumps under her desk. The knowledge that she was standing there in her bare feet made her feel self-conscious, which in turn made her frown at him. “This is … this is …”

  “Nick Evans,” the newcomer lied—although, of course, she’d had no clue then that it was a lie—stepping out from behind her father and holding out his hand. “You must be Mike’s daughter.”

  “I’m Jenna,” she confirmed, shaking his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Evans.”

  “Nick,” he said, smiling at her, and she had smiled back, both because he was a smokin’-hot guy and, she assumed, a client, although her father’s demeanor still made her wonder what was up with that. But when she taxed him on it, once they were alone, he steadfastly insistedthat Nick was simply a new, potentially very big, account, and told her that as a firm they should do everything they could to keep him happy.

  Poor trusting thing that she was then, she believed him.

  After that, Nick was around a lot, at the office and, later, as weeks turned into months, out of it. He never worked with her or any of the associates; instead, her fatherkept him as his exclusive client, which, again, was unusual. But her father brushed off her questions, and— as she saw later, with the useless wisdom of hindsight— she was too intrigued by the guy’s good looks and easy charm to probe too hard.

  The brutal truth was that during the course of banteringexchanges at the office and deeper conversations over cups of coffee and casual meals and the occasional poker game for three when she would, with increasing frequency, drop by her father’s house to discover Nick there, she developed a real thing for him. A major crush. The kind of chemistry-based infatuation that would make her heart speed up when he walked into a room, that would make her go all warm and fuzzy inside when he smiled at her, that would make her daydream with embarrassing regularity about what it would be like to just walk up to him, wrap her arms around his neck, and kiss him senseless like she was dying to do.

  But she held back, because he was a client and comingon to him did not seem like the professional thing to do.

  The thing was, although she could tell that he was attractedto her, too, although she could see the heat in his eyes sometimes when he looked at her, although she could feel the electricity sizzling between them when he walked her out to her car after dinner at her father’s house, say, or when he sat in her chair in her office with his feet propped on her desk while she tried to explain to him the intricacies behind different financial vehicles, he didn’t so much as make a move in her direction. He didn’t ask her out, he didn’t try to kiss her, he didn’t even make a suggestive remark. Not once.

  He simply looked at her with eyes that she could swear burned for her and stayed strictly hands-off.

  Until the day when she found out the truth.

  It was a Thursday, a perfectly ordinary Thursday in late January, one of those cold, gray, slushy days when nobody wants to be outside. Wrapped up tight in her camel wool coat, with galoshes on her feet and her high heels in her hand, she was the last one out of the office, although not by much. Her father had stayed
later than usual, leaving only some fifteen minutes before. It was full night at almost seven p.m., and she remembered thinking how tired she was and wondering whether, if she stopped by her father’s house on the way home, she would find Nick there. He’d been in her father’s office earlier, but he had left before she had a chance to do more than wave and smile at him through the open door.

  It was embarrassing to admit even to herself, but she really, really wanted to spend some time with Nick, and that’s what she was thinking about when she left the building via the side door, which opened onto the parkinglot that they shared with a couple of other businesses.The wind was blowing a few sparkly crystals of snow around, and the macadam was shiny-wet and ringed with the previous day’s snow. The smell of wood smoke hung in the air. There was no one, absolutely no one, in sight. She hurried through the dark parking lot with her shoulders hunched against the cold. She had almostreached her car—which she was careful to park under one of the two security lights, since it was almost always dark when she left work—when she happened to notice that her father’s gray BMW was still in the lot. Surprised, frowning, she changed course and went over to check it out.

  What she found was her father lying motionless on the asphalt beside his car.

  “Dad! Oh my God!” She dropped to her knees besidehim, grabbing his shoulders, the slush immediately soaking her black pants from the knees down, as icy cold as she suddenly felt all over. “Dad! Dad!”

  To her everlasting relief, he groaned and moved and opened his eyes. Her first, immediate, reaction was a wave of thankfulness that he wasn’t, as she had originallyfeared, dead.

  “What happened? Did you fall?” Her voice faltered as she noticed that one eye was starting to swell up and his mouth was cut and bleeding. Her hands slid over the smooth surface of his navy overcoat, instinctively searching for other injuries. “Were you mugged?”

  Glancing fearfully all around as the thought occurred—still no one in sight—she was already fumblingthrough her purse for her phone as she added, “Don’t move. I’m calling for an ambulance.”