Her Forgotten Betrayal

by Anna DeStefano

  No. She could trust this man.

  The certainty of it drew her a step closer to him. She stopped an arm’s length away and set Esme down, painfully aware as she did of her disheveled appearance…and of how carefully he’d gone out of his way to act as if he hadn’t noticed. He’d simply talked her into calmly facing her fears instead of running again.

  She offered her hand to shake. “Can we start over? I’m Shaw Cassidy. You say we knew each other as children?”

  His dubious expression said he didn’t trust her sudden shift in mood. “You don’t remember me? Not at all?”

  “No.” But if she could remember the feel of someone, the comfort of a voice and a touch, if she could dream her idea of a perfect protector into life, this guy would definitely fit the bill.

  “Okay.” He took her hand, the controlled strength of his grip making her shiver. “My name’s Cole Marinos. We grew up together. We haven’t seen each other since… Not for years.”

  She grappled to remember the name. His face. Anything about him or their past together. All she came up with was the same hazy sense of familiarity that had led her to ask him to stay.

  “I can assure you,” he said, “I’m not a threat to your safety. I’m taking a few weeks of vacation from work, and my family’s cabin is on your property. It was deeded to my dad’s estate when yours died. I didn’t realize there was anyone living up here again. Your scream woke me up, and I wanted to make sure everything was all right. I’m usually the kind to keep to myself. I certainly wouldn’t be chasing you around your grandmother’s house at night, shooting up the place.”

  If he were any other man, his slight southern drawl might have softened him. This man—Cole—gave off too formidable a vibe for that. But there was honor there, too, rolling off him in waves. And there was a past between them…one that felt as familiar as he did. Even if she couldn’t remember it, she could feel the connection through his touch and his words and the assurance that made her feel she was safe with him.

  An image of flames seared her mind, of her surrounded by them, screaming…

  She yanked her hand away.

  “You can trust me, Shaw.” His eyes flicked to the neat little hole the bullet had made in the wall. “Let me make some coffee while you tell me what’s going on. It’s not like either one of us is going to sleep again anytime soon.”

  My God. How ungrateful could she be? This guy was accepting her irrational fears at face value and offering to help sort things out. And she hadn’t even thanked him.

  “I’m sorry.” She gulped at the detestable tears that refused to recede. “I’m so sorry to be disturbing your vacation like this. It’s just…” Where did she begin? She had no idea how much of her situation was safe to tell him. But he was right. There was no way she was getting back to sleep. And being alone with her thoughts until dawn was an unbearable proposition. “You’re being very understanding, staying as long as you have. Thank you.”

  “I haven’t done all that much. But if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think that bullet hole is fresh.”

  “But…” She glanced at the mark. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  He examined the damage more closely. He pulled a small, dark cylinder from his jeans’ pocket and clicked a switch on its barrel. It turned out to be a penlight, like something Shaw imagined a Boy Scout might carry, which he used to examine the hole once more. “Do you come in here a lot?”

  “Not really.”

  Not at all, actually. To Shaw, the room appeared to be a long-term storage area full of tools and old boards and other things she didn’t feel at all connected to. So she’d focused her near-obsessive cleaning efforts on the clutter elsewhere.

  “Then it’s possible,” he said, “this happened years ago.”

  “Who would have had a reason to shoot off a gun in my grandmother’s house?”

  “Who would have a reason to shoot at you tonight?”

  She shook her head. She wanted to keep shaking it, violently, until the answers she didn’t have jostled free.

  He rubbed his thumb along the blemish in the plaster. “The edges aren’t rough. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m guessing over time things tend to smooth themselves out.”

  Something deep inside her quivered at his statement. Would time really help her make sense of her upside-down world? It had already been three weeks. She realized how close she was to giving up on her mind ever getting better. She shoved aside the unappealing thought. She wasn’t a quitter. Not before the attack, and not now. That much she knew for certain.

  She should call the number Inspector Dawson had given her in case of emergencies. But she’d feel like a fool, as she had every other time she hadn’t been able to produce proof to back up her paranoia. She didn’t want to go there tonight. For a few moments, she wanted to believe she really was as safe as she felt each time this friend she couldn’t remember touched her.

  “I’ll…I’ll make the coffee,” she said to Cole. “If you wouldn’t mind—” He was a childhood pal, right? A neighbor whom her sensitive feline had taken to without hesitation, who was doing the best he could to comfort a nervous woman in the middle of the night. “Would you mind checking the rest of the doors in the house to make certain they’re locked? I know I’m being ridiculous, but sometimes I swear it feels like someone’s watching my every move.”

  Cole’s gaze narrowed on her.

  He clicked off his penlight. “What makes you say that?” he asked, seeming to believe her without question.

  She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “It’s just a feeling, but my feelings are all I have left of my old life. That kind of nothingness tends to make a girl pay attention to the least little things.”

  “What’s going on, Shaw? Why are you up here alone, terrified of your own shadow and thinking someone’s trying to kill you? Why don’t you recognize me?”

  She wrapped her arms around her waist, making the decision that she was done keeping everything to herself, hang what her doctors and Dawson thought was best for her. All their helpful recommendations had achieved so far was her making herself even more of a candidate for a straightjacket. It was time to experiment with alternative solutions, even if it meant breaking the rules.

  “Why? Because someone did try to kill me.” She lifted her bangs to show Cole her scar. “Only I can’t tell you who, any more than I can remember you. Or myself and my cat. Or this house, the beautiful mountains around us, my life before here, or even my grandmother, who was supposedly like a mother to me until she died. The only thing that feels real is the irrational belief that if something doesn’t come back to me soon, whoever did this to me is going to try to kill me again. And this time I’m going to die.”

  …

  Cole warred with the conflicting impulses either to pull Shaw close once more, or to hit the road.

  The scope of his assignment was shifting precariously, even if the rest of his team didn’t know it yet. As unexpected as his confrontation with Shaw in the woods had been, it was already producing some enticing results. If she kept trusting him, and if he got over his aversion to being back in this damn house and applied himself to calming and soothing her the way his instincts still screamed for him to, they might accomplish together what she hadn’t been able to on her own.

  Would his presence be the catalyst that would finally get her to remember, without an interrogator resorting to forcing her, as the Bureau intended to do?

  She was still too lost to her nightmares. She didn’t recognize him. Yet she was remembering fire, which meant that some things must be coming back to her, if still subconsciously. And she’d asked him to stay. Dawson wouldn’t be thrilled. There was still the chance that Cole could further damage her memory. Then again, his presence might trigger her to recall everything the government needed in order to hand down th
e first indictments in the Cassidy Global investigation. Hopefully not directed at Shaw.

  From the task force’s standpoint, it would be seen as progress if someone actually had taken a shot at her tonight. Possibly from long range or with a silencer, because she hadn’t mentioned hearing gunfire. The bad news was, Cole couldn’t be certain what had truly happened. She might have imagined the whole damn episode. He didn’t have the right equipment in the cabin for a detailed site incursion analysis. And his orders were clear: if confronted, no one was to know his true purpose for being on High Lake.

  It would take a forensics team to determine if it were even possible to isolate the trajectory of the bullet when it pierced the wall. Or how someone might actually have bypassed his obstacle course of sensors spanning the grounds, to come within a hair’s breadth of hurting or killing Shaw. But until those things could be determined, for all Cole knew, the hole had come from a hunter, months, possibly years ago.

  “I’ll check the doors and windows,” he agreed, “and meet you down here.”

  He’d double and triple-check them. While he did, he’d use the secure satellite phone he’d brought with him to call in the possible attack, own up to his breach of protocol, and get the all clear to move forward, ensuring that his ass would remain stuck in the mansion for the foreseeable future.

  With a nod toward Shaw and her exotic-looking pet, he shut and securely locked the back door and struck off toward the front of the house. He cased the first floor, all while double-checking the portable device he’d brought with him which was remotely linked to his equipment at the cabin. With it, he confirmed there’d been no unexplained activity in the woods surrounding the house since he’d carried her home. Mounting the back steps two at a time, he stopped at the landing halfway to the second floor and placed the call he couldn’t put off any longer.

  He’d learned the key to career longevity was to own up to any rule-breaking from the start. Then each deviation he successfully executed became perceived as a calculated risk instead of carelessness. Delivering the desired outcome however he had to was then perceived as resourcefulness rather than a screwup that had somehow managed not to hit the skids.

  “This is Marinos,” he said when the connection completed. “We have a problem.”

  “Code?” was the emotionless response that sounded the same on each of his daily check-ins.

  Rattling off the series of numbers and letters that would confirm he was who he said he was, he walked the rest of the way up the stairs.

  “Go,” the deep voice said.

  “Attempt on principal.” Every window and door he checked was locked. Many of them looked as if they’d been painted shut for years. He found no indication that any of the entry points to the Cassidy mansion had been breached. “Location confirmed secure from the inside.”

  A pause followed. “Repeat?”

  “I’m inside the house, and there’s no evidence the perimeter’s been challenged. But I have identified a single bullet hole, advanced from a weapon fired on the grounds.”

  The officer taking his report responded with another stretch of silence. Cole could only imagine the frenzy of activity his alert had set off in Atlanta.

  “Repeating,” the voice finally replied. “Perimeter and principal secure. One shot fired toward target area. Breach of protocol. Marshal on the scene engaged with principal.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Advise that unless situation further escalates,” the voice said, “next contact at scheduled time.”

  “Confirmed.” Cole flipped the cell shut and accepted that his subsequent check-in might not go as smoothly. If the task force thought the case was compromised, Dawson might very well decide to yank Shaw into formal custody.

  Before that could happen, Cole had to help her remember more about her shooting, something that would buy her time. Even if it meant manipulating the hell out of her tenuous trust in him. And he had to find a way to do his job and keep her calm amidst the craziness of her here-and-now world, without reminding her of their disastrous history together. His hand clenched at the memory of discovering the gold charm hanging from her cat’s collar.

  Touching it again had been like reaching for a ghost and discovering that what he’d thought was long dead had been given new life. Except Shaw didn’t remember him gifting her with it on her sixteenth birthday, or that it had once belonged to his mother. She didn’t remember anything about him, particularly not the violent, deadly way their relationship had ended. Basically, his babysitting assignment had just become a goatfuck. One he couldn’t walk away from no matter how loudly his instincts were clamoring for him to do so. Not yet.

  The job of everyone from the Marshals Service to the Bureau would be made significantly easier if Shaw were taken into custody instead of merely stranded on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. The weak, circumstantial evidence that an unsub might possibly have her in his sights actually gave Cole hope. It was a stroke in favor of her innocence. But some of the concerned parties weren’t going to be happy that there might be more to Shaw’s situation than met the eye.

  He couldn’t allow them to railroad her a step closer to prosecution. Not until he’d done everything he could to prove her innocence.

  He turned to head downstairs.

  A crash shattered the night, followed by a muffled cry that sent him racing down the steps, pulling his Glock from the shoulder holster he’d concealed beneath his T-shirt. He halted outside the kitchen’s closed door, just long enough to register the sound of a sharp inhale of pain on the other side.

  Damn it.

  He blew through the door in a forward lunge that became a tucked roll, rotating him up onto the balls of his feet. He stilled, resting in a perfectly balanced crouch. He leveled his weapon on the only moving target in the room.

  Then pulled up. It was Shaw, trembling against the counter by the sink, holding her hand before her in an awkward way—a hand that was bleeding all over the place.

  Alarm stabbed through him. His reflex was to go to her, assess her injury, soothe her. But the cold-as-ice agent within him scanned the scene first, left then right, his back pressed to the refrigerator to give him an optimum angle to take out anything stupid enough to challenge him. When he was satisfied there was no one else, he lowered the Glock and refocused on Shaw.

  Blood had soaked through a kitchen towel she’d wrapped around her left hand. She was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering.

  “You…” Her eyes were wide and as wild as an owl’s, her stare fixated on the weapon in his hand. “What are you doing with a gun?”

  “What am I doing?” It grated when it shouldn’t matter, her mind’s insistence that she should fear him first and ask questions later. He returned his weapon to the holster that enabled him to carry his gun low and at his side, hidden beneath his T-shirt. He stepped toward her, ignoring how she shrank back as far as she could against the counter. He nodded toward her injury. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. I heard your cry of pain all the way upstairs. What the hell are you doing?”

  She glanced down at her hand.

  “Oh.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”

  Then she promptly fainted into his outstretched arms.

  Chapter Six

  “Shaw…Shaw?” Calloused fingers tapped at her cheeks. “Darlin’, can you hear me? What the hell happened? Wake up and talk to me.”

  There was another touch at Shaw’s wrist, feeling her pulse. Then pressure on her injured thumb that sent pain shooting up her arm, ripping her eyes open.

  “Stop.” She gasped and tried to pull away. “Oh, God. Did I faint? Again? Give me a break!”

  Cole had knelt beside where she’d slid to the floor in front of the sink. Her legs fought awkwardly, unsuccessfully, for the traction to stand and move away from him. She slipped on the silverwar
e she’d spilled from the drawer after she’d searched for a teaspoon and somehow cut herself. Everything scattered in even more directions, until she relented and dropped back onto the floor.

  Cole applied more pressure to the towel she’d wrapped around her hand.

  “Ow!” she cried. “Don’t do that.”

  “You’ve cut yourself.”

  “No kidding.”

  Weak. She’d felt weaker by the day since coming to this place. And she hated it. Especially each time she let herself think about giving up, the way she had earlier tonight when she’d run. She was supposed to be getting stronger, not squandering her chance to heal.

  And then there was the matter of how all this nonsense must be making her look to her drop-dead-gorgeous neighbor.

  “Just leave me alone,” she said, mortified by the fact that he’d thought it necessary to come to her rescue twice in as many hours. “Please. I’m going to be fine.”

  “Let me see how deep it is.” He unwrapped her makeshift bandage. The tenderness of the gesture made her go soft deep inside, in the same place that had been terrified when he’d burst into the kitchen like an avenging warrior, wielding a gun. His head bent over her hand. His focus was locked onto her the same way it had been in the parlor.

  And somehow, she found herself relaxing into his touch again, into an overwhelming rush of sensation and familiarity that spoke to her of a time before she’d forgotten everything important. When, according to him, she’d once known she could trust him. She’d sent him to check the house while she fiddled with the coffee, more to regain some distance between them than anything else. But as soon as he’d thought she’d needed him, Cole had come running back.

  They’d been friends once, and she was unexpectedly dizzy with the rightness of his ease at being part of her midnight meltdown. As if some part of her she couldn’t recall was certain that this was absolutely where they both should be, this man settling on the floor beside her as he tried to take her pain away.