He’d opened his eyes and was looking straight at her. Aside from a slight dilation of his pupils, he looked pretty normal. Had the injection worn off so quickly? She didn’t know the answer to that any more than she knew why he was suddenly determined to rehash their breakup. But by the same token, she could no more bring herself to stop him now than she’d been able to forgive him back then.
“Why?” she asked softly, beginning to realize there had been far more to that night than she’d ever begun to imagine.
“Because I was furious,” he said, his voice all but inflectionless. “Because for a moment, when they were standing around you, making their sleazy threats, I flashed back on what it’d felt like to lose Alicia, and I froze.”
Sara frowned. “You didn’t freeze. You chased them off by showing them your badge and your gun.”
His eyes went cold, reminding her all too strongly of the man he’d been back then. There was zero warmth in his tone when he said, “I didn’t go for the gun intending to wave it at them.”
“Oh.” Blood rushed through her ears, sounding like the ocean. “But—”
“I went back later,” he repeated, “because I wanted to teach those guys a lesson. I found two of them, and beat the crap out of them, nearly killed them. I was…I was completely outside myself. Didn’t recognize the thing I’d become—all that rage, all that guilt. Until then, I’d been holding it together as our relationship developed. I’d told myself that it was okay, that I could deal with the things I felt for you, because you weren’t a cop, weren’t likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a gun. But then you did, and I froze. If those punks had been more committed, that night could’ve ended very, very badly for you.”
“That night did end very badly for me,” she snapped. “Or have you conveniently blocked out the part where you—I’m guessing here, so correct me if I’m wrong—finished your revenge and went straight to the nearest bar, where you bought yourself a couple of shots and a waitress.”
He winced and said, “I was all messed up inside my head at that point.” It wasn’t much of an explanation, but was still more than he’d given her previously regarding the incident. “I’d never told Alicia how I felt—she died not knowing I loved her, with us not ever giving it a chance.”
Something went very still inside her. “I’m not Alicia, and you and I were giving our relationship a chance. At least I was. In retrospect, I wonder whether you ever really did.” You never said the words, she wanted to say, but didn’t because that was too weak, too female. She hadn’t needed the words—though they would’ve been nice. What she had needed was fidelity.
“I tried,” Romo grated, which wasn’t the same as saying that he’d loved her. “But I was starting to struggle even before that night.”
She shook her head, baffled. “Struggle with what? I thought we were great together!”
“We were, and that was the problem. The harder I fell, the more terrified I was of losing you. I had nightmares, reliving Alicia’s death over and over again, only it wasn’t Alicia, it was you.”
A half-remembered conversation suddenly clicked into place. “That was why you wanted me to go full-time over at the hospital in the pathology department, rather than sticking with the ME’s office.”
“I hated that you were anywhere near police work. I wanted to keep you safe, but I knew I couldn’t follow you every moment of every day. It wouldn’t have been healthy.”
“A great deal of this sounds unhealthy,” she observed. Leaning forward, she checked his eyes, which looked almost normal. “Is this you or the pentothal talking?” It had to be the drug, she knew. It wasn’t as if the real Romo would’ve voluntarily given up so much of himself, offering her more insight into his inner workings than she’d ever had back when they’d been a couple.
“A combination of the two, I suspect.” He rolled his head on his neck, wincing slightly, no doubt when his stitches twinged a protest. “The room’s stopped spinning, and I don’t feel stoned anymore, but the memories have stuck with me.” He paused. “I think I remember everything up to the prison break and the events surrounding it. I’ve got my parents and my childhood back, which is a huge relief. I’ve got Vegas and Alicia back, which is far less of a relief, except that it gives me a much better understanding of why, even though we’d broken up, you remained the one person I trusted with my life when I needed help.”
“Because you didn’t love me as much as you loved Alicia,” she said bitterly, finally seeing it after all this time. It wasn’t that he’d been fatally flawed as a human being, unable to stay faithful. It had been far worse than that. He had, whether consciously or unconsciously, done the one thing he knew she’d be unable to forgive. He’d wanted out of their relationship, but hadn’t had the guts to dump her. Instead, he’d forced her to dump him.
Bastard.
Crossing her arms over her abdomen, where a sharp ache had taken root, she turned partly away from him, wishing she could go to her room and lie down for a few hours. But she’d been the one to drug him. She’d see it through, no matter how badly it hurt.
“You’ve got it wrong,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “In fact, you’ve got it entirely backward.”
“How’s that?” she asked without looking back at him. She didn’t want to see the emotion in his face, didn’t want to be reminded of the man she’d gotten to know over the past few days, the one who’d accepted his own feelings—and hers—far more readily than the old Romo ever had. He had his memories back; he knew who he was, knew almost everything that mattered. The new Romo was gone, subsumed in the old one, or maybe by the man he’d become over the months he’d been undercover.
But the man he was now—whoever that was—wouldn’t let her avoid his eyes. He reached out, pried one of her hands loose from their defensive clench, and clasped her fingers in his. “I sabotaged our relationship because I panicked, pure and simple. I’d started to realize that what I felt for you was ten times stronger than what I’d felt for Alicia. Which meant that the fear of losing you, the terror of having something happen to you, of having to live through that again, was ten times worse, too, if not more.” He grimaced and shook his head. “I couldn’t…I couldn’t be with you, fearing every time you left that you might not come back.”
His words tugged at something wistful deep inside her, but she scowled. “So your solution was to sleep with someone else, knowing I’d dump you?”
“It wasn’t a solution. It was panic. Only it didn’t really fix anything, because even after we broke up I couldn’t stop thinking about you, worrying about you. I knew almost immediately that I’d made a huge mistake, but I also knew that it would be a long time—if ever—before you could learn to trust me again. I started seeing a shrink, started trying to fix myself before I tried to fix things with you. Then there was the prison break and the task force, and things went downhill fast.”
“You sure picked a strange way to show your affection,” she snapped. “Your investigation almost gave Proudfoot the excuse to shut down my office.” She tried not to acknowledge that the events of the past few days could very well have sealed that deal for the acting mayor. By now he might know she’d set up the meeting that had nearly killed Fax and Tucker, might even know she was harboring the target of Friday’s manhunt. Even if he didn’t know those things, there was no way she could show up at work on Monday. She’d be too much of a target.
“My official investigation moved away from the ME’s office within the first few days after al-Jihad’s prison break,” Romo said, his eyes intent on hers, losing the last of their blurriness as she watched.
“Like hell it did. You were breathing down my neck for months after that.”
“It was the simplest way to stay close to you and make sure you kept out of the case.” His fingers tightened on hers. “When you and the others went off the radar to help Chelsea and Fax that first week after the prison break, I almost lost my mind trying to find you. It…well, let’s just say
it wasn’t pretty.” He paused. “I’ve made mistakes with you, I know that. But I never set out to hurt you. Please believe that, if you believe nothing else about me.”
Sara stared at their joined hands for a moment, not sure what she was supposed to say, how she was supposed to feel. One part of her was wearily grateful to finally understand what had gone wrong. Another part wanted to tear at him for pushing her away instead of letting her in on what he was thinking and feeling. And still another part of her—the weak, wanting part—was whispering at the back of her brain, saying that he’d changed, that they might have a chance, after all.
Yeah, rationality said, just so long as he spends the rest of his life on a low dose of sodium pentothal. Which so wasn’t an option. It was too bad that was what it seemed to take to make him a functional human being.
“My father was a smooth talker,” she said slowly, wanting to get the words right and give him the same level of honesty he’d finally given her, drugged or not. “Good apologies aren’t enough, though. What I’m looking for—what I deserve—is someone who’s willing to be honest within each moment, not after the fact.” Forcibly recalling herself to the task at hand, she let go of his hand and reached for the pentothal and another syringe. “Lie back. I’m going to hit you with another dose, see if we can’t get you to remember the important stuff.”
He sat up, caught the hand that she’d reached toward the drug and once again twined his fingers around hers, hanging on as though he never intended to let go, ever again. “No, don’t. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try again until morning. Besides,” he continued before she could argue the point, “I need to tell you something.”
She told herself to pull away from him, but couldn’t. Instead she looked at him, found herself trapped in his eyes as she whispered, “What?”
The moment the word left her lips she damned herself because she knew—even if he didn’t—that she’d just given him permission to break her heart all over again. She hadn’t shut him down when she knew she should. Instead, she opened the door a crack.
“I’m not the same man I was,” he said, his words ringing with quiet conviction. “I may not know what I’ve done over the past few months—and trust me, that scares the hell out of me—but I’m sure it involved lots of time alone, probably in that crummy apartment we visited today. Logic says I was cracking code and hacking whatever al-Jihad and the others told me to, but I know from experience that jobs like that involve lots of sitting and thinking.”
She told herself she didn’t care, that this was just more smooth talk, but couldn’t keep from asking, “Thinking about what?”
“Death,” he said, which wasn’t what she’d expected him to say, and had her jerking her eyes to his in surprise. He smiled grimly, and continued. “And life. I don’t remember what I was doing or why, but I guarantee I was thinking how sometimes someone dying is just crappy bad luck, and it doesn’t mean the people left behind should stop living.”
Emotion balled hard and hot in Sara’s throat, but she forced it down, swallowing before she said, “It sounds like being dead was good for you.”
He gave a bark of surprised laughter and swung to sit on the edge of the mattress facing her, his knees bumping hers, his face too close, his eyes too intent. “I think it was. The guy you met as he was bleeding all over your living room the other day? That’s the man I want to be with you, once all this is over. If you’ll give me the chance.”
What was she supposed to say to that? She didn’t have a clue, knew only that her body was telling her one thing, her head another. And her heart? Well, it had long proven unreliable when it came to Romo, so she didn’t figure it should get a vote.
Experience and logic told her that the smart answer was to tell him no, they wouldn’t be together ever again. But she couldn’t help thinking that he really wasn’t the same man she’d known before; she’d recognized it even before he’d made the claim. Whatever he’d done over the past months, whoever he’d become, it had changed him, making him simultaneously more open and more complex, as though his experiences had forced him to accept the part of him that had mourned his dead partner and nearly killed her killers, and later had sent him after the street punks who’d menaced him and Sara in a similar alley.
It was that violence she sensed inside him now, a wildness he hadn’t harbored before, or had buried so deeply she hadn’t seen it. Somehow in bringing that part of himself to the surface, he’d found the rest of himself, too. She couldn’t regret that. But she also wasn’t sure she could trust it.
“Please,” he said. “Let me make up for everything I did wrong.”
Something quivered deep inside her, as she wondered whether he was seeing her as a means to atone for more than just the mistakes he’d made in their relationship. Because of that, because of so many things, she couldn’t say yes. She didn’t know if she dared try again with him, didn’t know if she could trust him going forward. But at the same time she was viscerally aware of the hours passing, of the countdown al-Jihad had imposed on them. It seemed pointless to worry about things that might or might not happen in the future, when she wasn’t entirely sure there was going to be a future. Yes, she believed that Romo would never willingly allow al-Jihad to harm her—she’d known that even before he’d told her about Alicia, and knowing about his guilt over his dead partner only added another layer of determination. Romo would protect her or die trying. But that was the problem—so far, the terrorist leader had proven untraceable and indefatigable; if he promised to target her, then he would. And he would most likely succeed, unless they somehow managed to outwit his plan. But how were they supposed to do that?
Romo didn’t remember what he’d done or who he’d worked for, and he was probably right that she shouldn’t repeat the pentothal dosing so soon after the first injection. If she were a trained anesthesiologist, maybe, but she was a pathologist. Keeping her cases alive had never been an option before, much less a priority. She didn’t dare take the risk. Which left them—where? They were out of plans, out of ideas. She couldn’t contact her friends for fear of endangering their lives more than she already had. Romo couldn’t contact his superiors until and unless he remembered who they were, who he could trust.
Despair rose up inside her, threatened to overwhelm her. How was she supposed to think about anything but the danger?
Except that she wasn’t thinking entirely about the danger, was she? Maybe because the situation was so dire, her mind locked on to Romo’s plea, his offer. Could there be a future for them? Did it really count as giving him a second chance when he’d changed so thoroughly?
Men don’t change; they just say they have, said her inner cynic, who’d learned that lesson early in childhood.
But even though she knew that was true, Sara found that she couldn’t bring herself to care about the future just then, didn’t really believe she had one. As far as she knew, she had another day or two at the most, and—assuming that they didn’t figure out what Romo’s mission had been, and use it to bring down al-Jihad—then she’d be headed into protective custody and WitSec relocation at best, a body bag at worst. Most of those options didn’t involve her being in Bear Claw beyond the thirty-some hours they had left on their clock, one way or the other.
Given that, logic said they should be focusing on other ways of coming up with Romo’s mission and figuring out what information he was supposed to be delivering. Or better, who—if anyone—he could trust within law enforcement, and how he could use that to trap the master terrorist within his own plot. But logic also said they’d tried all the avenues they could for now, that they both needed to rest and recharge. They were as safe as they could make themselves. They needed a break.
And she was rationalizing, she knew. Because, deep down inside, she’d already made her decision.
“No,” she said, voice soft because his face was still very close to her own. “I can’t promise to give you another chance once all this is over.” She leaned in, clos
ing the distance between them so her words were a breath across his skin as she said, “I will, however, agree to give you the next six hours or so to make your case.”
His dark green eyes widened a moment in surprise, then blurred dark, almost black with passion as he closed the final inches between them. His lips brushed against her cheek when he whispered, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Probably not.” She reached up and cupped his stubbled jaw in her palms in a gesture that twisted her heart with its awful familiarity, and the brutal heat and longing it brought. “But at this point I don’t really care anymore.” She blinked hard, and was faintly surprised to feel tears well. “I missed you so damn much,” she whispered, her voice breaking.
And even though she knew she was giving in to the weakness and the heat, she couldn’t bring herself to care as his lips crushed down on hers in a kiss that washed away indecision and brought with it only heat. Only desire.
Only him.
Chapter Nine
It had been more than a year since the last time Sara and Romo had been together, but those months telescoped to a bad dream at the first touch of his lips, the first soft caress of his tongue against hers. His taste filled her, buoying her with impossible joy that was only slightly tempered by the knowledge that the heat was born of desperation and danger rather than the love and respect she’d once thought they shared. Then even that moment of regret was gone, swept away on a rising tide of need as his lips slanted across hers and his tongue slid along hers in a move that brought a sharp stab of desire deep within her.
The dim light coming from the bathroom lent an air of romance to a room that was anything but romantic. Or maybe the romance was in the moment, in the impossibility that she was once again twining her arms around Romo’s neck, that his hands were once again sliding down her body on either side, then up again, cleverly working beneath her shirt to touch skin on skin.
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