He rolled it over in his head. Seattle. Sure, why not?
It might just be the thing to help him pull his thoughts together and figure out how to handle this without completely humiliating himself.
Chapter One
The indignant scream sliced through his thoughts like a newly honed scalpel.
By the time the angry barrage of words had followed in the scream’s wake, Jean-Luc LeBlanc had already whirled around on his heel and was running to the rescue. The reaction was purely instinctive, without so much as a shred of thought on his part to slow him down. Certainly it didn’t occur to him that a threat here on the streets of Seattle was something quite different from a threat in Hades, Alaska. There, more than likely, danger came from four-legged creatures or merciless weather. In the lower forty-nine, danger walked on two legs and could be just as merciless as any act of nature. Sometimes even more.
Luc didn’t stop to reason out anything, or weigh pros and cons. None of that mattered. Someone needed help and Luc was close by. That was enough for him.
It took only a moment to orient himself. Behind him in the alley, the taxi driver—who’d picked him up at the airport and had just, less than half a minute earlier, dropped him off near the hotel where he would be staying—was fighting someone off. The attacker was in the front seat of the cab, grappling with her. Something flashed, catching the light.
The man had a knife.
Luc threw aside his suitcase, running faster. “Let her go!”
The voice, deep and dangerous, seemed almost incongruous with his open, blond good looks. But he had the build and the muscles to back up the warning in his voice. Reaching the cab, Luc grabbed the would-be mugger by the back of the neck and roughly hauled him out. He threw the mugger aside as if the man was nothing more than an undesirable, miserable rag.
Caught by surprise, the man’s knife flew out of his hand. He went crashing into the broad side of a Dumpster housed against the rear of a tall building opposite the back of the hotel. Luc could almost feel the man’s brains rattling as his head made contact with the metal side.
His eyes still on the mugger, Luc stooped to pick up the fallen knife, meaning to toss it out of play.
Shrieking a curse that was almost intelligible, the mugger scrambled to his feet and lunged himself at Luc. Rather than throw it, Luc could only kick the knife aside. With the wind knocked out of him, Luc still managed to gain his feet quickly. He raised his fists to defend himself the way he’d learned when he was barely into his teens.
Luc heard the cabdriver yell and realized a heartbeat later that it was a warning. The warning melded with the sudden, excruciating pain crashing down on his skull.
And then everything went black.
Damn it, she shouldn’t have parked here.
She should have known better. But the street out in front of the Embassy Hotel was being torn up in both directions. The ongoing reconstruction of MacArthur Boulevard had forced her to pull the cab around to an alley that was best left to inhabitants of the night and to burly deliverymen driving large trucks. The alley certainly wasn’t any place for a recently graduated nursing student who drove her brother’s taxi in an attempt to earn a little money.
One eye on the fight, her heart pounding double time, Alison Quintano looked frantically around for a patrol car, but there was none in sight. It figured.
Swearing, she grabbed the lid of a trash can and hurled it at the second mugger who had appeared out of nowhere. The arm that had her older brothers swearing should have belonged to a first draft baseball rookie remained true and she clipped the second mugger on the back of the head, throwing him off balance. But not before the man had knocked out her recent fare.
Fury was in the man’s eyes as he swung around. Reflexes had him clutching at the back of his head. When he looked at his hand, there was blood. “Son of a bitch, I’m going to make you pay for that.”
He started after her, only to have his partner yell at him. “Ain’t got time for that.” He rifled through the prone man’s pockets. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”
The second mugger looked torn. Common sense prevailed and he followed the first man, stopping only to grab the fallen suitcase. Running down the alley, they disappeared.
Alison fought back the desire to chase after them. That would be stupid. There wasn’t anything she could do. Besides, there were two of them, and while not big, they could still easily overpower her. Look what they had done to her fare.
Abandoning the thought of pursuit, she hurried over to her Good Samaritan.
The man was flat on his stomach.
She got a sick feeling in hers.
Dropping to her knees, she placed her fingertips to the side of his neck. A pulse. She released the breath that had gotten clogged in her lungs at the sight of his unconscious body.
He was alive, but out cold. The second mugger had come up on him from behind, hitting him over the head with what looked like a kid’s bat. How much damage was there? Very gently she rolled the man onto his back. Gingerly she pried apart his eyelids one at a time. His pupils didn’t appear to be dilated, but that could still change.
Except for one cut over his left eye and what looked like the beginning of a nasty bruise on his cheek, it looked as if her Good Samaritan hadn’t been too seriously hurt.
She hoped.
Placing her hand lightly on his shoulder, she gently tried to rouse him without success.
“Are you all right?” She leaned in closer so that he could hear her. “Mister, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
He lay still and unresponsive.
This wasn’t good.
Worried, Alison looked around, but there was absolutely no one walking by the alley’s opening. Murphy’s Law. It seemed almost impossible, given that she was practically in the heart of Seattle.
For a second, she debated trying to wake him again. Maybe she should just go for help. To do the latter, she’d have to leave him and she was reluctant. He was unconscious and couldn’t defend himself, and while crime didn’t exactly run rampant in the streets, they had just been mugged. She didn’t want to take any more chances. The man was unconscious and that made him her responsibility.
Alison settled on trying to raise her brother on the two-way radio in the cab. She glanced at her watch. Almost two, but it was still considered lunchtime by a few. If she had any sort of luck left, Kevin should still be in his office.
This was going to make her brother blow his top, she thought. He hadn’t been keen on her taking the part-time position to begin with, never mind that it was with the cab company he owned. She was the baby of the family and everyone was always being protective of her.
Except once, but that had been no one’s fault.
Right now, she was far more concerned with her Good Samaritan than her brother’s reaction. She’d deal with that later. As she began to rise, she saw the man’s eyes flutter slightly.
He was coming around.
The next second, he opened his eyes. She hadn’t realized, when she’d glanced back at him in her rearview mirror earlier, just how blue his eyes were.
Alison sucked in air, and then exhaled it again, in almost a sigh of relief.
“You’re awake.” Relief was short-lived as her training reared its head again. Just because his eyes were open didn’t mean he was all right—not by a long shot. Sympathy flooded her. At the very least, the man had to have one mother of a headache. “How do you feel? That was some wallop he gave you.”
It took him a second to realize she was talking to him. He’d been too mesmerized by what he saw to absorb any of the words. He’d opened his eyes to find himself looking up at an angel. An angel with an abundance of dark, chestnut-colored wavy hair and eyes the color of the sky that was above her head.
She was talking about someone hitting him. “Who?”
He looked a little disoriented. Under the circumstances she couldn’t blame him. “The mugger.”
“Mugger?”
He struggled to sit up, feeling as if there was an anvil on his forehead.
Maybe he hadn’t put two and two together yet, she thought. Taking his hand, she slowly helped him into a sitting position, watching his face carefully. “Yeah, there was another one.”
He was trying to make sense of what she was saying to him and having very little luck. “Another one.”
The unease slowly began to return. “Why are you repeating everything I say?”
Luc passed a hand over his forehead. “Just trying to get a clear picture in my mind.”
Or any picture, he thought. God, but his head ached. The pain was crowding out any thoughts he was trying to grasp, squeezing them away.
Looking at his eyes, Alison sat back on her heels. “Anybody would be muddled after going through what you just did.” The blank look on his face had her adding, “Coming to my rescue like that was nothing short of sheer bravery.” Something straight out of King Arthur, her favorite section of literature. She smiled at him. “Don’t see much of that these days.” Guilt began to nibble at her again. He did look rather out of it. “Sorry you seemed to have gotten the worst of it. I beamed the second guy with a garbage can lid, but it didn’t seem to hurt him very much. Man probably had a head made out of stone, which would be in keeping with his Neanderthal behavior.” And then she smiled at her rescuer. “Not like you.”
He was trying, but he just wasn’t following any of this. “Not like me what?”
“Hurting him. I didn’t hurt him the way you did the other guy.” Now she was really concerned. She looked at him more closely. Her initial impression held. His pupils hadn’t dilated, but that didn’t mean they were out of the woods. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The pounding in his head was beginning to jar his teeth. “I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure what all right is.”
Oh, God. Anxious now, Alison held up her hand in front of him.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she moved her hand back and forth until she secured his attention. “How many do you see?”
Luc blinked, but even that seemed to bring about an avalanche thundering in his brain. It took effort to speak. “Two, you’re holding up two fingers. When you’re not wiggling them.”
“Good number. Could be a guess,” she added under her breath. She tried something else. “Do you know what day it is?”
He thought for a long moment, then looked at her. “No.”
Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s not bad yet, she told herself. There were times, when she was very busy, that she lost track of the days, as well. Still, the uneasiness was building within her. “It’s Wednesday. Do you know where you are?”
Though it hurt to move his head, he looked around very slowly. The street was narrow and there were two tall buildings vying for the sky. A distant smell of something rotting drifted toward him. “An alley?”
Alison suppressed the sigh before it could escape. This was looking worse by the second. “Nothing more than that?”
He looked again, this time moving only his eyes. it hurt less that way. “A dirty alley?”
Batting zero. She leaned in closer. “Do you know who I am?”
Her name, along with a license number, was on the back of the front seat. She remembered he’d read it out loud once he’d given her the address of the hotel, commenting that it was pretty. There had been a short, pleasant conversation about nothing on the drive over here.
He paused now before answering. Was she someone important to him? He had a feeling that she might be, but it was nothing that he could actually put into words. “A beautiful woman?”
The answer immediately dredged up suspicions. Was this all a ruse? Was he just trying to hit on her? He had gotten a blow to his head, but maybe he was all right and just milking the incident to elicit sympathy from her and possibly something more.
She sat back on her heels, straightening. “Is this a trick?”
“No, no trick.” He pressed fingertips to his head, wishing he could somehow push back the all-encompassing pain. “Unless you’re doing it with mirrors.” He winced suddenly as the pain seemed to spike upward, all but piercing his skull.
Falling back on professionalism, Alison examined the back of his head more closely. There was no blood, thank God. Still, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something going on internally. He needed to be seen by a doctor, the sooner the better.
She sighed again, this time exasperated with the situation.
“No mirrors,” she answered. “Just what do you remember?”
He tried to think, but there was a low-grade buzzing in his ears and it made it hard to knit any words together, never mind forming a coherent reply.
After a frustrating moment, he raised his eyes to hers. “Nothing.”
The single-word answer felt like a bullet that had gone straight to her chest. This was her fault. She should have taken her chances with the construction and just let him off in the middle of the block. But she had been in a hurry and had wanted to get to her next fare.
She struggled against the implications that were staring her in the face. “Nothing? What d’you mean, nothing?”
His eyes held hers. She sounded concerned. Who are you? Are we lovers? Friends? Fragments of questions came and went, leaving small, colored trails through his head, which led nowhere.
“I don’t remember anything. It’s all…just a blur.” There was wonder in his voice, as if he was discovering all this for the first time as well. Discovering it and being appalled at the same time.
“You don’t remember where you came from?” She knew what he was saying, yet she had to say it all out loud for herself, stalling for time. Hoping it would all return to him in a flash and absolve her of the responsibility she felt.
He paused and tried to think again. There was nothing. Except defeat. “No.”
He’d given her the hotel’s address. Maybe he was meeting someone there. At least it was a place to start. “How about where you were going?”
This time, the negative reply came accompanied with a sigh that was both weary and frustrated. “No.”
With effort, she drew on what she’d been taught, plus an inherent way of being able to comfort everyone but herself. Her voice was calm, displaying none of the sympathetic panic she was experiencing for the stranger at her feet.
“Your name…can you remember your name?”
There was something, hovering just out of reach, but when he tried to capture it, it broke apart into a thousand tiny pieces, like confetti blowing away in the wind.
“No.”
And then she remembered. He’d mentioned his name to her just after he’d said hers. He made a joke about not having the time to wait for a formal introduction. At the time it had struck her that he was incredibly friendly. She wasn’t accustomed to friendly, not off the campus. People generally kept to themselves in this part of the city, more concerned with where they were going and how fast they could get there.
She thought now. It was John something. No, wait, Jean-Luc, that was it.
She looked at him eagerly, hoping this was the trigger that would start the process rolling. She knew it could be as simple a thing as that, just a word, a look.
“Does the name Jean-Luc sound familiar?”
Though it hurt, he tried to fit the name to himself, waiting for a flash of recognition. Of another name that might attach itself to the first.
But there was nothing.
The only thing he recalled seemed strange and out of context. “Wasn’t there a science-fiction program on with—?”
It had been something she’d said to him when he’d told her his name. That he remembered. Alison banked down her impatience, knowing it was really directed at the situation, not the man.
“Yes. Star Trek, the Next Generation. Captain Jean-Luc Picard.” Repeating the information she’d originally given him verbatim, Alison waited for a sign of some sort of recognition in his eyes.
Nothing.
Either the man was an accomplished actor, or he really did have amnesia.
Amnesia. It was an ugly word.
He tried to resist the disorientation. Like quicksand, it only sucked him in deeper. Looking at her, he felt around his pockets. “Shouldn’t I have some sort of identification on me?”
He really didn’t remember the mugging, she thought. Otherwise he’d know. “They took it from you.” She’d seen the first mugger quickly go through Jean-Luc’s pockets after he went down.
“They?” With effort, struggling for at least an island of sense within this murky sea, he connected two of the myriad of dots floating through his head. “You mean the muggers?”
“Yes.” Alison looked over her shoulder toward the cab. Three of its doors were still hanging open, ponderous wings unable to lift something so heavy. “I think you’d probably be more comfortable in the cab.” She bit her lip, her eyes sweeping over him. “Do you think you can get up?”
“Let’s see.” It seemed like a simple enough question and an even more simple enough feat to execute under normal circumstances.
But when he attempted to do it, the world decided to remain just where it had been a second ago and not make the journey with him.
Instead, it spun around in a mad whirl, mixing colors and buildings all together. Trying desperately to hang on to stability, he still felt himself losing his grasp on his surroundings. Clutching at air, he wound up grabbing at Alison instead.
Oh, God, he was going to fall, Alison realized a second before he grabbed her shoulder. Quickly her arms surrounded him and she felt her knees buckling under the unexpected weight. Contact had her involuntarily stiffening. Remembering.
She forbid herself to go there. “Lean on me,” she ordered through clenched teeth.
It was a miracle they didn’t both fall over. At the last second, in an attempt to compensate for the shift in balance, she braced her legs, planting them farther apart, like a weight lifter going for a world-class record.
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