by Rita Herron
Luke shook his hand, thanked him, then headed to the psychiatrist’s office. Down the hall, he spotted his superior, Spencer Grossman, standing beside Dr. Wong’s office door. He was surprised to see Grossman here. For the past two years, he and the agent had clashed.
Grossman was a power hog, and played by his own set of rules. Basically, he was a real son of a bitch. And he had watched Luke like a hawk the past year, had threatened to suspend him more than once. Was that the reason he was here now? To pull Luke from the investigation?
The door opened, and Dr. Wong appeared with Stella by her side. The dried blood looked stark against her pale skin, fatigue lines drawing her slender features tight. She seemed impossibly small and fragile, as if she were a fine piece of glass that might shatter any second.
Odd, but when he’d first met her, he’d thought she was fragile, too. But she’d possessed a spunky side that had surprised him time and time again. Although he had suspected she’d had secrets she was trying to hide…
Secrets he’d looked forward to exploring. Secrets he should have uncovered before he married her.
“If she’s through, the locals can take her to the precinct and book her,” Grossman said.
Stella wavered slightly, glanced at the psychiatrist, then at him as if desperate for someone to save her from herself.
Luke ground his molars. “Let her clean up first.”
Grossman grunted. “She can clean up at the jail after she’s booked.”
Stella shuddered, and Luke steeled himself against the sympathy tugging at him. But the image of Stella being forced to endure the humiliation of a prison shower before a night in jail sent a cramp through his already churning stomach.
He glared at Grossman. “She’s cleaning up here.”
“She’s under arrest for murder,” Grossman said. “And you don’t belong on this case.”
“She’s also still part of an ongoing missing persons case, and she’s obviously not well,” Luke stated. “And you know I’m not leaving the case alone. Not after all this time.”
“Watch it, Devlin. You’re a hair away from losing your job.”
Luke ignored the comment, although Grossman’s threat was the very reason he had to stay and investigate. Before his career ended, he’d find out what happened to his partner and Stella. Although J.T.’s wife had thought that J.T. might have had an affair, Luke didn’t believe it for a second. J.T.’s death had something to do with Nighthawk Island and the cloning project he was investigating, not a woman. In fact, Luke suspected that his partner’s death wasn’t a suicide, that he’d been murdered, and his death made to look like he’d killed himself. Unfortunately a suicidal death kept J.T.’s wife and son from collecting the insurance money owed them.
But Luke had no proof about the murder. He’d been looking into the theory that CIRP had killed J.T. because he was on the verge of discovering something about them. Then Luke had met Stella and gotten sidetracked.
Now, he had to know the truth about her, too. The two cases couldn’t possibly be connected, could they?
No. Stella had met him in D.C. at a bar. She’d been flirty. Fun. Seductive. A break from the intensity of his job. They’d had a fling. Then he’d made her his wife. He’d vowed to love, honor and protect her.
He hadn’t done so on his wedding night.
He sure as hell had to do so now.
STELLA WANTED TO HUG Luke Devlin for letting her shower at the hospital. Every inch of her reeked of blood and death, of being examined and touched by a strange man’s hands. She scrubbed and scrubbed, lathering her body repeatedly, digging beneath her fingernails to scrape away the dried blood and remnants of whatever extraneous elements dirtied her skin. Her hair came next, soaking the long strands with the cheap hospital shampoo and scrubbing her scalp until it felt raw.
Minutes later, a knock sounded, intruding on her peace. She couldn’t stall the inevitable. She was going to jail for murder.
And she had no one to call for help.
Worse, she couldn’t even help herself.
Sighing, she towel-dried her body and hair, then slipped into the faded hospital scrubs the nurse had provided, grateful at least to be out of her soiled nightgown. She’d felt naked in the sheer fabric, as if every cop and doctor who’d looked at her had touched her bare skin with vile eyes. As if she’d come up lacking.
When she opened the door, Agent Devlin was standing to the side. The other agent, Grossman, stared down at her as if she were roadkill.
Another officer had also joined them, jangling a pair of handcuffs. Stella couldn’t look at Devlin, simply resigned herself to her fate and allowed the officer to handcuff her and lead her back to the police car. Outside, a camera flashed, and she glanced up in horror to see a reporter jamming a microphone in her face.
“Is it true that you murdered the man at the Sunset Motel tonight? Who was he? Your lover?”
Luke Devlin shoved the reporter aside, raised his arm to shield her face from the camera flash again, urging her into the back of the car. She ducked her head, burying herself as low in the seat as possible as the siren’s shrill sound rent the air, and they drove off into the night.
The next hour proved to be another ordeal in humiliation. The booking process, blatant stares of accusations and suspicion, fingerprinting, the photo that would go into a file. Finally a surreal numbness spread through her, a coping mechanism she guessed. By the time the guard escorted her to her cell, she almost collapsed.
But Luke Devlin appeared, then motioned for the guard to leave them alone. She dropped onto the dingy cot, avoiding looking at the open toilet in the corner of the room and fighting nausea at the stench of urine and sweat permeating the cell. It was late so most of the other prisoners were asleep, although an off-key, sick humming radiated from the other side of the wall, and another inmate beat the concrete repeatedly, a testament to the dregs of society with which she was now housed.
Luke stood silently assessing her, his big body making her feel more crowded than she already did with the bars closing around her.
“Stella, are you all right?”
Unwanted tears pooled in her eyes. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so helpless in her life. Still, she nodded, refusing to look at him and reveal her fear.
The mattress squeaked and dipped with his weight as he sat down beside her. She knotted her fingers together, plucking at the baggy prison suit she’d been forced to change into.
“I spoke with the doctors. Dr. Wong believes you’ve been traumatized and have repressed memories of the murder.” He hesitated, his voice gruffer when he continued, “But what about me? What about last year—you must remember our wedding night.”
She shook her head, a shiver running through her. He sounded upset, almost hurt…
With fingers of steel, he grabbed her arms and shook her. “What happened that night? Why did you run out on me?”
“I…don’t know.” Her voice broke, tears overflowing. “I’m sorry. I…wish I did.”
His fingers dug into her flesh. “Think. You suggested we elope. We drove to Vegas, you picked out the chapel, the ring—”
“When?” she whispered, gulping back tears. “When did we get married?”
His jaw flexed. “Thirteen months ago.”
She frowned, searching her memory banks, but she couldn’t recall ever going to Vegas. “How did we meet?”
He swallowed, his dark eyes raking over her. “In a bar in D.C. I bought you a drink, we talked…”
And had sex. She read it in the flare of heat in his eyes.
It had been good, too. No, not good. Hot, steamy. And they’d done it more than once.
That part she wanted to remember.
He certainly did.
“What happened?” she asked in a low voice. “After the chapel, what did we do?”
He chewed the inside of his cheek. “We went to a hotel. I ran to the car for champagne. When I got back to the room, you were gone.”
A
flash of some memory teetered on the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t quite grasp it. If he’d gone out for champagne, then they must have been happy. So why had she left?
“I found a note telling me not to follow you. But there was blood on your wedding dress, so I was frantic.” He paused, scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Is that what you wanted? For me to run after you, to think you were hurt—”
“No.” Panic squeezed her chest into a fireball. “I…have no idea what you’re talking about. I…wish I did. I wish I remembered you.”
“You lied to me back then, and you’re lying now.” His voice hardened another notch. “After you disappeared, I checked you out. You told me you were a graphic designer, but when I investigated the company on your business card, no such company existed.”
Stella searched his face, couldn’t believe his words. “But why would I lie about my job?”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting a year for you to tell me.” Flames of anger spiked his voice again. “The police thought I had something to do with your disappearance. I almost lost my damn job because I was a suspect. We hunted for your body for months.”
Stella shook her head in denial. “That can’t be true.” She stood, anger taking root. “You’re lying to me now, trying to make me think I’m some horrible person. This is all part of your good-cop, bad-cop routine, isn’t it? Break me down so I’ll confess even if I don’t remember what happened.”
“I’m not playing games with you, Stella.”
She was so confused. Her head throbbed, her palms were sweating. The world spun again, making her dizzy. “I don’t know what to believe…”
“Believe this. We were married.” Without warning, he jerked her to him, lowered his head and captured her mouth with his. The kiss was rough, erotic, full of pent-up emotion and anger. Steeped with blatant desire. His tongue probed inside her mouth, and he sucked and nipped at her lips, tasting, exploring, conjuring up sensations foreign to her, but so sultry she ached for more. Yearned for him to erase the horrors of the night with his touch.
He slowed his ministrations, and the kiss softened, turned tender. Erotic. So sweet that tears came to her eyes. She’d never been treated with gentleness or loving hands. That much she knew.
He seemed to remember what he was doing, where they were, and the kiss changed again. Anger and suspicion tainted the taste. Finally he jerked away, and she stumbled back onto the bed. He didn’t bother to try to catch her.
Instead he turned and stalked to the cell door, yelled for the guard to unlock it, and stepped outside. For a long moment, he stood ramrod straight with his back to her, his chest heaving up and down. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, uncertain what to say. That she’d never been kissed like that. That she wished she did remember him, but that his face and touch were as foreign to her as the dead man in her bed had been.
That she wanted him to hold her and kiss her again. Make her remember what it had been like between them. Why she’d agreed to be his wife.
When he faced her, he met her gaze with a cold emptiness that splintered her desire. She recognized that kind of emptiness because she’d felt it so many times herself.
Still, hunger darkened his eyes, but the emotion was steeped in distrust and anger. He tossed a photograph into the cell. It fluttered to the floor, but her eyes followed it as it fell. The picture captured her and Luke kissing—in a wedding chapel.
So he hadn’t been lying…
“I’ll be back tomorrow for your arraignment,” Luke said in a gruff voice.
His stony gaze cut over her one more time, then he walked away without a backward glance. She picked up the picture and stared at it, trying desperately to recall her forgotten wedding night as she collapsed onto the bed. But only blackness filled her mind. Weary and frightened, she hugged her knees to her chest and faced the dirty wall.
Finally the tears she’d struggled to suppress flowed from her eyes and splashed against the prison pillow.
LUKE STRODE THROUGH the double doors to the outside of the jail, and leaned one arm against the brick wall, his breathing rasping out as he inhaled the sultry summer air. Heat and humidity caused his clothes to stick to him, and the few cars on the road in the middle of the night spewed exhaust, adding to the cloying air.
Only it wasn’t the sound of cars or late night partiers that disturbed him. It was his own idiotic behavior back there.
What the hell had he been doing?
Kissing a suspect? Kissing Stella…
As if the last thirteen months hadn’t cost him enough, he’d had to relent to his raging need for her and his instinctual desire and kiss her.
Because she had been the angel of light that had obliterated the darkness after J.T.’s death.
But what had he been trying to prove today?
That he was so potently sexy that his kiss would miraculously cure her memory loss?
He’d heard Dr. Wong’s report. The amnesia was real. She had been traumatized.
Did that trauma have something to do with her initial disappearance, or the events of the night before?
The station house doors opened, and two officers lumbered out, heading to their police-issued vehicles. He grabbed his composure like a lifeline, fished in his pocket for his keys and planted a mask over his emotions as he strode to his own car.
Ten minutes later, he parked at the small house he’d rented on Skidaway Island and climbed from the vehicle. The scent of the ocean drifted toward him, the gushing of waves against rocks mingling with the thunder. Another storm cloud opened up, sending down sheets of rain in a downpour. He jogged to his house, opened the door and hurried inside. A shot of bourbon warmed his icy blood as he booted up his computer and accessed the files he’d collected so far on his wife.
There was very little there. Mostly her lies.
Her name had been real. Her birth certificate filed. Her parents listed as dead.
The job had been bogus.
He’d chased her for a year and now found her just miles away from Nighthawk Island and the research facility he and the feds had been investigating. It had to be a coincidence.
Although he’d been in law enforcement too long not to take a second look. Coincidences just didn’t fly.
Frustrated and exhausted, he scrubbed a hand over his hair. Who the hell was Stella Segall? And how had he been such a fool to fall for her?
She was nothing but a pack of lies.
And he had turned a blind eye, ignoring instincts, listening to his sexual drive instead of his common sense.
The kiss rose to taunt him. Her green eyes. The feel of her naked skin against his. The memory of his sex inside her body.
Damn. It had been over a year, and her touch still haunted him. Her lips and hands had done incredible things to him. And she had moaned and cried out each time he’d slid inside her as if she’d never been loved by a man. As if he were her first time.
How could she have forgotten making love with him when the thought drove him completely wild?
An even more disturbing thought rattled his composure and shattered his male pride—had she been faking her reaction to him when they’d made love a year ago?
Had her cries of ecstasy been lies in disguise?
SOMEWHERE AROUND dawn, Stella finally fell asleep. But nightmares filled the dark hours, thrusting her back in time.
WHERE WAS her mother?
She was five years old. Terrified, she peeked around the bedroom at the other girls, all lined up on cots, huddled in the darkness. Their faces were barely visible from being scrunched beneath the covers.
Together. But alone.
No one talking. No one whispering. All too afraid to ask.
Was her mommy ever coming back to get her?
Or was she in another dark room, on a cot lined up with the other mothers, wondering when they could see their children?
She closed her eyes and tried her best to conjure her mother’s face. Sometimes Stella saw
her in her dreams. But she’d been torn away from her so long ago that Stella had forgotten what her face looked like.
Had her mother forgotten her as well?
“You’re not supposed to remember.” The other girls’ voices whispered in her mind. “They’ll punish you if you do. You’d better keep quiet.”
An image appeared to her then. A dream or a memory, she wasn’t sure. An angel’s face floated above her bed. Long blond hair. Green eyes. She reached for Stella with slender fingers.
“Stella…”
“I’m here, Mommy.”
Seconds later, her mother’s screams broke the night. “I want my baby back! Bring her to me! Please, don’t take her away!”
But each time they shoved her mother away, dragged Stella deeper into the darkness. The unknown. She was alone. With no one to save her.
And when she asked, they claimed her mother had died.
But in her dreams, her mother was alive.
Were her dreams only wishful thinking?
Rolling to her side, Stella burrowed beneath the heavy quilts, hiding from the demons that came to snatch her at night.
They did things to her that she didn’t want to think about. Things that weren’t right. Things the other girls never talked about.
But she saw the horror in their eyes.
Saw them change. Become quiet. Obedient. Robot-like. Afraid to argue. Afraid to think. Afraid to cry.
So she hid and sobbed into the pillow, aching. Wondering why they locked them in this terrible room. Wondering if they would ever release them and let them go home.
If they had a home to go to.
She’d heard the girls’ chatter when they thought no one was listening. Knew the rumors. That the parents were gone forever. That they hadn’t wanted the girls anyway.
That soon she would forget, too. Then the hurt would stop. It was better that way, they said. Better to be numb. Not to care. Not to feel.
She saw that emptiness in the others. The light fading each day as if it had been snuffed out during the endlessly cold nights.
Suddenly a loud sound burst through the room. Metal and wood pelted her covers. Bianca and Nadine screamed. She peeked above the covers, and her eyes went wide.