by Rita Herron
I want you completely.
But she wasn’t ready for that.
“The bathroom’s yours,” he said in a gruff voice.
A raw primal need flared in his eyes while he waited for her response. But Stella couldn’t relinquish control.
She stood, wrapped the sheet around her and walked into the bathroom. Twenty minutes later she emerged, her body still aching with want. He had apparently laid a pair of loose warm up pants and a T-shirt on the bed for her, so she slipped them on and went to the kitchen.
Already dressed, Luke handed her a cup of coffee.
“Thanks.” She indicated the T-shirt and warm-up pants. “Where did you get the clothes?”
“The locals have used this place as a safe house before. They keep it stocked with a few basic things.”
She nodded and sipped the coffee, her gaze drawn to his mouth as he drank his own.
“Stop looking at me like that, Stella.”
A small smile quirked her mouth. With his hair still damp, he looked delicious. “Like what?”
His eyes darkened. “You know.”
She smiled, and sank into the kitchen chair. “I can’t help it. I’ve never had a man treat me like you did earlier.”
This time he smiled, his own look of hunger deepening. Obviously determined to maintain control, he closed his eyes, swallowed another sip of coffee, then looked at her again, his expression serious. “Your memories are returning, aren’t they?”
“I think so, but they’re all jumbled.” She set the mug down, traced a finger around the edge. “It’s hard for me to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Some of my visions…they might just be nightmares.”
“Ones that really happened?”
She stared into her coffee. “Maybe.”
“Why don’t you tell me about them. Maybe we can make sense of them together.”
She contemplated her choices. “If I tell you, you’ll never look at me the same way again. Never…”
“Never want you?”
She nodded, her throat clogging with emotions.
“Do you really care what I think, Stella?” Luke asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I always have.”
“Then trust me not to let your past affect me.” He tilted her chin up. “No matter what happens between us, you’re not going back to Sutton.”
No, she couldn’t do that. “But you want to put me in jail. And I’ll die if you do that, Luke. I…can’t ever go back. Be locked up. Caged like an animal.”
“You’ve been in prison before?”
She shook her head. “Not that kind of jail.”
He gritted his teeth. “I…maybe we can work something out, Stella. If you help me, that is.”
She sighed. “You mean like the witness protection program?”
He shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
She contemplated the thought. Under the program, she could assume a new identity. Start over.
Erase her past. Have a new life. Literally become another person.
But that would also mean severing all ties with Luke. Then she’d be all alone.
“I just want the truth,” Luke said.
“But what if the answers I give you aren’t what you want to hear?” Stella whispered.
“I’m a big boy.” He circled the table, knelt and cradled her hands in his. “I’ve been an agent a long time, Stella. I’ve seen things that I don’t like to talk about, things that…give me nightmares. I promise I’ll try to understand.”
Riveted by his words, she stared into his eyes, wanting to believe him, but so afraid.
“What does Sutton want with you? Is he in love with you?”
“No. It’s not about sex.”
He hesitated. “Then what?”
“Ownership.”
His jaw tightened.
“Controlling me,” she admitted. “Kat. Jaycee.”
“Who are Jaycee and Kat?”
“Two of the others.” She licked her dry lips. “I…you know already don’t you?”
“That you were involved in espionage? Yes.”
She sank lower into despair. “Then why the questions, Luke? Why not just arrest me for being a traitor? Lock me up and throw away the key?”
“Because there’s more to the story. First, I don’t think that you’re the leader, and that’s who we really want.” He rubbed his hands over hers, warming them. “I’m not sure you were fully aware of all your actions, either. You were definitely coerced.”
“Don’t make excuses for me, Luke. I won’t.” But her nightmare returned. Do as he says. Submit. Follow his commands or be punished.
She didn’t realize she’d voiced the thoughts out loud until Luke’s sharp intake of air broke the silence. She looked into his eyes. Saw the disgust.
And turned away.
But he spun her back around, forcing her to look at him. “What else, Stella? What did Sutton do to you? What do you remember?”
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “I only see bits and pieces. Some of them don’t make sense.”
He nodded. “What about last week? What happened at his house?”
She chewed on bottom lip. “He took me to a suite upstairs in the house and locked me inside.”
“You weren’t free to move around the house?”
“No. A nurse monitored me daily. She also gave me injections.” She rolled her arm over, showed him the marks.
“What kind of drugs?”
“I don’t know. She insisted the doctor ordered the medication to help me rest. But it made me sleep all the time. I had nightmares and heard voices, even saw things.”
“A hallucination?”
“I think so, although they could have been memories.” She tightened her fingers inside his. “I finally asked them to stop. Told them the drugs made me groggy. That I wanted to wake up and know what was going on.”
“Did they do as you asked?”
“Not at first. Then you showed up.”
“Thank God,” he murmured. A heartbeat of silence stretched between them. “Tell me about the bits and pieces of the memories. Everything, even the hallucinations.”
She closed her eyes, images flooding her, and finally allowed the words to flow.
LUKE BRACED HIMSELF for Stella’s story. He’d promised her he’d listen, that he wouldn’t judge. He just hoped he could keep that promise.
But the thought of someone, especially Sutton, forcing her to obey him, sent a sour feeling to Luke’s stomach.
“Sometimes I dream I’m a little girl,” she said in a strained voice. “I’m on a cot in a room with other children. I’m crying for my mother and wondering where she is. I think they took her away, but they say she’s dead.”
“Who are they?”
She shook her head. “I…don’t know. Sutton. The other men.” She hesitated. “The other girls whisper that I have to forget my mother. And when I look at them, their expressions are so empty.” She hesitated, her chin wobbling. “Then sometimes the men come and take us away. One at a time.”
“How are they dressed? In military uniforms? As doctors?”
She froze. “They’re wearing lab coats. White, like doctors.”
Luke nodded. “What happens next, Stella?”
A glazed look filled her eyes. “I can’t remember the details. But it’s painful. They attach probes to me. Sometimes I feel sharp jolts of pain like shock waves. Sometimes I’m drugged and disoriented. And then there are dark voices.”
Bile rose to Luke’s throat at the thought of the frightened children. What exactly had Sutton been up to? “What else, Stella?”
“As I grow older, I’m locked in a tiny room for days. I can’t even see my own hands it’s so dark. Sometimes forced to do without water. Or food. Or light. Sometimes they show me pictures of people dying. I hear sounds of guns firing, over and over.” Her hand trembled as she tucked her hair behind her ear. “Then I see the children. I’m one of them, and we’re sho
oting. Being ordered to kill people. Late one night there was an explosion and fire. I see the flames eating up the floor. The blaze is all around me—” Her voice broke. “Then this man came in and reached for me. I hated him, but I went anyway.”
“Was it Sutton?”
“I think so.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “I was so scared….”
“You’re safe now, Stella.” Sweat beaded his forehead as he stroked her hands in his.
She nodded. “But I knew he was the devil, and I went with him anyway.”
Luke wasn’t sure whether to believe her story so readily, but the anguish in her eyes seemed so real. “You were a child. You weren’t to blame, Stella. You did what you had to do to survive.”
She gazed into his eyes. Her terror appeared to run so deep that he pulled her into his arms and held her.
Or was he being a sucker again? He’d have to look further into her story. Still, if her memories were real, she’d endured something unconscionable, and he couldn’t resist comforting her. “It takes strength to endure what you described and survive.”
“I’m not strong. I was weak. I gave in—”
“You’re only human, sweetheart. They took advantage of your age. They found your breaking point. Everyone has one.”
“Sometimes at night, I hear this voice commanding me to do bad things,” she said against his shoulder.
He stiffened slightly. Now she sounded schizophrenic.
“I have to follow his command. I have to…kill somebody. But…I don’t want to do it anymore. I never wanted to.”
He contemplated her admission. “I’ve heard of brainwashing techniques in other countries,” Luke said. “But not in the States. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist years ago, or that it isn’t being done today behind closed doors.” He stroked her hair, felt her tears dampen his shirt, wished he could alleviate the pain and horror of her past. “The man in the hotel—who was he?”
She blinked, then bit down on her lip. “Sutton said he was my handler. That he was going to expose us.”
“Expose who? You, Sutton, Kat and Jaycee?”
She nodded and pulled away slightly, palming the tears from her cheeks. “Sutton has a secret room in the basement that’s accessible through his study. There’s an elaborate computer set up down there complete with surveillance equipment.”
“And your mission was to meet me so you could get information on me?”
She nodded slowly.
“You were supposed to seduce me?”
She closed her eyes. “He wants information—it doesn’t matter how the agent obtains it.”
“So, the marriage was a sham.”
She looked up at him, winced, then shook her head. “I think it started that way, but I…later, I was trying to escape from Sutton.”
He stewed that over for a minute. Wanted to believe her. His FBI instincts warned him not to trust anything she said though.
But the male side of him, the part of him that had held her, that was looking into her troubled eyes and that’d just heard her story, swung the other way on the pendulum.
He forced himself not to respond either way. Couldn’t yet. Not until he knew more, and had more time to watch Stella. “What information did Sutton want you to extract from me?”
She hesitated, seemed to accept his silence with resignation.
That alone nearly broke his resolve. He sensed Stella had been forced to accept a world of distrust early on. That she’d never known any different. Men using her. Abusing her.
Being abandoned.
Her soft labored sigh drew his attention. “He knew you were investigating the projects on Nighthawk Island.”
“Did he mention any specific project?”
“No.”
Quinn’s undercover position came to mind. “I’ll have to talk to…my contacts,” Luke said, catching himself. Sutton was smart. As much as he wanted to believe Stella and trust her, if Sutton got her again and tortured her, any information he confided in her might end up with Sutton. Luke couldn’t afford to blow Quinn’s cover and endanger him.
Now came another hard question. The one he already knew the answer to, but had to ask anyway. “What were you doing at my cabin last night?”
She flinched, slowly dropping her head forward so a curtain of hair shielded her eyes. “Sutton told me that a reporter sent you a disk containing incriminating evidence against me. I was suppose to retrieve it.”
Luke silently cursed. In the haste of the shooting last night and in his hurry to rush Stella to safety after that dive into the ocean, he’d forgotten about the disk. And how did Sutton know the reporter had contacted him? Two possibilities. One, Sutton had a tap on his phone. Two, the reporter was working both sides. “Did you find the disk?”
She shook her head.
“And you were supposed to take it back to Sutton?”
She nodded. “And then…” She raised her head, looked straight at him, a torn look in her eyes. “I was supposed to kill you.”
STELLA WINCED at her own admission. But there, she’d said it. Luke had either figured out the truth himself, or he was trying to ring a confession from her, and she’d just walked into the trap.
At this point, she wasn’t sure it mattered.
Unless he broke his promise and sent her to jail.
“But you couldn’t shoot me, could you, Stella?”
His husky voice sent her nerves into a tailspin. She had pulled the gun, pointed it at him, but her hand trembled. She’d started to lower the weapon when he’d lunged toward her, and the bullets had started flying. “No.”
He squeezed her hand again. “I have to talk to that reporter. See what’s on that disk.”
She nodded.
“But I need to make a couple of phone calls first. Verify that Sutton isn’t monitoring my calls. Check on my contact at Nighthawk Island.” He stood, poured himself another cup of coffee and strode into the den for privacy. She warmed her own cup, uncertain where they went from here.
But she wouldn’t return to Sutton’s. Not ever again.
The memory of that little girl crying for her mother flashed back, and Stella struggled to recall more details. How had she come to be at that dormitory with the other girls? She’d asked that question over and over, but the answer had always been the same. Sutton had insisted her parents had died.
But Sutton was ruthless. He could have lied to her. Had he killed her mother instead?
“QUINN, BE CAREFUL.” Luke stared out the window as he gripped the phone handset. “Someone may be on you tail.”
“Don’t worry, I can handle it,” Quinn replied. “Remember I was in special ops.”
“Have you noticed any research that raises a red flag?” Luke asked.
“A couple, but I don’t have anything concrete. One of the major projects involves stem cells. And they’re researching biological and chemical warfare, although information is dispensed on a need-to-know basis. Security is tight. There’s another study focusing on cloning and one on face transplants.”
“Face transplants?”
“Yes, from cadavers. Burn patients, accident victims, people born with terrible birth defects—they would benefit.”
Luke grimaced. Some would take it farther. Choose a face as a new disguise. He could see the possibilities for the witness protection program.
But would others want to use it to replace plastic surgery?
“See what you can find on an experiment that took place fifteen to twenty years ago involving children,” Luke said. “The subjects might have been orphans or kidnap victims. Brainwashing techniques such as sensory deprivation were probably used. I think the subjects might have been trained as covert agents.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Hell, I wish I was.”
Quinn hesitated. “Does this involve your wife?”
Luke spared Stella a glance, the pain in her eyes ripping at him. “Yes, she was one of the children.”
Quinn cursed. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
Luke thanked him, hung up, phoned Detective Black, and relayed what he’d learned from Stella.
Black grunted. “Man, Sutton is one cold son of a bitch.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“How’s Stella?”
“I think she’s suffering from Post Traumatic Syndrome,” Luke said. “She’s having nightmares, some memories are returning, but they’re all jumbled and confused.”
“She admitted to killing the man?” Black asked.
Luke considered a lie, but he’d sworn to be straight with Black, and he never broke his word. Besides, under the circumstances, he was certain he could arrange a deal for Stella, providing she testified against Sutton.
“Devlin?”
“She doesn’t exactly remember firing the gun, but she admitted she was supposed to kill him. He was her handler and had planned to expose her.”
“What about the drugs in her system? She could have blacked out.”
“My thoughts exactly. Perhaps Sutton framed her because she tried to escape. When she stayed with him the past few days, he ordered a nurse to drug her.” Luke paused. “I’ll check my house for that disk that Andrews was supposed to send over.” Although the shooters might have already taken it. “Did you get CSI to process my place?”
“Yeah. They’re testing the bullets they found now.”
“Good. Let me know if they find any prints.”
Black agreed, and promised to meet Luke at the morgue. Luke made another phone call to the bureau to verify that Sutton couldn’t monitor his calls, then hung up and turned to Stella. “Are you ready to take a ride?”
Fear flashed in her eyes. She obviously wondered if he intended to keep his word about not taking her back to prison. She still didn’t trust him.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To my cabin to find that disk. And if it’s not there, we’ll visit that reporter, Andrews. I want to find out exactly what he knows.” He hesitated. “But we have to stop by the morgue first. The coroner’s ready to release the information on Raul Jarad’s autopsy.”