Secret Keeper

by Paula Graves

  She was gone again.

  Chapter Eight

  The room was dark and smelled of sweat and fear.

  Her sweat. Her fear.

  When the door opened with a rattle of metal on metal, Annie jerked out of her stupor of despair, going rigid with dreadful anticipation.

  Visits over the past few days had been sporadically spaced, chosen, she was certain, to maximize her anxiety. Give her time to shake and shiver in fear and despair, waiting for the next time he came.

  Not the same man every time. Though they kept her almost entirely in the dark when they entered the room, she could still differentiate them through their voices, both the timbre and the accent. One of them was from Louisiana, with a broad bayou drawl that did nothing to soften the cruelty of his taunts. Another was from somewhere up north. He’d disappeared early on, after the first week. There was a third man, the one who wielded the needles. She hated him and his flat, neutral accent.

  There was a fourth man as well. He was black, with a light urban southern accent, though that wasn’t the only thing that distinguished him from the others. His tone was almost gentle. Relatively kind. He wasn’t a taunter. He just brought her food and backed out of the room in an economy of movement and speech. She hadn’t seen him in a while, either.

  She’d begun to miss him dreadfully.

  The light came on, a flashlight, shining straight into her eyes. Her pupils contracted painfully and her eyelids tried to slam shut. The light moved closer, sliced more painfully into her eyes.

  “Hungry?” This voice belonged to the man from Louisiana. Fear crept up her spine like an army of spiders, tightening muscles and turning her insides to liquid.

  “I want to see my father.” She didn’t know why she said it yet again. She knew her tiny act of defiance would earn her greater punishment, but she feared that if she didn’t keep asking that one question every time someone walked into her cell, she’d lose herself completely to her terror. Then it wouldn’t matter if she ever escaped at all.

  “You know that’s not going to happen, beautiful.” His voice was close, his breath hot on her cheek. She could see him now, even though he kept the light in her eyes. He was shadowy and indistinct, but at least she could see his eyes, glittering in the reflected beam of the flashlight.

  “You can’t keep me here forever.”

  “No. I don’t think that’s in the plan, sweetheart.” He touched her neck, sliding one finger downward, across her ever more prominent collarbone. They hadn’t starved her at all, but she could find no appetite for anything more than the bare minimum she had to eat to subsist.

  Her skin crawled where he touched her, quivering beneath his fingers. Maybe he could even feel her shudders, because he just laughed. “The rules are, look, don’t touch.”

  “What do you call torturing me?” she spat back at him, her skin still tingling from the last go they’d had at her with the needle. She wasn’t sure what they were injecting into her, but it burned like crazy. They didn’t allow her a lot of light even when they weren’t around, so she hadn’t gotten a very good look at the marks the needles had left in her skin.

  “There’s different kinds of touching, baby girl.” His growl held a definite sexual tone. His breath was hotter, closer. She could smell a faint remnant of coffee and a cool, sharp rush of wintergreen mint.

  “I want to see my father.” She repeated the words like a prayer, as if they could somehow keep her from going completely over the edge into insanity.

  His voice lowered to a purr. “Maybe I could do something about that, if you did something for me.”

  She heard the scrape of a zipper, and her whole body contracted with revulsion.

  Suddenly the door opened, spilling light into the scene. A tall, dark silhouette stood in the doorway, broad-shouldered and powerful. “Out,” he said.

  The darkness around her fractured into soft, waning daylight.

  It took a second to reorient herself. She wasn’t strapped to a wall in a dark, dank room. Instead, she sat on a bed, held upright by a pair of strong, warm arms. She twisted free of those arms, needing space and distance. Needing to feel her own autonomy.

  She ended up backing into another bed and sat with a thud. Wade Cooper sat facing her on the opposite bed, his dark eyes wary.

  “Annie?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. And she was. Even the crawling revulsion and bone-rattling fear from the dream had seeped quickly away, swallowed by reality.

  More important, she remembered the flashback this time.

  All of it. The sensory elements—dark room, hard wall, tight restraints. The smell of coffee and mint on her captor’s breath. The glitter of his eyes in the low light. Even the sound of his voice.

  “The man from the candy shop,” she said aloud. “He was definitely one of my captors.”

  “We figured that.”

  “And I don’t think they raped me,” she added, relief fluttering in her belly. “He said they had a ‘look, don’t touch’ policy with me.” She grimaced. “But he wasn’t happy about that rule.”

  “You remember the flashback this time?” He looked surprised.

  She nodded. “I do. It’s not a confabulation. It’s a memory. It’s too clear, too detailed to be anything else.”

  “Do you remember where you were?”

  “Just that it was a small room. No windows—they kept me in the dark as much as possible. I think maybe to protect them more than to punish me.” She wasn’t sure why she thought that to be the case, but it just felt right. “They kept me chained to the wall. I didn’t have much room to move at all.”

  “Did they starve you?”

  She shook her head. “Three meals a day.” She was sure of that, too, though she didn’t have a distinct memory of eating any of those meals.

  “Do you remember everything?”

  “No,” she admitted. “It’s kind of strange—I remember everything about that moment, that memory. Anything I knew about my experience as a captive to that point, I remember. But I don’t remember how I got there or how I got away.”

  “You remembered stowing away on a truck before, right?”

  She nodded. “I think it was some sort of trailer truck. Enclosed.”

  “Do you remember what was inside the truck?”

  She tried to picture it, to get past that vague sensation of being enclosed and traveling, but she couldn’t push past the invisible wall between herself and the memory. “No.”

  “That’s okay. You remembered a lot more this time. And you retained it. That’s new, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She looked across the narrow space between them, taking in his hopeful look. He really wanted her to remember, she realized. But for her own sake? Or for his family’s investigation?

  And where did that kiss figure in?

  His eyes narrowed as he noticed her sudden scrutiny. “Are you remembering something else?”

  “You kissed me.”

  He actually blushed a little, his dark eyes softening. “Yeah. Though, technically, I think it was sort of a joint effort.”

  She managed a smile. “Fair enough.”

  His answering smile faded quickly. “Is that what triggered the flashback?”

  “I guess it was,” she conceded.

  “That bad?” He said it lightly, but she heard a sliver of vulnerability behind the words.

  “No.” She wasn’t sure how to explain what she thought might be behind the correlation, but he’d been good to her so far. He deserved the effort. “I think maybe it had more to do with the way I was feeling.”

  “Repulsed?”

  “No.” She made a face at him. “Vulnerable.”

  “Oh.”

  “I felt out of control, and I guess that’s what really triggered it.” She looked down at her hands, noticing for the first time how short and ragged her nails were. She’d always taken care with her manicure, growing her nails long and keeping them neat and polished as befit a professional w
oman, mostly because as an awkward teenager, she’d had a bad habit of chewing them to nubs.

  She rolled her hands into fists, hiding her nails from herself. “It was a nice kiss.”

  “Not sure how you’d know,” he murmured. “You flashed back pretty fast there.”

  “I still remember the start,” she said. “It was nice....”

  “But?”

  She met his questioning gaze. “But I don’t think it should happen again. Not right now.” Maybe not ever.

  “Okay.”

  She slanted a look at him, unexpectedly hurt by his glib agreement. “Not even a token protest, just for my self-esteem?”

  He grinned at her, and she felt a flutter of regret that she’d just closed the door on another kiss. He was awfully cute, especially when he grinned. And distracting herself from her boatload of worries with another round of snogging with the cowboy Marine was more tempting than she expected.

  “Tell you what,” he said, still smiling. “When we get your folks back and you’re ready to look at life from a more normal viewpoint, if you’re inclined to make out with a gimpy old Marine, you know where to find me.”

  She smiled back at him, trying to imagine what it would be like to have her life back to normal. Was that even going to be possible, after what she and her parents had been through?

  Her smile faded as she remembered something else. Not from her most recent flashback but from the one before. She remembered the sound of her father’s voice, his tone low and urgent. She felt a black rush of terror as the words rang in her head, suddenly certain they’d been spoken in a rush as the world spun out of control around them.

  If you get out of here, find Marsh.

  “Annie?”

  “I’m not flashing back,” she said, looking up at him.

  “You seemed a little distant.”

  Find Marsh. That’s why she’d gone to the lake house.

  Her father had told her if she got away from their captors, she had to go find General Marsh. And he’d also told her to protect the code.

  But what code?

  Wade’s cell phone rang, the loud trill sending a jolt of electricity through Annie’s nervous system. She snapped her gaze up to meet his and found him staring back at her, his brow furrowed. He answered the phone. “Yeah?”

  He listened for a moment. “Hold on, let me put this on speaker.” He pushed a button. “Go ahead.”

  Luke Cooper’s deep voice came over the staticky line. “As I was saying, we have an ID on the guy in the candy shop. Rick dropped by the stable to take a look at the video and he says it’s a guy named Toby Lavelle.”

  The name meant nothing to Annie, but Wade’s expression darkened. “Isn’t that the gunrunner Scanlon came across in Bolen Bluff back in April?”

  “One and the same. Former MacLear agent, apparently did black ops stuff with the Special Services Unit before the company fell. Rick says he’s a nasty son of a bitch—you’ll want to stay well clear.”

  Wade met Annie’s gaze. “Yeah, I think we figured that out already.”

  “How are y’all holding up?”

  “Okay for now,” Wade said carefully, but he shot a questioning look at Annie.

  She nodded quickly, though the rush of information swamping her at the moment—from Luke Cooper’s call to her own influx of disjointed memories— had her feeling anything but okay.

  “Don’t want to stay on the line too long,” Wade said.

  “Stay in touch,” Luke said.

  “Will do.” Wade hung up the phone and slipped it back into his pocket, his gaze still tangling with Annie’s. “Why don’t you go ahead and take your shower? I’ll get the burgers out and we can eat.”

  A shower sounded like a wonderful idea, though she was beginning to wonder how much longer her shaking legs could bear her weight. She showered as quickly as she could and dried off quickly, even as her legs threatened to give way beneath her.

  She made it into a clean pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt before her legs gave out, and she sank down to the floor in front of the sink.

  Hot tears leaked from her eyes. She batted at them with her knuckles, but they kept coming, burning her eyes. A soft sob escaped her throat and she clamped her mouth shut to keep any more from getting free. But her body shook with each aborted sob, each swallowed wail of despair.

  How had her life turned so utterly, irrevocably upside down? Her mind—the one attribute she’d always prized most highly—had betrayed her, keeping dark and dangerous secrets from her in a cruel game of hide-and-seek. Her body, which she’d worked hard to keep strong and fit, had wasted into this fragile shell that couldn’t even hold her upright long enough to take a quick shower.

  Nothing made sense. Nothing seemed familiar in this upended world in which she had awakened not twenty-four hours ago.

  Give yourself time. The voice she heard in her mind was her mother’s, gentle and understanding as always. Guileless and sweet. Cathy Harlowe was the kindest person Annie knew, and she’d tried all her life to balance the fiery drive she’d inherited from her ambitious father with the goodness of her mother.

  Another sob tore through her, bursting past the tight clench of her jaw. Where was her mother now? What had those bastards done to her? Of all the people in the world, Annie could think of no one who less deserved to be tormented and abused.

  A soft rap on the bathroom door sent her scuttling backward, instinctively seeking the protection of the sink. It took a second for her hypervigilant brain to process the fact that it was almost certainly Wade Cooper on the other side of the door. And if she didn’t answer him quickly, he’d come inside and witness her meltdown.

  She tried to speak, but her aching throat closed. And then it was too late. Wade opened the door and stuck his head inside.

  His dark gaze met hers, and she looked away, humiliated.

  After a moment, he entered the bathroom, and she heard the door close behind him. It seemed an odd thing to do, shutting them in when there was no one else in the motel room, but she found the extra seclusion strangely comforting.

  Wade sat down next to her on the floor, careful not to touch her. “Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head, still not looking at him. “Just having a moment.”

  “Ah.” He was quiet for a few seconds, then spoke in a lowered voice. “I fell flat on my butt the first time I tried to take a bath alone after my injury. I was stark naked in the bathroom and completely unable to get back up. And the only person in the house at the time was my cousin Hannah, who’d dropped by to check on me.”

  She winced at the picture he painted.

  “You think it was bad for me, think about poor Hannah. But she’s a Cooper, so she just hauled my sorry naked butt up and lectured me about trying to go too fast. Healing takes time.”

  “And sometimes it never happens,” she replied, her voice tight with tears. “Sometimes, things can’t be fixed.”

  He rubbed his bad knee. “That’s true. But they can usually be endured, if you just give yourself a break.”

  “If I could just remember what happened—”

  “It’s been only a day since I found you. Not even that long. You can’t expect it all to come flooding back at once. I’m not even sure your brain could handle that kind of onslaught.”

  She looked at him then. “What I know could save my family if I could just remember it.”

  “You’ve already remembered some things, haven’t you?”

  She looked away again. She’d remembered more than she’d told him.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said when she didn’t respond. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to stick around here with that S.S.U. guy hanging around. He may be looking for you, figuring you’d show back up to the place where you last saw your folks.”

  Part of her agreed with him utterly, the quivering, cowering part of her sitting here hiding under a motel room sink. But that wasn’t who she was. That part of her wasn’t supposed t
o call the shots in Annie Harlowe’s life.

  She had a backbone, too. And she still remembered how to use it.

  Annie scooted out from under the sink and pushed to her feet, surprised and pleased to find that her legs weren’t shaking any longer. “I’m not done here,” she said, looking down at him.

  He gazed up at her. “Okay.” He put his hands down beside him and tried to push to his feet, but he seemed to be having difficulty. Finally, he flushed dark red and dropped his head to his chest. “Damn it. I knew better than to get down here on the floor.”

  Annie reached her hand down to him. He looked at her hand, then at her. Suddenly, he grinned and she felt the same strong tug of attraction that had landed her in a lip-lock with him just a short time earlier. But she didn’t draw back her hand when he reached for it, closing her fingers around his to give him leverage to maneuver himself up.

  He stumbled a little when he got to his feet, his weight driving her backward against the bathroom door. She felt a flood of heat run straight to her core as his hard body flattened against hers for a long, breathless moment.

  His face was so close it made her dizzy to try to look into his dark, deep eyes. Eyes fluttering shut, she grabbed the fabric of his T-shirt in the fist of one hand, swallowing a groan of need.

  Don’t kiss me again, she thought. I don’t know if I can take it if you kiss me again.

  Wade flattened his palms against the door on either side of her head and pushed himself backward, robbing her of his heat. She swallowed another groan, this time of disappointment.

  “Sorry,” he murmured.

  She opened her eyes and found him looking back at her, his gaze brimming with questions.

  She pulled herself together, lifting her chin and straightening her back. “No harm done.” She opened the bathroom door and slipped outside, leaving him to follow.

  On the table near the window, he’d laid out their dinner—two hamburgers, still wrapped in foil in a probably futile attempt to keep them warm. Their drinks were sweating condensation onto the laminate tabletop.

  She sat, leaving Wade to take the opposite chair. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”