Heir to Secret Memories

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But they told me to find you.”

At her words, Jay tensed. Almost unconsciously he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, alert, prepared for anything.

“Were you followed?” he snapped.

Her brow furrowed briefly. She looked down at her fist, clenched in her jacket pocket, then over her shoulder at the door. “Yes.”

He heard a noise behind her. “Look out!”

Wood splintered and the door flew open, hurling her into his arms. The breath hissed out of her and she squealed in pain. He tossed her back toward the bed, hoping to get her out of harm’s way, as the two men attacked him.

He struggled, fighting dirty, aiming for the groin, the kidneys, the nose, any vulnerable spot. He’d learned how to fight the hard way out on the oil rigs.

One man was beefier, thicker than the other. Jay concentrated on his face.

He punched, felt something crunch, then drove an elbow behind him into the smaller man’s solar plexus.

A fist connected with his jaw. He stumbled. The small man pinned his arms behind him and Beefy reared back a fist, prepared to punch him in the stomach.

Jay used the momentum of the small man’s grip to lift his feet. He drove them into Beefy’s stomach, pushing himself backward at the same time.

Beefy fell. The smaller man huffed as Jay’s weight pinned him against the wall. Jay turned, jerking his arms clear, then smashed the guy’s nose with his forearm.

When he looked back at Beefy, the big man was trying to regain his feet. Jay kicked him solidly in the groin.

Both men were down for the moment. The smaller man’s nose was pouring blood. Beefy was doubled over with pain. But they’d recover fast.

Jay wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, barely noting his own blood as he rushed around the bed.

He bent over the woman. She was unconscious, or nearly so. When he slid one hand under her back and the other under her knees, she whimpered.

“Sorry,” he whispered, afraid she was injured but knowing he didn’t have time to find out. He hefted her, absently noting how small she was, and took her out through the French doors. He kneed the doors closed and glanced inside. The two men were beginning to stir.

Hurrying to the old sedan he kept in tiptop shape for just this purpose, he opened the passenger door and carefully set her inside. He quickly and awkwardly fastened her seat belt, then ran around the car, got in, grabbed the keys from under the mat, cranked it and took off.

Chapter Three

Not until Jay reached the edge of the city did he relax his hunched shoulders and breathe a bit easier. They’d made it, for now. The whole process, from the moment the brutes had broken in the door, slamming the woman forward into his arms, until he’d cranked the car, had probably taken no longer than five minutes, eight at the most. Unless there had been a third guy watching the alley, Jay was sure he’d lost them.

As he took a right off the main road, he glanced over at his unconscious passenger. She was limp and still, her face shadowed, her braid draped across her shoulder and over her breast.

For a split second, his eyes lingered there, where the rope of wheat-colored hair rose and fell with the slight movement of her breathing.

Pulling his eyes back to the road, he drove the familiar route to his safe house. He’d always felt vaguely foolish about the elaborate escape plan he’d devised, but waking up with a bullet wound and no memory tended to make a guy paranoid.

Obviously, some deeply buried part of his brain had remembered enough of what had happened to him to keep his survival skills intact.

He took a long breath and thought about the last few moments. What he’d always feared had happened, with a twist, and now he was running away from thugs with an unconscious woman beside him.

Not just any woman either. The woman whose face haunted him, whose image he’d tried time and again to capture.

He searched her face. There was no doubt in his mind. She was the girl in his drawings. The girl in his head.

She’d said they’d known each other years ago. Had they been lovers? Was that why her face was the clearest memory he’d managed to glean from his battered brain?

She’d called him Johnny. Implied he’d come from serious money, and that he’d been kidnapped and presumed dead. Obviously whoever had wanted him dead back then still did, and they’d kidnapped an innocent child to find him.

Kidnapped.

Clenching his jaw against the panic that washed over him, he forced himself to think about it, testing the idea in his brain. It made sense. Was that why he was so damned afraid of the dark? Why the headaches that assaulted him yielded up such a suffocating claustrophobia?

He wiped sweat off his face, tongued his split lip, and waited for his pulse to slow as the panic finally eased.

Maybe he should have taken the woman to the police. Maybe he should have left her there with the thugs. It wasn’t impossible that she’d deliberately led them to him.

Shaking his head he pushed damp hair off his forehead; neither of those choices were an option. He’d recognized her the instant he opened the door, as soon as he’d looked into her eyes. He’d always known those eyes were green and gold. He’d known her chin stuck up pugnaciously when she was mad.

Somehow, somewhere, in his malfunctioning brain, he knew she had once been the most important person in the world to him.

She still was, because if she’d known him seven years ago, then she was the one person who could help him regain his lost memories, the one person in the world he might be able to trust.

A cell phone rang. He jumped, startled, the car swerving under his unsteady hands.

“What the hell?” It must be hers.

She whimpered and stirred.

Jay tried to ignore the phone, but he couldn’t. If he was going to make any sense out of what was happening, he had to have every bit of information available, including who was calling this mysterious woman from his past.

He reached out and felt around for the phone, doing his best to ignore her rounded woman’s body. His mouth quirked and he shifted uncomfortably as he searched blindly, keeping his eyes on the road. It had been a little too long since he’d touched a woman.

The ringing continued. She moaned, saying something, but didn’t wake.

He pulled over to the side of the road and took the car out of gear. He searched her pockets. Finally, on the fourth ring, his hand closed around the hard plastic case in her jacket pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it. The caller ID was blocked.

After hesitating for a brief second, he pressed the answer button and listened.

Just then Paige stirred and lifted her head. She blinked and moved, then froze, gasping with pain. Her wide, terrified eyes glittered, pleading with him in the darkness.

“Give me the phone,” she whispered, her words strained and breathless.

“Who is this?” the voice on the other end of the phone demanded.

He didn’t speak. There was something in the background, some sound that seemed familiar. He listened intently, his head beginning to throb, as the voice spoke.

“Paige? Don’t play games with me.”

Paige reached into her pocket with her right hand, moaning involuntarily as she moved. She pulled out a minitape recorder and turned it on, then tried to take the cell phone with her left hand, but she couldn’t manage it.