Obsession (39 page)

“Nick,” she called, her voice as weak as she felt. “
Nick.”

But he must have been nearby, because he heard and walked into the bedroom. He had stripped down to a white T-shirt, which he wore with his black pants now, she saw as he looked at her inquiringly. Her eyes met his, clinging to them, even as his inquiring look turned to a frown and he lengthened his stride to reach her.

“What the hell?”

“Nick.” If she hadn’t been leaning against the doorjamb, she would have collapsed as the pain came back and the room started to spin around her. “Who’s Jenna?”

24

"Damn it to hell.” He caught her as her knees gave way, grabbing her by the upper arms, then, as she crumpled against him, gathered her up. “Okay, I’ve got you. Don’t faint on me.”

She dreaded saying it again, knowing that the pain would come with it, but she had to know. In fact, she felt that somewhere deep inside she did know, that the knowledge was right there beneath the surface of her consciousness waiting to emerge.

“Who’s Jenna?” Her voice was the merest breath of sound. Her heart hammered. Her pulse raced. The expected pain attacked her, sharp and stabbing, and she moaned faintly as it shot through her head. Sliding an arm around his neck, she closed her eyes. He sank down into the armchair in the corner with her cradled in his lap.

“Everything’s going to be okay.” He was holding her close, his hand warm and gentle as it smoothed her hair back from her face. There was an undertone of harsh, driving fear in his voice, and she forced herself to open her eyes. Her head was pillowed on his wide shoulder, and he was looking down at her. His jaw was hard and set. His mouth was a tense line. His mild blue eyes weren’t mild at all. They were the color of steel and fierce with concern for her. “You don’t need to upset yourself about it. Just relax and let it go.”

“I’m Jenna,” she whispered, holding his gaze, feeling as if her heart were trying to pound its way out of her chest. “Aren’t I?
I’m Jenna.
”

She had known it all along.

As the knowledge burst through the barriers at last, defying every attempt of her subconscious to hold it back, the pain was so intense that she cried out. Her heart lurched. Her stomach dropped. But it was true, she knew it was true, she could feel it deep down inside herself—and he knew it, too. She could see it in his face. In that one split second, it was as if she could see the whole fabric of her life spilling out before her, the narrative of it undulating like waves of fine silk.

Then it was gone. All except for the certain knowledge that she was Jenna. Not Katharine. Never, ever had she been Katharine.

“Jesus Christ.” His tone made it equal parts prayer and expletive. The distressed sound she made must have terrified him, because his voice turned harsh and his arms tightened around her. She could feel the heat of them, the hard, muscular strength of them, enfolding her in a protective cocoon, cradling her close. He was breathing too fast. She could feel the rapid rise and fall of his chest against her breasts. “They said they’d fixed it this time. They said you wouldn’t be able to remember.”

“They were wrong. I remember.”

The pain was so bad that she was dizzy with it. It felt like it was tearing her head apart, ripping her brain in two. Her head spun. Her pulse drummed in her ears. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth in an effort to fight it, curling up close against him, drawing her knees up against his side, pushing her face into the warm curve between his neck and shoulder, clinging like a barnacle to a rock. She lay against him like that, tense, unmoving, battling the pain while he murmured a mixture of curses and reassurances into her hair and held her close. Slowly, slowly, the pain receded. Gradually her body relaxed, and finally she took a deep breath, inhaling his comforting, familiar smell.

She knew his smell, recognized it instinctively, had probably subconsciously picked up on it from the moment she woke up in the hospital. It was a mixture of his own masculine scent with a spicy overlay of Irish Spring.

“Who’s Katharine?” Her voice cracked a little on the name. Fortunately, no pain accompanied it. “
Is
there a Katharine?”

“There’s a Katharine.” His face was impossible to read. “She’s Ed Barnes’s girlfriend. And his personal assistant. She’s been working for us as an informant, and when we had to pull her out, you took her place.”

“
What?”
She couldn’t get her mind around it. It hurt to even try. She felt like a newly hatched chick with its beak agape, only she was desperate for knowledge rather than food. “How?”

“The thing is, you look like her. Dead like her when you come right down to it, although because of the difference in your coloring, it isn’t all that easy to see at first. Your height and general build are the same, although she was about fifteen pounds lighter. Once you got down to her weight, and you got your hair colored and styled like hers and we did a few other things, like fix the gap in your teeth and drill her mannerisms into you, it was hard telling the two of you apart. It’s the facial structure—and the eyes. She’s got the same beautiful green eyes.”

The compliment went totally unappreciated. At the moment, she didn’t care whether he thought her eyes were beautiful or not.

“The hypnosis—it made me think I was her.”

“We thought it would be safer for you. Barnes isn’t stupid, and he has spies and surveillance systems everywhere. You needed to stay in character twenty-four hours a day. There was no way you could give yourself away if you truly thought you
were
Katharine.”

“You used me.” The words came out of nowhere, sharp with accusation. The memory behind them shimmered just beneath the surface of her consciousness. On some deep level she knew what it was, what he had done, but she could not quite access the details.

“I made a deal with you.” His tone was flat, unemotional. “You agreed to it. Hell, you welcomed it.”

The memory popped into her mind with the sudden sharp clarity of a snippet of video unspooling on a dark screen. On a Sunday some six months before, just as it was starting to get dark, she was standing at the sink in the kitchen of her own small house, looking out at a backyard dusted with snow. She was dressed in jeans and an oversized gray sweatshirt that concealed most of her curves. The unruly mop of her auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail that still allowed long tendrils to escape and tickle her nose. Which was a problem, because she was wrist-deep in loam as she struggled to repot a Christmas amaryllis that had grown too large for its container. Gardening, it seemed, was one of her passions. She always had her hands in the dirt, and had the short, clipped nails to prove it.

Then someone knocked on the kitchen door—only friends and family ever used her kitchen door—and she rinsed her hands and went to answer the summons. When she opened the door, Nick was standing there—Special Agent Nick Houston, FBI—with his hair cut ruthlessly short and his face pale and tired, wearing a puffy green goose-down jacket and jeans with scuffed boots instead of his usual jacket and tie.

“Hey,” he said by way of a greeting, and he must have read her intention in her eyes because he moved fast enough to prevent her from slamming the door in his face, which she fully intended to do. Instead, he strong-armed his way into her kitchen, then turned to look at her with the merest suggestion of a mocking smile.

“Good thing I’m not sensitive,” he said. “Otherwise, you’d have me thinking you’re not glad to see me.”

At which point she screamed
“Get out,”
and when he didn’t, she screamed it again and then took off one of the rubber clogs she was wearing and threw it at him.

He dodged, and the shoe smacked into a cabinet behind him. Then he grinned at her and held up a hand and said, “Stop! Wait! I’m here to make you a deal.”

She hesitated, barefoot now, her other shoe in her hand, glaring at him. . . .

The pain attacked without warning and the memory vanished just like that, although she knew it was still there, still lurking in her mind just out of reach. Whimpering, she pressed a hand to her temple, doing her best to will the pain away. As she let her mind go blank, it finally did go away. She lay against Nick’s chest, panting in its aftermath, wanting to know more but dreading another onslaught of pain.

“Okay, forget the whole hide-until-this-is-over thing.” His voice was grim. “We need to get you to the doctor who did this, pronto.”

She could feel his chest muscles tightening, feel the bunching in his arms and legs as he gathered himself to stand up with her.

The doctor—he was a psychiatrist. A government psychiatrist. An ordinary-looking man with a little paunch and intelligent eyes. She remembered him, not clearly but well enough to be sure. He had been one of the men in the woods that night with a flashlight. She had been terrified when she had realized they had come for her. She hadn’t wanted to go with them, but she had to.

This time she felt the pain coming and tensed in dread. Then she deliberately let her mind go blank before it could grab hold.

Tightening her grip on Nick, she waited, shivering, until she was sure it had retreated.

“Look, you’re scaring me here,” he said. “I was supposed to take you to Dr. Freah and let him sort this out when the investigation was over anyway. I think maybe, under the circumstances, we should be heading his way a little early. Like now.”

“No,” she repeated, opening her eyes. “I’m not letting anybody do anything to my mind again. No way, nohow.”

“Jenna . . .” He sounded like someone who was trying to reason with a stubborn child. But hearing him say her name felt incredibly right. It was as if she had been looking at the world through a distorting prism all this time, and now it had suddenly dropped away so that she could once again begin seeing clearly.

“I won’t go,” she said, adding, “I’ll fight you every step of the way,” just to make her position perfectly clear, and moved her head back on his shoulder a little so that she could see his face. There was a pinched whiteness at the corners of his mouth and a hardness to his eyes and jaw that told her his emotions were on edge, too. She didn’t want to try summoning more memories, because she was afraid of the pain. But she wanted to know. She
needed
to know. “I remember throwing a shoe at you and then you telling me you wanted to make me a deal. What deal?”

She could feel him hesitating, feel his breathing deepening, feel the tension in his body. His face could have been carved from stone. His eyes slid over her face, and then he glanced away.

That was how she knew: Whatever the deal was, he didn’t feel good about it.

“Nick,” she said, and he looked back at her, finally meeting her eyes. “Please.”

“You want to know about the deal? Fine, I’ll tell you about the deal.” His voice was flat. “Here’s the bottom line: If you would agree to pose as Katharine Lawrence, I’d pull some strings to get your father out of prison.”

The blow couldn’t have hit her harder if he had shoved his fist into her chest. Her eyes went wide. She sucked in air.

Snippets of memory swirled through her mind like images in a kaleidoscope. Her father: the voice chiding her teenage self for thinking about getting a nose job. The parent who had raised her single-handedly after her mother had died in a car accident when she was four. The person she had always loved most in the world.

“My father’s in—”
prison
, she started to say, but before she could finish, a surge of memory hit her like a torrent of water spilling through a broken dam. A lightning-fast mental picture of her father grinning impishly at her made her heart lurch. She could see him plain as anything, stocky and not overly tall, wearing his trademark short-sleeved white shirt, red tie, and dark slacks, his thick, gray hair curly as lamb’s wool, his jovial, blunt-featured face wreathed in smiles. He had met her on the threshold of his Baltimore financial services firm that day, hugged her, and then stood back to show her what was freshly painted in tall gilt script on the frosted glass in the top half of the front door:
Michael T. Hill and Daughter, LLC.
She’d been fresh out of the University of Maryland, armed with an accounting degree, and this was her first day on the job as his full-time—rather than summer or after-school—employee. She had meant to work for him for just a little while, to help him out and get some experience under her belt. But adding her organizational ability and work ethic to his talent for finding and charming clients proved a potent formula. The firm thrived and grew, and four years later she was still there, working flat out, a lot of twelve-hour days, a lot of weekends, a lot of holidays, whatever it took to get the job done. A couple of relationships fell by the wayside—she didn’t really have the time to devote to them—but at its apex, Hill, LLC (she had talked her father into shortening the name) had sixteen employees and an annual billing of more than a million dollars. They were on their way.

Then one golden summer evening the wolf appeared at the door, in the form of Special Agent Nick Houston, FBI. Of course, she hadn’t known that he was the wolf at the time. She hadn’t known he was an FBI agent, either. She’d thought he was a client, because that was what her father told her. The first time she had set eyes on Nick was early on a Saturday evening some two years ago. She had been at the office for about an hour, totally alone in the empty building as she worked to finish up a corporate audit that had to be completed by that Monday morning before going to meet some clients at a nearby Morton’s for dinner. Seated in her private office with the door closed, frowning over some figures that didn’t want to add up, she heard noises in her father’s adjoining private office, which, since he took weekends off as religiously as some people went to church, was unusual. When she went to investigate, she discovered her father, who usually spent his Saturdays playing golf, seated at his desk in front of his computer—which was equally unusual, because he barely knew how to work it—with a handsome stranger standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. Her father wore his golf clothes: a bright yellow polo shirt and madras slacks. The other guy—mid-thirties, close-cropped blond hair, tall, lean build—was dressed in gray dress pants and a navy blazer, white shirt, and gray striped tie. Practically the Fed uniform, but, of course, at the time she hadn’t known enough about Alphabet Soup World to even begin to suspect.