Undercover Memories. Alice Sharpe

a fraction. She wrenched away again and took off. This time she ran right smack into the wall.

      He was there again, towering over her, peeling her away.

      “Calm down,” he muttered.

      “Wouldn’t you like that? Who are you? What do you want?”

      He was silent. Was he making a list or something? She struggled a little, but his hold on her was firm.

      “Turn on the light,” he finally said.

      “I can’t. The electricity is out. Let me go. I’m warning you, my husband will be here any minute and he’s ex-military.”

      His finger rolled over the top of her left hand. “You’re not wearing a ring,” he said. “And there isn’t anything in this cabin to suggest a man was ever here. Don’t start yelling again, please. I’m not going to hurt you.”

      “Who are you?”

      It took him a few seconds to mutter, “I don’t know.”

      “What do you mean you don’t know?”

      “I don’t know if I’m Brian,” he said, and his voice was strange, too. Slurry, as if he’d been drinking, but his breath didn’t smell of booze. “I don’t know who I am.”

      “Will you let go of me if I promise to hear you out?” she asked calmly, but her heart was jumping in her chest. Nothing he said made any sense.

      “If you run into the night you’ll freeze to death,” he warned her.

      “If you stand here in those wet clothes much longer, you’ll freeze to death, too,” she countered.

      He slowly dropped his hands.

      She scooted out of reach, but this time he didn’t come after her. His shape was large in the small room, but a little stooped. His breathing was uneven. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

      “Yes.”

      “How—”

      “I don’t know.”

      “So you don’t know who you are or how you got hurt.”

      “No. I may have fallen down a waterfall.”

      “I’d better have a look at you,” she said.

      “Are you a doctor?”

      “No, but I’m the only other person here, so I guess you have to settle. First I need to find a flashlight. I’m going out to the kitchen.”

      “Okay,” he said, and she heard the squeak of the bedsprings as he sat down.

      She took her first deep breath as she left the bedroom, feeling the walls to keep from tripping. The living room wasn’t pitch-black, thanks to the meager firelight, but she ran into an ottoman anyway and swore under her breath. She should leave. Damn, her keys were in her jeans pocket, and the pants were back in the bathroom.

      Okay, then she should keep going to the door and run back to the Pollocks’ house. It was only a mile or so. Better then winding up a headline.

      She kept going to the kitchen. She needed that flashlight and maybe a nice big butcher knife.

      It took a few minutes of opening drawers and rummaging through the contents in the dark, but her fingers finally touched a smooth, cylindrical object. She fumbled with it until she found a switch and pushed it.

      “Let there be light,” the man whispered from a few feet away.

      She turned the beam onto him. Judging from the arm he threw up to his face, she’d blinded him.

      “Sorry,” she muttered, lowering the light. She held a cleaver in her right hand, down by her side. If he took one step toward her—

      “Well,” he said. “Am I?”

      “Are you what?”

      “Am I Brian?”

      Of course he wasn’t Brian. His voice was too deep and he was far too big, and anyway, Brian wouldn’t act the way this man acted. But she raised the light again to get a good look at her intruder and found a well-built man in his late thirties wearing a torn, wet, bloodstained suit that might once have been pretty sharp looking. His face was scratched and bruised. One eye was puffy and swollen. His bottom lip appeared cut, and there was a split in his chin that probably needed stitches if it wasn’t going to leave a scar.

      Pushing a mat of thick black hair away from his battered-looking forehead, he gazed at her with dark eyes that revealed nothing. He didn’t look like a businessman. In fact, he looked as if he’d be more at home in an alley than in a high-rise, but that could be because he also looked as though he’d gone ten rounds with a prizefighter—and lost.

      “No. You aren’t Brian,” she said.

      “Pity.”

      She shook her head. “Not really.”

      He pulled a chair out from the table and sat down as though it was either that or fall on his face.

      Who was he, and what was he doing in her cabin? Now that she’d seen his face, she wasn’t as frightened of him, and why was that? There wasn’t one cuddly thing about him. She should be running for her life.

      Instead, cleaver still in hand, she sat down on a chair opposite him, the two of them trapped in a puddle of yellowish light that portended poorly for the flashlight batteries. “You think you fell down a waterfall?” she asked.

      “I don’t know for sure,” he said, touching his lip and wincing.

      “You must know something,” she insisted.

      He raised his gaze to hers. “I wish I did, lady, but I’m afraid that what you see is what you get.”

      Chapter Two

      While she built up the fire, he told her about waking up on the riverbank in his current condition. It was a struggle to get the words out. For one thing, his head felt as if it was going to explode. And for another, he was tired beyond endurance.

      He didn’t mention the gun, which was still in its holster tucked under his jacket. He wasn’t sure why he was reluctant to tell her. He just was.

      “The second time I woke up I was in the forest. It was almost dark and it was raining,” he added as she handed him a cup of tea she’d brewed on the gas stove in the kitchen. She was a restless woman, or maybe she was just nervous, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t surprising. Still, given the state of his head, he wished she’d stop moving around so much.

      He had a feeling that at any other time in his life, he would have enjoyed watching her move. She was very slim with blond hair cut kind of uneven in a quirky way, falling long over one side of her face. Her ears were each pierced two times, and she wore small stones that glistened in the flickering light from the fire just as the whites of her eyes did. She looked to be in her late twenties.

      “So you just stumbled around until you came to my cabin?” she asked.

      “I broke into another one first,” he admitted. “But there wasn’t anything to eat. Yours looked lived in, so I came through a window in the mudroom. You had food in the fridge and your bed looked too good to pass up.” He paused for a heartbeat. “In retrospect, probably not the best idea to pass out in an obviously occupied place, but my thinking was a little fuzzy.”

      She studied him a minute. “You really don’t know your name?”

      “No.”

      “I have to call you something.”

      “Call me John Doe. It’s as good as anything else. What should I call you?”

      “Paige Graham. Okay, John Doe. What do you want to do?”

      “Sleep,” he said, quite honestly. “Though