Silently and at length, he cursed the Man and Frank for everything he could think of, ranging back over several generations of their ancestors. Not Frank so much, because he could see the Man’s fine hand in this. Nobody had a mind as intricate as Kell Sabin’s; that was how he’d gotten to be the Man. They had probably—no, almost certainly—saved his life, assuming there was a mole passing information to Piggot, but they weren’t the ones who had to tell Jay he wasn’t her ex-husband. They didn’t have to tell her that the man she loved was dead and she’d been sleeping with a stranger.
What would she say? More important, what would she do?
He couldn’t lose her. He could stand anything except that. He expected, and could handle, shock, anger, even fear, but he couldn’t stand it if she looked at him with hate in those deep blue eyes. He couldn’t let her walk away from him.
Immediately he began examining the situation from all angles, looking for a solution, but even as he looked, he knew there wasn’t one. He couldn’t marry her using Crossfield’s name, because such a marriage wouldn’t be legal, and besides, he’d be damned if he’d let her carry another man’s name. He would have to tell her.
His family probably thought he was dead, and there was no way he could let them know he wasn’t without jeopardizing them. If his cover was blown, his family would be at risk if Piggot ever found out he hadn’t died as planned. The way things stood now, he’d have a hard time convincing his family of his identity anyway; he neither looked nor sounded the same. His hands were tied until Piggot was caught; then he supposed Sabin would arrange for his family to be notified that a “mistake” had been made in identification, and due to extenuating and unusual circumstances, et cetera, the error had only now been corrected. The Man probably already had the telegram composed in his mind, letter-perfect.
His family would be taken care of; they would be glad to get him back despite the way he looked, or the fact that his voice was ruined.
Jay was the victim. They’d used her as the ultimate cover. How in hell could she ever forgive that?
JAY DOZED, FINALLY awakening as they turned onto the track to the meadow. “We’re home,” she murmured, pushing her hair back. She turned her head to smile at him. “At last.”
He was tense again, surveying every detail of the track. There was new snow on the ground, filling the tire tracks they had made the day before and also obliterating any other trail that could have been made after they’d left. All his training was coming into play, and Lucas Stone didn’t take chances. Unnecessary chances, that was. There had been more times than one when he’d laid his life on the line, but only because he’d had no other choice. Taking chances with Jay’s life, however, was something else.
As usual, Jay picked up on his tension and fell silent, a worried frown puckering her brow.
The snow surrounding the cabin was pristine, but when Lucas parked the Jeep he put a detaining hand on Jay’s arm. “Stay here until I check the cabin,” he said tersely, drawing a pistol from beneath his jacket and getting out without looking at her. His eyes were never still, darting from window to window, examining every inch of ground, looking for the betraying flutter of a curtain.
Jay was frozen in place. This man, moving like a cat toward the back door, was the man she loved, and he was a predator, a hunter. He was innately cautious, as graceful as the wind as he flattened his back against the wall and eased his left hand toward the doorknob, while the pistol was held ready in his right. Soundlessly he opened the door and disappeared within. Two minutes later he stood in the back door again, relaxed. “Come on in,” he said, and walked back to the Jeep to get their bags.
It irritated her that he’d frightened her for nothing; it reminded her of the morning when he’d tracked her in the snow. “Don’t do that to me,” she snapped as she threw open the door and slid out. The snow crunched under her boots.
“Do what?”
“Scare me like that.”
“Scaring you is a hell of a lot better than walking into an ambush,” he replied evenly.
“How could anyone know we’re up here, and why should anyone care?”
“Frank thinks someone would care, or they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to hide us.”
She climbed the steps and knocked the snow off her boots before entering the cabin. It was cold but not icy, because they had left the backup heat system on. She took the bags from him and carried them into the bedroom to begin unpacking while he built a fire.
Lucas watched the yellow flames lick at the logs he’d placed on the grate, slowly catching and engulfing the wood. He couldn’t tell her, not yet. This might be the only time he’d ever have with her, an indefinite period of grace while Sabin’s men hunted Piggot. He’d use that time to bind her to him so tightly that he could hold her even after she found out his real name, and that Steve Crossfield was dead. She had told him she loved him, but it was Steve Crossfield she’d been saying the words to, and, oddly, it had been Steve Crossfield hearing them. He was Lucas Stone, and he wanted her for himself.
His need was fast and urgent, like a fire low in his belly. He walked into the bedroom and watched her for a moment as she bent over to remove her boots and socks. She was as slim as a reed, her skin silky soft. He caught her around the waist and tumbled her on the bed, immediately following her down to pin her to the mattress with his weight.
She laughed, her blue eyes no longer filled with irritation. “The caveman approach must be fashionable this year,” she teased.
He couldn’t smile in return. He wanted her too badly, needed to hear her say the words to him, not to a ghost. The yellow glitter was in his eyes as he stripped her and surveyed her nakedness. Her nipples were puckered from the chilly air, her breasts standing up round and firm. He circled them with his hands and lifted the tight nipples to his mouth, sucking at each of them in turn. She gasped, and her back arched. Her responsiveness did it to him every time, shattered his control and made him as hot and eager for her as a teenager. He could barely tolerate taking his hands off her long enough to hastily tear at his own clothing and throw it to the side.
“Tell me you love me,” he said as he adjusted her slim legs around his hips and began entering her.
Jay squirmed voluptuously, rubbing her breasts against the hairy planes of his chest. “I love you.” Her hands dug into his back as she felt the muscles ripple. “I love you.” Slowly he pushed and slowly she accepted him, her pleasure already rising to an urgent pitch. Her body was so attuned to him that when he began the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of lovemaking her sensual tension swiftly reached a crescendo. He held her until her shudders stilled, then found the rhythm anew.
“Again,” he whispered.
She wanted to cry out his name, but couldn’t. She couldn’t call him Steve now, and she didn’t dare call him Lucas. She had to bite her lips to keep his name unsaid, and a moan rose in her throat. He controlled her, his slow, deep thrusts taking her only so high and refusing to let her go any higher. She was on fire, her nerve endings exploding with pleasure.
“Tell me you love me.” His voice was gravelly, the strain apparent on his face as he kept his movements agonizingly slow.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you.”
He wanted to hear his name, but that was denied him. Sometime in the future, when this was all over, he promised himself that he would have her as he was having her now, and she would scream his name. He had to be content with knowing it himself, and with the way her eyes locked with his as she whispered the words over and over again, until his control broke and sweet madness claimed them both.
He couldn’t get enough of her, ever, and knowing that he might lose her was intolerable. Physical bonds were the most basic, and instinctively he used them to strengthen the link between them. He would make himself a part of her until his name no longer mattered.
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Frank had just gotten into bed when the telephone rang. With a
sigh, he reached for it. “Payne.”
“Piggot’s in Mexico City,” the Man said.
Forgetting about the good night’s sleep he’d been anticipating, Frank sat up, instantly alert.
“Do you have a man on him?”
“Not at the moment. He’s gone to ground again. It’s about to unravel, and this move tells me who snipped the thread. I’ll take care of that little detail, but you get Luke out of there. The cabin’s location has been leaked.”
“How much do you want me to tell him?”
“All of it. It doesn’t matter now. It’ll go down within the next twenty-four hours. Just see that they’re safe.” Then Kell Sabin hung up, wondering if he’d cut it too fine and endangered a friend, as well as an innocent woman.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AT THE FIRST beep from the palm-size pager lying on the bedside table, Lucas was on his feet and reaching for his pants. The tone told him it was the communications beeper, not the alarm caused by the laser beam being broken, but the very fact that Frank was contacting him in the middle of the night was alarm enough. Jay roused and reached for the lamp, but Lucas stopped her.
“No lights.”
“What’s going on?” She was very still now.
“I’m going out to the shed. That’s the communications beeper. Frank’s trying to get in touch with us.”
“Then why not turn on a light?”
“He wouldn’t contact us in the middle of the night unless it was an emergency. It might be too late. Piggot could already be close by, and a light would warn him.”
“Piggot?”
“The guy who tried to make me into beef stew, remember?”
“I’ll go with you.” In a flash she was out of the bed and fumbling with her clothes in the dark. Lucas started to stop her, not wanting her to leave the safety of the cabin, but if Piggot had found them, the cabin wouldn’t be safe. A hand-held rocket launcher in the hands of an expert, which Piggot was, could turn the cabin into a shattered inferno in seconds.
He stamped his feet into his boots and grabbed the pistol out of the holster, which he always kept at hand. As he left the room he lifted his jacket from the hook beside the door, then shrugged into it as he raced through the dark cabin to the back door. Jay was right behind him; she had on her jeans and his flannel shirt, her bare feet shoved into boots.
They slipped across the snow to the shed, staying in the shadows as much as possible. The ramshackle shed was a revelation; Jay had been stunned the first time Lucas had shown her what lay below its surface. He moved a bale of hay aside and revealed a small trapdoor, just wide enough to allow his shoulders through, then pressed a button on the pager that released the electronic lock. The trapdoor silently swung open. A narrow ladder extended downward, illuminated only by tiny red lights beside each step. Lucas urged her down, then he followed and closed the door, once more sealing the underground communications chamber. Only then did he switch on the lights.
The chamber was small, no more than six by eight, and crammed with equipment. There were a computer and display terminal, a modem hookup and a printer against the end wall, and an elaborate radio system on the right. That left about two and a half feet of room on the left for maneuvering, and part of that was taken up by a chair. Lucas took the chair and flipped switches on the radio. “On air.”
“Get packed. Piggot has been spotted in Mexico City, and we have word the location of the cabin is no longer secure.” Frank’s voice filled the small chamber eerily, without the tinny sound radios normally produced, testifying to the quality of the set.
“How much time do we have?”
“The Man estimated four hours; less if Piggot has already put accomplices in the area.”
“His usual method is to move people in, but keep them at a distance until he arrives. He likes to orchestrate things himself.” Lucas’s voice was remote, his mind racing.
Silence filled the chamber, then Frank asked quietly, “Luke?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, aware of Jay’s sudden movement behind him, followed by absolute stillness. He hadn’t wanted to tell her like this, but all hell would be coming down in a hurry. Four hours wasn’t a lot of time, and no matter what happened, he wanted her to know his name. For four hours she would know whose woman she was.
“When?”
“A couple of days ago. Any chance of intercepting Piggot before he gets here?” That would be the best-case scenario.
“Slim. Nailing him there would be our best bet. We don’t know where he is, but we know where he’s going.”
“He won’t go through customs, so that means he’s in a small plane and will land at a private airstrip, one close by. Do you have a record of them?”
“We’re pulling them out of the computer now. We’ll have men at all of them.”
“Where’s a safe place for me to stash Jay?”
Frank said urgently, “Luke, you’re out of it. Don’t set yourself up as bait for the trap. Get in the Jeep and drive, and call me in five hours.”
“Piggot’s my mess, I’ll clean it up,” Lucas said, still in that cool, remote tone. “If I’d taken care of him last year, this wouldn’t be happening now.”
“What about Jay?”
“I’ll get her out of it. But I’m coming back for Piggot.”
Realizing the futility of arguing with him across two-thirds of the continent, Frank said, “Okay. Contact Veasey, at this frequency, and scramble.” He recited the frequency numbers only once.
“Roger,” Lucas said, and flipped the switch that cut them off. Then he shoved the chair back and stood, turning to face Jay.
Her entire body felt numb as she stared at him. He knew. His memory had returned. Her time of grace had ended, the mirrors had shattered, the charade was over. The violence that had brought him into her life was about to take him out of it again.
With the return of his memory, he was truly Lucas Stone again. It was there in his eyes, in the yellow gaze of the predator. His face was hard. “I’m not Steve Crossfield,” he said bluntly. “My name is Lucas Stone. Your ex-husband is dead.”
She was white, frozen. “I know,” she whispered.
Of all the things he’d expected her to say, that wasn’t one of them. It stunned him, confused him, and irrationally angered him. He’d agonized for days over how to tell her, and she already knew? “How long have you known?” he snapped.
Even her lips felt numb. “Quite a while.”
He caught her arm, his long fingers digging into her flesh. “How long is ‘quite a while’?”
She tried to think. She had been caught in a web of lies for so long that it was difficult to remember. “You…you were still in the hospital.”
Scenarios flashed through his mind. He’d been trained to think deviously, to keep hammering at something until it made sense, and he didn’t like any of the situations that came to mind. He’d assumed from the beginning that she was an innocent blind, used by Sabin and Frank Payne to shield him, but it was more likely that she’d been hired to do the job. White-hot fury began to build in him, and he clamped down on his temper with iron control. “Why didn’t you tell me?” God, for a while he’d thought he was going crazy, with all those damn memories coming back and none of them connected with the things she had told him. He might have gotten his memory back sooner if he’d had one solid fact to build on instead of the fairy tales she’d woven.
He was hurting her; his grip would leave bruises on her arm. She pulled at it uselessly, gasping as he only tightened his fingers. “I was afraid to!”
“Afraid of what?”
“I thought Frank would send me away if he knew I’d discovered you weren’t Steve! Lucas, please, you’re hurting me!” At last she could say his name, even though it was in pain, and her heart savored the sound.
His grip eased, but he caught her other arm, too, and held her firmly. “So Frank didn’t hire you to say I was Steve Crossfield?”
“N-no,” she stuttered. “I believed you
were, at first.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Your eyes. When I saw your eyes, I knew.”
The memory of that was crystal clear. When the doctor had cut the bandages away from his eyes and he’d looked at Jay for the first time, she had gone as white as she was now. That was odd, because he knew Sabin would never have overlooked a detail as basic as the color of his eyes.
“Your husband didn’t have brown eyes?”
“Ex-husband,” she whispered. “Yes, he had brown eyes, but his were dark brown. Yours are yellowish brown.”
So his eyes were a different shade of brown than her husband’s had been; it was almost laughable that Sabin’s carefully constructed scam could have fallen apart over something as small as that. But she hadn’t told them that they had the wrong man, which would have been the reasonable thing to do. She hadn’t even told him, not then and not during the weeks when they’d been up here alone. Angry frustration made his voice as rough as gravel. “Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you think I’d be a little interested in who I really am?”
“I couldn’t take the chance. I was afraid—” she began, pleading for understanding.
“Yeah, that’s right, you were afraid the gravy train would end. Frank was paying you to stay with me, wasn’t he? You were with me every day, so there was no way you could hold down a job.”
“No! It isn’t like that—”
“Then what is it like? Are you independently wealthy?”
“Lucas, please. No, I’m not wealthy—”
“Then how did you live during the months I was in the hospital?”
“Frank picked up the tab,” she said in raw frustration. “Would you please listen to me?”
“I’m listening, honey. You just told me that Frank paid you to stay with me.”
“He made it possible for me to stay with you! I’d lost my job—” Too late, she heard the words and knew how he would take them.