Forbidden Stranger Read online

  She’d forgotten, not that she’d told him that, but the specifics of why she’d said that in the first place. Frowning, she chewed the inside of her cheek for a second. “Probably everything, I guess. I’m still forgetful. I don’t remember what I meant to say, to be honest.”

  “Are you doing the exercises the doc left for you?”

  Along with the physical routine of getting her body back in its best working order and the daily meds, she’d been given a series of mental exercises designed to work out her short-term memory. Number matching, pattern recognition. That sort of thing. She never minded working her body, but she hated the mental tasks, mostly because they seemed to have been designed for toddlers or people with dementia. The colors, music, “rewards” of chipper cartoon characters praising her, all smacked of condescension.

  “Of course I am,” she lied.

  “They’re supposed to help. Working on your short-term memory is the key to triggering the long-term.”

  Nina lifted the glass and studied it. “And if it doesn’t? I’ll have permanent amnesia for large chunks of my life. Sometimes about my life when I was eight years old, sometimes about what happened to me at eight o’clock this morning. I have brain damage, Ewan. From everything you all have told me, I’m lucky to be alive. That’s what’s important, right?”

  Her own tone didn’t even sound convincing, but Ewan nodded. “Absolutely. Glad you’re alive. But it doesn’t hurt to hope that you’re going to make a full recovery.”

  “Is that all it is? Hope?”

  “Without hope,” Ewan said, leaning forward, his tone almost fierce, “what’s the point of anything?”

  Later, the echo of his voice filled her head as she slipped naked between fresh sheets and beneath the heavy comfort of her thick blankets. Nina looked up, up, into the darkness of her bedroom. Hope.

  It was really all she had.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ewan hadn’t yet told Nina he’d be living full-time on the island, but Aggie and Jerome knew. He’d offered them both a severance package, fully expecting them both to take it but grateful when Aggie informed him that if it was all right with Ewan, the pair of them planned to stay on.

  “We both only have a few more years until retirement,” she told him over mugs of hot, sweet tea in the morning. Nina had gone out for her daily run, leaving Ewan and Aggie the freedom to talk without fear of being overheard. “As far as jobs go, Mr. Donahue, I could scarcely ask for a better one. I’ve grown quite fond of your Ms. Bronson, as I’m sure you can tell. I’d like to stay on to see her get better.”

  “She might never get better,” Ewan said.

  Aggie smiled. “She might not ever remember everything, but that doesn’t mean she won’t get better. Now, tell me all about the new laws.”

  Ewan gave her the rundown on what had been passed. The enhancement tech itself was still illegal for use in any new patients, but the upgrades that kept the original recipients functioning without additional mental stress were now approved. Neither he nor his team had yet been able to find a way to remove or disable the self-termination programming, but Ewan had made sure that all of the remaining enhanced soldiers would be eligible to receive the upgrades and any that came after without cost, courtesy of Donahue Enterprises, for as long as they lived.

  “Very generous,” Aggie said, when he’d finished telling her everything.

  Ewan shook his head at her praise. “Not generous. It’s all my responsibility.”

  “You take on a lot of that, don’t you? Responsibility.” The older woman looked up from the round ball of dough she was kneading. It would become a savory loaf of crusty sourdough bread.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “It’s admirable and surprising.”

  “I can’t say I like to hear that it’s surprising,” Ewan said ruefully.

  “I must confess to you, it wasn’t what I thought of you when you first hired me and Jerome. I’d looked you up, of course. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know who you were. Who our dear Nina was.” Aggie thumped the dough with her strong fists, then began to shape it into a loaf. “To be honest, I didn’t expect to like you very much.”

  “But now you do?” Ewan grinned, not offended at anything she’d said. He knew he’d had a well-earned reputation.

  Aggie nodded and settled the loaf onto the baking sheet, then covered it with a clean towel so it could rise again. She put her hands on her hips. “Sure and enough, I do. It will be nice having you around here more often. She’ll like it, too, I wager.”

  Ewan wasn’t sure what to say about that. Aggie knew he and Nina had been romantically involved. He’d never mentioned it, but he was sure Aggie knew he was still in love with Nina. The man he’d been before meeting Nina would not have cared what Aggie thought about this arrangement of keeping the lover who could not remember him isolated here on the island. He wouldn’t have thought twice about how it looked, or what it meant for Nina. He would never have sought validation from an employee. Loving Nina had changed him.

  “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Moving here full-time, I mean.”

  Aggie studied him as she pulled a mixing bowl toward herself and began adding ingredients for another loaf of bread. “It’s your home as much as it’s any of ours. I would say you’ve more right than anyone to live here instead of only visiting.”

  “I want more time with her,” he said. “I want to be here to help her. I just . . . want to be around her.”

  “Of course you do. You love her.”

  The words were a tiny stab. “Yes. But she doesn’t love me. She might never love me again, Aggie.”

  “She might not,” Aggie agreed. “She might never remember you were ever anything more to her than her boss.”

  “If she does remember that, and safely, she might hate me.”

  Aggie chuckled and shook her head. “I’ve no idea why, though I’m sure you have good reason to think so. But let me tell you something, Mr. Donahue. When someone loves you the way you love that girl, it’s terribly difficult to hate that person.”

  “Trust me, she did. She could again.” Ewan frowned. “I hurt her, Aggie. So much.”

  “She forgave you, didn’t she?”

  Ewan thought to the times he’d hurt Nina, and how she had, each time, forgiven him. How they’d been trying to make it work, despite everything that had happened and every reason they had for why they should not be together. “I can’t expect her to forgive me for everything, forever.”

  “Why not? Isn’t love about forgiveness?”

  “Nobody should expect that of someone else,” Ewan said. “Love doesn’t give you a free pass to hurt someone, over and over again.”

  Aggie pursed her lips and shook her head. “So you did it on purpose, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any better,” Ewan said. “I’m still the reason for every bad thing that ever happened to her.”

  She paused to look at him steadily. “Every single bad thing? Really? I’d heard rumors that you were arrogant, but until now I wouldn’t have agreed.”

  “I’m being honest,” Ewan said.

  Aggie pointed one strong finger in his direction. “You might have been the source of some bad things, sure, and aren’t we all a source of pain to our loved ones? It’s a rare thing, indeed, when the one you love doesn’t hurt you at least a little bit, here or there. It’s not the hurting that matters in the end, Mr. Donahue. It’s what you do to fix it. And it would seem to me that you’re doing your best to fix your Nina. The rest will come along with it.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then you love her enough to let her go,” Aggie told him.

  * * *

  “I hate you. I hate you so damned much.” Nina spoke the words through gritted teeth and gestured at the tablet in front of her.

  On the screen, bright colored jewels clustered in a grid. She was supposed to tap the groups of more than four, which would make them disappear
with an irritating jangle noise, thus rearranging the rest of the grid. The goal was to get as many groupings as she could within the puzzle’s time frame, using extra bonus functions that she earned by being fast.

  “I despise you, puzzles. Abhor. You are an abomination, as a matter of fact,” she added under her breath.

  She’d been talking to herself, alone in the den. She’d finished her work for the day hours before lunch. Ewan had been busy with a private viddy meeting, and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt him to ask for a new batch of assignments. She’d gone to the kitchen only to be chased out by Aggie, who was doing the week’s pastry baking. Nina had helped her in the past, but today with both ovens at high heat and every inch of counter space taken up by bowls of ingredients and a fine powder of flour all over everything, Nina had seen instantly that she was out of her element. Jerome had been working in the garden, pruning half-dead flower bushes that held onto life despite never getting enough sun. Nina didn’t even try to help him out. Unlike his wife, Jerome could be straight-up grouchy if you got in his way.

  So she’d gone for a run instead. Running usually helped Nina focus on something, even if it was only the harsh panting of her straining breaths. Today, though, the exercise had been so easy, so flawless that she’d barely broken a sweat. After the run she’d dropped to do a set of push-ups, first twenty and then fifty and then another fifty, before she got up. The push-ups had been on impulse, and had left her arms feeling well-used, but not worn out. She’d have done more, but the gnawing emptiness of her stomach had sent her back inside. None of the exercise had been able to erase the faintly ominous feeling in the front of her mind that she’d forgotten something important.

  “Everything I forget is important,” she muttered now with a glare at the tablet.

  The puzzles were supposed to sharpen her memory skills. The one on the tablet in front of her was one of the more entertaining ones, but Nina was already frustrated and bored with it. She thought for a moment about faking the log entry and saying she’d finished the weekly requirements the doc had given her, but guilt kept her from it. She suspected Zulik would know the truth one way or another, no matter what she told him, but Ewan had asked her if she was doing the exercises, and she had said yes. Lying to him felt wrong.

  Determined now to finish, Nina bent back over the tablet and started the puzzle again. This time, she focused, running through the entire series of grids, each one faster than before. She was remembering, she realized with a grim satisfaction as she completed the final grid.

  Big deal.

  It was shiny fine to remember the order in which a puzzle placed clusters of jewels, she thought and got up from the couch to stretch. She expected soreness in her muscles from her earlier treatment of them, but there was only a dull warmth. What she needed to remember was the color of her childhood home. Family vacations. The name of her first boyfriend . . . assuming she’d had one, Nina thought suddenly with a frown. Because she really didn’t even know. Maybe she’d had a girlfriend. Or one of each. That felt possible.

  A low beep came from the coffee table as the tablet shut down. Nina’s lip curled at the reminder that she still had hours of exercises to work on, but in the next moment she lifted the tablet and thumbed the screen to turn it on. She swiped away the puzzle and brought up the tablet’s main menu.

  Why hadn’t she thought about this before? If there was one thing she did remember without a doubt, it was her own name and that she’d grown up in a small town in Pennsylvania. She recalled trees, mountains, the comfort of a community. She brought up the search engine and typed in her name, her heart pounding hard as she waited for the results.

  The tablet beeped and went blank.

  Frustrated, Nina tried again. The second time, the tablet also refused to bring up any information beyond the initial search screen. She tried a third time without her name, instead using a neutral question. “How to cook a chicken.”

  Again, nothing. Nina studied the tablet, turning it over and over in her hands. The black case was clearly worn, but not battered.

  Eliminate the threat.

  Searing pain ripped through her head. The tablet dropped from her fingers as Nina let out a cry and clapped her hands to her temples. She bent, gasping, then went to her knees in front of the couch.

  At a noise from the doorway, she tried to turn, but there was too much pain. She closed her eyes against it, pressing her lips together to keep her cries stifled. It all hurt too much for her to be embarrassed by it, but even so, at the touch of a hand on her shoulder she cringed away. Ewan’s voice sounded very far away, his words muffled and incomprehensible.

  “Nina. I’m here. It’s going to be all right.”

  Blinking, Nina shook her head. The pain had faded enough for her to stand upright and face him. To her horror, Ewan’s eye was puffing up, the skin already darkening into what was going to be a spectacular shiner.

  “Did I hit you?” Her voice, shrill and hysterical, hurt her ears.

  Ewan shrugged, but didn’t reach for her again. “I startled you.”

  “That’s no excuse,” she told him, her stomach twisting at the idea of her punching him. “I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “You turned around and clipped me by accident. It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. Are you all right?” Ewan looked concerned. His low voice soothed her. His gaze fell onto the tablet, which had been knocked to the floor. The screen had shattered—more like it had been stamped on than normal damage from a mere fall.

  She didn’t remember doing that any more than she recalled hitting him in the face. “I’m fine. Just had a weird episode again. I was trying to . . .”

  She paused, not remembering what, exactly, she’d been trying to do. Frustrated, she clenched her fists at her side. Her shoulders slumped.

  “I don’t know what I was trying,” she admitted.

  Ewan bent to pick up the tablet and looked at the cracked screen with a frown. He held it out to her. “We can get it fixed. Or get you a new one.”

  “I feel like this isn’t the first tablet you’ve had to replace for me.” Nina took it, thumbing the screen to see if the unit would turn on. When it didn’t, she gave him an apologetic smile. “I won’t have to do the puzzles anymore if it’s broken.”

  He chuckled, and the sound of his humor made Nina feel instantly better. Calmer. Still embarrassed, but after a minute or so, even that started to fade.

  “I didn’t realize you hated them so much,” he said. “If you don’t want to do them, you don’t have to. We can find other ways to help you, Nina.”

  She held the tablet quietly before setting it onto the coffee table. “I should want to do whatever it takes, shouldn’t I?”

  “Life’s too short to spend it doing things you hate.”

  Nina studied him. “I want to get my memories back, but I’m afraid I never will.”

  “Do you think you can learn to be okay with that?” Ewan asked her seriously, his gaze level with hers.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I won’t have any other choice. Maybe I’ll simply have to accept that this is who I am now, and stop worrying about who I used to be. That might have to be good enough.” Nina hadn’t known she was going to say that until she did, but once the words were out of her mouth, they felt right.

  Ewan’s expression twisted a little. “Who you are now is more than good enough.”

  “How long did I work for you? How well did you know me? Can you tell me about my family and friends? Did I have . . . was I . . .”

  She stopped herself with a shake of her head. “I’ve asked you all of this already.”

  “You can ask me as many times as you have to,” Ewan said.

  “Was I ever . . . married?”

  Ewan shook his head. “No.”

  “No children?” Nina frowned as a series of emotions curled and twisted inside her.

  “No,” Ewan said quietly. “You never had any children.”

  A harsh burst of laughter
flew out of her. “Did I want them? I don’t even know. Did I plan to have children but never got around to it? Did I want them but couldn’t have them? Never mind, Ewan. I know you can’t answer that, and I know it’s not fair to get upset this way and make you tell me over and over again whatever details you do know.”

  “You were strong,” Ewan said, surprising her. “You’re still strong. You were funny, with a sharp wit. You still have that, too. You were loyal and brave and committed. You’ve lost the memories of you, Nina, but I promise, you haven’t lost you.”

  Neither of them spoke right away after that. The silence between them was comfortable, like slipping into a warm sweater on a cold day. She appreciated that more than awkward small talk or pointless platitudes mean to reassure her.

  “Thank you,” she told him finally. “That means a lot to me. I . . . trust you, Ewan.”

  It’s not my job to trust people.

  The voice in her head muttered, then went silent. Nina tried not to let on that she’d heard anything. She thought Ewan had been able to tell.

  His gaze became shadowed in an expression of concern that embarrassed her, but he smiled at her. “You’re welcome. I want only the best for you, Nina. I hope you always remember that.”

  “I believe you,” she said, although his tight expression confused her. “I hope I always remember that, too.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ewan wouldn’t have cared if Jordie Dev spent the rest of his life in shackles, gibbering and drooling in a cell without windows. The kid who’d shown such promise as one of Ewan’s interns in the tech lab had turned out be the worst kind of thief and traitor. The kid had been directly involved in organizing Nina’s kidnapping, in collusion with Ewan’s former partner Wanda Crosson, and although Jordie had ended up getting screwed over by the League of Humanity, Ewan had no sympathy for him. Jordie had made his choices, and every one of them had been self-serving and greedy.