SHE really was crazy. Completely blitzed, off her rocker.
Of all the things she could have asked—
Do you remember me? You were there the day of the bombing. What happened?
—that was the one that burst forth out of her mouth. It was a massively embarrassing question. Insane, actually. But it had welled up out of her with an unstoppable force, the words out before she even knew she was going to say them.
The thing was, there’d been some . . . image, some aura of her having been intimate with him.
It wouldn’t have been such an awful question if he’d been a less attractive man. But the fact of the matter was that he was almost insanely attractive, in a very rough way.
When she’d had her meltdown out in the reception area, her arms had been unable to encompass his immensely broad back. His muscles had been like steel and she’d clung to him the way you’d cling to a girder in a storm. Hard, unyielding, safe.
She didn’t date much, but the men she did date—had dated, when she still had a life—were metrosexuals. Soft and funny and even a little flighty. Daniel Weston was the exact opposite of her usual date. He was hard and serious and right now she wanted to cling to him and never let him go.
And he was letting her cling to his hands, letting the crazy lady work out whatever nuttiness was in her head. Which was obviously filled with fluff because the first thing she’d talked about was . . . being his lover.
Where had that come from?
Obviously it had come from her deep loneliness and sorrow. A year completely alone, she falls into the arms of a dangerously attractive man—a very
male
man—and crazy Claire goes right off the deep end. It was totally humiliating and if she had any backbone at all, she’d stand up, apologize for bothering him and fly straight back to Safety Harbor.
Except . . . her cold hands were encased in his large, brown, warm ones, and they felt so
good
there. She looked down at them, suddenly ashamed of herself. Of her weakness. Her inability to remember anything, the constant feeling of standing over an abyss.
“No, we weren’t lovers. Why do you ask that?” Daniel Weston was watching her carefully, eyes dark and intelligent.
She told the truth. “I don’t know. I have no idea why I said that. It wasn’t what I was going to ask at all.”
His gaze was so steady. “What were you going to ask?”
“If you were with me,” she answered simply, watching him. “That day. The day of the bombing.” The day her world died.
He didn’t answer, simply bowed his head, eyes fixed on hers.
Yes!
There’d been no one she could talk to, no one at all. The entire staff had been at Crock-of-Shit’s reception, all the Marines at Marine House. Marie was dead.
By the time she’d woken up from the coma, Crocker had retired and most of the staff had been reassigned. There was no one to ask that she knew of. She’d been alone with her nightmares and the black hole in her head instead of memories.
“You were there, on guard,” she whispered. He had to have been. An embassy was never left without a Marine guard.
She hadn’t even thought of that.
Claire Day, able to write a report on threat levels based on scanty intel and still be right, had been totally unable to think her way through this. “You weren’t at Marine House?”
“No. I was at the embassy,” he answered soberly.
“Because I can’t remember anything,” Claire whispered, searching his dark eyes for answers. “Nothing at all. The last thing I remember was the reception at the French Embassy.”
“November eighteenth.” He nodded. “A whole week before. My first official day of duty was November seventeenth, but I spent that day and the next being briefed. You don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”
“No.” She didn’t tell him of her nightmares, the incessant heat, the whispers and gunfire. “Nothing. It’s like this huge hole in my head. And I’m sorry about the question about being lovers. I have no idea where that came from.” She gave a little half laugh that came out sad and unfunny, and decided to tell the unpleasant truth. “I sustained massive head injuries. I’ve had . . . problems since the bombing.”
A swift knock, and the voice of the receptionist through the door. “Dan? Can I come in?”
He released her hands, stood and walked swiftly to the door, opening it. Her hands immediately felt cold again.
The receptionist stood on the threshold with a big tray holding a pot of coffee, two big mugs, a sugar bowl, a milk pitcher and two plates, each with a huge croissant on it. She set the tray on the coffee table and stood back, eyeing him, then eyeing Claire with a worried expression on her face.
Claire was ashamed of the way she’d behaved earlier, falling apart in this man’s lobby, making this very nice lady worry about her. She drummed up a smile. “Thank you so much. The coffee smells delicious.”
The woman’s worried expression lightened slightly. “You’re welcome. You two eat every bite now, you hear me?”
Daniel Westin snorted. “Yes, ma’am.” He rolled his eyes at Claire after snapping off a military salute. “You’d better obey Roxanne here because her revenge is swift and brutal if her orders are ignored.”
The receptionist smiled, showing dazzling white teeth, and swatted him on the arm. The air of affection between them was palpable. “Go on now. You just make sure that girl eats something. She looks like she’s about ready to fall down.” She turned and met Claire’s eyes. “Did you have breakfast this morning?”
Claire was taken aback by the first personal question anyone had asked her in over a year.
“Um, no.” She sketched a shaky smile. “Lucky thing, too. I flew up from Florida and it was one of the most turbulent flights I’ve ever been on. The lady sitting next to me tossed her breakfast right into the barf bag.”
Roxanne shook her finger. “And I’ll bet you anything you didn’t eat much yesterday, either.”
Actually, Claire hadn’t eaten
anything
the day before except for some milk and honey. She’d come back from the cemetery so depressed her appetite, never strong since she’d woken up from the coma, had deserted her completely. The hot milk and honey had been to warm her up.
“Uh-huh,” Roxanne replied nodding, as if Claire had spoken. “I thought so.” She pointed a slender brown finger at the tray, looking first at Daniel, then at Claire. “I don’t want to find even crumbs on that plate.”
Daniel grinned. “Yes, ma’am
.
” And he gave another ironic salute.
The door closed quietly behind her and Daniel bent to the tray, giving Claire a sharp-eyed glance. “Roxanne’s right,” he said quietly. “Try to eat something. You do look like you’re about ready to fall down.”
In her previous life, Claire would have bristled at those words. She’d never taken orders well and was lucky that she often worked alone. Few embassies could afford two DIA analysts and so she was always at the top of her own pecking order. No bosses and no colleagues, just as she liked it.
But right now, what he said was so palpably true her indignation lobe just switched off.
“How do you take your coffee?” he asked.
“Black,” she replied.
He looked at her, a long, penetrating look out of those intelligent dark eyes. “Are you sure you don’t want to try the coffee with some milk and sugar? Might be a bit easier on an empty stomach.”
Claire shrugged. “Okay.” She watched as he made the coffee almost white and refrained from wincing as he proceeded to dump half the sugar bowl into the mug.
“Here.” He put a plate with a huge croissant in front of her, followed by a mug of pale coffee. “Those come from a French pastry shop across the way and they’re not half bad.”
Claire leaned forward carefully, checking her stomach. To her astonishment, it wasn’t closing up like a fist, it wasn’t lurching back in horror. It was . . . quiet. Calm, peaceful. Not noticing that she was about to eat something. Maybe thinking of something else.
She pulled off a corner and smiled. The exact same buttery smell of the croissants she used to eat in Paris wafted up, except this croissant was about three times the size. A croissant on steroids, but excellent just the same, she found as she put the soft puff of pastry in her mouth. Heaven.
Dan was watching her carefully, nudging the mug closer to her. “The coffee now.”
Okay. It didn’t taste of coffee, it tasted of milk and a mountain of sugar, but it was warm and went down and stayed down.
He nodded as she sipped. “So . . . you don’t remember anything?” His jaw muscles rippled. “Nothing at all?”
Claire shook her head, tearing off another small bite. “No.” Her voice came out almost a whisper. She cleared her throat and pushed her diaphragm to make her voice stronger. “Nothing. I read some of the after action reports, but it was like . . . like reading about the Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks back in 1983, which we did in my poli sci classes at Georgetown. It felt sort of long ago and far away, you know what I mean?”
He nodded soberly.
“But—” She took another sip of the overly sweet brew and put the mug back down. The room was quiet. The reception area had overlooked Barron Street but this office overlooked a series of back gardens, lushly green in the damp air.
“But?” he prodded quietly and Claire nearly wept with frustration.
There’d been something she wanted to say. A memory had flashed across her mind. Or maybe not a memory—a vision.
It was gone now, like so many things in her life. It had retreated back into the big black hole of her mind.
“Nothing,” she whispered. How could she tell him she saw things that came and went? And that she had difficulty distinguishing reality from visions? He’d think she was insane, and he wouldn’t be far off the mark.
Change the subject
. It was a tactic she’d developed this past year, when she found herself forgetting things that everyone knew, or blurting out something that made people look at her as if she’d just been beamed down from Mars. When that happened, she changed the subject. Comment on something entirely different.
Her mind whirred uselessly as she checked the room for a diversion, but nothing presented itself. The furnishings were bland, not expensive, not cheap. Bookshelves, a couple of framed certificates.
Her eyes alit on the
Washington Post
on the coffee table, open to the Politics section. She’d had zero interest in politics this past year, but something about the article arrested her attention. A photograph. Of a smiling, good-looking man.
Oh, yeah. He’d have landed on his feet.
Bowen McKenzie. She’d overlapped two tours of duty with him, in Durban and Laka. It had been an open secret that he was CIA. He never really tried to hide it. She imagined he felt it gave him a dashing air. Hinting that he knew dark secrets was part of his special seduction technique, which had worked on every available woman he’d come across in the Foreign Service between the ages of twenty and fifty, married or not, with the exception of Claire and Marie Diur.
Claire would rather have put her hand in a thresher than go to bed with Bowen. He’d made her skin crawl. But she’d been a lonely exception, and Bowen had taken her refusal personally and had made it his mission to change her mind.
He hadn’t been successful and it had burned.
“Bowen’s in Washington? I wonder if I should have gotten in touch with him, too.” Her mouth twisted with distaste at the thought.
“Would have been useless,” Daniel answered. “Bowen wasn’t there that day.”
She sighed in relief. Talking to Daniel Weston was infinitely nicer than dealing with Bowen McKenzie.
He was sitting across from her, in Male Mode—knees apart, leaning forward, clasped hands between knees. His shoulders were so broad they blocked her view of the lower edge of the window.
There was nothing polished or elegant about him. He was dressed more for comfort than for style, in corduroy trousers, a heavy brown sweater with a blue shirt collar underneath and boots rather than dress shoes.
She stared out the window. It had started sleeting, needle-like shards of ice pinging against the windowpane. The windows had triple-glazing so there was no noise, not even from the sharp wind bending the branches of a big, old oak in someone’s backyard.
There was something about what he said . . .
She turned back to him.
“Bowen wasn’t there?” She frowned. “But . . .”
There was something wrong in that. Wasn’t there? Bowen McKenzie had been working with a private think tank on some big development project with military implications, some big new unholy alliance the CIA had been forging. She knew he’d staked his reputation on it and that he was incredibly ambitious. He’d rarely left Laka in the previous six months. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. He wasn’t even in Laka, he was in Algiers, meeting with the deputy premier.”
“Are you sure?” Why was she insisting? It was just that . . . for a second there, clouds parted in her head and she thought she had a memory of Bowen in Laka that day. A memory of a memory.
“It was my job to keep track of everyone working at the embassy,” Daniel said gently. “I’m sure. McKenzie was on a two-day trip to Algeria, due to come back the twenty-seventh.” He shook his head. “Of course, he came right back after the bombing. I heard about that from my second in command, later. By the time he made it back to Laka, I was being operated on in Ramstein.”