Kill Me Again (13 page)

“What did you tell him?” Chief Mac asked.

“What
could I?
He already knows more about her than I do.” He sighed. “Look, Chief, why don't we both go home and try to get some sleep, huh? I'm beat.”

The chief nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, that's probably the best idea. I'll see you back here in the morning, Kendall. Don't be late.”

“Yes, sir.”

T
hey ate their stew as Freddy munched his own evening meal nearby. Olivia thought the tension seemed to melt away from her companion as the evening wore on. She couldn't quite believe she had been as forward with him as she had. It wasn't like her. Or maybe it was. God knew she'd kept her interactions with attractive males to a minimum. She'd been so badly burned by her relationship with Tommy Skinner that she'd never found the courage to trust a man again. She'd never had the desire to, either.

Until now.

The scars and the fear, it seemed, didn't apply to this man. Oh, she knew how ridiculous it seemed, but she felt as if she
knew
Aaron Westhaven. She knew his soul, because it came through in his words. In his work. He wrote with such grace, such a deep understanding of the human heart. He wrote about the heartbreak of unrequited love, of love gone wrong, of love lost forever, in a way that no one had equaled since the Bard had penned
Romeo and
Juliet.
She
knew
this man. Even if the man she was getting to know now seemed to have a lot more going on inside than the one she had thought she'd known. Being with him, spending time with him—it was a revelation. He wasn't what she'd expected.

He was more. Better.

And she was drunk.

Obviously Aaron didn't have the same lack of inhibitions where she was concerned, but then again, he didn't have any way of knowing her the way she knew him. He hadn't read her words over and over again.

Unless…unless he'd actually read the letters she had sent him years ago. She'd shown a little bit of her heart to him in those. Not all of it. But there had been pieces there.

Still, even if he had read those letters, he had no memory of them now. Might not have remembered them even without the amnesia. He must get thousands of letters from admiring readers.

At any rate, the idea of sex with her had made him get tense all over. It showed in his face, came through in his voice. She had felt it wafting from his body in waves. So she decided to defuse the situation, to put him at ease, as he dished up more stew, handed her a bowl and sat down beside her once again.

“You know, I've never been camping in my life,” she said. “Not even when I was a kid.”

“No?”

“Nope. Chicago wasn't exactly a camping kind of place, you know?”

“I can imagine.”

She shrugged, then slapped a mosquito just as it landed on her forearm. “Never thought I was missing anything. But now I see I was. Bugs. And campfire smoke.” She moved her camp chair a foot to the left to elude the ribbon of smoke that had decided to aim for her face. Freddy stopped eating to look up when she moved. He wasn't going to let her get far from him. Seeing her settled in her chair, he relaxed and resumed his munching.

“Funny thing about campfire smoke,” Aaron said. “It'll pick one person and follow them around the fire all night long. You no sooner move your chair than the smoke changes direction to find you.”

As soon as he said it, the gray stream shifted and wafted right into her face again. She waved a hand and blinked her burning eyes. “Sheesh, I think it hates me!” She got up to move her chair again.

Then she stopped in midmotion, just clear of the smoke but still standing up. “Hey, you said you didn't think you'd gone camping a lot. But you
have
gone. You
remembered
that, didn't you? That bit about campfires and smoke and—”

He met her eyes, his own animated. “I did. In fact, I remember tents, and a water hole with a rope over it. I remember s'mores and ghost stories, and a bunch of other guys in uniforms of some sort.”

“You were a Boy Scout. You must have been.” She sat back down.

“I guess…” He shrugged. “How do you like your boil-in-the-bag beef stew?”

“I think it's delicious.” She scooped another bite from her bowl and didn't speak again until it was scraped clean, then got up and took his bowl with her to the nearby lake, rinsed them thoroughly and wiped them dry. Freddy abandoned his dish to go with her, but when he went to get into the water, she held up a hand, and said, “No, Freddy. Leave it alone.”

He obeyed, but he whined about it.

Aaron remained by the fire, but she felt him watching her every move as she cleaned the dishes.

When she came back, he was still staring at her, and he kept on looking as she went to the tent to put the bowls away.

When she came out, he was standing halfway between the fire and the tent, as if he'd been about to join her inside and then changed his mind.

“I, um…I'm going to wash up and get ready for bed,” she told him. “We have a big day tomorrow.”

“Do we?”

“Yeah. We're going to try to make a deal with the devil himself.”

“This ex of yours, you mean? You still want to do that?”

“Yes. But he
is
dangerous, Aaron. I ran for my life.
That's how bad he is. So if you'd rather I did this on my own, I'll understand.”

“I'm not running out on you, Liv. You don't need to worry about that.”

She smiled a little. “No one calls me ‘Liv.'”

“No? Do you mind?” he asked.

“No. I like it when you do it.” She shrugged, then turned and walked back to the lake, toting the little mesh bag of supplies she'd bought at the store. Freddy fell right into step beside her.

“Be careful in the water. Don't forget, you've been drinking.”

“I will, don't worry.” She paused, eyeing her dog. “Do you think you could keep Freddy with you? I don't want a wet dog curling up with us in the tent tonight.”

“Sure, if you think he'll stay. C'm'ere, Freddy. Come on, boy.”

Freddy tilted his head to one side, then the other, looking first at Olivia and then at Aaron.

“Say, ‘Freddy, come,'” she told him. “And say it like you mean it.”

“Freddy,
come
.”

Freddy obeyed immediately, and she felt her chest swell a little with pride. He was
such
a good dog. And Aaron was telling him so, too. So she continued walking, confident that he could keep Freddy out of the lake.

Part of her wondered if Aaron was still watching as she stripped bare in the star-sprinkled darkness and
stepped into the lake to begin her chilly bath. And all of her hoped he was.

She didn't know, though, and thought she probably never would, as she emerged from the cool water far more awake and a little more sober than she had been when she'd gone in. She toweled off, shivering, and pulled on her nightshirt, knowing full well she was going to need a whole lot more to keep warm tonight. She scrambled to gather up her things, and then scurried barefoot back to the tent, shooting inside fast and heading for her sleeping bag.

Two seconds and she was inside, burrowing and pulling it tight around her as she curled up to half her normal size.

“Colder than you thought?” Aaron asked.

She opened her eyes, to see him sitting in the corner, watching her with thinly veiled amusement coloring his eyes. He'd traded the large white bandage on his forehead for a smaller square adhesive strip that was all but invisible behind his dark hair. Freddy was stretched out on the floor, his head in Aaron's lap, even though his own bed was two feet away.

“Pretty cold, once I got out and the night air hit me.” Then she frowned. “Where did you find a sleeping bag this big?”

“I zipped two together to make one bigger one. It'll be warmer.”

She lifted her brows and peered out at him. “I thought you didn't want to have sex?”

“I…never actually
said
that.”

“So you do, then?”

“I didn't say
that,
either. I just want us both to be warm. If you're not comfortable with that, then—”

“I'm
fine
with that.” She noticed he had something in his hand, something round and gold. He was turning it over and over. “What have you got there?”

“Pocket watch,” he told her. “I had it on me when they found me. Cops checked it out and returned it to me. Said it didn't tell them anything.”

She nodded and sat up for a better look.

He slid closer without getting up. The roof was too low for standing upright, anyway. She held out a hand, and he gave her the watch.

Sighing, Freddy got up, too, wandered to his bed and pawed at it as if to smooth it out before lying down—for the night, she hoped.

Olivia drew the watch closer, examining it with care. It was engraved with a pattern of Celtic knots, a shamrock in their center. “Seems to suggest you might be Irish.”

“There's something else.”

“What?” She looked up at him, her brows furrowed as her fingers felt for the catch, found it and opened the watch up so she could see its face. “I don't see anything else.”

“I don't, either. But I
feel
it.”

She inhaled, turned the thing over, looked and looked at it, but for the life of her, she didn't feel a clue coming
on. “I don't see anything that
could
be useful—unless the knotwork spells out a secret message or something.” She strained her eyes, but no matter how she tried, she couldn't make a single letter of the alphabet out of those swirling patterns.

Shaking her head, she handed it back to him. “Maybe it'll come back to you. Other things have.”

“Yeah.” His tone was on the dark side. “Yeah, but I have to tell you, nothing that's come back to me has anything to do with writing or books or…”

“What has? Besides how to drive and what camping is like, I mean?”

He licked his lips, and his gaze turned inward. “That's about it.”

She knew it was a lie. His tone was deeper, and he didn't meet her eyes as he said it. “Wait a minute,” she said softly, sitting up fully and probing his face. “You
have
remembered something else, haven't you?”

“I just told you what I've remembered.”

“And you were lying.”

“And you're an expert on that?”

“Either that or you're a terrible liar.”

He shook his head. “Get some sleep, Liv. Disconnect the sleeping bags if you want to. I'm going to go take my turn in the lake.”

“Okay.” He went, and she set the pocket watch on top of his pile of clothes, and curled back into the sleeping bag to get warm and await his return. She would have to
ask him again what he had remembered. She was certain there was something he wasn't telling her.

She thought she knew what was going on, though. He hadn't been happy in his former life. Bestsellerdom must not be worth much if it meant living life alone, in hiding. With no one to be…a partner. An ally. Everyone needed someone like that in their lives, she thought. One person who would be there no matter what. Without judgment, without reservation, without even a second thought.

She'd seen that kind of love and devotion. Not often, and never without a pang of jealousy for what those few rare couples had. A connection that went beyond marriage or sex or parenthood, or whatever other things they shared. Lots of people got married. Very few of them seemed to have the sort of bond that made it seem as if they were…extensions of each other's soul.

But some did. She'd seen it. And secretly, she'd longed for it for most of her life. But she'd also spent most of that time knowing she could never have it. Because she couldn't get that close to anyone, not another living soul. You couldn't be that close to someone and keep secrets from them at the same time. Big secrets. Like who you really were. She'd often wondered how she could have a romantic relationship with a man when she couldn't even tell him her real name.

And her answer to that was, she couldn't. Not ever. And so she hadn't. She'd resigned herself to living without love, but she'd never fallen asleep one single
night, nor wakened to greet a solitary sunrise, without regretting its absence to the depths of her being.

He must feel that way, too. And maybe deep down, on some subconscious level, he knew that was the life he had forgotten. And so now he didn't want to return to that lonely life again. He wanted to be someone else, someone different. That was why he was denying who he was, finding reasons to doubt he could possibly be the man she knew him to be.

He would rather believe himself to be someone else. Anyone else. That had to be why he was so doubtful.

But if that were the case, if human contact and a deep connection with someone was what he'd been missing in life, then why was he so averse to the notion of having sex with her?

She supposed figuring out the mind of any man was beyond the ability generated by her limited experience, and figuring out the mind of a reclusive genius author was probably beyond anyone's.

She rolled over, sliding one arm out from beneath the covers now that the chill had eased from her bones. It was a beautiful night. The screen was zipped closed, but the outer flap was tied open, so she had a breathtaking view of the night. Trees surrounded the tent, pines with their delicious tangy aroma that seemed to stimulate all her senses. And above, the stars that dotted the sky were like flawless diamonds, illuminated from within and scattered across a swatch of black velvet. Her eyelids felt heavy as crickets played a raucous symphony,
singing her to sleep. And when she woke again, sensing that time had passed but having no idea how much, it was to find Aaron lying on his side next to her, his eyes on her face.

She was on her side, too, facing him, as she sleepily became aware. She smiled very slightly, unsure of herself now. Not sure she was brave enough to try again, after he'd rejected her once—or was it twice?—already. And so she lay there, waiting for the courage to arise within her, or for him to make the offer this time.

He didn't. He just stared at her, his eyes deep and contemplative, making her wish she could see inside his mind, hear the thoughts that must be racing around in there.