Parallel Desire (2 page)

Shaking, he tightened his hold on Hope. "I'm as dead as she is."

"That's not true." Kelsey shook her head.

"I don't even have a name now."

"You're still Scott Dillon."

One of the soldiers tossed a wallet in her direction and it landed beside her knee. "Found this in his jacket. Says he's Jakob Tierny."

Kelsey flipped open the wallet and examined the driver's license inside. Only a few other slips of paper, a lined photograph, and a computer chip were crammed within. She studied the man in the license photo, but he had almost no resemblance to the one huddling in front of her. The green eyes in the ID were the same electric hue, but they were hollow and empty. Chilling. The eyes gazing at her right now were filled with heartbreak and weariness. They did not belong to the man in the photo.

She extended the ID to Scott. "Take a look. This is the man you killed. Can't you see what's wrong with him? You have to see the soullessness in his eyes."

Scott examined the photograph, staring at it for many minutes before slowly handing it back to her. "From this day forward, call me Jakob Tierny."

"I don't understand."

"Scott Dillon is dead," he pronounced, slowly releasing his hold on Hope. With a quick glance at his former body, crumpled on the floor of the tent, he said, "Everything inside of me is dead. I'm a killer, just like the man whose body I stole. So from now on, I will become him."

"You took his body, but you're not him," Kelsey tried to argue, but he only shook his head.

"Scott is dead." He bent low, nuzzling Hope's cheek. "Scott is dead. And I am Jakob."

Present Day

J
ake stared at the cell phone
cradled in his palm and deliberated whether he should actually make the call he had planned. The last time he'd phoned Hope, it hadn't gone so well, a result he'd come to expect after about, oh, twenty or so calls like the one he was currently contemplating. Of course things would be awkward between them, he told himself. Of course their relationship would be strained. After all, she had once been his wife, many years before. Not many—five, he corrected himself, although each one of those calendar rotations had felt like an eternity. Days had given way to months, had dissolved into years, a blur of body-numbing grief that finally bled into one long march of pointless time.

And that sensation of timelessness and pain had only grown more muddied now that he was stranded ten years in the past, where everything he'd ever known had been altered. He was a stranger living in the wrong time and dimension, and although he rejoiced that Hope would now live, it was slowly killing him that she was joined with his younger self.

He'd thought he could handle it, knowing the two of them would have the happily-ever-after that he'd been denied. But with every passing day, another chamber of his heart went dead cold.

In his future, she was dead, murdered by the man whose body and identity he'd chosen to seize in a murderous act of his own. At least he had been justified, acting in a moment of blind fury and grief. And that grief hadn't stopped dogging him since that day five years earlier, when Hope and their unborn baby daughter, Leisa, had been ripped right out of his arms. And now, after all that he'd once endured, it was happening again: Hope was alive and well in this world, sure, but she might as well be dead. Dead to him.

Just as dead as the man he'd once been—Scott Dillon.

Every part of his soul that answered to that name had died long ago, too. All that remained in its place was a shell, a hulking hollow of his former self. Staring down at the cell phone clutched in his hand like a lifeline, he realized that he couldn't possibly stop himself. It was inevitable: He had no choice but to try reaching out to Hope once again.

Hitting speed dial, he lifted the cell to his ear and held his breath. She answered after six rings, sounding slightly winded, and his nasty streak of jealousy kicked right in. What the hell had she been doing before he called?

"What's going on … Jake?" She always stumbled over his assumed name; then again, he couldn't imagine that she would want to call him Scott, either.

For a moment, he let silence grow between them, listening to the sound of her soft inhalations across the line. "I needed to hear your voice," he admitted at last. "That's all."

He could practically sense her urge to groan aloud. He'd been calling her far too often lately, more frequently with every passing month since he'd last seen her back in December. It was May now, and not one of those months had dampened his love for her—or the ache lodged deep inside his chest.

"Jake, this has to stop. You know it does." Her voice was gentle, tender. Loving, even.

"I can't seem to help myself, sweetheart."

"But you're going to have to, Jakob." Her tone was firm, insistent. "You're killing yourself like this, and we don't want that."

"
We
?" he mimicked distastefully. Yeah, he had no doubt that his calls were bugging the shit out of his younger self.

"
I
don't want it, Jake. I want you to start living again, to figure out what you need … here, now. Not keep mourning me forever like you've been. It's time to let go."

"What's
he
doing?"
Making love to you, kissing you from navel to collarbone?
No wonder she sounded so breathless, he thought, muttering a quiet curse.

"Scott's not here right now," she told him, her tone more clipped than usual.

He buried his head in one hand, staring at the floor beneath his cowboy boots. The dismal room he'd been calling home lately, with its torn mattress and lopsided dresser, only made his mental state more dark and oppressive.

"What if I can't stop?" he whispered into the phone. "What if it's not possible?"

"It's
not
what
I
want, Jake. Don't make me start screening your calls." She attempted a laugh, but he knew her too damned well. The jocular note was entirely false. "I love you, Jake, and I always will; but I really just want you to let this go."

"
This
… or you?"

"Our past. I want you to move on."

"Where am I supposed to move on to? Huh?" He felt tears sting his eyes. He'd been caught in an impossible triangle with his younger self and his one-time wife for five months now, and he wasn't even treading water. He was sinking fast. He guessed that Hope could read that in him; no wonder she was getting more forceful.

"You should go back to the main base in Wyoming."

"And if Scott returns? I can't be in the same place as he is, not if I don't want to obliterate us." He laughed mirthlessly. "You of all people know that I can't occupy the same space and time as my younger self. The universe just isn't going to tolerate that kind of displacement."

"Scott and I are staying here at Warren Air Force Base indefinitely," she told him. "Working with the Joint Alien Task Force. So it's safe for you to go back, and you should. Make a life for yourself with your own people." How easily she dispensed her advice, how simple she made it all sound.

"Are you happy?" he asked, a stab of pain digging into his chest.

She hesitated, blew out a sigh. "How do you want me to answer that?"

"I want to know it was worth it, everything I gave up. Everything I've lost with you. I need to know that you're happy with him. …" He paused. "And that he's happy."

"You remember what we shared in your past," she admitted in a thick voice. "You already know what it's like."

"Oh, gods," he half moaned, shaking his head. "Look, I gotta go."

"Jake, please—"

He cut her off, positioning his finger over the
end
button. "Gotta … go," he repeated, realizing that what he needed was to get shit faced and lose himself in a bottle. But he didn't tell her that. "You take care, sweetheart," he said in a choked voice, and quickly disconnected the line.

S
ome guys just ought to know
when to stay down. When the jaw took a certain kind of hit, when the guy clubbing him had all the advantage, well, hell, that was the time you should just play possum. Of course Jake Tierny wasn't one of those guys, and Shelby would have been disappointed if he had been. Still, she winced watching him flip backward over the pool table, his long, lean legs buckling over his head.

"Hey, hey," she tried to intervene, peering across the table at her fallen friend. "Enough's enough, no?" She looked up at the red-faced hitter, who tossed her a glare, then revved his fist up once again, ready to deliver another blow.

"He had it coming, okay? He brought this shit down."

"I'm sure that's true." She pressed her eyes closed, not wanting to see yet another fist pummel into Tierny's already bruised face. "But surely a guy's paid his price after, oh, an hour's bout or so?"

"An
hour
!" The jerk straddled his awkwardly crumpled opponent on the far side of the pool table. "Hell, we ain't been at this but five minutes."

A gathered group of onlookers parted for her, an assortment of potbellied men with alcohol-reddened faces who'd been cheering the whole thing on. A few of the fools even hung their heads shamefully. "Sorry, ma'am," one of them muttered, cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

She squeezed through the pack, rolling her eyes in disgust at the lot of them. Men could behave like such overgrown children when it came to their egos and territory. She stepped carefully past a splintered pool stick, tempted to pinch her nostrils shut. The nauseating scent of aggression permeated the bar, nastying up the place with its twin odors of sour alcohol and day-old sweat.

She dropped to the floor, squatting beside Jake. "What have we here?" She chuckled, balancing her hands on both knees as she bent closer to examine Jake's injuries. Her patient squinted up at her, lifting a broken beer bottle in a toast. Then all of a sudden Shelby was being airlifted, Jake's assailant having slid his pair of beefy hands beneath her armpits. She flailed with her sandals, one of them flying like a dagger at the far wall, clattering as it bounced off the vinyl-paneled surface.

"You. Let. Me.
Go
!"  She writhed her hips, bicycling her legs until she finally managed to kick her attacker. He dropped her with a painful thud onto the cement floor of the pool hall, climbing past her to get at Jake.

Huffing like he'd just run five miles, the human took advantage of Tierny's prone, drunken position. He snatched Jake's broken beer bottle right out of his hand, drawing instant blood with a slice to Jake's forehead.

Shelby had truly, finally, and completely had enough.

She grabbed the brown bottle out of the attacking redneck's hand, gesturing toward him with its sharp edge. "Do that again, and you'll lose half that pretty face of yours. Okay? This is just ridiculous, so stop it already."

"He came in here looking for a
man
. You don't come in
our
bar, in
our
town, pulling shit like that." His overbite seemed to get worse, his mouth turning down at its edges until bloody spittle shot toward her. "It just don't go over, not around here."

Shelby thought fast. "He's looking for his missing twin brother." She worked her face into a mask of semi grief, weaving her hands together in front of her chest as if she might break into prayer at any moment. "Gone so many months now. So very many." She shook her head wistfully, raking her eyes over Jake meaningfully. "It's terrible when someone you care about vanishes without a word."

The attacker tugged his T-shirt down over a beer belly that protruded like a swollen upper lip. "I don't care who the hell he's looking for, not after what he called me. Y'all heard it." Thrusting his chest out and preening like a
flkiisii
, the fool gestured at his pals, who'd closed a small perimeter around her and Jake.

Uh-oh.
Warning bells chimed like midday mess call inside her mind.

"Yeah? What did that boy say, now?"

"Called me. Something I can't repeat, using that funny language of his." The surly redneck pointed his forefinger at her, wielding it like the stubby barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. "Couldn't pronounce it."

"Called him a
slav'nrksai.
" Jake struggled to sit up, temporarily bobbing out of his drunken haze.

Just freaking brilliant.
Here the guy was lost
in South Texas, in some after-hours honky-tonk, calling this dude by a particularly obscene Refarian expleti
ve. Perfect. Perfectly perfect.

"Jakob Tierny," she announced in her loudest, most annoyed voice. "You don't have a fuck's clue what you're doing, now, do ya, boy?"

Closing one drunken, long-lashed green eye, Jake stared up at her with the other, wrestling to untangle his legs. "I'm all right." His voice was a slur.

"Yeah—and that's why I told you that you needed a guide here in Texas." She gestured at his assailant, who looked ready to pounce on Jake again without the slightest provocation. "I did warn you about needing some qualified help."

More than four months had passed since last December, when Jake had hauled ass out of their compound—without her offered guidance. And, man, had she ever offered it, practically insisting that he cart her along with him on this crazy-assed odyssey of his. But the stubborn fool had snuck off base in the middle of the night, leaving her with a packed bag—and a few shattered fantasies about what might have happened between them on the open road. She'd realized it wasn't personal, not for a loner like Tierny, and finally managed to put the whole dang thing out of her mind.

Besides, from the look of things right now, he hadn't stopped grieving the loss of Hope Harper, not for one day since his hasty departure. He might have come down this way with the thinly veiled excuse that he was searching for the real Jake Tierny, in order to stop him from killing Hope a second time, but it was more than obvious that he was lost in a haze of drunken grief. He couldn't be with Hope, so chasing Tierny was obviously the next best thing.

Knowing that Jake was still in love with Hope had made it obvious she should just forget him completely. That was, until their commander had asked her to go after him. She'd do anything her king requested, including following Tierny into the deepest bowels of Texas, and so she complied. Her mandate was to bring Jake back to their camp, and now she was here to follow through. She'd die before disobeying Jared Bennett. And she might die, actually, right here in this hellhole of a dive, if she couldn't disentangle Tierny from Redneck Man in five seconds flat. In fact, it sure looked like dying was the major part of Jake's plan.

"So, Bruiser, you drive a truck?" she called over her shoulder, lifting her shirtsleeve to Jake's bloodied cheek. "
You freak
," she added under her breath, scowling down at her crumpled comrade. "Told you.
Told
you not to try this alone."