To the Edge (11 page)

And yet he was. And the really bad news? He wanted her.

Fuck.

She moved in a world of Armani suits and slick money-men. Men like he'd never been—never wanted to be. For some reason, it pissed him off, knowing he had no place in her world. For some reason, he wanted her to understand what kind of man he was—one like she'd never seen before. And he wanted her to want him in spite of it.

Talk about a suicide mission.

He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, rubbed.

And wished to hell he had a drink.

A few miles away, vagrants huddled under packing boxes in a back alley clogged with misery and debris. The clean salt scent of the ocean and the heavenly fragrance of grapefruit blossoms didn't make it to this part of paradise. Here paradise was lost amid the fetid odor of Dumpster waste, the stench of urine, unwashed bodies, and despair.

Halogen security lamps cast a brittle glow outside the run-down low-rent motel on Blue Heron Boulevard in Riviera Beach. Those who walked the streets this time of night shied away from the light. Their business was best done in the shadows.

It was not a neighborhood that fostered dreams. Nightmares were more the norm. Nightmares and sins. Big sins. Little sins. There was market enough for both and little market for hope.

In a sparsely furnished room on the motel's fourth floor, John Smith lived his own personal nightmare. For eighteen months he'd been atoning for what must have been a sin of epic proportions. Why else would he have ended up like this? His transgressions must have been unforgivable. If only he knew what he'd done. John was a religious man. He did not know this for a fact. This conclusion came from something deep within him— something so deep inside, it was knotted in the muscle and blood and bone that was left of him and told him he'd been a man of faith. Why else would he look to God for answers, appeal to God for help, curse God for forsaking him?

He was a tall man and slim, his features unremarkable but for the chilling gray of his eyes. Even to him, they looked eerily empty when he confronted his image in a mirror and saw a man who did not remember his own face as a boy.

The sheets on which he lay smelled of sex and sour regrets. The air he breathed smelled of darkness and desperation—things he knew, bone deep, had not been a part of his life before he'd lost everything he had been. Everything that he was.

Beside him, Mary slept. She was new to his almost empty rank of memories ... but she hadn't been new in any other way for a very long time. If he had any pity left in him. he might think it was a sad thing for someone so young to harbor such an old and damaged soul. He didn't know why she had sought him out little more than a week ago, why she continued to come to him. Or why she sometimes begged, through her tears, for him to hurt her.

In his deepest moments of despair, neither did he care. He was nothing. He was no one.

Without his memories, nothing mattered. At least on his best days, it didn't matter. It was easier that way. Easier not to
care that he'd had a real name once, a name lost to him along with the other pieces of his life when he'd been mugged
and left for dead. Now he was called John Smith, compliments of a civil servant who felt he should not forever be known as John Doe.

This man who was John Smith had once had a birth certificate, proof to confirm or dispute his age, which the physicians estimated as between forty and forty-five. He'd claimed citizenship somewhere; his fluency
in
five different languages, had thus far given little back in the way of clues. Only
more frustration.

Somewhere, he'd had rights. He'd been a man who could travel and work and live where he wanted. Now he could go nowhere with legal sanction. He was trapped by a lack of identification to even allow a passport should he chose to leave and go ... where?

He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and buried his head in his hands. The headaches were less frequent now. But the emptiness was severe.

He stood and walked naked to the window overlooking the street. And stared, even though he'd given up looking for answers a long time ago.

He had no home filled with the dusty gatherings of a life that chronicled his transition in time. He had no job to make him feel like a man, no skills he could draw from to support himself. No memory beyond eighteen months ago when he'd awakened in a Jupiter hospital.

The mugger who had struck the blow to his head had stolen so much more than his wallet. He'd stolen his identity. He'd ended his life. And yet he breathed. He bled.

But no longer did he cry.

In the silence of the night, with a soft, willing body curled on her side of the bed the only tangible proof that even the moment was real, he wished he could simply die.

But he was a coward. So he lived. With a mind he'd numbed to the injustice. With emotions he'd conditioned himself not to feel. He'd reduced his human contact to the animal rutting Mary allowed. He gave his body release but kept his mind disengaged.

It was a way to survive the loss of what the doctors had given up on recovering. He would probably not remember, they'd said. Not after this long. Officially, he'd been written off as a man without a future because he was a man who had no past.

A siren howled in the distance, grew closer, then faded to nothing. The window air-conditioning unit wheezed little more than tepid air into the room and rustled the faded blue curtains. On the bed, Mary stirred in her sleep, whimpered, and he knew it was because he'd used her roughly. Remorse played a distant second to his own misery. A misery that had been compounded as he'd watched the eleven o'clock news several hours ago.

The Kincaid woman, with her camera crew and tape recorder and glossy lips, had brought it all back. The kernel of hope, the painful wish to know. She'd read his story in the newspapers a few months ago, she'd said. Sought him out to help him, she said. To tell his story to the world on television
.
She'd said.

Someone might recognize him. Didn't he want that? Didn't he want to know if there was a chance her story could draw national attention and possibly reach someone who would recognize him? Someone who would step forward and tell him who he was?

Pain lanced through his temple. His heartbeat ratcheted, slamming inside his chest.

Didn't he want to know?

Fear, stark and cutting, infiltrated his body like tainted air.

Didn't he want to know?

With everything in him, yes, he wanted to know. And with everything in him, he was afraid to know.

This was what Jillian Kincaid had done to him. She'd brought back the hope. And for John, hope was not a cause for elation and light. Hope was a horror of resurrected cravings for all things that were denied him. Hope was cruel. Hope bred insanity.

Jillian Kincaid, with her power and ambition, was not seeking his salvation. She was seeking her own fame.

She didn't care that his suffering had begun anew the day she
had approached him. She'd stirred, to a frenzy, the utter nothingness of his existence with her camera and her microphones and her pleas to let her interview him again as she filmed her documentary. About him, The Forgotten Man.

He drew a fractured breath. Settled himself and turned to the woman on the bed.

Mary offered relief from all the bleakness. Temporary.

Fleeting. He didn't believe her when she told him he was someone—someone important, someone vital—and he hated Jillian Kincaid for her relentless questions, her unnerving silences that prompted him to fill them and to speak of his sense of loss and despair.

Hers was a careless cruelty.

His would not be.

Just like he was not carelessly cruel when he awakened Mary with a harsh hand, then used her again until she begged him to stop.

8

IN LIGHT OF THE FACT THAT SHE HADN'T drunk enough wine last night to merit even a whisper of a headache, Jillian felt particularly uncharitable toward the hammers pounding away behind her eyelids when she swung her feet over the side of her bed at 7:30 Saturday morning.

To face the day with her bodyguard.

Oh, joy.

Grim and grouchy, she headed straight for the shower, telling herself to just deal with it. Whether this loony toons character was simply out to scare her, which she firmly believed, or he was for real, which she did
not
believe, she couldn't afford to let Garrett disrupt her life in the interim. Broken speed limits, biker bars, and bloody Rangers notwithstanding.

And let's not forget the beautiful body,
her libido reminded her before she could quell the memory of Nolan Garrett damp from a shower and naked to the waist in the pale light of her kitchen in the wee hours of the morning.

"Oh, let's," she muttered in disgust, determined to ignore the flicker of sexual tension lingering from last night and licking through her belly. "Let's forget it and just get through this. "

She twisted off the faucets and caught herself worrying about his knife wound. Stone-faced, she dried her hair and wrapped up in her robe and then went about the business of regrouping before she faced him.

When she opened her bedroom door and smelled coffee— good coffee, by the scent of it—she knew she could face anything. Even the fact that Garrett was evidently good for something other than intimidation and stoic scowls and messing with her pheromones.

"So he knows his way around a coffee grinder. Goodie for him."

With a roll of her eyes, she stepped out in the hall... then stopped short and braced a hand against the wall, so stunned by what she saw, she barely found the breath to scream. "My God. Oh, my God! What are you doing! Let her go!" Garrett didn't so much as move a muscle. And she'd have known if he had. He wore nothing but a pair of black boxer shorts, shower dew, and a scowl so caustic it could have eroded tempered steel. And at the moment, he looked about as vulnerable as a stealth bomber.

"You know this person?" he asked with quiet and lethal calm and absolutely no indication that he was about to let up on the pressure of the massive forearm he'd pressed against Lydia Grace's throat.

Pinned to the wall just inside the penthouse door, Lydia, her eyes wide with terror, glanced at Jillian; her hands clutched at Garrett's imprisoning arm, bracing for the worst. On the floor at her feet, a garment bag lay in a tangled heap. Her purse had slid across the foyer tile and landed a few feet away.

"Of course I know her! We work together. Now for God's sake, let her go!" Jillian demanded, tripping over the bag to get to Lydia.

A strong hand gripped her arm, steadying her. She shoved it away and reached for Lydia.

"Are you all right?" She touched a hand to the younger woman's arm, then almost cried herself when a tear trickled
down
a cheek that looked as pale as chalk against the straight jet-black hair falling around Lydia's face.

Lydia nodded valiantly. She lifted a hand to her throat.

"Oh, sweetie. I am so, so sorry." Jillian cut a venomous glare at Garrett and steeled herself against feeling sympathy over the injuries he'd received last night. The bruise on his cheek had turned a bluish purple. His knuckles had scabbed over. She didn't even want to think about the knife wound covered by white tape. 'This is my assistant, you dolt. What
on
earth were you thinking? Never mind. Just get out of the way.
And get her some water."

Stepping over the garment bag again, she led a shaky Lydia to the living area and set her carefully down on the sofa. "Did he hurt you?"

"I did
not
hurt her," Garrett volunteered from behind them; his eyes were hard, his manner bored, as he held out a glass, then raked his wet hair back from his face with his fingers.

Jillian snatched the glass and offered it to Lydia, who shook her head. "I'm OK. Really. Just.. .just a little, oh, what's the word? Terrified?" she managed on a shaky laugh.

Jillian scooped Lydia's hands into hers. She looked her hard in the eye, hesitant to accept the attempt at reassurance. "You sure you're OK?"

"I'm fine," Lydia insisted, then cut an anxious glance at Garrett. "I... um... did I... interrupt... something?"

When Lydia actually blushed, Jillian saw the tableau from her perspective. Jillian was in her robe. Garrett wore only his boxers and the stark white bandage across his ribs. Not only his hair was damp. So was his body. He seemed to be that way a lot.

"Lydia Grace, meet Nolan Garrett. My bodyguard," she added with grim tolerance as Garrett eased a hip onto the back of the sofa. His only other reaction was a deepening scowl.

Lydia's big brown eyes made a couple of sweeps between them. "Oh .. . well... um ... OK."

"Not OK. He owes you an apology." Both women looked at Garrett, who crossed his arms over his bare chest, clearly unaffected by both Jillian's condemning gaze and Lydia's apologetic trepidation.

"I need a list of everyone who knows your penthouse security code," he said without preamble, "and then we're going to change it."

Jillian blinked. "That's your idea of an apology?"

"You want me to apologize for doing my job?"