Kiss (40 page)

How?

Shauna slipped the platinum engagement ring off her right ring finger. Holding it with two hands balanced on top of the steering wheel, she tried to angle the diamond to catch moonlight. Too dark. The rock blinked halfheartedly under the dash lights.

Miguel Lopez had saved her life—how many times? Twice that she remembered already, and once that she had forgotten. He’d saved her life and set aside his own.

That was love. Without a doubt, she recognized it as the deepest possible kind of love.

And yes, she loved him like that too. She would show him. If she could find him.

How could she find him?

Shauna slipped the ring onto her left hand.

Her clever little memory-stealing trick, her freak-show ability, was worth nothing on Wayne anymore. He knew what she could do, even if he didn’t understand it. For crying out loud, she had
told
him what she could do, handed the information to him on a silver platter! At the time she thought it would keep her alive. Now it seemed to her things might have gone better, for Miguel at least, if she’d kept her mouth shut.

Wayne wouldn’t come within arm’s reach of her if he could help it.

What were her options? She stole a glance at Frank. His brawn could help her. That was her initial idea in bringing him along anyway. She could maybe have him knock Wayne out, and she could kiss the man—she shivered—while he was unconscious.

Assuming Wayne wasn’t flanked by a thousand sycophants there to do his bidding. Assuming she and Frank weren’t bound and gagged the moment Wayne spotted them. Would Trent be at Wayne’s side? Maybe he would be with Miguel while Wayne attended to Shauna. No way to be sure. No way to plan for every contingency.

Too many unknowns. To many “have tos” that could go wrong.

Her mind returned to its image of Wayne, knocked unconscious on the pavement of some back alley. Even if she and Frank could get that far, she didn’t know if she could take anything from an unconscious person. She needed contact—easy enough—and she needed access. Vulnerability. Openness. A free will that said yes to her probing.

Not sure she could get that from someone whose mind wasn’t fully engaged with his surroundings.

She tossed that option away.

She could drug him.

The same problems reared their heads, plus the fact that she didn’t have access to any kind of narcotic that would do what she needed, namely, to keep him both conscious and sedate.

She punched Frank in the arm. He stirred.

“Frank, you got any drug connections?”

He scowled at her and closed his eyes again. “Told you that’s not my territory.”

“Do you know anyone whose territory it is?”

“No. Now let me sleep until you figure this out.”

“Thanks for the help.”

She could pretend a one-eighty, a complete conversion to every piece of advice he’d ever offered. Frank would be her proof, evidence that she was on their side now, that if they cut her in to their schemes, however complex or illegal, she would forget
everything.
She would speak his language. Break down the wariness that held up his defenses. Seduce him with a touch, a lover’s kiss. Make him believe that his own playacting at concern for her was authentic.

Shauna’s stomach flipped over. Impossible. She couldn’t convince him under such circumstances. He would never believe her. Even thinking about it caused her hands to quiver. What she had done with Frank marked the outer limits of her abilities.

Besides, Frank was supposed to be dead.

She could weaken Wayne somehow. Physically. Stab him like he’d stabbed her. She mocked the flimsiness of her own mind. As if she could even touch an ex-Marine if he didn’t want her to. An ex-Marine trained in some form of martial arts she’d never heard of. Frank could, maybe, but Shauna couldn’t risk that Frank might kill him.

Wayne needed to stay alive. There would be no other way for her to find Miguel.

She could see no way to find out from Wayne where Miguel might be. In that case, she would throw out assumption number four. She could hope Wayne might lead her to Miguel and stay in the shadows.

And then what? He’d kill them both?

Shauna felt her despair slide off her shoulders and give way to a fresh fury. She hated Wayne Spade, hated that he had stolen from her again and again and would most certainly do it once more. What he had done to her was nothing less than a rape of her mind, a plundering of her most valuable personal belonging—her memory, her history, her journey, her identity.

He had stolen her brother. He had muzzled the man who loved her. He had turned her own father harder against her. He had skewed truth. He had betrayed her with an imposter friendship and a false sense of security. He propped her up on a scaffold of lies that claimed lives when it began to collapse.

He had even tried to kill her. Drown her—

An idea came to Shauna with all the surprise of a bucket of ice thrown in her face.

That she was capable of even thinking it made her shudder. Was she capable of such a thing? She studied Frank’s hands, his thick palms and long fingers. Was she capable of talking someone else into such a thing?

Yes, she was.

For the sake of Miguel’s life, she was. For the sake of truth, and justice, and making wrong right, she most definitely was.

She caught Frank awake, looking at her. She held his gaze longer than was safe, until he turned back to watch the road on her behalf.

He’d help her.

If he didn’t get them both killed in the process.

“Let me tell you what I’m thinking,” she said.

37

By a quarter to one, Landon’s usually tidy office was strewn with papers and glossy blue and yellow booklets bearing MMV’s logo.

Annual reports, prospectuses, executive memos, magazine articles about MMV’s golden era, hard copies of electronic presentations made at board meetings. He had also pulled out campaign documents: finance reports, accounting summaries, donor records, anything he had at his office pertaining to the monies flowing through his coffers. These were less helpful; the most detailed files were at campaign headquarters, not here.

Even so, Landon found nothing amiss, nothing at a glance to support Shauna’s fears. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. Maybe he’d been right, that Shauna’s behavior was only a pathetic cry for attention.

But the timing of MMV’s dramatic profitability spike would not stop needling his mind. Trent had been so confident that Landon would have the funds he needed to take on a race for the White House, and at the time, Landon had read nothing into that but the unflagging faith of a dear friend.

Trent had approached Landon about this at Easter of that year. The following January, MMV posted their fourth-quarter results to much trumpeting and fanfare.

Where was that quarterly report?

Landon riffled through the stacks but couldn’t put his hands on it. He found all the files for the following year, but not that one. Irritated that it wasn’t there, he got up from his desk and went to Patrice’s office to see if it was in her files. He didn’t really believe that the document would shed any further light on his questions, but the fact that it was missing from his own files bothered him. He needed to find whatever would set his mind at ease.

He flipped on the overhead light, which sent a glare across the green paint and floral draperies. This place had always reminded him of an English tearoom.

He crossed the room to the oak file cabinet in the corner and opened the drawer where he knew she kept her copies of MMV paperwork. The contents were a mess: she didn’t even use hanging file folders for this stuff.

Patiently, he went through the pile. Nothing. Fine. Time to give this up.

He closed the drawer.

It wouldn’t shut.

A closer examination of the problem revealed a small wooden box in the drawer beneath, standing on end next to a similar pile of unfiled paperwork. The box was the size of a large hardback book and appeared to have slid off the top of the papers, perhaps when Landon opened the drawer above it.

Landon reached behind the open drawer to pull the box out of the way. This was an awkward feat, because the open space was barely large enough for his arm to slip through. But he managed to grip the container and lift it out of the lower compartment. When he pulled it through the top, however, the hinged lid snagged on the back of the drawer and flew open, spilling its contents.

Landon swore under his breath, set the box on top of the file cabinet, and began to collect the dumped papers.

They were letters, it appeared, most on simple stationery. He paused at a glimpse of the handwriting. Trent Wilde’s handwriting.

My dearest Patrice . . .

In the past few years, Landon had taken more beatings by pundits and political opponents than he could count. But not one blow had struck his heart so dead center as those three words.

He collected the papers and read love letters that sickened him. He read them anyway, picking up each note before he’d finished reading the previous one.

His fingers landed on a glossy sheet of paper. He looked at it, registered with a vague disconnection the blue and yellow MMV logo.

It was that first quarterly report he’d been searching for.

He dropped the other letters and opened the report. There, on the page that pronounced the bottom line, the impressive figure had been highlighted and circled with a red Sharpie. Scrawled across the page in the same bloody ink, in the same blasted handwriting, was a note that sent a blade through Landon.

         To My Future First Lady, My Only Love,
         Keep your eyes on the prize.
                                             Always,
                                             Your Wilde Man

Landon put his fist and the report through the wall next to the file cabinet, then yanked both out again, raining drywall over the rosebud-covered carpet.

The physical pain in his knuckles kicked his mind into gear. He turned his body toward the door and plotted a change in his itinerary. He was not the fool Trent and Patrice had played him to be.

Nor was his daughter.

The three-hour wait did nothing to settle Wayne Spade’s nerves. It was approaching two o’clock, and Lopez should be on-site any minute. Wayne was still pacing the rear office of the warehouse, a room temporarily converted into a jerry-rigged medical room.

“I can’t promise this will work.” Will Carver, the pharmacologist who had overseen Shauna’s memory wipe, shoved his hands into his pockets, took them out again. At two in the morning, he looked more harebrained than usual.

“Why can’t we expect the same results we got with Shauna?”

“Different circumstances.”

“Nothing different. We traumatized them, knocked them out. Shot them up with anesthesia. When he gets here, we’ll give him the same cocktail.”

“There are variables. Like the simple matters of gender. And more complicated issues. Her cocktail was tailored to her DNA. We had more time to evaluate the details.”

Wayne kicked the closed door. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“And Siders administered MDMA to her when she got to the ER.”

“I can get more if you need it.”

“I’m just saying this isn’t exactly a controlled environment. I can’t guarantee the outcome.”

Wayne swore. “It seems none of us can.”

“Are you prepared to keep him under for the full six weeks? Follow the regimen?”

“That depends.” On Shauna. On how much damage control was needed before this blew over. He could always kill the journalist if he had to. In fact, he might do it anyway, because the Mexican was such a troublemaker. Once Shauna arrived, Miguel Lopez’s life would diminish in value considerably.

“What do you make of the memory stealing?” Wayne asked.

“I can’t even begin to theorize. Can she prove it?”

Prove it? Doubtful. He wasn’t sure if she’d actually taken memories from him or if he’d simply forgotten a few details, the way most memories fade over time. And yet he could dream up no other explanation for her discovery of so many secrets. How had she dreamed of his football injury, and why couldn’t he remember the actual event? When had she discovered he’d gone AWOL, and why couldn’t he recall anyone trying to talk him out of it?

Any half-good scientist could come up with an experiment to test it, he mused. Provided they could ensure Shauna’s cooperation.

Wayne studied Carver. “Maybe I’ll hook her up with you and we’ll find out.”

A door slammed outside the building. Lopez was here.

“Leave me what I need,” Wayne said.

He strode out and followed the aisles created by crude-oil barrels and cargo containers stacked two high. The outer door swung open before he reached it. Two men entered, dragging a limp form between them. They dropped the figure on the floor in front of Wayne. He crouched over the face of one unconscious Miguel Lopez.

“You’re alive as long as it takes Shauna to get here,” Wayne said. “After that, we’ll see what you’re worth.”

“Take him to Carver,” he said to the men. “Then get him out of here. Stay mobile until you hear from me.”