She took him in, letting her gaze slide over his jawline and down the side of his neck, taking in the scars that had never been there before, down to his hand and the half-missing ring finger. Dear God. She didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with the people at Steele Street, nowhere near as much as they spent hanging out with each other. She mostly ran with Denver’s art crowd, but she’d been around enough to know that Gillian had been without her memory for a few years, quite a few, before her life’s history had started coming back to her, which had explained a whole lot about her coldly awkward personality. She was actually kind of sweet now … sometimes, and just a little bit nice, but not a lot. She could still kick major ass.
Ah, hell.
Jane had been in some pretty rough situations, but she couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like to be tortured until you lost your memories, even of who you were.
And she was sitting in a car with a man who was ripped like Red Dog, and fast like Red Dog, and who took pretty pills and looked like he’d been tortured, and who seemed to have lost his memory.
This was a disaster, and she was in the middle of it.
So what was she going to do?
Lowering her hand, she looked away from him and out toward the street, and realized the question might be moot. Roxanne was sidling up to the curb on Vallejo at the intersection.
The man next to her reached down and shifted the GTO into a different gear, drawing her gaze back to his mutilated right hand.
“Was it an accident?” she asked, suddenly needing to know. “How you lost your finger?” Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been tortured. Maybe he’d been in a crash, a car crash, a train crash, a plane crash, a bad one that had left him without his memory and cut him in a lot of places.
“Probably not,” he said, his voice calm, matter-of-fact.
She flicked her gaze up to his face, meeting his eyes, and they were calm, too, and very clear. Whatever had happened to him, he either didn’t know, or he’d accepted it and moved on.
“Any one of these guys will give you a ride,” he continued. “So why don’t you get out and go home, do us both a favor.”
He was right—but she had plenty of reasons to do her damnedest not to get kicked out of his car, none of which had anything to do with her ancient-history teenage crush. She was all grown up now, and that whole pathetically besotted time of her life was long gone. All she could hope was that if he really had lost his memory, he’d lost the one of her lurking around Steele Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him from the roof of Sprechts Apartments. She hazarded another quick glance in his direction.
No, she surmised, he didn’t seem to be connecting her with any latent memories of schoolgirl idiocy—thank God.
And if he’d forgotten the idiocy, maybe he’d forgotten the last time she’d seen him, the night things had gotten completely out of hand and the damned next morning when he’d left and she’d cried.
Oh, yes, she could only hope he’d forgotten all of that.
Watching her from his side of the car, Con refrained from a weary sigh. She wasn’t budging, which made no damn sense at all, and he didn’t like things that didn’t make sense.
“Is this personal between us?” he asked, going with his least likely theory first. It sure sounded good to him, but it also sounded like wishful thinking, despite the intense awareness they’d had of each other when he’d first seen her on the street. “Why are you sticking to me like superglue gone wrong? Why are you still in this car?”
That’s what he needed to know before he got rid of her, why she hadn’t gotten out at the Quick Mart. He wanted to know what her stake was in the day’s events.
“Or am I a job?” That was theory number two, and it was a helluva lot more likely. He’d been a lot of guys’ job over the last six years, a world full of spooks and door-kickers determined to bring him in for cash, or glory, or both. She’d be the first girl he’d come up against, though, and if somebody had sent her, well, he could only give them