Scraped knee, scratches on her arms and face, torn dress, and her jacket long gone back at Mama’s, and she was still exquisite, still looking like a woodland sprite, if Gucci had taken to designing woodland sprites this year.
“Here,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her closer. “Lift your face, let me look at you.” He knew what he looked like. He was a rough-and-tumble, ready-to-wear type of guy with a knife wound in his side and blood running down his leg. Luckily, he was wearing dark jeans.
She, on the other hand, needed some straightening up and some calming down if they were going to stroll into the crowd on the sidewalk without every cop on the block noticing that the beautiful girl in the gold dress looked like she’d been dragged through the alley backward.
All they had to do was get across the street, into the neighborhood of old houses, and they could disappear.
She tilted her chin up, and he combed through her hair with his fingers, getting a couple of the tangles and a few twigs and leaves out.
Lovers.
They’d been lovers, and he’d let her go. It didn’t make sense.
He smoothed his thumb over the satiny skin of her cheek. “Why did I leave you?” He really needed to know.
“W-work,” she said. “You had a job to do.”
“What kind of work?”
“With the Army. You told me once that your boss was a general.”
In the big picture, that made perfect sense. Even without his memories, he’d known he was a soldier. All his skills, all his technical knowledge was tactical and weapons-based.
Pulling up the edge of his T-shirt, he gently wiped the scratches on her face. She was a mess, her teeth chattering, the look in her eyes a distressed clash of confusion and fear.
“I-I sh-shot it,” she said, her voice trembling right along with the rest of her.
“Shot what?” He went ahead and straightened her dress, but it had gotten torn again, and there was only so much he could do with it. So he rearranged the buckle on her belt to front and center and hoped no one would notice her clothes were a little topsy-turvy. She still had all her jungle bangles on her wrist, so that was good, and throughout it all, she’d kept a death grip on her zebra-striped purse.
“I-I sh-shot that … that—that thing back there,” she said, her breath still not quite caught.
He looked down at her for an instant more, then looked over her head to where they’d just come from.
“What kind of thing?” He searched the shadows again for any movement other than the cops, who were moving everywhere. Geezus. They needed to get out of here.
He checked the sidewalk to see if there was enough cover yet.
“A-a ghost …”
No.
He didn’t think so.
He didn’t know what she’d been shooting at, but he was pretty darn sure it hadn’t been a ghost.
“… and I h-hit it … h-hit it hard,” she said. “My last shot might have missed, but I’m dead-on about my first one … d-dead-on, and it hit.”
“Good,” he said, and gave her arm a quick, supportive squeeze, bucking her up, letting her know he was with her, proud of her. Hitting what you were shooting at was always good.
Always. Though technically, he didn’t think nailing a ghost with a .380 did much actual damage. Geezus.
“I-I shouldn’t have run. I sh-shouldn’t have left Mama’s.”
No. She shouldn’t have run.
“You would have been safer with the police,” he agreed, which was exactly what he’d told her, which he wasn’t going to mention, but if she’d done as he’d suggested—okay, ordered her to do—she wouldn’t have ended up blasting away at something in the alley—probably a rat, or a muskrat, or a raccoon, and he hoped to hell not a homeless person. Any one of those was enough to spook somebody.
Not really.
They were enough to spook a high-end girl who looked like she’d spent half her life getting a pedicure and the other half getting a shiatsu massage, no matter how good a shot she’d turned out to be at Mama’s.
And hell, if it had been a homeless person, at least there were enough cops congregating back there to find him and give aid.
“You d-didn’t do that, did you? To King and Rock. You d-didn’t tear them up like … like that, right?” she asked, dragging her hand back through her hair, tangling it all up again, her gaze locked onto him like