cooler because of the damp. Laurel said she would be driving, and it was no weather to drive in. Yet his spirits leaped at the prospect of seeing her. To be truly cold was to doubt whether you would ever feel warm. Right now, he felt that she was the only thing that could warm him up again.
At 11:00 P.M., squinting through binoculars, he saw the sedan drive up, a Chevrolet Cavalier, pummeled by the downpour. Somehow he knew it was Laurel even before he caught a glimpse of her tousled auburn hair through the windshield. Now she did as he had instructed: waiting for a minute in front of the hotel, then rejoining traffic, driving until the next exit appeared, and reversing direction. From his high floor he was able to peer at the patterns of traffic surrounding her. If she was being tailed, he should be able to tell.
Ten minutes later, she had returned to the hotel's concrete porte cochere. Once he called her cell phone to reassure her that she had no visible tail, she emerged from the car, holding a bundle wrapped in plastic, holding it as if it were a precious thing. She knocked on his door just a few minutes after that. As soon as the door was closed, she dropped her blue nylon parka to the floor-as sodden as only supposedly waterproof garments can get-and laid her bundle on the carpet nearby. Wordlessly she stepped toward him, in to him, and they held each other close, feeling each other's beating hearts. He was clutching her the way a drowning man clutches a lifesaver. For a long moment, the two stood together, nearly stationary, holding each other tightly. Then she pressed her lips to his.
He pulled back after a few moments. "Laurel, all that's happened-you need to step back. You need to be careful. This isn't-what you want." The words came out in a rush.
She looked at him, her eyes imploring.
"Laurel," he said thickly. "I'm not sure that we ..."
He knew that trauma could produce forms of dependency-could distort perceptions, emotions. She still saw him as the man who had rescued her; could not accept that it was he who had imperiled her in the first place. He also knew that she needed desperately to be comforted: to be possessed, even. He could not push her away without wounding her, and the truth was that he did not want to.
Guilt mixed with aching desire washed over him, and soon the two tumbled onto the bed, two naked bodies, flexing and shuddering and flushing and, together, creating the warmth each desperately craved. When their bodies finally parted-spent, out of breath, glazed with perspiration-their hands sought out each other, and they interlaced fingers, as if neither could bear to be wholly separated. Not just now. Not just yet.
After several minutes of being quiet together, Laurel turned to him. "I made a stop on the way," she whispered. She rolled from the bed, got to her feet, and retrieved the package she had arrived with. His heart quickened as he watched her naked form, silhouetted against the drawn curtains.
God, she was beautiful.
She removed something from a plastic bag and handed it to him. A large, heavy volume.
"What is it?" Ambler asked.
She was trying not to smile. "Take a look."
He switched on the bedside lamp. It was a clothbound yearbook, the Carlyle College logo embossed on a tan cover and still in its original shrink-wrap, now looking slightly brittle. His eyes widened.
"Pristine," she said. "Untouched, unaltered, untampered with." She handed it to him. "This is your past. This is what they could never get to."
Carlyle College was where she had stopped. "Laurel ," he whispered. He felt a surge of gratitude and of something else, as well, something even stronger. "You did this for me."
She looked at him hard, and there was pain in her eyes and something like love, too. "I did it for us."
He took the book into his hands. It was substantial, a bound volume meant to last for decades. Laurel's faith in him was evident in the fact that she had not even felt the need to open the yearbook herself.
His mouth felt dry. She had found a way to punch through the lies-to expose a cunning charade for what it was. Laurel Holland.
My Ariadne.
"Dear God," he said. There was wonder in his voice.
"You told me where you went to school, you told me what class you were in, and so I got to