You Betrayed Me (The Cahills #3) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,8

. and . . . and driven home. He remembered stepping inside, his dog greeting him, and then headlights in the driveway. Then?

Damn if he could recall.

Monroe was speaking again, bringing him back to the here and now.

“—a call in to Detective Rivers.”

“He’s the cop I need to talk to?” James asked.

“Yes.”

So be it. No one here was going to give him any answers. He read it in Monroe’s staunch professionalism. James was being stonewalled. Either the doctor didn’t have any answers or had been instructed to keep his mouth shut. And Sonja Rictor had clammed up. Grabbing her had been a mistake. She was now as tight-lipped as Dr. Monroe, saying only, “I’m sure you’ll sort it all out once you remember.” She injected something into his IV. “This should help take the edge off.”

“I need to get out of here,” he said.

“Not tonight.” Monroe was firm, and James had trouble concentrating, probably from whatever it was that had been slipped into his IV.

“If you don’t let me out of here—”

The doctor cocked his head in unspoken question: Then what? Where do you think you’ll go? What do you think you’ll do?

“At least give me my phone.”

“We don’t have it,” the doctor said, looking at the nurse for confirmation. She gave a quick shake of her head.

Blinking to stay awake, James said, “It must be at home . . .”

“I’ll check on you tomorrow,” Monroe was saying, and James watched him leave the room, the nurse at his heels.

James lay back on the pillows, his eyelids heavy as the meds kicked in, and he suddenly didn’t care that he was being held here in the hospital or that his cell wasn’t with him. He thought he heard the swoosh of the door to his room opening, and he tried to waken, but his eyelids were so heavy. He managed to crack one eye and caught a movement, then the back of someone he didn’t know, someone in scrubs scuttling away, a rope of jet-black hair falling between her shoulders as she hurried out of the room. He blinked, and she was gone.

If she’d ever really been there.

His mind was playing tricks on him, and the person quickly exiting the room could well be just a wayward image his mind had created.

But had he caught a waft of some perfume?

It didn’t matter. Not now. Not when he was so damned tired, grateful for the sleep pulling him under.

As he slipped away, a woman’s face floated for a second before his eyes—a beautiful woman with even features, a quick, wry smile, dark auburn hair, and a suspicious glint in her gold eyes—but he didn’t know if she was real or a figment of his imagination. Someone he knew or had just seen in passing. Her name—did he even know it? It eluded him, and he remembered the nurse’s assertion that his girlfriend had been Megan. But that didn’t seem right. He felt his eyebrows slam together as he tried to conjure her to the surface of his faulty memory, only to fail. Who the hell was she? he wondered, before drifting away on a soft, welcome cloud of relief.

CHAPTER 4

“Amnesia? Can you believe that?” Detective Brett Rivers didn’t. Not for a second. He shot a skeptical look at his partner over the snow-covered hood of his Jeep Cherokee before climbing inside. He’d woken up in a bad mood hours before, and as the day had worn on, it hadn’t improved much.

Wynonna Mendoza slid into the passenger seat and buckled up. A petite woman in her mid-twenties, she was whip smart, smooth-skinned, and not afraid to speak her mind. Her usually unruly black hair was pulled into a knot at the back of her head, and large hoop earrings dangled at the sides of a face that was devoid of makeup. Her eyes were light green and sparked with intelligence, and her humor was sarcastic. Like his. She sent him a look. “The doc says it’s possible.”

“Possible or probable?”

“Possible,” she said as her phone beeped. She pulled it from her jacket pocket.

“Pretty damned convenient, if you ask me.” He reversed out of the parking space, then wheeled through the lot. Snow was still falling steadily, and he flipped on his wipers as he reached the first intersection. “I’m not buying it.”

“Head trauma. Concussion.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They were passing by the storefronts at the center of town, hundred-year-old buildings tucked tightly together, most with Western façades and awnings, pedestrians bundled in thick jackets with hoods