“Then it’s good it has you to hold it,” Ryker said, tightening his hold on her fingers. But he didn’t want to go slow. He wanted to understand. “I reached the plane and—I turned. I saw it.”
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, and Francesca stopped with him, her attention riveted to his face. “I’m here, Ryker,” she said with quiet urgency. “Let’s step back, off the sidewalk, let’s stop here.”
She pulled him out of the mix of people and he let her drag him to another side street, where a collection of benches sat along the traffic circle-style intersection. He sank gratefully onto the closest bench, but it wasn’t the bench or the street or the sidewalk he saw in his memory.
It was another plane.
“There was someone else there that night,” he said. “The night I flew out into the storm. I was angry, careless. Didn’t perform all the checks—because there was someone there.”
Francesca had lifted her other hand to his, holding it tight. Vaguely he realized her hands remained cool on him while he felt like his were on fire. Her thumbs moved rhythmically up and down his skin, over his knuckles and back. “Do you know who it was?” she asked, her tone almost casual. As if the answer didn’t truly matter, as if he could tell her or not, it was all the same to her.
He relaxed another notch as he focused on the rhythm of her soft hands moving over his. “I don’t,” he said. “I did then. I should now. But I don’t.”
“You will or you won’t, and it will be okay,” Francesca said simply, and her words were like the lull of the tide, washing over him and drawing him out. A sense of languor spread through him, and he sighed, settling more deeply into himself.
“I don’t remember what happened after that. I…woke up in the street. Then again in the cab. You were there.” He squeezed her hands. “It seems you’re always there for me.”
“You fell,” she said, as if she was discussing the weather. “You dropped to your knees by the royal plane, then got up and moved away as fast as you could, though I don’t think you could see well. You were at the side of the road when I drove up in the cab. The driver helped get you in the car.”
“He knew me,” Ryker said, and he sensed the tension in Francesca, though she continued smoothly.
“He may have, or you may have reminded him of someone he once knew,” she said carefully. Then her tone became teasing. “Either way, he wouldn’t recognize you now. Your skin beneath your beard probably hasn’t seen the sun in a year.”
“Oh.” He straightened self-consciously. “I didn’t think about that. Is it bad?”
She looked up at him and sighed, then shook her head. “It’s not bad, no,” she said. “In fact, you’re now probably the most handsome man in Garronia, bar none.”
12
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Ari rumbled the words, and Fran held on to her teasing tone, as it seemed to comfort him. “Well, it’s been nice having you all to myself. Now that you no longer look like a beach bum, I might have to start fighting off the other women.”
He laughed and stirred on the bench, and she sat away from him then stood as he did. His left hand remained locked on hers, and she let him tug her back to the sidewalk. There was some sort of festival going on near the center of town, and Ari gravitated toward it.
Especially in the evening light, she didn’t much notice the difference in his skin tone between his cheekbones and his chin, and she suspected that a few days in the bright Garronia sun would blur those lines further. But there was no longer any denying the similarity between Ryker Stavros/Conti Goba and the deceased Aristotle Andris. She knew she shouldn’t allow him to walk around the city, despite her serving as a distracting cover, but she didn’t see how she could keep him from doing so without explaining why. Even now his brain was valiantly trying to link up the disparate bits of data it had—he was a pilot, he recognized the royal seal, he’d had a near collapse at the municipal airfield walking among his treasured planes.
What had he meant by his muttered phrase at the side of the road, though? “The bastard tried to kill me.” He hadn’t recalled saying those words, and she wondered if it would return to being buried in his psyche. Clearly, however, there’d been someone at the airfield who had caused him distress, someone that he’d been able to recall vividly tonight. One of the other mechanics? A pilot? She didn’t want to push him to find out. She felt that he was right on the edge of discovery…but now that discovery was becoming more perilous by the minute.
“You’re keeping all your thoughts to yourself.” Ari’s words tugged her back to the moment, and she offered him a rueful shrug.
“I spend a lot of time alone,” she said. “I get used to thinking more than talking.”
“The hallmark of a good counselor, I suspect? As long as you listen too.”
She laughed, forcing herself to unwind another notch. “We try to listen most of all,” she admitted. “So many recoveries are already right there, in the minds and hearts of the patients, that listening is all that’s required is to tease them out.”
“And who listens to you, Francesca?” Ari’s voice was light, flirtatious, but his question struck a deep pang of wariness inside her. “Who do you go to when you are done with all that thinking? I can’t imagine Nicki slows down enough very often for conversation.”
Fran chuckled. “Not if she can help it.”
“And your other friends?” Ari stopped as if he’d realized something new. “Your other friends—they’re staying at the palace now, yes?”
“Yes,” she allowed.
“We should go there,” he announced, so fervently that Fran would laugh if her head weren’t spinning. “I’m convinced there’s a link between me and the palace, one I need to understand if I’m ever going to regain my memories. If you are returning to your friends, surely the royal family would agree to see me.” He scoffed. “They footed the bill for my private rehab on Asteri Island. I can’t imagine they wouldn’t want a thank you for that.”
“We should go see them,” Fran agreed—how could she not? And it had to be better than letting Ari run around loose in the city. At least if he was inside the royal palace, they could keep him away from prying eyes. That mattered now more than ever since he’d decided to shave. “Tonight?”
