Hide?A shiver of apprehension slid through Fran. She was out of her depth. Had someone been hunting for Ari? Threatening him from the start? No one had said anything about that. But there was no time to consult the official history of Aristotle Andris before the crash. All she had to work with was Ryker Stavros here, now.
And he needed her.
Ryker knewhe should shut the hell up, that he should pull his hands away from Francesca, but neither of those options appealed right now. Sweat dripped cold down his neck, falling onto her hands gripping his, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to let go when he was so—close, he thought. To a breakthrough. A memory. Something.
“Once I got into the open water, I spent as much time rowing as I did bailing. Couldn’t trust the motor. I was taking on water too fast to move at any speed.” He turned away from Francesca’s beautiful face but didn’t see the softly swaying trees behind her. Instead he saw the long rocky shoreline that marked the mainland. And there’d been heat, he remembered now. So much heat.
“The local squatters helped—or tried to. Tried to keep me quiet anyway. Out of the way. But they found me.”
“Who?” Francesca prompted and he couldn’t stop the smile that creased his lips. Her word was steady and quiet, but cautious too. Like everything about her was cautious. When he’d said her name so roughly, his intent to kiss her obviously clear, wariness had been Francesca’s primary response. Not fear. Not revulsion. But caution. As if she had to proceed carefully, bit by well-considered bit.
He didn’t mind answering her though. “I don’t know who. Someone new, different. That I understood. Someone else I’d managed to piss off. And hell, maybe I had committed a crime. It seemed like I could have, the way I was so—I don’t know. Guilty, really. I felt guilty. Over what I don’t know.”
He shook his head, knowing how all this must sound. “Believe me, I already laid all this on Stefan. Not the timetable—that was a new memory. That I’d landed at night and all of that. But the guilt…” he chuckled now, recalling that memory clearly when everything else was in such a fog. “I asked him if I’d committed a crime. He stared at me like the idea was insane. So I asked him if I was a priest.”
Francesca’s eyes flashed wide, a bark of laughter sneaking out despite her clear attempt to remain dispassionate. “A priest?”
“Well, who isn’t at leastafraidhe’s guilty of some crime, other than a man of God? The way Stefan reacted made me laugh but he said no, in the end. They’d checked. There were no crimes committed the day I’d disappeared. No warrants for my arrest. No one asking for my head on a platter.” He grimaced. “And if anyone would know about my past, it’s that guy, let me tell you.”
“He seems thorough.”
Francesca’s voice sounded a little wan, but Ryker knew she understood—anyone who’d met Stefan Mihal understood immediately how far he’d go to get answers. “Yeah, thorough would be how I’d describe him too.” And a few other words Francesca didn’t really need to know, he thought. He’d rather avoid the aristocratic diplomat going forward.
And he could avoid the man a lot more easily if he wasn’t tripping over him two hundred times a day.
“Anyhow, so I’m apparently clean, have no criminal history, and didn’t upset the wrong man at the wrong time.” Ryker breathed a long sigh, finally working up the strength until he could finally let go of Francesca’s hands. He felt their loss like a physical ache, and focused on clenching his own into fists. “Of course, that hasn’t gotten me any closer to getting free of this place, but maybe now that you’re here, things will move more quickly.”
Though he hadn’t intended the words as some kind of negative, Francesca drew herself up sharply. “How do you mean?”
Ryker could have kicked himself. The layer of frost edging Francesca’s tone was gossamer thin—but it was undoubtedly there.
“It’s been silent as a tomb here for a week. Nothing but me, the docs and the VIPs in the big house, who must be here for political asylum or something because they are seriously hiding out. Now that you’re here, however, and it seems like your friend Nicki is about to climb out of her own skin, it feels like…I don’t know. Like life can start moving again.”
To his relief, though he hadn’t realized he’d been nervous, Francesca coughed a short laugh. “I’m glad you have such belief in my abilities to move the indomitable mountain of Stefan Mihal,” she said wryly. “I honestly think Nicki thought they’d say no to having me drop in, so she zoomed over before anyone fully knew what she was up to. Now that I’m here, they’re not sure what to do with me, either.”
“You don’t believe she truly needed you for moral support?”
Once again, Francesca appeared cautious. “I’m not saying she didn’t,” she hedged. “And of course I’m happy to come help her, regardless of what she needed.”
“You two are that close?”
She shrugged, but her manner changed subtly again, becoming more confident. “It’s more a point of knowing we can rely on each other. Nicki is a big believer in the mental side of recovery from an injury, and I’m interested in that too.”
Her last words tugged at him, and he frowned. “The mental side,” he repeated. “You’re a doctor? A trainer?”
Francesca’s easy laugh would have soothed him ordinarily, but he was getting the sense that such reassurance came easily to her, one of the tools she used to give comfort and relief. Not that it wasn’t authentic, but there was something intentional about her every response that made him itch to know the woman below the surface.
First, however, he had to understand the womanonthe surface.
“I’m a student, I think is the most accurate to put it,” she said. “I’m training in psychology, but I’ve worked with athletes many times throughout my coursework so far. Soldiers too.”
A psychology student, he thought. That explained a lot of her careful manner. “Soldiers?” he prompted.
“A bit,” she nodded. “I was part of a several-month study to help injured service men and women recover from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As you can imagine, there are no shortage of candidates for that.”
He stared. “You didn’t go to a war zone, surely.”
“No, one of the allied bases in Europe, there was a hospital there who received patients from multiple places.” She was being deliberately vague, but this he understood. He had served in—
