Page 23 of Hunter

His gaze slid away from hers, and she sensed that he didn’t want to tell her the answer.

“You must go,” he said suddenly.

“Why?”

“You should not be with me. Alone. You will get into trouble.”

“How do you know that?”

“The same way I knew about Major Fenton. I hear people talk. I listen to what they say. Granger and Winslow were laughing about your assignment checking personnel records. Winslow called it shoveling chicken shit.”

She nodded. Probably they talked in front of him quite a bit without realizing how much he was taking in.

“Dr. Kolb will come back.”

“Where is he?”

“He was called away. I was waiting for him. You came instead.”

She wondered if someone had sent the doctor a note—like the one she had received.

“Go,” Hunter said.

She raised her face toward his. “Do you want me to leave?”

A shadow crossed his eyes. “I made the mistake of wanting something from you before.”

The look and the words made her heart squeeze. In this little room, she had created the illusion of privacy. Just as she’d imagined they wouldn’t be disturbed in the locker room.

But the same conditions prevailed as the last time they’d talked. Someone could come in at any time. It might be Dr. Kolb. It might be McCourt. Or even a security team with tranquilizer guns. And this time Hunter wouldn’t be the only target. This time she’d get a reprimand—or worse—for disobeying Emerson’s orders.

In the locker room, she had told Hunter she would help him. With all her heart, she longed to assure him that none of the unspeakable things they’d done to him would ever happen again. More than that, she wanted to tell him that she would help him get his memory back. That he would be whole again. Yet she’d come to realize that she couldn’t say any of that. If she gave him assurances, they might be a lie. And the worst thing she could do was lie to him.

“If you are my friend, Kathryn Kelley, please go away!” he said again, his voice harsh.

She knew he was right—at least for now. She allowed herself only a quick squeeze of his shoulder. Unable to look into his eyes, she turned and hurried across the little room, but she felt his gaze burning into her back all the way to the door.

By the time she had left the building, she had decided. She was going to force a confrontation with Emerson, because he was the only one with the authority to make a difference in Hunter’s situation.

Climbing into her car, she barreled off. After half a block, she slowed her pace, reminding herself again that it would be stupid to charge half-cocked into the office of the Chief of Operations. She had to understand her goals and then think clearly about what she wanted to say.

Pulling under the shade of a maple tree, she made a concerted effort to bring her breathing back to normal. When she reached into her pocketbook for a tissue, she found the medical forms.

Stupid, she thought. Very stupid.

Climbing out of the car, she returned to the medical center. When the nurse at the front desk looked up inquiringly, she slapped the papers onto the desk. “I forgot these.”

Thirty seconds later, she was out of the building again and looking up and down the sidewalk to see if anyone was watching. Luck seemed to be with her. Keeping her pace steady, she walked back to her car. What she wanted was to give Hunter back a normal life. However, she suspected the Chief of Operations didn’t give a damn about that. He and the rest of the staff thought of Hunter as the subject of an experiment. They were training him for a dangerous assignment, and they wanted her to help make sure he completed it successfully. Somehow, she had to make it seem as if her private agenda meshed with her official duties.

And maybe she had an ally, she thought, as she remembered the note. Someone who had been willing to give her the gift of a few minutes alone with Hunter. She considered the senior staff, pondering the possibilities, but could come up with no obvious candidates. Some of them seemed in favor of her working with Hunter. Some had voiced opposition. But she couldn’t be absolutely sure which men were revealing their real feelings and which ones were secretly glad she’d been assigned to shoveling chicken shit. The only thing she knew for sure was that whoever had left the note was afraid to come out into the open.

Which only reinforced the growing realization that both she and Hunter were in a precarious position. Every contact with him made her surer that the story about his criminal background was a convenient fiction. If she operated on that premise, the logical way to help him was to bring back his buried memories by finding touchstones to his past and using them to trigger remembered responses. And if they’d made it impossible for him to remember his past life, teaching him about social norms would help him cope when he finally got out of this place.

The plan had a certain elegance, and she found herself with a genuine smile on her face for the first time since she’d arrived at Stratford Creek.

She took it as a good omen when she stepped into the anteroom to Emerson’s office and saw that the tough-as-nails secretary was away from her desk.

“Sir?” she called, as she knocked on his door. “Mr. Emerson, I need to speak to you. And—”

---