What I Get in Return

"Mmm…"

A crushing weight on her skull dragged a groan out of Bella as her eyes opened. She bolted upright, eyes as wide as they would go, and the dizziness spinning through her head pulled her face into a grimace. For a moment her gaze wandered empty air. Then it caught a white ceiling trimmed in ornate molding. What her sleep had shown her and what her waking eyes held could not have been further apart.

A dream.

Tension and terror drained from her head, but her heart kept hammering as if it meant to burst, and it was a while before the pounding eased. This was not the first dream of its kind. They had grown rarer lately, yet when she had first gone to live in the Raymonds' house she had woken the same way, night after night, soaked through with sweat.

Being chased, and falling from a cliff—that must have been something that had truly happened to her.

She had been found in a park in Grand Bend, a place redevelopment had emptied of passersby, her body covered in wounds and chilled to the bone by a rain that had fallen all night. If the Raymonds had not been out on a hike, she would have died in those dense woods and left nothing behind.

She lifted a hand to her forehead and found a bandage wrapped there. A brace held her wrist rigid.

She remembered the street, the quarrel with Dane Hunter, the slip. After that, nothing. What had happened? Bella raked through a mind gone to panic.

Dane Hunter had behaved as if he knew her. The certainty in his eyes had been so absolute that it was difficult to believe he had simply mistaken her for someone else.

If she had finally met someone who knew her, she ought to have been glad. He had been furious—so furious she was afraid to ask what she was meant to be sorry for.

Bella jerked her head around. Beyond the vast window the city skyline glittered, and that was enough to tell her this was Dane Hunter's penthouse. The darkening view said time had passed.

She looked down and started, clapping a hand over her half-bared chest. The suit she had been wearing was gone. In its place was a white silk slip she had never seen in her life. Her eyes darted, frantic to make sense of it—and then the quiet broke.

"You're awake."

A low voice, badly cracked, cut across the room. Her body locked. Dane Hunter stood in the bedroom doorway, watching her.

"How do you feel."

He had been standing at a slant, both hands in his pockets. Now he came toward her, unhurried.

Bella scrambled off the bed and faced him, her face gone pale. The mere sight of him drew every nerve in her body tight. He stood a full head above her, and his frame was more than twice hers; Dane Hunter did not need to do anything but approach to make the air feel too small. Her eyes fled past his shoulder to the door, shut fast behind him. He caught the look and smiled, mouth twisting.

She faltered back a step, then another. Being alone with that man in an empty room made her feel she might come apart from the unease of it.

"You really don't remember me?"

He tipped his head and studied her. In the dim light the lines of his face showed clear—fine, and unmistakably a man's.

Only a little while ago he had tried to reach Neil. What he had heard from the mentor he respected had been a shock. Three years of her absence. He had been certain she was somewhere out there, laughing at him, living well. He could not make himself believe she had lost her memory and been surviving on another person's mercy.

He had no intention of offering cheap pity. Misfortune did not water down what she had done.

"Zena."

A large hand caught her chin as she retreated. His palm closed over her rigid cheek, and there was no slipping it.

Zena. Is that really my name?

Zena. Zena. She turned it over in her mind. Nothing came back. Not a shard.

Her eyes were wet, and they would not hold still. Dane laughed as if the sight were absurd. That slender neck—he had kissed it more times than he could count, and he had promised himself that if he ever saw it again he would break it—filled his vision.

"Want me to give you your memories back?"

His gaze traveled the white nape, where a pulse jumped, and the narrow line of her shoulder. Meeting his eyes was enough to send her heart lurching as if it had been thrown onto a track, and her lips went dry. In front of him every cell in her body seemed to rise at once and answer.

"Don't you want to know who you are?"

He murmured it low and licked his own mouth. Then his lips were at her ear, catching the lobe for a moment before they traveled down the side of her neck.

She had to shove him off. Her body would not move, a wind-up doll with a broken spring. So this was what it felt like when the head and the body refused to share a single will.

"Nnh—"

Her nape drew in, and his mouth bit down on it. The sting was sharp enough to drag a small sound out of her. Something strange climbed through her lower body, and she pressed her thighs together.

"Shh. Relax."

Hot breath sank deep into tender skin. She shook like a small animal that had offered its throat to a beast, and she could not move.

"You used to like it when I did this."

White teeth pressed lightly into skin gone tight with nerves. Breath rushed out between her lips, quick and uneven.

She understood it now. Her mind did not remember him. Her body did. The man who had come looking for her through countless nights, down in the dark of her unconscious, was standing in front of her.

The voice cut through her head like something heard that was not there, and Zena flinched. A ring glinting on a knuckle, and then—something tried to surface and fled again into the dark.

Her thoughts were so clouded she could not tell whether what was happening to her was dream or waking. The déjà vu filling her body was not, she thought, a mistake. Fear sat apart from the rest of it. Before a man sensual enough to make her legs fail, she felt reason leave her in a hurry.

What had they been to each other? Did he know her through and through, well enough to promise he could wake what she had lost?

"Put that hopelessly innocent look away."

He had been watching, quiet, as a shadow crossed her face. His tongue clicked. The low laugh that followed shook her heart as if the ground had moved. His thumb dragged slowly across her parted lips.

"Nothing's changed. Then or now."

Ash-gray eyes, the irises stark, caught the light.

Thump. Thump. She could hear her pulse in her ears.

Something. There was something. The unrest that had clawed at her heart every time she woke from the dream was here, in the waking world. In a blink, questions crowded her mind until she could not sort them.

For three years she had been shut inside a tower of forgetting. She could not go on forever as an emptied shell, not even knowing what had been taken from her. She had to learn it. Even if what she heard turned out to be nothing but disaster.

"Mr. Hunter."

Speaking his name, Zena caught her lower lip lightly between her teeth.

"Do you really know me? How well?"

One of his brows lifted, just barely.

"Better than anyone alive."

The voice that followed was slow, and it left no room. He started to say something else, stopped, and looked straight through her.

"Go on."

She couldn't answer.

"How much of it do you want."

"All of it. Every last piece."

"Is that so."

His eyes traveled the feminine line of her cheek and jaw, the baby fat long gone. Time had laid a maturity over her, and her body was far more languid than it had been. Three years, and the girl was gone. What stood in her place was a woman ripe and dangerously seductive.

"If I help you…"

A feminine waist and sensual hips that a scrap of thin cloth could not hide. A shoulder line smooth, without an ounce of excess, lovely enough to tempt any man.

"What do I get?"

"What?"

"Give and take. There ought to be something in it for me."

What she could offer a man who seemed to possess the entire world was painfully obvious. She might suspect it, but she did not have the courage to ask outright. And if he named some unreasonable price, would she even be able to refuse?

She had far too much to recover to play at modesty and turn him down. No—her whole life was a mystery, and if she did not take this man's hand she would stay sunk in the swamp forever. There was no one, just now, who knew her better. The key to pulling her out was closed in his fist.

"What do you want from me?"

Zena dropped her eyes and fidgeted with her hands. She had asked. She was afraid of the answer.

Dane rolled his tongue slowly along the inside of his mouth, as if turning something over. The small, frail chin trembled, and the urge to torment her rose of its own accord.

"Foolish. What do you think?"

"I'll look after your child—Jude—with everything I have. Room and board would be enough."

She released the lip she had bitten hard and spoke with a desperate earnestness. Dane laughed without a sound.

My child. And yours as well. He had no intention of telling her that tonight.

These past three years she had clearly struck bottom and found no way up. If a woman like that ever learned she was Jude's birth mother, she might start invoking parental rights and show him something shameless. Better, for now, to keep the truth buried. A woman who might vanish again—no telling when, no telling how—must not be allowed to wound the child.

"Fine. There's one thing you need to know about Jude."

She waited.

"He has a tic disorder. Take responsibility for it and fix it. The faster those symptoms improve, the hotter I'll burn to help you get your memory back."

"You mean it? You'll really do that?"

"Zena Lee. Twenty-six. Born to a Korean mother and a Korean-American father. Studied special education at NEIU—Northeastern Illinois University. Well? Tell you and you still won't remember, but it's a decent start, isn't it?"

There was no word for what it felt like to hear the story of her own life from someone else's mouth, a life she could not recall. Zena drew a slow breath in, and let it out, trying to quiet the heart that was thrashing in her chest.