Don't Drag Me Into Your Delusions

"And my family? Don't I have a family at all?"

"Greedy."

Their eyes had barely crossed before she flicked her gaze aside, and Dane caught her chin in his hand.

"The more you want, the more you ought to consider what you'll be giving me in return. Don't you think?"

"Just one thing. Just one more. What were we to each other?"

"You want to know?"

The corner of Dane's mouth curled.

"I don't think you do."

He lowered his face close, and a sharp shadow cut across it.

Zena's lashes trembled where his grip held her jaw. His eyes traveled over her—the unsteady flicker of her gaze, the small straight bridge of her nose, lips flushed hot.

"You were always this sly."

He murmured it from a distance where their mouths might or might not have met. Dane Hunter's eyes, meeting hers from that near, were dark and cold as deep water.

"Wearing that face. Innocent. As if you didn't know a thing."

Veins stood rigid along the back of the hand that bound her chin.

He tipped her head back and leaned in. A faint trace of alcohol drifted where the tips of their noses crossed. Zena fought her quickening breath and moved her lips.

The dream rose in her—herself bound so she could not move, taken by him. Feeling crashed through feeling, and her heart slammed as if it might burst.

"You and I... were we lovers?"

Dane angled his head and, instead of answering, laughed under his breath. Zena blinked up at him.

"The way you're this angry, it doesn't seem as if we were only ordinary—"

His face went hard again in an instant.

"See?"

She couldn't have said why, but the words scored her heart. Zena lost whatever she had meant to say. With an indifferent face Dane let her go and took a step back.

"I'll take you to Professor Raymond's tomorrow. Leaving without a goodbye wouldn't be polite."

He stared a moment longer at Zena as she let out a shaking breath, then turned his back.

His footsteps stopped halfway across the living room.

Goddamn it. He remembered how close he had come, only moments ago, to losing the reins and going for her. The want had swallowed him—to close a hand around her throat and crush his mouth down over hers until he swallowed her. It was only because her eyes had been on his face. Another second and she would have seen how hard he was, hard enough to strain against his lower belly.

He strode into the master bedroom and yanked the bathroom door open, nerves raw.

Zena and Dane arrived at the Raymonds' bungalow the following afternoon.

"Bella!"

Aiden came running as she stepped through the door, both arms thrown wide. Zena bent and swept him up. He locked his legs around her waist and covered her cheek in loud, smacking kisses, welcoming her with his whole small body.

"Bella, where were you? You're only coming now? I was waiting."

"Did you wait a long time? I'm sorry."

She tickled his side. Aiden arched back and laughed as if the joy might knock him flat.

Dane, coming in behind her, stopped where he stood and watched them greet each other.

The irony sat cold in him. For three years this woman had forgotten even the existence of her own blood, and all the while she had been playing mother to someone else's child.

"Come in."

Jillian came out of the kitchen, took Dane's coat, and offered a gentle smile. A good smell filled the house; she had clearly been cooking in anticipation of guests.

"It's been a while. The last time we saw you was at the retirement ceremony, wasn't it?"

"So it was."

Jillian squinted at Zena's forehead as she held Aiden.

"How did you manage to fall? Does it hurt badly? We were terribly worried when we heard you'd been hurt."

"I'm all right."

After exchanging greetings with Neil, Dane went on into the living room, and Zena took Aiden to her room.

She changed, tumbled around on the bed playing with him, and by the time she came back out, some conversation had already passed between the others.

"Bella... no. Zena. I still can't believe you've gotten your identity back like this."

The Raymonds looked genuinely stunned. The name still felt awkward to the one saying it and the one hearing it, but it was the first step in turning three derailed years back toward the life that had been hers.

"To run into someone who recognized you at the very place you went looking for work—can a coincidence like that even exist?"

Jillian and Neil looked glad, and more than a little shaken.

"But how do the two of you know each other? You said Zena is twenty-six now? Then three years ago she was only twenty-three. How could her path have crossed Mr. Hunter's at all..."

"Zena was one of the students our firm sponsored."

"Ah. I see...!"

Jillian's face settled, as if that explained everything. Zena's did not. She was not dull enough to miss that the way Dane Hunter treated her went beyond a sponsor and a student. The breathless sexual tension that closed in whenever they were alone was not the sort of thing a person could ignore.

"Now I can really leave with an easy heart. Bella—no, Zena, come and sit."

Neil spoke in his usual warm tone. Dane watched her over the rim of the hot teacup Jillian kept refilling.

"I can't tell you how glad I am that Zena found herself before we go. She's an inexpressibly pure, good child. You'd know, if you've spent any time with her."

At that, Dane's brow twitched, barely.

"Of course. I know her well."

Before the Raymonds, who were waiting on his answer, he drew up one corner of his mouth and smiled. Just then Aiden, lingering in a corner of the living room with a toy in his hands, edged shyly toward Zena.

"Bella, where are you going?"

"Hm? Oh, Aiden, that's..."

She needed to say something, but her throat closed as if a hand had caught it. Three years was not a short time even for an adult. In the life five-year-old Aiden remembered, she had never once been missing.

Please don't let him feel abandoned. Don't let this goodbye become a wound. Wanting that might only have been an adult's selfishness, a way to keep her own heart comfortable.

Zena lifted him onto her lap and pressed a soft kiss to the crown of his head.

"If you go to England first, I'll follow later. There's something I have to do."

"You'll go and come right back, right? I don't like being away from Bella."

For a child who had followed her like a mother since he was two, it was only natural.

"Of course. Obviously. And you'll listen to the grown-ups while I'm gone, won't you? If you're good, I'll bring you a present."

"Okay. But come quick."

There was no way to promise when they would see each other again, and no way to lay that truth on a child.

Heavy as a guilty woman, Zena brought his small hand to her lips and kissed it again and again. The corners of her eyes stung of their own accord.

"I'm not leaving right away. I'll stay until you and Grandma and Grandpa leave for England. Mr. Hunter, if it isn't too much trouble, would that be all right?"

At her question Dane looked from her to Aiden and back, and did not answer. Neil turned toward him as well, as if seeking the same reply.

"Would that be all right? We'd like a few more days with Zena ourselves, if we may."

"It's fine."

Dane watched her draw Aiden close and soothe him, something cold and sour in his face.

You can ache like that for a child who hasn't a drop of your blood, and you can't even recognize your own flesh? Even if I failed to know him, your child should have remembered you. Then again—if you'd loved him that way, you never would have walked off and left him.

Neil turned toward Dane then, as if to lift the sunken mood.

"Speaking of which, I thought I once heard you had a fiancée. Was I wrong?"

"A rumor that got around. It wasn't true."

At the question Dane uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.

"I see. For a child's sake, you'll have to make a home someday. Not that you need me telling you. You'll manage well enough on your own."

"I don't know. I'm not thinking about it yet."

A fresh start. That had been unthinkable then, and it was unthinkable now.

There had been no shortage of women who tried to tempt him. The one who slipped into his private imaginings was someone else.

Smooth, damp skin winding under his fingers. The look of her gazing up at him with the corners of her eyes and her cheeks flushed red. And between those legs, clenched so tight that every time he drove in he had to summon the last of his restraint—because it was the best he had ever had.

If you rise in me at the crest of every blinding orgasm, then you were born a temptress, Zena. The worst kind.

"Anyway, please look after our Zena. I can't shake the worry that such a fragile child might not make it through this."

"Zena isn't as fragile as you think. You needn't worry."

At the words Jillian added, Dane smiled, thin and cold.

A week since she had her name back. The day the Raymonds and Aiden finally left for England.

The couple's small bungalow was busy with people coming and going. So many had already visited over the past few days to say goodbye, and even on the day of departure more than a few neighbors came for one last look at their faces. Talk among those gathered turned, naturally, to Zena.

The neighbors who had heard she had recovered her identity were, to a person, alight with it.

She had met someone who recognized her at the very place she had gone looking for work. And that someone was no ordinary man, but a figure of world-class wealth. For the wives of a quiet town where nothing ever happened, it was drama enough to make their eyes go wide.

"Come and see us now and then. I think I'm going to miss you terribly."

Mrs. Hoyt, who had always been fond of her, said it with regret. For a parting gift she had brought a generous portion of the pâté Zena loved.

Stopped in the entry for the last time, Jillian pulled Zena into her arms and let the tears come.

Regret and joy both ran down her cheeks. Neil, moving the luggage, did not look entirely bright either. But he had no intention of joining the women's tears.

"We'll see each other again."

He gave Zena a light embrace and went outside.

"Bella, you have to come soon!"

Aiden, strapped into his car seat, waved through the open window. Zena bit her lip and waved back with the brightest face she could manage. As the car carrying them shrank out of sight, she felt the strength leave her body. In the empty living room, the furniture draped in white sheets seemed to announce that the time she had lived here was over.

Seated on the sheet-covered sofa, Zena slipped a hand into the pocket of her cardigan and found the new phone Dane Hunter had given her. Now that she meant to call him, the nerves came. She drew a sharp breath and lifted it to her ear. It rang perhaps five times, and then the tone cut off. No greeting came back.

Dane left only that, and hung up. Zena leaned back against the sofa and stared for a long while at a space that no longer had its people.

Dane looked down at Zena, newly arrived at the penthouse, through eyes narrowed to a thin line. He had just come back from a meeting with a client, his hair impeccably done, dressed in a suit that breathed quiet, expensive elegance.