"That's really pretty the way they--Oh." She stopped speaking as Freddy walked purposefully up to the flowers and lifted his leg to water them.

  She grinned, shaking her head, and looked at Adam.

  He didn't share her private amusement, though. He just unlocked the door to his room, then walked back to the Lincoln to grab their luggage--and then realized they didn't have any. It was all still in the Expedition.

  Freddy came running back to Olivia at her call, and the two went inside through the door Adam had just opened.

  He shook his head and followed.

  "Look, Adam, there's a dog bed--and dishes, too!"

  "Yeah." He glanced at the padded doggy bed on the floor. Brown plush, thick and cozy, and he thought it would only hold about half of Freddy's massive body. Fred preferred to be in bed beside his doting owner, though, so it probably didn't matter.

  "And a back door. I need to see if..." She crossed the room toward the door in question as she spoke, flinging it open and looking outside. "Oh, this is perfect, I didn't realize. Freddy, come!"

  The dog loped to her side and peeked out, and she stretched out her arm and pointed. "Go outside. Run, Freddy, run!"

  With a happy "woof," Freddy bolted.

  Curious to see that what had made the dog so happy, Adam opened the door to the second room, a twin of the one they were in, and joined her in the doorway. Behind the motel, a grassy lawn stretched out in either direction, completely surrounded by a shiny new chain-link fence. A wooden stand in a far corner held a trash can, a few scoopers and a sign that read Clean Up After Your Pet.

  Freddy was running from one end of the lawn to the other, pausing to sniff at places where other dogs had left their scents, then spinning around and galloping off again so fast he nearly tripped over his own legs.

  Adam couldn't help but smile at the dog's antics. His attitude relaxed a little, and he turned to look at Olivia. She was leaning in the doorway, watching her dog with the most loving expression on her face.

  Imagine her looking at me that way.

  Whoa, where the hell had that come from?

  He shook himself, blinking, not sure what had come over him.

  "I guess that second room and adjoining door were unnecessary after all," she said softly. "Freddy will be happy right out there."

  He frowned. "The second room was for Freddy?"

  She looked up into his face, her brown eyes dancing. "Oh, hell. You thought I wanted it for me, didn't you?"

  He nodded.

  She smiled a soft, romantic smile that was designed, he was sure, to make him turn to mush. He was not, he told himself, a mushy-turning kind of a guy.

  "You thought I only slept with you because I believed you were my favorite writer. And that now that I know better, I wouldn't want to be with you again. Which would make me a pretty lousy person. Is that what you think of me, Adam?"

  Her hand had curled around his nape, her fingers moving lightly over his skin, and he was fighting the urge to close his eyes, tip his head back and moan softly.

  "I don't know what I was thinking. Just that it wasn't me you wanted. It was him."

  "It was you." She stared into his eyes to emphasize the words, then went on. "Freddy's been cooped up for days now. I just thought with two connected rooms, he'd at least have a little room to romp. And a bed of his own, since we left his in the other SUV. That's all." She leaned up a little, brushed his mouth with her lips. "And I have to admit, I thought the notion of giving the big lug a bed all to himself would give us a little more room for...whatever."

  His lips curved into a smile that felt a little crooked and a little goofy, but he didn't care. He stopped arguing with himself about what was wise and slid his arms right around her waist, pulling her close. And then he bent his head and kissed her, long and deep. She opened her mouth to him and their tongues mated, and he knew she still wanted him, maybe more than before. He could tell by the way she arched her hips against him. He was hard before the first kiss melded into the next.

  He reached out to close the door. She caught his hand and stopped him, muttering an explanation between kisses. "I want him to be able to get back in when he's ready."

  "He'll be fine."

  She shook her head beneath his mouth. "It's a new place. He'll be scared."

  The notion of a two-hundred-pound mastiff getting scared almost made him laugh, but he didn't want to ruin the mood. Whatever Olivia wanted was perfectly fine with him, as long as she was going to give him another taste of her glorious body and another round of her enthusiastic passion.

  Turning her toward the bed, he shuffle-walked with her, never breaking the contact of their lips. At the bed, she fell backward, pulling him down on top of her, and they made out like a pair of horny teenagers.

  Twenty minutes later Freddy came loping through the door and right up to the bed, where he paused, staring at them. He lifted one paw, set it on the mattress and waited, a question in his eyes, brows crooked as if he were human.

  "Go lie down, Freddy," Olivia said, pointing toward the second room as she grabbed a pillow and threw it at the back door. It connected, and the door closed with a bang. Freddy jumped, barked once at the noise, then calmed again. With a giant sigh, he plodded into the adjoining room, and a moment later Adam heard the bedsprings creak beneath his weight.

  About ten seconds after that, the sound of his chain-sawlike snoring filled both rooms.

  Adam laughed in midkiss. She was laughing, too, and he realized this was something he was sure he'd never done before, even without his memory. Laughing while making love. They'd laughed the first time, too. It felt different. More intimate, somehow, than the sex act itself.

  The outside door was closed now, the dog settled. No more reason to extend the pre-game show, although he had to admit he was enjoying the hell out of it. But already she was squirming out of her clothes and tugging at his. So he helped, and with a bit more wiggling they were both naked and twined around each other again. He found her wet and eager, and sliding inside her, he felt a rush of sensation that was almost beyond endurance. And it was more than physical, dammit--though he told himself that realization would have to wait until later to scare the hell out of him.

  And it would. He knew damn well it would.

  But right at that moment, he didn't particularly care.

  15

  She lay curled in his arms, her head on his chest, his heartbeat thrumming in her ear. And she felt things she didn't think she ought to be feeling. She'd only known him such a short time. And to be honest, she'd been experiencing this onslaught of tenderness toward him from the beginning. But she'd written it off to empathy for his plight, to identifying with his situation--feeling hunted, having to hide. Those were things she understood all too well. Anything beyond that...she'd written off those emotions, as well. She'd told herself it was normal to feel so close to the man who wrote the novels that had fed her lonely soul for so long.

  But none of those things explained the level to which her feelings had soared tonight. She knew he wasn't the author of the books she loved. She knew he might very well be more perpetrator than victim in whatever had befallen him. And yet there was this softness in the very center of her heart--a place that had been, she was certain, hard and numb before. What had been like the pit of a barely ripe peach had become the soft, warm, gooey middle of a fine chocolate truffle, and she could tell there would be no going back ever again.

  She lay there on his chest feeling warm all over, one leg over his so she could rub her smooth calf over his hairy shin and enjoy the delicious contact.

  He squeezed her a little closer, his arm around her shoulders, and she sighed. Then the sigh formed words, and the words were, "I love you."

  She bit her lip, and her eyes popped open wide. She felt him tense beneath her and wished she could suck the words back, but there was no way. She'd said it. She didn't even know for sure if she meant it, but she'd said it. There was no taking it back now.

  "You know that's not really possible, right?" he asked, after a moment of what had to be stunned silence.

  "I didn't mean to say it. Really, I didn't. It was some kind of a...a...tic. A spasm."

  "A spasm," he repeated.

  "Like when you get a muscle twitch."

  "Right, or a hiccup."

  "Exactly. Just treat it like a hiccup and forget it."

  "Not such an easy thing to forget. But like I said, pretty much impossible. I mean, you don't know me. Hell, I don't know me."

  She swallowed hard and lifted her head to stare into his eyes. "I know you," she whispered.

  He held her gaze for a long moment, but she said nothing more. It was the truth. She did know him. Not the minutiae of his life. Not the stats, the history, the details. Him.

  He was a good man. An honest man. A brave one, and yes, perhaps a violent one, too, when it was called for. And skilled at it. But she didn't think he was the kind who would wield that skill against an innocent. He certainly hadn't done anything but watch out for and protect her.

  And Freddy loved him.

  Really, that said it all. He couldn't be dangerous to her, not in any way, or Freddy would know and wouldn't have tolerated him coming anywhere near her.

  Then again, she thought with a little chill, Freddy wouldn't know if he posed a threat to her heart. That kind of danger wouldn't be so easy for her best friend to sense. And it wasn't the kind of thing he could protect her from, either.

  She snuggled closer. Adam hadn't bolted from the bed at her impulsive declaration, and she took that as a good sign. She hadn't scared him too badly. Then again, he didn't scare easily.

  "Get some sleep, if you can," he said at length.

  She interpreted. "You mean you don't want to talk about emotional stuff anymore tonight. That it was just sex, and I shouldn't read anything more into it. And that you need a whole lot more time to process that stupid declaration I just made before you can even begin to know how to respond."

  He rolled onto his side and stared into her eyes for one long, silent moment. "No. I meant what I said. You should get some sleep if you can. We have a big day tomorrow, and we can't stay here long before we need to get going again."

  She blinked at him. "So you really don't want to talk about...this?"

  "I don't know what there is to talk about. We had sex. It was great. Aside from that--"

  "Oh, is that how it is?"

  "Is what how it is? What do you want me to say? I don't even know who I am, Liv. Or what I do, or where I live, or if I'm married with six kids, for God's sake."

  "What does any of that have to do with how you feel?"

  "It has to do with where I'm coming from."

  "But how do you feel?"

  She was pushing, she knew it, and she didn't like it, and yet something was driving her. Some irrational part of her she felt she barely knew was pushing her to push him.

  He shook his head. "I feel good. Satisfied. Relaxed."

  "About me," she persisted.

  He drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "I like you. I think you're beautiful and smart and very brave. And I think you've been hiding in a self-created shell for a long time, and that this is the first time you've allowed yourself to be coaxed out of it. I think you're living for the first time in a long time--really living. And parts of it aren't so good. Guns and killers and shootouts. And other parts are very good. Attraction and sex and excitement. And I think that this is like a thrill ride to you, and I think you're going to want to settle back down into the mundane life of a college professor in a small New England town when it's over."

  She listened, nodding slowly, and when he finished, she said, "But how do you feel about me?"

  He rolled his eyes. "Go to sleep, Olivia. And hold off on being too sure about those feelings of yours, at least until we find out who and what I really am. For your own good. Okay?"

  "I'm not sure I have much of a choice in the matter, to be completely frank. I mean, it's not like I analyzed the situation and decided to fall in love with you, you know."

  He frowned at her as if she were speaking some unknown dialect, then shook his head as if giving up on her completely and rolled onto his side, facing her. He hooked an arm around her and closed his eyes.

  Ten minutes later he was snoring almost as heavily as Freddy was. And she lay there wondering if any of what she'd said tonight had made any sense at all. Because he didn't seem to think it did. And she wasn't so sure herself.

  At 5:00 a.m. he was still awake. He hadn't really slept, only pretended to, so she would stop with the talk about feelings. Once Olivia had finally fallen asleep, he'd alternated between lying on his back, staring through the darkness at the ceiling, and lying on his side, staring at her face. Both objects of his attention gave him equal amounts of clarity. Zip.

  How did a woman swear off men for sixteen years to keep herself safe, then fall in love with a complete stranger? How did she hold everyone she knew at arm's length, and fall for the first guy she let herself get close to? How did she stop trusting males so completely, only to give her trust to the guy who was probably less deserving of it than anyone she knew?

  Was she that self-destructive?

  And why was it bothering him so much? He ought to just write it off to female insanity and let it go. If she was fool enough to think she loved a man she didn't know, then she deserved whatever she got, right? Including a broken heart.

  So then why was he so damn nervous about what they were going to find in Philadelphia? It wasn't that he was afraid of learning the truth. Whatever it was, he would deal with it. It would be better than not knowing.

  He was actually obsessing, he realized, about what her reaction to the truth about him would be.

  And as much as the potential outcomes wanted to take turns racing through his mind, he knew there was only one way to find out, and that was to get on with it. They'd solved her biggest problem: Tommy Skinner. Maybe someone else was after her, and maybe not, but he knew he could keep her safe as long as she was with him. So now it was time to solve his biggest problem--he just hoped it wasn't going to unleash a whole passel of new ones.

  He slid out of bed, careful not to wake her, and she rolled onto her side, stretching one arm and one leg out from beneath the covers in a pose worthy of a centerfold before settling more deeply into sleep again. He stood beside the bed looking down at her and thinking he wanted to climb right back in, kiss her awake and have another round of incredible sex.

  Unfortunately, that would likely result in her wanting him to talk about his feelings some more, and he didn't want to hear it. Not now, not when he still thought he might be a hired gun sent to kill her.

  Freddy bumped him in the hip with his giant head, and he looked down to see the dog staring at him with a look of impatience in his eyes. He could have been thinking Adam was an idiot not to declare his undying love just to keep this smart, beautiful, sexy woman by his side for as long as possible. But it was more likely, Adam thought, that the dog just needed to go outside.

  He opened the door to let him, and then he hit the shower.

  Two hours later, they were on their way.

  He'd intended to be under way much sooner, but she'd had other ideas. She'd lingered in the shower, then insisted on buying fresh meat for Freddy as a special treat, and after feeding him, she'd spent forty-five minutes romping through a vacant field with him. When that was done, she'd started chirping about needing coffee until they stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts for a vat-size mugful and a breakfast sandwich. And then, finally, they drove the last hundred miles into Philadelphia, the GPS directing them in its calm, steady voice. Something in Adam's mind seemed to perk up as they ate up the distance to their destination.

  "It feels familiar, doesn't it?" she asked.

  He nodded, barely hearing her through the rush of sensations swirling through his mind. The neat sidewalks, the buildings, the smells. He nodded. "This is where I live." And then he felt a smile pull at his lips. "There's a bar around that corner--Paulie's Pub."

  He turned the corner, pointing, and she spotted the name on the sign. "Oh, my God, you're right," she breathed. "You're remembering!"

  "I don't know. I mean, I know it's there. And that I've been there. And I know I like it because people mind their own business there. But I don't remember anything specific."

  "No? What's it like on the inside?" she asked.

  As soon as she asked the question, he could see the inside of Paulie's. The round amber globes over the low-hanging ceiling lights that gave the place a quiet ambience. He saw the bar stools, burgundy leather upholstery and antique-looking gold-toned tacks holding it in place. He saw the horseshoe-shaped bar and the mirrored wall behind it, the racks on that wall filled with bottles and glasses.

  But before he could relate any of it to her, the GPS was interrupting. "You have reached your destination."

  He blinked, his eyes shooting first to the dashboard and then to the buildings around him. One stood out. It wasn't redbrick like everything else on the block. It was reddish-tinted concrete, with a pair of matching cement lions guarding the double doors. The circular drive was brick, though, curving around a giant fountain that stood between the building and the street.

  "That's it," he said. "That's where I live."

  She lifted her brows. "It looks like a hotel."

  "Condos. And I own the penthouse."

  She stared at him, blinking.

  He swallowed hard. "I can almost see inside it."

  "You can actually see inside it," she said. "You have the key, remember?"

  He nodded, cruising slowly past the building, tearing his eyes from it to look at the other vehicles on the street. He saw no sign of surveillance. No FBI types seemed to be watching. There wasn't much traffic, and anyone parked, or just sitting or standing, nearby and trying to look inconspicuous would be easily spotted. There was no one.