“I don’t know what happened to me or how I got to Paris or why or . . . I don’t know anything except this bed is very big and these sheets are very soft and those little cheeses are very good, and I just need something good, Sawyer. I just . . .” She wasn’t crying. It was like she’d lost her tears when she lost her money and her memories and her name. “I don’t know who I am.”
There were several hours of daylight left, but it was suddenly dark inside the honeymoon suite. Shadows lined her face, and he’d never felt more defenseless than when he sat there, watching her demons win.
Sawyer couldn’t tell her who she was. He couldn’t track down her memories. He might not even be able to track down her sister. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something.
He looked around. There was a pad of paper and a pen by the phone, so he got up and grabbed them, tossed them on the bed beside her. “Do me a favor and get this pen to work, will you?”
At first, she just sat there, looking up at him like he was very much a useless man. Then she pulled the lid off with her teeth and spat it halfway across the room, a do I have to do everything? look on her face, but he leaned against the table, crossed his arms, and tried not to smile and call her a smart-ass.
“So let’s say we go with your plan, what then?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” she whined. “What were we going to do if you hadn’t blown up your second favorite safe house with a snowball?”
“The snowball didn’t actually . . .” He rubbed a hand across his face as he trailed off. “I don’t know. I probably would have kept checking safe houses. Called up some old friends . . . or enemies.” He gave an ironic laugh. “Maybe her archnemesis has heard from her.”
Her eyes went wide. It was her excited face and he was starting to fear it.
“Ooh! Alex has a nemesis? Are they enemies to—”
“They are nothing to lovers!” Sawyer blurted, and her face fell. “Besides. He got out of the game five years ago and Alex hates his guts.”
“But you think he might have heard from her?” she asked.
“I think she’s got to be somewhere,” he told her softly, wishing like hell he didn’t have to say the next part but knowing she needed to hear it. “But the clock’s ticking. The agencies have unlimited resources. And Kozlov? If she has a weakness, sooner or later, he’ll find it. And his guys will use it.”
“You mean sooner or later, they’ll find me.” He wanted to go to her, hold her, tell her it would be okay, but she just threw the pen and paper at him. “Here. It works. Weirdo.”
He looked down at the paper and didn’t try to hide his grin. “Watch who you’re calling a weirdo . . . Zoe.”
Maybe it was the adrenaline crash or just the aftermath of her quiet, indignant rage, but it seemed to take her a moment to hear it—to realize what he’d said.
He tossed the paper back onto the bed, watched her scramble for it then look down at the pretty writing in wonder.
Zoe.
“How . . .”
He didn’t want to smirk but that didn’t mean he was able to stop it. “Ask someone to test a pen and nine times out of ten they’ll write their own name.”
“I don’t remember my name.”
“Your muscles do.”
He thought he heard her mumble something about butt kicking but he was too busy watching the smile bloom on her face to ask.
“I’m Zoe.” She looked younger than she had five minutes before, and the light was back in her eyes, and Jake Sawyer, a man who had spent the past decade doing very bad things to very bad people, couldn’t bear the thought of putting it out.
“No, you’re not.” He looked from the banks of the Seine to the woman on the bed and resigned himself to what he had to do. “Until you’re rested up and we have some kind of game plan . . . You’re Mrs. Michaelson.”
Chapter Nineteen
Him
Sawyer let her sleep. At some point in his training he’d been lectured about head wounds and concussion protocols, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open and between her full stomach and the gentle swaying of the ship and the knowledge that she had a name—Zoe, he reminded himself; Zoe had a name—she must have felt safe enough to roll back up in her blanket burrito and drift into the deepest sleep he’d ever seen.
He hated her for it.
Sawyer couldn’t remember the last time he had slept—had dreamed. Sleep with one eye open was a cliché but it was also a way of life. And his way of life was killing him. Probably sooner than he hoped.