Page 30 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“Do you need some help?”
“I do not.” The words were crisp and brittle.
“Because itlooks like...”
“Here.” They must have been in worse shape than she thought for him to hand over the tools that quickly.
Two seconds later, Alex’s cuff was popping open and she was wriggling her fingers. It took all her self-control not to sayta-da, but King just grunted and held out his own hand. A moment later, his cuff sprang open. They were separate. They were... free.
On instinct, Alex looked at the door, like maybe she should turn around and walk away. Like maybe she was safer on the street than she was with him. She’d spent the last year telling herself she’d gotten good at hiding. But she was wrong, evidently. The red ring around her wrist was proof that someone had found her. Someone who wasn’t King. But that might have been because he hadn’t even bothered to look.
“Go ahead. Run if you want to.” The voice was darker than the windows. “Goodness knows I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”
He sounded bitter and cold, and Alex didn’t want to argue. She didn’t want to fight, and she absolutely refused to explain. They were both better as free agents. That was true a year ago and it was true now.
“King—”
“You can go take a shower if you want to. I’ll scrounge up something for you to wear.”
He went into one of the bedrooms and Alex wandered toward the darkened windows. It was the middle of the day, but it looked like the middle of the night. And that just made Alex remember—
She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t even know what day it was.
“King?”
“Yeah?” he called from a bedroom.
“What day is it?” Alex couldn’t imagine a more embarrassing question, but (for once) the man in the other room didn’t mock or scold. He just came out and tossed a heavy robe in her direction, then picked up a remote control, and the TV flickered to life.
“Thursday. January sixteenth,” he read from the hotel information page. “Eight forty-five a.m.”
There were dark spots on the edge of Alex’s memory, looming like a total eclipse that stretched across her mind. She remembered waking in her little cottage, groggy because she’d stayed up too late,one-more-chapteringherself until she finished a book at four a.m. She remembered making a grocery list and being out of coffee. She remembered... home. And solitude. And silence.
And missing...
“So?” King sounded impatient.
“Okay.” She had to get her act together. “It’s Thursday. I remember... Wednesday? No. Tuesday. I remember two days ago.” She turned and looked out the window. “I lost two days,” she whispered, but the reflection in the glass just stared back, indifferent and uncaring. She wished he’d go back to hating her. It was so much better than this.
“Okay.”
“See, now it’s your turn. What’s the last thingyouremember?”
He turned off the TV. “Yeah. Sure. Two days sounds about right.”
“But what do you remember?”
“I don’t remember anything!” He was mad at himself for shouting, Alex could tell. Not because he’d hurt her feelings but because he’d showed his cards. “I don’t remember.”
“I know—”
“No. You don’t.” He went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water. “You don’t have any idea what this feels like.” He drank the water down in three whole gulps.
“You were in... Scotland?” At least she didn’t choke on the word.
“I think so. That’s the last place I remember, but I come here a lot,” King told her. “Just because I don’t remember being in Vegas doesn’t mean I wasn’t here when they grabbed me.”
“Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” But it didn’t. Not really. Alex had never heard King talk about Vegas. He didn’t even like Monte Carlo. He didn’t gamble because he couldn’t keep himself from counting cards, and Michael Kingsley was far too noble to cheat. He barely drank, and he wasn’t a fan of crowds, and there was literally no reason for the man she knew to have an apartment here. But that just meant one thing: she didn’t know him anymore. “What aren’t you telling me?”
