He felt her breath against his face, felt the heat of her body as she struggled not to be thrown off balance. The sound of her heavy breathing penetrated the fog descending on his brain. With effort, he chased away the darkness encroaching on him.
“Sorry.” A line of perspiration formed along his brow and between his shoulder blades as he struggled to regain his equilibrium.
“Not your fault.” Still braced, testing the waters slowly, she began to release her hold on him. The stiffness within her was harder to release. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“For what?” She felt soft, enticingly soft. The thought pushed its way in through the clutter of pain that insisted on holding him prisoner. It was a tiny bit of sanctuary within a world engulfed in chaos.
“If you hadn’t come to my rescue, you wouldn’t have made intimate contact with the cement. Who knows what they could have done if you hadn’t come along.” Despite herself, she shivered. It took everything she had not to allow the memory to return, to hold her hostage. There was no time for that. She couldn’t let it get the upper hand on her. Not again. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”
His hand on her shoulder to prevent another embarrassing dip, he walked slowly to the cab.
“No, I don’t.” He looked at her, his head pounding. “But if I came to your rescue, I’m glad, even if it did cause everything to disappear.” Concern entered his eyes. “Did they hurt you?”
He was asking about her. His memory had been reduced to that of an eggplant because of her and he was still asking if she was hurt. She couldn’t make up her mind if he was for real or a figment of her imagination.
“They didn’t have time. You were too quick.”
He lowered himself into the back seat, his legs giving out at the last minute. What had that guy hit him with, anyway?
“I don’t feel very quick now,” he confessed. He stopped, considering. “Jean-Luc, huh?”
“That’s what you said.” She remembered something else. “But you added that everyone calls you Luc.”
“Luke.” He rolled the name over in his mind, waiting for a familiar ring. And then something seemed to gel. “Luc,” he said suddenly. “It’s not Luke, it’s Luc.”
She heard no difference, but as long as it made one to him, that was all that mattered. She looked at him eagerly, not wanting this man’s condition on her conscience. She had just attained her life’s dream of becoming a nurse. That meant helping people, not putting them in harm’s way. “Do you remember?”
He knew she meant more. But there was only that. “Just that Luc is my name.”
She wasn’t about to give up easily. “Luc what?” she prodded.
He tried, he really tried, but nothing came. Trying to move his head from side to side, he instantly aborted the effort, regretting it. “I haven’t got the vaguest clue.”
Chapter Two
Detective John Donnelley stared at his notepad. Twenty-five minutes of questioning had resulted in less than half a page of writing. It was hot and muggy and he was struggling to keep his irritability from showing. Passing his hand over a near-bald pate that had once sported more than its share of hair, he shook his head.
“Not much to go on.” He looked at the man he’d been questioning as he flipped the book closed.
Alison resisted the urge to place herself between the two men. It was her natural mothering instinct coming to the fore, an instinct she’d acquired ever since her own mother had passed away over sixteen years ago.
“It all happened very fast,” she interjected. Luc had been through enough, and in her estimation, he wasn’t looking all that good right now. He didn’t need to be grilled any longer. “Five minutes, tops. Probably more like three.”
The bald head moved up and down slowly, thoughtfully. “Usually the way.” Donnelley eyed Luc. The impression that Luc might be a suspect didn’t appear to be entirely out of the detective’s range of thought. “And there’s nothing you can add?”
Luc tried to think, to summon a memory. Something. It was like trying to find angel food cake in a snowdrift. “’Fraid not.”
Still, Donnelley pressed one more time. “Height, weight, coloring—?” Dark eyebrows rose high on an even higher forehead, waiting. Moderately hopeful.
There was no point in pretending. “I wouldn’t know them if they were part of that crowd,” Luc admitted honestly, gesturing toward the people who had gathered behind the sawhorses that defined the crime scene, separating it from the rest of the alley.
Why was the man going over the same thing again? Luc needed a doctor, not a badgering police detective who looked as if he was ten years past weary. “We’ve been through all that,” Alison pointed out.
The protectiveness welled up within her. It would have been funny if she’d stopped to analyze it. She was slight, almost petite in comparison to Luc, yet she felt as if he needed her to run interference. At least until he was himself again. Whoever that was.
“He told you, Detective, he can’t remember anything that happened. Why do you keep asking him the same questions?”
The slight shrug wasn’t a hundred percent convincing. “All I’m saying is that it seems awfully convenient, this loss of memory.” His eyes met Luc’s. Something within him relented. He could feel the girl’s eyes boring into him. She seemed convinced enough for both of them, he thought. “Hey, listen, I’m just trying to do my job here. You don’t push, you don’t get answers, right?”
“Sometimes you don’t get answers even when you do push,” she replied quietly. But he was right, she supposed. The man had probably seen it all. Certainly far more than she ever had. That made everyone suspect in his eyes. Even her. She shrugged. “Sorry, it’s just that he needs to see a doctor.”
Donnelley looked at Luc’s face. His pallor was almost ghostly. No point in beating a dead horse, at least for now.
“Okay, you can go,” he told Luc. His voice was almost casual as he asked what sounded like an afterthought, “Where can we reach you, in case there’s something else?”
Luc slipped his hands into his pockets. If there’d been money there originally, there was none now. His pockets were empty. All he had, as far as he knew, were the clothes on his back.
“I don’t know.”
Luc frowned. He was getting very sick of the sound of that. Perforce, it was his reply to almost everything. Because he didn’t know. Didn’t know his name, didn’t know where he’d been or where he was going. Didn’t even know how old he was or if there was someone waiting for him. Someone getting increasingly worried as the minutes slipped away.
Frustration ate away at him, filling up all the empty spaces.
The detective paused, considering. And then he reached back into his pocket for his notepad. Writing something down quickly, he tore off the page and held the single sheet out to Luc.
“Here’s the address of a shelter in the area.” Donnelley tried to distance himself from what he was saying. There was a hot meal waiting for him at the end of his shift. A hot meal and a good woman in a tidy, three-bedroom house he’d almost paid off. He wouldn’t have liked to be in this kid’s place now. “Cleaner than most. They can fix you up with a meal and a cot. Maybe it’ll come back to you by morning.” The note in his voice said he had his doubts.
Luc took the page. Standing on her toes, Alison managed to look over his shoulder at the address. It was an area she tried to avoid when she drove the cab. Her eyes met the detective’s. “Not the best address.”
Donnelley