When it was over, Riley felt both exhausted and curiously shaken. What had just happened? It was more than sex, or at least more than she knew sex to be. And she wasn't at all sure she'd be able to pretend otherwise. But she gave it her best shot.
When he pushed himself up on an elbow beside her, she finally opened her eyes and murmured, "Wow. Good thing I had that second dessert."
Ash laughed. "You never say the expected, do you?"
"Probably not. Is that a bad thing?"
"Not as far as I'm concerned." He reached across her to draw the sheet over their cooling bodies, pausing to briefly nuzzle the curve of her neck.
Riley felt her eyes starting to cross at that pleasurable caress, and hastily closed them. "Mmmm."
"If you go to sleep, I'll just wake you up," he warned.
Her laugh ended on a sigh. "You have only yourself to blame."
"Open your eyes and talk to me."
"I thought men always wanted to sleep after," she complained mildly, opening her eyes.
He was smiling faintly. "You should know by now not to lump me in with a group. Neither one of us runs with the crowd."
Now, what in the world does he mean by that?
She couldn't ask, of course.
Instead, she said, "Well, you should know by now that I either sleep after-or grab a snack. Fuel, remember? The tank's empty here, pal."
"Okay. I promise you a midnight omelet. How's that?"
Riley turned her head to look at the alarm clock on the bedside table. "That's more than an hour away." She allowed her voice to fade pathetically. "I may not make it."
Before she could turn her head back, she felt his fingers at the nape of her neck.
"What's this?"
It was a sore spot; she realized that when he touched it.
"What does it look like?" she asked, holding on to the sleepy murmur even though she was, now, wide-awake.
He rubbed very gently. "A burn, maybe?"
Just at the hairline at the base of her skull, an area normally covered by her short hair. An area she hadn't checked visually when she examined herself that afternoon. And a sore spot that would have been both hidden by her hair and masked by the headache she'd had almost continually since waking.
Chapter 7
Riley fought not to react in any way he'd notice, fought not to reveal the sudden questions and fears tumbling through her mind.
"I'm all thumbs with a curling iron," she said casually. "It happens so often I forget about it, usually."
"Have you considered maybe not using a curling iron?" Ash inquired dryly.
She turned her head back and met his gaze, smiling. "From time to time. But it's a girl thing, you see, and I clung to those when I was in the army."
"What, you were afraid of ending up butch?"
"That is not a politically correct term. And-yes."
Ash grinned at her. "Not a chance in hell. You are utterly and completely female, my love, from the top of your head down to the tips of your toes. It practically oozes from your pores."
Riley ignored the lurch inside her at the unexpected endearment and pulled on a considering frown. "I'm not at all sure that's a compliment."
"It's disarming, that's what it is. Dandy camouflage for the razor-sharp mind behind those big eyes."
"Mmm. But you weren't disarmed, huh?"
"I wasn't fooled," Ash said. "Not like Jake was."
A little surprised and very curious, she said, "You think he was fooled?"
"I think he's badly underestimating you. And I think if he hadn't done that from the moment he met you, he might be here with you instead of me."
Wry now, she said, "I really stepped in something between you two, didn't I?"
"Maybe." He shifted position to lie more fully on his side, his head propped up on one hand and the other resting warmly on her stomach. "But it had to happen eventually."
"Why?"
Ash's shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "Because letting Jake have what he wanted most of our lives was easy for me. Until what he wanted was something I wanted more."
Riley thought about that. "Me?" she half-guessed.
"If you have to ask," he said, "you haven't been paying attention."
She managed a laugh. "Oh, I was paying attention. Just trying not to feel like a trophy between two jocks."
"You know better than that." He leaned over to kiss her, the caress a lingering one. "At least as far as I'm concerned. This is not about Jake. This is about you and me."
Riley was trying her best to think straight despite the lips playing with hers. "Mmm. But if all Jake sees…is that trophy…he might still want it."
"Then he'll have to learn a lesson I probably should have taught him when we were kids." Ash pushed the sheet back down so his seeking hand could find bare flesh. "He doesn't always get what he wants."
Riley had thought she was completely exhausted, but her body was coming to life, and as her arms lifted to wrap themselves around his neck, she decided that she just might have the strength for this…
As it turned out, she also had the strength left for a shower with Ash afterward, but by then her energy reserves were seriously low and they both knew it.
"I'll go get started on those omelets," he said, knotting a towel around his lean waist.
"I'll get my hair dry and meet you in the kitchen. Sorry to be so high-maintenance," she said.
He tipped her chin up with a finger to kiss her. "You aren't," he said, and left her alone in the steamy bathroom.
Riley finished wrapping herself in a towel, then held her hands out and watched them shake for a moment. Damn. Between the mental and emotional demands of a Swiss cheese memory and the physical demands of a relationship with Ash, she was using up energy at a rate far faster than normal even for her.
Something was badly wrong, and she knew it.
Shaking off yet another worry, she rummaged in the vanity drawers for a hand mirror and wiped off the steamy mirror over the sink so she could check out the back of her neck. It took a bit of maneuvering, and she ended up sitting on the vanity with her back to the big mirror while she held the hand mirror with one hand and pushed her hair completely off her neck with the other hand.
It looked like a burn, as Ash had said. Like two burns, actually, very close together, just below the hairline at the base of her skull.
Even in the warm, steamy room, the chill that swept her body left gooseflesh in its wake. She had to concentrate fiercely in order to hold the hand mirror steady long enough to study the marks until she was certain of what she already knew.
They were the marks of a stun gun, a Taser.
And what they very clearly showed was that someone had held the gun to the back of her neck and discharged an electrical current directly into her body.
Into the base of her brain.
It took less than ten minutes to blow-dry her short hair, and that didn't allow Riley enough time to think much past the numb realization that in all likelihood a killer had stood over her twitching body and emptied into it from a weapon meant to incapacitate a target a potentially deadly amount of electricity.
Riley had used a Taser. She had also been Tasered herself. She knew what the weapon was capable of, and what its normal aftereffects were. There was nothing normal about this.
The marks on her neck indicated sustained contact, with both voltage and amperage considerably higher than the manufacturer had ever intended for the device.
The question was, had her attacker deliberately used an amped-up stun gun knowing it could be a lethal weapon? And, if so, was she alive by design or only by accident?
Either way, the attack could explain her headaches and the memory loss, and the dulled-or absent-senses. It could even explain her unusually frequent need for more fuel.
An electrical jolt to the brain could scramble a lot of things in the human body.