It should make him strong enough to walk away from her.
“Was it something about your childhood that made you worry about my boss?” Noelle asked.
He sighed and sat back. “There are lots of reasons I’m worried about your boss. I don’t believe in coincidences, not at this level. I could buy that someone tried to get on your laptop and there was an accidental fire in a lab. Tie that together with a DPD detective in your building and someone attacking you and it’s a pattern I haven’t identified yet.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out softly.
Yeah, he’d wanted to avoid that. “It was a shitty time of my life. I avoid talking about it with anyone but my therapist, but as it’s the reason I can’t sleep tonight, hell, why not.”
She crumpled the empty Red Vine wrapper in her hand. “You don’t have to.”
He didn’t want this moment to end. He got the feeling the intimacy between them would be over if he let her go back to bed. “If I talk, I want something from you.”
She sat back as though she was happy to have a reason to stay. “What?”
He’d never felt this comfortable with a woman before. Maybe comfortable wasn’t the right word. In synch was better. “Whatever you’re willing to give. A story about your childhood or some of your cinnamon rolls. A list of your favorite songs and why you love them. It’s up to you. I only want it to be something you don’t mind giving me.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I know I should tell you that you don’t have to talk, but I want to know the story.”
Because she felt what he felt. She felt the pull of whatever this thing was between them. “Okay. Then I’ll tell you why Jessica Layne bothers me. It’s not that I have a problem with powerful women. I work around a whole bunch of them. I would let Charlotte or Erin Taggart watch my back any day of the week. I’ve witnessed a wealth of kindness from my friends’ wives, and there’s power in that, too. But I was held captive by a woman who called herself a doctor.”
“Held captive?”
It sounded like the plot of a bad action film, but it had been his life. “Yep. I was held hostage for my computer skills. Hope McDonald was working on a super-soldier program that included being able to wipe her subjects’ memories. She kidnapped soldiers and intelligence employees. She took one look at Theo Taggart and decided he would be her greatest soldier. It didn’t matter that he had a girlfriend. She went right for him.”
Noelle nodded. “Like Jessica flirted with Kyle.”
He’d seen the look on the tech guru’s face and been right back to that time in his life when Hope McDonald ruled everything. She’d made his father look like a great and loving papa. “Yes, though McDonald was even more aggressive. No one thought anything of it at the time. We joked about how Theo had a stalker and generally gave him hell about it. And then she took him and erased his memory, and for a long time we thought he was dead.”
She gasped. “She really erased his memory?”
“Yes, she did. She was brilliant. She was known as a wunderkind, much like your boss. She was also a sociopath. She took a lifetime of memories and replaced them with perfect obedience to her. She beat her subjects, gave them days of pain if they stepped out of line. She forged them into perfect soldiers. I was on the team that found Theo, but it went wrong and instead of me capturing Theo, my dumb ass was captured by Theo. Thus began my year in Hope McDonald’s tender care.”
She was on the edge of her seat, her hand coming out to cover his. “How did you get your memories back?”
He wanted to flip his hand over and thread their fingers together, but she didn’t know the whole story yet. “Oh, she didn’t take mine. You see, muscle memory is a thing. She could erase a soldier’s memories and the ability to fight, the training they’d had before, was still accessible. But kicking ass wasn’t what I was brought in to do.”
“They wanted your skills as a hacker,” she surmised.
“And my connections to the hacker world, and after a couple of what felt like years of torture, I gave them to her. You should understand that, Noelle. I’ve been broken. I’ve had my soul stripped down and seen who I am at my core, and I was broken. I did what she told me to do.” He sat back, drawing away from her and picking up a fresh licorice. It was a weird emotional crutch that went back to those days with his grandmother. “One of the things she did was put me on a diet. I went in at a pleasingly plump one eighty, and when I came out I was one hundred fifty pounds of pure muscle. Two percent body fat because if I got above that I was beaten and didn’t eat for three days. It took me a year to be able to eat anything sweet after I got home. I hated the fact that this thing that gave me comfort and reminded me of the one good thing about my childhood was suddenly another means of torture.”