Tatum spoke from the end of the table. “This afternoon we’re going to try to approximate how AbaCo’s lawyers will question Nick. As unpleasant as it may be, I would remind you we’re on your side.”
Laura, a former CIA operative, had been through training at their infamous Farm, and she highly doubted a bunch of lawyers could throw anything at Nick that she hadn’t seen before.
Carter gestured and in short order a trio of lawyers was taking turns rapid-firing questions at Nick. They started with his kidnapping. The Paris police believed he’d been drugged at the Paris Opera and taken to the shipping container in which he spent the next five years. Nick denied remembering any of it. If only she’d gone to the opera with Nick that night, but her CIA partner—and ex-lover, truth be told—had been missing, and she’d been following up a lead.
The lawyers pressed Nick about any enemies who might have paid people to ghost him, and she listened with interest. This was a subject he’d flatly refused to discuss with her. It worried her mightily that whoever’d had him kidnapped was waiting to pounce again. Again, he denied knowing anything.
The next lawyer pushed harder and Nick’s shoulders climbed defensively. When the third lawyer pressed even more aggressively for information about Nick’s past, he crossed his arms stubbornly and quit speaking altogether. Darn it. That was the same thing he did to her whenever she brought up the subject.
“Water break,” Carter announced abruptly.
Laura released the breath she’d been holding. Nick slumped in his chair, his head down. She put a supportive hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he answered roughly. But his arm trembled beneath her palm, and his jaw clenched so hard he looked about ready to crack a molar.
She suggested gently, “Let’s call this for today. We’ll come back another time when you’re feeling better—”
“We finish it now,” he snapped uncharacteristically.
She drew back, startled. Nothing ever flustered Nick. He was always the soul of gentlemanly composure.
“I’m sorry.” He sighed. “I have no past. It’s over and gone. My life started anew when you rescued me. This is who I am now. You are my life. You and the kids.”
She appreciated the sentiment, but he was going to have to face his past eventually. The psychiatrists had told her repeatedly not to push him, to let him investigate his previous life at his own speed. But it had about killed her to contain her curious nature for so long.
The lawyers’ badgering resumed, continuing until Nick finally declared, “Gentlemen, this line of questioning is over. My past is not relevant to the fact that I spent five years in an AbaCo box on an AbaCo ship at the hands of kidnappers in the employ of AbaCo.”
Laura stared. It was the first time he’d shown even a flash of the decisive streak he’d had in abundance in Paris.
Carter replied mildly, “AbaCo’s lawyers will, without question, go on a fishing expedition into your past in hopes of finding something they can make seem relevant.”
Nick scowled. “As far as I know, I never had anything to do with AbaCo before I wound up on that damned ship.”
The lawyer sighed. “President Nixon’s lawyers had the eighteen-minute gap to explain. We’ve got your five-year blackout to overcome. Have your doctors said anything more about the chances of you regaining some portion of your memory?”
Nick shrugged. “They think everything’s gone for good. I remember Laura’s face, and that’s it.”
“Can’t you remember something from before your memory loss to give you a clue about who you are and what you do?”
“I know who I am and what I do. I’m Nick Cass, and I spend every waking moment enjoying my family.”
The lawyer looked regretful, but said firmly, “You’re going to be under oath at the trial, and I guarantee they’ll ask you for explicit details of your past. If you won’t talk, they’ll have investigators dig up everything they can find.”
Laura observed closely as Nick’s gaze went hard. Closed. He’d never talked with her about his past in Paris before he disappeared, either. What was the big secret? She’d lay odds he wasn’t a criminal. She’d worked with plenty of them over the years, and he just didn’t have the right personality for it. He was too honorable, too concerned about doing the right thing.
The lawyers started up again, asking about Nick’s connection to AbaCo. He stuck firmly to his story that he’d never had any dealings with AbaCo that he was aware of, and knew of nothing that would’ve provoked the shipping giant to kidnap him of its own volition. Nick maintained steadfastly that his had to have been strictly a kidnapping for hire.
Frankly, she agreed with him. Laura tapped a pencil idly on the pad of paper before her. With first his long months of physical and emotional recovery and then the new baby coming, she’d been distracted enough this past year to abide by his wishes to leave his past alone. But she felt an investigation coming on.
Somebody’d messed with the father of her children, and that meant they’d messed with her. Furthermore, that person or persons might still pose a threat to her man. She smiled wryly. Her mama bear within was in full force these days. Must be the baby hormones raging.
She listened with a mixture of anger and sadness as Nick tonelessly described his incarceration. The psychologists said he had completely disassociated himself from his imprisonment and would have to make peace with it in his own time. For now, though, he held the emotions at arm’s length.
The lawyers moved on to the night of Nick’s rescue. He didn’t have a lot to say about it other than his door opened and a man named Jagger Holtz let him out, and Holtz and Laura led him to safety.
The lawyers left alone the events to follow Nick’s rescue—his weeks in a hospital recovering from various illnesses and malnutrition, his paranoia, the long silences, his difficulties with crowds and open spaces. None of that would help AbaCo’s case, apparently.
Then the lawyers attacked the veracity of Nick’s whole story, claiming it was entirely too far-fetched to be true, doing their damnedest to trip him up or get him to contradict himself. The only evidence he had of this supposed capture of his was a grainy video that could just as easily have been faked, and they demanded to know why he had it in for AbaCo.
She was ready to explode herself by the time Nick surged up out of his chair. “Why do I have to withstand this sort of character assassination? I’m the victim here! And now you make me a victim a second time!”
Carter nodded soberly. “You are correct. It’s the nature of our legal system that the victim often endures outright assault in the courtroom. That’s what we’re here to prepare you to face.”
Nick shoved a hand through his hair. “Why exactly do I have to testify?”
“Because AbaCo will try to convince the jury that the video is faked. The government has to have your direct testimony that the events on the tape are real.”
“Other people were there that night. Why not put my rescuers on the stand?” He sent Laura a quick, apologetic look, no doubt at the notion of dumping this mess into her lap. Not that she minded. She’d love to say a thing or two about AbaCo to a jury.
Carter grinned. “AbaCo won’t touch Laura with a ten-foot pole. She’s a former government agent, which gives her credibility, and they bloody well don’t want to give her a chance to vent her righteous fury in front of a jury…. The mother of your child alone and frantic for years? Oh, no. Way too damaging a story for AbaCo.”
He omitted the part where the government prosecutors wouldn’t put her on the stand because she’d illegally obtained most of the information that led to Nick’s rescue. They’d rather not open up that can of worms for AbaCo to pry into.
After his outburst, Nick settled into