Blind Trust Read Online Free Page A

her son to go to college? Or
that she doesn’t want him to follow her husband into his business? Or that she
has arthritis in her left wrist, she’ll still want to be friends?”
    Renee gazed out of the window, once again looking lost and tense.
“I can’t speak for her but you scared the crap out of me and I’m still here.”
    “You wouldn’t have been if you weren’t making sure that I wasn’t
killing young girls.”
    Her grey eyes snapped to mine. “I never believed you would.”
    “Uh huh.”
    She kinked her eyebrows up in the middle. “I did not.”
    “You did in the institution. You thought I had tricked you or have
you forgotten?”
    Renee’s gaze flickered between my eyes and empty space, then she dropped
her chin and sighed. “Point made.”
    “It’s not your fault I’m a freak,” I said, offering the waitress a
smile as she brought our drinks. “I’m just glad you like me in spite of it.”
Before Renee could argue, I turned to the waitress. “Do you have pie?”
    The waitress laughed and beamed at me. I got a burst of warmth
from her that made me smile back. “I think I got just the thing for you.” She
turned to Renee, paused, and tapped her finger to her lip. “I think you are the
cheesecake kind.”
    I felt the flicker of panic from Renee. She was always on her
guard. She’d lived her life undercover for so long that the closer someone got
to the truth about her as a person, the more on edge she became.
    “Cheesecake, huh?” I said, trying to cover up Renee’s sudden blanching.
“What flavor do you reckon?”
    The woman closed her eyes as if she were trying to sense
something. I used that moment to touch Renee’s hand, giving her a shock and me
a weird flashed image.
    “Strawberry,” the woman guessed.
    She was way off.
    Renee snapped her hand away from me and feigned happiness. “Yes,
you have me there. I’d love a piece.” She weren’t all that keen on strawberry
and she only liked cheesecake without gelatin in it. In the mass of weird
flashes, I got a memory of her finding a lump of gelatin in her cheesecake as a
kid.
    “I never fail . . . it’s a gift,” the woman said as she hurried
off, answering a couple of other customers on her way.
    Renee narrowed her eyes at me. “You had no right.”
    “It wasn’t intentional,” I muttered, the cold sweat dribbling down
the back of my neck. “I was trying to comfort you.”
    Murmuring a quiet “oh,” Renee leaned her head back and let out a
sigh. “I’m sorry. I—”
    “It’s okay. I wasn’t the only one who crawled back in her shell,
huh?” I didn’t want to show her how much the flash had affected me but my hands
were so clammy that when I wiped them on my knees I felt the damp through my
jeans.
    “It wasn’t an easy time,” she said, staring up at the set of skis
hanging from the wood ceiling above us.
    I didn’t know what she meant, not really. With Renee, it was hard
to know what was her, really her and what was a fake memory from one of her
covers. The cheesecake felt pretty real but another flash, I wasn’t so certain
about. I wanted to say something to help her. Something that would ease the
edginess I could feel.
    She rolled her head to the side and her gaze drifted to the
window. I hated seeing her look so worn and worried. I knew she’d been out on a
protection detail of some sort, that much I could decipher, and judging by the
time we’d spent when I was her protectee, it took a load of energy and then
some.
    “You just need some time with me,” I said, drawing her eyes back
to me.
    She raised her eyebrows. 
    “You heard,” I said. “A couple of weeks trying to train me and
you’ll have laughed so hard, you’d have forgotten everything.”
    Her eyes, much deeper in the yellowy lighting, twinkled. Then they
misted, her sadness gushing at me. The flash had been full of pain, fear,
desperation and I wanted to erase it from her memory.
    “When I was a kid, I got real scared sometimes when I