Fragmented (A Section 8 Novel) - Softcover

Tyler, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451413512 ISBN 13: 9780451413512

Publisher: Berkley, 2015

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Tyler, the Section 8 series continues...

WHEN THE RISKS ARE THIS GREAT...
 
When Dr. Drea Timmons was kidnapped during Section 8’s last mission, Jem did everything in his power to rescue the woman he’d fallen for—a woman unwillingly recruited for one of S8’s most personal and dangerous covert operations. Drea survived, but at a price. The trauma of her capture has rendered her without a single memory of her ordeal—or any recollection of how violently unpredictable her ex-boyfriend, Danny, an Outlaw Angel, had become, or why she had left him.
 
IS TRUST EVEN AN OPTION?
 
When Danny threatens to turn Drea over to the feds, she is forced to go on the run and confront a past that is as deadly as her future. As trouble closes in on both ends, Drea has no choice but to trust Jem, the only man who can help her, the only man whose electrifying touch brings back memories—piece by piece—too stirring to forget.

About this title

About the Author

Stephanie Tyler is the New York Times bestselling author of two previous military romantic suspense series, as well as the Skulls Creek and Eternal Wolf Clan series. Fragmented is the third novel in the Section 8 series, following Unbreakable and Surrender.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR THE SECTION 8 NOVELS

Also by Stephanie Tyler

SIGNET ECLIPSE

Chapter One

“What are you so afraid of, Andrea?” her school counselor probed.

Fifteen-year-old Drea Timmons shifted in her seat, wanting nothing to do with this. But at least the woman sitting across from her with the smooth bob and placid expression hadn’t tried to call her by her nickname. That, Drea reserved only for friends, and these days, that pool was small. “I’m not afraid. Where do you get this shit from?”

That last part was one of Danny’s favorite expressions and was usually a conversation ender with most adults.

Not with this counselor, trying to bore into her brain by pulling the “we’re all very worried about you” card. “Your grandmother is concerned that you’re hanging out with dangerous people. I’ve heard the same thing from your teachers. They’re particularly concerned with your boyfriend . . . I believe his name is Danny Roberts?”

Drea shrugged. It was all the truth, yes, but what was the counselor going to do?

Continue to push, that was what. “Andrea, do you consider the people you’re hanging out with dangerous?”

Drea hadn’t bothered to learn the counselor’s name, because she was simply another in a long line of seemingly well-minded people trying to help. She wanted to ask where they’d been when her mother was doing drugs in front of her, when her mother’s boyfriends touched her in her bed at night, but she’d learned from Danny that showing weakness was to be avoided at all costs. As was the truth. “Why does it matter? I mean, they’re not dangerous to me.”

“Not yet,” the counselor countered. “But eventually, you’ll get caught up in it. There’s no way around that.”

“He’ll keep me safe.”

“Who’s he? Danny?”

Drea clamped her mouth shut—she’d said enough already. Danny didn’t like her talking about him to anyone in authority.

“Andrea, listen to me. I understand how you’re feeling.”

“No you don’t. How could you? You’re not me. You’re not in my mind. You have no idea how I’m feeling,” she challenged. “Danger isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes his kind of danger makes me feel alive.”

“And the other times? Does it scare you?”

“Sometimes. But being afraid is part of life.”

“Not to the extreme to which you’re taking it, honey.” The counselor shook her head. “To you, danger has somehow come to mean safety, and that’s completely wrong.”

“Who says?” Drea demanded.

Seventeen years later

“You’re angry.”

Drea stared back at Dr. Siegel, the casually dressed older man who sat across from her, alternating his gaze between her and the open laptop in front of him. He and his wife, who was a doctor as well, made a formidable team. Some days they tag-teamed her, but today it was one-on-one. “Wouldn’t you be angry if you were me?”

He wagged a finger at her. “Spoken like a true medical professional. You’ve got to open up to me if you want this to be of any help.”

She threw up her arms. “Hypnosis didn’t even work—so how is just talking going to do it?”

He turned the laptop to face her, and there was a picture of a dark-haired, dark-eyed man wearing a black leather jacket. He’d been caught off guard by the picture, but he still looked easy and relaxed as he stared at her through the screen. “Tell me about him.”

She looked at that picture an awful lot these days, and for a guy she had zero memories of, the man called Jem certainly consumed a lot of her thoughts. But she hated having to admit that, and tried even more not to show it. She forced herself not to grit her teeth as she answered, “I can’t.”

“Tell me what you know. Tell me what you’ve heard. Tell me what you’re feeling when you look at him.”

She frowned and sat back in the chair like a petulant child. “He’s the reason I’m here. He’s part of the reason I don’t have a memory, although he didn’t do anything to me himself. He rescued me.”

“So he’s a white knight?”

Drea snorted softly, blurted out, “I wouldn’t say that,” without thinking.

“So what would you say, Drea?”

She crossed her arms for a second, but once she realized she’d done so, she uncrossed them, going for a more relaxed, neutral position, telling Dr. Siegel in a reasonable tone of voice, “I’m not sure what he is. Maybe it’s not black or white. Because he rescued me, but according to Carolina, he’s also the reason I was in the position to need rescuing in the first place.”

“So this man, he got you into trouble. He put you in danger.”

“From what I’ve been told.” It should’ve been painful to hear about all this, but whenever this topic was broached, a part of her went numb, like her mind was still trying to protect her from whatever horrors she’d endured. Some days she thought that maybe she was better off not remembering the hell she’d gone through. But that would mean not remembering Jem, and she’d been clawing at that memory desperately. “But I wanted to go with him.”

“In spite of the danger?”

“That. And maybe because of it too.”

“Because you didn’t have enough in your life already?”

“I didn’t say it made sense,” she muttered. “You’re very judgmental.”

“It bothers you?”

“I thought you people were supposed to stay neutral.”

He wrote down some notes, then glanced at her casually. “I thought you wanted to figure your missing memories out.”

She sighed, stared around the sitting room in the grand old house that had become her touchstone.

Both Dr. Siegel and his wife had been working with her for just over two months—longer than any of the others, but her tolerance was running low. Especially for him, because he was more fond of telling her what she was doing was wrong instead of waiting her answers out. Probably because he knew he’d get none. “I just want you to realize that you’re repeating old patterns. Over and over again, it appears. And you have a chance to finally break them.”

“How? Because of my amnesia?”

“In spite of that. Because the one thing you didn’t lose is your feeling that somehow danger equals security. And that’s wrong.”

From everything she’d heard about Jem from Carolina, Drea knew this therapist was the one who was wrong and she’d finally found something so right she wasn’t about to let logic ruin it. Jem’s picture did something to her insides, made her stomach flip, and she leaned forward and pushed the laptop screen back toward the therapist so she didn’t have to see Jem staring back at her. “Okay, that’s not exactly true, about the kidnapping-me-the-second-time part. Apparently I volunteered. More than once. He took me up on it both times. The second time is when it went bad.”

“You volunteered to put yourself in danger?”

“Yes.”

“This is the first time you’ve done something like that in your life?”

“I’ve always been attracted to danger. I guess I feel like the more dangerous a man is, the more he can protect me from the danger I’m running from.” Even so, she knew that Danny’s kind of dangerous had never been good. But Jem? He was a whole other story.

Dr. Siegel steepled his fingers as he stared at her. She felt she’d had some kind of breakthrough, but of course it didn’t make her recognize the man in the picture any more than she had before. Truthfully, she didn’t even want to look at the picture.

“Are you?” Dr. Siegel asked.

“Am I what?”

“Running.”

That she could answer truthfully and without reservation. “Every single day of my life.”

Chapter Two

Six months later

When Drea first arrived at Carolina’s a year earlier, she hadn’t realized she’d been running from an outside danger . . . and running just as hard from her missing memories. She’d also thought she was only seventeen, that Danny was still her savior, the only man who stood between her and her grandmother, who treated Drea like she was the devil incarnate. Truthfully, after just escaping her mom and her mom’s never-ending series of boyfriends, living with her grandmother should’ve been a dream come true for Drea.

Instead, her grandmother had been a nightmare, and Danny, the son of the president of a very dangerous motorcycle club, was the only person in Drea’s life who’d ever stood up for her.

She believed she owed him loyalty . . . She believed she owed him everything.

Slowly, she’d begun to discover that, despite these feelings otherwise, something inside her was off, and that Danny wasn’t the right man to love.

Now she kicked the treadmill into high speed, ran until her mind was settled and her muscles were jelly, all the better to give the trapped memories a chance to surface. This was part of her daily routine, since she couldn’t run outside. At times she resented it, yes. However, it was one thing to be a prisoner in Carolina’s house—and she had no doubt she was a prisoner—but there were many worse places she could be.

Like with Danny—or the FBI, who was apparently looking for her because of Danny. Or so she’d been told. Carolina was careful in doling out information, and while Drea hated being treated like something fragile, she was also smart enough to know Carolina was right.

And if Carolina didn’t trust her, it never showed. There were no interior key locks on the door, just a bolt that slid easily. But the house was like a fortress, with alarm systems, cameras in every room and an unending supply of ammunition everywhere Drea looked. The alarm bells chimed whenever a door or window opened, but that was so they could keep track of who entered, like the grocery delivery or Drea’s therapists.

The newest of those were a married couple—the Drs. Siegel were a formidable team. They didn’t let her get away with anything. They probed her mind until she wanted to scream, but they didn’t use drugs or any invasive methods . . . unless you counted what she’d started to deem as “the mind fuck.”

And yes, over the past six months with them, she’d made tremendous progress. As it happened, this very treadmill was where her first memories, post “happy Daniel time,” had come back to her.

It’d been a brief flashback, and even though she’d known logically that Danny wasn’t there with her, hitting her, threatening her with a knife, she still hadn’t been able to hold back her screams. When Carolina found her, Drea had been huddled on the floor in the corner, tears running freely down her face.

It’d taken a while for her to reassure Carolina that she was truly okay, that at least a crucial part of her memory had returned . . . everything, it seemed, except her time with the mysterious Jem.

Now she upped both the speed and the incline, pushing her muscles harder, the same way she’d continued to push forward from that breakthrough.

Discovering Danny was a violent criminal, and now the head of the upstate New York Outlaw Angels MC, like his father before him, made her even more certain that she was with good people. These days, the face she saw in the mirror, while by no means old, was not seventeen.

You’re a doctor.

You’re in trouble because of Danny.

Jem’s been helping you.

Carolina had kept her from mirrors in the beginning, and that hadn’t been hard. Drea had been in a fog, thanks to the antianxiety medicine she’d slowly been weaned from. Even after she’d realized her real age, she continued to actively avoid looking in the mirror for several more weeks, until Carolina forced her hand.

“You’re thirty-two, not ancient,” Carolina would tell her. “What do you think you’re going to see?”

Carolina had to be fifty, but she was ageless. Steely. Beautiful. Her hair was a beautiful white-blond sheen and she had the complexion to pull it off. She looked natural. She had laugh lines in her smooth skin. Her face had character.

And when she’d walked Drea to the mirror and forced her to confront her present, Drea saw a fierce amber-eyed woman with long, tawny hair that was wild and loose past her shoulders staring back at her, one who didn’t look nearly as weary or exhausted as she felt inside at times.

“Beautiful, child.” Carolina had pulled some of Drea’s hair off her shoulders as they stared at their reflections together. “Trust me. Your memories are all here.” She pointed to Drea’s forehead, and then to her heart. “And here.”

“What happened to me?”

“You’ve gone through more than most, Drea,” Carolina said gently. “The most important thing you need to know is that you’re safe with me. And you’re safe because of Jem.”

Drea believed that, which was why she sat with Carolina nightly since learning that she’d been kidnapped when she was with Jem, that she’d been helping him and things had gone terribly wrong. It was at that point when she’d asked Carolina to tell her about Jem, wanting to know more beyond his physical appearance. Only then did Carolina begin to show her pictures and tell her stories until Drea began to feel as if the man were an old friend.

But somehow she knew Jem was far more than simply a friend.

It was all so much more complicated than it had seemed at first, and she wasn’t at the bottom of it yet. There was so much more to learn, and Drea was determined to make sure she did so.

Carolina had quietly slipped into the gym toward the end of Drea’s workout, knowing that the treadmill tended to fill her with more questions than answers. And she carried the file folder that contained pictures of various Section 8 members, including—especially—Jem.

Drea shut the treadmill down, patted her face with a towel and grabbed for her water bottle, and Carolina motioned for her to follow.

They sat at the kitchen table, and Drea asked, “Did you know any of them—the old Section 8?”

“I’d heard of them, sure. They were part legend and myth, but anyone who worked for the CIA during that time knew that a team like that could be far too real. There were so few rules then. It was . . . lovely.”

“So if you’d been asked . . .”

“I’d have joined that team in a second,” Carolina confirmed. “These days, I’m much better as backup.”

They’d had this discussion before. So many times Drea hadn’t recalled it the next day. Now she did, but they still started this way. It comforted Drea that she could retain information. And this information was important—she could feel it.

To her credit, Carolina was very good at pretending this wasn’t the nine millionth time they’d done this. It happened mostly every night, except for those times when Drea was too frustrated to try.

Tonight wasn’t one of those nights.

They went over the background easily, with Drea recalling, “The old Section 8 was disbanded. Most of the members were killed, except for Darius and Adele. But then Darius disappeared, Adele was killed and Darius’s son, Dare, and his half sister, Avery, found each other. And realized they were in trouble, because they were the kids of Section 8 members.”

“That’s right.”

“So Dare and Avery are part of this new Section 8, right? Along with Jem and Key, who are brothers, and Gunner.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0451413512
• ISBN 13: 9780451413512
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368