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As the patient cut into a thigh, she thought absently that he had beautiful hands.

Okay, now she was disgusted with herself, too. Hell, he’d used them to hold her down and strip her coat off like she was nothing more than a doll. And just because he’d carefully folded what she’d had on afterward didn’t make him a hero.

Silence stretched, and the sounds of his silverware softly hitting the plate reminded her of horribly quiet dinners with her parents.

God, those meals eaten in that stuffy Georgian dining room had been painful. Her father had sat at the head of the table like a disapproving king, monitoring the way food was salted and consumed. To Dr. William Rosdale Whitcomb, only meat was to be salted, never vegetables, and as that was his stand on the matter, everyone in the household had had to follow the example. In theory. Jane had been a frequent violator of the no-salt rule, learning how to flick her wrist so she was able to sprinkle her steamed broccoli or boiled beans or grilled zucchini.

She shook her head. After all this time, and his passing, she shouldn’t still get pissed off, because what a waste of emotion. Besides, she had other things she should be worried about at the moment, didn’t she.

“Ask me,” the patient said abruptly.

“About what?”

“Ask me what you want to know.” He wiped his mouth, the damask napkin rasping over his goatee and his beard growth. “It’ll make my job harder at the end, but at least we won’t be sitting here listening to the sound of my silverware.”

“What job do you have at the end, exactly?” Please let it not be buying Hefty bags to put her body parts in.

“You aren’t interested in what I am?”

“Tell you what, you let me go, and I’ll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I’m slightly distracted with how this happy little vacation on the good ship Holy Shit is going to pan out for me.”

“I gave you my word—”

“Yeah, yeah. But you also just manhandled me. And if you say it was for my own good, I’m not going to be responsible for my comeback.” Jane looked down at her blunt nails and pushed at her cuticles. After getting her left hand done, she glanced up. “So this ‘job’ of yours…you going to need a shovel to get it done?”

The patient’s eyes dropped to his plate, and he forked at the rice, silver tines slipping in between the grains, penetrating them. “My job…so to speak…is to make sure you won’t remember any part of this.”

“Second time I’ve heard that, and I’ve got to be honest—I think it’s bullshit. It’s a little hard to imagine me breathing and not, I don’t know, recalling with the warm and fuzzies how I was draped over some guy’s shoulder, hauled out of my hospital, and drafted as your personal physician. Just how do you figure I’m going to forget all of that?”

His diamond-bright irises lifted. “I’m going to take these memories from you. Scrub this whole thing clean. It will be as if I never existed and you were never here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh, ri—”

Her head started to sting, and with a grimace she put her fingertips to her temples. When she dropped her hands, she looked at the patient and frowned. What the hell? He was eating, but not from the tray that had been here before. Who’d brought the new food in?

“My buddy with the Sox cap,” the patient said as he wiped his mouth. “Remember?”

In a burning rush, it all came back: Red Sox walking in, the patient taking her razor, her tearing up.

“Good…God,” Jane whispered.

The patient just kept eating, as if eradicating memories were no more exotic than the roasted chicken he was sucking back.

“How?”

“Neuropathway manipulation. A patch job, as it were.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“How do you find the memories? How do you differentiate? Do you—”

“My will. Your brain. That is specific enough.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Quick question. Does this magical skill with gray matter come with a total lack of compunction for your kind, or is it just you who were born without a conscience?”

He lowered his silverware. “I beg your pardon?”

She so didn’t care that he was offended. “First you