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Husbands and Other Strangers
Marie Ferrarella
DEAR DIARY:The first face I saw after hitting my head on my brother's boat was that of a gorgeous stranger…a stranger that everyone said was my husband. Taylor Conway is the type of man that no one forgets, so I thought it was my brothers' idea of a joke. How wrong I was! There's something about this gorgeous, determined man that's grown on me. And whether Taylor's really a stranger or the man I was head over heels in love with, I can't stop thinking about him. I just can't understand: Why would I erase my husband from my mind? I've got to find out for sure….
“I don’t know who you are.”
If Gayle was putting him on, Taylor was going to kill her. Slowly.
“You’re not kidding?” Taylor ground out each one of the words slowly, giving her every opportunity to recant. Praying she’d take it.
Why were her brothers doing this to her? “Sam, Jake, what’s going on here?”
Gayle looked from Sam to Jake, then her eyes came to rest on the stranger. Her brothers had played pranks on her before. But this was going a little bit too far.
Gayle gave each of them as much of a piercing, demanding look as she could muster, under the circumstances. “Jake, Sam, one of you tell me. I want to know. Just who is this man?”
Husbands and Other Strangers
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MARIE FERRARELLA
This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA
Award-winning author has written over 140 books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.
To Charlie, and remembering
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
His hands were gentle, so incredibly gentle. They passed over her body slowly, like a warm spring breeze. The hands of a lover. Caressing her. Stroking her. Making her yearn.
She knew instinctively that they were powerful hands—hands that could have just as easily snapped a neck in two if unrestrained anger had flashed through his veins. Which made it all the more wondrous that he could touch her this way. As if he were worshipping her.
As if he were making love to her with just his hands, just his fingertips.
He was making love to her.
A moan slipped from her lips, as if the pleasure that filled her was just too much to contain, to keep captive within the vessel of her body. It overflowed from every pore.
Drenching her.
Drenching him.
And then his hands were no longer blazing a trail along her skin. His lips were there instead, anointing her body. She could feel herself trembling as his mouth, ever so lightly, skimmed along her flesh, following the very same path that his fingers had traced just a moment ago.
A century ago, when time began.
She couldn’t see him.
Why couldn’t she see him? Why, when every fiber of her being felt him, knew him, wanted him, couldn’t she see his face? No matter how she tried, how she turned, she couldn’t see him. His identity remained hidden from her view.
Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see. She could only sense him. It was as if something inside of her prevented her from seeing him.
He wasn’t a stranger. How could he be? She knew who he was, at least in her soul. Somehow, deep within the secret recesses of her mind, she had always known, that he would be coming for her. Coming to her. Whoever he was, he was her soul mate, her intended, the one she had been destined for from the very moment destiny began.
Destined to love until the last sands of time blew away into the dark abyss of eternity.
So if her soul knew him so well, why couldn’t she see him?
Gayle Conway strained, trying to turn her head, aching for a chance to get a better view. Any view. Aching to see.
But something was holding her back, restraining her movement. A heavy weight was pressing down on her. And there was such exhaustion consuming her she couldn’t breathe. Still, with her last ounce of strength, she struggled against the iron bands on her arms.
A sense of overwhelming loss edged out the pleasure within her, like a blot of ink staining every square inch of the bright, colorful material it had been spilled on, obliterating it.
He was gone.
Gone as if he were nothing more than smoke, as if he hadn’t existed at all. But he had. She knew he had. He had been as real as she. Now she was left alone, shackled to a hard bed of loneliness.
The moan that came from her lips this time was devoid of pleasure. It was a keening sound, filled with the sorrow of bereavement and loss.
And then something else cut into it. Another sound, another voice.
Something…someone…
Someone was calling to her. Calling her from this oppressive, weighted darkness she was lost in.
The heaviness began to lift. Hands were on her again. But this time they were not gentle hands. Rough hands, trying to snatch at her consciousness. Trying to bring her back around. She could feel hands rubbing her arms, her legs, coaxing the color, the strength back into them. Back into her.
Gayle tried to listen. To recognize. But the voice calling her name belonged to someone she didn’t know. A stranger’s voice.
“Gayle, please wake up. Honey, please, just open your eyes. Just look at me. Please.”
Fingers. Gentle fingers, not running along her body but lacing her fingers with them. More words.
Supplications? Prayers?
Prayers. Someone was praying over her. She felt more than heard the words, as if they were being whispered into her subconscious.
Gayle tried hard to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t move. Each lid felt as if it had been sealed permanently shut.
She had to open her eyes to find who’d been loving her. She had to find the man who had so abruptly left her side.
The man she couldn’t see.
Slowly, mercifully, she could feel herself rising from the depths, the almost life-threatening heaviness leaving her. A moment longer and it would be all right. She would be out of this lonely, stark world and reunited with the man whose passion had set her on fire. Already she could feel her body warming again. Warming, as if touched by sunlight.
Sunlight.
It was the sun she felt on her face, on her body. The sun. Nothing more, just the sun.
The realization underlined the emptiness in her soul.
Something moist slid from her lashes and slithered in a zigzag pattern along both cheeks. Gayle opened her eyes and looked up at the concerned ring of faces hovering over her.
It took her a moment before she could focus on them. Sam. Jake. The emptiness within her shifted a little as she recognized the familiar faces of her two older brothers.
And then she saw someone else.
Taylor Conway wasn’t easily given to allowing his emotions to overtake him, but in the past twenty minutes he had unwillingly sped through an entire gamut of emotions. Every one of them had warred for complete possession of him as he had frantically worked over his wife’s body. Equal amounts of CPR and desperation had gone into his attempts to force air into her lungs again. He’d prayed every single prayer he could summon to his numbed brain, making deals with a god he hadn’t, until now, known firsthand.
Anything, as long as Gayle came back to him. He couldn’t lose her like this. No, not in any way at all. He refused to lose her.
Taylor had never tasted real fear before. It was metallic and bitter on the tongue, worse than anything he’d ever sampled. It had almost choked him.
Just the way the sea had almost choked the very life out of Gayle.
But she was alive. Beneath the green bathing suit top her chest was moving ever so slightly. She was breathing, thank God. Taylor was vaguely aware that at this point, he was into God for plenty, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered as long as Gayle was alive.
The next moment she was coughing, the water she’d taken in spilling from her nose and mouth. Taylor felt light-headed, giddy and only half-conscious of the hot tears stinging his eyes as what had almost happened began to take hold, getting a death grip on his mind.
Gayle struggled to sit up. He almost smiled. That was his Gayle. A fighter. She didn’t have enough sense to lie down. Taylor laid a restraining hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t try to get up,” His voice threatened to break. Damn, but she had scared the hell out of him.
Taylor quickly looked her over. There was a gash on her forehead just beneath the blond hairline. That would explain why she hadn’t come up. She must have hit her head against the side of the boat when she dove off the sloop into the choppy blue water. The gash was still bleeding. The blood trickled down, a few drops mingling with the ring of water that surrounded her body on the deck.
Now that she was safe, he could feel his temper beginning to rise. But he couldn’t shout at her yet, demanding to know what the hell she’d been thinking of to pull a stunt like that. Not when she was still so pale and weak.
So he bit back the hot words as best he could, turning instead toward his brother-in-law.
“Sam, where the hell is that first-aid kit you keep around here?”
Jake was already ahead of both of them. It was his sloop and his invitation that had brought everyone together in the first place.
“Right here.” Jake knelt beside Taylor, flipping the lock on the dark-blue box. “What do you need?”
“Something to stop the bleeding for now. That gash looks nasty.” Rummaging, Taylor found the last butterfly Band-Aid in the rusted box. He peeled off the wrapper and applied it along with pressure to the cut.
He frowned now. God, but she had scared him. Really scared him. Now that it was over, now that she was lying here on the deck of her brother’s sloop, alive and fully conscious, Taylor was aware of his own racing pulse, his own shaken feelings. If he didn’t love her so much, he would have wrung her fool neck. He might still do it, just on principle.
Shaken, Jake rose to his feet, the first-aid box in his hands. He pushed it toward Sam. “Right.” Sam looked down at his sister dubiously. She still looked really pale. “Is she going to be—”
“I’m okay,” Gayle cut in, waving away the concern buzzing around her like a swarm of bees.
Why were they talking about her as if she were in another dimension? She was right here. And she hated being fussed over. At least she thought she hated…yes, she did, she hated having a fuss made over her.
Despite the pounding going on inside of it, her head felt as if it was wrapped in cotton.
Gayle narrowed her eyes as she focused on the man who was rising. “Sam.” She said the name that came to her aloud, exploring it. Her vision and the fog about her brain slowly began to clear. Sam was her brother. One of her brothers. Silly that for a moment she hadn’t remembered. She could just hear what he’d have to say to that if he knew. They both teased her unmercifully as it was.
Sam quickly dropped back to his knees beside her. “What is it, Gayle?”
“Nothing.” It took effort to talk. Her throat felt incredibly raw, as if she’d swallowed then coughed up a seashell. “I just wanted to say your name.”
Sam and Jake exchanged looks. That sounded way too subdued for Gayle, but then, she’d never almost drowned before. Of the three of them, it was Gayle, the youngest and most agile, who could swim like a fish. Gayle on whom their father had pinned all his hopes from the very beginning.
Gayle took a deep breath. It was cut off by a sharp pain in her lungs. Jackknifing up, she began coughing violently. Half the ocean was still sloshing around inside her. Without being fully conscious of who she grabbed, she clutched at a strong arm, leaning against it as the cough racked her.
“Easy.” The same strong hands held her. The hands that had pressed her down before, when she’d struggled so hard to discover the identity of the man who was fading away. The man who’d made love to her. “Don’t try to get up just yet,” the deep voice warned her. “We don’t want you falling over and hitting your head again. I know it’s hard, but even your head has a breaking point.”
The familiarity and humor veiled an undercurrent of concern. She tried to smile at the words and succeeded only marginally.
“She’s not biting your head off. She must have done more damage to her head than we thought,” Jake murmured, then went back to the wheel.
Gayle turned her head and winced as pain accompanied the simple movement. “What happened?” she asked Sam. “What am I doing here?”
“I fished you out,” Taylor answered. “You insisted on diving off the bow of the sloop.” He pointed to where they’d all watched her dive off. It had been on a stupid dare. Taylor had raced over to stop her, but it was too late. “Probably just to annoy me.”
When he’d looked down in time to see her slice cleanly into the water, he’d felt his temper rising at her defiance. But it was admittedly mingled with admiration. He couldn’t help it. The sight of her form affected him that way. She’d always moved like sheer poetry.
At first when she didn’t emerge, he was sure she was doing it just to get back at him for that disagreement they’d had yesterday. Taylor knew she could hold her breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time. Her father, Colonel Lars Elliott, retired, an Olympic gold medalist, had thrown all three of his children into the water long before they could walk, determined to make serious Olympic contenders out of them, just as his father had made of him. More than that, he’d demanded winners. Gayle had been his winner.
But thirty seconds after her dive today, an uneasiness had taken hold of Taylor. Even as Jake and Sam quickly checked the perimeter of the sloop to see if Gayle had come up somewhere away from them, Taylor was diving in to find her. Something told him this wasn’t one of the pranks she was so fond of pulling. This was on the level.
He almost hadn’t found her. By the time he’d brought her up to the surface, it had been at the last possible moment for him. His lungs had been bursting, screaming for air. He could have made it up faster without her, but he would rather have died with her than let Gayle go and risk anything happening to her.
She blinked, her eyes stinging as she looked at the man beside her in wonder. What he said didn’t make sense. “Why would I want to annoy you?”
Taylor rose to his feet, looking down at her. He shook his head and smiled once more. “That’s something I ask myself a lot. My only conclusion is that annoying me seems to be a hobby of yours.”
Gayle frowned as she stared back at him. As if she didn’t know what he was talking about. As if she were looking at him for the first time.
The uneasiness returned, though he couldn’t put a name to it.
“I think that blow to the head might have finally succeeded in doing something none of us had ever managed to do. Make you docile,” Sam elaborated when she turned her sea-blue eyes on him quizzically. At the helm, Jake laughed.
“Fat chance,” Gayle said. Pulling her legs to her, she tried to sit up again.
Taylor started to stop her. “I told you to lie back.” Why did she always have to be so damn stubborn? If she had a concussion, movement might make it worse. He was prepared to carry her in his arms from the shore to the hospital if he had to. After what he’d just gone through, he’d prefer it that way.
Rather than lie down, Gayle pulled her arm out of his reach. Who the hell did he think he was? “Why should I listen to you?”
A grin slicing his face, Jake shook his head, relief flooding him. “She’s ba-ack.”
Taylor ignored him. His eyes were on Gayle’s. “Because I’m making sense. Now lie back, damn it.” He glanced at the butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead and saw a small, angry red line forming beneath it. “You’re still bleeding.” He looked over his shoulder at his brother-in-law at the helm. “Jake, can’t you make this thing go any faster?”
The waters were getting choppier. The storm was coming sooner than they’d expected. Jake was already pushing the engine to the limit. “I’m trying,” Jake answered. Frustration outlined his voice. “This isn’t a speedboat.”
“Try harder,” Taylor snapped. Though he didn’t often lose his temper with people other than Gayle, the near tragedy they had narrowly avoided had turned his patience to the consistency of dried kindling. His temper flared easily.
Gayle rallied, taking immediate offense. “Hey, stop yelling at my brothers. Just who the hell are you, anyway?”
“What?” Taylor looked at her incredulously. Now what was she trying to pull?
The question unsettled her a little as she tried to ignore the vague, irritating feeling that she should know the answer to her own question. Gayle licked her lips, tilting her chin slightly.
“I said, who are you?”
Taylor sank down again, his eyes fixed on her face. “What do you mean, who am I?”
Was he deaf as well as belligerent? “Just what I said.” Gayle slowly repeated the question. “Who are you? Are you a friend of Sam’s?”
He has no idea what kind of a game she was playing, but because she’d just given him the worst scare of his life, and because he still felt a little shell-shocked, he momentarily played along.
“Yes, I’m a friend of Sam’s. And a friend of Jake’s, too,” he added for good measure.
The answer made Gayle frown. She thought she knew most of her brothers’ friends. Certainly the ones they had in common. It was what made them such a close-knit family. But she had absolutely no recollection of the brooding, dark-haired man who seemed to think it his God-given duty to order everyone around.
The ache in her head grew even as she tried to ignore it. Gayle peered at his face, searching for some sort of recollection. “Then why have I never met you before?”
Hands on the wheel, Jake turned around. He and Sam exchanged looks. Their unspoken question mirrored each other.
What the hell was Gayle up to this time?
Taylor sat back on his heels, studying Gayle’s face. A face he’d long since memorized, every nuance, every fiber. All deeply embedded in his brain.
“Oh, we’ve met, all right.” The deep voice was pregnant with meaning.
Gayle shook off the almost hypnotic effect. Met? She sincerely doubted it. She would have remembered a face like that, even if she’d only seen it just in passing: chiseled, stern, perhaps even hard, to the undiscerning eye; an odd collection of planes and angles that somehow arranged themselves to make the man impossibly handsome.
The total is greater than the sum of the parts, the vague thought echoed through her throbbing head.
But handsome or not, that didn’t give him a right to lie to her or play a trick at her expense, especially when her brain felt as if it was the consistency of Swiss cheese.
“No, we haven’t met,” she insisted stubbornly.
Maybe some other time, when his nerves hadn’t been pulled thinner than the thread used for suturing an internal wound, Taylor would have been willing to play along a little longer. But not now. Not when he’d been to hell and back in what could have been a watery grave for both of them. He wasn’t in the mood for it.
He reached out to touch her shoulder. “Gayle, I don’t feel like playing games.”
She shrugged him off again. What made him think he could just touch her like that? As if he had a right to? Why weren’t her brothers protesting?
Weakness passed over her, bringing with it a volley of heat that drenched her in perspiration. Gayle would have drawn herself into a ball if she could, locking out everything. For a moment she had to struggle just to hang on to consciousness again. But she refused to surrender.
Gayle gritted her teeth together against it, against the probing fingers of pain.
“Good, because neither do I.” Her eyes became dark penetrating slits of blue green as she looked at this man pushing his way into her life. “My head feels like it’s coming apart.” She held it as if she were afraid that it would. “So, are you going to tell me your name or not?”
Concern returned like a clap of thunder. Sam sat down in front of his sister. He fanned out the fingers of one hand before her face, ignoring her question to Taylor. “Gayle, how many fingers am I holding up now?”
The sharp headache sapped any patience she might have had to spare.
“Three.” Gayle closed her hand over Sam’s and pushed it aside. “We all know it’s as high as you can count. I don’t want to play count-the-fingers with you, Sam. I want someone to tell me who this man is and why he’s trying to boss everyone around.”
Despite the tension in the air, his sister’s comment made Jake laugh. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.” His dark eyes darted toward his brother-in-law. Taylor’s face did look pretty strained. Both he and Sam had often marveled how Taylor could have lived with their sister for the past eighteen months and still remained sane. “Not that I mean to imply you’re a kettle…” His voice trailed off, having nowhere to go.
Fear began to rear its head again, bringing with it an uneasiness that nibbled away at Taylor. Jake’s comment didn’t even register. Taylor stared at Gayle, at the woman he had ultimately loved more than the allure of the free life he had abandoned for her.
“You don’t know who I am.” It sounded absurd even to say out loud. After what they had shared, he would have said that the pyramids would have become mounds of sand and blown away before she forgot him, or he her. This had to be some kind of game, a cruel prank to get back at him for the argument and God only knew what.
“Yes,” Gayle replied. But before he breathed a sigh of relief in misunderstanding, her next words took it away from him—and cleared up the minor confusion while ushering in a complete new truckload. “I don’t know who you are.”
If she was putting him on, he was going to kill her. Slowly.
“You’re not kidding?” He ground out each one of the words slowly, giving her every opportunity to recant. Praying she’d take it.
Because something deep inside her was suddenly afraid, afraid of what she couldn’t begin to understand, Gayle clung to temper.
“I’m bleeding. Why would I be kidding?” Why were her brothers doing this to her? Why were they putting her through this charade at a time like this? She looked from one to the other, silently asking them to stop. “Sam, Jake, what’s going on here? And how did I get here, on the boat, anyway?”
The three men looked at one another, not knowing whether they were all victims of an elaborate hoax and being played for fools—Gayle wasn’t above that—or if they should be seriously worried.
Gayle drew herself up to her knees, swaying just a little. “I said, what’s going on here?” She glanced from Sam to Jake, then her eyes came to rest on the stranger. Her brothers had played pranks on her before. It was a way of letting off steam that was a holdover from their childhood, when their father’s rigorous training would get to them. But this was going a little bit too far now.
“Jake, Sam, one of you tell me. I want to know. Just who is this man?”
Chapter Two
Jake was the oldest, and as such, he was apt to take things more seriously than his siblings. He looked at the woman he was fond of calling his baby sister, although it was not quite six years that separated them. There were times when Gayle had trouble knowing when to stop. He had no problem stepping in when it came to that.
“Okay, Gayle, quit fooling around now. You’ve had your joke and scared the hell out of the rest of us, including your husband.”
All she heard was one word. One frightening word. Was she going crazy? Or were they? Knowing her brothers, it was them. And she didn’t appreciate being the butt of the joke.
“Husband.” Gayle looked around angrily, deliberately not focusing on the stranger at her left. “What husband?” she demanded.
“That’s enough, Gayle.” Jake was using his police-detective voice. It masked his growing uneasiness. Gayle wasn’t normally such a good actress.
“My sentiments exactly,” she retorted, getting to her feet. The pounding in her head increased twofold, ushering in a dizziness that threatened to make her pass out. She mentally clung to her surroundings as she sank onto one of the four seats on the deck. “Now quit fooling around, guys.” She put her hand to her head, as if that could somehow contain the headache that was consuming her. “I don’t feel right.”
Doggedly refusing to step back, Taylor took a closer look at the woman who had been the bane of his existence as well as the center of his universe for the last eighteen months.
What he saw worried him.
He wasn’t comfortable in this frame of mind. Marriage had never been in the cards for him as far as he was concerned. Never close to either of his parents, he hadn’t wanted a family of his own.
Independent, handy, Taylor had stubbornly made his own way ever since he’d graduated from high school. He returned to college only when he felt that it might give him a leg up in the field that he’d finally chosen for himself: restoring, recreating or just plain overhauling houses that had long since seen their zenith. He took sows’ ears and albatrosses, turning them into things of modern beauty and functionality.
Blessed with vision, Taylor considered himself both a craftsman and an artist with a keen eye for detail. He liked working with his hands as well as his mind. Liked partying hard, too, when the occasion called for it. And always, always moving on whenever the next project called. Moving on alone.
Until he’d met Gayle Elliott.
It was, appropriately enough, at a party thrown by Rico Cimmaron, a professional football player. The party was at Rico’s house, a building Taylor had renovated for a sinfully exorbitant amount of money. Rico had said as much when he’d introduced him to the small, slender and incredibly sexy woman he was currently dating.
Looking back, Taylor thought everyone should have a moment where the rest of the world faded away as the focus zoomed in on one perfect individual. The way he found himself focusing on Rico’s date. Gayle Elliott. He quickly discovered that the golden blonde with the sea-green eyes had an attitude that both pushed him away and reeled him in. By the end of the party, he knew that Gayle was funny, outgoing, witty and as combative as hell when she thought she was right.
He also quickly saw that she was accustomed to being the center of attention, just like Rico. For all intents and purposes, they looked like a golden couple. He didn’t let that stand in his way.
Like Rico, she was a name in the world of sports. His knowledge of that world was cursory, but someone at the party obligingly filled him in about Gayle. She’d earned not one but nine gold medals over the course of the last three Summer Olympics, winning her first gold medal at the age of sixteen. After she’d announced her retirement at the close of the Olympic Games, Gayle turned her attention and all her incredible energy and exuberance to sports commentating.
Her enthusiasm for all sports made her a natural. So did her looks. She quickly found herself courted by a number of local news stations around the country. She chose to remain in Bedford because it was her hometown and took the offer from a Los Angeles affiliated station.
Ratings went up and her temporary stint turned into a permanent spot. John Alvarez, the man she’d subbed for, found himself moved to the morning broadcast.
It was to Gayle’s credit that Alvarez bore her no resentment. Taylor saw that men of all ages fell all over themselves in their attempt to be around Gayle and garner her favor. Which was precisely why he’d initially held back. That and because she was dating a former client.
He realized his reticence was what had attracted her to him in the first place. In his estimation, the pert, sassy and somewhat opinionated woman wanted to leave no man unconquered. He admitted to Sam, although not to her, that Gayle won him over fast enough. And it was difficult to keep his feelings to himself.
They’d had one hell of a courtship. He liked to think of it as two forces of nature coming together. There was no other explanation why a five-foot-three woman had suddenly taken such a dominant position in his life, when, from an early age on, he’d had his pick of any woman he wanted and had wanted none for the duration.
The way he’d wanted Gayle.
From the very beginning Gayle had turned his life upside down.
And had nearly brought it to a screeching stop just now, when he’d believed for several horrible moments that the waters through which she’d always negotiated her way like a mermaid had suddenly and finally claimed her.
His nerves were stretched to the very limit. Crouching beside her chair, Taylor took hold of his wife’s shoulders, pinning her against the teak back. Anger flashed across her face as she attempted to shrug him off. And failed.
She was weak, Taylor thought with concern. If she wasn’t, Gayle could have easily worked her way out of his grasp. She had an exorbitant amount of upper body strength.
“You don’t remember me,” he said, stunned by her statement.
What if it was true? a nagging voice whispered inside his head. What if, for some awful reason, she couldn’t remember him?
Gayle exhaled a ragged breath. What was going on here? And why did she feel as if someone had just shot holes through her every thought? She couldn’t remember how she got to this deck. Or even to Sam’s boat. She tried to think back to the last thing she could clearly remember. Everything felt murky in her head, as if it was submerged in a tank overgrown with algae.
Panic fueled impatience. She stared at the man crowding her. “No, I don’t remember you. Why would I lie?” she demanded.
“Because you’re good at it. Not lying,” Taylor amended, “just at being stubborn. At playing pranks. And being a pain in the butt,” he added, his own temper just about snapping. One minute he was afraid she was dead, now she was pretending not to recognize him. His emotions couldn’t handle this uneven roller-coaster ride. “This isn’t funny, Gayle.”
Anger was her only defense. Her face was deadly serious as she looked at this stranger who was intruding into her life with lead-soled combat boots.
“No,” Gayle agreed vehemently, “it’s not.” She looked to her brothers for help. Why were they humoring this character? Why weren’t they coming to her defense? Fun was fun, but this was beginning to be cruel.
“Gayle, you’ve had your fun—” Sam began, only to be waved back into silence by Taylor.
“I’ve known her to get pretty elaborate with her jokes, but even Gayle couldn’t fake that kind of pallor,” he pointed out.
She looked as white as a sheet, he thought with mounting anxiety. And there was something in her eyes that had him coming to the unwelcome realization that his wife wasn’t kidding around.
She didn’t remember him.
Moving closer, Jake looked at his brother-in-law. “You think she might have amnesia?”
Taylor rose to his feet. Before he could reply, Sam snorted in disgust. “Amnesia,” he repeated, scoffing at the notion. “You don’t just forget one person if you have amnesia. It’s not selective.”
Gayle tugged on the leg of Sam’s bathing suit. “Hey, guys, I’m right here. Don’t talk about me as if I were some inanimate object.”
Her tone was angry, but inside she was beginning to give way to fear. A large, overwhelming, all-encompassing fear because this was beginning to feel strange.
What made matters worse, tipping the scales in Sam and Jake’s favor, was that her brain really did feel as if there were holes running all through it.
She clenched her hands in her lap. No, not possible, she thought. Things like this didn’t happen. Not to her. Okay, so she couldn’t remember the events of this morning. Couldn’t remember how she came to be here, but those were just a few random events. And there were all those facts and figures crowding her brain. It was only natural to forget a few things along the way.
Besides, Sam was right. You didn’t just forget a whole person, at least not a significant one and husbands definitely came under the heading of significant people. How could she forget a husband and nothing else?
This had to be a prank. And once she got them to admit it, she was going to make them all pay for it. Sam and Jake and especially the man with the superserious expression.
“We need to take her to the E.R.,” the man was now saying to her brothers, talking again as if she had no more mind than the red cushion against the chair. But at least he was making sense. It was the first thing out of his mouth she agreed with. A doctor would take care of the cut on her forehead, give her something for this awful headache and tell these bozos to quit yanking her chain like this.
“Boat’s already turned around,” Sam assured him. The next moment he returned to the helm and the wheel he’d left on automatic pilot.
“Good,” Gayle declared in a voice she prayed didn’t sound as shaky as she felt. “The faster we get this squared away, the better.” With superhuman will, she forced herself up to her feet again, then mentally defied that woozy feeling to return. For the moment it seemed to remain at bay, hovering just outside the perimeters of her consciousness.
Her hands clenched at her sides, perspiration forming along her forehead, she managed to edge closer to Jake. She glanced back toward her so-called “husband” and saw that the man had taken out a cell phone from somewhere. Suspicion rose immediately. She didn’t trust this guy any further than she could throw him.
“Who are you calling?” she wanted to know.
“Dr. Peter Sullivan. He’s a neurosurgeon at Blair Memorial Hospital.”
Her eyes widened. Without realizing it, she took a step closer to Jake. “I’m not letting anyone operate on me.”
Finished, Taylor closed the cell phone. He was aware that both her brothers seemed really concerned now. That made three of them. He did his best to keep a poker face. One of them had to look as if they weren’t playing pattycake with panic.
“It’s not about an operation,” he told her. As he took a step closer to her, he noticed her flinch. She didn’t even seem to be aware of it. Her involuntary action ate away at his soul. “He’s the best in the area.” Which, he added silently, considering that the area was Southern California, a region of the country generally thought to be overloaded with doctors from every field of specialization imaginable, was saying a great deal.
Her eyes met his. He saw a familiar look of bravado there. It gave him a measure of hope, even if it was getting in his way at the moment. “Or he’s a friend, willing to go along with whatever you tell him to say,” she countered.
Her sense of paranoia was still intact, Taylor thought. Over the course of their courtship and marriage, Gayle had always been prepared for another retaliation. He was always careful to choose his pay-backs wisely. They fought well and made love even better. Lord, he hadn’t known he could feel this happy, this fulfilled until he’d met Gayle.
A cold shiver slithered down his spine. He tried his best to ignore it. She was going to be fine. If this was on the level, she was going to be fine.
If this wasn’t, the woman was dead meat.
“We’ll be there with you,” Jake assured his sister.
Gayle turned to look at him and he saw the fear in her eyes.
So did Taylor. He tried to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Like Rico, Taylor had met Dr. Sullivan while doing renovations on the man’s house just after the surgeon had gotten married. The wedding had made the society page as well as the business section, because the bride was the head of a well-known fashion design company and, along with her younger brother, the owner of the Fortune 500 company that produced the designs.
He saw the man frowning now as he approached him and his brothers-in-law. They’d been cooling their heels in the waiting room, trying to convince one another that this was nothing more than a stupid joke. Getting nowhere.
Peter wore the expression of a man who knew he was not the bearer of good tidings. “The good news is that she checks out fine physically and she can go home.”
“And the bad news?” Taylor pressed.
“The bad news,” Peter told them, trying to phrase it as clinically, as painlessly as possible, “is that Gayle appears to have sustained a blow to the head and while there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a concussion, it has apparently triggered a bout of amnesia.”
“A bout,” Taylor repeated. Fighters had bouts. They were over after a given amount of rounds. A bout with the flu lasted a while, then was over. He rallied around the word. “Which means that it’ll go away.” Taylor silently willed the surgeon to confirm his conclusion.
Peter took a breath, then said, “Probably.”
“When?” Taylor pressed before either of his brothers-in-law were able to say the word.
Peter shook his head. He sympathized with what he knew the three men had to be going through, especially Taylor. “I’m afraid that I can’t really say. Amnesia is still a very gray area for us.”
Taylor felt as if he was free-falling through space, with a terrain full of nothing but jagged rocks beneath him.
“�Appears,’ �apparently,’ �probably,’” he echoed in protest. “There’s nothing definite here, Doc.”
“No,” Peter agreed, “there’s not. Amnesia is such a capricious condition. There are no hard-and-fast rules established yet. This could go away in an hour, a day, a month or…” He let his voice trail off, not wanting to utter the word that he knew Gayle’s husband dreaded.
Never.
“Capricious.” Jake seized on the doctor’s description. “That makes it sound like it’s all a prank.”
Peter slowly moved his head from side to side. “I’m afraid not.”
Taylor had worn a path in the carpet, waiting for the neurosurgeon to emerge. He had to hold himself in check now to keep from pacing again. This just didn’t make any sense to him.
“But Gayle can’t just forget one thing and not everything else,” he protested. And then that sick, sinking feeling had him adding, “Can she?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Peter agreed, “but I’m afraid that she can.”
“Selective amnesia?” Taylor scoffed at the notion even as he fought to keep the panic he felt from crawling up his belly and into his throat. “How is that even possible?”
“More easily than you think, Taylor. Actually, all amnesia is selective in a way. A person with amnesia doesn’t forget how to talk. How to walk. How to get dressed. They remember who’s president or how to make change. They forget other things, things like who they are.”
“Okay, she knows all that. She just claims not to know who I am,” Taylor bit off, frustrated.
“Has she been taking any new medications?” Peter asked, looking at all three men.
“No. She’s as healthy as a horse,” Taylor told him. “Why?”
“There was this man, a former astronaut actually, who forgot who his wife was. They thought it was the onset of Alzheimer’s, but it was a bad reaction to a statin medication he was taking for his cholesterol. It happens.”
“She’s not taking anything for cholesterol.” Taylor took a second to collect himself. “So what you’re saying is that it’s possible to forget just one integral part of her life. Me.”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
“Why?” Taylor demanded. He hated this helpless feeling that was taking over. He was a doer, not someone who just sat back to wait. Waiting had never been very popular with him. “Why would Gayle just forget me and not her brothers?”
“I don’t have the answer to that,” Peter told him honestly.
“Take a guess.” It was a barely suppressed plea.
Peter blew out a breath. “There might be some sort of underlying reason. The mind is still largely a huge mystery to us. It represses certain memories, sometimes so much so that the person forgets they ever had them. Gayle hitting her head triggered a response, allowing her mind to spring into action.”
“And erase me.” The words tasted bitter in Taylor’s mouth.
Peter frowned slightly. “I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but yes, erase you.”
Taylor still needed a reason, something to rectify, to make right. “But why?” He looked at Jake and Sam. Along with concern, there was pity in their eyes. He hated being on the receiving end of pity. His frustration continued to mount. “There’s nothing wrong between us.”
“No explosive events in the past few months?” Peter addressed the question not only to Taylor, but to Gayle’s brothers, as well.
“Gayle is always explosive. She’s a hotbed of emotion,” Sam told him. “She always has been.”
“But there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary,” Taylor insisted.
It wasn’t strictly true. There’d been one argument, a minor one really, especially when you took into consideration that it had been with Gayle. She was usually far more vocal than she had been over this last thing. They’d had a difference of opinion over her getting pregnant. He wanted to wait, and she seemed intent on it happening soon. The reasons for his side were purely logical and perhaps a little chauvinistic.
He wanted to save a little more money before they started a family. Through her endorsements as well as her job, they were far from hurting financially, but he thought of it as “her” money. A baby should be raised with money that he provided. He’d said as much and she’d backed away from her position quickly enough. But she hadn’t seemed happy about it.
The matter hadn’t come up again, so he just thought it was one of those things Gayle occasionally raised, getting on the opposing side of an argument just to goad him. It really hadn’t been much of a disagreement as far as some of their disagreements went. He figured she was just testing the waters to see how he felt. Quite honestly, he’d been rather surprised that the discussion had evaporated so quickly.
Taylor tried to think of something else, something remotely major that might have upset her. He came up empty. That couldn’t be it.
Shrugging, he said, “She wanted us to go and visit my parents, but I told her I was too busy and she got a little bent out of shape over that. But you’re not going to tell me that my wife just suddenly decided to wipe me out of her memory banks because I wouldn’t take her for a visit to see her in-laws.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “They’re not the kind of people you’d put yourself out for.” They weren’t even the kind of people you’d bother crossing the street to meet, he added silently, then shook his head. “This can’t be about that.”
“Whatever it is about, for some reason her mind decided to shut down when it came to things about you. I’m not even sure if anything traumatic is really directly at the heart of this.”
He felt they were going around in circles. And he was getting dizzy, as well as despondent, because he was beginning to believe Peter. “But you are sure that Gayle doesn’t remember me. That this isn’t some elaborate trick.”
The doctor’s expression told him as much.
Taylor’s heart sank even lower.
“There’s actually a precedent for this,” Peter told him. “There was case several years ago where a woman was involved in an accident. She hit her head and when she came to, she couldn’t remember her husband. But she could remember everything else.”
Taylor was almost afraid to ask. “Did she ever get over it?”
“Yes.” The doctor smiled.
Hope began to rebuild inside of him. “Then it’ll be okay.”
“Every case is different.”
Taylor snorted. “You don’t exactly dip into the well of optimism, do you?”
Peter laid his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “Most likely she will come around.”
Most likely. He wanted guarantees, not nebulous words he couldn’t bank on. “What do I do until then?”
Peter gave him an encouraging smile before he left to see his patient. “Be nice to her.”
Chapter Three
“�Be nice to her?’” Sam repeated in disbelief, looking at Taylor once Dr. Sullivan had left. “That’s his professional advice to you? �Be nice to her’?” Stunned almost beyond words, Sam could only shake his head. “Damn it, Taylor, where did you find this guy? In an ad on the back of a comic book?”
“No,” Taylor replied slowly. “Actually, he’s pretty high up in his field. The guy works miracles.”
Even as he spoke, he felt as if the words were bouncing around in an echo chamber in his head. As if nothing around him was real.
This couldn’t be happening.
He and Gayle had had a rocky eighteen months, but they were learning to work things out, to travel on the same road because they loved each other. No matter how heated things got between them, there was always that to fall back on, the love they felt for each other.
And now he was supposed to accept the fact that he was standing out there, alone? That he loved her but she didn’t love him because she didn’t even know him from any other stranger on the street? How the hell was he supposed to come to terms with that? What did that do to their marriage? To their relationship?
Damn it, he had no frame of reference for this. No idea how to cope.
“Sure doesn’t look as if he worked any miracles on Gayle,” Sam countered in disgust.
“I think it makes sense,” Jake said in his even, quiet voice.
Taylor had to concentrate to keep the fog from closing in around his brain. He looked at Jake and realized he hadn’t been listening. That he’d been mentally trying to catch up all the marbles in his hand at once, but they kept insisting on slipping through his fingers and rolling away.
“What does?”
Jake nodded in the general direction that the surgeon had taken. “What the doc said about being nice to Gayle. All you can do is be patient.” He put his hand up, forestalling the words he knew had to be coming. “I know it’ll be hard, but this condition has got to be a temporary thing.”
Taylor wished he had Jake’s ability to see the bright side of things. But he was a realist who knew that sometimes, the worst could and did happen. “And if it’s not?”
Jake’s small mouth curved ever so slightly, his expression more philosophical than amused. He put his arm around Taylor’s shoulders. “Now you see, there’s your problem, Taylor. You can’t think of this negatively. You’ve got to believe. Believe that it’s going to be all right. Before you know it, Gayle’s going to be back to normal.” Although the smile remained, there was an enormous depth of feeling behind every word.
“Yeah, and then before you know it, you’ll find yourself missing her not knowing you,” Sam speculated.
“Yeah,” Taylor bit off.
How many times over the course of the last eighteen months, at the height of one of their “disagreements,” had he wished he’d never met her? The woman seemed to go out of her way to drive him insane. And yet…
And yet he knew that life before Gayle had been nothing more than an existence, marked by pockets of work he was really proud of and interludes with women that left him feeling empty and somehow lacking. Until Gayle, he hadn’t realized exactly what it was that had been lacking. After Gayle came into his life, rolling in like a tempestuous storm, he knew that what had been lacking was color, vibrancy and a zest that had him greeting each day with the enthusiasm of an adventurer poised to take the first step into the greatest adventure of his life.
That was what living with Gayle was like, a constant adventure. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always, always stimulating.
There was no way he was going to give that up. No way he was going to give her up.
Okay, he thought. This was going to be just another adventure in a long series of adventures. A little strange, but then, life with Gayle had never exactly been what one would call normal.
As long as he kept his eye fixed on the light at the end of the tunnel—as long as he kept telling himself the light was there even when he couldn’t see it—he could get through this.
“The doctor said Gayle could go home,” Taylor said aloud, more to himself than to Sam and Jake.
Jake nodded, as if to say that this was a good next step. “Then let’s go get our girl,” he said.
Taylor returned the nod, grateful for his brother-in-law’s support. He knew that he could count on both Jake and Sam. Not just because Gayle was their sister, but because he was part of the family. There were times when he caught himself thinking how odd that felt. Eighteen months and he was still adjusting to the idea that he had more than himself to lean on. That he wasn’t alone anymore. It was a fringe benefit for getting involved with Gayle.
Flanked by Jake and Sam, Taylor entered the curtained area, ready to pick up the fight where they had left off. Gayle had called him a liar just before the nurse had drawn the curtain around the gurney so that she could change into a hospital gown.
Words melted from his tongue and his head the moment he looked at the woman who no longer remembered that she was his wife. He couldn’t recall ever seeing Gayle looking so small, so vulnerable as she did lying in that bed—and yet so defensive at the same time.
She was probably scared. But then, who wouldn’t be, in her position? Part of her memory had been whisked away like a so-called alien abduction. That would have rattled anyone. And although she was outgoing, Gayle had never been what he would have called the blindly trusting type.
Which was why she’d been so suspicious of him. Why she was still suspicious of him, if that look in her eyes was any indication of the state of her mind.
This was going to take a hell of a lot of patience, he warned himself. More than he’d ever had to dig up before. Taylor really hoped he was up to it.
You have to be up to it, he upbraided himself. The prize was far too precious. And he had no intention of losing it.
“The doctor said you could go home now,” Taylor told her.
Gayle deliberately looked toward her brothers. The less encouragement she gave this poor joke of theirs, the better. Not that she wouldn’t have been interested in spending some time with this guy her brothers had dug up. The man had definite potential, especially around the mouth and eyes.
His dark-blue eyes looked as if they’d been the inspiration that had led someone to coin the phrase about eyes being the windows of the soul. His looked as if they were almost bottomless. And his mouth—there was something incredibly sensual about his mouth even though, so far, she’d only seen it looking unhappy.
Or maybe her reaction to him was because his mouth was pulled back into a frown.
This wasn’t the time. She was letting her mind wander, taking her thoughts on a wild and very obviously purposeless chase.
She had to keep her mind on her goal. Getting out of here.
“Good,” she declared.
Gayle began to look around the small enclosure for her clothes. And then another thought struck her. With a sense of foreboding, she had the uneasy feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer to her question.
Anticipating what he thought was Gayle’s next move, Taylor bent down and removed the plastic shopping bag tucked just above the wheels of the gurney. When the nurse on duty had brought Gayle her one-size-fits-all hospital gown, she’d placed Gayle’s bathing suit, as well as the shorts and tank top Jake had thought to bring with them, into the bag.
“Looking for these?” He held up the bag.
She took the bag from him mechanically, mumbling a thanks she was hardly aware of uttering. Gayle looked at Jake. There was only one way to find this out, and she might as well get it over with.
“Um, Jake, I can’t remember.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and then forged ahead. “Where do I live?”
Taylor didn’t wait for Jake to answer. “With me,” he told Gayle. “You live with me.”
She hadn’t been prepared for the intense wave of panic that washed over her. It all but robbed her of her breath. “No, I don’t,” she insisted.
“Yes,” Jake said to her, quietly but firmly, “you do.”
Sam was right there to back him up. “He’s right, you do.”
She wanted to scream “No.” To shout that the joke was over. But beneath it all was the strong, underlying fear that they weren’t playing a trick on her. That for whatever reason, part of her memory was gone.
“Guys, you’re scaring me.”
“No more than you’re scaring us,” Taylor told her evenly.
She looked from one face to another, ending up with the man she wanted to believe was an impostor. Her eyes reverted back to Jake. Her throat suddenly felt dry, and her head began to spin again. She fought to keep from getting dizzy.
“Really?” she asked Jake, her voice hardly above a whisper. She stared into her older brother’s eyes, certain that if he was lying to her—the way she was fervently praying he was—she could tell. She could always tell when Jake was lying. He squinted.
“Really.”
Jake wasn’t squinting.
Shaken down to her very core, she sighed.
“Then why can’t I remember?” she demanded, looking at Jake. Ever since she’d taken her first step, she’d fought to be independent, to be taken seriously on her own merit. But right at this moment, she wanted her big brother to take care of her. To make things right. “Why can’t I remember anything about him?”
Jake ached for her as he struggled to make sense of all this. He took Gayle’s hand in his. “We don’t know, Gayle.”
“The doctor said he doesn’t even know,” Sam chimed in, as if that could somehow make her feel better. That she wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand.
“Guys, could you leave us alone for a minute?” Taylor asked his brothers-in-law.
Panic returned, as raw and nearly as unmanageable as it had been that very first time her father made her jump into the water and swim on her own as he stood on the side of the pool. She’d flashed a confident smile, wanting to be his golden girl. But inside she’d been trembling. She’d been four at the time.
“No,” Gayle cried, grabbing Jake’s arm. She didn’t want to be alone with this man. “Don’t.”
Very gently Jake peeled her fingers away from his forearm.
“We’ll be right outside, Gayle,” he promised, backing out of the area. A beat later Sam followed. Leaving the two of them alone.
For a moment Taylor stood there in silence. It was killing him, seeing her like this. Ever since he’d known her, Gayle had been vibrant, feisty. He couldn’t ever recall her being frightened, the way she so visibly was now.
And then it came—that look he’d become so familiar with in the past year and a half. Defiance. Relief flooded over him, emotions threatening to close his throat. His Gayle was in there somewhere and he was going to go in and find her, even if he had to drag her out, kicking and screaming.
It would be like old times.
“Well?” she demanded, doing her best not to let this man see that she felt as if she was falling apart. She’d never been this frightened….
Except that she had, she suddenly realized. Something, just now, had flashed through her brain, a glimmer of a memory moving so fast she couldn’t catch hold of it. All she could grasp was the hem of a fragment of fear. But fear of what or who, when and why, none of this had any answers.
Damn it, this was so frustrating. She felt like a book with all the even numbered pages missing. Nothing made any sense to her. Least of all why she couldn’t remember this man everyone told her was her husband.
“We’ll take this slow, Gayle,” Taylor promised. “One day at a time.”
He fought the urge to take her into his arms and just hold her. Knowing that it was the last thing he should do. A hint of a smile formed as it occurred to him that if he did do that, she’d probably toss him across the room with one of those martial arts moves of hers. Martial arts had become her newest passion. Gayle did nothing by half measures. Whatever she undertook, she did so wholeheartedly.
It was the same when they made love.
God, he just had to bring her around. Had to make her remember their life together. And he didn’t care what the doctor had said, he couldn’t help but take this personally. She’d remembered everything. But him.
There had to be an underlying reason for that. The trouble was he wasn’t sure he was going to like the answer once he found it.
She never took her eyes off him. He’d seen old tapes of Gayle at swim meets. She always watched her opponents the same way. Was that how she saw him? As an adversary?
“And meanwhile,” she said, “I’m supposed to come home with you.”
“It’s where you live.”
Gayle frowned. That’s what he said, but how did she know for sure? If she was his wife, wouldn’t there be a degree of familiarity somewhere, however deep in her subconscious? If he was really her husband, the man she supposedly loved, would her mind really have shut down, excluding him from every thought, every memory?
She’d spent the past two hours sitting in a drafty hospital gown, waiting to be scanned and probed while she desperately tried to summon any kind of memories with him in them. All she’d managed to do was come up against a blank wall.
It had led her to an inevitable conclusion. If this man was her husband, then he must have been a terrible one. There was no other explanation why his very presence had been burned away from her memory banks.
Gayle drew herself up as high as she could manage. “I can stay with Sam or Jake.” Her tone was deliberately dismissive. On a whim she added, “Just until I remember you.” She thought that would put an end to any argument he might have.
Taylor shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from shaking her. A part of him still felt maybe this was payback for some imagined sin. She’d spent the first six months of their marriage testing him, as if she couldn’t believe that he was going to stay and wanted him to go before she became used to her status. Used to him. He’d just dug in and waited her out. He didn’t know if he had the stamina to do it again.
“The familiar surroundings might make you remember faster,” he finally told her.
“Why should they be familiar if you’re not?” she countered.
He threw up his hands, then struggled to regain control over his temper. Shouting at her wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She wasn’t testing him, he told himself. She was thrashing around in the same choppy waters that he was. It was up to him to lead her out of them. How, he had no idea, but he knew he was going to. There was too much at stake to just give up.
“I don’t have any answers here, Gayle. The doctor doesn’t have any answers,” he emphasized. “This is all new territory for me.”
She raised her hand as if she were sitting in a classroom, trying to catch the teacher’s eye. “Let’s not forget me here.”
“I’m not forgetting you,” he said so fiercely he knew he scared her. “Not for one damn second am I forgetting you. And I don’t know why you seem to have forgotten me.”
“Seem?” Gayle echoed, her temper flaring at the single word. She cleaved to the familiar feeling as if it was an old friend. This, this she could remember. Getting angry. Having no fear over voicing her opinions. She was her own person, no matter who this man was or wasn’t to her. She had to remember that. “You think I’m faking this? That I’m pretending not to know you?”
For just a moment the bars he’d placed around his own temper seemed in danger of melting.
“Right now I don’t know what to think,” Taylor shot back. “You’re not above doing things to bedevil me for reasons that I could never fully understand. You—”
Abruptly he stopped himself.
This wasn’t the way to go, even though for him the ground was familiar. Arguing with Gayle might just push her farther into this black hole that had somehow eaten away at the part of her mind that had contained him.
Struggling for control, Taylor blew out a breath. He didn’t need this. He pushed the plastic bag with her clothes closer to her. “Get dressed, Gayle. I’m going to take you home.”
She clutched the bag against her, tossing her head the way he’d seen her do a hundred times before. Her long, blond hair flew over her shoulder. “No, you’re not.”
He leaned in close to her, his lips against her ear. “Yes,” he said quietly, firmly, “I am.”
His breath slipped along the curve of her neck. The shiver along her spine mimicked its path. Something in the distance stirred, although she could put neither name nor description to it.
She dropped it.
Although she didn’t know him, something in the man’s voice told her he wasn’t someone to be messed with, to be disregarded. Certainly not a man she could order around the way she could so many of the others in her life. Even her brothers bent from time to time.
Just her luck, her so-called husband had a steel pole stuck up a place that should never be visited.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he told her. With that Taylor pushed the curtain aside and walked out of her space.
He found Sam and Jake waiting for him in the hall where they’d talked to Peter.
Sam pretended to look him over carefully. “Well, no wounds,” he observed. “That’s a positive sign. Is Gayle coming around?” Taking a look at Taylor’s face, Sam saw the answer to his question. Disappointment followed. “Guess not.”
Taylor was struggling to take this newest development in stride, the way he had everything else that involved Gayle. “The woman’s got the disposition of a wounded warthog.”
Jake laughed. “Then she is coming around,” he commented dryly. And then he looked at his brother-in-law. “Look, Tay, maybe Sam or I should take her in for a couple of weeks. I mean, if she doesn’t remember you’re married—”
Taylor cut him off. “She’s going to remember, Jake. She’ll see something, hear something, it’ll trigger a memory and we can go from there. I’ve got to be there for that. Got to give her every opportunity to remember me. To remember us.” He struggled to keep the hopelessness from absorbing him. “Maybe I’ll show Gayle the wedding pictures.”
“Might just do the trick,” Sam agreed cheerfully, a strained smile pasted on his lips.
“You’re a lousy actor, Sam,” Taylor told him. “But thanks for trying.”
He realized that Sam was no longer listening to him. Instead he was looking at something over his shoulder. Taylor turned around and saw that Gayle had emerged from out of the curtained area, wearing a white pair of impossibly short shorts and a white-and-pink-checkered blouse that tied above her midriff.
Her hair had long since dried and was hanging about her face and shoulders in tiny curls. She’d always told him that she hated the way that looked. He thought she looked beautiful.
Except for the hairstyle, she looked exactly the way she had when she’d stepped onto Sam’s sloop this morning.
And yet she was different. She wasn’t his Gayle anymore.
But she would be, he vowed. She would be.
“God, I look like Orphan Annie,” she complained, spiking her fingers through her hair and trying to pull it straight. It was an exercise in futility.
“Orphan Annie she remembers,” Taylor muttered under his breath.
But Gayle heard him. “Sure, I used to read the comic strip every day when I was a kid,” she said as she moved closer to Jake and away from him.
Closer to what was familiar. Away from what was not.
Chapter Four
“Well, this place isn’t going to win the Good Housekeeping award anytime soon.”
Gayle stood in the doorway of the house her “husband” claimed to be theirs. A distant feeling of déjà vu whispered through her, but then in the next moment it was gone.
She didn’t recognize the house, and she had a feeling she would have, given its unique state.
Gayle remained where she was, holding on to the doorknob. Not wanting to let go.
Not wanting to take a step farther into this house she didn’t recognize, into this life she didn’t know with a man who was a stranger to her.
Stalling, she looked around. A clear plastic tarp hung from the ceiling to the ground and furniture clustered together in the middle of the room like marooned survivors of a shipwreck. The furniture, a sofa, love seat, coffee table and two side tables were covered with more plastic tarp.
The wall to her left had holes in it, courtesy of the sledgehammer leaning against it. Sanders, saws and a variety of equipment she didn’t readily recognize were scattered throughout the area she assumed had once been a living room. Here and there, hints of olive-green wallpaper still clung for dear life to the walls that remained intact.
It looked like the center of her worst nightmare. She lived here?
Taylor slowly pocketed his key. He couldn’t close the door because she was still blocking the sill. His eyes never left her face as he waited and prayed for some ray of recognition to cross it. All he saw was startled wonder.
“We live here,” she finally said, looking at him. It wasn’t so much a question as a statement rimmed in disbelief.
“Yes.” It was a work in progress and because of another job he’d taken on, progress had been slow and limited. The shoemaker’s children went barefoot, he thought cryptically. “Why don’t you come away from the doorway, Gayle?”
She gave no indication that she heard him. Instead Gayle looked up at the unfinished ceiling.
Squinting, she could see that it had been recently scraped and then textured. The surface seemed brighter than the rest of the room, even though it was obviously waiting for a final coat of paint.
Gayle’s eyes shifted to his. “I’m afraid something might fall on me if I come in.”
Taylor looked around, trying to see through her eyes. It wasn’t easy. What he usually saw even when he looked at a place that was crumbling was potential. Always potential. He supposed that was where he channeled whatever optimism he possessed.
“Don’t be. The house is rock solid. I thoroughly checked out the foundations before we signed the mortgage papers.”
Mortgage papers. For some reason she’d just assumed they were renting the house. It was more in keeping with this temporary feeling that nibbled away at her.
She looked at him. Why in heaven’s name would they have wanted to buy such a place? “We own this.”
“Yes,” he answered evenly. He knew her well enough to know that he should be bracing himself for the onslaught of something.
Gayle moved away from the doorway. Proximity did not improve on her impression. This was a disaster area. All it needed was to be declared so by the governor.
“Why?” she asked. “Did we lose a bet?” Gayle crossed to the ventilated wall. The gaping holes where sledgehammer had met plywood gave her a view of another room. The latter was decorated in colors and styles that had been popular roughly thirty years ago. She did her best to stifle a shiver and succeeded only marginally. “This place is falling apart.”
“No,” he corrected, following her as she conducted her inspection. “I’m taking it apart.”
When she was growing up, her father had considered hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture major construction. For anything else he always hired help, laborers. Physical labor was something to be avoided. “Why?”
He could remember Gayle taking an interest, not only in this house, but in the ones he worked on. Had she feigned that? Or was she now just trying to find the path back and, once there, her interest, her enthusiasm would return? “Because it’s what I do for a living.”
Gayle looked around again, then back at him. She’d always assumed that when she did get married, it would either be to a professional athlete or a professional something, like a doctor or a lawyer. But apparently she was supposed to have tied the knot with a laborer. “You destroy houses for a living?”
“Renovate,” Taylor corrected evenly, “the word is renovate.”
He thought he saw her frown slightly. Before he could tell himself that it was his imagination, impatience bit into him. He’d been pushed to the edge today and wasn’t sure just how much more he could take before he was on overload. He’d been half-terrified out of his mind when he thought that he’d lost Gayle, then relieved when he’d found her.
But now he was faced with the same situation, only in a different form. He had lost Gayle, at least temporarily. Because she couldn’t remember him. Couldn’t react to him the way only a wife could to the man she entrusted all her secret hopes and dreams to. A man who’d been privy to all the private moments that went into making Gayle who and what she was.
Or had been, he amended silently.
Frustrated, Taylor wanted to shout “Game over!” and have her the way she’d been just this morning, before they’d taken off for Jake’s sloop.
Damn, he wished they’d never stepped foot on that stupid hunk of overpriced, floating ballast. More than anything in the world, he wanted her to look at him the way she did when it was just the two of them, and the world was fading away.
Instead it seemed as if he was the one who had apparently faded away for her.
“You don’t remember this?” He asked the question even though he already knew what her answer would be.
Gayle turned on her heel to face him. “I don’t remember you,” she needlessly reminded him.
She pressed her lips together, trying desperately to keep the sharp edge of panic from growing into unmanageable proportions the way it had earlier.
She needed to keep moving. If this man looking at her so intently really was who he said he was, well, he had to prove it to her, to make her remember him. He had all the cards. She had nothing to draw on. No special place to retreat to in order to start all over again, rebuilding memories.
She had no memories, at least none of him. He had to do something that would change that, not her.
It suddenly occurred to Gayle that she was lacking the most basic form of information. She tried to remember if one of her brothers had called out to her would-be husband and failed to come up with anything. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Taylor. Taylor Conway.” He shoved his hands into his back pockets. This felt so stupid, introducing himself to his wife of eighteen months.
“And I’m Gayle Conway?” She rolled the name over on her tongue, testing it out. Tasting it. Listening to the way it sounded. No sense of the familiar came washing over her, yet she did recognize the name as belonging to her.
“Privately,” he told her. “Professionally you’re still Gayle Elliott. You work at—”
“KTOC, yes, I know.” She had a very clear image of her small dressing room. Her section of the desk on the set, beneath glaring lights. She loved the life.
He felt as if a paring knife had slipped in beneath his third rib. And he had to wait awhile before this stopped bothering him so much. Maybe they’d get lucky and she’d regain her memory by then. “You remember your job.”
“I like referring to it as a career.”
There were times when she thought it was somehow unethical, being paid for doing something she loved so much. She would have paid the station to allow her to mingle with professional athletes, follow certain teams when they went on the road to play in other cities, reporting it all back to hungry viewers who weren’t as lucky as she was.
He felt as if something was about to snap inside of him. What if she never remembered him? Never remembered the past eighteen months?
Taylor grasped her by the shoulders. “Damn it, Gayle, if you’re putting me on—”
She watched him unflinchingly, the strength of his fingers registering as they pressed hard against her biceps. “Why would I put you on about that?”
Belatedly he realized he must be holding her too tightly, that he was channeling his frustration through his fingers.
Taylor dropped his hands to his sides. “You know what I mean.” Taking a breath, he got himself under control again and muttered, “Sorry.” It was the fear that had made him behave this way. Fear of losing what they’d had.
“That wasn’t easy for you, was it?” When he gave her a slow, puzzled look, she said to clarify, “You don’t like apologizing.”
Hope sprang up like toast out of an overly eager toaster. “You remembered that?”
He’d looked so hopeful that she’d almost lied. But this was about getting down to the truth, not lying. “Sorry, no. Instinct,” she explained. “I’m pretty good at reading people.”
He should have realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. Still, he couldn’t help being resentful. “So how come you erased me out of your book?”
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