THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Dani and Beau were in a private conference room at Laramie Community Hospital with Jackson McCabe and his wife, Lacey, during their dinner break.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Jackson quipped, accepting the two chicken Caesar salads and fruit compote Dani and Beau had ferried over from the Lone Star Dinner and Dance Hall.
“I don’t know about that.” The blond and beautiful Lacey winked at her surgeon husband. “I rather like having any kind of dinner I want brought to me just for taking the time to answer a few questions.”
“The way to my woman’s heart is through her stomach,” Jackson teased with a rueful shake of his head, prompting an affectionate glance from his beloved pediatrician wife.
“So what’s on your mind?” Lacey prodded as she settled into her chair and snapped off the top of her mineral water.
“Are you concerned about Dani’s pregnancy?” Jackson asked.
“Actually we’re wondering how exactly she got in that condition,” Beau said, looking movie-star handsome in the small but cheerfully appointed room.
Lacey and Jackson chuckled in unison. “You’re telling us you two have come to us for a lesson in the birds and the bees?” Lacey said, incredulous.
“More like a lesson on amnesia,” Dani replied. “Because the problem is, neither Beau nor I remember the deed.”
Lacey’s eyes widened. “How is that possible?”
Dani sighed. “That’s what we’d like to know,” she said, her curiosity outweighing her embarrassment.
“Okay,” Jackson interjected, holding up a palm. “Start from the beginning. And tell us what you do remember.”
Dani looked at Beau. He nodded at her, tacitly giving her permission to go first. “Beau came to me and said he thought it was time that this feud of ours came to an end. I really wanted a truce, too,” Dani said on a heartfelt sigh. Cautiously she swiveled around in her seat to look directly at Beau. “That much I remember very clearly.”
“I was tired of the fighting,” Beau admitted. “So we flew to my private villa on the Mexican coast.”
“And then what happened?” Lacey asked.
Beau looked at Dani. Dani looked at Beau and saw the hollows beneath his cheeks become more pronounced. Silence strung out between them like a tautly drawn bow. “I remember us talking a lot—” and flirting “—that afternoon,” Dani said finally as she rubbed her palm nervously over the smooth surface of the conference-room table.
“I have a brief fuzzy memory of us walking on the private beach together late at night—right outside my villa, under the stars,” Beau said in a warm hushed voice. “But that had to have happened before we got married.”
“Married!” Lacey and Jackson said in unison, clearly stunned.
“Yes and I don’t even remember that.” Dani sighed.
“What is the next thing you do remember—either of you?” Lacey asked.
“Waking up in a hotel room in the village with Dani beside me and a marriage certificate from the chapel in the village on the bedside table.”
Jackson shook his head in amazement. “And I thought my brothers and I had some wild times lassoing us our wives!”
Lacey McCabe grinned, admitting this was so. “Which is where and when you assume conception occurred?” Lacey asked, turning her attention back to Beau and Dani. “In that hotel room?”
Beau nodded. “At least it certainly appeared that way—we were in bed together, sans clothing of any kind. And there was no evidence I could see that there had been any kind of birth control used.”
“And you weren’t on the pill or anything?” Jackson asked Dani.
Dani shook her head. There would have been no point. She hadn’t been intimately involved with anyone since she and Chris Avery broke up.
“So what happened then?” Jackson and Lacey asked eagerly in unison.
Beau exhaled shortly. “I left to check out the marriage certificate, and sure enough, it was valid. By the time I returned, Dani had left.” He pressed his lips together unhappily. “I didn’t see her again until this afternoon.” Three weeks had passed between the trip to Mexico and now.
“Is that all you remember?” Jackson turned to Dani.
Blushing fiercely, Dani nodded. “Except I was alone when I woke up. So I assumed I had been set up or duped—that it was revenge for my four bad reviews of his movies, or maybe even a warning regarding the new movie he has coming out in a couple of weeks. Anyway I hightailed it home to Laramie as fast as I could.”
“Do you think the two of you made love?” Lacey asked Dani.
“Actually, I’m beginning to think maybe we did,” Dani said reluctantly, becoming even more embarrassed. It would certainly explain a lot. Why she’d felt so contented in that distinctly physical, feminine way when she’d awakened, before the shock of discovering herself naked in Beau’s hotel room bed had set in. And it would explain these strange, almost dream-like flashes of memory she’d been having, of Beau kissing her and caressing her breasts and covering her body with his own. Up until now, she had almost convinced herself it was all a dream, albeit a wild and crazy one, brought on by a combination of the circumstances she’d found herself in, and the fear of possibly never being able to remember fully what had actually happened that night to land her in such a predicament. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it had all been real. Right down to the incredibly passionate lovemaking.
“And Beau’s right.” Dani forced herself to put her pride aside and go on. “It looks like we didn’t use protection.” A fact she had been secretly worried about for three weeks now. But like a fool, she’d kept hoping if she pretended none of it had happened, and she didn’t let herself think about it, it all might just go away. And her life could return to normal. Yeah, right!
Lacey concurred. “Did you two have anything to eat or drink that might have been contaminated while you were at the villa?” she asked, turning back to Beau and Dani.
Beau shook his head no. “We purchased all our food and water in Texas before we flew down there and prepared the food ourselves. I later had some of it tested. It was all fine. No toxins or poisons of any kind.”
“Could anyone have slipped you something without your knowing it?” Jackson pressed.
Beau, who’d obviously had some of the same suspicions himself, shook his head. “I don’t keep a staff at the villa. The two of us were completely alone. But just to make sure, I had some blood work done by my family doctor as soon as I got back to Los Angeles. I was going to call Dani if it looked like we’d been poisoned, but nothing turned up in the tox screen and he assured me I hadn’t been. So I went back to the village—that’s what I’ve been doing the past three weeks—and retraced our steps to try to make sense of all this. Apparently, after our wedding ceremony we went to a restaurant there, and they gave us celebratory drinks—on the house—spiked with homemade tequila that was apparently around two hundred proof. Dani drank most of one, and I drank all of one and part of another.”
Dani, who’d never been much of a drinker, anyway, winced. “Do you remember any of that?” she asked Beau.
“Nope, not a thing,” he replied quietly. “Not even being there. But they took our photo and put it on the wall of the cantina. I had that checked, too. It was genuine.”
“Do you have a copy of the photo?” Dani asked.
Beau reached for his wallet, took out the photo and dispassionately placed it where all could see.
Dani stared down at it. She and Beau were sitting at a table, holding hands. A wedding bouquet of wildflowers was on the table beside her. A lace mantilla had been placed on her head. She was wearing the off-the-shoulder gauzy white Mexican dress she’d found in the hotel room the next morning when she woke up.
“Does this ring any bells for you?” Lacey asked.
Dani shook her head as she continued to study her glowing countenance. She sure looked happy. And sober. And very much in love. To her utter amazement, Beau appeared equally ecstatic.
“It looks like we got married before we were at this restaurant, Beau. Before we had anything to drink,” she said in a low puzzled voice. If they had been drunk and silly, it would have been one thing to run off and get married on a whim. But this picture hinted that they had known exactly what they were doing when they exchanged their wedding vows, and that, Dani did not understand at all.
Beau draped his arm over the back of her chair and leaned in so their bodies were less than an inch apart. His face was close to hers as they studied the picture together. “That’s exactly what they swear we did,” he said thoughtfully. “According to the locals I talked to, we got married on the spur of the moment. But we were stone-cold sober when we did it. And happy.”
No wonder he kept calling her his wife, Dani thought.
In his mind, in the minds of all who had witnessed their union, they really were married. Feeling more confused and upset than ever, Dani bit her lip and looked into Beau’s eyes. “I don’t understand why we don’t remember getting married—especially if we were sober at the time.” She turned back to Lacey and Jackson. “I know this isn’t your specialty, either, but you’re both doctors. Have either of you ever heard of something like this happening?”
“No.” Jackson frowned. “But I know someone who might be more versed to help us figure this out.”
“So do I,” Lacey added.
Jackson and Lacey took Beau and Dani upstairs to his office to look up the phone numbers of their psychiatrist colleagues. Without disclosing who their patients were, Jackson and Lacey took turns describing the situation over the phone. Beau and Dani sat tensely in the reception area while Jackson and Lacey bandied about medical terminology, very little of which made any sense to them at all. Finally, after about four phone calls and twenty minutes, and a brief discussion—equally baffling and full of medical jargon—between Lacey and Jackson, they had a consensus.
“Okay, here’s what we think may have happened,” Jackson said as the four of them sat down to hash it out again. “It’s probably a combination of some sort of hysterical amnesia and an alcohol-induced blackout. The homemade tequila you drank was really potent. Which in turn caused your blood alcohol level to rise very quickly. Whatever chemical process it is in your brain that allows you to make memories was then all messed up. Since you both drank the same thing at the same time, you probably got inebriated at approximately the same rate. Hence the dual blackout or loss of memory.”
Dani and Beau breathed a sigh of relief at the same time. It was good, finally, to have a medical explanation for their memory loss. “Are we ever going to remember what happened?” Dani asked anxiously.
Jackson frowned. “It depends on what kind of blackout it is. There are two kinds. One, where you will remember in hazy fragments or with prompting what went on. And the other kind where the memory is gone forever.”
“We think you will remember this, though, because of the other component,” Lacey added matter-of-factly. “The one that caused you both to forget everything up to and including the actual marriage and jaunt to the restaurant.”
“Which is where the hysterical amnesia comes in,” Jackson explained.
Lacey nodded. “It may be, and again we’re all just guessing here, that the fact that the two of you got married—given your feuding history with each other—when combined with the alcohol’s and resulting blackout’s upset to your system caused a sort of dual hysterical amnesia about everything that went on, not just at the time you were accidentally inebriated but in the twenty-four hours or so preceding that, too.”
“Sort of like what happens after a head injury or an accident or anything that is really traumatic,” Jackson explained.
“In which case…?” Dani prodded nervously, wondering what the prognosis was.
“You’ll remember when and as you’re able to deal with it emotionally and not before. And, as with a blackout, it probably won’t be all at once, but in little fragments,” Lacey counseled gently. “Dani, you’ll remember something. And then if you tell Beau, he may remember something else. Until all the pieces finally fit together. At least that’s what we hope will happen for you two.”
“And you’re saying the more we stay together, the better the chances of remembering?” Beau asked. His arm moved from the back of Dani’s chair to her shoulders, cloaking her with a steadying warmth.
Lacey and Jackson nodded. Speaking for them both, Lacey continued, “Frankly, so much time has already gone by—a good three weeks—for the best chance of success, we advise you to stay together until you do remember.”
Dani let out a wavering breath. “I’m not so certain I want to remember everything,” she muttered. What if it turned out she’d done something really embarrassing? Like a striptease? Her clothes had been draped all over the hotel room. Her slip here, panties, bra, garter belt and stockings there…
“Don’t worry,” Jackson soothed. “A person isn’t likely to do anything during a blackout they wouldn’t do when just plain drunk.”
“Are you sure about that?” Beau asked.
Jackson and Lacey nodded. “Psychological studies have been done on that.”
Dani rolled her eyes. This was not helping. Although now that she noticed, Beau was beginning to look all the more intrigued. As if he wanted to remember every little thing, down to exactly how and when and why her clothes had been draped on chairs, windowsills, bureaus and lampshades, even the drapery rods! Had it been just her clothes scattered willy-nilly around the room? Or his, too? Dani wondered as a self-conscious flush heated her cheeks. Again, she was not sure she wanted to find that much out.
“It’s just the inability to remember that makes the gap in memory seem filled with awful possibilities,” Jackson continued.
You can say that again, Dani thought. The last thing she wanted to find herself doing around Beauregard Chamberlain was shedding all her inhibitions. But that was apparently what she had done. What they both had done.
“Jackson’s right,” Lacey said. “The things you imagine you did together or are afraid you did may be much worse than the actual events. It’s just the uncertainty of it that’s going to drive you crazy until you do remember.”
Dani fervently hoped that was the case, because right now she was imagining all sorts of things, none of them good. And not just for her.
“What about the baby?” Dani asked Lacey, her teeth worrying her lower lip as she expressed the most riveting fear of all. “If I did become pregnant while I was that inebriated, is the baby going to be okay?” This much was Lacey’s field of expertise, as she was a crackerjack pediatrician with an excellent reputation.
“Not to worry.” Lacey smiled reassuringly. “It takes three to five days for the fertilized egg to move down the fallopian tube, another three to five days for the zygote to be implanted on the uterine wall. And nothing will pass from your body to the baby’s body until that occurs. So Mother Nature had your baby well protected.” Lacey paused, then asked, “You haven’t been drinking since?”
“Haven’t had a drop,” Dani said. In fact, the way she was feeling now she didn’t care if she ever had another drink of alcohol of any kind.
“Neither have I,” Beau said. He didn’t look as if he wanted to drink anything again anytime soon, either. Another thing they had in common, Dani realized reluctantly.
“Well, good, keep it up, parents-to-be,” Lacey said, patting Dani on the shoulder.
“Meanwhile, let us know if there is anything else we can do to help,” Jackson said as he and Lacey walked them out. Dani and Beau promised they would, then left the hospital together in thoughtful silence.
“What a night,” Beau said twenty minutes later as he ushered Dani from his pickup truck to the front porch of her newly-purchased house.
“Tell me about it.” Dani sighed wearily as she let them inside and tossed her purse on top of a box.
Beau took her hand in his and led her toward the kitchen. “Do you think we’re going to be able to remember?”
The idea that she might never be able to recall not just her wedding but the conception of her first—maybe her only—child was more dismaying than Dani wanted to let on. She might not want to remember anything embarrassing, but she certainly wanted to remember the parts that weren’t. She shrugged as she peeked into the refrigerator, then, finding nothing she wanted, despite the bounty of groceries her sisters had brought her as housewarming presents, shut the door again. “I don’t know.” Dani leaned against the refrigerator and looked up into eyes that had never seemed so blue. “I want to—”
“So do I.” Beau’s dark brows drew together as he looked down at her in mock seriousness. “So I guess there’s only one thing to do,” he said, slipping back into his native Texas drawl.
“And what’s that?” Dani prodded. Reading the sudden mischief on his face, she found it was all she could do not to smile, too.
Beau’s sexy grin widened alarmingly as he looked deep into her eyes. “We try to reenact the conception, of course.”
Chapter Five
Dani tossed her head and stepped past him. “Dream on, cowboy.” She threw the words over her shoulder like discarded bits of sand.
For three weeks now Beau had been telling himself that circumstances had exaggerated the potent chemistry between them, the impact of her stunning good looks and feisty personality combined. But it just wasn’t so. He had only to be near her to realize what a truly beautiful woman she was. Sassy, spirited, determined, and no one challenged him—no one wanted to know him—the way Dani did. As for her stunning good looks, he had only to be near her to appreciate the flawlessness of her complexion and the delicate features of her oval face. He dreamed about her pert nose, full lips and perfect chin. Longed to see the intelligence and quick wit in her amber eyes and hear the throaty softness of her voice.
Aware he had never wanted to possess a woman more, heart and soul, Beau closed the distance between them. Maybe it was time she learned she couldn’t shut him out that way, not out of his own child’s life and not out of hers, not if he wanted in, and right now, as it happened, he did want in. The best way to do that, of course, was to drag her into his arms and kiss her again, the complications of their situation be damned. He wanted to let their feelings—not logic and reason—take over. He wanted to take her to bed and make wild passionate love to her again, so thoroughly and completely neither of them would ever forget a single instant of it. And then, only then, when they’d exhausted themselves, run the gamut of their feelings for each other, deal with all the unresolved specifics of their situation. Which, he admitted, were considerable. But they couldn’t take it all on now. They had to take on each issue one at a time. Starting with the return of their memories.
The Bride Said, I Did? Page 6
