A Marriage To Remember

by Cathryn Clare

  Jayne started to shake. Her eyes moved inescapably to the wrinkled surfaces of the pillowcases she’d had her arms wrapped around just before she’d been wakened by the phone. If Ryder hadn’t been lucky—if the other side of the car had been crumpled—

  It was too awful to imagine. She thought about Ryder’s taut, tanned skin, the lean, strong body she’d always loved.

  “He wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” the woman continued. “That was probably what saved him. He was jolted around a bit—that’s how he got the bump on his head, apparently. But a couple of’ people saw the car go over the edge and were able to pull him out in time.”

  Ryder always wore his seat belt.

  He’d seen too many grisly accidents in his fifteen years as a cop to get into a car without buckling up. The seat belt was one question too many.

  Jayne frowned and tucked the receiver under her chin as she shimmied over to the edge of the bed and got to her feet. There was something nightmarish about Nick Ryder resurfacing in her life like this, she thought. But nightmarish or not, she needed to know what was going on, and why.

  “Tell me which ward he’s in,” she said as she pulled open the top drawer of her bureau, “and I’ll be there in a half hour.”

  The pattern of the cars in the hospital parking lot should have been calming.

  It wasn’t.

  They’d told him to stay in bed, but he couldn’t. Something about the smell of the place was driving him crazy. It was sharp and institutional and almost—almost—familiar. With every breath, his body was yelling at him to get on his feet and get the hell out of here.

  He’d tried roaming the hallway, but a nurse with a no-nonsense voice and shoulders like a first-round NFL draft pick had ordered him back into his room.

  “We’ve called your wife,” she told him. “She’ll be here in a little while.”

  None of it made any sense.

  He tried to connect with the idea that he had a wife.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He tried staring at the driver’s license that had been in his wallet. Nicholas James Ryder, it said, right next to a picture that was anything but flattering, but was obviously of himself. The dark blond hair, high cheekbones and wary expression were the same ones he’d seen in the mirror when he’d stumbled into the bathroom after waking up.

  His hair was longer now than when the picture had been taken. In fact, he’d asked one of the nurses for a rubber band to pull it back. He was getting tired of shaking it out of his eyes.

  And the bandaged welt on his forehead was new—brand-new, the nurse had said. “That’s where your memory went,” she’d told him. “Stop agitating yourself, now, and with luck things’ll gradually start to come back to you again.”

  It made sense, as far as it went.

  But he still couldn’t get any of these random facts to connect with any kind of a bigger picture.

  Beyond knowing his name and the reason he was here, everything was a blank. A gigantic, frustrating, ominous blank.

  He slammed a hand against the wall next to him, and glared out at the parking lot.

  For the past half hour he’d been trying to ignore the dull thudding in his head, the ache in his midsection and the feeling of panic deep down in his gut by concentrating intently on the cars lined up outside his window. His room was on the fourth floor of the hospital complex, giving him a clear view of the parking area. It was almost 7:00 a.m., and the empty spaces were starting to fill up. He watched as a white pickup truck with red and maroon pinstriping pulled into a spot at the end of the row closest to the building.

  Damn it, why could he recognize a pickup truck when he saw one, and a pinstripe, when his own face seemed strange to him? Why could he remember how to tell time, when he had no recollection of anything that had happened to him yesterday?

  He growled and turned away from the window.

  And realized he wasn’t alone.

  The woman in the doorway wasn’t a nurse. She wasn’t wearing the right clothes, for one thing. Her flowered skirt and short-sleeved lavender sweater were nothing like the stark white uniforms he’d been seeing since he’d first opened his eyes sometime in the middle of the night.

  It wasn’t just her outfit that was wrong, though. It was something in the way she held herself. She looked half-hesitant, half-defiant, as though she’d steeled herself to step into the doorway, and was now fighting the urge to turn and walk away again. He could see the silent struggle in the set of her shoulders and the stubborn tilt of her fine boned chin.

  Whoever she was, she was beautiful.

  Her dark brown hair was cut short. It made her eyes seem enormous. They were dark violet, luminous, seeming to shine with a light of their own.

  He thought he could see a pale sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. And a taut determination in the way she’d curled her fingers around the strap of the big purse that hung from her shoulder.

  “Well.” Her first word was abrupt, almost angry. “It really is you.”

  Her voice sounded as though it had been made to murmur quiet secrets in a man’s ear. Its throaty undertones undid the bluntness of her opening line.

  “Is it?” Politeness was beyond him at this point. “At least this makes sense to one of us.”

  “I didn’t say it made sense. I just thought—I wondered whether there’d been some mistake. I wasn’t sure you were even supposed to be out.”

  She’d been standing her ground in the doorway, assessing him with those amazing violet eyes. As she finished speaking, though, she finally stepped into the room.

  Like her voice, her walk aimed for briskness and ended up being disconcertingly sexy. Ryder found his eyes drawn to the gentle sashay of her hips as she crossed the linoleum floor and dropped her large shoulder bag on the foot of his bed.

  Was this his wife?

  Was it possible that even the most enormous bump on the head could have chased away the memory of what it must feel like to hold a woman like this close against him? To kiss the soft lips that were pursed so seductively as she appraised him? To run his hands over skin that looked as soft as swansdown?

  He shook his head.

  Damn it, he was wearing nothing but a flimsy hospital-issue johnny. And if he let his thoughts run on in this direction, his body was going to start reacting in ways that a single layer of too-often-laundered fabric wouldn’t be able to cover up.

  He crossed his arms over his chest and forced his attention back to her last phrase.

  I wasn’t sure you were even supposed to be out.

  Now, what the hell did that mean?

  “Out of where?” he asked her. “What are you talking about?”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. They really were the most incredible eyes, he thought, as deep and brilliant as amethysts, and fringed by a set of impossibly long dark lashes.

  He was so caught up in the violet dazzle of her gaze that her answer caught him completely off guard. “Prison,” she said matter-of-factly. “You were supposed to be in prison, the last I heard.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got to be joking.”

  Her face told him she wasn’t.

  “Why was I in—” He stopped the question midway, waving the rest of the words away with an impatient gesture. “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s back up a bit here. You can at least confirm that my name is Nicholas James Ryder?”

  “Nick Ryder.” Her voice sounded a little huskier as she said it. “That’s your name.”

  It didn’t feel like his name. But it sounded so good to hear her say it in that throaty voice that he was willing to go along with the idea that it was his.

  “And you are...” He let the sentence hang.

  “Jayne.” Her fine chin tilted up again as she spoke. “Jayne Robards.”

  “We have different last names.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought—” He was surprised at the strength of his own disappointment. He frowned, and tried to ignore it. “The
nurse said she had called my wife.”

  “She did.” She gave him that narrowed, assessing look again. “We’ve always had different last names. I’d established my professional career before we got married.”

  “As—”

  “A photojournalist.” And then she added quickly, as though she wanted to get it over with, “But we’re not really married anymore. That is, we’re separated. We’re getting divorced. Damn it, Ryder, I can’t believe you don’t remember any of this.”

  This time the stab of disappointment that went through him was stronger. He knew it was absurd. There was no reason he should have his heart set on being married to a woman he’d only just laid eyes on. But there was nothing he could do to stop the feeling.

  He had no memories of Jayne Robards, not exactly. But he felt some connection to her—something deep down, something he couldn’t explain.

  Maybe any red-blooded male would have responded this strongly to a woman with eyes like a moonlit sea and a voice suggestive enough to make a man’s blood simmer.

  Maybe he was only reacting this way because she was the first person he’d seen since waking up who seemed to know anything at all about him.

  He couldn’t be certain why she made him feel this way. And his own frustration made him curt as he answered her. “I don’t know anything about any of this,” he said. “Not how I got here, not where I was before I woke up in this room. You might be making this up, for all I know.”

  “Well, I’m not.” Her eyes flashed purple fire at him. “Unfortunately, it’s all real. Which leaves us with a heck of a mess to sort out.”

  She stepped closer to him, heading for the telephone on the bedside table. His eyes followed the purposeful sway of her flowered skirt as she moved.

  “What was I doing in prison?” he asked.

  “Two to five years for theft, the last I heard.”

  “How long had I been in?”

  “A year.” Something in her face tightened as she leaned over and picked up the phone. “You were supposed to be eligible for parole after a year.”

  Her fingers were tapping out a phone number she obviously knew well. He could hear the faint electronic tune from the receiver she’d tucked under her chin.

  “So I might be out legally.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I steal?”

  “Money.” Her eyes met his briefly, then glanced away as she spoke into the phone. “Hi, this is Jayne Robards calling for Madeleine Murphy. I know it’s early, but I wonder if you could pass a message to her for me.”

  “Who are you calling?” he asked.

  “The same people you apparently stole the money from.” She looked back at him, and he could see some kind of struggle going on in her eyes. But her voice was level enough as she added, “The Miami police department.”

  He was on the move before he knew he was even contemplating it. He shoved himself away from the windowsill and took two long steps toward the bed. He had just a brief impression of Jayne Robards’s eyes widening in surprise as he reached her.

  She didn’t quite move in time. She leaned toward the bedside table, but he. got there first. A split second later his left hand hit the button on the cradle of the phone, severing the connection.

  Chapter 2

  “Hey!” Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  She might have known it was a waste of time. Ryder looked terrible—he was leaner than she’d ever seen him, with a pallor to his skin and a near-panicky expression in his deep blue eyes that was unsettling, to say the very least.

  But he was still strong. She could feel the whipcord resilience of his wrist as her fingers closed around it, making short work of her efforts to move his hand away.

  She could feet the familiar warmth of his skin, too. It made her heart beat a little faster as she struggled against his grasp on the phone.

  “Damn it, Ryder, you can’t just—”

  He cut off her words as forcefully as he’d cut off her phone call. “Talking to the police is a bad idea,” he said.

  “How do you know that, if you can’t remember anything?”

  He shook his head, then stopped abruptly, as though it hurt to move. “I don’t know how I know.” He sounded angry. “I just—it’s not exactly a memory. Just a feeling. A strong feeling. The moment you said ‘Miami police department,’ it was like somebody punched me in the gut.”

  He looked as though someone had done exactly that. Jayne took in a shaky breath and let go of his wrist. It was too disturbing to be this close to him, to feel his skin under her fingers and the tension in his body communicating itself to her as though their nervous systems had been wired together.

  They had been, once. Once, they’d had a rapport so instinctive and so strong that sometimes they’d been almost eerily aware of each other’s thoughts and feelings.

  But those days were gone.

  And she couldn’t let herself forget it, just because Ryder had.

  “Well, that shouldn’t come as a big surprise,” she said, taking a step back from him. “You and the police department didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”

  His blue eyes turned wary again. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You used to work for them.”

  “As what?”

  “You were a detective. A police detective.”

  And a good one, or so she’d thought until the night two of Ryder’s colleagues had turned up on the doorstep to arrest him. He’d never said a word to her to explain or refute the charges against him. She’d been caught, ever since, between her belief in his integrity and her realization that the man who’d gone out of her life so stony-faced and silent was not the same man she’d loved and married and hoped to spend the rest of her life with.

  He was anything but stony-faced now. She could see him trying to put all this together in his mind. And the struggle showed clearly in his features, in his direct blue gaze and the long, uneasy slant of his eyebrows.

  His eyes looked haunted.

  His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it. He’d pulled it back in a tight ponytail. It accented his high cheekbones—testimony to some Indian blood bootlegged into the Ryder family generations ago, he’d told her on one of the few occasions he’d ever talked to her about his family.

  She couldn’t tell whether his hair still glinted blond on top. The ponytail was too tight, the morning light too dim for those golden highlights to show. she could tell that his deep tan hadn’t survived the year in prison. He looked as though he’d barely seen the sun since she’d watched him walk out of the courtroom to start serving his sentence. The impression wasn’t helped by the stark white bandage across his forehead.

  She’d never seen him look worse.

  And he was still one of the most beautiful men she’d ever set eyes on.

  “So... I was a cop, and I stole money from the police department,” he was saying, frowning as he spoke.

  “That’s about the size of it. At least, that’s the official version.”

  “Are you saying there’s another one?”

  Jayne hesitated. He was asking the question that had tormented her since the night he’d been arrested.

  She was no closer to an answer now than she’d been then.

  Was Ryder guilty of the crime he’d been sent to jail for? Had he changed so much that he’d been able to do something he once would have found unthinkable?

  How could she answer his question without touching on all the feelings that had gotten so badly bruised in the whole long process of their marriage’s disintegration?

  Ryder had changed in the thirteen years they’d been married—there was no doubt about that.

  But she didn’t really want to explain all that to him now.

  While she was still trying to figure out a way around it, she heard a knock at the open door behind her. She turned to see a lanky, bearded man hesitating in the doorway.

  “Mr. Ryder?” The
stranger was looking past Jayne. “Tad McMaster, Miami Herald. I wonder if I could interview you about your experiences yesterday.”

  “Interview me?”

  “Yes. You are Nick Ryder, aren’t you?” The man stepped into the room, setting down his bulky shoulder bag on the unoccupied bed next to Ryder’s. His black hair and beard looked as though birds had been nesting in them.

  “And are you Mrs. Ryder?” He turned to Jayne, looking at her from under thick black eyebrows.

  “She’s my wife.” Ryder said the words slowly, experimentally, as though he wasn’t sure they were true. “Jayne Robards,” he added.

  Jayne felt an unexpected tightness in her throat as he said her name. She’d heard that tone before, but not for a very long time. When they’d first fallen in love, he’d spoken this way—tentatively, almost reverently, as though their love was a miracle he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe in. As though too blunt a word might shatter it.

  There’d been plenty of blunt words since those early days. And it had turned out Ryder hadn’t believed in the miracle of their love, after all. Not enough, anyway, to let it grow into the family Jayne had wanted so fiercely—the family he’d once told her he wanted, too.

  She swallowed past the unwelcome lump in her throat and made herself focus on their visitor instead of the old hurts Ryder’s voice had called up.

  Wasn’t it a little odd that she’d never heard of Tad McMaster? Or that he’d apparently never heard of her? Miami was a big city, but the members of its journalism community tended to know each other’s names.

  “Are you new at the Herald, Mr. McMaster?” she asked him.

  “You bet. Just signed on last week.” He pulled a steno notebook out of his bag. “I’m not new to the business though. Been a journalist for ten years, back home in the Midwest.”

  Well, that answered her question. But there was still something odd about the man’s manner, something Jayne couldn’t put her finger on.