A Marriage To Remember

by Cathryn Clare

  “We have to call the police,” she was saying as Ryder turned left at an orange light and tried to look in the rearview mirror at the same time.

  The streets seemed quiet—was this a weekend? He had no idea. But he wasn’t about to let anything lull him into a false sense of security. Quiet or not, the city was still a dangerous place at the moment. He wanted to make damn sure they weren’t being followed.

  And now he had to argue with Jayne, as well.

  “No police,” he said bluntly, slowing for another traffic light.

  “Ryder, that’s crazy.” She half turned toward him on the seat. Her velvet-smooth forehead had puckered into a frown. “Don’t tell me you seriously think the Miami police had anything to do with that guy trying to kill you.”

  “I have no way of knowing that they didn’t.”

  She shook her head. They were in the shadow of the tall building to their right, but even in the dim light he could see how glossy her brown hair was. It looked as though it would feel like satin against a man’s fingers, soft and thick and smooth.

  And there was a decidedly angry motion to it as it resettled around her head. “I’m not talking about involving the entire police force,” she said. “I’m talking about making one call, to someone I know and trust—”

  “Do I trust him?”

  He hated having to ask the question, hated not knowing one single thing about the mess he was in. Frustration made his voice abrupt, and something in Jayne’s face seemed to close down at the sound of it.

  “As far as I can tell, you don’t trust anyone,” she said. “And this isn’t a he I’m talking about, it’s a she. Madeleine Murphy.” She paused, as if she was hoping he might recognize the name. “She works in the public affairs office. She should be able to find out what we need to know.”

  Ryder could feel his gut tightening again. “It just feels wrong to me,” he said. “I don’t like getting the police into this. I don’t like getting you into it.”

  “Too late for that.” Then she looked away, leaving him feeling strangely alone. Why was it that the simple fact of her violet gaze made him feel as though there might be some hope in the bleak, memoryless world he’d wakened into?

  Her next words weren’t exactly hopeful. “You did your best to shut me out of all this when we were married,” she was saying. “And it worked. I don’t know any more than you do about what’s going on now. But if you think I’m capable of walking away and leaving you when you don’t have any money or anyplace to go or even any clothes, for heaven’s sake—”

  She turned to look at him again. This time her gaze was focused on the part of him that was only barely covered by the green hospital gown. Ryder felt his whole body heating up as she scanned his torso, his belly, his thighs.

  He knew he looked like hell. He felt like hell. And the bruised ribs that had taken a second pounding back in his hospital room were the very least of it.

  But somehow, Jayne Robards’s searching gaze made all of that recede into unimportance. In its place he could feel a warming that was part sexual, part something else, as though this woman could restore something to him that he couldn’t even remember having lost.

  It was frustrating on too many levels. And the longer she looked at him, the more insistently his body was responding to her scrutiny. Given the flimsy fabric of the hospital johnny, that was going to start creating problems in just a few more seconds.

  Fortunately she was turning away again, quickly, almost as though she’d sensed his reaction and didn’t want to know where it might be leading. Her words were rushed, too. And Ryder thought he detected a slight breathless sound to them that didn’t do anything to calm him down.

  But she was clearly trying to sound matter-of-fact. “Well, anyway, if you think I’d leave you on your own, you really have forgotten everything you used to know about me,” she said. “The light’s green, by the way.”

  He’d forgotten all about the traffic light. Muttering to himself, he stepped on the gas pedal and tried to concentrate on the road ahead.

  It was hard to do, when his body was stirred and tantalized and his mind was flooded with contradictory images and impulses—to keep her safe by getting as far away from her as he could, to take her in his arms and hold her close until the ache of frustration and powerlessness inside him went away.

  For several blocks neither of them spoke. Ryder had no clue what was going on inside that close-cropped head of hers. Was she frightened, or furious, or both?

  There’d been a moment, just before all hell had broken loose in his hospital room, when he’d felt a sudden certainty—fleeting, but powerful—that he knew what she was thinking. It was as though his own misgivings about the bogus reporter had traveled to Jayne Robards silently, through the air. Or maybe it was her doubts that had communicated themselves to him.

  It didn’t matter—the point was, for that one brief moment, it had been like seeing straight into someone else’s mind. It had been inexpressibly comforting, in the midst of all the blank spaces in his own mind.

  Now, though, he had no idea what she was thinking, or feeling. Her eyes were fixed on the road, not on him. And that powerful sense of connection was long gone.

  But even without it, their thoughts were clearly still running on parallel tracks. “What made you suspicious of that guy, anyway?” she asked.

  Ryder considered his answer. “His hair,” he said finally. “There was something wrong about it. Something fake.”

  She nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “It was too theatrical—like a wig and fake beard. And the way he kept worrying at it—” She cut herself off. He could tell her agile mind had jumped ahead a pace or two.

  “If we don’t call the police, what are we going to do?” she asked.

  It was a good question. Ryder would have given almost anything to have had a good answer.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that quite yet,” he said. “Right now I’d settle for some idea of where we’re headed.”

  That proved remarkably easy to decide. Jayne pointed out a freeway entrance in the next block, and they agreed that putting some distance between themselves and the hospital was a good idea.

  Once they were on the highway that ringed the downtown area, though, Jayne’s question hung uneasily in the air between them. It wasn’t the only thing making Ryder uneasy.

  “Why do you keep looking in the mirror?” Jayne asked as Ryder slanted his eyes upward yet again. “Is there somebody back there?”

  “I don’t think so. I just—” Damn it, why couldn’t he answer even the simplest question? “Something about this road just makes me nervous. That’s all.”

  He could feel her watching him, but this time he didn’t meet her eyes. The urge to keep looking over his shoulder was driving him crazy, and he couldn’t afford the distraction of Jayne’s violet gaze and the warmth it kept kindling down low in his body.

  “You were on a highway when the accident happened,” she said.

  “Was I?” Did that explain the tightness in his gut, and the constant feeling that. there was something outside the car he needed to pay attention to?

  Jayne shook her head. He caught the frustrated motion of it out of the corner of his eye. “There are just too many things we don’t know,” she said. “You don’t remember what happened to you yesterday—I’m in the dark about everything that’s gone on in your life for the past year—for longer than that—”

  “I guess you didn’t make a lot of visits to the prison to keep my spirits up.”

  “We’d decided to call it quits before you were even arrested.” Her brusque tone told him there was a lot more to it, but she didn’t go into detail. “I haven’t seen you since the day you were sentenced.”

  “So my being arrested wasn’t the reason we were getting divorced.”

  “No.” She cut off his next question with an emphatic wave of her hand. “Ryder, this is getting us nowhere. We should be deciding what to do next, not talking about
old history.”

  But somewhere in that old history is the answer to why I’m being shot at now. He wanted to shout the words, but he tightened his grip on the wheel and forced himself to stay calm, or as close to it as he could manage.

  He knew Jayne was at least partly right: they couldn’t just keep driving around aimlessly. Even if the gas tank had been full—which it wasn‘t—they needed to decide pretty soon what their next move was going to be.

  “Neither of us has any money,” he reminded her. “Or any way to get money.”

  “I know.”

  “And there’s no way we can go to wherever you live. That’s the first place anyone would check, if they were looking for us.”

  Without really meaning to, he found himself saying we and us as though he’d come around to Jayne’s way of thinking that they were in this together. He hadn’t intended to do it—the thought of endangering her still made him nuts. But he couldn’t see a good way around it for the moment.

  “I know. I thought of that, too.” She paused, and he saw her raise one hand to the collar of her pale purple sweater. “I have—there’s a piece of jewelry I can sell. To get money, I mean.”

  “You have it with you?”

  She nodded, and he realized what her raised hand meant. She had a thin gold chain around her neck—he remembered seeing it when she’d first arrived in his hospital room—and she was fingering it now.

  “It‘s—well, it should be worth a few hundred dollars,” she said. “And it’s not as if—” She seemed to be having trouble maintaining her usual straightforward manner. Ryder frowned as she added, “I was trying to figure out what to do with it anyway. This seems as appropriate as anything else I could come up with.”

  It hit him with sudden certainty.

  Her wedding ring. She was talking about selling her wedding ring.

  The ring wasn’t on her finger. That made sense, since she’d told him the marriage was all but over.

  But she was still wearing his ring on a chain around her neck.

  Now, what the hell did that mean?

  The possibilities buzzed disturbingly inside him. He could feel the same treacherous warmth pooling in his belly again, dragging his attention away from practical questions, whispering to him of unshared secrets, of unimagined pleasures.

  But after her halting suggestion about the ring, Jayne seemed to be all-business again. She let go of the gold chain at her neck and said, “In a couple of hours the stores will be open. We can find a jeweler, or maybe a pawnshop. That’ll take care of our money problem. Once we’ve done that, we can buy you some clothes. Arid that just leaves the small matter of calling the police.”

  He didn’t give in without a fight.

  They argued about it until they’d left Miami behind and were cruising north toward Fort Lauderdale. They were still arguing when Jayne spotted a big mall with a long strip of stores next to it just off the highway.

  Ryder agreed it looked like a good bet. The mall parking lot was huge, with a couple of quiet corners where they could park unobtrusively until the mall and the nearby stores opened. But he still wasn’t happy when Jayne pointed out that there was a pay phone right in the middle of one of those unobtrusive corners.

  “You’re sure this Madeleine Murphy is reliable,” he said for at least the third time.

  “She’s as objective as they come—never takes sides.”

  “Not even about my arrest?”

  “She wasn’t around for your arrest. She was hired just after you went to jail.”

  That seemed safe enough. Whatever he was afraid of at the Miami police department, surely a newcomer in the public relations department wouldn’t be a part of it. But still...

  “Don’t tell her where we are.” He had to fight against the churning in his gut as he parked the blue sedan in the shade of a row of trees.

  “Ryder, for heaven’s sake—”

  “Just tell her you’ll call her back in an hour. We need information, not a bunch of cops swarming all over us.”

  He could tell by the set of her mouth that she disagreed with him. But she seemed willing to settle for the compromise he was offering—and half-afraid he might change his mind at any moment. There was an urgency in her movements as she unbuckled her seat belt that told him how eager she was to enlist some help.

  He turned to watch her grappling with the buckle, and realized why she was having problems. She’d fastened the thing in a hurry on their way out of the hospital parking lot, and her flowered skirt had gotten tangled in the strap.

  “Here,” he said. “This is stuck.”

  As he leaned over to help her, he caught the faint, sweet smell of her skin and hair, like an echo of remembered laughter.

  He stopped when he saw the hole in the fabric.

  “Was that there before?” he asked sharply.

  “Was what there?” She hadn’t noticed it yet.

  But Ryder couldn’t take his eyes off it. He took a handful of the filmy material and spread it out against his palm. There it was, clear as daylight and twice as deadly: a clean, circular hole at Jayne’s thigh level.

  If he was right about what had made it, there would be a corresponding one somewhere else on the skirt.

  He could feel his heart rate escalating as he started looking for it, ignoring her pointed, “What are you doing?”

  He found it almost immediately.

  And realized he was shaking so badly he couldn’t hold his hands still.

  Jayne’s quick intake of breath barely registered on him. “The silencer—” Her words sounded very far away. “When he came after us in the hallway—he must have fired at us.”

  Ryder nodded. He couldn’t speak. The bullet had been mere inches from Jayne’s body, puncturing the folds of her skirt. Another three inches to the right, and she would still be back at the hospital, perhaps fighting for her life.

  And Ryder would probably be dead.

  Inescapably, illogically, his mind was flooded with images of Jayne’s naked body, of the soft, erotic curve of the thigh the bullet had passed so dangerously close to.

  He thought about her lying on that hard linoleum floor in a pool of her own blood—thought about himself bending over her, calling her name—imagined McMaster stepping up behind them and blowing away the fragile connection that was Ryder’s only tie to the rest of humanity at this moment.

  He thought about losing Jayne, and felt his whole body shudder in protest.

  Nothing about his response was rational. He knew that. But he couldn’t seem to control it. His nerves and muscles had taken over, and they were telling him—screaming at him—to hold on to this woman, to keep her safe, to keep her his own.

  “Jaynie—”

  The word felt torn out of him. He saw her amethyst eyes open wider at the ragged sound of his voice—or maybe she was still reacting to the bullet hole in the skirt she was fingering so cautiously.

  He knew he should stop to explain. But he wasn’t sure he could explain. Need was going through him like a wave, an overwhelming need to hold her in his arms, to keep her safe, to keep her from leaving him.

  He didn’t know where these emotions were coming from. But he could no more resist them than he could keep his heart from beating.

  He saw Jayne’s violet gaze shift to the stubborn seat belt again. Heard the quiet click as she got it open. And then, as her eyes met his, wide, uncertain, dazzlingly deep and soft, he gave in to everything that was roiling inside him, and reached out for her.

  There was something almost painfully right about the way she fit against him. He pulled her into his arms as though her slender frame was the only thing standing between him and total, terrifying oblivion. As though the scent of her skin—that subtle sweetness that had been twining around him since he’d. first touched her at the hospital—could save him from all the dangers threatening him.

  He knew it was crazy. He was the one trying to keep her safe, not the other way around. But the sheer temptation of ho
lding her like this was driving all the sense straight out of him.

  Her hands came up to rest on his shoulders. Another slow shudder rolled through him with the pleasure of her touch. The gentle weight of her fingertips through the thin hospital gown was like a blessing on everything in him that was hurt and bewildered and alone.

  “Oh, God—Jaynie—”

  He turned his face against her hair, feeling the heavy silk of it against his cheek. He found himself wanting to absorb her, to devour her, to capture all the sensuality and spirit that radiated from her like perfume.

  He wasn’t intending to kiss her. Hell, he wasn’t intending for any of this to happen. It all just felt inevitable, like birth and death, like a dream he’d had so many times he didn’t know whether it was memory or fantasy.

  His lips met hers on a low moan of longing. He was already dizzy from the soft, welcoming warmth of her mouth—from the ache in his belly that seemed to be spreading to every corner of him—when he realized that he’d just heard Jayne’s throaty voice mixed in with his own.

  The realization threatened to tip him over the edge.

  She wanted him?

  His head started to spin faster at the idea that this overpowering hunger might be mutual. He gathered her more closely against him and groaned again as their kiss deepened. He could feel the strength in her even as she opened to his lips, his seeking tongue. Her hands were smooth against his slicked-back hair, her breath warm where it blended with his.

  If he could just make this moment last...

  If he could catch hold of the memories that were teasing him from somewhere at the very edge of his consciousness...

  The problem was, the edge felt like a very long way away. The only thing that mattered was the center, where his mouth met Jayne’s in a kiss that was going deeper and deeper. He felt the whole universe whirling as he drank in her honeyed sweetness and answered the slow, tentative swirl of her tongue with a suggestive caress of his own.

  Her breasts were a gentle weight against his chest, her body increasingly, tantalizingly familiar in his arms. He slid one hand farther down her spine. The curve of her hips had been driving him crazy ever since he’d first seen the gentle sway of her flowered skirt this morning. His mind was overrun by visions of how she would look, unclothed and eager, wanting him, ready for him.