A Marriage To Remember

by Cathryn Clare

  It was exactly what Ryder was looking for.

  “I’ll bet the fleas here have their own union.” Jayne was looking dubiously at the sagging screen doors and rusty metal lawn chairs at each motel unit.

  Ryder snorted. “Probably,” he said. “But fleas don’t ask too many questions—and neither will the owners, by the look of this place.”

  He was right. Unlike the chain motel they’d tried a few miles back, where ID had been required even from a customer paying cash, the woman at the desk of the Olde Maritimer barely glanced up when Jayne pushed a pair of twenties across the counter toward her. Better yet, there were some small cabins behind the motel, even farther from the road.

  “Need your license number and make of car,” the clerk said, lifting a key off the board behind her. “Cabin number three is the one on the left.”

  Faced with the blank registration form and the ballpoint pen the woman had shoved toward him, Ryder had a blind, panicky moment when he wasn’t sure what to write. Making up a license number for the car wasn’t the hard part—it was the names that stopped him.

  Nicholas James Ryder. That was his own name, although it still felt far from natural to him. But he didn’t want to use it. And at first he couldn’t imagine what to put in its place.

  He stared at the form, gripped without warning by the same helplessness he’d felt on first waking up in the hospital. What if he picked a name at random and it turned out to be something significant, something that would tip off a cop who might be enterprising enough to track them this far off the beaten path?

  He hated feeling adrift like this, hated the emptiness that kept gaping open where his memory should have been.

  He could count on his gut instincts some of the time—their escape from the would-be killer back at the mall proved that. With his first glimpse of that white pickup truck, he’d known exactly what he had to do.

  But now he didn’t. Faced with something as simple— but crucial—as filling in his name, he was drawing a blank. And that shook him, right down to the soles of the new sneakers Jayne had bought for him.

  He could feel himself slipping into confusion again, the kind of swirling chaos that had threatened to engulf him at the hospital when he’d first realized he couldn’t remember anything about himself.

  Then, he’d hung on to reality by taking fiercely detailed notes of everything around him—the nurses’ name tags, the pattern of the carpet in the hospital hallway, the neat rows of cars in the parking lot outside his window. But now he had nothing to fall back on, except—

  Except Jayne.

  He raised his eyes to hers and immediately felt some of his tension start to ease. She was watching him, those amazing violet eyes darkened but still dazzling, even in the dim light of the motel office. Her gaze was serious, gentle. As though she knew what was going on in his mind.

  As though she understood

  She gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, and then her pink mouth moved silently.

  “Smith.”

  The soundless syllable was enough to do it. Ryder felt the frozen panic leaving him. He relaxed his grip on the blue ballpoint pen as he started to write.

  John Smith. Of course—it was so obvious he hadn’t been able to see it. Probably half the couples who came to this place signed themselves in as Smiths. Hell, they probably had Smith conventions here in the off-season.

  He refused to let himself give in all the way to the relief that washed through him as they left the dimly lit office. He’d come far too close to letting his own nameless fears paralyze him. And that meant he couldn’t afford to start letting his guard down, even for a minute.

  “Thanks,” he muttered to Jayne as they walked back to the car. “I was blanking out.”

  “I could tell.” She seemed to be avoiding his eyes, but her voice was still thoughtful as she added, “What were you going to write, just out of curiosity?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, was anything coming to your mind? I was just thinking—” She got into the seat beside him and closed the door. “There might be some fragments of memory kicking around that you may be able to catch hold of, if you try.”

  “There’s not a damn thing. I have tried.” He started the engine and swung the car past the decaying boat on the lawn. He knew he’d stepped on the accelerator with more force than he needed, but her comment made him angry.

  He knew it was his own vacant brain he was mad at, that and the fact that he’d managed to get this beautiful and compassionate woman into deadly danger without having the slightest idea how he’d done it.

  “There’s nothing there,” he repeated as he pulled the car around to their cabin. “Just a big zero. My body remembers how to do things, like driving a car—”

  And kissing a woman. He chased off the thought and scowled at the little red-and-white cottage ahead of them.

  “But there aren’t any specifics,” he finished abruptly. “No dates, no events. No names.”

  Away from the road everything seemed quieter. The slam of the passenger door sounded loud as Jayne stepped away from the car. Ryder could hear a dog barking somewhere on the property, but its shrill yapping was distant, swallowed up in the midday stillness.

  Even in the quiet of the wooded area around the cabins, though, Jayne’s reply was hard to hear. Her voice had gotten huskier than ever, and she was looking away from Ryder as she spoke.

  “You remember some names,” she said.

  He frowned as he pocketed the car keys. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  She still didn’t look at him. “You called me Jaynie, when we—in the parking lot at the mall,” she said. “You must have dredged that up from somewhere. No one ever called me Jaynie except you.”

  She walked ahead of him into the little cabin, not looking back to see how he’d taken her words.

  Which was just as well, he thought.

  Two minutes ago he’d had himself convinced that for both their sakes, he needed to stay utterly focused on keeping one step ahead of the danger that threatened them. There was no room in this nightmarish adventure for the kind of feelings that had overrun him when he’d taken Jayne in his arms at the mall.

  But those feelings seemed to keep surfacing, anyway.

  He was aroused all over again by the gentle sway of her hips as she climbed the three wooden steps into the cabin. And the soft rasp at the edge of her voice kept connecting with parts of him that remembered only too well how to respond to a woman’s gentleness—this woman’s gentleness.

  And he’d called her by a name no one else had ever used.

  It was enough to keep him rooted to the spot for several minutes after she’d walked away. He stood there, in fact, until the damn dog’s barking started to get under his skin and he found himself wanting to escape the noise. For some reason—his own too-taut nerves, probably—it sounded louder now. Every yap cut into the noontime tranquillity like a dull knife. It was irritating and intrusive.

  As he climbed the cabin stairs, Ryder was doing his best to convince himself to stick to the subject of the gunman who’d tried twice today to kill them.

  But he already knew it wasn’t going to work.

  The cabin was tiny. There was one double bed against the wall and barely enough room to walk past it into the bathroom at the back. Jayne was standing next to the single chair, fingertips on its arrest, looking out the window to the treed area beyond the clearing around the cabins. Against the drab furnishings—dark brown bedspread, tan carpet, walls of knotty pine—her flowered skirt and lavender sweater looked more vibrant than ever.

  And the filtered sunlight hitting the narrow gold chain around her neck made it impossible to remember all the sensible subjects he’d been intending to stick to.

  “How much did you get for your ring?” he asked instead as he pulled the screen door closed behind him.

  She raised a hand to the chain, fingering it gently. It looked like a gesture she had performed often. “
Five hundred dollars,” she said. “Why? Are you wondering whether I got a fair return on your investment?” Something in her tone stung him, some hint of a bitterness she wasn’t quite admitting to. “I wouldn’t know, since I have no idea how much I invested in the first place,” he said. “Do you?”

  She shook her head. Her hair shone gold where the sun hit it, matching the faint glint of the chain around her neck. “It was a surprise,” she said. “The ring, I mean. You sprung it on me.”

  “Was there an engagement ring to go with it?” he wanted to know.

  She shook her head. “We barely had an engagement,” she told him.

  She was watching him again, but this time the concern in her sidelong gaze had been replaced by wariness.

  “Whirlwind courtship?” he asked.

  “No. We’d known each other for years before we got married, ever since college. And we’d been—well, monogamous about each other for a long time.”

  The word monogamous had sounded that bitter tone in her voice again. “Is that why we were splitting up?” he asked. “Did I—stop being monogamous?”

  The ache under his ribs intensified as he framed the question. He realized it was more than just his battered rib cage that hurt. Was it conceivable—could anyone who’d been married to this spirited, intelligent woman possibly have been unfaithful to her?

  Her face—and her words—told him it hadn’t been that simple. “In a way,” she said. “You didn’t leave me for another woman, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What, then?”

  “You were very involved with your job.” It had the stale sound of a too-simple answer she’d given many times to explain a complicated situation. “We had—drifted apart.”

  Ryder frowned. “We’d drifted apart,” he repeated, “but you were still wearing my ring on a chain around your neck.”

  “Technically, I’m still a married woman.” She wasn’t able to hide the bitterness in her tone this time. “I was planning to take the ring off altogether once the divorce was final.”

  “Which was going to be—when?”

  There were a lot of questions crowding at him now. If they’d decided to split up before he’d gone to prison, why wait this long to finalize the divorce? Why hadn’t she just gone ahead with it during the year he’d been gone?

  Did it have something to do with the touch of possessiveness, of regret, he thought he’d seen when she raised her hand to the chain at her neck? There’d been something almost wistful in the gesture, as though she was touching something she couldn’t bear to let go of.

  The new hardness in her face made him think he must have been wrong about that. Her voice was very firm as she said, “It was going to be as soon as you were free. But now we’ve got other things to get out of the way first.”

  Her answer didn’t satisfy him, but he knew enough not to keep running at what was obviously a dead end. Doggedly, he returned to his earlier question.

  “Why did we get married suddenly?” he asked. And then; as another possibility occurred to him, he added, “Did we—you know, have to?”

  She hadn’t mentioned children. Surely she would have, if they’d had any. Or would she? Abruptly he felt he was in dangerous, empty territory again. Jayne Robards stirred him more powerfully than he could deny. But in every way that really counted, he didn’t know her at all.

  She was crossing her arms now, impatiently. “I really don’t want to talk about this, Ryder,” she said.

  Ryder crossed his arms, too, and waited. He could feel the edge of the elastic bandage where it was holding his ribs in place, and that ever-present ache just underneath it.

  Finally, after a long moment of silence, she answered him, “If you have to know, we got married in a hurry because one Thursday night you came over to my apartment with that ring in a little box and said you couldn’t stand not being married to me any longer. You always used to do things that way—saying nothing for ages, and then suddenly leaping into action.”

  And she’d once loved that about him. He could see it in her eyes, in the sadness she was trying to hide. He was about to comment on it when another thought struck him.

  He’d acted that way only this morning, when he’d given in to that impulse to kiss her. He’d felt everything building up inside him like a sea at high tide. And then it had all spilled over, and he’d let himself plunge headlong into a hunger so fierce it still made his heart pound to remember it.

  And Jayne had felt exactly the same way.

  The certainty of that fact was as troubling and arousing as hell.

  “Was it good?” He hadn’t known he was going to say the words until her eyes were already widening in response to them. “You know, what we had together—all of it—”

  He wasn’t sure how to finish the question. Deep down he knew what he was really trying to say was, If that moment in the car when I kissed you was anything like what we felt for each other when we were married, how the hell could we ever have broken up?

  But the tangle of emotions in her eyes made it impossible to sort out his feelings. And before he’d found the words he was searching for, Jayne was speaking again. The edge in her voice told him she’d shared about as many old memories as she wanted to.

  “It was good.” There was no mistaking her emphasis. “But it’s, over, Ryder. The only reason I’m here now is because everybody else seems to be trying to get you killed. And I may not love you anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to stand by and watch you get shot without at least trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  He should have been happy about the second part of what she’d said. She was willing to help him—she wasn’t going to walk away and leave him alone and in danger.

  But he wasn’t happy.

  His whole world felt shaken by the words It’s over, and by the bleak look in her eyes as she’d said them. I don’t love you anymore—she couldn’t be much plainer than that, could she?

  What she was telling him was that he’d been wrong about the sadness he thought he’d seen as she’d fingered the now-empty chain around her neck. Ryder might be feeling as though he was just discovering the promise of something passionate and hopeful, but to Jayne, all that was in the past.

  Any joy he’d once shared with this beautiful woman was over and done with.

  And he didn’t even know why.

  He clenched his teeth and tried not to notice his body’s insistent response to her movements as she crossed the room and seated herself on the other side of the double bed. There was something head-spinningly seductive about the idea of easing down on the mattress next to her, welcoming her back into his arms. But her expression told him passion was the last thing on her mind right now.

  “All right,” she said, leveling those violet eyes at him and drawing her fine, dark eyebrows together in a serious line. “If we can’t call the police and we don’t know who’s chasing you, what exactly are we going to do next?”

  Chapter 5

  The sun felt good on his skin.

  Ryder leaned back against the park bench and closed his eyes briefly. He knew he couldn’t let himself relax the way the beachgoers around him were doing. He needed to stay alert, on his guard.

  Behind him, at a pay phone next to the busy boardwalk skirting the long sand beach, Jayne was making a call that might get them a step closer to safety.

  And Ryder was sitting on the nearest park bench, trying to resist the warm temptation of the November sun, trying to keep a sharp eye on what was happening around them.

  But just for a moment, the afternoon sun on his face felt like a golden promise, as warm and seductive as the touch of Jayne’s fingertips when she’d smoothed the new bandage over his forehead this morning.

  He forced himself to open his eyes, squinting at the crowds thronging the beach in front of him. He couldn’t afford to think these thoughts.

  He had to keep his mind on the problem at hand: how to find out who was chasing him without getting hims
elf and Jayne killed in the process.

  Ahead of him was a family of six setting up a blanket and beach umbrella. He watched the father head toward the bathrooms with the youngest child in tow, while the mother grappled with the umbrella stand and tried to keep the other three kids from wandering too far away.

  She’d dropped her purse at the edge of the blanket, Ryder noticed. It was at moments like these that he could feel what he knew must be his cop’s instincts alerting him to potential danger. He’d felt the same thing a few moments ago when he’d noticed a couple of tough-looking youths strolling the beach. They’d had rap sheet written all over them—he’d sniffed them out immediately.

  Just now, though, the scene in front of him was innocent enough. “Jason, Isabelle!” The woman’s voice carried clearly over the sound of surf and laughter and cars on the nearby road. “I said not until Daddy comes back.”

  What would it be like to lie down on a white beach like this with Jayne next to him? Ryder was half tempted to close his eyes again, to let the sun’s kiss on his weary body warm him into a vision of how it would feel to glide his palms over Jayne’s smooth, warm skin, how the tension inside him would melt at the touch of her lips.

  Now that he knew the taste of her mouth, the feel of her body against his, it was impossible to stop himself from wanting to know more. He could almost sense her honeyed scent wafting around him, could feel himself responding to it with a hunger that seemed to start from the very core of him.

  Damn it, he had closed his eyes, without meaning to. Growling, he forced them open again and went back to his scrutiny of the beach.

  He might be in the grip of a desire he couldn’t understand or control, but Jayne had been all-business when they’d finally gotten down to planning their next move. She’d agreed that getting in touch with any kind of law enforcement officials was too risky until they knew how things stood between Ryder and the Miami police.

  “And I’d suggest calling my editor at the Bulletin,” she’d said, “but the only thing he dislikes more than cops is crooked cops. He’d be more likely to blow the whistle on us than to help us out.”