by Laura Parker
Certainly she had to have been devastated by a second divorce. She was not a coldhearted bitch, no matter what his own friends had thought at the time of their divorce. They hadn’t understood why she hadn’t stood by her man, right or wrong, in his hour of need. Loyalty often ranked above ethics in police circles. At least he had thought so—until loyalty cost him everything.
He’d had two long miserable years since to reconsider his choice of loyalty to an old friend over loyalty to his wife.
Perhaps if he had confided in Halle at the beginning then she would have understood, or tried to, when his gamble blew up in his face. Maybe then she wouldn’t have listened to the attorney she’d hired who advised her not to give her husband a hearing, another chance, or the benefit of the doubt. She might have seen him anyway, given him a chance to explain why his badge was being taken and the possibility of a trial loomed in his future. He knew for certain she would not have believed the rumor that he was seeing someone else.
But things had begun to get shaky between them months before. Small differences escalating into huge fights that became harder and harder to smooth over. Like a chronic hangover, the next bout of fighting seemed the only way to erase the soreness that remained from the last. By the time his professional life cratered, it was too late. They no longer trusted one another. They were adversaries, estranged by differences greater than background and economics.
Joe’s hands flexed on the steering wheel as behind his sun shades his eyes glistened. Halle didn’t deserve such a fate. It was as if a light had gone out inside her. The radiance that had first drawn him to her was absent when she gazed at him. He was a stranger, as she was to herself.
It seemed as if life had abandoned her. He just could not turn his back on her, no matter what pain it might ultimately cost him. That lost look in a pair of celadon-flecked amber eyes was stopping him from walking away. He couldn’t leave her, even if she might one day soon remember how much she hated him. Until then, he was going to stick as close to her as a burr in a cotton sock.
Joe floored the accelerator, causing the wind rushing in through the open window to rustle the speeding ticket he had stashed on the dashboard hours earlier.
“We were friends in New York City?”
“That’s right. Friends.” Joe repeated the words with all the warmth of a cop reading a collar her Miranda rights. Keep it neutral, he told himself, matter-of-fact.
He was relieved that Halle didn’t overreact, cry out or jump up from her perch on the motel-room bed where he suspected she’d been sitting ever since he dropped her off three hours ago. She hadn’t changed her clothes, turned back the bed, or in any way disturbed the pristine vacuousness of the room. It was almost as if her presence didn’t leave an impression these days. The dark color of her hair still disconcerted him. Its drabness seemed to shun light instead of filter it the way her fair hair had. Even her posture seemed contrived to hide the woman he had once known.
Only her eyes, enormous now in her too thin face, were familiar. He recognized that expression in them. Was she still afraid, afraid even to leave this room? The uneasy feeling residing in his gut knotted.
When Joe had returned to Dr. Lawlah’s office to tell him what he’d learned from Sarah, the doctor had suggested that he not hand Halle all the reality of their past relationship at once. The added information that she was recently divorced for the second time had made the doctor more cautious. The trauma of the divorce might be one of the contributing factors to her amnesia, he had said. If so, she might be unconsciously fighting her memory’s return. Only time would tell. He had advised Joe to take things easy, see if his gradual revelations jogged her memory.
“Give her positive reinforcement,” he had said. “Make her want to remember.”
Joe took a slow breath. He had devised a plan on the way over here. He would tell her who she was and where she was from, all things he thought he could safely supply. If she wanted names and phone numbers, he’d get them for her. But, he wasn’t willing to hand her the lit firecracker of a detail that they were once married. He would help her remember her past but he wasn’t at all certain she would thank him for it when she did. “So, what do you think, Halle?”
Halle looked at him with guarded interest. “Why are you telling me this now? Why not last night, or even this morning?”
He shrugged. “I was annoyed before, because you forgot we were friends.”
“I see.” Halle sat poised on the end of the hotel bed where she had been sitting all morning long, staring with unfocused eyes at the TV. It passed the time but little else. “How good friends were we?”
“Pretty good.” Joe shifted his weight from one foot to the other, jutting out the opposite hip. He debated only a moment before adding, “We were roommates.”
He saw her gaze drop for an instant below his belt buckle and chagrin deepened the color in his cheeks. “I didn’t mean we were lovers,” he added hastily. Good grief! He didn’t want to stir that up yet. “We were roomies, that’s all.”
“Platonic?” she ventured doubtfully though her cheeks were quite pink.
“Yeah. Platonic. Buddies.” His throat tightened on the lie. This was going to be harder than he thought. “So, I was thinking, since you’re out here in Texas alone that we might, well...er, become roomies again, until your memory comes back.”
Halle rose. “But if you know me, you must know my family, my friends, other people I can call for help.”
Joe knew that was coming and so he didn’t have to tell an outright lie this time. “I didn’t know your friends that well. I never even met your family. You didn’t like to talk much about them. They live in Europe.”
“Europe is a continent.” She cocked a brow. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”
Joe smiled a little. Glimpses of the old Halle helped. “Not really. Last I heard, your mother was marrying for the third time. Your dad was already on to his fourth wife.” Her expression was one of faint shock. “Look, it was no big thing for you. You once told me your parents weren’t exactly reliable or what you’d call steady influences.”
“I suppose not.” Halle tilted her head to one side, as if she might better hear the tiny voice that had begun whispering inside her the night before. But it had no information to offer about her parents. It only said Joe was not lying about their relationship. And she wanted, no needed, oh so badly, to trust him.
“What’s that?” He pointed to the expensive leather suitcase at her feet.
“My things. At least, they’re supposed to belong to me. A deputy from the sheriff’s department brought them by. By process of elimination with other passengers having claimed their belongings, they determined the suitcase must belong to me.”
Joe tensed. “Recognize anything?”
She shrugged and flipped the lid open. “Not really. Everything fits, though. Even the shoes and bras.”
Joe bent and picked up a flimsy bit of turquoise fabric which turned out to be a scantily cut teddy. “It’s your taste.” He dropped it back into the bag without making eye contact with her.
He knew he was toeing a thin line. Now that he was determined to take her in, he suddenly wondered if she’d actually go off alone with him a second time, a complete stranger but for his word to the contrary. The old Halle had never been gullible.
“What did you do when you lived in New York, Joe?”
“I was a cop.”
“A police officer?” she corrected automatically, as he had taught her to when her friends used the more derisive word cop.
“That’s right.”
“What kind of policeman?”
“Detective in vice, bunko, narcotics.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Someone’s got to do it.”
“And so you volunteered?”
His expression sobered. “I did.”
“Were you any good?”
“The best.”
Joe couldn’t quite believe it when she sudden
ly smiled at him. But he knew by the expanding of her pupils that she was buying his story, hook, line, and sinker.
She stood up. “Then I should be in very safe hands with you, Officer Guinn.”
Safe hands! Was she joking? If he dared put his hands on her in the ways he ached to, that would result in a major felony.
She tossed her head to clear her face of her hair. Joe found himself following that sweep of unfamiliar dark hair as it swung out and away from her head, revealing one side of her neck and ear.
“Where did you get those?” He pointed a finger at her ear.
She reached up and touched one of the earrings she was wearing. It was a silver loop from which dangled a silver cow with enameled pink udders and chocolate brown eyes. Her finger set its fully articulated legs dancing. “They were in the suitcase. Cute, huh? I must have a sense of whimsy.”
“Or the giver did,” Joe responded in a tight voice.
Her expression altered as her gaze snagged his and he knew he’d given himself away. “Did you give these to me?”
He could have, maybe should have lied. “Yeah. For your birthday.”
They were the first gift he’d given her and she’d worn them for months, even to work. Knowing how much she valued his gift had made him feel like a millionaire though he could only afford sterling silver, not gold, on his salary. And now, she’d brought them with her to Texas. More mysteries.
She glanced at her reflection in the mirror a few feet away. “How old am I?”
“You’ll be thirty next month.”
“So old?” The arrested expression on her face was worth his admission.
“No, you don’t look it.” He chuckled. “But over-the-hill isn’t what it used to be. I’m thirty-two, remember?”
Her smile lit up that dingy room. He had known it to light up a city block at midnight when the snow was falling soft as sighs around them.
“I do remember.” She rose and took a step to close the distance between them. “You told me last night.” She touched one earring again, rubbing the silver lightly between her thumb and forefinger. “Cows from the cowboy. Nice.”
Joe hissed a sigh of supreme frustration. Things were getting tougher by the second and he hadn’t even gotten her home yet. He needed distance, a realignment of judgement, but mostly distance. He grasped at straws. “I’ll bet you haven’t eaten today. Neither have I. Let’s get out of here and get some food.”
She caught his sleeve as he leaned down to reach for her bag. For a moment there was an odd little silence in the room while he did a mental backstroke through the dappled golden green of her shady-lake eyes.
Then she leaned toward him and placed a featherlight kiss on his cheek. “I’m glad you came back today. Really glad.”
The touch was so brief he should hardly have felt it. Instead, the kiss mark on his skin burned as he watched her bend to relock her suitcase. It burned as he took the case from her and followed her out the door. It burned for old time’s sake and present possibilities and for what must never be.
“I’m not ready for this,” Joe muttered to himself as he hoisted her bag into the back of the pickup while she climbed into the cab.
He was still too raw, too needy, too likely to take any kindness from Halle as a sign that her feelings for him had softened or, better yet, never gone completely away. No, he mustn’t do that to himself, or to her. The fact she’d packed his gift of the earrings was mere coincidence.
They were history.
He bent forward and lowered his head between the arms he’d slung over the side of the pickup and stared at the ground.
Okay, he could at least still think of them as over. Maybe, when her memory returned and she began to regard him with the same wariness with which she had treated him during their final days together, he would finally begin to believe it was over. Really dead-and-buried over. In the meantime, he was going to have a roommate for the first time in two years.
It belatedly crossed his mind that there’d be no way he could keep Halle hidden for long. He’d never bothered to tell people in Gap that he was divorced ... or had ever married for that matter. His private life was just that, private. Yet, this was a small rather straitlaced community. He was going to have to deal with gossip about Halle.
A thumping sound caught his attention and he looked up and saw Halle waving and smiling at him through the back window of his truck cab. That smile reached deep inside him and tugged at the roots of his being.
God help him, he thought with the fatalism of a drowning man, if she could still do that with only a smile.
Chapter 6
“I feel as if I have been married.”
Joe spilled iced tea down the front of his clean T-shirt. Cussing under his breath, he grabbed a dozen paper napkins from the dispenser sitting on the table of the booth they occupied and daubed at the beige stains. They were having lunch at the local Dairy Queen.
Halle watched his bent head intently, distracted by the thick dark waves of his hair until he looked up and his face was once more visible. Whatever emotion her question had triggered was gone from his expression. “Well?” she prompted.
“Well what?” he deadpanned.
“Why do I feel married?”
His lip curled as he reached for his sandwich. “How the heck does one ‘feel’ married?”
“I don’t know.”
Halle glanced down as she repeatedly dunked the crushed ice floating on top of her tea with the tip of her straw. “It’s just a feeling, the sense that I was once connected to someone else. Not family exactly. Different. I don’t feel quite whole.”
She shifted her gaze back to his face. “Does that make sense?”
Too much sense. Joe took a huge bite of his chicken-fried steak sandwich. She was digging in sacred ground and he wasn’t going to help her spade over their life together.
Halle watched him chew furiously, as if he had a mouthful of nails instead of beef. “I’m still willing to pay for your professional services, Joe, even if you are doing me a favor by letting me stay with you. I need answers and I know you can supply them. I can handle the truth. I’m not an emotional cripple nor am I delusional. I’ve made a few observations of my own. For instance, look.”
She held out her left hand and pointed at her ring finger. “There’s a very faint pale stripe around this finger. That means I wore a ring regularly until fairly recently. That intensified my feeling that I was or am married. I want to know what you know about me. It’s only right.”
He lifted blazing dark eyes to hers and she felt a flutter in her stomach. That gaze was recognizable, all right, recognizable as potent attraction tinged with an unwelcome admission of fear. He was feeling what she was feeling and trying like the devil to ignore it. Well, that was his problem. “So? Are you going to tell me?”
He chewed a little more and then swallowed. Then he took a long drink of his tea. Finally he wiped his mouth, smearing a blob of white gravy across his top lip. “I may have heard that you were married for a time.”
Halle’s whole body reacted to his statement. She leaned forward across the table until the edge of it was digging into her middle just below her breasts.
“Really? Whom did I marry?” She grabbed his wrist just as he was about to take another bite.
Joe plopped his steak sandwich back into its plastic basket. She didn’t shy from the hard questions. How the hell was he going to get past this one?
He met her inquiring gaze with stony reserve. “I didn’t really know him.” No outright lie in that. He didn’t really know Shipmann well and it was Shipmann’s ring that had left the mark. “I mostly heard about him.”
She reacted with a dazzling smile and little jump of delight with her shoulders, pleased as a puppy who’d received a pat on the head. “That’s a beginning. What’s his name? How do I get in touch with him?”
“I don’t know.” Joe picked up a long spiral of curly fried potato slathered in ketchup and casually stuffed it in his
mouth. Beneath his shirt he was sweating guilt like a perp pulled in for the first time. If he’d been a suspect under interrogation, the officer in charge would have known to go for the jugular now. Lucky for him, Halle had never developed killer instincts.
But Halle had a temper which she reined in as he munched. At least he was talking to her. “This is really important, Joe. Tell me anything you do remember about my husband. Surely you remember something, his first name?”
Joe zeroed in on her hopeful yet determined expression. He should have known softpedaling things wouldn’t work. He was once a cop. Time he started to act like one. He could face the truth even if it blew up in his face. “First off let me warn you, you’re not together anymore. You’re divorced. Your former husband’s name is Daniel Shipmann.”
She looked like a two-year-old asked to pick the red block out of the multicolored pile. “Shipmann?”
He answered her bleat of distress with the objectivity of the few facts in his possession. “Yeah. He’s a Harvard grad. Antiquities dealer, specializing in ancient manuscripts. Ring any bells?”
“No.”
The word sounded contrite coming from her, as if she felt the need to apologize. No red block this time.
She sucked in her lower lip. “And we’re divorced?”
Inwardly, Joe winced. Her expression was way too open, scared, miserable and exposed. No history, no self-awareness. Her vulnerability made him angry at the world. He hadn’t thought of all the ramifications of her delicate emotional state until this moment. And he was all she had. Poor Halle.
“What did you expect?” he muttered, the question directed more at himself than her.
A swathe of dark hair swept forward across her shoulder as if on cue, shielding them both from the haunted look in her eyes. “I don’t know. I guess I expected something...else.”
