His groan evoked guilt. She’d kept him away from home and he had a life of his own to lead. Everyone did, except for her. “I’m sorry.”
She was, he thought. Despite the situation she found herself in, she could still think of someone else. It came automatically. He took it as a good sign. Angus smiled at her as he got out.
“Next time you lose your memory, try to do it in the morning. It’ll fit my schedule better.” He saw the bewildered look enter her eyes. He guessed he wasn’t his sharpest at this hour. “My turn to be sorry. It was a joke. Now you can see why stand-up comedy was never a viable alternative for me.”
He had a nice smile, she thought. The kind of smile that crept into your subconscious, arousing trust. It felt as if he cared. The thought heartened her, even though she knew that, logically, there was no reason in the world why this man should care about the dilemma she found herself in. She was as much of a stranger to him as he was to her.
But for some reason he didn’t feel like a stranger.
She looked toward the artfully arranged row of garden apartments. Which one belonged to him? And his child, she reminded herself.
Someone else whose life she was interrupting. “Will your daughter be asleep?”
Angus led the way to his apartment, which was located on the ground floor. The door faced the carport, but the bedroom windows looked out onto the center of the complex. At night, the peaceful sight almost made him forget the frantic hum of the life that swirled just outside the manicured landscaping. It was worth the price he paid each month.
He grinned at her question. Though Vikki talked as if she were seven-going-on-forty, she had the constitution of a whirling dervish. Even if that whirling dervish had been up half the night with a bellyache.
“It’s highly unlikely. Vikki hardly ever seems to sleep.”
After unlocking the door, he gestured for the woman to walk in first.
She did, and found herself immediately under the scrutiny of a petite, older woman dressed entirely in black leather, with hair that resembled the color of a ripe, pink grapefruit.
Jenny Marlow made no effort to hide her interest in Angus’s companion. She took full measure of the woman before turning her attention toward her neighbor. She’d regarded him as her unofficial son from the day she discovered his profession.
“Well, it’s about time you got back, MacDougall. I was beginning to think I was going to have to move in.” Brushing seductively against him as she traded places with Angus, she wrapped her long, bony hand around the doorknob. “Lucky for you, my biker club doesn’t meet tonight.” The wide, amused grin uncovered a space where one tooth was conspicuously missing. Jenny maintained that a spill from the back seat of a Harley had been responsible. “Bringing your work home with you now, are you?”
Angus shoved his key into his pocket, along with his hand. “She needed a place to stay.” Now that he thought of it, his neighbor was a far more suitable roommate for the woman than he was. “Jenny, would you—?”
Jenny read him like a book with large print. Fluffy pink hair fluttered from side to side as she adamantly shook her head.
“Sorry, can’t help you. Got my grandson and his friend camping out in my living room right now, sleeping bags and all. Walking hormones, that’s what they are.” Jenny winked at Angus, opening the door. “She’d be better off here, trust me. You, at least, are a gentleman.”
She paused as she regarded the woman one last time. “Got a heart as big as a swimming pool,” Jenny confided. Her eyes glittered with sex and mischief as she looked at Angus. “Give him a tumble myself, but he’s too old for me.” Jenny punctuated the declaration with a loud laugh.
“No question about that,” Angus agreed. “Way too old.” He looked toward the back. Vikki now occupied what had once been his den. “Vikki asleep?”
Jenny snorted. “You wish. She’s in her room, playing with that damn hand computer game you got her. We had pizza,” she suddenly remembered. She saw him reaching into his pocket and shook her head. “My treat. There’s a slice or two left in the refrigerator.”
Her eyes shifted again to the woman. “I’d suggest you feed it to your guest here and fatten her up a little so she qualifies for a shadow.”
Jenny let herself out. “Call me if you need me.” She nodded at Angus’s companion. “It was nice meeting you, honey.”
The door closed, and the woman asked, “That’s your neighbor?”
He laughed at her tone, understanding it perfectly. “Something else, isn’t she?”
But Jenny was already forgotten as he regarded the woman before him. How did it feel, being a walking question mark? He wasn’t sure he’d know how to handle it. He’d always been the type who had to know things, who had to get the answers, figure out the mystery before anyone else did. Not knowing who he was would have driven him crazy.
“You know, we’re going to have to come up with a name for you,” he told the woman, “until we find out your real one.” Crossing to one end table, Angus picked up the telephone book, then handed it to her. “Why don’t you look through this and see if any name appeals to you, while I look in on my daughter?”
He walked out of the room, thinking how strange it still felt saying that word. Daughter. Six months, and he still hadn’t quite gotten used to it.
But he was getting there.
And maybe eventually, he thought as he heard the pages of the phone book rustling, so would the mystery woman.
Chapter 3
He knocked softly but received no answer.
Easing the door open slowly—mindful of the fact that even at the tender age of seven, Vikki guarded her privacy—Angus looked in.
He found his daughter sitting cross-legged on her bed, her eyes intent on the screen of the game she held in her hands. With her hair—dark blonde like his—falling into her face, she appeared oblivious to his entrance.
Angus knew better. Vikki absorbed everything that went on around her, like a proverbial sponge. In that, he supposed, she was a great deal like him. The nonchalant, spit-in-your-eye independent streak, so incongruent with someone so young, was something she got from her mother.
It wasn’t easy, being the father of a precocious seven-year-old. Especially since he hadn’t had seven years to work up to it. Days like today didn’t help. She’d been sick last night. So sick that she’d actually allowed him to hold her and give her sympathy—something she’d yet to do of her own accord when she was well. There was very little else he could do for a bellyache that came from eating too much junk food. So he’d stayed up with her and held her and read her favorite story to her over and over again until he could recite it from memory, the way she could.
When he’d left this morning, he’d promised her that he’d be back early. Instead, he’d been exceptionally late and probably lost the headway he’d made last night.
But then, he hadn’t counted on a woman with amnesia wandering into his office.
The fortunes of war. He doubted Vikki’s seven-year-old worldliness made room for things like that yet.
Since she didn’t acknowledge him, he made the first move. “Hi.”
Vikki didn’t reply. She didn’t even look up. If he’d been his own father, he would have walked out. But Angus wasn’t his father, and it was precisely the memory of those austere, stark days—when it had only been the Colonel and him, moving from base to base—that kept Angus in the room. Kept him there searching for a crack, an opening he could widen enough to wiggle through. He wasn’t about to let Vikki shut him out the way the Colonel had shut him out. The way Jane had. Vikki was his and they were going to communicate.
He leaned against the doorjamb, watching her. Vikki’s thumbs flew across the buttons as she battled to keep the earth safe from yet another alien invasion. She had great hand-eye coordination, he thought. The Colonel would have liked that.
Angus tried again. “Heard you had pizza.”
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and pressed do
wn harder on the right-hand button. Another alien bit the dust, he judged.
“Yeah.”
Her answer was preoccupied. She might be young in years, but she was all female. And she was making him pay for breaking his word. Angus crossed to her bed.
“I didn’t mean to be this late, Vik.” He knew she liked him to call her that. It made her feel grown up.
Vikki’s eyes momentarily left the playing field. They were accusing when they met his, the accusation masking the hurt just beneath.
Seven-going-on-forty, he thought again. A child shouldn’t have to mask anything. Shouldn’t know how to mask anything. In his opinion, Vikki knew way too much too soon, and he wasn’t sure if that was really such a good thing.
He sat down on the edge of her bed. Vikki went back to playing her game. And to ignoring him. “I got caught up in a case. It couldn’t be helped.”
Her thumbs never stopped moving. “Did someone shoot at you?”
That seemed to be the only excuse she was willing to accept. Sometimes, she was positively ghoulish. Angus sighed.
“I think you watch too much television.” He was going to have to talk to Jenny about that again. The woman had a weakness for movies about private investigators. Hollywood was giving Vikki some very strange ideas. “I’ve never been shot at, Vik. I don’t handle those kind of cases. You know that.” He had explained what he did at length when she first entered his life.
The look Vikki spared him was one of disappointment. “If nobody was shooting at you, then you could’ve come home.”
He wasn’t about to spend what was left of the evening arguing with her about it.
“I did. Just later than expected.” He meant for that to be the end of the discussion. Rising, he nodded toward her door. “We’ve got a guest.”
Her face became animated. She discarded the game as if it were nothing more than a candy wrapper, and scrambled to her feet. “A dog?”
It was familiar ground. Angus had no use for dogs himself, but if getting one meant so much to Vikki, he knew he was going to have to look into it. He wondered if there was any place that let you test-run owning a dog. The way he figured it, he’d already committed himself about as far as he was willing to, without seeing exactly what he was getting himself into.
“No, a lady.”
“Oh.” Exuding annoyance, Vikki picked up her game and went back to eradicating aliens. “Why’d you bring her here for?”
Very patiently, he removed Vikki’s hands from the game. Over her protest, he shut it off and put the game on the bookshelf above her bed. “I brought her here because she has nowhere to go.”
Vikki forgot to pout about the game. “She’s homeless?”
Noting the barely contained enthusiasm, Angus decided not to disillusion Vikki for the moment. “I guess, in a way.”
“And dirty?” Anticipating the sight of someone she considered really interesting, Vikki made it to her door ahead of her father.
Angus shook his head. The way Vikki’s mind worked baffled him completely. Weren’t little girls supposed to be neat and clean—or was that a thing of the past? He had never had a sister, or even a female cousin, but the girls he had known at the various bases he’d lived on had never had an affinity for dirt or flying bullets. Certainly not the way Vikki did.
And Jane had been unconventional, but nothing like this.
Vikki rushed out, heading toward the small living room. She stopped short when she saw the woman Angus had brought home with him. Her first reaction seemed to be disappointment. It shimmered across her small, oval face like a spring rain. And then she saw the white dressing taped slightly askew on the woman’s forehead.
Hope sprung eternal.
“Did someone shoot at you?” Vikki held her breath, waiting for the right answer.
“No,” Angus dismissed. This bloodthirstiness of hers was getting out of hand. About to say something else to his daughter, he almost didn’t hear the soft, awestruck yes whispered behind him. Turning, he looked at the woman, positive he’d imagined the word. “Did you say something?”
“Yes.” Her eyes opened wide, she was the personification of disbelief. “I said yes,” she repeated.
Like a woman moving through the languid waves of a dream, she gingerly touched the wound, then winced. It was still there, still real.
And she remembered how she had gotten it.
She raised her eyes to Angus’s, just the tiniest shard of a memory catching the light, flashing through her mind before disappearing into oblivion. There was nothing before it, nothing after it. It existed autonomously. But it was there.
“Someone shot at me,” she told him. Even when she said it out loud, it didn’t sound plausible.
But she knew it had happened. Shutting her eyes, she could relive that one split second in time. Hear the gun discharge, feel the pain as something—the bullet—grazed her.
“Who?” Angus demanded. If Vikki’s question had triggered something, maybe he could push that something a little further, make her remember more.
She pressed her lips together, trying to summon an answer. The fragment broke up until it was just so much dust. And then it was gone. Nothing took its place. “I don’t know.”
Vikki’s blue eyes were huge with admiration. “Real bullets?”
That wasn’t a cut on her forehead, Angus realized, that was a graze. The woman had been grazed by a bullet. He hadn’t noticed it when he cleaned up her wound—and he felt like an idiot. But, despite the romantic notions attached to his profession, flying bullets didn’t immediately jump to mind.
“It looks that way,” he told his daughter. He ruffled the tousled blonde hair fondly. He noticed that she didn’t jerk immediately away this time. Yes, he was making progress. “Also looks like you scored the first point.”
Eyebrows drawn together, Vikki turned her small face up to his. “Huh?”
Affection nudged at his heart. She looked exactly her age. Seven, and not a minute older. “She lost her memory.”
There was renewed wonder in her eyes as Vikki looked at the woman again. “You don’t know who you are?” Her young voice hummed with awe.
At least someone was entertained by her dilemma, the woman thought, smiling at the little girl. “No, I’m afraid not.”
That was the key word, she thought. Afraid. She was afraid that this condition would remain forever. Afraid that no one would turn up to claim her and take her back to her life. And afraid that she would never remember what that life was.
The grin made Vikki look like a miniature of her father. “Cool.”
The woman found that she could laugh at Vikki’s response. Cool wasn’t the word she would have used to sum up her situation, but somehow, on the little girl’s lips, it seemed like the right one.
Ever pragmatic, Vikki asked, “What am I supposed to call you?”
The fact that Vikki was interested in addressing her at all told Angus that his daughter had tentatively accepted the woman’s presence in their home. Maybe she even identified a little with the woman, he thought, because for a long time, she didn’t have a place to call her own, either. From what he gathered from Jane’s letter, the life she and Vikki had led was pretty nomadic.
He glanced at the telephone book he’d given the woman before going into Vikki’s room. It was sitting back on the side table, closed. Had looking at it proved too frustrating?
He began fielding Vikki’s question for her. “We were just—”
“Rebecca.” Even as she said it, as her tongue wrapped itself around the name, it felt right to her. Sounded right.
Rebecca.
Her name was Rebecca.
She’d found it on the second page in the telephone book. As soon as she’d read it, she’d known. It was her name. She waited for more, for her last name to attach itself to Rebecca in her mind. But just as with the earlier fragment, nothing more had followed.
Angus looked at her. This was beginning to feel promising. “Is that the name y
ou picked?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t pick it. It picked me. My name is Rebecca.”
She remembered, he thought. She remembered her name and that someone had fired at her. The pieces were beginning to come together.
“Rebecca what?” Angus pressed.
Her smile was almost shy. And damn appealing. But he banished the thought as soon as it came. This couldn’t get personal. He was just helping her in his professional capacity.
Yeah, right, by bringing her home with him. Very professional.
“I don’t know.”
Angus curbed his impatience. After all, they were making progress. The doctor at the emergency room had told him that most of the time amnesia was just a temporary condition. Dropping a dark curtain over everything was sometimes the mind’s way of coping with an intolerable situation.
Like being shot at.
“You’re doing great.” He was the soul of encouragement. “Maybe by morning, the rest of it’ll come back to you.” Though she nodded, she looked extremely tired. Small wonder, considering the kind of day she’d had. “Until then, I can offer you some cold pizza, an old football jersey and a bed.”
Vikki’s head immediately jerked up at the mention of the last item. Suspicion clouded her small features. “Mine?” she wanted to know.
She’d had little when she came to him. Maybe that was why she guarded everything she had so jealously. Still, it was a trait he didn’t particularly like. He wondered if it was ingrained, or if, given enough time, he could break her of it.
“No, mine.” He placed one hand on Vikki’s shoulder, his eyes on Rebecca. “I’ll take the couch,” he added before Vikki had the chance to ask anything that might embarrass Rebecca.
He liked the sound of her name, he thought. Rebecca. It had grace, poetry. It suited her.
Rebecca had other ideas about the arrangement. “I can’t put you out like that. I’ll take the couch.”
She glanced at it. The tan-and-brown sofa looked well broken in, comfortable for a night of TV viewing. But for sleeping? She had her doubts. Still, she couldn’t take his bed. He had already done far more than most people would.
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