by Leanne Banks
After they drove into town, Dylan and Alisa climbed the steps to the St. Albans Fine Arts Museum. They entered through the heavy wooden doors, then took the elevator to the third floor where the reception was to be held. Dylan couldn’t keep his eyes off Alisa. Quietly observing everything, she didn’t seem to be the least bit aware that he’d thought about stripping her clothes off her at least twenty times during the past twenty minutes.
They walked through another set of doors only to be greeted by Kirsten Remington. Dylan watched his younger half sister’s jaw drop nearly to the ground.
“Dylan Barrow,” she said as though he were the scourge of the earth. “You weren’t expected.”
“Surprise,” he said with a dry grin. “Kirsten Remington, this is Alisa Jennings.”
Alisa extended her hand. “How nice to meet you,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse my lack of knowledge, but I’m not in the pharmaceutical business. You said Remington? Any relation to Archibald Remington?”
Kirsten lifted her chin. “Archibald Remington was my father.”
Alisa nodded. “Oh,” she said with a smile. “So you’re Dylan’s half sister.”
Kirsten paled and seemed to have a hard time catching her breath. “Excuse me. My fiancé is waving at me.”
“Torpedo one,” Dylan said.
Alisa looked at him. “Why do you say that? She was polite.”
“Uh-huh,” he said in mock agreement. “I was just wondering if I would need smelling salts for her.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” she insisted.
“Alisa,” he told her, “they don’t like to be reminded that they’re related to me.”
“Tough,” she said, with an indomitable attitude. “Introduce me to your work buddies,” she said with a smile. “Show me a good time.
He guided her around the room, introducing her to the members of the board. Although each board member appeared surprised by his presence, Alisa somehow managed to get past their reserve. Finally he and Alisa approached Grant, who was holding court at the other end of the room. Grant looked at him, but might as well have looked right through him. For some reason tonight it didn’t bother him.
As soon as Grant finished talking, Dylan walked directly in front of the man. “How are you tonight, Grant?”
Surprise glinted in the man’s eyes. “Fine, and you? We’re surprised you attended, since you’ve never come before.”
“Change can be good,” Dylan said.
“Some change,” Grant said.
“Grant Remington, I’d like you to meet Alisa Jennings.”
Grant nodded and murmured a pleasantry.
“Another Remington,” Alisa said with a smile. “Half brother?”
Grant went perfectly still. His nostrils thinned as he took a quick breath. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Really?” she said brightly. “It occurred to me how lucky all of you are.”
Grant swallowed. “All of who?”
“Well, you and Dylan and your sister and your other brother. What’s his name?”
“Walter,” he said, looking at Alisa in confusion. “Lucky?” he echoed.
“Yes,” she said. “Think about it. You could have ended up with an ax murderer or some subintelligent bum for a brother. Instead you got an extremely intelligent, motivated man who’s an asset to the company.”
Dylan squeezed her hand to signal her to stop.
Grant flexed his jaw. “Is that so?”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “But Dylan tells me you’re a smart man, so I’m sure you already know that. And in Dylan’s case, he got lucky because he could have ended up with two brothers and a sister who were so insecure they couldn’t see the good in him. Instead he got you,” she said.
Dylan was going to kill her.
Grant gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “How kind of you to point all of this out to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Torpedo two. Time for us to go,” Dylan said, shaking his head and guiding her from the room. He didn’t trust himself to speak, and she must have sensed it since she didn’t say a word on the drive home.
As soon as they entered the front door, he rounded on her. “Why in hell did you do that?”
She shook her head as if she were unable to explain it. “I don’t know. I probably need to talk to the hospital shrink about it.”
“What?” Dylan asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, wincing. “It must go back to our childhood. I have this overwhelming urge to protect you.”
Dylan stared at her. “Do I look like I need protecting?”
“No,” she admitted, taking in the length of him in a way that told him she was very aware of him as a man. “But the longer we were there, the more upset I got about the situation. It should be different.”
“Lots of things should be different,” he said with more than a trace of impatience “That doesn’t mean they are.”
“Maybe things aren’t different because nobody does or says anything to change matters.”
“This is none of your business.”
“I know,” she agreed wholeheartedly. “But this is wrong and someone needed to say something.”
“And it had to be you.”
She stared at him a long moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know what made me do it. It isn’t rational. Maybe there’s some kind of weird karma thing going on.”
“Weird karma?” he echoed. Heaven help him.
“I feel like I owe you.”
Her statement blew him away. He took a breath to clear his head. “Because I’m letting you recover at my house.”
She frowned, shaking her head. “It goes back further than that. I just have this feeling that you did something so special or so important to me that I owe you.”
Dylan immediately remembered how he had hurt her during college, and his stomach dropped. “You don’t owe me,” he assured her. “You’ve never owed me,” he said, and left her staring after him. He had to escape her searching gaze. He had to escape his own disgust with himself.
Alisa felt incredibly foolish. After donning a nightgown, she’d tossed in bed for more than an hour, then given up. She should be tired. She’d certainly had a doozy of an evening.
Even though she’d defended him, Dylan was justified in being angry with her. It was none of her business if he and his half siblings wasted their entire lives avoiding each other. Dylan was more than man enough to defend himself. She had the sense that he’d protected her more than once during her growing-up years.
Upset by her thoughts, she pushed open the French doors to the balcony and walked outside into the warm night air. Closing her eyes, she lifted her face and bathed in the gentle light of the moon. She wondered when she would sleep through the night again. If she wasn’t dreaming of Dylan, she was pushing her brain for more information on her past.
Why did she care so much for him, when he set solid boundaries against her? She wondered if he’d been a quasibrother figure for her, but then remembered they’d been teenage sweethearts. She wondered if they’d been lovers. Her skin heated with the possibility. That might explain the connection she felt with him.
A delicious breeze stirred the air. Alisa savored it, and a decadent thought flitted across her mind. The breeze whispered over her again, and she wished she could feel the air over her body, her bare body.
Frustration bubbled in her throat and she walked to the outer wall of the balcony, lifting her head to the breeze. Alisa suspected she’d been modest before. Certainly she wasn’t the kind of woman to strip off her clothes on a balcony just to feel the breeze. But perhaps, she thought, she’d secretly wanted to do that. She wondered if beneath her white-bread exterior beat a passionate, adventurous heart.
Standing in the darkness of his room, Dylan watched her glance from side to side, then he held his breath as she lifted the straps of her gown and slid the silky garment down her body. She didn’t know he watched her, and he had the vague feelin
g of being a voyeur, but he couldn’t have turned away if he’d tried.
The moonlight poured over her curves like cream. She lifted her hair off the back of her neck, causing her back to arch and her breasts to thrust forward, the tips like berries. The balcony wall hid her lower body from his sight, but Dylan remembered. He remembered a night when he’d burned and made her burn, too.
She’d danced with him at the fraternity party. There’d been plenty of beer available, but he and Alisa had been getting drunk on each other. After rediscovering each other, they’d spent every available moment together. That night, when they’d danced, they’d chosen a dark spot near the corner of the room and rubbed their bodies against each other.
He had seemed unable to stop kissing her, and she hadn’t seemed to want him to stop. He’d been so hard he’d been aching with it. He’d taken her away from the party to a secluded area off campus where they’d necked on a blanket with the stars shining around them.
Dylan hadn’t spent much time looking at the stars. He’d been too hungry for Alisa. Even now he could remember the sounds of their breaths in the fall night air. He’d touched her breasts, and her soft moan had driven him crazy. Tugging her blouse loose, he’d inhaled the sweet scent between her breasts and kissed the creamy tips. When he’d felt her shudder, he’d taken a deep breath.
“I can’t get close enough,” he’d said. “But you’re probably freezing.”
“I’m not cold at all,” she’d told him, lifting her hand to his cheek. “I can’t get close enough to you, either.”
He’d pulled off his shirt and pressed his chest against her breasts. The sensation was indescribable. He’d known she was inexperienced, but he’d felt as if he’d wanted her for a lifetime. Being with Alisa made him feel safe. Being inside her would make him whole. He kissed her again and slid his hand beneath her skirt and panties to find her wet with arousal. He stroked the petals of her femininity and prepared her by sliding his finger inside her.
Her hands were restless over his chest and shoulders. He guided them down to where he ached. He opened his jeans for her and she fondled him with an awkward tenderness that made him feel as if he would burst.
His urgency drove him. He slid her skirt down, and her skin was pale in the moonlight, her thighs creamy in invitation.
She looked at him, her gaze full of passion and a tinge of apprehension he could tell she was trying to hide. “I’ve never—”
He covered her lips with his fingers. “I know,” he said. “I’ll protect you,” he promised, and he had.
He thrust inside her and caught her gasp with his lips. She felt like wet velvet surrounding him, milking him. He looked into her eyes of pure love, and Dylan had known where he belonged.
Dylan’s body pulsed with the memory of making love to Alisa. He watched her touch her bare arm and the top of her breast. His mouth went dry. His heart tightened in his chest at the memory of how she’d gone into battle for him tonight. He had lost so much when he’d lost her all those years ago, far more than he ever would have imagined. Even if he had her back for a while, she would eventually leave him again when she regained her memory. Dylan had learned the hard way that nothing lasts forever. This was no different.
The following morning, Alisa rode to her apartment with Dylan again. After an hour of prowling around her apartment, however, she grew restless. In her datebook she’d seen a notation for Granger one afternoon every week. Her doctor hadn’t released her yet to drive, so she called a taxi and followed her nose to Granger.
She felt totally at ease with the layout of Granger and easily remembered the location of the cafeteria and the cottage where she’d spent her childhood years. She saw a group of boys playing baseball and remembered taking her own turn at bat. In many of her childhood memories Dylan’s presence was woven like a strong bright-red thread in a tapestry.
She even remembered why she’d visited Granger once a week before the clerk in the office reminded her. “Sorry I’m late, Ms. Henderson,” Alisa said, so pleased she’d remembered the woman’s name without a prompt she could have wept.
Gladys Henderson glanced up from her desk and gave a cry of delight. She swept around the counter with surprising speed for her girth and gave Alisa a big hug. “What a sight for sore eyes! We’ve been worried about you. I visited you in the hospital that first week, but you were out of it.” She lifted Alisa’s arms to the sides and surveyed her. “You look beautiful. How’s your brain, sweetheart?”
Alisa laughed at the woman’s warmth and bluntness. “I have some gaps, but I remember how to read, and I remember that Robbie and I were working on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.”
Ms. Henderson smiled. “Then you’re doing pretty good. He missed you something terrible. Let me see if I can find him,” she said, heading back for the phone. She called the dorm manager and told him to send Robbie to the office. Alisa chatted with Ms. Henderson while they waited.
Robbie, a thin, young-looking ten-year-old, walked into the office with an expectant expression on his face. As soon as he saw Alisa, he smiled, revealing a missing tooth.
“Robbie!” she said, rushing toward him and embracing him. “One of your teeth is gone.”
“It finally fell out,” he said. “Two years later than everyone else. How is your head? They told me you hurt it very bad.”
Alisa nodded. “I did, but I’m much better now. How much reading have you been doing?”
Robbie stuffed his hands in his pockets and shifted from foot to foot. “I read a whole chapter, but it was hard.”
Alisa smiled. “Would you like to start reading together again?”
His face lit up. “Oh, yeah. It’s a lot more fun with you.”
“Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock,” she said, remembering their standing appointment.
He gave a thumbs-up and nodded. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me, too,” she said, and felt somewhat lighter. The world suddenly made a little more sense to her.
Dylan counted to ten, then twenty, then one hundred when he couldn’t find Alisa at her apartment at their agreed-upon meeting time. There was no reason to call the police, he told himself even as he felt a trickle of perspiration stream down his back.
He doubted he would ever get that call from the hospital out of his head. They hadn’t been sure she would make it and even though Alisa couldn’t stand him, he didn’t want to imagine a world without her. He’d never been much for praying, but he’d spent the next several days in long conversation with the Almighty.
He checked his watch again and racked his brain for where she might have gone. He spied a taxi round the corner and pull into the parking lot and exhaled in relief as Alisa exited the cab and looked for him. He tightened his hands around the steering wheel several times to relieve his tension, then got out of the car.
“There you are,” she called, and walked toward him. Her face was shining with such joy that he couldn’t call her attention to the time. “I remember,” she said, and hugged him.
Confused, Dylan felt a mixture of happiness and foreboding. He automatically closed his arms around her. She couldn’t possibly remember everything, could she?
“I remember Mrs. Henderson at Granger’s and I remember Robbie is a little boy I’ve been helping with reading. And I remember the total layout of the Granger campus.” She looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. “I remembered Mrs. Henderson’s name before she told me, and I even remembered the name of the book Robbie and I were reading together.”
Her joy was contagious. He’d watched her struggle from the very beginning. “What do you want to do now?”
“I want to make chocolate chip cookies,” she said with a knowing glance. “My mother’s recipe,” she added with determination. “And I want to see if I can do it from memory.”
His heart contracted. “What do you remember about your mother’s cookies?”
“I used to snitch a few and give them to some of th
e guys.”
“You were the cookie girl, and everyone always wanted your cookies.”
She paused for a moment, then looked up at him from the veil of her eyelashes. “Did you always want my cookies?”
Five
“They’re still missing something,” Alisa said with a frown after the third batch.
“Taste great to me,” he said, having eaten entirely too many cookies. “At this rate we won’t have any room for the barbecue at Michael’s house tonight.”
She glanced at him and winced. “I forgot. Since Michael and Justin were Granger boys, too, maybe they can tell me what’s wrong with them.”
“Nothing is wrong with these cookies,” Dylan said emphatically.
“I still think there’s something missing.” She glanced at the clock. “What time do we need to leave?”
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, not all that eager to go to the barbecue tonight. Who knew what she would remember next? “We don’t have to go if you’re too tired or too full,” he casually offered.
She shook her head. “Oh, no. I want to see what else I remember. This could be fun.”
Yes, he thought. Or not.
Thirty minutes later he drew near the turnoff for Michael’s home. Alisa glanced at him. “My cookies didn’t make you sick, did they? You’ve been very quiet.”
“No. I’ve just got a few things on my mind.”
He seemed so distant, Alisa thought, and wished things were different. She wished a lot of things that made her heart hurt. She had the strongest yearning to be the one he felt he could turn to, but she knew she wasn’t. The knowledge hurt a tender spot deep inside her.
He pulled to a stop, and she covered his hand with hers. “I hope all those things work out,” she said, reaching out to him the best way she knew.
He met her gaze and in his eyes she saw a kaleidoscope of emotions. The one that affected her most profoundly was regret. “Some will,” he said, “and some won’t.”
Alisa’s heart twisted. She sensed that he was certain something important to him would not work out.
