by Linda Turner
A nervous giggle bubbled in her throat at the thought and was hastily swallowed. She had to stop this! After five years of marriage, she was supposed to be well past the stage of mooning over her husband. But he made her want things she couldn’t remember and yearn for a closeness that they’d lost somewhere along the way. Why? What had happened to them? How could they have let what they’d once had slip through their fingers without a fight?
She fell asleep, wondering and worrying in her dreams, knowing that if she didn’t remember soon, it was going to be too late. She cared for him so much more than she should, and they could be here, alone together, for who knew how long. How was she supposed to protect her heart, when the pull he had on her grew stronger with every passing hour?
The next day, she was still asking herself the same questions, and the answers were as elusive as ever. And that was when the panic started. She was falling in love with him for the second time in her life, but the knowledge brought her little peace. They were on a collision course with heartache and quickly running out of time. There was no way to avoid the inevitable disaster unless she somehow got her memory back.
So while he spent the day recaulking the cabin windows and trimming the trees that brushed against the eaves, she tried her damnedest to remember not only the day she’d first fallen in love with him, but the exact moment she’d turned her back on him and walked away. In doing so, she knew she might get more than she bargained for. Not only could she turn out to be a woman she didn’t like at all, but by trying to force one memory, she could be opening herself up to a whole flood of bad ones. Either way, she was probably going to get hurt, but at least she’d have some answers.
All she got for her efforts, however, was a low-grade headache that stayed with her all day. By the time they’d finished supper and retired to opposite ends of the couch to relax in front of the fire before going to bed, it had progressed to a constant pain that pounded at her temples. Unable to concentrate on one of the paperback novels they’d brought along to pass the time, she let it fall to her lap and squeezed her eyes shut. It didn’t help.
“Problems?”
Her eyes still closed against the light that only seemed to intensify the pain, she nodded and rubbed tiredly at her temples. “It’s just a stupid headache.”
“Have you taken anything?”
“No. The baby…” .
She didn’t have to say anything more—he knew she would never chance doing anything that might hurt the baby. Silence stretched between them, but she couldn’t bring herself to find some tidbit of conversation to break it. Then she heard him move, and before she could begin to guess his intentions, he slid across the couch, not stopping until he was sitting right next to her, his thigh firm against hers. Startled, she tensed and her eyes flew open. “What—”
“Shhh,” he murmured, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t go getting all skittish on me. I’m just trying to make you feel better.”
“Said the spider to the fly,” she drawled. Drawing back slightly, she eyed him warily. “What are you doing?”
“Just giving you a massage,” he retorted, grinning. “Why? What’d you think I was doing?”
Her mind drifted to hot, slow-moving images of the two of them touching, kissing, loving. And an ache that had nothing to do with the one in her head settled low in her abdomen.
“Annie? Are you in there? Where’d you go?”
She blinked and looked up to find him staring into her eyes, trying to follow her into her thoughts. Mortified, she felt a hot blush steal into her cheeks, and wanted to die right there on the spot. “Sorry,” she said in a rough voice she hardly recognized as her own. “I guess my mind just wandered for a second. Maybe I should go to bed.”
“Not yet. Turn around and let me give you a back rub. It’ll make you feel better.”
She shouldn’t have, but when his hands urged her to scoot around and present her back to him, she couldn’t summon the will to resist. Without a word of protest, she settled sideways on the couch with him right behind her. Then his hands worked their way down her spine and back up to her neck, massaging the tension out of her tight muscles, and she melted like a candle in the sun. By the time his fingers slid into her hair and found the throbbing in her temples, she was boneless. Groaning, her eyes still closed and a soft smile curving her mouth, she leaned back into his touch.
She was falling asleep in his hands and seemed to have no idea what she was doing to him. Don’t! he wanted to warn her. Don’t trust me that much. I want you too badly.
But he couldn’t say the words any more than he could push her from him. Unable to resist temptation, he leaned down and kissed the side of her neck. Under his mouth, her skin was soft and warm and far too tempting. His teeth hurt, he wanted her so badly. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Not when her head was hurting and she was so tired she could barely string two words together.
“That’s it, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Just relax. You were probably out in the sun too much today. Tomorrow I’m going to make sure you stay inside with your feet up.”
“No,” she muttered, leaning more heavily against him. “It wasn’t that. I was trying to remember.”
His fingers stilled at her temples. “Grant said you were supposed to just take it easy and let everything come back at its own pace.”
“I tried that. It isn’t working.”
“What about your dream?” he reminded her. “You described that dead banker to a T, so he must have had something to do with whatever happened in the garage. Give yourself time. The rest will come when you’re ready to deal with it.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” Voicing her worst fear, she turned to face him, her eyes troubled and dark with worry. “What if I never remember anything?”
His gaze locked with hers, Joe didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She wanted to know about them. What was going to happen to them if she couldn’t tell him where she’d been for the last two months? Who she’d been seeing? Who she might have been sleeping with when she still had a husband at home? Did they even have a prayer of a chance with so many unanswered questions between them?
She needed reassurance—he could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice—but he couldn’t give it to her. “I don’t know,” he said, letting her go. “I guess we’ll have to wait and cross that bridge when we come to it, won’t we?”
Chapter 8
By unspoken agreement, they strictly avoided discussing the future after that. And all physical contact, including massages. Knowing it was for the best didn’t make it easy on either one of them, but somehow they managed. The work that still needed to be done around the cabin was a welcome distraction, but it was a small place, and by the end of the third day, they had it in tip-top shape. Then the real torture began.
When Annie left him back in the summer, Joe thought he knew what hell was all about, but as the days dragged, he realized he was only just beginning to know the meaning of the word. They were literally living in each other’s pocket and bumping into each other every time they turned around. There was no privacy, no space, no room to get away from each other. When she took a bath every night, he found himself listening for the sound of the running water and waiting for the subtle, enticing scent of her shampoo to drift under the bathroom door to tease his senses. By the time she finished and left the bathroom in a cloud of fragrant steam, he was hard and aroused and frustrated. Every damn night.
Considering that, it was little wonder that he dreaded the setting of the sun. The nights were impossibly long, and when he did manage to fall asleep, which was only for short stretches at a time, Annie was waiting for him in his dreams.
He wasn’t, he discovered, a man who handled celibacy well. He was short-tempered and edgy, with too much time on his hands. And the only distraction was Annie herself. Through half-closed eyes, he watched her every move and didn’t care that she knew it. If Sam didn’t call soon about a break in the case, they were goin
g to have to go into Marathon or El Paso and see about getting Annie some maternity clothes, but for now, she still wore her jeans unsnapped. Just knowing her pants were only partially zipped under the long tail of her shirt drove him quietly out of his mind.
Once he might have found comfort in the fact that she was just as miserable as he was, but that only made him want her more. They were both waiting, fighting the inevitable, and the tension in the cabin was as sharp as shattered glass. By the morning of the fifth day, Joe couldn’t take it anymore. He was going to blow the lid right off the place if he didn’t do something about the hot energy crawling under his skin.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said curtly as soon as they finished breakfast. “The doctor said you needed exercise, and we haven’t been out of sight of the cabin since we got here.”
“I’ll pack some sandwiches,” she said eagerly, as anxious as he to get out. “We can have a picnic.”
At that point, Joe would have agreed to a full-scale barbecue cooked over an open campfire if it would get them out of the forced intimacy of the cabin. “Take whatever you want. I’ve got a backpack in the closet. I’ll get it while you’re getting the food together.”
They were ready in five minutes and out the door in five and a half. It was a cool morning, but crystal clear, with the scent of pine heavy in the air. Wearing lightweight jackets they could later tie around their waists as the temperature rose, they took a path that meandered north of the cabin, walking single file at a leisurely rate as they struck off through the trees.
The forest was hushed and cool and bathed in shadows, the atmosphere almost churchlike, and neither felt the need to break the companionable silence. So, for long stretches at a time, the only sound was the whisper of the wind through the trees and the crunch of pine needles under their feet as they hiked farther and farther from the cabin. For the first time in days, they were both at peace.
They might not have spoken for hours, but, just as they stopped for a break, Annie spied a young deer standing fifty yards away in a small clearing off to their right. Still as a statue, it stood poised for flight and watched them with dark, liquid eyes. Instinctively, she reached for Joe’s hand.
“Look,” she whispered, and nodded toward the clearing.
His fingers closing around hers, he stood with his shoulder brushing hers, hardly daring to breathe. Then, just when it seemed as if time itself had stopped, the deer turned and bounded off into the trees, its white tail waving like a flag before it disappeared in the shadows.
That should have broken the hushed silence and the spell that had fallen over them. But when Joe looked down at Annie and found her looking up at him with shiny eyes, the intimacy that had pulled them together in the cabin was nothing compared to what they’d just shared there in the forest. He had to order himself to let her go, but even then, his fingers tightened around hers before he could bring himself to release her and step back.
“That was a surprise,” he said in a voice as rough as a gravel road. “You don’t see too many deer around here this time of year. Hunting season’s right around the corner, so they’re usually pretty skittish once the weather starts to cool off.”
Her heart thumping in her chest, Annie could understand how the deer felt. Nothing had happened, but something in his gaze made her feel as if she’d just had a brush with a kind of danger that had nothing to do with fear. She wanted to run for the hills…and turn into his arms. Tom, she did neither, but followed his lead and acted instead as if nothing had happened. With her pulse skipping and her stomach jumping crazily, it wasn’t easy.
“I could never shoot anything so beautiful,” she said huskily, only to realize she didn’t know if she’d ever done such a thing or not. “At least, I don’t think I could. I’m not a hunter, am I?”
His lips twitched but didn’t quite curl into a smile. “You? Hardly. Grant tried to give us some venison once, and you accused him of shooting Bambi.”
She laughed, relieved. “Serves him right. If we need meat, that’s what the grocery stores are for.”
This time, he grinned, his brown eyes crinkling with amusement. “That’s what you told him. He never made the mistake of doing that again.” Still grinning, he said, “C’mon. Let’s see if we can find Bambi’s mother.”
They hiked for the rest of the morning, then had lunch in a meadow that offered a breathtaking view. It was a quiet, tranquil spot, and though they were both more talkative than they had been all morning, Annie knew Joe wasn’t any more relaxed than she was. In spite of the leisurely lunch they’d eaten, her heart rate hadn’t slowed one iota from the moment she’d taken his hand when they’d spied the deer. And she doubted that his had, either. Though he was much better at concealing his emotions than she was, there was a tension in his jaw and a heat in his eyes that stirred a restlessness in her that made it nearly impossible for her to sit still.
So as soon as the remains of their lunch were repacked in the backpack, she jumped to her feet, eager to put some distance between the two of them before she did something stupid and reached for him again. If it happened a second time, she was afraid she might not be able to let him go. “Can we climb to the top?” she asked him as he, too, rose to his feet. “It doesn’t look like it’s that far.”
“It’s not,” he replied, frowning. “But it’s pretty rough.”
“But the doctor said to get some exercise.”
“Somehow I don’t think he had mountain climbing in mind,” he replied dryly. “And you’re going to be sore enough tomorrow as it is. We haven’t exactly been taking a walk in the park, you know. We’re at least two miles from the cabin, and we’ve been climbing ever since we left.”
“But it’s such a wonderful day and I feel fine. We don’t have to go all the way to the top if you don’t want to. Just a little way up. Please? It’ll be a downhill walk all the way home.”
She wouldn’t have figured herself for a finagler, but she looked up at him pleadingly and shamelessly batted her lashes and he never stood a chance. Oh, he knew she was blatantly working her wiles on him, but he laughed, and instead of teaching her a badly needed lesson about the dangers of flirting with her husband, he was willing to be amused.
“Okay,” he chuckled, “but I don’t want to hear a single word of complaint out of you tonight when you’re as stiff as a zombie and can’t even get in bed without help.”
“Not a word,” she promised solemnly, her blue eyes twinkling. “I swear. Let’s go check out that rock. I bet it’s got a great view of the valley.”
The rock she pointed to was actually a limestone outcropping that formed half the side of the mountain three hundred feet above them. As far as distance went, it wasn’t all that far, but the path wasn’t the most stable one. A fire had taken out all the trees and vegetation several years ago, and since then, the path had been washed out by storms. Steep and rugged, there was nothing to hold on to but the crumbling rock itself. One wrong step and it was a long way to the bottom.
“If it does,” he retorted, “you won’t be seeing it today. It’s too dangerous.”
“There must be another way to the top,” she argued. “Look! There’s a path that cuts through the trees. C’mon, let’s check it out.”
She started around him before he could stop her, and in the process, stepped in a hole that was hidden from view by a layer of pine needles. Her ankle twisted, and with a startled cry, she pitched awkwardly to the side. Lightning quick, Joe reached for her, his curses ringing in her ears as he caught her just before she could hit the ground.
“Dammit, Annie, what the hell are you trying to do? Hurt yourself? If you fall up here, we’re a long way from a doctor!”
“I know. I’m sorry. It was my mistake. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
It happened so fast, neither one of them had a chance to catch their breath or protect their hearts. One moment she was falling, and the next she was in his arms. Startled, she lifted her gaze to his, and all she could s
ee was a need in his eyes that was as fierce as her own. Somewhere in the back of her head, the thought registered that she should move, slip free of his touch, laugh off the moment while she still could. But it was already too late for that. It had been from the moment his hands had caught her close.
“Joe…”
She couldn’t manage more than that, just his name, but even she could hear the longing that turned her voice husky and deep. He stiffened, a muscle ticking along his hard jaw, and she almost cried out in protest. But then something in him seemed to snap, and with a muttered curse, his arms tightened around her. “Dammit, woman, I didn’t bring you out here for this,” he growled. “I swore I wasn’t going to touch you again until you got your memory back. It’s the only sane thing to do. We could both get hurt—”
“But I already hurt,” she replied softly. Taking his hand, she pressed his fingers to her mouth. “Here. And here.” Daringly, she moved his hand down to cover her wildly beating heart. “All I want you to do is kiss it and make it feel better. Just this once.”
He shouldn’t have. One of them had to keep a cool head, and if it wasn’t going to be her, then it had to be him. But her breast was soft and warm in his palm, her heart hammering out an erotic rhythm that echoed in the throbbing of his own blood. He wanted her more than he wanted his next breath, and with a groan that came from the depth of his being, he knew he could no more resist her than a wolf could resist the call of the wild.
“Damn you, Annie,” he muttered, drawing her closer, against his heart, “you don’t play fair.”
Covering her mouth with his, he gave in to the hunger that was knotted like a fist in his gut. His arms locked around her, his tongue dove deep, taking, wooing, seducing. Struggling to hang on to what was left of his control, he tried to give her tenderness, but he was too needy, too hard. His blood was hot in his veins, his arousal pressed against her belly, his mouth rough.
