by Jean Barrett
“He’s not at risk. Didn’t you say it yourself when you patched him up? That someone with a body that fit wouldn’t need a hospital to recover?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have said it. I’m a nurse-practitioner, not a doctor, and if there should be any complications—”
“Then I’ll see to it he has whatever attention is necessary.”
“When?” Tia demanded, revealing a form as dainty as her features when she came to her feet. It was a figure that belied her strength. Tia had demonstrated that robustness, a result of her work with patients twice her size, when she had helped Eden bear her midnight visitor into the guest room where he had been stripped and examined, his wounds treated. All of which Tia had handled skillfully, if unwillingly.
“As soon as he tells me what I have to know,” Eden promised her.
“Let the police question him then. You should have called them right away.”
“And see him taken away?” Eden shook her head obstinately. “No, I won’t risk losing this opportunity. I won’t trust hearing what he has to say from anyone but him personally.”
“Eden, this is reckless. The guy could be dangerous. Probably is dangerous. Stumbling in here out of nowhere like that, no identification on him, absolutely nothing to suggest who he is or where he came from.”
“He won’t hurt me.”
“Why? Just because at the moment he’s too weak to be a threat?”
“No, because my instincts tell me this is a decent man. Couldn’t you hear it in his voice?”
“What I heard were a few mutters that didn’t make sense. But what I saw worries me. Those injuries aren’t the result of some accident. I think he was beaten, brutally beaten. And I’ll tell you something else. He has several old scars on his body, a bad one on his right leg.”
“I noticed.”
“Then those scars should have told you this is someone with a history that might not be so good and that you shouldn’t have him here. Come on, Eden, you’re thinking with your emotions, not your head.”
“Wouldn’t you if you were me and this brought him here?” Her hand went out to the table beside her and snatched up the business card she had found in the jacket of his pocket. Her business card. “And this.” Her other hand closed around the photograph that had accompanied the business card. She could feel the painful longing deep inside her as she gazed down at it. “Nathanial, Tia. He was carrying a picture of Nathanial.”
Tia’s face softened at the mention of Nathanial. “Honey,” she pleaded gently, “be reasonable. Having red-gold hair and a pair of lavender-blue eyes, distinctive as they are, doesn’t make him Nathanial. He was what when he was taken? Less than two years old, right? It’s been almost three years now, and kids change a lot. The boy in that photo could be anyone.”
“It’s Nathanial,” Eden insisted fiercely. “I know it is!”
Because you want it to be. That was what the expression on Tia’s face told her. She knew what her friend was thinking, what all the sympathizers had thought and refrained from saying since Nathanial’s disappearance. That too much time had passed, that she would never recover him, that Nathanial was probably dead.
Let them think it. She knew better. Nathanial was still alive. She had never stopped believing it in all the agonizing weeks after his disappearance, in the months and years that had followed. She had never dared permit herself to believe otherwise, haunted as she was by his loss, frustrated as she was that none of the efforts of the professionals, including her own, had produced any results. But now… Oh, yes, now.
“He’s a link to Nathanial, Tia. Whoever he is and whatever brought him to my door, he’s a link to Nathanial. And however rash you think I’m being, I’m not letting him leave until he tells me what I want to know.”
“You’re vulnerable as long as he’s here. You realize that, don’t you?”
“I’m a mother, Tia,” Eden reminded her. “I’ll do anything to find my son. Anything.”
Tia sighed softly. “Yeah, I guess I can understand that kind of desperation. I just hope you know what you’re doing.” Medical bag in hand, she moved toward the door to the piazza and the outside stairway to her apartment. “The painkiller should have taken full effect by now. My guess is he’ll sleep the night through, but if he should wake up and you need me—”
“I won’t hesitate to call you,” Eden promised, following her friend to the door to see her out.
“I’ll come down tomorrow to check on him. Oh, damn, I just remembered. Quinn is picking me up first thing in the morning. We promised to spend the day with his parents down on Seabrook Island, and if I cancel—”
“Don’t cancel. Go, and stop looking at me like that. It’s not as if I’m entirely on my own. The Davises are just across the garden.”
Tia went, though reluctantly and with last-minute instructions about the patient, which she followed with a promise to phone Eden in the morning before she left with her boyfriend.
Eden was relieved when she was finally able to close and lock the door behind her upstairs neighbor. She shouldn’t have been relieved. She was all alone now with a man she knew nothing about, a stranger who had arrived out of nowhere in the middle of a wild night. There was everything about him to make her apprehensive, but her only fear was that he wouldn’t be able to tell her what she would give her soul to know.
She stood there for a moment in the stillness of the apartment, listening to the sounds of the wind and the rain outside. Then she crossed the parlor and went into the guest room to look in on her patient.
The light from the door she left open was sufficient to reveal the man who lay there, undisturbed by her entrance. She stood beside the bed, gazing down at him, remembering the body concealed now by the quilt that covered his length. It was a tall body, and though it had suffered, it was solidly built, with powerful shoulders, lean hips and long legs. A body that had been conditioned for—
What? She had no way of knowing. That was as much a mystery as the rest of him, including his square-jawed face. “Hard to tell,” Tia had observed when she’d been working on that face, “but there could be something worth looking at under all this battering.”
Restless, he stirred briefly, muttering something in his sleep before he became quiet again. Whatever it was, Eden was unable to understand it. Nothing he had murmured since collapsing on the piazza had been intelligible. Except for those first three words. “Am I home?”
She didn’t know what, if anything, he had meant by them or why at the time she had been so moved at hearing them. Am I home?
Eden mentally embraced those words now, clung to them, because only this way, remembering their poignancy, could she go on convincing herself that she was not making a terrible mistake by keeping this man in her home.
Chapter Two
Eden loved her adopted city. Charleston had so many things to offer, the climate being one of them. Even in midwinter like this, the weather was generally mild. Having grown up in Chicago, she appreciated that.
Last night’s frigid temperature had been an exception. But this morning, early though it still was, the thermometer had climbed to a balmy level that had prompted her to open the door to the garden where the sun was already drying the soaked and sagging vegetation.
Eden could hear the tolling of the bells from Charleston’s historic churches summoning worshipers to Sunday services. It was another thing she enjoyed about the city. Not this morning, however. She was too anxious to be soothed by their restful sounds drifting through the open doorway as she waited for the coffeemaker to finish brewing.
The phone on the kitchen wall rang. She picked it up, knowing it would be Tia, knowing, too, what her friend would immediately ask. She wasn’t wrong.
“Is he awake yet?”
Eden was careful to keep her concern out of her voice. “He’s still sleeping, but after what he must have gone through that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. You check his vital signs like I showed you?
”
“Yes. They’re normal.”
“You want me to come down?”
Eden heard an impatient sound in the background and realized that Tia’s boyfriend was there and not happy about an offer that would delay them. “That’s not necessary. I’ll give him another hour, and if he isn’t conscious by then, I’ll wake him myself.”
“And if you can’t revive him—”
“I’ll call an ambulance. Look, don’t worry. I can handle it. Just go and enjoy your day.”
Eden’s certainty evaporated when she hung up. She was back to wondering again, asking herself the same question that had troubled her since she had last looked in on her patient. Could he have a serious head injury, and was she denying him the treatment he needed by keeping him here?
It was the thought of Nathanial that kept her from reaching for the phone again. Smothering the threat of guilt, she glanced at the coffeemaker, saw that the brew was ready and poured herself a steaming mug. The first few sips steadied her.
Mug in hand, she headed once more for the guest room. Spreading the door inward, she stole quietly into the room. Her silence this time was unnecessary. He was awake.
Apparently sensing her presence, he turned his head on the pillow and gazed at her from a pair of deep brown eyes that were more alert than she would have expected, and far more unsettling. There was something positively intimate in the way they held her gaze.
“Hello,” he said, his voice slow and raspy.
Eden held the mug in front of her, as though she were gripping a weapon. Swallowing nervously, she made the effort to address him with a casualness she was a long way from feeling. “Good morning. How do you feel?”
He frowned, considering her question for a moment before answering her in that husky voice. “Like an eighteen-wheeler rolled over me. I seem to be aching in places I didn’t know I had.”
“Your head?”
“Not inside, but—” He broke off to raise one of his hands to his head. His fingers began to explore the wounds on his face. He looked puzzled when they encountered the bandage across the bridge of his nose. “Your work?”
Eden shook her head. “No, Tia’s from upstairs. She’s a nurse-practitioner.”
“I’ll have to thank Tia.”
“You’ll have to wait to do that. She left for the day.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t remember Tia. Is she one of our friends?”
Eden thought it was an odd thing for him to say. He sounded normal enough otherwise. In fact, he was in a far better state than she could have hoped for, but she experienced a moment of uneasiness. If he was still dazed, not entirely lucid, it could mean he had sustained a head injury after all.
He was looking at her as though waiting for her reassurance. “Well, she’s my friend, anyway. Are you sure you don’t have anything like a headache? Or some dizziness maybe?”
“Not this morning, no.”
She fought the need to ask him about Nathanial, why he had been carrying a photograph of a child she was convinced was her son along with her business card, both of which were tucked now into her purse for safekeeping. But an interrogation like that would be insensitive when his well-being had to be their immediate concern. Her urgent questions would have to wait.
“Does that mean you did have a headache last night? That you experienced dizziness?”
“I suppose so,” he said vaguely.
“You had quite a lump on the back of your skull. The swelling went down after Tia applied ice packs.”
“That’s good.”
He didn’t seem troubled by any of it, but Eden was beginning to be worried for him. How could he be so blithe about everything? His behavior under the circumstances didn’t seem altogether rational. “Do you remember last night at all? How you found your way here and passed out on the piazza?”
“Sure I do. I had a hell of a time getting here.”
“What happened to you? How did you get those injuries?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Eden’s uneasiness was beginning to deepen into alarm.
“I remember everything from the time I found myself wandering out there beside a river, but not before that.”
“Nothing?”
He pondered her earnest question for a few seconds and then shook his head. “Afraid not.”
“What about before last night? You must remember something.”
He thought about it again. “Sorry. It’s all a blank.”
Eden stared down at him, shaken by the realization of his condition. He had no memory. No past. “Are you telling me,” she asked him slowly, “that you don’t know who you are? That you’re suffering from amnesia?”
He lifted his head from the pillow, his wide mouth offering her a smile. It was a smile that was both reassuring and unexpectedly sensual. “Don’t worry about it. Now that I’m back, everything will be fine. You can tell me all about us, everything I need to know. I’ll listen, and it’ll come back to me. Even exactly what happened to me last night. That coffee smells good,” he said cheerfully, indicating the mug she was clutching. “Do you think I could have a cup?”
He couldn’t know it, but he had just given her exactly what she craved at this moment—an opportunity to escape his presence long enough to recover from her astonishment, to collect her bewildered thoughts.
“Of course,” she said.
Eden fled from the room. It wasn’t until she reached the kitchen that she realized her hand bearing the coffee mug was trembling. She set the mug on the counter and drew a steadying breath before making an effort to deal with her confusion.
He had amnesia. That was frustrating enough right there, because if he couldn’t remember who he was, how could he possibly tell her anything about Nathanial? Even more puzzling, he had somehow gotten the idea into his head that they knew each other, that she could tell him all about himself. She couldn’t begin to imagine why.
What was she going to do about him? The answer was an obvious one. If he needed professional help, and it was beginning to look as though he did, then she had an obligation to surrender him to the people who were equipped to handle this kind of thing. Except she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Not just yet. Not until she tried to find some way to unlock his memory.
Because you are professional help. That’s exactly what a private investigator is supposed to do, deal with people’s troubles.
She was arguing herself into something that was morally questionable, and she knew it. But she couldn’t help herself. She had to have those answers about Nathanial.
Her patient was waiting for his coffee. She filled a mug, then hesitated. Did he take it black or white? With sweetener or without? No way of knowing if he even remembered that much. She put the mug on a small tray and placed a spoon, sugar bowl and container of milk beside it.
He presented a disturbing sight when she returned to the guest room with the tray. He had propped himself up against the headboard in her absence, displaying an expanse of naked male flesh he seemed in no way self-conscious about.
Eden had viewed that hard body last night when she and Tia had examined him and attended to his injuries. But that had been an impersonal thing. Now, though, with him awake and aware of her standing there…
She tried not to gape at the powerful chest whose allure was not diminished by its several scars as she set the tray on the bedside table. Ignoring the sugar and milk as though they didn’t exist, he reached for the mug and brought it to his mouth. She watched him drink the coffee in eager gulps. There was something strangely mesmerizing in the way his Adam’s apple bobbed in his strong, corded throat as he swallowed.
“Ah, that’s better,” he said, lowering the mug. Leaning toward her, he sniffed the air, then demanded abruptly, “What is it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The scent you’re wearing. I do
n’t remember that either, just the whiffs of it I caught last night when you were helping me and my thinking how much I liked it. Something floral, huh?”
“Lily of the Valley.”
“Nice,” he said, putting the mug back on the tray.
Before she could back away from the side of the bed, he reached out, wrapping his big hand around her own hand and dragging it up to his face. Turning it over, he buried his nose into the back of her wrist, inhaling deeply.
“Yeah, very nice,” he growled softly.
Eden was so startled that she failed to react. Failed to stop him when his bold mouth covered the place where his nose had been. He planted a warm kiss on her wrist, the tip of his tongue caressing its vulnerable pulse point. The action was so unexpected, and so instantly tantalizing, that a jolt of electricity raced up her arm. Gasping, she snatched her hand away from his provocative assault.
He chuckled. “What’s the matter? Can’t a man nuzzle his own wife?”
“What did you say?” she whispered.
“Nothing, just that I was appreciating how my wife smells.” He laughed again. “Among other things.”
Eden stared down at him, so stunned that she was speechless. This was incredible, much more involved than just his impression they knew each other. He thought he was her husband! That they were actually married!
Tell him. Why aren’t you telling him?
Eden didn’t know what was holding her back from immediately and emphatically correcting his mistaken belief. Or was it that she didn’t want to know, because a remorseless little voice was already telling her that she could take advantage of this situation? Unthinkable! How could she even consider it? And yet…
“Do you suppose I could have some breakfast to go with this coffee? I’d fix it for myself if I remembered where things are.”
Eden managed to find her voice then, shaky though it was. “Do you think you’re well enough to eat?”
“My insides tell me I am.” Demonstrating his rapid recovery, he swung his long legs over the side of the bed and eased himself to his feet. To her relief, he kept the quilt wound around his hips. “See? Perfectly steady. Now, if you could point me to my clothes…”
