I'LL REMEMBER YOU

by Barbara Ankrum

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Why couldn't he remember? His name. Last night. Something. How could a whole lifetime of memories be simply blotted out in the space of a night? He had to believe it would come back sooner or later. It had to. It was his only hope.

  Right now, he had more immediate worries. He scanned the room. No phone. At least not in here. Not that he knew who to call. He needed a drink and he needed a way out. But most of all, he needed an edge.

  * * *

  Tess had stopped at Ned Wilton's Pharmacy for supplies, feeding Ned a story about how she'd cut herself on a piece of barbed wire fencing and needed bandages and antibiotic ointment. She hadn't dared write a prescription for Jack. Ned's pharmacy was linked to the rest of the world by computer and prescriptions could be easily tracked. She'd have to make do with what she had.

  Thick ominous clouds had moved in from the west by the time Tess pulled up to the cabin. At seven thousand feet, the mountain air held the promise of an early fall. The weather matched her mood, she thought, as the first fat drops of rain splatted against the flagstone path that led to the porch. She ran the rest of the way, fumbling again with the key in the stubborn lock.

  Her conversation with Gil kept surfacing in her thoughts, pricking her conscience. She knew he was angry he couldn't jump in the car and rescue her. And God knew, she needed rescuing. But there was something about Jack – something she couldn't even articulate – that made her want to help him. She prayed she'd done the right thing, not telling Gil where she was. She would have to deal with his anger later, after she figured out how to get out of this mess. And Jack? She had no intention of telling him about her conversation with Gil until she found out where she stood. What he didn't know couldn't hurt him. What she didn't know, on the other hand, could kill her.

  Finally, the lock gave. She pushed the door open and went absolutely still at the sound of a gun cocking beside her ear.

  Tess gasped and dropped the bag in her hands. At the other end of the gun stood Jack, wearing nothing but a half-buttoned pair of bloodstained jeans and a deadly look on his face. His aim was shaky, but unnervingly accurate.

  "Jack…"

  He was breathing hard, leaning against the wall. His size alone was enough to intimidate her – all two hundred-odd pounds of rock-hard muscle.

  "Jack!" she whispered. "Please. Put it down."

  A four-letter expletive hissed from his lips. He dropped his injured arm to his side and tipped his forehead heavily against the wall.

  "Give me the gun," she said, carefully extending her hand toward him.

  It took him agonizing seconds to even respond. Then, he eased the cocking mechanism safely back into place and handed the weapon to her.

  She took it gingerly between two fingers like a smelly piece of fish and sent it skidding across the kitchen island, far from his reach.

  He roiled his back against the wall, then slid down it like warm taffy until he reached the floor. He clutched his shoulder and went utterly white.

  "Jack?" She knelt down beside him.

  Through a sweep of dark lashes he glanced at her. "I thought you left. I thought maybe you went to call the cops."

  Outside thunder rumbled across the sky. "No. I needed some things." She reached for the bag she'd dropped and pulled them out to show him. "For you. Supplies. Bandages. Groceries. Why would I do that after all we've already been through? Look, you're not thinking straight. We … we have to trust each other, Jack." It was a despicable untruth, considering she'd already broken a promise to him by calling Gil. "Where did you get that gun?"

  His blink was slow and unfocused. "Found it."

  Cara was keeping a gun here? "Well, you obviously know how to use one."

  He tipped his head tiredly against the wall. "Apparently."

  Tess ripped open a small red box and flicked the lid on the bottle of Ibuprofen open. She yanked out the cotton filler, and pills scattered across the floor. She ignored them. Shaking out two, she handed them to him and stood to get a glass of water. "Take those. Your fever's up."

  He just stared at the two little red-and-yellow pills in his palm as she hurried to the sink. Running the water cold did little to stem the panic she was starting to feel. She handed him the glass and watched him force the pills down his throat. The water he attacked as if he hadn't tasted it in years. Outside, rain slapped against the window.

  "You should be in bed." Tess took the glass from him, but didn't move. "You're bleeding again." She reached for a fresh bandage and tore open the protective paper around it.

  "I wouldn't have blamed you." She looked up questioningly from the bandage she was pressing against his chest. He explained, "If you hadn't come back."

  Pulling a length of gauze from the roll, she drew him forward to wrap it around his back. "I told you I would. Anyway, do you think I went to all this work so you could die alone here in my best friend's house?" She leaned him back and ripped the gauze so she could tie the ends. "Cara would never forgive me."

  He smiled thinly. "That's real comforting, Doc."

  Her own smile faded as she watched him. The very real possibility of that happening was too disturbing to ponder. "That's why I get the big bucks," she quipped. "My winning bedside manner."

  That practically earned her a chuckle. But his smile vanished almost as soon as it appeared. She laid the backs of her fingers against his forehead, and this time he let her. No thermometer was required to tell her he was too hot. She had to get his fever down and soon, or all of the bandages in the world weren't going to help him.

  "C'mon," she said. "Let's get you moved before I have to drag you to the bedroom." She tucked his arm around her shoulders and helped him up. "I'm not sure I could do that again."

  "Keep that gun close," he said hoarsely as they passed it on the countertop. "Promise me, Tess."

  "That gun—" she began tightly, but checked herself. "No one's going to find us here, Jack. No one. I promise. Just concentrate on resting. That's all you have to do."

  They shuffled through the living room in an awkward three-legged dance as Jack grew weaker and weaker. He started to shiver. Outside, the rain beat harder against the tin roof.

  As they moved into the guest room, she aimed him toward the bed. Glancing up at him, she noted that his face, mere inches away, was a study of grim resolve. "Let's take this slow," she said. "Now, I'm gonna back you up to the bed and—"

  He wasn't listening. His entire focus had already shifted to the cool, inviting mattress dead ahead. In fact, his whole being seemed to surrender at the sight of it, and she felt him listing toward it before she was able to stop his momentum.

  "Wait," she gasped. "No – uh-oh!"

  Down they went. Tess managed to avoid landing directly on him, but he didn't manage the same feat with her. He landed on her arm, pinning it beneath his naked back.

  "You ever do anything the easy way?" she asked him under her breath. He didn't reply, and she rolled toward him.

  His face was a study of cool concentration as he focused on breathing in and out. The only outward sigh that he was in pain was the rhythmic pulse of the muscle in his jaw and the shiver that was working its way down his body with some regularity. She wondered if he'd learned that somewhere – how to control his reaction to pain, how to push it out of his mind.

  She started to pull her arm out from under him, but he stopped her.

  "Stay," he whispered hoarsely.

  "Jack – this isn't—"

  "Just f-for a minute. I'm so … c-cold."

  His skin was so hot it nearly burned her. Hesitantly, she eased her cheek down on his good shoulder and wrapped an arm carefully around his bare torso.

  It had been years since she'd shared warmth with a man or felt the brush of a naked shoulder beneath her cheek. Not since Adam. She wondered now if that had been her mistake. Cutting herself off from this sort of intimacy, denying herself the very comfort that Jack now craved. How odd that she would choose this time to think of it, with Jack
so perilously close to death, when his need for her meant only that he was cold. But lying here, she felt like a woman. And that was something she hadn't felt in a long, long time.

  She tightened her arm around his waist and listened to the steady thud of his heart. How long they lay that way, Tess didn't know. But when she felt his arm relax over her back and heard the steady, even rhythm of his breathing, she knew he'd fallen asleep again.

  Pulling her arm from beneath him, she lifted his legs fully onto the bed. Somehow she managed to drag the down comforter from underneath him so she could get him in after undressing him. That he'd even been upright was a miracle. The fever and blood loss were sucking the life from him. She doubted he'd have had the strength to pull the trigger if his life had depended on it.

  She stripped off his jeans and his boxers and tried not to look at the all too tangible evidence of his masculinity.

  That proved harder in practice than in theory. She'd seen hundreds of men. Patients. After her years as a resident, she'd thought nothing of it. Patients were patients.

  Jack, on the other hand, was Jack. A warrior in a warrior's body. Nothing about him was routine or ordinary. Not the way her heart skidded against her chest as she took in the Michelangelo form beneath his clothes, nor the kick-in-the-gut feeling she got as she imagined losing the battle for his life.

  She told herself she didn't need any good reason to try to do that. It was her job. Her duty. But something more than that connected them, something more elusive. He needed her. And in a strange way, she needed him, too. A point of honor, she told herself. If he survived, then somehow she'd have survived these last two harrowing years, skill intact. If he died, it would simply prove all her doubts about herself were justified.

  That's what she told herself.

  But as she ran her fingers down his muscled arm to the pulse on the inside of his wrist, and felt the fierce life force burning inside him, she knew it was more than that. She needed him to survive because for the first time since Adam died, she felt alive.

  And she needed to know why.

  * * *

  The swirling sand enveloped him like a whirlpool, invading every orifice, hampering every lungful of air he tried to drag in. The inferno-like heat sucked him dry and blistered his tongue. His mouth seemed incapable of forming words, but he wanted to cry out, "Help me!" No one could hear him. The storm raged around him, and his men were too far away. Dying wasn't all it was cracked up to be, he thought, fighting the shifting sand for footing, though it beckoned him downward with a soulful howl. In the distance, the thunder of guns and tanks drowned out the sound of his struggle.

  A young man appeared beside him, smiling with a tilted grin that was so familiar. His name teetered on the edge of Jack's memory, then eluded him. Crouched there with his forearms poised on his fatigue-covered knees, the man seemed to be waiting, unconcerned by Jack's efforts to drag himself through the sand

  "Remember?" the soldier said "Her name was Sheila. Best damned dog we ever had."

  Dog?

  "Used to do tricks. Remember? She could play dead for hours in the heat. Try it. You'll sink slower."

  Like a ball of yarn sent spinning from its end, Jack felt himself unfurl. He stopped struggling and let the stinging sand drift over him. He was so damned tired. Maybe he would die now. Just swallow sand until there was no more air. But as the sand piled deeper, he felt the soldier's hand behind his head, holding him up.

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  «^»

  Tess's eyes drooped as she wrung out the washcloth for the hundredth time since dawn had broken. Mind-numbing fatigue manacled her movements as if she'd been caught in a slow-motion sequence of a movie. She ached with the need for sleep, but didn't allow herself even a moment of it. Her movements had become automatic somewhere after the first twelve hours of battle.

  Dunk. Wring. Fold. Lay the washcloth on his forehead.

  Dunk. Wring. Wipe down his chest and arms and watch the steam practically rise off his body.

  She'd run out of ice quickly. The automatic ice maker couldn't keep up after she'd packed him in the stuff. She'd scavenged Cara's bathroom cabinets and found a partially used bottle of antibiotics, which she'd crushed up and forced down Jack. There weren't enough for a full course, but they couldn't hurt him now. For hours he hadn't so much as moved a muscle, retreating to some dark place where none of this could touch him. During the darkest part of the night, however, all that had changed.

  The restlessness that had begun with terrible sounds coming from his throat dissolved into a full-blown wrestling match, in which Tess had come out the loser. She had the bruises on her cheek and upper arm to prove it. He was astonishingly strong for a man so weakened by fever. But caught in the throes of some terrible dream, he had struck out at her as if she were the enemy he was fighting. His fist had sent her sailing halfway across the room. Stars clattered through her vision and for a minute, she lay there, simply trying to breathe again.

  After that, she'd tied him down. Naturally, he hadn't been keen on the idea, even unconscious. He made his protest clear by fighting the restraints with every toss and turn. But restraining him made the rest almost manageable.

  Except that the hours without sleep preyed on her now. And even lifting the washcloth onto his forehead seemed an unreasonable task to ask of her body. She was going on forty-eight hours without sleep and the toll was inevitable.

  But she couldn't sleep. If she did, he would die. Of that she was sure.

  So she dunked the washcloth again in the tepid water, wrung it out and ran it slowly over his heated body. She moved the sheet aside to access one long, muscled leg and ran the washcloth down his firm, bruised thigh. Dampness tangled with the silky hair that grew there. A runner's legs, she mused. Or legs that were familiar with running. Tess sighed, covered his limb and turned her attention to his chest.

  In the last few hours, she'd become familiar with the flat brown discs of his nipples and the way his skin quivered as she passed the cloth over his taut abdomen. She'd memorized the geography of the bruised and battered chest with its dark triangle of hair trailing down in an ever-narrowing V to disappear beneath the sheet at his hips. She'd become intimately familiar, too, with the L-shaped scar that bisected his good shoulder to curve lazily around his collarbone, and the puckered one she'd noticed before, three fingers below his last rib on the right. That one was either from a bullet or a knife, she guessed. She traced one finger lightly around its outline, wondering about it. About him.

  Who was he and what sort of a life had he led before yesterday? She gazed at his torso, which, despite the battering he'd gotten, was beautiful: a perfect balance of form and substance. No bulky gym-junkie's body, his physique had been forged like fine steel. A tan line marked his thick upper arms, as if he wore T-shirts often. If she had to guess a history for him, she'd pick some job that kept him outside. Construction, maybe? The tattoo would fit there. Maybe even the scars. But his hair didn't quite fit that image. It was shorter than most construction workers' she'd seen, who seemed to prefer loose and casual. There was nothing loose or casual about this man.

  She smoothed a hank of hair off his forehead. Dark and soft, it sifted through her fingers like damp silk, and she followed the movement with the washcloth. This time he seemed to press his heated face into the coolness, like a cat craving a rub.

  "Feels good, huh?" she asked homely, her voice roughened from lack of sleep. "Why don't you wake up and tell me so?"

  He tossed his head with a moan when she picked up his hand to smooth the washcloth over his arm. His fingers curled around hers with something close to desperation.

  "Jack?" she whispered, shaken by what she felt in his grip.

  "Don't—" The syllable was invested with a need she couldn't begin to comprehend.

  "What is it? Don't what?"

  "Don't go," he mumbled hoarsely.

  The fear in his voice was almost tangible. Tears pricked her eyes. Even in t
he short time she'd known him, she sensed how much he would despise being so vulnerable. She shook her head. "I'm not. I'm here." But he wasn't talking to her. His eyes were closed and he was talking to someone who wasn't even there.

  "Should've seen it … should've…" Jack came up off the pillow. "Joe—no—!" he cried, tightening his fingers suddenly and painfully around hers. "Don't—! Damn you—!"

  "Shh," she said, dreading the next round. "It's all right. You're safe."

  He muttered something else she couldn't make out. Something ugly.

  Tess frowned and braced herself against his arms. She straddled his hips and pinned him to the bed. "Jack!"

  He tossed his head from side to side, gasping for air. He thrashed around as if water was closing over his head. "Nooo!"

  Alarmed, Tess pressed down harder. "Jack, stop! You're going to start bleeding all over agai—"

  He opened his eyes and looked right at her. Ancient ice, those blue eyes, muddied with a fury that transformed his face and scared her right down to her bones.

  "Tell him!" he growled. "He's a dead man. You hear me?"

  His intense gaze shifted to a point somewhere behind her. She'd ceased to exist.

  "He's a dead man," he breathed, falling back against the pillow, exhausted. He mumbled something that sounded like Benedict – or Benedicto – then slipped back into the darkness from which he'd emerged.

  Tess let out the breath she'd been holding. She stared down at him, knowing it was over. For now. Shaken, she smoothed her fingers gently along his arm. The hatred that oozed from him was real. The violence in his voice was real, too.

  Tess pressed four fingers over her mouth. What was she doing tangled up with this stranger? What had he been before last night? And who did he want to kill? Who or what was Benedicto? It sounded Italian or South American. Were the memories real, or were they some figment of his fevered imagination? And how could he remember those things unconsciously, if his conscious brain could not?

  More importantly, how did she even know that he hadn't been lying to her about his amnesia? What if he remembered everything, even that man he wanted dead? Her eyes fell to the nasty swelling near his left eye. She'd operated on instinct for most of her adult life. Now that same instinct told her that he wasn't lying. Whatever memories were coming back to him now were the first trickle in the floodgate she hoped would open for him soon.