Virgin without a Memory

by Vickie Taylor

  Hours seemed to pass before she hooked her boot over the lowest rung of the rickety boards nailed to a post that served as a ladder. When she swayed as if the boards might break, he leaned down and snagged her under her arms. Ignoring the hot pokers someone kept shoving between his ribs, he lifted her out of the water. She weighed next to nothing, even dripping wet.

  Kneeling on the dock, he cradled her against his chest while she struggled for breath. He alternately stroked the wet hair out of her eyes and rubbed her back. She felt incredibly thin and frail in his arms. Damn that man in black. He could have killed her, throwing her around like that.

  After a minute, her eyes lost some of their glazed look and she struggled against him.

  “Easy,” he told her. “Give it a minute.”

  “I’m okay.”

  He wasn’t so sure. The words sounded more like a reflex than a coherent assurance. “Don’t rush it.”

  Without warning, her body tensed. Alarm cleared her eyes and she pushed away from him, as if terrified to realize exactly where she sat. She scrambled out of his lap.

  He gritted his teeth, irritated that she was still afraid of him, although he certainly couldn’t blame her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Her breathing seemed a little rushed.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I was looking at the lake when something—someone—ran out of the bedroom door. He pushed me in the water before I got a good look at him, but I think he had on a mask.”

  “A ski cap,” Eric confirmed, “just like on the mountain.”

  Her eyes darted around the cabin and nearby shore.

  “Don’t worry. He’s gone.”

  She shivered. The lake must be fed by mountain runoff. This time of year, the water would be cold as ice from the spring thaw.

  “Let’s get inside.” Rolling to his side to get up, Eric spotted a scrap of paper floating next to the dock. He leaned over and scooped it up. A powerful vise squeezed his heart as he absorbed the image. It was a picture of Mike, riding on the mountain. He held it up for Mariah to see. “Is this one of the pictures you took?”

  “It could be.” She rubbed her arms, staring over the lake. “He must have dropped it. He was holding something else. It looked like a big envelope. It could have been pictures.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Do you think that’s what he was here to get? The pictures?”

  “I don’t know.” The whole damn mess confounded him. He nudged her toward the house with a hand on the small of her back. His adrenaline rush had begun to fade, leaving a haze of sensual awareness in its wake. He couldn’t help looking at her, noticing the way her clothes clung to her, outlining her trim waist, the firm curve of her buttocks.

  He frowned at her back. She was too thin. No wonder, trying to run a horse ranch all by herself.

  He ran into her as she stopped inside the door and turned to face him. She sucked in a quick breath. Chill-bumped and blue-lipped, she crossed her arms over her chest, but not before he caught sight of her pert nipples straining against her soggy flannel shirt.

  His heartbeat quickened. The urge to take her in his arms and warm her body with his own chewed at him like a thousand little piranhas in his bloodstream.

  The hell of it was, holding her would never be enough. He wanted to lie on top of her and peel that chill shirt away from her. He wanted to find out if the peaked tips of her breasts were baby pink or dusky, sprawling silver dollars or diminutive dimes. And he really wanted to take her into his mouth and taste her.

  She shivered again. Jesus, while he stood there deluding himself into a wet dream, she was freezing to death.

  He cleared his throat. “Get your clothes off.”

  Her eyes widened, thin purple rings around huge dark pupils. That hadn’t sounded quite the way he’d meant it.

  He pointed down the hall. “There are plenty of clothes in the bedroom. Take your pick, just get into something dry.”

  Thankfully, she scampered off without protest.

  While he waited for her, he gave his self-control a pep talk. It was only the cold her body had responded to, not him. Even if it had been him, her physical response didn’t matter. The only thing he wanted from her was the truth about Mike.

  Dragging a troubled hand through his hair, he meandered to the kitchen and surveyed the supplies. The coffeemaker was in twelve different pieces, but a jar of instant grounds, one ceramic mug, a plastic tumbler and an aluminum pot had survived. He put some water on the stove to boil, figuring they could both use a cup. He’d read somewhere that caffeine could help stave off shock. At this point, he wasn’t sure who needed it more, him or her.

  He had a steaming mug ready for her by the time he heard her emerge from the bedroom. When he turned around to hand it to her, he started, sloshing boiling coffee on his arm.

  The sight of her pulled a groan from deep inside him.

  Of all the clothes scattered around, she’d chosen to don his favorite T-shirt, the yellow one Mike had given him with Motocross Riders Do It in the Mud emblazoned on the back in large orange letters. That, and a pair of threadbare sweats that rode low on her hips and framed her curves as well as any designer gown.

  She took the coffee cup from his hands and thanked him.

  Eventually, he managed to say, “You’re welcome.”

  What was it about seeing a woman in his clothes that kicked a man’s possessive instincts into high gear?

  She sipped her coffee and grimaced. He liked his brew strong.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  He leaned against the kitchen counter. She sat in a cane chair with most of the cane ripped out.

  “Know that the accident scene was staged.”

  “You finally believe me?”

  “I’m not sure what I believe yet. But this,” she said, waving one arm over the wreckage in the house, “has to mean something. And we had a deal, remember? I’ve told you what I know. Now it’s your turn to share.”

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, huh?”

  She didn’t bite. “How did you know the accident was staged?”

  What did it matter if he told her? He’d already told the sheriff most of it, before he knew the lawman played both sides. “The angle of approach was all wrong. Mike would never have jumped from that direction.”

  “I suppose that makes sense to a motocross rider, but how about something a mere mortal can understand?”

  “The area where he supposedly jumped was sandy, but there was black mud caked in the treads of his tires.”

  “Better, but not conclusive. What else?”

  He hesitated. The most damning evidence, he hadn’t shared with the sheriff.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Mike’s bike had special tires. Ones I bought for him. They’re a kind not many people know exist, and fewer yet can afford. The tread is hand-cut so the tracks it leaves look just a little different. I walked all over the area around the accident.”

  “And?”

  “There were a lot of tracks, but none of them were made by Mike’s bike.”

  Her shoulders slumped. Her eyes closed. Eric saw the truth settle over her like a shroud.

  So, she finally believed.

  “Somebody faked it. They made it look like he’d been riding in the area and tried to jump the ravine, then tossed his bike—and maybe him, too—over the edge.”

  Quick as the strike of a match, her eyes flew open. The fire within them blinded him like a pair of oncoming headlights. For a moment he couldn’t move. Couldn’t think under her spell.

  “We have to figure out who did this.” She jumped to her feet, leaving her coffee on the end table, and paced the room. “But where do we start?”

  “We?” He found his voice when he realized the direction of her thoughts.

  “Of course ‘we.’ What do we do now?”

  “Now you go home, and I find out what happened to
my brother.” He had to do this alone. He couldn’t work with her; he didn’t trust himself to be anywhere near her.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You can’t stay here. What if they come back?”

  “I’ll risk it.” Facing those goons again seemed safer than being around her—safer to his peace of mind, at least.

  “Well I won’t. You have to come back to the Double M.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” In fact, it was most certainly one hell of a bad idea.

  “Why not?”

  She knew damn well why not. She had to feel the same pull that he felt, the thrum of arousal whenever their eyes met. Even now it drummed a jungle beat between them. A call to the wild.

  He’d have to be crazy to let this go on. He had to get rid of her. Now. Send her away. Scare her away, if that’s what it took, before he did something they both regretted, like kissed her.

  “Look around,” he said. “Look at what they did to this place. How do you know your ranch won’t be next? I can’t involve you in this.”

  “I’m already involved. I don’t know exactly how, but I am. Somehow my memory loss is connected to Mike’s disappearance. We had a deal, remember? We look for the answers together.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not trying to welsh on me, are you?”

  He was trying to protect her. Couldn’t she see that?

  “Besides,” she continued, “they’ve seen us together now. They know I’m involved. If they do come to the ranch, I’m safer with you than without you, aren’t I?”

  That was debatable. Yet all the same, ten minutes later, Eric walked out the front door carrying a green canvas duffel bag stuffed with the essentials.

  Once her afternoon chores were done, Mariah realized that she hadn’t seen Eric for hours. When they’d arrived back at the ranch, he’d asked to use the phone.

  His conversation with his mom had been subdued. Mariah had left the room to give him some privacy. Then he’d gotten his office on the phone. Even from the kitchen Mariah could hear the frustration in his voice and his heavy footsteps pacing the hardwood floor as he explained, more than once, that he didn’t know when he’d get back to California and that his clients would just have to wait, this once.

  She’d poked her head in the room when she heard him hang up, and he waved her in the room. “You’re indispensable to Purgatory, I take it.”

  “You’d think so.”

  Then he’d handed her the phone and asked her to make a few discreet calls to the rumor mill in town. She quickly confirmed that there was no news on the search for his brother. Then he’d just disappeared. She was worried about him.

  Walking outside, the rhythmic clacking of a socket wrench drew her attention. She followed the sound to the equipment shed and found Eric hunched under the hood of her old tractor. He’d exchanged the pea-green sweatshirt for a denim button-down and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. Grease smudged one side of his face. The air in the shed pulsed with the beat of an old rock ‘n’ roll tune blaring out of a transistor radio.

  Eric tapped his foot to the song. Apparently unaware of her, he swiveled his hips to the chorus. And very nice hips they were, too. Lean and loose and...

  When he saw her, he stopped dancing and straightened up so fast he banged his head on the hood. “Ouch! Mariah, uh...”

  She stifled a laugh. “Those are some moves you have there, Elvis. I’ll bet you were a big hit at your high school prom.”

  He looked embarrassed but grinned. “Nah. Disco was in then. I never could get that pointy thing right.” He struck a famous pose, crossing his arm over his chest to point at the floor, and then raising it to point at the sky.

  This time, she let her laugh loose.

  “What about you? Did you set all the boys on fire, showing them your groove thing?”

  “Not exactly. The high school in Pine Valley is too small to have much of a prom.” If she lied, it was only by omission. Pine Valley High was too small to have much of a prom. And the state facility from which she’d graduated didn’t have any kind of prom at all.

  Her eyes swept over the collection of truck parts spread across the floor like dinosaur bones on display at a museum. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just checking out this old tractor. It’s a real classic.”

  “Is that a polite way of saying it’s an old hunk of junk?”

  “No, it’s a compliment. They don’t make machines like this anymore.”

  “It was my dad’s. These days it’s broken more days than it runs, though. I suppose I should give up on it and buy a new one, but I just can’t seem to part with the old rust bucket.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you won’t have to. I started poking around in it and I think I found the problem.” He shifted from foot to foot as his eyes traced the line of parts on the floor. “I needed to think and, well, I think better if my hands are busy. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not if you can fix it. Can you?”

  “Maybe.” He patiently wiped the grease off a part that looked like a large vertebra and set it on the floor between two larger fossils. “Mike isn’t the only one in the family who’s mechanically inclined.”

  “This isn’t exactly a motorcycle.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ve worked on all kinds of equipment.”

  “Even tractors?”

  “No, we don’t get many of those in L.A. But an engine is an engine.”

  “But this is a very big engine.”

  He grinned cheekily. “That’s a woman for you, always judging a guy’s engine by its size.”

  She stuck her tongue out and he smirked at her while she climbed up to the tractor’s seat, propped her elbows on the steering wheel and plunked her chin down on her fists.

  She wanted to zing a reply back at him, but she didn’t dare start up a round of sexual banter with him. That kind of game, she couldn’t win. Heck, she barely knew the rules.

  Eric picked up the socket wrench and went to work. She watched him fuss with this part and that.

  “I suppose I should be honored, having a big-shot corporate executive fix my old tractor.”

  “I wasn’t always a desk jockey. I used to spend my summers and weekends with my old man, working on whatever neighborhood heap had broken down that week.”

  “Mike said your dad owned a chain of high-class garages.”

  “He did, by the time Mike was old enough to remember. But before then, when I was in school and Mike was a baby, Dad was just a shade-tree mechanic with big dreams. I built my first motorbike out of ten-dollar parts I picked up at the scrap yard.”

  Mariah remembered her first saddle. She’d bought it at a used tack auction; it had cost about that much. “You rode motocross too?”

  Eric shrugged, still bent over the engine. “I ran a time or two. But I never wanted to make it a career, like Mike did.”

  “Then why do it?”

  He grinned. “Do you know any teenage boy who doesn’t like to go fast?”

  “So if you didn’t want to race, what did you want to do with your life?”

  “I don’t know. What does any eighteen-year-old know about the rest of his life?”

  “I always knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

  He looked around. “The ranch?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Ducking back beneath the hood of the tractor, he said, “Well things weren’t so clear for me. I had a scholarship to UCLA. I thought about studying engineering or something. Not that it mattered in the long run.”

  “What do you mean?” She cocked her head, curious at the tension that had taken hold in his voice.

  “I got a job at Purgatory instead of going to school.”

  “who?”

  He paused so long she thought he hadn’t heard her over the clacking of the wrench. Then he laid down the tool and raised his head, looking older than his thirty-two years. “I needed the money.”

  “What f
or?”

  “For my mom.” His voice roughened with each word. “Because she wanted my dad to have a nice funeral, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her he couldn’t afford it.”

  “But your dad’s businesses...”

  “Were all in hock to the hilt. My father built his dream on credit. He owed on everything—the buildings, the equipment, the tow trucks. He’d even taken a second mortgage on the house.” He shook his head as if still angry at the memory. “And what’s worse, he was so anxious to expand his shops that he skimped on a few minor details like insurance. Two days before the grand opening of his fourth shop, there was a fire. He died trying to save the place—a stupid garage.

  “So I went to work for barely enough to live on myself, much less pay off Dad’s debts and keep Mikey in a brand of sneakers that wouldn’t get him beat up at school. I worked in the refinery during the day and in the shipping yard at night. I learned a lot about the business, and eventually I got us out of the hole enough to be able to quit the night job. Purgatory had a co-op program where I could take some time off of work for classes, in addition to the nighttime courses I took. Plus they paid half the tuition. So I entered their program and went to business school. When I got my degree, they gave me a real job, one where I could wear a suit and tie to work instead of filthy coveralls.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, well I guess Mike left out a few details when he filled you in on the family history.”

  She watched him go back to work, yanking and twisting a wrench viciously under the hood. “He didn’t leave them out, did he?” she asked softly. “You never told him all this.”

  Splotches of angry red tinged his cheeks. “He was just a kid. He didn’t need to worry about stuff like that.”

  Mike had told her Eric was eighteen when their father died. Old enough, and still so very young. No wonder he didn’t believe in dreams. He’d been forced to give his up before he’d even had a chance to figure out what they were. Without asking for it, he’d been given a heavy load—the burden of a family.

  Then again, she thought, studying his broad, strong back as he leaned over the truck, he looked like he was built to carry a load. In that way, he reminded her of Jet.