He stepped on the accelerator and peeled away from the curb.
He replayed his conversation with Wilson Nollier in his mind, over and over again, despite his best attempts to shut it out. A mixture of shame and anger coursed through him, so mixed together that he couldn’t begin to separate them. He’d been glad to hear his position as Richard Tremaine’s son validated! Glad, after all these years of professing to loathe Tremaine. Did that mean he harbored some foolishly sentimental, hopeful and hopeless notion about being reunited with his real father some day? Connor blanched at the very notion.
And if that wasn’t difficult enough to deal with, Wilson Nollier, the man he’d reviled as a corrupt baby-seller, had turned out to have a decent, compassionate side, wanting to help an old friend’s son, even at his own financial expense. It was almost unbelievable and thoroughly disconcerting, something akin to hearing that Satan didn’t mind performing an occasional good deed, just for the hell of it.
Nollier’s own good deed had complicated things immensely, though. Courtney had fallen in love with the baby and planned to adopt her! And while part of him scorned her impulsive idealism, Connor admitted that another part admired her generosity and her loving, can-do spirit.
She wasn’t the one driving around town, brooding and ambivalent, he noted wryly. She’d made the decision to keep the baby; she was taking care of her; and that was that. Courtney possessed the inner confidence to pull it off, that same inner confidence that enabled her to handle his temper, to keep his tendency to dominate from squashing her individuality. The flash of insight surprised him. He hadn’t known her long, but he felt like he knew her well.
She was a genuinely good person who deserved someone far better than himself, Connor acknowledged grimly. He was doing her a favor by keeping his distance. He’d always been uncomfortable around good girls; he felt he’d corrupt them if he were ever to become involved with them. He should stick with his own kind, what he deserved. He certainly didn’t want sweet, loving Courtney’s corruption on his conscience.
But he wanted her. Oh, how he wanted her! His mind filled with pictures of her lying beneath him on the bed, her body warm and responsive, her mouth hungry for his, her breasts soft and arching into his hands, the small nipples pebble-hard. It was all he could do not to turn the car around and go back to her. They could put the baby in the crib and pick up where they’d left off, before Nollier’s and Sarah’s arrival.
Sarah! Good Lord, now he was even beginning to think of the baby as Sarah, Courtney’s name for her. If he wasn’t careful, she would bamboozle him into going along with the two-week stay here, and he’d end up leaving Shadyside Falls a father, a legal adoptive one. And what could be more natural in this crazy scheme of things than to marry the baby’s adoptive mother?
He heard the slam of those imaginary cage doors closing. What a nice little family they’d be. He waited to be repelled and outraged by the very thought of such a fate. To his great consternation, he felt neither. Never had he been so restless, so agitated and confused.
With no particular destination in mind, he drove through the town, stopping at the red light at a four-way intersection. The music on the tape, each note, each word, so familiar, began to work its magic and soothe him. This was the way to do it, he assured himself, put everything out of his mind and concentrate on listening to his favorite songs.
The light changed to green, and he pulled into the intersection at the same moment that a sturdy ’67 brown sedan, built like a tank, charged through the red light at an astonishing rate of speed.
“Hey! ” yelped Connor. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. One trusted traffic to stop at a red light; drivers put their faith in the belief that it was safe to cross the street on green. But the big brown car didn’t follow the rules.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Connor watched the other car head directly for him. Turning out of its way was futile; pedestrians filled the crosswalks. They were scrambling and screaming at the sight of the renegade car; only if Connor plowed into them could he save himself from being hit. He didn’t do it. The noise of the panicky shouts mingled with the sounds of the instruments on the tape. Music to crash by, he thought wryly, resignedly, as the other car smashed into him.
“He’s opening his eyes.”
“Thank God. Connor, Connor, are you all right?”
“Connor, you gave us all quite a scare, my boy.” “Connor, say something, please! Why isn’t he saying anything, Doctor? He’s looking right at us, but—”
Connor blinked his eyes and attempted to focus in the direction of the voices. It hurt to listen, it hurt to blink, it hurt to focus, and the urge to close his eyes and shut out all stimuli was overpowering. He wanted to drift in the thick, slumberous mists enveloping him.
“Mrs. McKay, keep talking to him,” said a doctor whose name pin read Dr. T. Standish. He was standing alongside the bed beside an older man and a young woman. “Stimulus is extremely important to keep him from lapsing into a coma.”
“A coma?” Courtney’s voice broke. She fought back tears.
“There is no reason to frighten Mrs. McKay,” Wilson Nollier scolded the doctor. “The X rays showed no brain damage. I have a gut feeling that his diagnosis is just what the ER doctor said—a concussion and nothing more.” “We’ll know more after the MRI,” countered Dr. Standish. He turned to Courtney. “MRI is short for Magnetic Resonance Imagery. It’s a state-of-the-art diagnostic tool and can detect a subtle injury to the brain that might have eluded the less definitive X rays. Mr. McKay is the next on the schedule.”
“Those machines don’t come cheap,” added Nollier, glaring at the doctor. “Perhaps you should keep in mind that a small community hospital like Shadyside Falls would never own one if my firm hadn’t donated three-fourths of the cost for it.”
“I’m well aware that you’re one of the hospital’s most generous benefactors, Mr. Nollier,” the doctor said tautly.
Courtney was tired of their squabbling. Ignoring them both, she leaned over Connor’s bed, took his hand in hers and squeezed. “Connor, please, wake up! Open your eyes and look at me. Please!”
Slowly Connor opened his eyes again, responding to the urgency in her voice, to the warm pressure of her hand in his. She was very close to him, and he could see the tears in her huge dark eyes. Gypsy eyes, he thought, and wondered who she was. At that particular moment, he didn’t know who he was, either. But he was too groggy to worry about it.
“Oh, Connor!” Courtney cried, relief flowing through her as she gazed into his beautiful sea-green eyes. “Do you remember the accident?”
“No,” he admitted dazedly. “Is that why I’m here? An accident?”
“A car accident,” she confirmed. “As soon as you were brought into the hospital, Dr. Martin—he’s on the staff here, the one who delivered Sarah—recognized your name and notified Wilson Nollier on his car phone. He was on his way to Washington, but he turned around and picked me up at Mrs. Mason’s place and we came straight here. You’ve been unconscious about an hour and—”
“My head!” Connor interrupted with a groan. The mists were receding, but a powerful throbbing pain in his head erupted with volcanic force.
“I bet you have the granddaddy of all headaches, Connor, my boy,” Wilson Nollier said sympathetically. “Your head was banged against the window when that old man hit you. The police said if you hadn’t been wearing your seat belt you would have been seriously hurt.”
Connor groaned. “As opposed to what?” His head hurt so badly he wanted to scream with pain, but he had neither the strength nor the energy to do so.
“Oh, Connor!” He sounded so like his old self—weaker, of course, but still droll—that Courtney began to cry, letting the tears she’d been rigidly holding at bay slide down her cheeks. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
“Connor,” he repeated dreamily. “Me?”
Courtney glanced in horror at Wilson Nollier. The attorney inhaled sharply.
“Now, what’s this? Of course, your name is Connor. Connor McKay,” Nollier said with a hearty laugh that sounded both forced and false. “Are you having a bit of fun with us, son?”
The doctor pulled up his eyelids, one by one, and shone a pencil-thin light into each eye. “Mr. McKay, do you know where you are?”
Another stunning jolt of pain made him wince. “In a hospital, obviously,” he rasped.
“You’re in Shadyside Falls Hospital,” the doctor supplied helpfully. “You were in a car accident—”
“Poor old Herman Meredith got hold of the keys to his wife’s car,” added Nollier. “He’s eighty-nine years old, has Alzheimer’s disease and hasn’t driven for the past ten years. No one knows what possessed him to get into that car today, but he ended up running a red light and hitting you broadside.”
“There were dozens of eyewitnesses,” Courtney added tearfully. “They all said how brave you were not to turn your car out of his path. You would’ve hit a group of pedestrians, including a number of small children. Instead, you let him hit you and saved those people!”
So he was a hero, of sorts? Connor contemplated that for a moment. But he still didn’t remember any of it.
“Do you know who the president of the United States is?” Dr. Standish pressed.
Connor told him the president’s name.
“And who was president before that?” the doctor asked. “Who cares?” snapped Nollier. “Ask him something relevant. Like who is Richard Tremaine?”
Connor thought about it. “I don’t know.” He saw the anxiety and fear in both the young woman’s and the older man’s faces. “Should I know?” he asked.
Nobody answered him.
“Mr. McKay, Connor, do you know who she is?” Dr. Standish interjected, pointing to the pretty, dark-haired young woman who was still clutching his hand.
Connor stared at her, though the effort of doing so made his head ache more. She was a knockout, he decided, though the term made his temples throb in protest. “No,” he said softly.
Right now she looked scared to death, and he wanted to comfort her. And though he seemed to possess no personal knowledge of himself, he instinctively knew she was the kind of woman he could fall in love with.
“Connor, she’s your wife!” Wilson Nollier exclaimed. He appeared genuinely distraught. “Your wife Courtney. You’ve been married for five years, you both wanted a child, and finally, today, you were blessed with a beautiful baby daughter. I believe you’re naming her—Sarah?” He glanced at Courtney for confirmation and she nodded. “Connor, try to remember!” he urged.
Connor tried but nothing came. Though he felt that strong connection and attraction to her, he couldn’t actually remember her as his wife. There were no memories at all, not of the accident or of a wife named Courtney or a baby daughter named Sarah. The fog blanketing his brain began to lift, and the seriousness of the situation struck him with full force. He didn’t know who he was!
“I can’t remember anything,” he said, panic creeping into his voice. He looked at the woman called Courtney. “You had a baby today?” Though his memory seemed to have been erased, somehow he knew that she looked amazingly fit for a woman who had just experienced childbirth.
“No,” Courtney said quickly.
“You’re adopting the baby,” Wilson Nollier added. He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Damn, this is terrible! A tragedy!”
Agitated now, Connor tried to sit up, but the severe pain in his head made him fall back on the pillows. A wave of nausea rolled over him and he began to perspire.
“Mr. Nollier, if you can’t control your outbursts, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room,” Dr. Standish said sternly. “You’re upsetting the patient.”
“Hell, he’d be brain-dead if he weren’t upset,” retorted Nollier. “He has amnesia! I never really believed amnesia existed, I thought it was a stupid plot device used by hack writers. But here’s poor Connor who doesn’t know who he is or who his wife is. He doesn’t know—”
“Mrs. McKay, tell your husband something about his job,” the doctor interjected. “You’d be surprised what small fact might suddenly click and stimulate his memory.”
His job? Courtney was aghast. If she said that Connor scrounged up facts for Insight magazine and TV tabloid shows like Inside Copy and the like, Wilson Nollier might become suspicious of their motives in approaching him about adoption. And if he got suspicious, he might become defensive and feel threatened and find a way to neutralize the threat. The threat being her and Connor.
With Connor, an amnesiac in the hospital, and herself staying with Mrs. Mason, Nollier’s henchman—henchper-son?—they would be pitifully easy targets. And they had baby Sarah to consider as well. Perhaps she’d seen one too many couple-in-jeopardy movies, which was making her wrongfully paranoid, but Courtney decided that she didn’t dare risk the truth.
She remembered Connor teasing her on the drive to Shadyside Falls earlier. “What if I were to tell you that I worked my way through college and law school? That I passed the bar exam and am a licensed attorney in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia?”
It wasn’t true, of course, but couldn’t she use it to divert Nollier? “He—he’s a lawyer,” she said quickly, mentally asking Connor’s forgiveness for deceiving him along with Nollier.
“I didn’t realize Connor was a lawyer,” said Nollier. “We didn’t get into occupations and professions during your office visit.”
“No, we didn’t,” said Courtney. Vital issues such as employment, family background and references had not been mentioned at all. She and Connor had been appalled, for it had confirmed their belief that Wilson Nollier was only interested in the cash he would receive from the prospective adoptive parents.
That meeting seemed a thousand years ago, when Nollier had been their enemy. Now, strangely enough, in the time since Connor’s accident, she’d begun to view the attorney as an ally. He certainly seemed genuinely concerned and upset about Connor’s plight.
Still, her every instinct warned her to keep the truth about themselves a secret. Wilson Nollier was a powerful man with contacts everywhere, particularly, it seemed, in this town. For Connor’s safety, for little Sarah’s sake, she had to let him go on believing that she and Connor really were married. No, Nollier must not find out their true motives for coming to Shadyside Falls.
“Does Connor work for a law firm or the government?” Nollier asked. “Does he have his own practice?”
Courtney bit her lip. She knew next to nothing about law, and if she goofed, Wilson Nollier could really nail her. “Sometimes he—uh—represents clients like—like National Public Broadcasting,” she said slowly, trying to remember something, anything, about lawyers from episodes of TV shows she’d seen.
“So he sometimes deals with the entertainment industry?” Nollier seized on that. “Does he have any celebrity clients? What case was a particular landmark for him?” “He—uh—drew up the contract between NPB and Sinead Halleran, the Irish folksinger,” Courtney said. At least she was fabricating on a little firmer ground now. She had been a production assistant on the NPB filmed concert featuring Halleran and a marvelous Gaelic flutist. “He was very excited about that,” she added, striving for credibility. “We, uh, both were.”
Connor looked blank. “I’m sorry, I have no recollection of any of it.”
It tore her apart to see him look so sad, so helpless. Courtney fought back another round of tears. Of course he didn’t remember, it hadn’t happened! But she didn’t dare tell him, not with Wilson Nollier standing there.
“Never heard of Sinead Halleran. I don’t watch much television, not even NPB,” Nollier said apologetically.
Courtney breathed a sigh of relief. Nollier’s lack of familiarity with NPB could only work to her advantage, especially since she’d invented an imaginary legal career for Connor there!
A nurse entered the room and motioned the doctor, who followed her
out. Courtney and Nollier looked at each other, then at Connor, who had closed his eyes and was lying very still in the bed.
“Courtney, I want you to know that I’m going to do everything I can to help,” Nollier said quietly. “I’ll make certain that Meredith’s insurance company handles the hospital bill, and I insist on picking up your expenses here in Shadyside Falls.”
Courtney swallowed hard. “And Sarah? As you know, Mrs. Mason is taking care of her now but—” she paused and took a deep breath “—I don’t know how to say this, I hope it doesn’t sound overblown and melodramatic, but I love her already. I don’t want to lose her.”
“My dear, you’re not going to. That paperwork will be processed as planned. You and Connor are keeping your baby.”
Dr. Standish returned to the room with the nurse and two orderlies. “We’re taking him down to the MRI for the brain scan now,” he announced.
Connor’s head ached; he was nauseated from the movement of being transferred from the bed to the gurney. He felt depressed and alone. Having no memory had plunged him into a dark abyss where nobody or nothing else existed but himself, and it was the most terrible feeling in the world. He glanced bleakly at Courtney, who was watching him through tear-filled eyes.
Their gazes held.
Suddenly Courtney slipped between the orderlies to stand beside the gumey. “Connor, everything is going to be all right,” she said fervently, reaching for his hand. She carried it to her Ups and pressed her mouth against his palm.
“I love you,” she said impulsively. The words tumbled out, unrehearsed and unplanned. Was she so caught up in playing the role of loving wife that she’d ad-libbed what such a character would most surely say at such a moment? she wondered.
Connor managed a slight smile. Her words were a soothing balm, warming him and banishing the deep despair that threatened to engulf him. He wasn’t so alone, after all, he consoled himself. He had a wife who loved him, they had a child.
The Baby Track Page 11
