by Mallory Kane
This was a man.
A strong, hard-eyed, capable man with calluses on his artist’s fingers and a scar that parted his hair and lent a cynical lift to one dark eyebrow.
Paige’s gaze traveled over shoulders that she was sure had not been this broad, down the front of his T-shirt to the faded jeans that molded over long powerful thighs, then back up to his face.
It could be someone else’s face, harsh, scored by years and darkened by the sun. But there was no mistaking the eyes. They were the same brilliant blue eyes that had regarded her so tenderly as he told her how much he loved her. Now they blazed with startling intensity in his tanned face.
She wasn’t sure what was going on behind those familiar eyes. He watched her warily, all senses alert, like a cat watches an unknown threat. His taut, muscled body was perfectly balanced, his hands loose but open and ready at his sides, his gaze never leaving her face.
“It’s Paige,” she ventured, wanting to cry because she had to remind the only man she’d ever loved of her name. She tried a smile. “Paige Reynolds.”
He frowned. He frightened her, this familiar stranger who stood in a dingy, sordid hotel room and acted like he’d never seen her before today, but whom she knew without a doubt was the father of her daughter.
Katie! Searing loss and chilling fear met with stormy force inside her. Her head reeled and she swayed.
“Are you all right?” Johnny asked, reaching toward her.
She pressed her lips together to gain control of her emotions.
Hold on. This is for Katie’s sake.
She nodded stiffly.
“Good.” His voice was cold. “Now what are you doing here, and what did you call me?”
Paige lifted her chin. “I called you Johnny. Johnny Yarbrough. It’s your name.”
He didn’t move a muscle, but she felt his increased tension like an aura surrounding him. She saw the vein that beat in his temple, saw the infinitesimal tightening of his wide, generous mouth.
“Johnny Yarbrough,” he repeated, his voice no more than a croaking whisper. His lips barely moved. “Yarbrough.” His mouth closed grimly and a muscle jumped in his jaw. He winced, touching the side of his head.
Paige stared at him. He was acting so strange. “Actually,” she said wryly, “I guess that would be John Andrew Yarbrough. You never told me who you really were.”
His eyes never left her face, but she had the sense he wasn’t looking at her at all. His fingers slipped through his sun-kissed brown hair, and then went back to his temple.
“Johnny?”
He shook his head, looking confused.
“I don’t understand. What’s the matter with you? You act like you—”
The truth hit her like a wrecking ball. In one explosive instant, everything Paige had pinned her hopes on crashed down around her.
As unbelievable as it was, it explained everything. Why no one had ever found a body. Why he’d never returned to his rightful place in his father’s business. Why he looked so bewildered.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, stunned.
Her daughter’s life was at stake, and the only man who could save her didn’t know who he was. Telling him he had a daughter would mean nothing to him.
“You don’t remember.” Her numb lips formed the words, hoping he would deny them, but knowing he wouldn’t.
He couldn’t.
He sent her a terrible, haunted glance, then turned away.
She stared at his bowed back, watched his bicep flex as he massaged his temple.
Her brain rejected the idea. It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t allow it to be true.
“I need your help.” She took a step toward him. “Look at me,” she pleaded. “Look at this.”
He angled his head, and the muscles in his back rippled the white cotton of his T-shirt. Then he half turned, his long lashes shadowing his eyes.
She held up the drawing. “You drew me. We were together here, in New Orleans, seven years ago. You can’t tell me you don’t remember that.”
He faced her, his jaw set, his eyes bleak. He shrugged. “I don’t remember that.”
“You have to. If you don’t remember me, surely you remember being kidnapped?”
His eyes narrowed. He took a step toward her. “I was kidnapped?”
Paige gasped and forced down the panic that bubbled up into her throat. “Of course. Three years ago. It was all over the news. The ransom note demanded two million dollars. After weeks and weeks, your wallet covered with your blood was found in a stolen car out by Chef Menteur Highway. You were—presumed dead.” She couldn’t believe he didn’t remember anything.
“Your father begged the kidnappers not to harm you. He offered twice the ransom if they’d just let you go.” Paige stopped to take a shaky breath.
“Your father gave them the money. Nobody understood why they killed…” Her voice died on the word and she stared at his familiar, alien face.
There was pain there, and a kind of bewildered disbelief. But she also saw a spark of interest, and something that almost broke her heart. For one naked second, she saw hope reflected in his eyes.
He wasn’t lying. He really didn’t remember.
Oh, Johnny. What did they do to you?
She caught herself and shook her head. She didn’t have time for sentiment or pity. She had to save her child. It was her only reason for being here. Her only reason for living now.
Once she’d thought she knew him better than she knew herself. She’d have staked her life on his honesty. But he’d promised her he was coming back for her and he hadn’t.
He’d lied to her then. Was he lying now?
But why would he be here in this seedy hotel instead of living the wealthy life he was born to? Why would he draw her picture then deny he knew her?
“Do you expect me to believe you don’t remember any of that?” Her gaze fell on the scar that started at his hairline and furrowed along a couple of inches, like a carefully combed part.
At the same time he lifted his hand and touched it. “All I know is somebody tried to kill me. Who kidnapped me?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed, “We weren’t together then. We last saw each other seven years ago.”
He reached out and took the picture from her hands and looked at it, then at her, searching her eyes as if he hoped to find the answers he sought there.
“How long did we know each other?”
She shrugged and twisted the ends of her braid, painfully aware of the time ticking by. “About six weeks.”
Long enough to create a beautiful child who was out there, held captive by dangerous strangers. What if they hurt her?
“We knew each other for six weeks seven years ago,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “So why do you haunt my dreams?”
“Why do I what?”
He tossed the picture on the bed, on top of other similar sketches. A few were of her.
He looked up, and for a second the caution and doubt in his face changed to a yearning so strong, Paige felt its pull like a fishing line, reeling her in. Then he blinked and it was gone.
“So you knew me once,” he said quietly, a bitter longing rising up like bile inside him as he stared at the drawings, those pathetic attempts to capture the visions that streaked through his brain when the headaches hit him.
He looked at the woman whose face haunted him. “I assume you traced me through that picture to Tante Yvette. She sent you here?”
She nodded.
Tante Yvette had trusted her. The strange dark woman claimed to know things, to be able to read minds. He hoped she was right this time.
He studied the lovely, hauntingly familiar face of Paige Reynolds for a moment. The glint of panic in her golden-green eyes and the tension in her shoulders told him she was a hairsbreadth from losing control.
But as familiar as she was, he didn’t know her and his small store of memories made it hard for him to trust anyone, even someone Tante Yvette
believed.
“What do you want from me?” he asked coldly.
He winced at the unguarded hope that flared in her green eyes. “They’ve got my daughter,” she whispered, clenching her fists.
He hadn’t expected that. “Your daughter? Who does?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But they told me to find you.”
At her words, Jay tensed. Almost unconsciously he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, alert, prepared for anything.
“Were you followed?” he snapped.
Her brow furrowed briefly. She looked down at her fist, clenched in her jacket pocket, then over her shoulder at the door. “Yes.”
He heard a noise behind her. “Look out!”
Wood splintered and the door flew open, hurling her into his arms. The breath hissed out of her and she squealed in pain. He tossed her back toward the bed, hoping to get her out of harm’s way, as the two men attacked him.
He struggled, fighting dirty, aiming for the groin, the kidneys, the nose, any vulnerable spot. He’d learned how to fight the hard way out on the oil rigs.
One man was beefier, thicker than the other. Jay concentrated on his face.
He punched, felt something crunch, then drove an elbow behind him into the smaller man’s solar plexus.
A fist connected with his jaw. He stumbled. The small man pinned his arms behind him and Beefy reared back a fist, prepared to punch him in the stomach.
Jay used the momentum of the small man’s grip to lift his feet. He drove them into Beefy’s stomach, pushing himself backward at the same time.
Beefy fell. The smaller man huffed as Jay’s weight pinned him against the wall. Jay turned, jerking his arms clear, then smashed the guy’s nose with his forearm.
When he looked back at Beefy, the big man was trying to regain his feet. Jay kicked him solidly in the groin.
Both men were down for the moment. The smaller man’s nose was pouring blood. Beefy was doubled over with pain. But they’d recover fast.
Jay wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, barely noting his own blood as he rushed around the bed.
He bent over the woman. She was unconscious, or nearly so. When he slid one hand under her back and the other under her knees, she whimpered.
“Sorry,” he whispered, afraid she was injured but knowing he didn’t have time to find out. He hefted her, absently noting how small she was, and took her out through the French doors. He kneed the doors closed and glanced inside. The two men were beginning to stir.
Hurrying to the old sedan he kept in tiptop shape for just this purpose, he opened the passenger door and carefully set her inside. He quickly and awkwardly fastened her seat belt, then ran around the car, got in, grabbed the keys from under the mat, cranked it and took off.
Chapter Three
Not until Jay reached the edge of the city did he relax his hunched shoulders and breathe a bit easier. They’d made it, for now. The whole process, from the moment the brutes had broken in the door, slamming the woman forward into his arms, until he’d cranked the car, had probably taken no longer than five minutes, eight at the most. Unless there had been a third guy watching the alley, Jay was sure he’d lost them.
As he took a right off the main road, he glanced over at his unconscious passenger. She was limp and still, her face shadowed, her braid draped across her shoulder and over her breast.
For a split second, his eyes lingered there, where the rope of wheat-colored hair rose and fell with the slight movement of her breathing.
Pulling his eyes back to the road, he drove the familiar route to his safe house. He’d always felt vaguely foolish about the elaborate escape plan he’d devised, but waking up with a bullet wound and no memory tended to make a guy paranoid.
Obviously, some deeply buried part of his brain had remembered enough of what had happened to him to keep his survival skills intact.
He took a long breath and thought about the last few moments. What he’d always feared had happened, with a twist, and now he was running away from thugs with an unconscious woman beside him.
Not just any woman either. The woman whose face haunted him, whose image he’d tried time and again to capture.
He searched her face. There was no doubt in his mind. She was the girl in his drawings. The girl in his head.
She’d said they’d known each other years ago. Had they been lovers? Was that why her face was the clearest memory he’d managed to glean from his battered brain?
She’d called him Johnny. Implied he’d come from serious money, and that he’d been kidnapped and presumed dead. Obviously whoever had wanted him dead back then still did, and they’d kidnapped an innocent child to find him.
Kidnapped.
Clenching his jaw against the panic that washed over him, he forced himself to think about it, testing the idea in his brain. It made sense. Was that why he was so damned afraid of the dark? Why the headaches that assaulted him yielded up such a suffocating claustrophobia?
He wiped sweat off his face, tongued his split lip, and waited for his pulse to slow as the panic finally eased.
Maybe he should have taken the woman to the police. Maybe he should have left her there with the thugs. It wasn’t impossible that she’d deliberately led them to him.
Shaking his head he pushed damp hair off his forehead; neither of those choices were an option. He’d recognized her the instant he opened the door, as soon as he’d looked into her eyes. He’d always known those eyes were green and gold. He’d known her chin stuck up pugnaciously when she was mad.
Somehow, somewhere, in his malfunctioning brain, he knew she had once been the most important person in the world to him.
She still was, because if she’d known him seven years ago, then she was the one person who could help him regain his lost memories, the one person in the world he might be able to trust.
A cell phone rang. He jumped, startled, the car swerving under his unsteady hands.
“What the hell?” It must be hers.
She whimpered and stirred.
Jay tried to ignore the phone, but he couldn’t. If he was going to make any sense out of what was happening, he had to have every bit of information available, including who was calling this mysterious woman from his past.
He reached out and felt around for the phone, doing his best to ignore her rounded woman’s body. His mouth quirked and he shifted uncomfortably as he searched blindly, keeping his eyes on the road. It had been a little too long since he’d touched a woman.
The ringing continued. She moaned, saying something, but didn’t wake.
He pulled over to the side of the road and took the car out of gear. He searched her pockets. Finally, on the fourth ring, his hand closed around the hard plastic case in her jacket pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it. The caller ID was blocked.
After hesitating for a brief second, he pressed the answer button and listened.
Just then Paige stirred and lifted her head. She blinked and moved, then froze, gasping with pain. Her wide, terrified eyes glittered, pleading with him in the darkness.
“Give me the phone,” she whispered, her words strained and breathless.
“Who is this?” the voice on the other end of the phone demanded.
He didn’t speak. There was something in the background, some sound that seemed familiar. He listened intently, his head beginning to throb, as the voice spoke.
“Paige? Don’t play games with me.”
Paige reached into her pocket with her right hand, moaning involuntarily as she moved. She pulled out a minitape recorder and turned it on, then tried to take the cell phone with her left hand, but she couldn’t manage it.
She had a tape recorder. He was impressed.
The voice from the phone called her name again.
Without a word, Jay held the phone up to her ear.
“Katie,” she sobbed dryly, pressing her head tightly against the phone. He held it steady for her.
“
I’m sorry. I…dropped the phone. Where’s Katie?” As if just remembering the tape recorder, she held it close to the cell phone. She listened for a moment, then cut her eyes over at Jay, looking away when he met her gaze. “Yes. I found him. You should know. You had me followed.”
She listened, breathing in short bursts. She was obviously in pain.
He pushed away the easy compassion that rose in him. She was negotiating with these people, using him as a bargaining chip.
“I swear. I will. You just tell me where and when. But I have to talk to Katie. I won’t do anything for you unless you prove to me she’s all right.”
Jay glanced at her pale, pinched face. He was surprised at the strength of will in her voice. She was obviously in pain, judging by the way she avoided moving her left arm. He was pretty sure she had a dislocated or broken shoulder. He hoped to hell it wasn’t broken.
“Katie, honey? Hi.”
Jay held the phone, feeling her inner struggle. He could tell she wanted to drop the tape recorder and press the phone as close as she could to her ear. He had to give her credit for having the presence of mind to record the call.
He didn’t look at her, offering her as much illusion of privacy as he could. Her voice was thick with tears, and at the same time deliberately and pitifully cheerful.
“Are you okay, sweetie? They’re being nice to you?” She paused, and took a long, shaky breath. “It’s dark at night? Oh, Katie. I know you don’t like the dark.” Her voice quivered. “But remember what I told you? God wraps us up in the soft dark night to keep us safe.”
Jay winced. They were holding the child in the dark. An echo of the panic that had seized him earlier rippled through him again. He rubbed his temple where a headache was starting.
“You have Ugly Afghan? I’m so glad. Keep it wrapped tight and pretend it’s my arms, okay?”
Jay heard her voice almost break. She swallowed audibly. “Be brave, okay?” Paige continued. “No, I know you don’t like canned soup, but you eat it and stay strong. We’ll have p-pizza real soon, okay, hon—”
She stopped abruptly, listening. Jay glanced at her. Her face was still pale, her lips white with tension. “I understand,” she grated. “If you hurt her, I swear I’ll—”
