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She flushed when she realized he’d awakened during her scrutiny and was staring back with eyes as serene and brown as the river boulders outside the window.
“Welcome back.” His agreeable voice rolled through the room, a rich baritone.
“Back?” She attempted to draw herself to a sitting position, but the effort exhausted her and she collapsed against the pillows.
“You’ve been unconscious almost three days.” He shoved himself to his feet in a graceful movement and approached her bed with the rolling gait of a man more comfortable on a horse than on his feet.
Giddiness and disorientation washed over her. “What happened?”
He hooked his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans and lifted dark eyebrows with a look so galvanizing she averted her eyes. “You don’t remember?”
“No.” She fidgeted beneath his piercing inspection and wished she was wearing something more substantial than a thin hospital gown.
“I’d better get the doctor.” His probing expression relaxed as if he was pleased by an excuse to bolt.
Loneliness and an unnamed yearning overwhelmed her. Between the pounding in her head and the weakness of her body, she couldn’t pinpoint who—or what—she longed for. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be alone.
“Please, don’t go,” she begged.
The skin around his eyes crinkled in appealing lines and his mouth angled in a reassuring smile. He reached above her pillow and depressed a call button.
“Nurses’ station,” a chirpy voice responded.
“Tell Dr. Sinclair Miss O’Riley is awake,” he said.
“That’s good news,” the voice said. “I’ll page the doctor.”
When he started to move away, she grasped his sleeve. “Who’s Miss O’Riley?”
He frowned before composing his face into a neutral expression. “Don’t you know?”
Her misgivings multiplied by the second. She concentrated on the tenacious squareness of his jaw, the dark hair tumbling across his broad forehead, a tiny scar across one dark eyebrow—anything to block the other questions that assaulted her.
The one about O’Riley terrified her enough.
She gathered her courage with a deep breath. “Who is Miss O’Riley?”
His widened eyes conveyed his surprise. “You are.”
The answer stunned her, and the questions she’d tried to evade converged until she slipped again toward the black void from which she’d just emerged. In a futile attempt to conquer confusion, she thrashed her aching head from side to side on the pillow.
“Whoa, hold still.” The stranger cupped her cheeks with firm but gentle hands. “You’ve had a bad concussion. You don’t want to aggravate it.”
Closing her eyes to avoid his warm, searching gaze, she relaxed against the soothing pressure of his palms. “You don’t understand.”
“Try me.”
His simple, direct proposal inspired her trust. When she opened her eyes, tears misted her vision, and she observed the stranger through a watery haze.
“I don’t know who I am.” She choked back panic. “I can’t remember anything.”
“Nothing?” he asked, as if disbelieving.
Her throat tightened with anxiety, and she clasped his hands as if they were a lifeline. “Not even my own name.”
He freed himself from her grasp, fumbled in his shirt pocket and pulled out a letter. “Maybe this will jog your memory. It’s from you.”
She seized the pages and scanned the lines of looping scrawl, but nothing connected. No name, no remembrances. She blinked back tears of frustration. “This means nothing to me.”
More concerned with the stranger than the letter, she handed back the pages. Reeling from lack of memory, she battled her befuddling attraction to the good-looking man.
A disturbing possibility struck her. “Who are you?”
“Wade Garrett.”
She glanced at her left hand and her unadorned ring finger. “That’s a relief. I thought for a moment you might be Mr. O’Riley.”
“No.”
The mysterious glint in his eye intrigued her, but his lack of information was irritating. “Are you related to me?”
He shook his head.
Her disappointment stung. Wade appeared to be the kind of man she could lean on in a crisis—not only physically strong, with broad shoulders and hard muscles, but with a disposition that didn’t rattle easily.
If he wasn’t her relative or her husband…a tremor shook her at the very idea…who was he? “Do I know you?”
“Not yet.”
Behind a facade of calm, she hid her irritation at his refusal to provide more information. Obviously he wasn’t ready to tell her why he was here, but maybe he’d answer other questions.
Again she experienced the unsettling but sourceless longing. “What about my family?”
Uncertainty flickered over his handsome face. “We’ll discuss your family later.”
Between the ache in her temples and an avalanche of unanswered questions, she couldn’t think straight. The mysterious Wade Garrett, talking in generalities, was no help at all.
Fatigue depleted her last reserves of strength, and she closed her eyes. Maybe she was only dreaming, and once she awoke, she’d remember everything she was supposed to, including who she was and what part Wade Garrett played in her life.
All she wanted now was sleep.
WADE WATCHED HER DRIFT into unconsciousness again. He’d been totally unprepared for the impact of those eyes, the deep pine-green of a ponderosa, and so wide they almost swallowed her face. And her kick-in-the-gut smile had almost done him in, especially when he noted the fleeting unhappiness beneath it. That look reminded him of a stray dog Jordan had adopted years ago after its human family moved away and left it behind.
Maybe, like Shep, the woman would need lots of care before her loneliness left her. Wade’s thoughts snarled like barbed wire as he combed his fingers through his hair and massaged his neck, stiff again from sleeping in the chair. She hadn’t mentioned any unhappiness in her letters. And love definitely wasn’t part of their deal.
But she looked so vulnerable, lying there asleep, that he couldn’t resist reaching for her hand, fingers curled like a half-opened blossom atop the blanket. At the contact with her warm, smooth skin, testosterone bucked through his blood like an untamed mustang.
When the doctor entered, Wade jerked his hand away and blushed like a green adolescent caught necking on the porch.
Dr. Sinclair, a tiny, birdlike woman with enough nervous energy to power a city, marched to the bed and checked Rachel’s pulse. She removed a penlight from the pocket of her white coat, lifted Rachel’s eyelids and examined her pupils.
Straightening as if her back ached, the doctor brushed a strand of salt-and-pepper hair from her forehead and confronted Wade. “Did she speak to you?”
“Briefly.” Long enough for him to learn her voice was as soft as a mountain breeze.
“Was she lucid?”
“She was rational, if that’s what you mean.”
The doctor’s shrewd gaze skewered him. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Garrett?”
“Her memory’s gone.”
Her intense blue eyes behind gold-framed glasses gave nothing away, and she gestured toward the door.
He followed her into the hall before posing his question. “Is it a brain injury?”
Dr. Sinclair shook her head and stuffed her stethoscope into her pocket. “CAT scan and EEG are both normal, now that her concussion is subsiding.”
He rammed his fingers through his hair. He hadn’t expected this crimp in his plans. He should have been halfway home by now, as he’d promised Jordan, but how could he leave Rachel alone and frightened, not knowing who she was? “Why can’t she remember?”
“She suffered a bad bump on the back of her head. Amnesia caused by physical trauma should clear up within a couple of days.”
He expelled a sigh of relief. “So she’ll be all right?”
“Unless we’re dealing with hysteria.”
He frowned. “She seemed calm enough. But she did shed a few tears.”
Dr. Sinclair smiled and shook her head. “Not that kind of hysteria. Amnesia caused by psychological trauma. Imagine what she experienced, plunging into that deep ravine in a tumbling, burning railroad car.”
Wade nodded. Rachel had been air-lifted to Libby, partly because Wade was there, but mostly because the Kalispell hospital was filled to capacity with other wreck victims. He jerked his wandering attention back to the doctor.
“Her mind may be protecting her from reexperiencing that nightmare by shutting down her memories.”
“But she’ll get them back?”
Sinclair patted his hand, reminding him of his long-dead mother. “In a few days, if her memory loss is due to physical trauma.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“When she’s strong enough to face the memories.”
“Soon?”
The little doctor shrugged. “Maybe the next time she awakens, maybe in a few days.” Her voice had an upward inflection, hinting of things left unsaid.
“Or?”
Dr. Sinclair avoided his eyes. “Maybe never.”
“Never? But you said there’s no permanent injury to her brain—”
“In spite of medical advances, many mysteries of the human mind are still unsolved.” Her smile didn’t hide her weariness. “But you’re worrying prematurely. She may recall everything when she awakes again.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Her memories could come rushing back anytime, or they could return gradually in bits and pieces.”
He glanced into the room at the sleeping Rachel. If she didn’t remember soon, she’d be in for a rough time. She’d need care, attention and reassurance. The prospect of providing for her warmed him—until his common sense kicked in.
Feelings played no part in their relationship, and Jordan was enough to worry about. Rachel was supposed to ease his troubles, not add to them.
He hardened his heart and looked away. No point in worrying about what only time could cure. He glanced at his watch. If he hurried, he might reach home before Jordan’s bedtime. “What about her family?”
Dr. Sinclair shook her head. “The local authorities traced her to Atlanta, then back to Missouri. Her parents are deceased. She was their only child.”
“No aunts or uncles, cousins?”
The doctor shook her head. “Not that they could find.”
“What about close friends?”
“There’s no one.”
The tenderness he’d tried to suppress surged through him. “Poor kid.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Dr. Sinclair patted his hand again. “After all, she has you.”
Chapter Two
“Rachel.”
Sitting up in bed, she shaped the alien name with her lips, but it lacked familiarity.
She grimaced in disgust. So what else was new? Nothing seemed familiar. Nothing except her face in the mirror. She choked back a derisive laugh. What a big help. She recognized herself.
When she’d awakened this morning, she’d thought at first she’d dreamed Wade Garrett and her amnesia, until she had to admit her encounter with Wade was the only memory she possessed.
He’d said they weren’t related and had never met. But who was he?
Some religious zealot dedicating his life to visiting the sick? She quickly rejected that idea. The man had too much devil in his deep brown eyes.
Maybe he was a plainclothes policeman. Had she been fleeing some crime when her train crashed? After her heart stopped thundering in her chest, she discarded that possibility, too. Although she couldn’t remember, she could still feel, and she didn’t feel like a criminal.
In frustration, she pounded her pillow with her fists. No use wondering who Wade Garrett was when she’d probably never see him again.
The thought gave her no comfort.
