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“I’ve seen you.”
“Look,” she said, her eyes cool, “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m not interested.”
“If you don’t know what I’m thinking, how do you know you’re not interested?”
“Joey told me— He said you were asking questions about me. That you said I was—”
“Attractive,” he supplied.
She shrugged.
He had to speak to her.
“Give me a few minutes, that’s all. I need to talk to you,” he persisted.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
In Manhattan, he would have walked away a long time ago. He never asked a woman out twice if she rebuffed him. He wasn’t a pursuer. But he couldn’t walk away from Leah.
He knew little—actually, nothing—about memory loss. He’d called his sister Gen’s husband, Mark Davison, the day before. Mark was a physician. He’d been surprised by Roman’s questions but had answered them in a general way.
Memory loss could be physical or psychological. Short-or long-term. Permanent or temporary. Forcing too much information too soon on the patient could be dangerous. But Mark was a pain specialist, not a psychiatrist, he reminded Roman. He didn’t have all the answers.
Why the questions? Mark had asked. But Roman had hung up without answering. He’d asked Mark not to tell Gen about the phone call. He wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Leah.
“I don’t date,” Leah said finally.
“Why not?” He kept his tone light. She tucked her hair behind her ear. He recognized the familiar gesture. He was making her nervous.
“I’m a lesbian, all right?”
Roman almost burst out laughing. “I don’t think so,” he said. His mind rushed with images. Leah playing footsie with him in front of the fire—wearing nothing but socks. Leah pulling him behind a barn for a roll in the hay—at a farm where they had stopped for a wagon ride. Leah crying out during sex—at his parents’ home. She was the most uninhibited, passionate sex partner he’d ever had.
“Who are you?” she demanded now, and the look in her eyes stopped him short.
Fear. She was afraid—of what? Him? He felt cold all over. What the hell had happened that night she’d gone over that bridge? Why had she been there? He’d never understood that. She’d been on a highway she didn’t normally travel, on a trip she’d told no one about, carrying divorce papers he would never have signed. It had just been one of the many strange, horrible things about her death.
Finding the car had taken them two harrowing days. Inside, they’d discovered her purse, with her wedding ring tucked into a side pocket, and divorce papers inside a briefcase—but no body. They said her body had been washed away in the rain-swollen river. The search had gone on for interminable days, but divers had found nothing.
Leah had no family. The people from her design studio, already devastated by the recent loss of another artist in the co-op, had held a small memorial service.
Roman had told no one about the divorce papers. His family’s relationship with Leah had been difficult enough while she had been alive. There was no point in making it worse after her death.
But she wasn’t dead.
“I’m Roman,” he said, watching her. Nothing. Still not a flicker. “Roman Bradshaw.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Roman Bradshaw,” she said, “but if you don’t mind, we’re busy tonight.” She turned away.
He let her go because he had no choice. He couldn’t tell her the truth yet. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t want to know him. He couldn’t just waltz in here and claim her like a caveman throwing his woman over his shoulder.
But he wasn’t leaving, either.
Leah laced up her running shoes on the stoop outside the back door of the Shark and Fin. Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic. The sun shone a muted blue-gold glow through the morning clouds. It was chilly this early, but soon it would be hot.
The beach was quiet, empty. She loved this time of day, loved this beach, loved her life on Thunder Key.
She never wanted to leave, and she could only wonder, if she dared, what had taken her so long to get here. But she didn’t dare. She just lived her life, one day at a time. Thunder Key was her heart and soul—the endless water, sun, sand, the laidback lifestyle and friendly people.
Thunder Key was her home, and the people here her family. It was all she knew. And as if she had come desperate, thirsting, straight from the desert, she drank in what the quaint island offered. There was not a second of the past eighteen months on Thunder Key that was not stored precisely, vividly, in her memory.
Which made the fact that she could remember nothing before then that much more startling.
Do you remember me?
The man’s face leaped into her mind. Did she remember him? How could she forget him? Square jaw, intense blue eyes, planed cheeks, thick dark hair and a gorgeous, sexy dimple she’d glimpsed when he’d laughed. He was tall, wide-shouldered. Wealthy, too, she guessed. He had the bearing of a man accustomed to ordering the world to do his bidding. She’d asked around and learned he was staying in a bungalow at the White Seas Hotel, indefinitely.
The attraction had been instant, like being hit by a tidal wave. She had looked across the bar and her heart had gone wild, thumping and pounding. She’d had the insane urge to leap over the bar, throw herself into his arms, and—
What? The same way she’d known instant attraction, she had known instant fear, though she had no idea why.
But if she had learned anything in the past eighteen months, it had been to go with her instincts. Her instincts were all she had.
For example, she didn’t like peas. Cats made her sneeze. And the heart-stoppingly sexy man from the White Seas was dangerous. So she had schooled her features to reflect nothing of her thoughts, and she had stayed as far away from him as possible.
Quickly she looked around now and was relieved to see no one. He knew she ran in the mornings, he’d told her that. I need to talk to you.
She didn’t want to talk to him. She shouldn’t talk to him.
She stood, shoes laced tightly, images flashing through her mind. The man from the night before—smiling, watching, mixed with other, stranger images of the same man, another time, another place—then he was gone and there were no more images, only sensations, sounds. They were the markers of her panic attacks.
She’d had attacks like this before—both sleeping and waking—but not for a while. They had been so painful, so terrifying, that at first she’d thrown up after them.
Then she’d learned to block them. She had stopped trying to remember the past. And the panic attacks had vanished.
But they were back.
Rushing wind. Cold. Darkness. Screaming—her own.
Pain streaked through her temples, almost bending her double. She couldn’t give in to it. She forced herself to straighten, to walk. Then run, run. Breathe. Run.
She had been a runner in her life before Thunder Key; she knew that. She could run for miles. It was her salvation from the pain, from the past. She reached the packed wet sand and she immediately found the contact soothing. She loved to run right along the shoreline. The faster she ran, the faster she could shut down the haunting bits of the past that never came together, only remained in shards that stabbed at her mind.
Somehow the man from the bar had brought the past crashing down on her again. Was that why he was dangerous? Did he remind her of someone from her past?
Or was he someone from her past?
Birds wheeled overhead, their calls breaking the still morning air. She was alone, all alone, but in her head the haunting wind and screams played on. Sometimes she was afraid she was going crazy.
I know who you are, the voice said. Who was she?
Run, run, run. Before her head exploded.
I know what you’ve done. What terrible thing had she done? Why? What kind of person was she? Did she even want to know?
Leah ran faster, faster. Running was the first thing she remembered.
Pitch-black night, lights flashing past, air, just air, and she was dropping, dropping, dropping. Water. Pain. But not so terrible. No, she could move. She could run.
The trucker who had picked her up from the side of the highway had worn a green-checkered shirt and faded blue jeans with a hole over one knee. He had a round, easy face, and kind eyes.
“I’m going south,” he’d said.
“Me, too,” she’d answered. “Thunder Key.”
Where had that come from? She hadn’t even known where Thunder Key was located. It had come out of nowhere, and it had actually scared her, but everything had scared her that night, so she hadn’t let that stop her.
She’d been damp, bruised, shaken. Barely dawn, and she hadn’t known how long she’d been running.
“You got a name?” the trucker had asked.
She hadn’t known what to say. The trucker had reached over, and in the glow of the rig’s dash, had touched the bracelet on her arm.
“Leah.” He’d read the engraved letters. “You got a last name?”
They’d passed an interstate sign: Wells, 1 Mile.
“Leah…Wells.” She’d shivered in the heated cab.
He’d had a road atlas. In the index, she’d found Thunder Key, part of the chain of islands that appeared like an afterthought on the tip of the Florida coast.
The trucker had taken her as far as South Carolina. He’d given her money for a bus ticket from Charleston. He’d insisted.
“A pretty lady like you shouldn’t be hitching,” he’d said.
She’d made him give her his home address, and promised to send him the money. And she’d sent it, a month later, after she’d gotten her first paycheck from the Shark and Fin.
She’d met Morrie on the beach the day she’d arrived on Thunder Key. She’d been sitting on a bench, just staring out at the vast ocean of clear water.
“Are you lost?” he’d asked her.
“No. I think I’m found.” She was where she’d meant to go. That was all she knew.
Then he’d asked her if she needed a job and a place to live. He didn’t ask any more questions after that. He didn’t care where she came from. At a trim and vigorous sixty, the slightly balding bar owner didn’t like to talk about his own past, but she knew he’d been in prison. He was reformed, he told her. He’d started life over in Thunder Key.
She knew he must have still had connections. He’d offered to help her dig into her past after she confided in him that she’d lost her memory. And one day he’d shown up with an array of identification for Leah Wells.
“In case you ever need it,” he’d told her.
She hadn’t liked taking the false ID, but she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. He’d done so much for her. So she had put the documents away in a drawer.
Recently he’d reconciled with the family from which he’d been long estranged. Leah missed him, and she wondered what the future held for her.
For eighteen months she’d been happy here. Now Morrie was selling the bar, and a stranger was watching her.
And the panic attacks were back.
She stopped running when she came to the public beach and the parking lot outside the community center. From there she walked up Thunder Key’s main street, letting her breathing slow as she headed for the coffeehouse.
The town was quiet in the early mornings. In the distance she could see a car or two on the Overseas Highway. Most drivers kept right on going, heading for the hot spots of the other islands where they could find more exciting attractions and hipper nightlife.
Thunder Key suited Leah just fine. Just as she’d known it would.
She had her breathing and her nerves under control by the time she reached the counter inside the just-opened-for-the-day coffeehouse.
“Hi, Viv,” she said. “Got my cafе con leche ready?”
“Of course,” Vivien Ramon said, her rough smoker’s voice softened by her smile and the youthful sparkle in her eyes that belied the silver threading through her swing of rich black hair. Her husband was a sail maker, and Viv ran La Greca, the island’s only coffeehouse. If Morrie was like a father to Leah, then Viv was like a mother.
Her real parents were dead. She just knew that, without question.
Like Morrie, Viv didn’t ask too many questions. But Leah knew Viv worried about her.
Viv had wanted her to see a doctor. Like Morrie, she’d offered to help Leah find out about her past. So far, Leah had held back. She was afraid—of what, she didn’t know. But she knew her past held pain, and that was enough to stop her from seeking answers. She wasn’t ready, she’d told them both.
Maybe she’d never be ready.
“Here you go, honey,” Viv said, handing the sweet, hot espresso across the counter. Then she was looking beyond Leah.
“I’ll have what she’s having.”
Leah nearly leaped out of her skin, but she managed to stay very still. Then, slowly, very slowly, she forced herself to turn.
“Good morning,” he said, and his smile suggested he didn’t have a care in the world.
He must have come in behind her, but she hadn’t seen him outside. How had she missed him? How had she missed, for even a second, those intense, dangerous blue eyes of his? He was so devastatingly present, so vivid, just as he had been in the bar the night before.
She wanted to hate him. The reaction was strong, visceral. She couldn’t explain it. She wanted to say something horrible and rude. She wanted to shout at him. Go away!
But it was hard to think—much less speak—with her throat blocked by her heart.
“Fancy meeting you here. Roman. Roman Bradshaw. From the bar,” he clarified unnecessarily.
Leah finally found her tongue. “Yes, of course. Roman.” His name came across her lips smoothly, and she felt very strange, shivery, as she said it. She picked up her coffee and avoided meeting Viv’s eyes, though she didn’t miss the curious look on her friend’s face.
When Viv wasn’t offering to set her up with a physician, she was offering to set her up with a date.
