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Sanchia hesitated. He was a stranger to her, and yet his compelling authority forced her to respond. ‘I had an accident. When I was in Northern Ireland.’
‘Ireland?’ He sounded surprised, but he let her go on.
‘I stepped out in front of a car and was knocked unconscious. When I came to I couldn’t remember a thing. Not what had happened, where I lived, or who I was. Gradually things began to come back. Things further back in the past. I remember my parents. When they died. Where I was. I remember everything until my late teens. But after that some things remain hazy.’ No, not just hazy, she thought. Totally obliterated. ‘Sometimes things just don’t tie up. Like walking in here today…’
‘What about walking in here today?’ Restrained urgency over-laid the deep tones.
‘Sometimes I feel as though I’ve done things before, though I know I couldn’t have.’
‘How do you know you couldn’t have done them?’
‘I just know,’ she answered lamely. ‘There’s a portion of my life I can’t recall, but I can’t have done anything that important or significant.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I’m sure I’d remember it if I had. It’s just a matter of a year or so. Two, maybe. Like where I was before the accident, what I was doing. I’ve never been able to find the link.’
‘How long were you in Ireland?’
A slender shoulder lifted beneath the fluid jacket of her trouser suit. ‘I’m not really sure. I think I’d just moved there before the accident, because I was still in a bed and breakfast. Apparently I’d told the landlady I was an orphan and totally foot-loose and fancy-free, and that I was using a post office box address until I got myself some permanent digs.’
‘How long have you been back in England?’
‘Just a couple of months. I knew I’d lived in London. I just couldn’t remember where, or when I’d left, or why. Until then I was afraid to leave the safety of the places I knew. The doctors said things would probably come back in time, given the right stimulus, but…’ She gave another dismissive little shrug. ‘It’s been over two years now, and they haven’t. They say there might possibly have been something so traumatic in my life before the accident that my brain refuses to remember it. They call it psychogenic amnesia.’ Her tone derided the phrase, as well as her own inability to recover from it.
‘And you?’ He stood up then, with a subtle waft of rather pleasant aftershave lotion. Sanchia was very relieved. Crouched down in front of her like that, his masculinity was far too disturbing. ‘Do you believe that?’
She shook her head, more out of bewilderment than negation. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. How can I know?’ Vaguely sometimes she thought there must have been some boy; she caught a snatch of a voice, a bleary outline of features, a suspicion of being cruelly and brutally hurt.
Perhaps she’d gone to pieces afterwards—had a nervous breakdown. Who knew what was locked away in the depths of her mind?
‘Had you no friends who were able to help you? To try and retrace your steps?’
‘Apparently not. The doctors said I’d told the landlady that I’d been travelling round Britain—going where I pleased—but that I was definitely going to settle there in Ireland. They didn’t give me any reason to suspect I wasn’t telling the truth.’ And then as she remembered, ‘You said—you’d…been looking for me.’ She tilted her face to the strong features that wiped away any trace of the flimsy images in her brain. ‘That I ran away. What from? What was I running from?’ A cold, sick fear crept through her. She’d always known she’d been running from something.
‘…never dreamt it was so abhorrent to you that you’d actually run away.’
As the significance of those words hit home, Sanchia lowered her gaze to stare at the floor, as though she would find the answers stamped on the worn polished boards, her thoughts scouring the dark areas of her mind for the worst possible scenario. She had done something awful! Or been accused of it at the very least. ‘Were you defending me or something?’ The eyes she raised to his were dark with appeal. ‘Is that how we know each other? What did I do? Tell me!’
‘You didn’t do anything.’ A faint smile touched his mouth and was gone again, like a glimpse of the sun in an overcast sky. ‘Nothing unlawful anyway. Though that isn’t to say that what you did do, my lovely Sanchia, couldn’t be construed as criminal.’
Which meant what? she wondered, swallowing, detecting the inflection in his voice, the biting emotion behind the disturbing way he had addressed her held in check, she sensed, only by a formidable will. Involuntarily her gaze moved over his taut robed body, coming to rest again on the strong, hard contours of his face.
‘Who are you?’ she asked shakily, suddenly—inexplicably—afraid.
Alex hesitated. To tell her the truth would be to make a mockery of himself if she were just stringing him along with this preposterous story. And if she weren’t…
One strong masculine forefinger lifted insolently to trace her cheek, making her breath catch from the disturbing intimacy of his action. ‘You really don’t remember?’
She shook her head, recognising the disbelief that still laced the deep tones. Her heart was racing in her breast.
‘Anything?’
In the stillness of the room his voice, like his touch, was caressingly soft.
She didn’t know him, and yet her body responded as though she did—as though he had done this to her before and she had responded in exactly the same way. She closed her eyes at the shocking impulses that rocked her with devastating sensuality.
‘Let’s just say we…’ his hesitation was marked ‘…were acquainted. Very briefly.’
Her wan features were wary, the only colour a splash of pink along her cheekbones from the mind-shattering awareness that had gripped her just now from the lightest brush of his hand. ‘Acquainted?’ Mercifully he wasn’t touching her any more. ‘What do you mean? In what way acquainted?’
He didn’t elaborate at once, as though he were weighing her reactions, his every move calculated, geared to eliciting the truth.
She shot him a sidelong glance, nervous again as she asked, ‘Were we…dating?’
He gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘Dating?’ Was that scorn or simple rejection in his voice?
‘I just meant…were we…seeing each other?’
‘If that’s what you want to call it.’
Oh, good grief! Then did that mean that she…that they…?
‘What happened?’ she asked tremulously, her throat contracting from the wild imagery her brain had started processing, afraid of the answers without fully understanding why.
‘It ran its course.’ It wasn’t true, of course. Not by a long chalk, Alex thought grimly. But if she really had lost her memory she wasn’t ready for the explicit details of their far too brief acquaintance.
He sounded cold and unmoved, Sanchia thought, her mind racing, desperately trying to grasp a thread of memory that faded even before it had taken shape.
Despairingly, she got up, moving over to the window.
In the street below, the city’s traffic was flowing unusually freely for a weekday morning in high summer. Pedestrians jostled with each other along the busy street, tourists and workers alike reflecting a world going about its business—while she was marooned up here, with this man who both terrified and excited her, groping like a blind person for a safe footing on a slippery precipice.
‘How…?’ She didn’t want to have to ask—couldn’t turn around as she tried to formulate the question that was burning through her brain, managing eventually to croak, ‘Just how…deeply were we…involved?’
Through the muted sounds in an outer corridor—a man’s sudden cough, the echo of footsteps across the floor—Alex Sabre’s sharp intake of breath was unmistakable. When he spoke, however, his voice gave nothing away.
‘You can’t remember?’
She tried. Put her hand to her head. Goodness knew, she wanted to. Blindly she shook her head.
‘If by involved you mean were we lovers…?’ The unfinished sentence was laden with meaning.
Sanchia’s back stiffened. Violently she shook her head again. No! Not with him! she thought, every nerve pulsing with an outrageously sensual rhythm as her brain determinedly denied it. She would have known. Remembered something like that. Remembered him…
‘I would have remembered,’ she said hopelessly to the window.
In the succeeding silence she was conscious only of his daunting presence, his scent, even his hard, steady breathing, her every sense painfully acute.
‘Sanchia. Turn around.’
She couldn’t have done so but for that soft command in his voice. Even then it was only to fix her troubled, confused gaze on his white wing collar and tabs, a vivid contrast with the dark austerity of his gown.
‘Don’t worry,’ he advised, and then, in a tone that was almost hostile in its coldness, ‘I would take your answer from the way your mind so keenly rejects the possibility.’
She noticed how harshly those masculine features were etched in the light coming from the window as her shoulders sagged with almost disproportionate relief. If double-crossed, she thought, he would make a formidable adversary.
‘If it puts your mind at rest, I stopped looking for you a long time ago,’ he went on. ‘Even so, I’d like to help you.’
‘Help me?’ Amber eyes widened in amazement.
‘If, as you say, you’ve lost a whole chunk of your life, then I’d like to help you try and retrieve it.’
‘How?’
‘Whatever it takes.’
Others had tried before—doctors, psychiatrists—and with no satisfactory outcome or hope of her memory ever coming back she had discharged herself over six months ago, resigned to the fact that it never would. But was it possible after all this time, she wondered, both fearful and excited by the prospect, that she could regain the lost pieces of her life, as this confident and obviously brilliant man seemed to think?
Whatever it takes, he had said. She shivered, trying not to imagine the methods a man like him might employ to delve into the intricacies of her locked, dysfunctional mind. She was afraid, and yet contrarily, with a bone-deep instinct she couldn’t even begin to understand, she knew that in doing so he wouldn’t harm her. Not any lasting physical harm, at any rate…
‘Why?’ Her slanting eyes were guarded as she looked at him askance. ‘Why would you want to help me?’
‘Why?’ The firm lines of the sensual mouth moved as though he were contemplating her question. ‘What about because the subject intrigues me? Because you intrigue me, Sanchia?’
‘Because I—?’ There had been an edge to his voice which made her break off, her features harden with sudden challenging anger. ‘You don’t believe me! You still don’t believe me, do you?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, but you’re thinking it.’
‘How do you know what I’m thinking when I’m not even sure myself?’
‘And you claim to know me.’ She wasn’t sure why she felt such bitter disappointment, but she did. ‘How can you? How can you know anything about me if you think I’d make something like this up?’ She wasn’t sure of him. She wasn’t sure of anything. But one thing she knew was her own character. That couldn’t have changed, no matter how many months or years of her life had gone missing. Could it?
‘Believe me, I want very much to make sense of it all. To believe you—’
‘But you don’t!’
She swung back across the floor, her high heels expressing her agitation. She felt that after this she would be walking out of here to face a greater, more frightening void in her life than she could ever have imagined possible.
The loneliness was suddenly terrifyingly overwhelming. A low moan came from her throat like that of an injured animal, but as she made to push past him his arm shot out, his fingers clamping hard around her wrist.
‘For heaven’s sake, Sanchia! Virtual strangers we might be, but do you really think I’m letting you walk out of here like this?’
‘Like what?’ Her pulse was hammering crazily under his broad thumb.
‘Like a little lost child—not knowing where she’s going, let alone where she’s come from.’
‘Let me go!’ she protested as her struggle to free herself only served to tighten his hold on her. ‘I was perfectly all right before I came in here today!’
‘I don’t think you were. When you looked at me in that court you looked…ridden by some sort of terror that could destroy you if it isn’t rooted out. Like you were being hounded by some nightmare you couldn’t ever wake up from.’
A chilling sensation shivered along her spine. How could he be so perceptive? How could he know?
Shaken, she tried not to let him see how his words—how he—was affecting her as finally she wrenched free from his clasp. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Psychoanalysing me now?’
A thick eyebrow arched as he noted the disparagement with which she said it, but slipping a hand into the pocket of his well-cut trousers, all he said in response was, ‘I gather you’ve had your fair share of that.’
She didn’t need to answer, wondered if the desolation she felt showed in her eyes.
Unwillingly she noticed how the way he was standing, with his robe pushed back, revealed the hard lines of his body. A body honed to peak fitness with the same punishing stamina with which he must have honed that keen intellect—single-minded determination and ruthless resolve.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Sanchia.’
‘I know that.’ How? How could she know? she wondered hopelessly, and after a moment asked, ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth?
‘That I know who you are?’
The neat hair that had once felt like tumbling silk beneath his hands gleamed darkly as she nodded. Alex swallowed to ease the pressure that seemed to be restricting his windpipe.
He wanted to tell her. Prove it to her. Take that hunted look out of her eyes by forcing her to remember, because he was beginning to shake off all doubts that this was any performance. And, curse it though he had just now, maybe—just maybe—her loss of memory might work in his favour. He felt unscrupulous, yet decidedly excited by the prospect as he responded, ‘To echo your own words: why would I lie?’
Sanchia frowned. Why would he? He was a barrister. Honourable. Respected.
And ruthless.
That other juror’s words sent a little shiver down her spine.
‘You’re going to have to trust me,’ he suggested softly.
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘I can’t.’ It was like a small hopeless plea in the darkness.
‘No.’ He moved closer to her, his cool, clear gaze penetrating hers, plumbing the depths of her fear and anxiety with merciless precision. ‘No,’ he repeated, as though coming to some hard decision. ‘I don’t believe you could. But all I’m asking is that you allow me to see you again—starting with this evening. I’ll take you out to dinner. That way you won’t even have to worry about being alone with me.’ And that would be for the best all round, he decided wryly, for himself, as well as Sanchia. Because he didn’t know how he was managing to stand there without reaching for her, pulling her against him, feeling her softness melting against him as he plundered that sweet, moist mouth…
‘I can’t,’ she said quickly, aware of the hint of sarcasm clothing his last remark. Nor did she particularly regret having to say it. Because, much as she wanted to recapture her missing memories, she was afraid of unlocking doors her mind clearly wanted to keep sealed. Which was as ridiculous, she thought, as fearing any kind of involvement with Alex Sabre. But nevertheless she did. ‘Not tonight. I’ve arranged to meet someone tonight.’
‘Then you’ll just have to ring him and tell him you can’t make it,’ he replied, causing her hackles to rise. She hated being bossed about. He was also wrong in his assumption that she was seeing another man, but she held back from telling him that. It was none of his business anyway. Before she could say anything, he tagged on, as though he were speaking to a rather stubborn child, ‘Isn’t this more important?’
Which, of course, it was, she thought, having already decided to telephone her friend to postpone their cinema trip.
‘That’s settled, then,’ he said, and it seemed it was.
CHAPTER THREE
