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Then, as without conscious volition she shrank away, he said, ‘It’s Jos... Surely you remember me? I’m your husband.’
If he was, why did she feel this instinctive fear of him? And why did she get the impression that he was cloaking his displeasure, playing the part of a loving husband to satisfy Dr Hauser?
He took her hand.
In a reflex action she snatched it away, cradling it against her chest as though he’d hurt it.
‘You’re not my husband! I know you’re not.’ Turning to the doctor, she cried desperately, ‘I’ve never seen him before!’ She held out her left hand. ‘Look, I’m not even wearing a ring.’
The man who called himself Jos felt in his pocket and produced a wide band of chased gold and a huge diamond solitaire. ‘You took your rings off when you showered this morning and forgot to put them back.’
No, she didn’t believe him. Somehow she knew she wasn’t the kind of woman who would lightly remove her wedding ring.
As she began to shake her head he caught her hand, and, holding it with delicate cruelty when she would have pulled it free, slipped both rings onto her slender finger. ‘See? A perfect fit.’
He gave her a cool, implacable stare, which sent a quiver of apprehension through her, before lifting her hand to his lips and kissing the palm. ‘And if you want further proof that we’re married...’ Removing a marriage certificate and a couple of snapshots from his wallet, he held them out to her.
A marriage certificate might be anyone’s, so she didn’t even bother to look at it, but photographs couldn’t lie. Afraid of what she might see, she forced herself to take the Polaroid pictures and look at them.
The first one had been taken in what appeared to be a cottage garden. She was smiling up at a tall, dark-haired attractive man. His arm was around her waist and she looked radiantly happy.
‘That was the day we got engaged...and that was our wedding day.’
The second picture showed a couple just emerging from the stone porch of a village church. Dressed in an ivory satin bridal gown and holding a spray of pale pink rosebuds, she was on the arm of the same man, who now wore a well-cut grey suit with a white carnation in his buttonhole.
A man who was undoubtedly Jos.
‘Do you still believe we’re not married?’
She couldn’t deny the evidence of her own eyes, but she knew that no matter what the picture suggested she didn’t want to be married to this man.
‘Well, Clare?’
‘No.’ It was just a whisper.
Standing in the background, Dr Hauser nodded his approval just as his bleeper summoned him. ‘I must go. Try not to worry, Mrs Saunders. I’m sure your loss of memory will prove to be only temporary.’
The door had hardly closed behind him when there was a bump and it swung open again to admit the nurse, pushing a shabby wheelchair. ‘Well, isn’t this good news?’ she asked her patient cheerfully. ‘As soon as you’re dressed, you can go home.’
Taking a small pile of clothing from the locker, she pulled back the bed-sheet and the single greyish cellular blanket. ‘Shall I give you a hand with the gown? Or would you prefer your husband to help you?’
Jos eyed the hospital gown with distaste, and raised an enquiring brow.
Agitated, because she was naked beneath the faded cotton and he knew it, Clare folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself defensively. ‘No, I...I don’t need any help.’
He rose to his feet in one lithe movement and said smoothly, ‘Then I’ll wait outside.’
‘You didn’t remember him?’ the nurse queried, unfastening the tapes.
Clare shook her head mutely.
‘So I guess you’re entitled to be shy. Though I’d have thought a man like that would have been impossible to forget. He’s really something...’
Seeing nothing else for it, Clare swung her legs off the bed and stood up. Moving slowly, carefully, wincing as she touched her bruised ribs, she began to get dressed in clothes she didn’t even recognise as hers.
The undies were pretty and delicate, the silky suit and sandals well-chosen and smart, but all of them appeared to be relatively cheap. Which didn’t seem to tie in with his expensive clothes.
Her tongue loosened, the nurse was chattering on. ‘I must say I envy you. It’s so thrilling and exciting. Like meeting for the first time and falling in love all over again...’
Clare wished she could see things in such a romantic light. Caught between an unknown future with a man who was a stranger to her and a blank past, all she could feel was alarm and dread.
All too soon she was dressed. With no further excuse for dawdling she took a few steps and, feeling weak, found herself glad to sink into the wheelchair the nurse was holding for her.
Standing at ease, showing no sign of impatience now, Jos was waiting in the bare corridor. He was very tall, six feet three or four, with wide shoulders and narrow hips.
He looked hard and handsome. And somehow dangerous.
Though he was so big, when he came towards them she saw he moved with the grace and agility of a man perfectly in control of his body.
‘Shall I come down with you?’ the nurse asked.
Anxious to put off the time when she’d be left alone with him, Clare was about to accept the offer when he said pleasantly, ‘Thank you, but there’s really no need. I’m sure I can handle a wheelchair.’
The smile accompanying his words held such devastating charm that the nurse almost swooned. She was still standing staring after them when they reached the lift.
It came promptly at his summons.
It probably didn’t dare do anything else, Clare found herself thinking as the doors slid open. Then she was trapped with him in a small steel box. It was a relief when it stopped a few floors down and a hospital porter got in pushing a trolley.
As the doctor had predicted, things were hotting up. The main concourse was busy and bustling, with people and staff milling about.
At the reception desk a hard-pressed woman was trying to cope with a growing queue. A large calendar with a picture of Cape Cod on it proclaimed the month was June.
When they reached an area close to the entrance, where a straggling row of shabby wheelchairs jostled each other, Jos asked, ‘Can you manage to walk from here?’ His deep, incisive voice startled her. ‘Or shall I carry you?’
The idea of being held against that broad chest startled her even more. Sharply, she said, ‘Of course I can walk.’ They were foolhardy words that she was soon to regret.
Struggling out of the chair, ignoring the hand he held out, she added, ‘I’ve only lost my memory, not the use of my legs,’ and saw his lips tighten ominously.
Once on her feet, Clare swayed a little, and he put a steady arm around her waist. As soon as she regained her balance she pulled away, leaving a good foot of space between them.
His face cold and aloof, he walked by her side, making no further attempt to touch her.
Somehow she managed to keep her chin high and her spine ramrod-straight, but, legs trembling, head curiously light and hot, just to put one foot in front of the other took a tremendous effort of will.
His car was quite close, parked in a ‘Doctors Only’ area. A sleek silvery grey, it had that unmistakable air of luxury possessed only by the most expensive of vehicles.
By the time he’d unlocked and opened the passenger door she was enveloped in a cold sweat and her head had started to whirl. Eyes closed, she leaned against the car.
Muttering, ‘Stubborn little fool!’ he caught her beneath the arms and lowered her into the seat. A moment later he slid in beside her and leaned over to fasten her safety belt.
‘Have you had anything to eat?’ he demanded.
As soon as she was sitting down the faintness began to pass and the world stopped spinning. Lifting her head, she answered, ‘I wasn’t hungry.’
‘No wonder you look like a ghost!’
Knowing it was as much emotional exhaustion as physical, she said helplessly, ‘It’s not just that. It’s everything.’
He started the car and drove to the entrance, giving way to a small ambulance with blue flashing lights before turning uptown.
The dashboard clock told her it was two-thirty in the morning, and, apart from the ubiquitous yellow cabs and a few late revellers, the streets of New York were relatively quiet though as bright as day.
Above the streetlamps and the lighted shop windows, by contrast it looked black—black towers of glass and concrete rising into a black sky.
It was totally strange. Alien.
As though sensing her shiver, he remarked more moderately, ‘Waking up with amnesia must be distressing.’
‘It is,’ she said simply. ‘Not to know who you are, where you are, where you’re going—and I mean know rather than just being told—is truly terrifying.’
‘I can imagine.’ He sounded almost sympathetic.
‘At first you just seemed to be... angry...’ She struggled to put her earlier impression into words. ‘As if you blamed me in some way...’
‘It’s been rather a fraught day... And I wasn’t convinced your loss of memory was genuine.’
‘You thought I was making it up! Why on earth should I do a thing like that?’
‘Why does a woman do anything?’ he asked bitterly.
It appeared that he didn’t think much of women in general and her in particular.
‘But I would have had to have some reason, surely?’
After a slight hesitation, he said evasively, ‘It’s irrelevant as you have lost your memory.’
‘What makes you believe it now when you didn’t earlier?’
They stopped at a red light and he turned his head to study her. ‘Because you have a kind of poignant, lost look that would be almost impossible to fake.’
‘I still don’t understand why you think I’d want to fake it.’
He gave her a cool glance. ‘Perhaps to get a little of your own back.’ Then, as if conceding that some further explanation was needed, he went on, ‘We’d quarrelled. I had to go out. When I came back I found you’d gone off in a huff.’
Instinctively she glanced down at her left hand.
‘Yes—’ his eyes followed hers ‘—that was why you weren’t wearing your rings.’
It must have been some quarrel to make her take her wedding ring off. She racked her brains, trying to remember.
Nothing.
Giving up the attempt, she asked, ‘What did we quarrel about?’
For an instant he looked discomposed, then, as the lights turned to green and the car moved smoothly forward, he replied, ‘As with most quarrels, it began over something comparatively unimportant. But somehow it escalated.’
She was about to point out that he hadn’t really answered her question when he forestalled her.
‘I can’t see much sense in raking over the ashes. As soon as your memory returns you’ll be able to judge for yourself how trivial it was. Now I suggest that you try and relax. Let things come back in their own good time rather than keep asking questions.’
Questions he didn’t want to answer?
Yet if not, why not? Unless he didn’t want her to regain her memory?
Helplessly, she said, ‘But there’s so much I don’t know. I don’t even know where L..we...live.’
‘Upper East Side.’
That figured. It went with his obvious wealth, his air of good breeding, his educated accent. She frowned. His accent... Basically an English accent?
‘You’re not American?’
‘I was born in England.’
‘How long have you been in the States?’
‘Since I was twenty-one.’
‘How old are you now?’
‘Thirty.’
‘Do your family still live in England?’
Glancing at his handsome profile, she saw his jaw tighten before, his voice repressive, he replied, ‘I haven’t any family.’
Plainly he was in no mood to be questioned. But, needing to know more about this stranger she was married to, about their life together, she persisted, ‘Where did we meet...?’
He swung the wheel and they turned into a paved forecourt and drew to a halt in front of a huge apartment block.
‘Was it in England?’
Curtly, he said, ‘I thought I’d made it clear that I wanted you to rest rather than keep asking questions.’
Resenting the way he was treating her, she protested, ‘But I—
He put a finger to her lips. This is the Ventnor Building and we’re home. Any further questions will keep until tomorrow.’
