But not all new mothers had amnesia.
Her throat burned with bile and fears that hadn’t abated since she’d woken from the coma a week ago thinking it was November, only to find it was December.
Five years later.
Five years of memories simply gone, pushed out of her head in the course of a month. Most devastating, she’d lost the four and a half years Porter had been in her life.
How was it that four weeks asleep could steal so much of her life? That coma had left her mind missing a substantial chunk of memories and yet her body felt 100 percent normal. She’d even been attracted to her stranger husband, so attracted that the aches and lethargy left over from her coma hadn’t dulled the shiver of awareness she’d felt at the brush of his hands against her as he helped her from the hospital bed and into the car.
She swallowed hard and turned to look out the window at the rolling waves as the Mercedes traveled the Florida coastal road toward what Porter had told her was their beach mansion. They also owned a home in Tallahassee but they’d been closer to the beach home when picking up the baby, then having the wreck. Traveling with their infant son so fresh from surgery and her so recently out of a coma hadn’t seemed wise. The doctors had advised they stay close for the short term at least.
Porter had quickly suggested they stay at their nearby vacation home. Apparently her tall, dark and studly husband was wealthier than Midas, thanks to his construction empire that won major contracts to build corporate structures around the country. They had no financial worries as she recovered, he’d told her. Another reason to be grateful.
But instead of gratitude, she could only feel fear at the imbalance of power between her and this man who was her husband. She was adrift with only the facts he told her about her past. No family since her parents were dead. No friends, other than people she apparently hadn’t seen in five years, since her breakup from an abusive boyfriend. She’d cut herself off from everyone then.
Still, she was missing the months following that breakup, the months leading up to her meeting Porter. Falling in love with him. Marrying him. He said after they married, they’d moved to southeastern Florida, away from her hometown in North Carolina. She believed what he said, but wondered what parts he might not have mentioned. Men could be so brief in their explanations, leaving out details or emotional components a woman would find crucial.
Porter glanced in the rearview mirror, his brown eyes as dark as undiluted coffee full of caffeinated energy.
Jolt.
“Alaina, is everything all right?” he said, his Southern drawl muted by some experience in another region.
Something else she didn’t know about him unless he told her.
What kind of answer did he expect from her? More of the same dodgy responses they’d given each other over the past week since she woke up? Guarded words spoken in front of doctors or said out of fear her fragile world might shatter into a somnolent fog again?
Each mile closer to a vacation home she couldn’t recall stretched the tension inside her tighter until she snapped softly, “Did the doctor give you any more insight as to why can’t I remember the past five years? Nearly a quarter of my life is just gone.”
“The doctor spoke with you. He has an obligation to be honest with you. You’re his patient.” The man in the front seat who called himself her husband was unfailingly polite but lacked the kind of warmth that Alaina would have envisioned in a man she’d married.
Her husband.
What had made her choose this coolly controlled male for a mate? Another question she couldn’t begin to answer. In spite of the spark that seemed to arc between them amidst the questions.
“I haven’t forgotten that conversation. It was more of a rhetorical question because there are so many other things I don’t understand.” She glanced down at her sleeping son in his impossibly cute elf pajamas. “Such as, how could anyone forget a child this precious?”
Her heart swelled to look at Thomas, his tiny nose and Cupid’s-bow mouth calling to her every maternal instinct. She’d always wanted children, dreamed of having a big family after growing up an only child. If she and Porter had been married for almost four years, what had made them wait to start their family?
“You’d only known him for a couple of hours before the accident.” Porter turned onto a secluded drive where mammoth houses were hidden by manicured privacy hedges on one side, although she knew the other side opened to the water.
“The length of time shouldn’t matter. He’s a child, my child—” she paused, brushing her fingers across the top of an impossibly small and soft hand “—our child. That’s life changing. A minute. An hour. A couple of hours. That should be burned in here.” She tapped the front of her head.
“Even if your marriage wasn’t?” he asked wryly.
Contrition nipped. This had to be tough for him, too. “I’m sorry. This can’t be easy for you, either.”
“You’re alive and awake, more than I ever expected to have again.” He said the emotional words with a harsh rasp as he guided the car along the palm tree–lined road. “I can deal with the rest.”
“You make me feel as if I shouldn’t be frustrated.”
“Give yourself time.” He kept both hands on the wheel, the late-day sunshine glinting off his Patek Philippe wristwatch. “You’ve been through a lot.”
How did she know the brand of his watch but not know if the band on his ring finger had an inscription? But then, she remembered studying art history when she’d got her bachelor’s degree. Recalled a love of finely made things and beautiful objects. Maybe that was why the watch resonated and the ring...nothing.
“What about you? What have you been through this past month? It must have been horrible, with a child in surgery and a wife in a coma.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice clipped. “I’m fine now.”
Her mouth twitched with amusement as the car braked at a stop sign wrapped in garland. “Are you one of those men who’s too tough to be vulnerable?”
His eyes met hers solemnly in the mirror. “I’m a man who thought he’d lost everything.”
And just that fast, she felt her terrified heart melt a little for this stranger husband of hers. “You still have, in a way,” she said sympathetically, “because of me and how I’ve lost any sense of us and our memories.”
At the deserted intersection, he twisted to look over the seat at her, his elbow resting along the back and tugging his button-down shirt across his muscular chest. “You and our son are alive. That truly is what’s most important to me.”
There had been tension between them since she’d woken up in the hospital. He still held all the answers she couldn’t access. But now, with the sincerity shining in his eyes, she wanted to hug him, ached to wrap her arms around him and have him do the same to her. Most of all, to have that feel familiar. She stretched a hand out to touch his elbow lightly—
A car honked behind them and she jerked her hand back. What was she thinking? Except for the few things he’d told her, she knew nothing about him or her or what kind of life they’d built together. Or what kind of future they might have because these events had changed them. Undoubtedly.
However for Thomas, she and Porter had to try for a level of peace between them. Could the Christmas spirit work a miracle for her family?
Shifting nervously in her seat, Alaina toyed with the reindeer baby rattle, gathering up her rapidly fraying nerve. “May I ask you questions about the past?”
“Why didn’t you question more before?” He kept his eyes on the road this time.
In some ways maybe that made