“You’re awake.”
“Yes.” She felt trapped in his gaze, caught by questions she couldn’t answer. “Have you been here...all night?”
His lips twisted at what could have been a not-too-funny joke that he didn’t share with her. “Yes.”
His voice was deep...and comforting, or she thought it would be if he ever spoke more than a few syllables.
She broke the mesmerizing spell of his eyes and glanced at her arm. “I don’t like needles.”
“I know.”
Careful of her arm, he seated himself on the edge of the bed. “Now that you’re back with us, we’ll see about getting that removed.”
She had been right about his voice. It caressed her.
“Thank you.”
Was it safe to look at him? Surely she could do so now without being captured. She glanced up. He still watched her—intent, cautious, questioning.
“I hate to ask this,” she said, “but where am I?”
“We’re in a hotel. In Boston.”
He didn’t sound like a Bostonian. His accent was softer. Southern? Perhaps.
She saw the slight softening of his frown and the gentle inquiry in his eyes. “How do you feel?”
She examined her feelings, wondering for the first time how she came to be here. “Like I’ve been beaten,” she admitted. The thought stunned her. “Have I been?”
His eyes shuttered. “No. Don’t you remember?”
Remember? Remember what? Her first clear thought had been that it was snowing.
“Who are you?” she whispered, but even as she asked, she knew there was a more important question. “Who am I?”
His face could have been chiseled from marble—pale, gray marble. His mouth tightened in a thin line. His eyes lost their warmth.
“Your name is Alexandra Jordan,” he told her. “I call you Lexi. You are my wife.”
She had a name now, Alexandra Jordan, and an age, twenty-six, a husband and a family. Melissa, Dr. Melissa Knapp, was part of that family, married to Richard’s brother, Greg, also a doctor. But these were things Lexi had been told in the long, slow weeks of recuperation since she’d awakened to find Richard keeping vigil by her bed, not things she remembered.
She remembered nothing, not even the cause of her strange, debilitating illness, because she couldn’t call the fragmented comments that occasionally fell from her lips remembering. She didn’t like needles. She was fond of the color blue. She liked seafood and fresh fruit—and spring flowers. At least, she thought those were her feelings. But each time one of those comments slipped from her, Melissa’s eyes narrowed, and Lexi felt like a laboratory animal under examination.
And no one had explained the nature of the illness that had robbed her of her memory. Nor would anyone tell her anything about her past other than the basic facts of her identity.
“It’s best for you to remember for yourself,” Melissa had said, not unkindly but with a determination that told Lexi that arguing would be futile.
And Richard, the dark stranger who was her husband, seemed at times even less approachable than Melissa.
Now they were taking her home. But even as they sat almost in isolation in the first-class section of the jet that carried them inland from Boston, they had granted her only the general destination. Oklahoma. Lexi had a fragmented concept of that state, dimly calling up pictures of prairie and dust, Indians and teepees, but the terrain she saw from the window of the small plane into which they had transferred at Dallas was anything but flat or dry.
They had flown for miles over mountains—tall hills, Lexi amended mentally. There were no jagged peaks, only timber and rock-covered mounds pushing up from the surface of the earth. And in the center of those hills, seeming to stretch forever from south to north, with great fingers reaching out from it, lay a vast lake.
“What is it called?” Lexi asked.
“Eufaula,” Richard said.
“Eufaula.” Lexi tried the word experimentally. Yew-fall-lah. “Is it a French name?”
“Creek,” he told her. “Indian.”
Melissa, seated in a front seat next to the pilot, seemed engrossed in some papers she had carried with her, and Lexi sensed a different mood in Richard from that which had held him locked in silence.
“Was our home built near the lake?” she asked, hesitant, but needing to test that mood.
“Not exactly.”
Lexi felt a small stab of disappointment. “Oh.”
Richard frowned and leaned closer to her, speaking in a soft, conspiratorial voice hidden from the others by the drone of the single engine. “Why do you sound so deflated?”
“You’re always doing that,” she said, for the moment not the least intimidated by the man who had complete control over her life. “It isn’t fair, you know, for you to expect answers and never give any.”
She thought she had destroyed the fragile moment. Richard’s lips thinned, and his eyes—they were black, she had long since discovered—bore into her. “Perhaps it isn’t,” he admitted. “Why were you disappointed, Lexi?”
She had destroyed the moment. “It isn’t important,” she said.
“You don’t know that!”
“No. No, I don’t, do I?” Her frustration had been building almost daily, and now she vented it in softly hissed words. “I know nothing but what you choose to tell me. And you choose to tell me very little. Why, Richard? What are you hiding from me?”
Their time in the Boston hotel room even with his frequent absences had done nothing to improve Richard’s pallor. Now he seemed to pale even more with her words. He gripped her shoulders with both hands, as though he wanted to shake her, she thought, or—or pull her against the strength of his chest and hold her there with arms that now trembled with the effort of doing neither.
“Why were you disappointed?” he repeated.
His strength was too much for her; his determination was too much for her. “I just—” What? It had been so fleeting, she couldn’t call it a memory. “I just thought it would be pleasant to live near the water.”
He closed his eyes and released a long breath. Then, as though realizing how tightly he held her, he loosened his grip on her shoulders.
“And so you shall,” he said.
She looked away from his face in confusion, to where his left hand rested warmly against her, to the raw scars that ran across the back of that hand to be partially hidden beneath the sleeve of his shirt. She had wondered about the scars, had wondered if there was any connection between them and her loss of memory. But this was of her past and therefore a forbidden subject, as were so many, and she had exhausted her small store of energy.
She sighed in defeat and closed her eyes to hide the sheen of tears that gave evidence to it.
“Your answer was important, Lexi.”
It was a concession, and she knew she should be grateful for it. “But you won’t tell me why?”
“I can’t,” he said. A note of insistence crept into his voice. “Be patient, even if I sometimes seem to be just the opposite. We have to trust Mel’s judgment in this, at least for a while longer.”
The plane banked and began circling to land. Richard leaned back in his seat. Taking her hand in his much larger one, he laced his fingers with hers. Lexi glanced out the window, but the rough