“No. No monsters, Lexi. That’s something you won’t tolerate.”
Then, perhaps thinking he had said too much, he half turned from her. “Your bath and dressing rooms are through there,” he said, nodding toward a door on a railed landing raised a few steps from the floor of the room. “I think you’ll find everything you need. I’ll bring you a tray when I come back upstairs. I shouldn’t be too long, but you’ll probably have time for a bath before I return.”
“Richard?”
He completed his turn, walked to a door near the hallway, and opened it.
“I’ve had my things moved into the adjacent room,” he said. “There is a key for the hall door, but I’d appreciate it if you would leave this door partially open so that I can hear you if you need me in the night.”
“Richard?” She watched him in confusion. He had reverted to impassive detachment. Polite, impersonal, he was treating her like a dependent stranger while she had questions spinning through her mind. He’d had his things moved. He helonged in this room. And while she wasn’t brave enough—didn’t know him well enough—to ask him to stay, there were questions she had to ask.
“We shared this room?”
He paused in the doorway. “Yes.”
“And that bed?”
His glance flicked toward the bed and back to her without revealing anything. “Yes.”
“Were we happy here?” she persisted. “Did we love each other?”
“Lexi.” His voice held a soft groan. “Why are you asking me?”
“Who else can I ask?” She walked to his side. Hesitantly she placed her hand on his arm. “You tell me this is my home, but I can’t remember. You tell me you are my husband. I don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t remember that, either. Can’t you give me at least this much?”
“And you’d believe me?”
She gazed up at him, pleading. “I’d have to, wouldn’t I?”
“If I told you that you loved me beyond reason, and the two of us were happier here than any two people had a right to be, you’d believe me?”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. But she saw the flash of pain in his eyes, hastily banked, when he spoke.
“Or if I told you that you feared me, that you hated this place, that you only waited for a chance to escape, would you believe that?”
She felt his arm tense beneath her hand.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered. “Why won’t you tell me?”
He lifted her hand from his arm, holding it between both of his—safe? imprisoned? she wondered—before he released it.
“You have the answers, Lexi. Whatever they are, you have to discover them for yourself.”
Three
The sound of rain hitting against the windows in irregular, rapid bursts dragged Lexi from sleep. Through partially opened eyes, she noted the dim light in the strangely familiar room and snuggled back into the down pillows with a sense of sleepy satisfaction. It was morning. She had slept the night through, unawakened by disturbing dreams or nightmares that refused to stay in her memory, unawakened by the vague yet demanding longings that sometimes gripped her and held her for sleepless hours.
“Of all the months of the year, I think January must have the most miserable weather.”
Lexi’s eyes flew open. Between the bed and the French doors stood a slender woman with stylish, short silver hair. The woman wore a dark green velvet dressing gown and looked completely at home in Lexi’s bedroom.
“It’s later than it seems,” the woman continued reflectively. “The storm has darkened the sky. Without a doubt the rain will turn to ice before noon.”
Lexi, fully awake now, scooted up against the rosewood headboard, pulling the blanket with her. The hall door was locked. She had watched Richard turn the key the night before. She glanced across the room. Richard’s door stood open.
“Oh, he’s downstairs writing in his office,” the woman said. “He has been for hours. He spent half his childhood telling his little stories. It is so nice he finally found an outlet for his obsession.”
She walked to the bed and seated herself on the edge of it. “I wanted to visit with you while he was busy. He was in such a foul mood when he telephoned weeks ago from Boston. I wanted to resolve at least one thing before I saw him again.”
The woman was much older than Lexi had first thought. Though she wore carefully applied, tasteful makeup, she had been unable to hide the network of deep lines fanning out from her dark brown eyes or from her thin, rose-glossed lips.
“I truly wanted to like you, Alexandra. You bear such a stunning resemblance to my niece.”
Lexi submitted to the woman’s brief, intense scrutiny with growing irritation. She was an amnesiac, not a laboratory animal who had no feelings. She could have—would have—demanded that a stranger leave her room, but who in this house was a stranger? And who had been given the right to come and go at will?
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
Had there ever been any doubt of that? Lexi wondered, but a stubbornness she had not realized she possessed refused to let her answer the woman’s question, just as it refused to let her ask the woman’s identity.
“Oh, well,” the woman said, rising gracefully from the bed. “Perhaps it’s for the best, after all.”
She crossed to a small table and opened its one drawer. “Richard seemed to think that I knew something about these,” she said. “Naturally I was disturbed by his unfounded accusations, disturbed enough that I had to do something. And where better to look than where it all began?”
She closed her fist over something she took from the drawer and walked back to the side of the bed. Lexi watched silently, willing the woman to end her cryptic comments and tell her, straight out, whatever she had come to say.
“They weren’t hard to find, not once I decided where to search. They were just stuffed in the back of a drawer, where any thief could have found them.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t tell Richard how careless you were with them,” she said, taking Lexi’s hand and pressing two rings into her palm.
Lexi stared at the wide, filigreed gold band and the sapphire and diamonds in an antique setting that complemented it When she raised her head with a question already forming on her lips, she found that the woman had crossed the room.
Standing in the doorway to Richard’s adjoining room, she lifted one delicately arched eyebrow. “And, Alexandra,” she said with a trace of condescension in her well-modulated voice, “welcome home.”
The night before, the rose-colored bathroom with its marble fixtures had seemed just another indication of the oppressiveness of the house. After a night’s sleep, however, Lexi was able to look at the room with new eyes, able to see the beauty in it, and able to wonder, Had she been accustomed to such wealth?
But the clothes in the vast closets, although too large, seemed suited to her. Just as the rings—although she found them, too, a little large once she was no longer able to resist slipping them onto her finger—seemed to belong on her hand.
She wore the rings, testing the feel of them but refusing to give in to the speculation they aroused in her, while she pondered the question of what one wore to breakfast when one lived in a museum. Not one of the several pairs of jeans she found neatly folded in a drawer, she