Lost And Found Bride. Modean Moon

Why did he think he had to pretend to be?

      “Would it help if I told you your very first words to me over a year ago when I brought you to this house?”

      Lexi felt her breath catch. Warily she turned to him.

      “You said, ‘My God, do we live here?’”

      “But that’s what I said—”

      “Last night,” he finished for her. He abandoned his casual slouch against the sideboard and walked to her side, looking down at her. “You don’t like this room, Lexi. You never have. And you don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings by telling me. I don’t like it, either.”

      “Does this mean—” She realized she had been holding her breath and expelled it slowly. “Does this mean you’ve decided to talk to me?”

      “About some things,” he admitted. “You’ve got to understand that I know no more about how to help you than you do. When Mel said that we should tell you nothing, that we should let all your knowledge come from your subconscious, I had to agree with her. She is a doctor. She is trained in these matters. But I’ve given a lot of thought to what you said yesterday, and while I still agree with Mel, at least in part, I see no reason why you should be kept completely in the dark.”

      He stared into her eyes with an intensity that would have stripped secrets from her soul, if she’d had any to share, and a chill claimed his features. “I want to know—have to know—the truth. And so do you. If this is the only way to learn what that truth is, so be it.”

      Lexi shifted on the chair arm, away from this suddenly frightening stranger, and when she did, she felt the rings in her pocket pressing against her thigh. In a nervous gesture she was barely conscious of, she began massaging the base of her ring finger with her thumb as she remembered the cryptic words of the woman who had given them to her.

      “Richard, does Melissa—do you...” Lexi fumbled for the words, not wanting to believe that he could think so, but knowing she had to ask. “Is there some doubt? Did you think that by not telling me anything, that I might, somehow, slip and prove that I really do remember?”

      Richard captured her hand in both of his and stilled her nervous movement. “Why do you ask that?”

      Lexi swallowed once and then met his eyes. “I had a visitor in my room when I woke up this morning.”

      “Who?” The pressure of his hands tightened on hers.

      “A woman. Silver hair. Very...stylish. She didn’t tell me who she was. I wouldn’t ask.”

      Richard dropped her hand and twisted away, but not before she saw the flash of a pain so old, so deep, she wondered how he bore it. “Damn her!”

      It wasn’t an answer, but Lexi sensed that it was the only answer she was going to get. Should she tell him about the rings? Maybe she should, she admitted, but she wasn’t ready to face a confrontation with this man about whether or not to wear the visible symbol that she belonged to him—or he to her, a small voice whispered—not when his face had tightened into a dark scowl that hid all the kindness she’d thought he possessed. Perhaps she could have found the courage to do so if that glimpse of his pain had remained. But now his black eyes reflected an even blacker anger.

      “Your door was locked?”

      “Yes. I checked it after she left. She left through your room.”

      “I’m sorry.” He placed his hand on the side of her head, almost reluctantly caressing a wayward curl, and let it slide down until it rested on her shoulder. “It shouldn’t have happened. It won’t happen again.”

      Lexi looked at his scarred hand resting against soft, peach-colored wool and felt the warmth of his touch seeping through to her. She fought the urge to rest her cheek against his hand and fought the urge to ask him about the scars. She looked up at him, but he had seen the direction of her gaze. He lifted his hand from her and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans.

      “Who was she, Richard?” Lexi asked, when she realized he was lost in bitter thoughts of his own.

      He sighed. “My mother. You’ll see her again at lunch.”

      

      The weather prevented them from going outside, so Richard confined their tour to the house. But even after they had passed through several rooms his mood did not lighten, only settled into one that was slightly less grim.

      There were rooms they didn’t enter: Greg’s groundfloor bedroom next to the basement-to-attic antique elevator that had been restored to accommodate his wheelchair, the bedrooms occupied by Richard’s mother, Helene, and Melissa at the opposite end of the second floor and a locked door beyond Lexi’s suite that Richard explained was a sunroom undergoing renovation and not safe for her to enter.

      There were places Lexi didn’t like, which she had suspected there would be: the reception hall, a massive game room on the ground floor with its walls hung with mounted trophies and its floor covered with the tanned hides of long-dead animals; and, surprisingly, the narrow service stairs leading from the second-floor servants’ quarters, down which she had to force herself to follow Richard.

      There were also rooms she found delightfully inviting. Yet only in the conservatory, a glass-walled and roofed structure appended to the east wing of the house, did she feel she could be truly at home. But they only paused in the doorway, looking in at the heated pool and a virtual jungle of tropical plants before Richard led her away.

      And throughout the tour, with a recital stripped of emotion or inflection, Richard told her of the history of the house. He had not lied to her about the lake, he told her eventually. The lake was a relative newcomer, only having been impounded forty years or so ago, while the house had sat on its mountaintop for half again that long. The house had been built by an oilman and land speculator for his mistress and her small daughter by a previous liaison. They had lived here until the oilman’s death in the crash of a private plane enroute to a west Texas oil field.