by Laura Parker
Halle’s mouth dropped open for an instant as he turned away from her and headed for the kitchen. He had thought she was serious. She went after him.
“What about the phone?” she called at his back. “Surely there are house rules for the phone?”
He moved toward the refrigerator and opened it. “Let it ring.” He bent into it so his second statement was muffled by the barrier of the door. “I have an answering service that will pick it up.”
Halle folded her hands into fists and settled them on her hips. “Let me get this straight. I’m not supposed to answer your door or your phone? Maybe I should just be locked in the bathroom while you’re out.”
Her voice had risen with her anger but she couldn’t keep her resentment from boiling over when he straightened and looked at her in mock innocence, soft drink can in hand. “Oh, another thing. Stop locking all the doors. I almost never lock my doors.”
“Doesn’t that encourage burglars?”
“This is Gap, Texas. We don’t have burglars. What’s gotten into you?”
Boy, was she ready to tell him. “You and your asinine behavior, for one. You treat me as if I’m another piece of furniture or a pet. No, you would at least pat a dog on the head as you came and went. Me you barely speak to.”
A dangerous gleam came into his dark eyes as he pushed the refrigerator door shut then propped a shoulder against it. His toasted gaze tugged every curve and swell on it’s way from her chin to her toes. “You want me to pet you?”
Halle almost choked. “I want respect. I’m paying you to help me piece together my absent memory. I expect service for the dollar, Mr. Guinn, not snide remarks.”
Joe popped the top on the can and took a long swallow to give himself time to think.
Anger made some women unattractive. It changed Halle’s face from mere prettiness into flagrant beauty. He had been provoked by the best hustlers on the street, pimps, drug dealers, confidence men and brutal thugs. Only Halle had ever been able to slip under his professional veneer. Only she had ever made him afraid of emotions like anger, jealousy and lust. Only she made him daydream of a sexual encounter just by crossing a room. Her sarcastic banter was the first sustained glimpse he’d had of the old Halle and it made him want to...
He lifted a brow as his heavy-lidded gaze surreptitiously caressed the curves of her breasts. Never mind what he wanted to do to her. He had to think when she was around. Relying on his instincts was too dangerous.
“Let’s get something straight, Ms. Hayworth. If I didn’t tell you where I was it’s because it’s none of your business.”
She accepted that slap on the wrist with all the grace of a poke in the eye. “Not my business? You leave me stranded without food or directions, without any kind of expectation of your return, and then tell me it’s not my business to question your actions?”
Joe shrugged off his culpability. He had forgotten about his empty refrigerator but that wasn’t the point. She was provoking old feelings. He mustn’t allow himself even for a short while to slip into the error of thinking she was part of his life. It would make living again without her that much harder. It might just kill him.
“Let’s get this straight. You’re a client. Until my office hours begin I’m on my own.”
Halle’s fists slid down her hips. “What time do you open, Mr. Guinn?”
“It depends.” He rolled the soda can back and forth between his palms. “As a rule, it’s after I’ve been fishing. If the fish are biting it could be ten, eleven or noon.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He hunched a shoulder then turned his can up to drain it but the hand that held it trembled. “If you don’t like my professional style, you can make other arrangements.”
He watched her arms come up to hug her waist in an act of unconscious comfort. “You’re tossing me out?”
“Suit yourself.”
When she didn’t answer in kind after a moment Joe glanced over and was surprised by the look in her green-gold eyes. That raw needy yet wary look said, “Don’t fail me.”
Guilt arrowed through him, spearing the last of his confidence. What had he been thinking to take her in? He wasn’t about to heed the urge that said he should try to fix things after all this time. They weren’t even on an even footing. Her defenses, the power to weigh and judge, were missing along with her memory. He suspected he could promise her the moon, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a majority share in Disney right now and she might believe him. The desperation in her gaze said she needed to.
He wasn’t unaware of her interest in him. She looked at him as if he were the first man she’d ever seen. He could probably tell her just enough of the truth to convince her that she had once loved him as much as he still loved her. He might be able to manipulate that attraction into seduction and slake his own need of her. But tomorrow or the next day she would remember and his world would collapse under the accusation in her eyes. He would have failed her again.
He looked away, feeling like the slimiest slug who ever crawled the earth.” Like I said, if you don’t like my rules you can always go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
The word clutched at his heart yet he’d known this kind of pain before. He would survive it. But he could no longer look at her. “Home. New York. You want the address of your old apartment? I can get it for you easy. One phone call.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
A little sick sound of distress made Joe turn back to her. Her face was ashen and she was clutching her middle as if she’d taken a punch to the stomach.
He bounced off the refrigerator and caught her by the arms. “Halle? What’s wrong?”
Halle shook her head weakly. “My stomach. I think it must be hunger.” She pushed against his chest. He felt so solid and so warm. If only she dared rest her head there for a moment and be enfolded in his arms as she had been that first night. She pulled back, afraid of the depth of her need for physical contact, of contact with him. “I think I need some water.”
“Sure, Halle, sure.” His arm slid around her shoulders as he steered her to the nearest chair. “You just sit down. That’s right. If you still feel lightheaded, bend forward and drop your head between your knees. Don’t be shy. It’s just me. I’ll hold on to you. Okay. Yeah, that’s better, sweetheart. I’m sorry for yelling at you, Halle. I forgot you’re not well.”
“You mean I’m sick in the head,” she said between her knees.
“No.” He levered her up by the shoulders until they were eye to eye. “I don’t think that. You’re not crazy. You’re just confused and the confusion will go away.”
“Will it?”
Joe put a hand to her cheek. She sounded as desperate as he felt. “You’re cold.” He pressed a little harder and began massaging her face.
What an ass you are, Joe Guinn. Bullying a sick woman.
The doctor had specifically warned him not to push her or upset her. He’d just done both, and not for the first time.
He added his second hand to the first, framing her face in his hands. How good it felt to touch her. It had been two whole days since he touched her. He ached with wanting to touch her. He hadn’t realized how much until this moment.
He brushed a thumb lightly over her lips. He ached with wanting to kiss her, and other things he should not think about. But he knew it was too late. Her eyes were suddenly wide and unblinking on his. She had seen his thoughts reflected in his gaze. All he had to do was move in a few inches and their lips would meet. Lord! He must be going nuts. He couldn’t kiss her. He mustn’t cheat on her memory of him because he could.
In the end, Halle decided for them both.
He stiffened as Halle placed her lips on his yet he didn’t move way. The fingers on her face tightened. For an instant, she thought he would push her away. Then his fingers curved under her chin, lifting her face and drawing her closer as his mouth suddenly opened on hers and she was engulfed in the hot passion of his kis
s.
There was nothing tentative or even tender about his kiss. The hard persuasion of the mouth moving over hers stunned her with it’s hunger, and need. It seemed as if he thought he could slake his curiosity in a single kiss, but only if it never ended.
She wanted Joe to kiss her. She leaned into the yearning she spied in his dark eyes, her own lids falling shut before the sheer audacity of what she was initiating, but suddenly there was empty space where a second earlier his lips had been.
When she opened her eyes it was to find her gaze on level with his belt buckle. He was still touching her face but he had risen to his feet. Even as she looked up at him with embarrassed desperation, he withdrew his touch and backed a few steps away.
“That was a mistake.”
Without any mediating gesture he turned and reached for a glass with one hand while he turned on the faucet with the other.
“You must be thirsty,” he had said without even looking over his shoulder.
But she had seen the look on his face before he turned the broad expanse of his back on her. The flush beneath his tan betrayed his need. He wanted her. But he was fighting it. The set of his shoulders, that stiff barrier of resistance, was not only to keep her out but to hold him back. He didn’t want the passion or the entanglement their kiss promised. As if to ram the point home, he handed her the water without turning around.
She took a long sip but the heat of his kiss could not be doused by water. She didn’t blame him for rejecting her. Well, not rejecting her exactly. He’d nearly set her eyelashes on fire with his response. But how could he want to get emotionally involved with a woman with a gimpy memory?
Abashed, she glanced up to find him watching her with all the intensity of a doctor monitoring a critical patient. In a way she felt sick, burning up with a fever called Joe. But maybe he didn’t feel anything. It was hard to tell what the sheen in his dark eyes meant.
Joe held his moody silence with an effort. He hadn’t seen Halle fold so quickly in the face of rejection since the time she’d received a couriered letter from her mother soon after she’d faxed each parent that she had married. She had been anxiously awaiting their response to her news. The note from her mother read, “Prenuptial agreement a must. Divorce so costly.”
She hadn’t cried, she’d just subsided onto the sofa and pulled herself into a ball. At first she wouldn’t even allow him to touch her. He’d had to fight her resistance, engulfing her in his embrace then just holding and holding on until she gradually melted against him. And how she melted, all soft and open in her need. He had poured his heart and soul into the love making they shared, believing that this night they had really become one, soldered by a need deeper than desire and romantic gloss. He realized that he was all she had, and he reveled in that need to be needed. It had made him believe that he could provide all she would ever need.
Afterward she had clung to him and whispered, “I’ve always been alone. Always. That was okay. Until you. Promise you won’t ever leave me, Joe. Promise.”
But he had failed her, and himself, and their marriage.
So what did he think he was doing just now by indulging in the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, forever. Oh, but it felt good, Halle felt good. For the few short seconds that kiss lasted he’d felt whole for the first time in two years. It felt now as if the hole in his soul would never heal.
Halle put the glass down on the table and licked her still-dry lips. “Every time I feel like I’m getting close to a memory, a kind of dread comes over me. It’s almost as if my mind is trying to protect me from remembering.”
His eyes narrowed. “Then you are remembering something.”
She shook her head. “Not remembering, exactly, It’s more like thoughts suddenly pop into my head from nowhere.”
“What kind of thoughts?”
She struggled with the decision to answer. It might only make her seem even more harebrained. But then, that wasn’t news to him. “Did anyone ever call you Jag?”
His head whipped around. “Where did you hear that?”
His question made Halle more uncomfortable than she had expected. Perhaps because he was now looking at her with a penetrating gaze, his interrogation gaze. Lie to me, it said, and I will know.
“I didn’t hear it. I just was thinking about you earlier.”
His brows arched, skepticism etched in the alignment of every hair. She was making things worse for herself and she knew it. He’d made it abundantly clear he wasn’t interested in pursuing whatever it was that had reared up spontaneously between them. She shouldn’t admit to feeling, only to fact.
Feeling self-conscious, she reached up to smooth a wing of hair away from her cheek but the strands clung to her damp fingers. She abandoned the gesture. “I was trying to remember, something...anything. That’s when it came to me that your friends called you Jag. Am I wrong?”
Joe felt as if the earth beneath him had trembled. That was her nickname for him. She was beginning to remember. So soon? The doctor said it would take a week, maybe longer. Now it seemed that it might all come back to her right here in his kitchen. What then?
She disappears and life goes on, his conscience supplied. Live with it.
“A close friend once called me by that nickname,” he said finally.
“Which close friend?”
“What difference does it make?”
Embarrassment blossomed once more in her face but Halle had begun to realize that Joe Guinn didn’t require handling with kid gloves. He could look after himself. So then, she should look after herself. She needed answers in order to piece her life back together. If she had to face down a burned-out expoliceman with a chip the size of Manhattan Island on his shoulder, she would. “Where did the nickname come from?”
Joe wanted to give her everything she asked for but he couldn’t, not and save himself, too. He needed just a little breathing space. Five minutes alone to think. “It’s my initials. Joseph A. Guinn. J. A. G.”
She smiled. “Of course. What’s the A stand for?”
He scowled. “I’d rather not say.”
Her smile turned mischievous. “Let me guess. Albert? Alvin, maybe? No, I’ve got it. Adonis.”
“Aloysius.”
“Aloysius?” Laughter bubbled out of her. “Oh, I’m sorry—but—that’s awful! How could your parents do that to you?”
A smile tugged at Joe’s mouth. It was good to see her smile, to hear her laughter. Very good. “It’s a family name. I’m half Irish and half Italian. Mom got to name me Joseph after her grandfather, Giuseppe. Pop thought he should get equal time. He had a grandfather named Alabhaois which is Irish Gaelic for Aloysius. He built this house before the turn of the century.”
She gazed at him with wonder. “Really? I didn’t think anything west of Mississippi was more than five minutes old.”
“That’s a New Yorker for you. Never can appreciate that anything west of the Hudson has a history worth seeking out.”
“That’s hardly fair. After all, you told me my major interest is in Native American art.”
Joe leaned into her. “But you never went in search of it, Halle. You just let it all come to you.”
She gazed deeply into those rich brown eyes and wondered if he had ever come to her. If he had, she was certain she would never in this lifetime have turned him away.
Her hand rose from his forearm to rest on the smooth sun-baked side of his face. Did he lean in closer or was it she who was falling in toward him?
He reared back. “Sorry,” he muttered, “but we can’t. We can’t.”
“Oh.” Halle looked down at her lap. Twice she had initiated a kiss. How many times did it take for her to accept no as an answer? What did she think she was going to learn from Joe’s kiss that made her able to risk rejection twice? Aside from the fact that kissing him proved all her female hormones were in full working order, very little she supposed. yet it was pure female jealousy that prompted her to say in accusati
on, “It’s Lauren, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.” Lie big! “Yeah. Lauren.”
Halle studied her fingernails as if she had never seen anything like them before. “I suppose she won’t understand why I’m staying here. I wouldn’t want to do anything that hurt you, after all your kindness to me. Maybe I should move back to the motel.”
Joe shook his head. He had never lied to one woman about another but he didn’t want Halle to think he’d been without a steady woman since she left him. She would think that there was something wrong with him. Something was. He was still in love with her.
“You can stay. I’ll be leaving in the morning, in any case.”
“To go fishing?” she inquired.
“No, I’ve got another investigating job that’s going to take me to Dallas for a while.”
“How long?” He shrugged. Evasion. He was leaving her. “I should move out then. To avoid any more misunderstandings.”
“Don’t worry about Lauren.” He glanced away and then back at her. “For the record, if I didn’t want you here you wouldn’t be.”
But Joe found later that night that he couldn’t sleep while listening to the sounds of her moving about in the other bedroom.
Was he being a fool to reject her? Since the moment she had stepped back into his life like an apparition out of his most fondly held dream, he had been afraid she would vanish. Was he losing out on the reality of her for fear it wouldn’t last? So what if it didn’t? They had here. They had now. That was more than he’d ever thought he’d have with her again.
During the past forty-eight hours the sexual tension between them was thick enough to slice and serve. His head and his libido definitely weren’t communicating.
Maybe this was that second chance he had given up on when he’d left New York. Fate had handed him the chance to live out that if-only-I-could-start-over scenario almost every shattered romantic partner hoped for but which almost no one ever received.