Private Vows

by Sally C. Berneathy

  His mouth moved slowly toward hers, savoring the anticipation of the feel of those lips on his, of losing himself in the taste of her.

  Suddenly she jerked backward, out of his arms, away from him. “What was that?”

  He blinked and sucked in a quick breath, trying to orient himself, to fight his way up from the flood of desire that overwhelmed him. “What was what?” The fear was back in her eyes and her cheeks had lost their color.

  She huddled against the counter. “I heard someone outside!”

  He hadn’t heard anything except the pounding of his own heart. “A ’possum or raccoon, maybe a deer. There are a lot of animals around here.”

  “No! It’s—” Her wild gaze darted around the room and she lifted a shaky hand to her cheek.

  “It’s okay,” he soothed, closing and locking the door behind him. “There’s nobody out there.”

  Leaning against the counter, she tilted her head backward and closed her eyes as she drew in a deep breath. When she opened them again a moment later, her expression was calmer. “I did hear something,” she said, and he could tell she was making a monumental effort to be calm.

  “An animal.”

  She nodded. “Probably.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “What if it was that man, that Sam Maynard?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You can’t be positive of that.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I can’t be positive, but it’s not likely. This place is hard to find even if you know it’s here, and only a handful of people have my address. I went to a lot of trouble to make sure of that. Somebody like Sam Maynard who’s not operating with a full deck anyway would never be able to find me. Besides, he wouldn’t have any way of knowing that you’re here with me. What you heard was only an animal.”

  He watched her as he explained everything in a quiet, rational manner. She listened and nodded agreement, but the fear never left her eyes. He was no more able to reassure her than he’d been able to reassure Angela.

  “I have an alarm system that I’ll set before we go to bed. If anybody should try to come in a door or window, it will not only contact the security company, it will also make so much noise, the intruder will be deaf in five seconds.”

  She smiled at his joke, but it wasn’t a real smile.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I promise.” Might as well promise to lasso the moon.

  “I know.” He could tell she didn’t know any such thing.

  He had to give her credit for guts, though he doubted if even that trait would be enough to conquer the demons that lived in her mind.

  Chapter Five

  Mary awoke early the next morning, surprised that she’d slept soundly and without dreams. Perhaps the nameless terror was finally vanquished, and without it filling the empty caverns of her mind, her memories might be able to return.

  It was Sunday, the first day of the week, a day for beginnings. Maybe today she could begin to retrieve her past. Lying in the small bed with the sun filtering through the leaves of the big oak tree outside the window and touching her face, knowing that Cole was in a room down the hall, she felt ready. He made her feel safe and strong, as if she was able to absorb some of his courage.

  She showered in the hall bath, using his soap, inhaling his scent, standing naked where he stood naked, and it was almost as if he were there, sharing his strength with her. But other, uninvited, less soothing, thoughts of him kept intruding…thoughts of him holding her and kissing her the way he would have last night if she hadn’t panicked.

  She set the soap aside and let the water skim over her body, rinsing away the lather. Maybe the panic had been a good thing after all. She’d wanted him to kiss her, wanted desperately to feel his lips on hers. Her wanting had driven out all common sense, such as the fact that she was engaged to another man, that she didn’t know who she was, that Cole, who’d lived through his own personal hell and survived, could never be attracted to someone who was terrified of the world, even of the sounds of small animals in the night.

  She toweled off and resolved not to think about that but to go downstairs, make breakfast and search for her memories, try to find the life she once had.

  The kitchen was bright and open with a small window over the sink and a large bay window at the end where the table sat. Last night all that glass had been dark mirrors, reflecting back her own bleak spirit. This morning the windows revealed a forest of trees with sunlight dappling the leaves while birds and squirrels darted among them. A sassy cardinal perched on a limb and twisted his head as if peering in at her.

  The woods were beautiful and dense, an effective screen from the outside world.

  But they would also hide an intruder.

  Stop it! She turned away from the window and ordered herself to ignore such thoughts, to hang on to her positive mood.

  After she started the coffee, she found a skillet and put on some bacon then set the table. Delicious smells soon filled the kitchen, and she found herself humming as she searched for and found the ingredients to make biscuits. She couldn’t remember her name but she could remember how to make biscuits, how to ensure they would be light and flaky, what temperature to set the oven, the way they’d taste with hot butter. None of this made any sense.

  Unless you considered that biscuits were good memories.

  No matter how much Cole tried to reassure her that her fears were of the unknown, that the images of blood had been called up by Officer Townley’s description of the body, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her mind was blocking something so awful she didn’t want to remember it.

  “GOOD MORNING.”

  The deep voice jerked Mary out of her pleasant fog, and she whirled around, temporarily sunblind, to see the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway. The egg she’d been about to crack fell from her nerveless fingers.

  “Mary, it’s me!” Cole moved toward her.

  She drew a shaky hand across her forehead as her eyes adjusted. “I know,” she lied. “You just startled me. That’s all.”

  She grabbed a paper towel and stooped to clean up the egg that lay shattered on the floor. Cole squatted beside her, offering her another towel. His eyes were soft with sympathy and concern, and she hated that. Last night for a few moments he’d looked at her the way a man looks at a woman, and though she knew the futility of that avenue, she couldn’t help but compare—and regret—the difference.

  She stood, tossing the mess into the trash under the sink. “I really appreciate your letting me stay here,” she said, making an effort to keep her voice strong and cheerful. “I slept soundly last night and didn’t have nightmares. Probably because I feel safe here, I remember some more things.” Surely the last part would please him.

  “That’s wonderful, Mary. Tell me what else you remember.” Neither his voice nor his face revealed any expression.

  “Last night the sound of the dishwasher triggered something. This morning it was the smells of coffee brewing and bacon frying.” She turned her back to him and concentrated on beating the eggs with a wire whisk. “I recall waking up to those smells then lying in bed for a few minutes, listening to my mother and father talking in the kitchen. It gave me such a feeling of security.” She poured the eggs into the skillet and stirred. “I lived on a farm in an old house. We didn’t have a lot of money, and it was a big deal when we got that dishwasher. Dad gave it to mother for their fifteenth anniversary. He brought it home in the back of his pickup truck and it had a big red bow on top.”

  She lifted the skillet off the stove and turned around to spoon the eggs onto their plates.

  Cole smiled at her, igniting an answering smile inside her breast. “That’s great, Mary.” He hesitated. “But that’s probably not your name, is it?”

  “I still don’t know that.” She set the skillet in the sink and took the biscuits out of the oven.

  “Oh. How about your parents’ names?”

  She sighed. “Mom and Dad.”

  �
��I see.”

  She sank into a chair and added two spoons of sugar and a generous splash of cream to her coffee, stirred, then picked up her fork though she was no longer hungry. “That’s right. No helpful details. I can see their faces, I can hear their laughter and feel their love for each other and for me. Dad’s a tall man with dark hair and eyes. He works hard and sometimes he’s too serious, but Mom can always make him smile. She’s short and blond and totally dependent on him. We both are. He’s very strong. He takes care of us. He likes to say that he’ll do all the worrying while his two girls enjoy life.” She shook her head in dismay. “I know so much about them, but I don’t know their names or my name or the name of the town where we lived. I guess I still don’t know any more than I did yesterday.”

  “Yes, you do. This is a breakthrough. And none of it’s bad. You were so afraid it would be something terrible. Now you can stop worrying about that and maybe the rest will come faster.”

  Mary nodded and nibbled on a piece of bacon. The memories of home and family had a nostalgic hue, like faded, treasured photographs. Anything could have happened between then and the present. But she wasn’t going to admit that to Cole. She wasn’t going to do anything to change the way he was looking at her with delight and approval.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’re getting a lot of details. Names should come soon.” He drained the last of his coffee and set the cup on the table. “I could try to trace your ring. With a stone that size, it shouldn’t be too tough to find out where it came from.”

  She shivered. The room seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed over the sun.

  “I need to see if Pete will release your dress,” Cole continued, oblivious to her distress. “I’m sure he will since there’s no evidence a crime has been committed. Then we can check with the local bridal shops and see if anybody has a record of selling it.”

  Mary’s mouth went suddenly dry. She lifted her coffee cup with fingers that trembled so badly she was barely able to drink from it. The brew was hot and bittersweet on her tongue, and she focused on that, avoiding the images of the ring and of the wedding dress stained with the blood of someone she couldn’t remember. “Maybe he won’t release the dress. Just in case something might come up.”

  “He’ll have to. We can’t hold personal items if there’s no evidence of a crime.”

  “We?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘We can’t hold personal items.”’

  Cole grimaced. “Habit. I used to be a cop for a lot of years. Pete was my partner.” He rose from the table and walked over to pour another cup of coffee.

  “You used to be a policeman?” A shiver darted down her spine.

  His reply seemed ordinary enough. She supposed a lot of private investigators were former police officers. Yet she could tell from his tone that it wasn’t ordinary to him, nor was it ordinary to her. She wanted nothing to do with policemen.

  From the beginning, no matter how kind Officer Townley had been to her, she’d never felt she could trust him. The feeling was completely illogical and had to come from something in her past, some reason that compelled her to distrust and avoid policemen. Was this further evidence that she had committed a crime, perhaps murder?

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “I was with the Dallas Police Department for twelve years. You want some more coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” Apparently he didn’t want to talk about his years in uniform, and she didn’t want him to. What secrets lurked in both their pasts to cause such inexplicable reactions?

  He refilled her cup then sat down across from her again. “Since it’s Sunday, there’s not a lot we can do as far as the dress and the ring. Do you feel up to driving around the area where I ran into you? See if it jogs your memory?”

  She didn’t ever want to go back there, but she wasn’t going to admit it. “I stayed in that hotel near there for two days and that didn’t help.” She’d never ventured outside the hotel, had only left her room to go down to the coffee shop for meals, but she couldn’t admit that to Cole.

  “That was before your memory started returning. Could be that a familiar sight now would be the key to everything, like the familiar sounds last night and the smells this morning.”

  She stirred more sugar into her coffee, the spoon moving faster and faster, creating a dark whirlpool that invited her to plunge into its bottomless depths and escape.

  The liquid sloshed over the side of the cup, onto the table.

  “Oh!” She shot to her feet, grabbed her napkin and tried to blot up the mess. “I’m so clumsy this morning!”

  “It’s okay,” Cole soothed. “Don’t worry about it. Sit down and relax.”

  She fell into her chair in dismay. That sympathetic tone was back in his voice and on his face.

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” he assured her in that same voice.

  “Yes, we do. I need to. I want to.” She tilted her chin upward and concentrated on making her gaze steady as she met his head-on. The effort took all the strength she had and some she hadn’t known she possessed, but it was worth it. The look in Cole’s eyes changed to one of admiration.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we take a picture of you, scan it into my computer and print out some posters to put up in the buildings in the area? I know your picture was in every area newspaper and on every news broadcast, but there are people who don’t read papers or watch the news.”

  She swallowed hard, forcing down the No! that wanted to come out of her mouth, ignoring the strangling fingers of fear that wrapped around her throat. “Good idea,” she said.

  COLE DROVE his beloved T-bird along the winding streets of the Oak Lawn and Turtle Creek areas. The day was beautiful and he had the top down since it was still early enough that the sun didn’t feel like a blast furnace.

  Mary sat beside him with the wind tossing her moonlight hair in the bright sunlight. She seemed to be a part of the wind and sunlight, so fragile she could float away at any minute. He had to resist the urge to take her arm and hold her down, keep her with him. That would be as futile as trying to grasp a sunbeam. Mary wasn’t really with him anyway, and the small part that was could leave at any minute.

  Even so, he had to applaud her effort to be brave. He knew this project terrified her, though she smiled and talked while one hand clutched the door and the other was knotted in a fist in her lap, the bruises on her wrist a dark, ominous stain. He had some misgivings about this trip, but now that she’d started remembering, he wanted to be with her when the rest came back.

  And he’d wanted to get her out of the house.

  If he were completely honest with himself, he’d have to admit that the thought of spending the entire day alone in the house with her tantalized him to the point that he knew one or both of them needed to get out. Last night he’d come far too close to kissing her. He could tell she felt the same desire for him as he did for her, and that made the situation doubly appealing and doubly dangerous.

  She was too delicate. He had to be careful with her. He knew from experience that what she wanted from him was more than passion, more than holding each other through the night. She wanted safety, the one thing he couldn’t give.

  Getting out today, looking around and putting up posters was the best idea he’d been able to come up with.

  He pulled into the empty parking lot of an office building, one of the two she’d appeared between. “Here we are.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Here we are.” She flung open her door and slid out as if afraid she’d change her mind if she waited.

  Today she wore a pair of khaki shorts that revealed long, slim legs. Like her face and arms, her legs were translucent porcelain, untouched by the sun’s rays. He couldn’t help but wonder if that meant she’d always been fearful of the world, if she’d spent her time behind locked doors and drawn curtains.

  As they went around to the front of the building, he had to clench his fists to keep from takin
g her hand. She seemed to float rather than walk, the quality emphasizing the ethereal air that both attracted and frightened him, and, as in the car, he felt the need to hold on to her, to keep her from drifting away.

  He couldn’t. He knew that. He could only frustrate himself and then feel guilty because he’d been unable to help.

  “That’s where you first appeared,” he said, pointing to the grassy area between the two buildings.

  She looked up, her gaze scanning the structures as if she expected one of the store gargoyles to fly down and attack her. Finally she licked her lips, straightened her spine and walked determinedly between them.

  They checked every building on that block as well as every block that bordered it, went inside whenever possible, taped or nailed posters to any available surface, and always Mary shook her head.

  “I can’t,” she finally said, crossing her arms under her breasts and squinting into the sun as she turned to face him. “I don’t recognize anything. I know I should, but maybe I can’t because I don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, and was surprised to find that he wasn’t as disappointed as he should have been. Perhaps he, too, didn’t want to know about her past, a past that could include a crime and certainly included a fiancé. “Let’s go get some lunch and drive around the city, stop at a couple of the big malls. Maybe you’ll recognize a favorite restaurant or a store where you’ve shopped.”

  She nodded, her expression bleak and without hope.

  He chose a small Mexican restaurant in the area. It was after two o’clock, and only a few tables were occupied. Mary hesitated briefly at the door, her head moving slightly from one side to the other as if she was scanning the faces. The action was so short and her steps so sure as she entered the place that he’d have missed it if he hadn’t known what to watch for.