Her Man To Remember

by Suzanne McMinn

  “No!”

  “Yes! Look at me, Leah! We were married. We’re still married. You’re not Leah Wells and you know it. Leah Wells doesn’t exist. I don’t know what happened that night. I don’t know why you can’t remember. But you know I’m telling you the truth. You remember being trapped underwater. Don’t you?”

  She turned her head toward him. Her gaze was lost and scared, but something flickered in her eyes, something tiny and barely noticeable, but it was there. She was listening.

  “I lost my wife in a car accident.” He kept going, trying his damnedest to slow down for her sake. “Her car went over a bridge, into the water. They never found her. They never found you. They told me you were dead, drowned, washed away in the storm. But I found you here, Leah. On Thunder Key. We spent our honeymoon here at the White Seas. You know you’ve been here before.”

  He could feel the shaking of her body. Her eyes—bright, shiny, confused—tore at him. What could he say? What could he do? He knew what he wanted to do—crush his mouth against hers, kiss her until she remembered him, until she couldn’t not remember him. Make her body know what her mind had blocked out.

  Close. She was so close. Her lips were a breath away. He could feel her heart pounding.

  “You know you’ve been here before,” he said. “Somewhere deep inside, you know you’ve been here. And you know that you know me. You said you felt it, every time you looked at me. We were lovers, Leah. Husband and wife. We had a life together. I gave you that bracelet you’re wearing on our honeymoon—right here at the White Seas. I’m not crazy. You have to believe me.”

  She wasn’t struggling now, just staring at him, and sudden awareness crackled between them. He knew all the desire he felt for her had to be burning in his eyes. And in her eyes—a flare of something. Desperation, and it matched his own. She was his wife, and somewhere inside, she knew it. No way was he giving up.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she whispered, raw.

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “You know this is true. You know you feel this connection between us.”

  He watched his words register in her eyes, and he couldn’t stop himself from reaching for what he’d wanted for so long. He claimed her mouth, sweeping his tongue inside at the immediate, shocked parting of her lips. He tasted her teeth, her tongue, her amazing sweet familiarity. He felt alive, alive like he hadn’t felt in eighteen horrible months. And happy. For one incredible heartbeat, he was happy. God, she was kissing him back, and nothing in his life had ever been sweeter or more agonizing.

  A weight of emotion filled his chest. Desire hit him with a rush, low in his gut. But with what little lucidity he had left, he sensed her stiffen, change, felt the frantic push of her hand against his chest.

  “No, oh, my God,” she breathed against his mouth, and tore away, scrambling to her feet.

  “Leah, wait.” He went after her. She pivoted toward him, hugging her arms to her body, a fragile form silhouetted against the sea. Staring at him as if she was scared to death of him.

  She could have no idea how she was killing him. He wanted to spill his guts right here, right now, but that would only frighten her more. He wanted to hold her, kiss her again, bury himself inside her. He wanted a lot of things he couldn’t have.

  “Come inside with me,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “We need to talk, Leah.”

  The sun felt cold on his face in spite of the growing warmth of the day. She looked so scared.

  “I can’t. I need time.”

  “You’re out of time. We’re out of time. I don’t know what happened the night your car went over the bridge, Leah, but if I’ve found you, there’s a chance someone else has found you, too. Those phone calls, the man watching you, taking pictures—it could be connected to the past, to the night you disappeared.”

  “It was an accident. The car going over the bridge was an accident. You said so yourself.” But even as she spoke the words, he could hear the doubt in her own voice, the fear.

  “I can take you to see doctors who can help you. Come to New York with me—”

  Her eyes sparked. “No.”

  “Fine. Then we won’t go to New York. There are doctors in Miami.”

  “No.”

  Her thick, chin-length hair tangled across her cheeks. Vaguely he was aware of other people on the beach now. People from the hotel. Watching them. They were creating a scene, beginning to attract attention.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know who to trust, what to believe.”

  “Trust me. Believe me.”

  “You lied to me!”

  Roman reached in his back pocket, pulled out his wallet. He opened it, flipped past his driver’s license, to the one photo it contained.

  He gave it to Leah.

  Leah forgot to breathe. She could barely think. Her mind rioted with so many different emotions, she was lost in the tangled mess of them.

  The small, wallet-size photograph took her breath away. The image was of a man in a suit, Roman, and a woman, her eyes shining up at him, in a wedding dress. The woman was a stranger to her eyes—and yet she knew without a doubt that the woman was her.

  She had been his wife. She had stood beside him in a wedding gown, spoken vows.

  She was Leah Bradshaw.

  He was telling the truth about that at least. All this time he had been grieving for her—and she was alive, here on Thunder Key. It blew her mind.

  So many things he’d said over the past few days about his wife raced through her mind. She was that wife he’d spoken about. It felt impossible to her. And yet, there she was, in this photograph. And something, somewhere inside her had known she knew him.

  That scared her the most. She didn’t have to believe him to know he was telling the truth. Something inside her knew it was true. And when he’d kissed her…

  She had known then, too. Oh, God, she was his wife. But wrapping her head around that fact left her reeling.

  “You could be in danger, Leah. I want you away from here. If you don’t want to go to New York, we’ll go somewhere else. Until we’re sure you’re safe.”

  “I have a life here.” No. It was all she could think—no. This was her home, and the past eighteen months were all she could remember. “I have a job. I’m not leaving Thunder Key with you.” How could she go anywhere with this stranger? She was still reeling at the knowledge that she had been his wife. Her whole world was tumbling into chaos. Thunder Key was all she had to hold on to.

  “Then you stay here with me, at the White Seas,” he said.

  “No,” Leah said immediately, almost violently. “The bar is my home. I’m not leaving my home.” She paused a moment. “It’s all I know.”

  Rage and grief welled up in Roman. This was his wife, and she was afraid to be with him. It hurt like hell, but he had to face it. It was how she felt. The bar had been her sanctuary for eighteen months. But it might not be safe now. And she had to face that.

  “Your home isn’t safe,” he said grimly. “Look, if—” He couldn’t believe what he had to say next. “If you’re afraid I’m going to kiss you, or anything else, you don’t have to be. I lost my head, I admit it. I kissed you. You’re my wife. We’ve kissed, hell, a thousand times. We’ve made love. Leah, I just want to keep you safe. You don’t have to be afraid of me. I give you my word, what just happened—” That kiss. “It won’t happen again.”

  She said nothing. She didn’t believe him, didn’t trust him, still.

  “Leah, I swear to you that the only thing I’ve lied about is who we were to each other. We need to find out what’s going on, who’s watching you and why. The apartment isn’t safe now.”

  “Then I’ll go to Marian’s,” she suggested. “Or Shanna’s or Viv’s.”

  He didn’t know who Viv was, but he didn’t stop to ask. “And put them in danger?”

  Her eyes widened. He realized she hadn’t gotten that far in her thinking.

  “Then you can stay at the bar
,” she said. “There’s a cot in Morrie’s office—”

  “I need to be with you, Leah, not in another room, on another floor. I don’t want you alone, at all, until we know what’s going on. At the bar there are people coming and going, late at night. It’s isolated. The hotel is safer.”

  “You don’t know that.” But there was doubt in her eyes, and a flash of fear. Of him? Or of herself? She’d responded when he’d kissed her, whether she would admit that or not. A violent, almost unstoppable explosion of need—on both their parts.

  Was that the real reason she didn’t want to stay with him? Was she afraid of how much he wanted her—or of how much she wanted him?

  “You know as well as I do that the apartment isn’t safe,” he said. “Someone’s already broken in, and they might not be finished. At the hotel, there’s security around the clock. It’s the best choice, Leah, and you know it.”

  He watched the struggle in her eyes. She looked exhausted and fragile, and he wanted nothing more than to wrap her in his arms and keep her safe forever.

  Slowly she took a breath, squared her slender shoulders. “All right,” she said. “I’ll stay with you. For now.”

  The bungalow was decorated in what the hotel called “upscale Cuban” style, colorful, tasteful and intimately designed. They walked past the king-size bed, the huge mound of pillows partially hidden by flowing mosquito netting reminding him that once they’d shared that secret place together. Made love. Right here in this very room.

  Don’t go there, Roman. He shut the memories down.

  “You said you spent your honeymoon at the White Seas.” Her voice sounded strained, odd. He could actually feel her anger, pain, radiating in the close quarters.

  His gut clenched. “We stayed here for a week,” he said. “You remembered something…when we stood in the pathway outside.”

  “I remembered the Spanish lime. The scent of it.” She looked out at the beach view from the garden doors, then back at him.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” he said. “Surely there are things you want to know—about yourself, about us.”

  A long beat passed. Maybe she wasn’t ready. Maybe he was a fool to think she’d ever be ready. He was a fool to hope. And yet he couldn’t stop hoping.

  Maybe the pieces of information he could provide would jog something in her mind.

  “How long were we married?” she asked finally.

  “Six months.”

  “We lived in New York?”

  “Yes. Manhattan. We have—had—an apartment across from Central Park. You designed clothing for a specialty boutique. You were part of an artist co-op.”

  She walked ahead of him, toward the sitting area. “I knew I was an artist, that I designed clothes. I wanted to design jewelry, too.” She stopped in front of the garden doors, looked back at him. “I remember the odd detail without knowing why. I know that I’m a horrible cook. I know I love cats but I’m allergic.”

  She remembered those tidbits, odd details as she called them, but she didn’t remember him.

  He shoved down the pain. “I was amazed to find you running a bar and grill. You were always trying to cook, but you burned everything. You would get distracted, run off and do something else and forget supper. You were always impulsive like that. Then you’d try to sneak in takeout.”

  “You said you had a lot of regrets about your marriage.”

  Your marriage. Like it was all his, not hers.

  “Yes.” His heart slammed, painfully. “Everything I told you about our marriage was the truth.”

  She pulled out a chair, sat at the table. She placed the photograph he’d given her on the table, folded her hands in her lap and stared straight at him, looked scared, brittle.

  “Tell me,” she said, “about me.”

  He sat across from her. “You’re Leah Bradshaw. You were Leah Conner when we met. You’re twenty-seven years old. Your birthday is April thirteenth. We were married on August thirteenth. You loved the number thirteen—said it was your lucky number.” There was a sharp flare in her eyes for a moment, then her gaze shuttered again.

  “Leah Conner.” She repeated the name as if it felt uncomfortable on her tongue. “Where did we meet?”

  “In the park. You were running. I was a runner, too. You would sit down afterward on a bench and watch the horse-drawn carriages. You loved the flowers in their manes. You loved to just…watch them. It was a small, everyday thing that I was so used to, I never noticed. But you watched the horses every day as if for the first time. You noticed all the little things, all the time. One day I sat down beside you and we started talking. And that was it. We were married six weeks later.” He had been completely, off-his-rocker taken with her from the moment they’d met.

  “Did we have a big wedding?” She gazed down at the photo now as if trying to see into the mind of the woman pictured there, the woman she’d once been.

  “No. It was small. In the park. Just my family, and a few of your friends from the artist co-op. One of the other artists, Nikki Bates, was your maid of honor. She was your roommate before we got married. You shared a little flat with her in Chelsea.” He watched for any flicker of recognition at her friend’s name, but saw none.

  “What about my family?”

  “You said you had no family. You told me your parents had died when you were a child. You were raised in a series of foster homes.”

  She was silent.

  He wanted to touch her so badly, but he knew she didn’t want the physical contact with him and truthfully, he couldn’t bear it, either. It only made him want more of what he couldn’t have.

  “Where was I from?” she asked. “Before New York?”

  “You told me you came from a small town in Virginia near the beach.”

  “Do you have more pictures?”

  “In New York.”

  She was quiet again, staring down at the one photo she held.

  “Let’s just get this over with,” she said suddenly. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”

  Let’s just get this over with.

  Fine. They’d get this the hell over with. “Then we have to start with the night your car went over the bridge,” he said as if she hadn’t just twisted the knife already killing him. “This is going to mean seeing a doctor whether you want to or not, Leah. If you want to get this over with, that is.” Her face tensed, but she didn’t protest. “And we’re going to have to contact the police. Your apartment was broken into.”

  She looked pale, fragile, but he knew she was strong, always had been. “I don’t remember much…from that night,” she began. “I remember the water. I didn’t know—” Her brow furrowed, and despair flickered across her face. “You said your wife—”

  “You.”

  She seemed to swallow thickly. “I… It was a car accident,” she corrected. “The car went into a river.”

  Still, she spoke as if the accident had happened to someone else, not her.

  “Your car went over a bridge,” he clarified.

  “How? Were there other cars involved? Some sort of pileup?”

  He realized, despite her reluctance, that she was desperate for information. She’d spent eighteen months trapped in a mystery. He wished he had more answers for her.

  “There were no other cars involved, as far as anyone knew. There were no witnesses to the accident. It was late, stormy, and the visibility was low on the roads that night. The next day someone reported seeing the broken railing, and they found your car in the river. You were just gone, completely gone. They finally convinced me you’d been swept away in the storm. They convinced me you were dead.”

  She said nothing, and he yearned again to reach out to her. But that would be a mistake.

  “Where was I going?” she asked.

  You were leaving me. With divorce papers.

  “I was working late,” he said instead. This was true, of course. “I don’t know where you were going. Tell me what the first thing is
you’re sure of that you remember.”

  “Running. I was running along the highway. I was soaked, but it was raining. I don’t think I realized then that I’d been in the river. I didn’t know how I got wet. Maybe it had just been the rain. But later—”

  “What happened later?”

  “Nightmares.”

  He wanted to know more about her nightmares, but she shuddered when she spoke. Her hands were on the tabletop now, and she twisted her fingers together. He could see her knuckles whitening on her unbandaged hand.

  “You told me you came to Thunder Key on a bus,” he probed.

  “Not all the way. I hitched a ride with a trucker.”

  She’d hitched. The risk in that hit him full in the chest. She’d dragged herself, somehow, out of the wreckage of her drowning car, memory destroyed, and climbed into a rig with a stranger.

  “You remembered your name,” he prodded, gut tight. Focus, he had to focus. “You must have remembered Thunder Key.”

  “I didn’t know why I remembered Thunder Key. I just knew it was where I wanted to go. I knew my name was Leah because of the bracelet. That’s all. I didn’t know my last name.”

  “Where did you get Wells?”

  “A road sign.” She rubbed her temple as if her head ached. “That night—it was like a nightmare. Just another nightmare. Sometimes it’s hard to know how much of it was real. I remember the rain, and being so frightened.”

  “I know this is hard, Leah, but I need you to tell me about your nightmares. Maybe we can put it together, figure it out.”

  “Do you think I’ve never tried?” she said, and her voice cracked. “In the beginning, I couldn’t help but try because the nightmares came so often.” She stopped, caught her breath. He could hear the strain in her voice. “Then I learned to stop them. As much as I could, I stopped the dreams. I had no choice—the panic attacks—I had to get control of them, and the only way was to stop trying to remember.”

  She stood suddenly, paced away from him. Instinctively he rose, wanting to go after her, comfort her, barely resisting the hellish urge to hold her. He stopped in the middle of the room, watching her desperate form silhouetted against the garden doors.