by Serena Bell
And there was that look Trina had given him. Not one look, actually—a whole series, like she was wrestling with big emotions and, more to the point, like he should do something about it.
The first time that expression had crossed her face, something had taken a dive in the pit of his stomach. The last time a woman had looked at him with that much disappointment, it had been Clara’s late mother. It was the kind of look you only gave someone you were involved with. Which would explain so much else—Trina’s presence with Phoebe at the airport, her beautifully lettered and intricately drawn WELCOME HOME, HUNTER sign, the fact that she’d been so painfully quiet on the way home.
It would also explain the way she’d snuck looks at him throughout dinner, as if trying to figure him out, while he’d listened quietly to the girls’ chatter, saying as little as possible and desperately trying to piece together the puzzle of his own mind. There must have been two battles in a small village in the north, and somehow he must have combined them in his head to make one, so that what he remembered as the “before” of his injury had actually happened at some point in a past deployment.
And if that was true—it was quite possible he didn’t remember anything from the whole most recent deployment, or the weeks immediately preceding it.
Jesus.
How much time had he lost? How much of his life? How much of himself? God, that was disturbing to think about. He’d always thought of amnesia as waking up and not knowing who you were. He knew who he was—
Or…
He knew who he’d been, more than a year ago…
But since then, what had happened to him?
Obviously, something had happened between him and Trina. Something that had made him willing to leave his daughter and house in her care. That had put that look on her face, as if he owed her an explanation.
What had he done? He’d been so damn careful, since Dee, not to lead anyone on. Not to create expectations he couldn’t meet.
“Hunter?”
She was behind him, in the doorway.
He wheeled to see her standing there, looking small and scared. Her blue eyes big in her heart-shaped face, the simple straight blond hair making her look much younger than he knew she was.
There was something painful and intimate about her standing there, in the doorway of his bedroom, as if she belonged there, as if she’d stood there many times before.
“I know you need time. I don’t want to push. I just— When you left—”
He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff. That if she kept talking, he would plunge over it.
“You said—”
But he didn’t want to know what he’d said. He didn’t want to know what he’d promised or what she expected. He didn’t want to know anything at all. If she wasn’t a stranger to him, she was the very next best thing, and he didn’t want her confessions or her fear, the open rawness of her expression. He wanted her to close herself up and take herself away, because he was not who she thought he was. He didn’t know that man, the one she thought she knew.
He was someone else.
“I guess I just wondered. If you thought it still could be true.” She looked like she might be trying not to cry, and he cursed his lost self for whatever expectations he’d set up in her.
There was nothing for it but the truth now.
“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember what I said, or what we did—”
He took a deep breath.
“I don’t remember any of it.”
Love stories you’ll never forget
By authors you’ll always remember
eOriginal Romance from Random House
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