by Cindy Gerard
In addition to loving Grant, Emma Connelly also loved her children—all of them. Tara was no exception. Emma hadn’t always been in Michael’s corner.
Once she’d understood that Michael loved Tara, however, Emma had done what she could to soften Grant’s anger and resentment. She did what she could now. Even though Grant’s back was to the room, Michael felt the subtle waves of his anger. He’d expected no less.
With his feet braced for battle, Grant stared through the French doors that lead to the east terrace. Finally, dramatically, he turned to face Michael.
“I went to Ecuador, Michael. Many of us went—Daniel, Justin, Rafe, Seth—anyone who could manage it. We searched for days. Days, Michael, and came home convinced that no one could have survived that derailment.”
“I seriously doubt that anyone did.” Michael lifted his gaze from his cognac to Grant’s steel-gray eyes that demanded an explanation. Then he dropped his first bomb. “But I wasn’t on that train.”
He scanned the faces in the room during the long moment it took for them to digest that shocking piece of information.
“What do you mean you weren’t on the train? That’s why you went down there,” Grant insisted when he found his voice. “You were going to inspect… What was it?” He waved a hand through the air, searching his memory. “A new source of exotic wood. Something about a potential supply for Essential Designs.”
“That’s right.” Michael nodded. “The company had sent me down for that reason. I’d flown the first leg to Dallas then on to Quito. And I was booked for passage on that train.”
Michael looked at Tara. Upstairs, in Brandon’s bedroom, she’d hung back even after he’d pulled himself together. He’d wanted to wrap her in his arms again, kiss her until they were both breathless, make love to her until they were both senseless.
While he wanted all of those things, after their initial embrace, she’d withdrawn into silence. Even now, she watched him with a suspended sort of wonder and a wariness that would have angered him if he hadn’t understood what a shock this was for her.
Obviously she needed time to deal with her feelings for him. It was enough to deal with the fact that he was alive. He didn’t figure she was ready for the whole story of his disappearance, either, so he cushioned it as best as he could.
“I had an overnight layover in Quito. I had time to kill so I decided to see a little of the city.” He stared at his cognac, then at Tara. “Turned out it wasn’t such a good time to be out on my own. Essentially what happened was that I got mugged.”
When Tara closed her eyes, he was glad he left out the part about being so angry and hurt over their parting words at O’Hare that he’d gotten blind, stinking drunk. He hadn’t been sight-seeing. He’d been wallowing in self-pity, nursing his hurt from one dive to the other, effectively making himself easy pickings for the gutter rats that had attacked him.
“Oh, my dear child.” Emma’s eyes glimmered with tears. “You were hurt. Hurt terribly, weren’t you?”
“There’s no easy way to say this.” He looked away, then back. “They worked me over pretty good. Stole everything I had on me, including my ID. As close as I can piece it together, they must have driven me out of the city, dumped me in the jungle and left me for dead.”
Even Grant winced at the last statement.
“But you didn’t die.”
“No.” He met Grant’s eyes, gave him the benefit of the doubt that he saw more shock than disappointment. “I didn’t die.”
He tossed back the rest of his drink, let out a long breath.
“I know this is hard to swallow. The rest is even harder. Long story short, a man by the name of Vincente Santiago found me on the other side of the mountain range. He and his wife, Maria, nursed me back to health. Maria is a healer.”
Michael read the speculation on the faces in the room and knew that his voice had warmed as he talked of the two people who had not only saved his life, but had taken him in as one of their own. There would be time enough later to explain his special relationship with the Santiagos.
“You’ve been recovering all this time?”
Grant again. Michael thought grimly that he’d have made a good D.A.
“No. It was… I don’t know…maybe six months before I recovered physically from the injuries.”
“Six months? That was eighteen months ago. Why the hell didn’t you come back when you were well?” Grant had moved past stunned and was edging well into anger.
“Why didn’t you at least contact us? Tara was half out of her mind with grief. You had to know we were all worried!”
“Grant, if I could have contacted you, I would have. But the problem was I didn’t know.” He met each pair of eyes, lingered, at last, on Tara’s. “I didn’t know you were worried. I didn’t know anything. I took some pretty good shots to the head in the beating.”
He touched his fingers to the scar on his temple, unconscious of the gesture.
“When I finally came around, I didn’t know up from down. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, didn’t know where I’d come from. Didn’t know my own name.”
“Amnesia,” Ruby muttered. “Lord above.”
She marched with single-minded intent to the bar, uncorked a bottle and helped herself to a shot of her employer’s very old and very pricey brandy.
“Yeah, amnesia,” Michael echoed. “And you thought it only happened in the movies.” Hell, he’d thought it only happened in the movies.
“Two years. Two years, Michael? You expect us to believe you just wandered around down there for two years not knowing who you were?”
“Grant,” Emma admonished gently. “The boy has been through a harrowing ordeal. For goodness sake. Let him finish.”
Michael smiled a thank-you to Emma then addressed Grant.
“As I said, I was a good six months recovering, and learning Spanish,” he added with a tight smile. “The Santiagos spoke very little English at that time. The fact that I did was my only link to my identity. I figured I was American, but it didn’t narrow things down much.
“And I didn’t wander,” he added as Grant’s frown deepened. “The Santiagos took me in. I worked for them. And then I worked with them, as a partner in their lumber business.” There was much more to that story but Michael figured it could wait for another time.
“When…when did you remember?” Tara asked, her brows pinched together. She’d pulled her hands away from Emma’s and locked them tightly together in her lap.
“Two weeks ago.”
“Two weeks?” Grant’s tone and expression made it clear he was still at odds with the story. “What? You just suddenly woke up one morning and remembered you had another life?”
“Look, Mr. Connelly, I know this is hard to accept. Hell, I still have trouble sorting it all out.”
“Just take your time, dear.”
Michael smiled at Emma again, grateful for her support.
“What did prompt the return of your memory?” Tara asked.
“You,” he said without hesitation.
Her face drained to pale.
“You did,” he repeated. “You have to know that like the Kennedys or the Trumps, the Connellys are American royalty to the rest of the world. What you do, where you go makes the news—even the international news.
“I was in a Quito equivalent of a supermarket.” He paused, rocked, as he was always rocked when he thought of that day. “I was checking out and spotted this trashy tabloid.
“Your face—” He stopped again, drew a bracing breath. “Your face and Brandon’s were splattered all over the front page, along with the announcement of your engagement to John Parker. My picture was there, too—complete with the gory details of my death.”
“My God.” Emma rose shakily and joined Ruby by the sideboard. Ruby poured her a glass of brandy, refilled her own. “How horrible for you.”
“Horrible? Yes and no. I’ve got to tell you, it scared the hell out of me at first. The rush of me
mories it triggered was staggering. Everything just came slamming back—I apologize for the expression—like a train wreck.” Along with an excruciating pain in his head.
“I passed out cold. Must have been quite a sight,” he added with a slight lift of the corner of his mouth. “When I came to, I was laid out flat in the aisle along with the contents of three sacks of groceries, and I started to remember. Everything.”
He looked pointedly at Tara, knew by the expression on her face that she was thinking about their last conversation. If possible, her face grew even paler.
“I suspect that right now you’re all feeling something close to what I felt that day,” he continued. “It…it felt like I’d been hit by a two-by-four.”
He touched his fingers to his temple again. A sharp, intermittent pain that had become his recurrent friend stabbed through his head.
“Michael!” Tara shot to her feet, raced to his side and touched his arm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” He shook it off, made himself focus, smile for her. “Just a little reminder of the past two years.”
“A long two years,” Grant put in. He looked from Tara to Michael, appeared to be not altogether pleased that she’d rushed to his side. “I can’t tell you how sincerely glad we all are that you’re alive.”
“But,” Michael said, offering the opportunity for the other shoe to fall.
Emma looked pained and apologetic.
“But it’s been two years, Michael. Two years,” Grant restated for emphasis. “We’ve heard nothing. Nothing.” He paused dramatically for emphasis. “Life has gone on. Tara has moved on.”
Michael watched Tara while her father spoke. Despite what Grant maintained, Michael could see that she hadn’t moved anywhere. Not yet. And if he had anything to say about it, the only direction she was going to move was toward him.
He was back. And he was prepared to fight. For his wife. For his son. For his marriage. It wasn’t a battle he was prepared to start tonight, though, not with Grant Connelly present.
“With due respect, sir,” he began as he met the older man’s eyes. “I don’t think that’s a decision Tara’s made yet. And when she does, that decision will be between her and me.”
It was the deepest part of the night, the hour reserved for lovers. Moonlight danced across tall walls cloaked in ivory damask. Fine linen sheets tangled and slid to the foot of the bed in the second-floor bedroom of Lake Shore Manor where Tara Connelly Paige slept.
The sheer ecru silk of her gown twisted around her hips; a delicate sheen of perspiration misted her throat and her brow. The slender fingers of her right hand clutched a cool spindle of the brass headboard as she moaned in frustration, ached for release.
Her left hand lingered at her breast in an unconscious caress. She dreamed of her lover’s mouth there, suckling, adoring. She dreamed of Michael, his gray eyes smoky with desire, his broad shoulders blocking the moonlight, his strong arms caging her in as he braced himself above her.
She sighed his name, arched her back and rode with the wild and stunning pleasure that he gave and took and demanded. His lean hips pumped into hers, his body filled hers as he enticed her to go with him to that place where sensation ruled and passion promised to make her whole again, make her real again, as she hadn’t been real since he’d left her.
“Michael,” she whimpered and, in her sleep, ran her hand over her ribs, across her abdomen, down to the place that ached for him, throbbed for him. “Michael…”
She sat up straight in bed, wrenched out of sleep by her own cries. Her breath slogged out in serrated gasps. She looked wildly around the room.
It was not the apartment she had shared with Michael.
It was her room in Lake Shore Manor.
Where she’d slept. Alone. For two long years.
A dream.
It had only been a dream.
She collapsed to her back on the bed, threw an arm over her forehead and willed her heart to settle, her breath to steady. And then she lay there in the dark of night, in a silence disrupted only by her ragged breaths. Aching for him. Burning for him.
Michael wasn’t a dream. He was alive. She’d seen him tonight, talked to him, touched him. And right now she wanted him so badly she hurt.
She missed lying with him in his bed. Missed the length of him, the strength of him, the heat of his mouth, the stroke of his hands.
She didn’t have to miss him anymore.
Staring hopelessly at the ceiling, she trembled with the need to call him, to ask him to come to her. To make love to her.
The ache intensified to pain.
It would be so easy.
And so wrong.
The tears came then. Tears of relief that he lived. Tears of grief that she hadn’t let herself shed since the day, two years ago, when the news had arrived with its ghastly presumption of death. Tears for all they’d had, for all they’d lost.
Michael was alive and she was so glad. And yet the one thing he wanted couldn’t happen.
He’d made it clear. He was determined to pick up where they’d left off. She dragged her hands through her hair, drawing on her resolve. That couldn’t happen. She could not resume her life with him. She couldn’t go through the pain of loving him again. Loving Michael hurt too much. Loving Michael had always hurt too much.
She closed her eyes, rolled to her side and hugged her arms to her breasts. And then she hid in the night and clung to the one absolute that overshadowed his miraculous reappearance.
On this point she could not waiver. For reasons that only she could understand, she was going through with the divorce. She had to. She had to because she knew what no one else did: She was a fake. A fraud.
The image the media and even her family held of Tara Connelly as a headstrong, independent, gutsy and self-assured woman was a lie. A complete sham.
The real Tara Connelly was a wimp. She wasn’t strong enough to do much more than drift through life with her emotions tightly under wraps. She wasn’t equipped to do much more than heed her survival instincts that warned her to stay under the radar, to exist with as little involvement as possible. Which meant she wasn’t capable of surviving another attempt at loving Michael Paige.
And as she lay in the dark, fighting the want, denying the need, she was ashamed of the knowledge that the real Tara Connelly was too afraid to even try.
Three
The next morning Michael started his day waiting for Tara’s brother Brett at an affluent Lake Shore Drive condominium complex. He stood in the visitor’s parking lot at the address Brett had given him, leaning against the fender of a rented BMW.
Belmont Harbor spread out before him like a water-color of sun, surf and sails. Pricey pleasure crafts rocked in their moorings; silver-white sails dotted the relatively calm waters of the bay. He felt a million miles away from the lush jungles of Ecuador, even farther from the projects in the rough part of the city where he’d grown up, although the distance in miles was under ten.
“And how many miles do you have to go to get your wife back?” he asked under his breath and thought about everything that had happened last night.
Tara had changed. He didn’t think he was wrong about that. Seeing him out of the blue when he was supposed to be dead had been a hell of a shock for her. But there was something…something else that he’d sensed. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it. But he would. He knew Tara. Knew her better than anyone, including John Parker, could ever know her.
A car door slammed behind him. He turned to see Brett Connelly walking toward him, a smile of disbelief and welcome spreading across his face. Michael grasped the hand Brett extended then felt himself pulled into a back-pounding embrace.
“I’ll be damned.” Brett stood back, gave Michael an assessing once-over with smiling blue eyes. “It really is you. Son of a gun, I thought I’d seen the last of your ugly face. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I was wrong.”
Michael had always liked the Connellys’
youngest son. Both Brett and his twin brother, Drew, were outgoing and friendly. Brett had also had enough of the rebel in him to appreciate Michael’s wild streak.
“Well, just goes to show,” Michael said, grinning, “nothing’s ever over till it’s over.”
As he’d been leaving the Connellys’ last night, Emma had asked him where he was staying. He’d sensed that she’d been on the verge of inviting him to move out of his hotel and into Lake Shore Manor when Grant had thrown her a murderous glare.
“Call Brett in the morning,” Emma had said instead, deferring to her husband’s unspoken command. Then she’d written Brett’s phone number on a slip of paper and pressed it into his hand with an affectionate squeeze.
“Brett’s a married man now,” she’d said, beaming brightly. “And a new daddy. He and his wife, Elena, just moved into their new house. The last I knew they hadn’t yet sold or sublet their condo. It should accommodate you nicely until you’re more settled.”
Speaking of settled, it looked like life had done well by Brett. He looked good, really good, as he grinned at Michael part in disbelief, part in pleasure.
“If Mom hadn’t filled me in with a 6:00 a.m. phone call, I’d have flat-out keeled over when you called.”
“It’s a shock, I know.”
“The best kind. Come on.” With a hand on his shoulder, Brett steered Michael toward the front entrance of the building. “Let me show you the condo. If you like it, it’s yours.”
“I appreciate this, Brett.”
“That’s what family’s for—and you’ve always been family, even though it may not have seemed that way at times.”
Inexplicably touched by Brett’s warmth, Michael acknowledged his overture with a grin. “Okay, brother, fill me in on this new family of yours.”
Brett did, with a huge smile and a beaming pride that told Michael how happy he was.
“Now fill me in on John Parker,” Michael said after congratulating Brett on his good fortune. He knew nothing about Parker but what he’d read in the tabloids that had linked him to Tara. Sensationalized news stories were no substitute for Brett’s take on the situation.