by Gayle Wilson
But the dark glasses were back in place, as if protecting his eyes from the glare of the morning sun. For some unfathomable reason, Abby was relieved to see them. She recognized how contradictory her relief was. Their black opaqueness had bothered her before, but last night, without them, he had once more been Nick. He had seemed far too much like the totally confident man she had fallen in love with.
“Maggie?” he questioned, his head turning toward the door.
Reflex action, Abby supposed, since the glasses were focused not on her, but a little to the left. That hurt. The pain of it ached in a place where she didn’t want to hurt. Somewhere within her memories of his strength. His masculine surety. Of the cockiness she had once claimed to despise.
She realized that she didn’t want that sightless uncertainty to find a place within her memories of Nick. Of what they had briefly had together. She didn’t want it there for his sake, and selfishly, not for hers either. Yet she despised the part of her that felt that way about his blindness.
“It’s Abby Sterling,” she said, forcing her reluctant feet to move across the room to where he was sitting. He rose at once, still facing the door. He was turned toward her advance, but his head didn’t follow her movement. It did lift slightly when she spoke again, standing next to him now, beside the desk.
“Rob wants to talk to you. On the phone,” she said.
While she waited for his response, she reexamined the scar at his temple, made more prominent by the glare of the light from the tall windows, and she realized that she had been right before. The temple piece of the glasses bisected it, serving to camouflage some of the damage.
“About last night?” he asked.
She nodded and then mentally kicked herself. How many times was she going to do that before she remembered? “Yes.”
He held out his left hand, palm up, and she laid the phone in it. “I’ll wait downstairs,” she said. “Just yell when you’re through. There are a couple of things I need to mention to him before you hang up. Things I forgot to tell him.”
She was babbling. Nervous at being this close to him. She could hear the tension in her own voice, in the toorapid stream of words. She assumed he could hear it, too.
“Tell him now. Then you won’t have to come back up,” he suggested, holding the receiver out to her.
“I’ll have to come back to get the phone anyway.”
“Something you don’t want me to hear, Sterling?” he asked. He sounded amused.
“No,” she denied.
She began to turn away, fully intending to go downstairs while he talked to her supervisor, despite his demand that she say whatever she needed to say to Rob in front of him. Before she could make her escape, however, Nick grabbed her.
The movement was sudden and totally unexpected. His fingers brushed quickly over her shoulder, then down her arm to fasten like a vise around her wrist. At the same time, he brought the phone he held in his other hand up to his ear
She twisted, struggling to free her arm from his hold. Her efforts had no effect on those iron fingers.
“Deandro,” he said into the mouthpiece, ignoring her.
Abby could hear Rob’s voice, like an insect hum through the wires, but she couldn’t distinguish words.
“That’s about it,” Nick said after he had listened to the captain’s low voice for a few seconds.
Was he agreeing with what she’d told Rob? Abby wondered suddenly. A little of the guilty tightness eased in her chest. She looked down at Nick’s hand while he continued to listen.
Her wrist looked incredibly thin, fragile almost, under the controlling pressure of his strong, dark fingers. She had stopped struggling against his grip, but he hadn’t loosened it. She knew she would have another bruise to match the one that had already formed on her shoulder.
She had examined that in the bathroom mirror this morning. She stood in front of the glass after her bath, watching as her forefinger carefully touched the blue discolorations his hand had made. She thought she could trace the outline of each individual finger, clearly marked on her skin. And she knew that eventually, after this, she would also be able to see those same marks on her wrist.
That was surprising, because what she remembered most from before was Nick’s gentleness. Big hands that were incredibly tender, drifting knowingly over her body. Touching. Caressing. Never leaving a sign of their undeniable power on her skin. Leaving nothing behind except the passion they had aroused.
“Sounds good to me,” Nick said to Rob.
Her eyes lifted again to his face. He was still turned toward her, and now the dark lenses were fixed on her eyes. Her heart skipped a beat before she realized that was simply a trick of her imagination. Or an accident.
“Nothing’s surfaced. Some recurring dreams. Things I know I should remember,” Nick went on. “But everything’s gone when I wake up. Almost everything,” he amended.
The black lenses hadn’t released her. Neither had his fingers. She realized suddenly that Nick had wanted her to hear this. He didn’t care about what she had to say to Rob He had stopped her because he wanted her to hear what he was saying right now. Everything’s gone when I wake up. Almost everything.
“Sterling wants to talk to you again,” he said.
She wasn’t prepared, because she had been lost in her memories. For so long they had been all she had. Now Nick was touching her again. Not the way he had before. Not anything like it had been before.
But then, Nick Deandro wasn’t the man he had been before, of course. That was one of the things that had made her afraid to come out here, she now understood She had been afraid of her inability to love the man Nick had become.
He held the phone out to her, and slowly her hand closed over it. His fingers loosened abruptly from around her wrist at the same time hers fastened over the receiver.
Permission to leave? If so, she didn’t take it Nick’s hand fell to his side, seemingly relaxed, but still she didn’t move. Except to lift the phone to her ear.
“Rob,” she said softly.
“You got something to tell me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said Nothing else. The silence stretched, seeming to reverberate with tension along the line.
“But you can’t do it now?” Rob guessed.
“That’s right,” Abby agreed.
“He remember something, Abby?”
She hesitated. Thinking about what Nick had said last night . . You still smell the same. And what he had just said about almost everything disappearing after the dreams Almost everything.
“I think maybe you’re correct,” she said finally
“About you?”
“That’s about it. The other thing wasn’t important”
“Good work,” Rob said softly, but she could hear the elation in his voice.
“Not much,” she warned.
Rob was very bright. Apparently he was reading her cryptic messages easily. She hoped Nick wasn’t having as much success. His attention was still focused on her, however, and she realized that she hadn’t said anything to Rob that might be construed as the additional information she had claimed she needed to give him. She had to come up with something fast, and she settled on making a suggestion.
“I think,” she said hesitantly, “if it’s okay with you, I’ll ask the sheriff to come out here when you send the guys to check the alarms. We want to be sure there’s nothing wrong with our connection to his office.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rob said. “You’re still in charge, Abby. I want you to know that I have every confidence in you. In the job you’re doing.”
She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved by that or not. She wasn’t even sure she agreed with it. “Thanks, Rob,” she said softly. “I’ll be in touch later on,” she added, and then she lowered the phone and clicked the off button on the receiver.
“Is that all you wanted to tell him?” Nick asked. His gaze still seemed to be unerringly directed at her face.
“
Yes,” she said. Nodding again. Another bad habit. Like remembering everything that had ever happened between them each time she was around him. “I said it wasn’t anything important.”
“Just an opportunity to call on the friendly local law”
There was something in his voice that didn’t fit the situation, but he didn’t elaborate. Maybe the comment was simply a gibe at her failure to call the sheriff last night until Nick had reminded her that was what she should be doing. The smartest thing to do in the situation.
“I just thought we needed his cooperation in seeing that the alarms work,” she said. “Besides, you’re the one who wanted me to call him last night.”
“It made sense at the time.”
“I guess more sense than what I wanted to do,” she acknowledged softly. Guilt again. Nothing she had done since she’d been on this assignment had been handled with the professionalism she expected from herself. And she knew why.
“I’m not criticizing, Sterling,” Nick said. “You wanted to know who was in the house. You wanted to go downstairs and find out. I probably would have wanted to do the same thing.”
“But that wasn’t my job.” Her tone was flat. She had made the wrong decision about how to handle the threat last night. And maybe, she admitted for the first time, maybe she had even forgotten to turn on the alarm.
All of which made her appear pretty damned incompetent, she supposed. So she made the offer she had thought about making to her superior. “You want me to ask Rob to send somebody else out here in my place?”
She had to push the question out. Had to make herself offer to be replaced on an assignment, something she’d never done in her professional life. But in all fairness, it was Nick’s right to decide who he wanted protecting him. It was his life at stake. As he had reminded her, he had ample cause to know that getting shot wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of fun.
She knew, however, that she could do this. She could keep him safe. She would never have accepted this assignment, despite her need to see him again, the need to sort out all her feelings about what had happened to him, if she hadn’t felt she could protect Nick Deandro as well as any other cop in the unit.
But after what had happened, he had every right to have lost confidence in her abilities. So did Rob. She had expected them to and had been surprised when neither of them had mentioned having her relieved.
“I didn’t ask for a replacement, Sterling,” he said.
“Because I was standing here?” she suggested.
“You were standing here because I wanted you to be. If I had intended to get you thrown off this assignment, I wouldn’t have wanted you around while I talked to Rob.”
“I thought that was because of…something else.”
“Like what?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Maybe that you wanted me to know you remember things.”
He laughed, nothing but a breath of sound. “Not things. Sometimes I remember…images, I guess. Just from the dreams, maybe. They’re there for a few seconds, still in my head when I wake up. I never know what they mean. And they’re nothing important. Nothing that’s helpful to the department.”
“Is that what you meant last night?” she asked.
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “About identifying you by the way you smell?” he asked.
“I wasn’t wearing any perfume last night”
“Its scent was there all the same. In your hair. Maybe in your clothing. Still the same.”
The last phrase had been added after a pause, after she thought he was through with the explanation. And that was the crux of it, of course. The same as when?
“The same?” she whispered.
“I keep thinking I should remember you,” Nick said instead of clarifying. “That there’s something…”
She waited, wanting him to remember. As she had wanted him to remember all along. Somewhere deep inside she had always thought that he should have remembered her. Even if he had forgotten the rest. All these months she had fought the urge to think that if he had really cared about her, he would remember.
It was illogical. Irrational even, given what the doctors had told Rob and what she had read. As if she thought Nick could pick and choose what he would recall. As if she believed he didn’t want desperately to remember everything so he could help put away the people who had done this to him.
But still, she acknowledged, somewhere inside she had always thought that if he had truly loved her, he would eventually remember. As if it was a test of some kind. That expectation was totally and completely unfair. And it was born, she also understood, of loss. And of loneliness.
“Something I ought to remember,” he finished, his voice, like the laughter, now only a breath of sound.
She could see the small furrow that had formed between his dark brows. It creased the area above the bridge of his nose, above the glasses.
“It’ll come,” she said softly. The same stupid comfort Rob had offered him. The patronizing assurance she had belittled.
Nick laughed again, louder this time, but his tone was dark and still without amusement. “That’s what they keep telling me, Sterling About all of it.”
“You don’t believe them anymore.”
She shouldn’t have spoken the sudden realization aloud. It was too much like admitting to him that no one else believed it either. She should be comforting. Reassuring. And instead she was probably making things worse.
“Would you?” he asked. “After all this time?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
He nodded, the movement slow, as if he were thinking about it. Deciding. He didn’t say anything else, and finally he turned his face to the windows, looking into the light that should have been too bright to be comfortable. Should have been, and for him was not.
Her eyes fell, determinedly fighting the emotions that aroused. Fighting pity for him. Fighting rage that so much had changed for the man he had been. Fighting her own loneliness.
For the first time she noticed what covered the surface of the desk he had been sitting in front of when she entered the room. “What’s all this?” she asked softly.
The top of the desk was empty expect for hundreds of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which lay in small piles around the corners of its surface. Some of those pieces had been fitted together. Most were the straight-edged ones. The perimeter of the puzzle’s picture had almost been completed, and nearly every piece of the open square formed by the outer, edged pieces had been filled in. Of course, there were hundreds of other pieces from the uncompleted middle of the puzzle that still remained unconnected. Those were the ones piled around the corners of the desk.
“This is almost two months’ work,” Nick said, his voice amused. His fingers had found one of the scattered pieces and were carefully tracing around its small curves and protrusions.
“It took you two months to do this?” she asked, shocked.
Again he nodded, and his lips tilted. His fingers were still moving over the small bit of cardboard. “But I didn’t have much else to do. Mickey mentioned that there were several of these in a closet downstairs. He did a couple, working on them at night. I hadn’t done one in years. Couldn’t imagine wanting to, but finally, out of boredom, I guess, I asked him to lay this one out on the desk. And to put the pieces face up for me.”
Abby looked down at the puzzle again. Her eyes burned, hot tears stinging behind her determined examination of the pieces. She blinked them away by pretending to herself that she needed to see the colors. The finished picture would be flowers of some kind, she thought It was hard to tell because the box these scattered pieces had come out of was nowhere in sight.
“I can do that now,” Nick said. “The surface of the front is smoother than the other. I can distinguish between them.”
Unbelievably, there was a hint of pride in that small claim. She didn’t know what to say to him. Or why he had told her. “That’s nice,” she said softly.
Then, in t
he sudden frozen silence that followed that inane comment, she wished she had bitten out her tongue instead. God, why hadn’t she just kept her mouth shut? Saying nothing would have been far better than that. Rob’s stupid platitudes again.
Suddenly Nick’s hand was on her arm. She raised her eyes from the puzzle to find he was looking at her. Except…Except she knew that he wasn’t. He couldn’t be.
He had turned slightly so he was facing her, his fingers wrapped around her upper arm. There was no pressure this time. Not an unpleasant one, anyway. His thumb caressed. Moving up and then down against the softness of her sweater. She wanted it moving over her skin. As it had done before. Before all this.
“Abby,” he said softly.
It was the first time he’d called her by her first name since she had been here, and when he said it, all the memories imploded. All the times he had whispered her name, his lips moving then against her hair. Or against her forehead or her throat. Her breast. Her name gasped into the heated darkness as his hips arched into and then retreated above hers.
The pressure of his fingers increased minutely. No force, but there was no doubt that they were drawing her toward him. His head lowered, and the light from the windows they were standing beside suddenly glinted off the dark glasses. Interrupting the spell. Allowing her to think again.
Nick was going to kiss her. She knew that was his intent. And maybe, if he did, it might be the catalyst that would break through whatever barriers were preventing him from remembering. She wanted him to remember. To remember her. She had wanted it for months. Had even dreamed about it. Dreamed about him.
I know all about the treachery of dreams, Nick, she thought. About the things you remember in them. All about those memories, and I know how much they hurt.
She was still watching his mouth lower inexorably to hers. Moving in slow motion, it seemed. Time had stopped, but her mind was racing.