A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “I recognize it.”

  Her lips, soft and full enough to warrant a second look from any man worthy of the term, parted a breath, then firmed. She turned to the file folder she’d carried in with her and looked at it as she pulled a pen from her lapel pocket. Her thick hair slid down her cheek.

  “I see.”

  He closed his hand over her arm, startling them both. “No, I don’t think you do. I’ve smelled that perfume before. What is it?”

  She looked pointedly at his hand around her arm and he released her. Reluctantly.

  “It’s a custom blend,” she said crisply. “But I’m sure there are similar elements in many fragrances, which is probably what your senses are picking up on.” , Sawyer stared at her. She could say whatever she wanted in her crisp, professional, cool voice. Perhaps there was even some truth in her statement. How was he to know? He only knew that the scent of her fragrance plucked some chord deep within him.

  It was the first familiar thing since he’d woken up in that damned hospital bed.

  She held her gold pen in her slender hand, turning it over and over between her fingers. Her nails were short and unpainted. Practical for her profession, he supposed. Then he had a sudden vision of those long, cool fingers running over him.

  Those hands were on his shoulders now, nudging him back onto the exam table. “Captain? Are you feeling dizzy?”

  “No,” he lied, catching her wrists between his fingers and receiving another frigid look, which he ignored. He thought perhaps he was used to ignoring people’s frigid looks. It wasn’t a comforting thought; made him wonder just what kind of man he was.

  He looked down at her slender wrists. Her skin was pale and soft compared to his darker, tanned hands. He waited for that vision to come again, then wanted to curse when it didn’t. He looked up to find her eyes studying him warily. “Have we met?”

  Rebecca’s heart stopped. Oh, God, this was worse than anything she’d ever dreamed. Any nightmare she’d ever suffered.

  She twisted her hands, and he released his hold on her wrists. She barely kept herself from rubbing them. Not because he’d hurt her, but to stop the warm sensation of his touch that lingered. “No,” she stated flatly.

  His dark blue eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to see into her mind. Into her lie.

  She turned away and snatched up the pen she’d dropped. “I need some medical information,” she said evenly, “in addition to what you’ve brought.”

  He made a rough sound and Rebecca dared a look at him, silently chastising herself for letting her emotions get in the way of her profession. “I’m sorry,” she said, not sure why she truly was—other than that he was a human being and he was suffering. “This must be very frustrating for you.”

  “You might say that.”

  She pushed her thumb against the end of her pen. “Tell me what has happened since your accident.”

  He rose from the table, and Rebecca braced herself against the waves of restless frustration emanating from him. “I woke up in a hospital bed with no idea who I was, where I’d come from or where I was going. They told me I’d been in a car accident, that I’d been alone and that there were no other vehicles involved.” His voice was deep. His words clipped.

  “Physically.” She knew what the report said. She wanted to hear it in his words, though.

  “I banged my head hard enough to knock my memory right out of me. They traced my fingerprints to identify me, ’cause it was faster than trying to find something identifiable on the car. Apparently I’ve got quite a file with the government.”

  That was no surprise. The fact that she hadn’t heard about his accident through Weaver’s well-developed grapevine was. “The hospital notified your family then? It’s a wonder they didn’t all troop to Maryland.”

  “I told the hospital not to notify them.”

  “Why?”

  If he thought her curiosity out of place, he didn’t say. “Just more strangers.”

  “Strangers or not, they’re your family. They’re concerned for you.”

  He shifted. Picked up a box of tissue and set it back down. Rebecca waited. “That’s what Jefferson said,” Sawyer finally admitted. “Only his words were a little less tactful. Apparently he—my brother—didn’t care what requests I’d made. And it’s just as well. ’Cause I was going nuts in the hospital. Apparently I didn’t show for a meeting a few days ago with someone Jefferson knows, and he made it his business to find out why. Which is why he ended up in Maryland, where he arranged my escape.”

  She squelched the traitorous curl of sympathy and clicked her pen. “I believe in treating the whole patient, Captain Clay, and—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is Sawyer, so I’ve been told. If you have to call me something, use that.”

  Rebecca looked down at her blank medical form. “Very well.” She started writing with a hand that barely trembled. Yet that faint trembling annoyed her immensely. She set the pen down with a snap and reminded herself again that she was a professional. She’d taken an oath. “You sustained additional injuries?”

  His eyes—a shade of blue that she’d never forgotten, no matter how hard and how long she’d tried—studied her. “Bruised ribs. Some cuts.”

  She motioned to the examining table, telling her stomach to stop jumping around like a third-year med student’s, and stepped up to him, lifting his chin so she could see the sutured cut more clearly. Her fingertips tingled against the rasp of whiskers. He hadn’t shaved. “You should keep this covered for another day or two,” she said.

  “I didn’t know where the bandages were.”

  Rebecca swallowed at the wave that swept through her, despite her better sense. She didn’t need to feel sympathy or empathy or any other “athy” but antipathy for this man. Yet that one statement drove right to the heart of her.

  She stepped back, pulling her stethoscope out of her pocket. “I think we can take care of that before you leave,” she said huskily. “Are you staying with Jefferson or Daniel?”

  “No.”

  Meaning he was probably staying at the main house of the Double-C Ranch. The house where he’d grown up, on a cattle ranch some twenty miles away from Weaver. The house where, now, he didn’t know where to look for bandages. She automatically warmed her stethoscope against her palm. “Remove your shirt and let me take a look at your ribs.”

  His smile was sudden and barely shy of wolfish. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Never before had Rebecca wished so strongly that she had a full-time nurse on staff with her. But she was long used to such comments from male patients, she reminded herself. She knew how to handle them. Unfortunately, as Sawyer slowly pulled off his long-sleeved T-shirt, that ability seemed to desert her.

  His shoulders were wide; his chest hard with roping muscle. And the sight didn’t make her feel breathless. It really didn’t. She was a physician. Well versed in the human form, male and female.

  No, what affected her, she assured herself, was the angry contusions blotching the golden skin stretching over those hard muscles. Another set of stitches—eleven—crossed his shoulder. She carefully checked him over. His pulse was a little rapid, but that was to be expected.

  She dressed his cuts and dropped several bandages into a small manila envelope, which she set on the table beside him. Then finally, thankfully, she was able to step back to her file while he pulled on his shirt.

  “You have a prescription for your headaches?” She caught his look of surprise when he nodded. “I can see the discomfort on your face,” she said. She certainly didn’t want this man suspecting that she had some special intuition where he was concerned. The fact was, his entire body was braced against pain.

  She rapidly completed the paperwork for the office visit and tore off his copy, handing it to him. “If you have an insurance card, we can submit that for you.” Rebecca made the decision then and there to look for a part-time bill
ing clerk.

  He slowly took the yellow form from her. “I suppose I must have had one,” he said, his voice suddenly weary. “And it was probably in my wallet, which stayed in the car that burned to cinders—”

  “After you were thrown clear,” Rebecca finished. She touched his arm gently, then barely kept herself from snatching back her hand when she realized what she’d done. It wouldn’t do to draw this man’s curiosity, she reminded herself sharply.

  She waved toward the form. “Don’t worry about that for now,” she said, stepping out into the hall where she could breathe easier again. “We’ll get everything figured out before long. The Maryland hospital will undoubtedly have all the information I need.”

  Sawyer’s injuries would heal. He’d regain his memory.

  He would disrupt the quiet, satisfying life she’d managed to create for her and Ryan. And then he’d go back to his life, leaving theirs in pieces.

  Sawyer couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed in one of the rooms he’d chosen in the basement guest suite of the house he’d been told he’d been raised in. Now he stared up at the dark ceiling.

  That ceiling was like his mind, he thought.

  Black. Empty.

  No, not empty.

  Murky.

  That was it. His mind was one murky place.

  What if he never remembered?

  He shoved back the soft quilts and strode out to the sitting area, grateful that he had the whole suite to himself. Grateful that the room he’d been told he had as a kid no longer existed because of the remodeling his brother was doing upstairs. The last thing Sawyer needed were any witnesses to his decline into insanity. He much preferred the small measure of privacy the downstairs rooms gave him.

  The sitting room’s temperature was cool against his bare shoulders, but it felt good. It was a damn sight better than lying there in bed working up a sweat over his murky memory.

  If he had to work up a sweat about anything, it ought to be for the beautiful Dr. Rebecca Morehouse. There was a woman a man could easily sweat for.

  A touch as cool as a spring breeze.

  Silky brown hair as inviting as...as what? He couldn’t remember, he thought with unexpected wryness.

  Eyes as hot as—Okay, he was stretching it there, too. He didn’t imagine for one minute that those warm brown eyes of hers couldn’t flame hotter than molten gold. But the fact of the matter was they’d been cooler than her touch. Distinctly cool. Okay, frigid.

  Maybe that was her usual bedside manner. Maybe that was why she was practicing in the dinky town of Weaver, rather than some busy city. He’d seen her diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall in her office. Some pretty big-name places that even his murky mind recognized. With credentials like that, she could probably hang out her shingle just about anywhere.

  Why Weaver?

  He knocked his shin on the corner of the television armoire and swore, fumbling for the little lamp that sat on the table next to the couch. He managed to knock it over before he found the damned little switch and he swore again.

  Once the light was on he went around the breakfast counter and yanked open the refrigerator door hard enough to make the bottles of beer in the door rattle. He didn’t reach for the beer, though he recognized the brand.

  Was it his brand?

  Did he even like beer?

  He pulled out the quart of milk and slipped it open, automatically sniffing to see that it was fresh before drinking right from the carton. Then he stood there in the open door of the fridge and wondered at the ease of his actions. Was this what he often did in the sterile apartment in Maryland that Jefferson had taken him to after springing him from that hospital?

  He’d walked, stiff and aching, through that apartment and even with the pain-medication-induced haze that clung to him, he had wondered who was pulling that great cosmic joke on him. Because he’d never seen the place before in his life.

  He’d walked down the short hallway to the single bedroom with its large bed in the center of the room with the plain blue bedspread tucked about it with military precision. He’d wondered if there was a woman who shared the bed with him. Or women. He was certain there was no one “special.” Not when the only visitor he’d had in the hospital that first week had been a man who claimed to be Sawyer’s commanding officer. It had been that man who told Sawyer enough details of his life, of the accident, to keep him from going stark mad those first few days.

  He’d gone into the adjoining bathroom of his impersonal home and stared at himself in the wide mirror that hung over the cold white sink and had looked at himself. The reflection had been no more familiar to him then than it had been all the times he’d stared at himself in the hospital mirror before Jefferson arrived and flatly told Sawyer that he couldn’t hide from the family any longer. Jefferson used his considerable influence on the powers-that-be who finally deemed him physically fit to leave. Physically fit. Mentally blank.

  No, that wasn’t right, he thought as he stared into the milk carton. He wasn’t a blank.

  He knew who the president of the United States was.

  He knew it was the twelfth of December.

  He knew how to speak and read and drive a car—he’d talked Jefferson into letting him drive the rental around the hospital parking lot just to make sure.

  But he hadn’t known his own name until they’d told him in the hospital.

  And here he stood at a strange refrigerator in a strange house with strange people in it, wondering if he often stood at his own refrigerator in the middle of the night wearing nothing but boxers, drinking straight from the containers.

  If there had been a woman in his life, would she have scolded him? Would she have smiled and shaken her head and invited him back to bed?

  There had been no hint of a feminine presence in that apartment anymore than there had been a feminine presence at the hospital during visiting hours. No lingering scent.

  The only lingering scent in his mind was that which clung to Rebecca Morehouse’s creamy skin.

  He replaced the carton and shoved the refrigerator door closed. This wasn’t getting him any closer to sleep.

  Rather than go back to bed, he opened the armoire to reveal the television and sprawled on the couch, picking up the remote control from the coffee table. Thanks to a satellite dish, he had his choice of channels—hundreds of them.

  Not a one held his interest and he finally settled on CNN, turning the sound way down. Listening to the murmur of the news channel was preferable to listening to the silence in his murky mind.

  He heard a soft footfall overhead and wondered who else in the house wasn’t sleeping at this late hour. Gomg up to find out held no appeal. It had only been two days since he’d arrived, but he was already fed up with the sympathetic, cautious expressions in their eyes.

  There was Matthew. Another of his four brothers. And Matthew’s wife, Jaimie, and their daughter, Sarah. There was also Squire Clay. His father. The man he had studied all during dinner the night he’d arrived, trying to see some resemblance. Some sense of familiarity.

  All he’d gotten for his efforts had been a throbbing headache.

  Rather than take up either of the offers he’d received from Jefferson and Daniel to stay with them, Sawyer had chosen to stay in this house. The “big house” they called it. Which, absurdly, made him want to laugh, since the only “big house” he could remember was some reference to prison in an old black-and-white movie. “The big house.” Where he’d been raised.

  But his first sight of the sprawling brick-and-wood house had brought about no blinding flashes of memory. Just the realization that he recognized the breed of cattle huddling in clusters beyond the fences. Jefferson had told him that Matthew and Daniel, who was the second youngest of his brothers, ran the Double-C Ranch jointly. That Jefferson and his wife, Emily, ran the spread directly east, breeding horses.

  Matthew, Daniel, Em—names that Sawyer knew he should know.

  Names he didn’t.


  So he’d declined both brothers’ offers. The whole point of coming here had been to see if it helped him regain his memory. He’d supposedly grown up here. In the big house.

  Had he felt like it was a prison?

  He shook his head, feeling like a madman.

  Maybe that was why he lived in Maryland, he thought. Because he didn’t get along with his family. Because this place was a prison to him.

  But that didn’t feel quite right to him. From what he’d seen since he’d arrived, his brothers were all straight arrows. He respected that. Liked that. Even liked them when he wasn’t analyzing to death all the blank spots in his mind. Their assortment of wives and daughters were okay, too. Sawyer didn’t think he had anything against kids.

  He just hated that look of expectation in their eyes—knowing he was disappointing everyone with his failure to recall his past. Them.

  The yellow form that Rebecca had given him sat on the coffee table alongside the packet of bandages she’d given him. He picked up the form and looked at the imprinted name, address and telephone number.

  A cordless phone sat on the side table by the lamp with the now-crooked shade. He picked up the phone and punched out the number from the form. He’d leave a message, he thought, even though he wasn’t quite sure what he would say.

  A fine idea shot to hell when the voice that answered was very much human.

  “Rebecca Morehouse,” she repeated when he failed to answer the first time.

  “I want to see you tomorrow.”

  Rebecca sat straight up in bed at the commanding voice that penetrated the phone line. She hurriedly fumbled for the light switch beside her bed, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Talking to this man in the still of night was better done with the lights blazing. Her first thoughts were utterly selfish. Had he remembered? “Captain Clay?”

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  She pressed her lips together. Thank goodness Ryan no longer awakened whenever the phone rang at all hours. “Are you all right?” she asked. “What are your symptoms?”

  “Sleeplessness.”

  She blinked. Stared sightlessly at her ivory eyelet comforter. Saw in her mind the man on the other end. Would his thick hair be rumpled from his pillow? Did he still wear those khaki box—Stop it.