Husbands and Other Strangers

by Marie Ferrarella

  This, he thought, this was his Gayle.

  Maybe her mind didn’t remember him, but it seemed as if her body did. It fit against him in that old, familiar way, her curves filling his spaces the way his filled hers. He remembered thinking, the first time they made love, that they were like two halves of a whole and that she made him feel complete.

  He couldn’t lose that, Taylor thought with an urgency that unsettled him.

  The heat of her body penetrated his.

  How could she respond like this and not remember him? his mind demanded just before all coherent thought faded into oblivion.

  Wow. Oh, wow, Gayle thought. How could she not remember this man? He was both frying her hair and curling her toes at the same time. And she didn’t even want to speculate about the condition her blood was in as it raced through her body, setting everything it came in contact with on fire.

  Her head spun almost out of control, almost out of reach.

  This was good. This was better than good; it was fantastic.

  She couldn’t catch her breath, didn’t want to catch her breath, afraid that if she did, this wild ride she suddenly found herself on would stop.

  Gayle was only marginally aware of pressing her body against his, although she was more than a little aware of the fact that her body seemed to have caught on fire in over a hundred different places.

  She should remember this. Why didn’t she remember this?

  The question beat in her brain over and over again with the ferocity of a storm, even as she struggled to keep the moment from coming to an end. Her whole body felt as if it had been reduced to rainwater that had been left out in the sun and was now just about to sizzle away.

  Moaning, she tightened her arms around his neck, pressing her lips harder against his.

  Okay, Taylor thought, she remembered. She had to remember. She couldn’t have kissed him this way with such feeling if she didn’t.

  God, but she’d had him scared there for a while.

  His lips still sealed against hers, Taylor shifted and tucked one hand beneath her legs. Before he could begin to lift her off the floor, Gayle pulled her head back. Her hands were wedged against his chest again, pushing for all she was worth. The accident had done nothing to reduce her strength.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. Although fueled by anger, the question came out in short, staccato phrases because there was absolutely no air to spare in her lungs.

  He stared at her, feeling like a man about to lose his mind. “I was going to take you to our bedroom.”

  “Put me down!” she ordered, sounding just like her father during a military drill. “Let me go!”

  Disgusted, bewildered and not knowing just how much more of this emotional tennis game he was able to take, Taylor unceremoniously released her.

  Survival instincts that were second nature to her ever since she’d first opened her eyes had Gayle grabbing his shoulders. The quick move was all that prevented her from crashing to the floor.

  Straightening, she glared at him.

  He returned the glare with an innocent look. “Just doing what you told me. Letting you go.”

  Gayle pressed her lips together, struggling to hold on to a temper she knew could be explosive. The euphoria that he’d created just a few seconds ago had completely vanished.

  “I also said just a kiss,” she reminded him hotly. “That wasn’t an invitation to drag me off to your lair, caveman style.”

  Taylor spread his hands out on either side of him, his fingers extended toward the ceiling in silent surrender. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to take you anywhere near my ‘lair.’”

  But even as he said it, he realized that this was going to be their next immediate problem.

  She saw the look on his face, knew he had just thought of something. “What?”

  The master bedroom was the only room in the house that he had actually completed. Doing it had been a gift from him to Gayle for her birthday. The other three bedrooms, like the other rooms in the house, were all in varying stages of being gutted. Tools, tarps and piles of fallen plaster marked his progress or lack of it.

  Taylor blew out a breath as he looked at her. “I suppose you want to take the master bedroom.”

  Ordinarily she wouldn’t have hesitated, but she wasn’t about to commit herself to anything inside this fun house. “That depends.”

  He had no idea where she was going with this. “On what?”

  “On whether or not it looks as if the unibomber tried testing out some of his creations in it before moving on. Does it have walls?” she asked.

  Given the state of the living room, he supposed it was a legitimate question. It had been too much to hope for that she remembered all the work he had put into it for her. “Yes, it has walls.”

  She wasn’t satisfied. “A door?”

  He bit back his impatience. “Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” Taylor motioned for her to follow him as he led the way to the stairs. He’d taken off the original banister and replaced it with one made out of finely sanded alder wood. It needed to be painted. He deliberately refrained from touching it. Just as he was about to go up the steps, he abruptly turned around to look at her. “Back there, in the living room, when I kissed you—”

  She had a feeling she knew what he was going to ask. What all men wanted to be told. How good they were. “It was nice,” she grudgingly admitted.

  This time he saw right through her. When she tried to avoid saying something, she wouldn’t look at his eyes. “It was more than nice,” he countered. “You felt something.”

  Her chin shot up. “Yes, I felt something. You, trying to get me into bed.”

  “Besides that.”

  He knew he was laying himself bare before the “old” Gayle, the woman his wife had been before they’d made that stunning connection that had rocked both their worlds, especially his. But he was trying to reach the woman she’d evolved into, the woman with whom the lovemaking threatened to burn right through any surface they were on. The woman he had exchanged vows and hearts with in the middle of a hospital chapel.

  She wasn’t that woman right now, not to him. But she had been. And if they were going to make any progress in that direction, one of them had to take the first step. It was obvious to him that Gayle wouldn’t be the one. Though she tried to hide it, she was having enough trouble dealing with the scary knowledge that part of her wasn’t the way it should be.

  Even so, he felt like a man crossing Niagara Falls, inching his way along a tightrope made of dental floss. And there was no net in sight. “We connected just then.”

  With a shrug, she looked away, doing her best to sound indifferent. “If you say so.”

  Taylor took hold of her shoulders, forcing his wife to look at him, even as she tried to shrug him off. “Gayle, you’re a hell of a lot of things, some good, some not so good, but you were never a liar.”

  She hadn’t counted on his sensing her reaction. She should have disguised it better, she thought, upbraiding herself. No man was ever going to have control over her unless she wanted him to, and then only for a short, specified duration of her choosing.

  “Okay,” she conceded, annoyed, “we connected. If I was wearing socks, you would have knocked them off. But that doesn’t change the fact that—”

  “You still don’t remember me,” he concluded for her. It was no longer an accusation, just a fact, one he swore he was going to change.

  Gayle shook her head and, in his estimation, looked almost sad for a second. “I still don’t remember you,” she repeated.

  Just for a moment it felt as if they were on the same team. “Maybe visual aids would help.”

  He saw her stiffen as she looked at him warily. “You’re not going to take off your clothes, are you?”

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or take offense. Damn, but he wished he could peek into her head, figure out what she was thinking. But then, he’d never had a clear handle on
that. He’d only gotten better at second-guessing her. Sometimes.

  “I was thinking of wedding pictures.”

  “Oh.” Wedding pictures. That sounded harmless enough. He had her worried for a minute. There was just something about him that made her feel he was an unquantified element, an unknown in the equation of her life. “All right.” She looked around the chaos that he envisioned as a living room. “Where are they?”

  “You keep them in our bedroom.”

  “My bedroom,” she reminded him. “They’re not lewd, are they?”

  “They’re wedding pictures,” he emphasized. What did she think he was going to do, spring some kind of semipornographic photographs on her and try to pass them off as their wedding? “With your brothers and your father. You remember your father, right?”

  Colonel Lars Elliott’s voice was probably the first voice she could recall hearing.

  Swim, Gayle, swim. You were born for the water. Make the colonel proud of you.

  She’d always wanted to ask her father why he referred to himself in the third person every time he wanted his children to carry out an instruction. An edict was really more like it, she corrected herself. She could remember him running along the edge of the pool, barking out orders as she swam furiously from one end to the other. Always too slowly to please him no matter what her time turned out to be.

  She could remember hating him at times for that. And trying harder the next time.

  Gayle gave Taylor an impatient look. “Of course I remember my father.”

  “Of course,” he echoed. Everybody and everything. Except for him.

  A wave of contrition swept over her. She banked it down. Her tone was flippant in order to hide the spasm of guilt she didn’t want to deal with. “Did I just hurt your feelings?”

  Taylor stopped a few steps shy of their bedroom. The look he gave her was cold. “If I was capable of any sensitive feelings, marriage to you rubbed the sensitivity right out of me.”

  Another insult. Any guilt she felt vanished instantly. Squaring her shoulders, Gayle sailed right past him and into the bedroom.

  It wasn’t what she expected.

  It wasn’t a bedroom, it was a suite. A beautiful suite.

  The extralarge room had a vaulted ceiling. On the far end was a small conversation pit, complete with a white flagstone fireplace. But what had caught her eye immediately was the huge, California king-size bed with its hand-quilted blue-and-white comforter, matching shams and a handful of throw pillows. The four-poster had lace curtains drifting down from a canopy frame. Power and femininity at the same time.

  It was, quite literally, the bedroom of her dreams. Growing up, she’d been accustomed to almost Spartan conditions. Her father firmly believed that too many possessions spoiled a person, too much clutter led to an undisciplined mind and he didn’t want any of his children to be either spoiled or undisciplined. And certainly not soft. He’d become a widower shortly after she was born and had approached the task of parenting the way he did everything else, militarily. She’d often said that the colonel hadn’t tried to raise children so much as he’d raised short soldiers.

  Life under her father’s roof—and during his time in the military there had been many roofs—had been one major battle after another. Although there was no question that she loved the man dearly and wanted nothing more than to please him, they had butted heads almost from the moment she’d taken her first breath. Certainly from the moment she’d taken her first step. According to Jake, the colonel had wanted her to come to him, but instead she had made a wobbly path to the neatly arranged toy box. The lines were drawn then. She was too much like her father for the battles not to continue.

  Gayle looked around slowly. The walls were painted a cool light blue, with white molding and white trim along the top and bottom.

  “It’s beautiful,” she told him, her voice hardly above a whisper. “You did this?”

  “I wanted to give you the bedroom of your dreams.”

  One night, she’d shared that with him, what she’d fantasized about while growing up. She’d wanted something soft, something pretty, yet something that still had an underlying strength to it. She’d confided the times that she felt trapped between two worlds, never living completely in either.

  He’d given her words a visual interpretation, sketching the room he envisioned as soon as he could. Creating it became his number-one priority the moment they’d bought this house.

  The look on her face the first time she’d seen the remodeled room had made all the hard work worth it.

  The look resembled what was on her face now. Except then her next move had been to throw her arms around his neck with a joyous whoop, declaring that they needed to christen the bed as soon as possible.

  They had, and even amid their rigorous love life, it had stood out as a night to remember.

  She’d forgotten that, too, he thought with a sharp pang.

  Crossing to the bed, Gayle picked up one of the curtains, examining it. The material felt soft, cool against her fingertips. She looked up at him. “You did this for me?”

  He shrugged, burying his hands deep in his jeans. “Men don’t usually go in for frills.”

  The look in his eyes got to her almost as much as his kiss had. He was making her weaken, she suddenly realized. With a little bit of encouragement…

  She needed to push him away somehow. Now. She couldn’t let herself be led around; she needed time, time to work this through for herself. To discover why it was she’d forgotten him when he’d apparently been so nice to her, at least some of the time,

  She dropped the curtain and moved away from the bed, pretending to look out the window. A row of tall trees blocked her view of anything beyond the boundaries of the property.

  “I guess that’s kind of fortunate, then.”

  He didn’t understand, but he braced himself. “What do you mean?”

  Turning away from the window, she looked up into his eyes. “Because it looks like the rest of the rooms in this place definitely don’t come with frills.”

  She was telling him to get out. “Right.” He crossed to the doorway. “Okay, if you need anything, I’ll be right down the hall.”

  He hadn’t made up his mind just which room to take. They were all pretty bad at this point, but in any event, all she needed to do was call out and he would hear her from whichever room he was in.

  “I won’t need anything,” she assured him crisply.

  Damn it. Gayle sounded like herself. She certainly kissed like herself. So why the hell wasn’t she herself? And how long was this going to take? If he just had some finite point, some final date to reach and know that this ordeal was over, he could wait this out. The fact that the wait could be endless scared the hell out of him.

  He crossed the threshold into the hall, then paused. “About tomorrow—”

  Instantly she was on her guard. “What about tomorrow?”

  “It’s Monday,” he told her. She went to the studio Monday through Friday when she wasn’t on the road. “You have work.”

  What was he getting at? “Yes?”

  She was making him feel like some kind of backward idiot. “I can call in for you,” he said crisply, “tell them you’re taking a few days off.”

  She was looking at him as if he was talking gibberish. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said in exasperation, “maybe to work at fixing this part of you.”

  “I’m not broken.”

  Taylor narrowed his eyes. “That might be a matter of opinion. You don’t remember me,” he reminded her, grinding out each word before pushing it through his clenched teeth.

  “Maybe I have good reason,” she retorted. “Did you ever stop to think about that?” He gazed at her for a long moment, then turned on his heel without saying another word. “Where are you going?”

  “To get an aspirin. You’ve given me a headache. Again.”

  The word hung in the air long after he
walked out of the room.

  Again.

  It didn’t sound as if they had the best of marriages, she thought. Maybe that was what she was trying not to remember.

  With a sigh, she crossed to the door and locked it.

  Chapter Six

  Taylor didn’t hear him approach until Sam was nearly on top of him. Between the sawing and the hammering, the noise level was so intense inside the house he was currently renovating, he wore a pair of earphones to help block out some of it.

  But even so, he might have been aware of Sam’s presence if he hadn’t been so lost in thought. He’d never been overly optimistic when it came to life. He liked to think he was prepared for some low blows, but no scenario he could have divined would ever have prepared him for Gayle suddenly not recognizing him, not being aware of his place in her life.

  It just boggled his mind.

  Gripping the handle of the sledgehammer tighter, he made contact with the concrete. The impact jarred him, traveling up the length of his arms through his biceps and triceps.

  He swung again and again. Breaking up the concrete. Doing nothing to alleviate the dilemma in his soul.

  The tap on his shoulder made him jump. Startled, Taylor just barely checked his swing as he turned around. Reality and the world returned. Sam was less than a foot away and had moved back quickly to avoid the unexpected contact.

  “Damn it, Sam,” Taylor growled, pushing his earphones off his head and down around his neck, “you came pretty damn close to having a hole where your stomach currently sits.”

  “Being a fireman makes you quick on your feet.” Sam eyed the sledgehammer in his brother-in-law’s hands. “You’re swinging that hammer awfully hard, Tay.” He took a calculated guess. “Working off steam?”

  Rather than answer immediately, Taylor hefted the sledgehammer and took another hard swing at the wall. He’d been working on the Andersen place for the last month, devoting all his spare time to it. Unlike some of the other projects he’d undertaken, the people who owned this house still resided in their previous home. He could come and go as he pleased without worrying about having to accommodate the hours of a live-in family.