Owen's Touch

by Lee Magner

  Owen wished to hell he knew whether Mariana was remembering the truth or the fractured version of the truth that a tortured woman had constructed to save her sanity.

  “Go on,” he murmured encouragingly.

  “There was something about Fred Lowe that made Maryanice trust him. She told him everything, eventually. And he used the AA network to locate a group she could meet with, one her husband would have trouble finding and separating her from.”

  “Kelton’s group up in the mountains.”

  “Yes.” Mariana swallowed and tried not to cry. “They were very supportive. When she flew out to Nevada, trying to find me, it was partly due to the strength she’d found talking to them. They helped her want to stop drinking. They helped her want to believe in herself. They showed her it was possible to rise from the ashes of your worst nightmare and begin again.”

  “She flew out west to search for you?” he asked in surprise. “Why?”

  Mariana sighed and smiled sadly. “She’s my twin sister.”

  Owen dubiously lifted an eyebrow. “Your twin sister.”

  Mariana felt her cheeks redden with embarrassment. Defensively, she lifted her chin and stared directly into his night gray eyes.

  “My twin sister,” she repeated, separately emphasizing each word. “From the way you repeated what I said,” she noted, a little angrily, “I assume you don’t believe me.”

  Owen sighed and ran a hand through his hair in frustration.

  “I’m trying to believe you,” he hedged.

  “Trying?” she exclaimed.

  “Look at the situation objectively, Mariana,” he argued. “This tale sounds more like imagination than reality. People who have been abused have been known to repress reality and create a fantasy explanation for their life that is easier to live with....”

  “You still think I’m both Mariana Sands and Maryanice Roualt?” she said in dismay.

  “I don’t know what to think.” he said evenly. “But that is one obvious explanation for your memories and your being in possession of Maryanice Roualt’s purse, wallet, house key and identification at the time of the accident. If Louie Roualt is as manipulative and terrifying as you think he is, it’s understandable that you’d try to create another personality, an entirely new life, in order to escape him. Maybe the concussion triggered a dual personality. Maybe it was there before the accident.”

  His jaw tightened stubbornly as he saw the growing hurt and disappointment reflected in her eyes as she gazed at him. “I don’t particularly want to believe this,” he said irritably. “I told you earlier...! don’t relish the possibility that you have a husband. And it has nothing to do with Roualt’s nasty disposition. It has to do with the way I feel about you.”

  “How do you feel about me?” she challenged him. “Are you sure you’re not confusing me with the woman that Mr. Brock was talking about this morning? The first Jane Doe?”

  He frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve been wondering why you stuck around at the hospital after the accident. You didn’t know me. It was a lot of trouble to drive back and forth, and to stay at Madge’s.” Mariana drew in her breath and forced herself to tell him what had been worrying her. “Did you stay with me when I was comatose because you were making up for what you couldn’t do for that other woman, the first Jane Doe in your life?”

  Owen’s face was hard to read. The frown had smoothed away, but a mask seemed to have replaced it. His lack of expression would have been the envy of any high-stakes poker player.

  Just when Mariana began to think that she had hit him so close to a vulnerable spot that he would refuse to answer her, he began to speak.

  “Yes.”

  Mariana almost flinched from the pain.

  “Well, that makes perfect sense,” she said, her voice thin and wispy from having the wind knocked from her lungs by the shock. She’d been hoping he would deny it. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d been hoping that until he confessed the truth.

  “That was part of the reason, in the beginning,” he continued. “Have you ever lost someone dear to you like that?”

  Mariana thought of Maryanice. And their parents. It wasn’t quite the same, she decided. Especially their parents.

  “Not exactly,” she admitted. She looked down at her hands. “What was the first Jane Doe’s name?” she asked unhappily.

  “Madelon Hurst.”

  There was another awkward silence. Mariana broke it first.

  “How did you meet her?”

  “At one of Portia’s dinner parties, like Brock said. For once, the newspaper accounts got it right,” he added with a bitter smile.

  “Did you love her?”

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  “Are you sure you want me to answer that?” he asked huskily.

  She lifted her chin, bravely looked into his eyes and nodded in the affirmative.

  “Yes.”

  Mariana wished she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t expected the fiery hurt in the region of her heart that his admission ignited.

  “I wasn’t ready for a permanent commitment,” he said reluctantly, as if the words were being dragged from him against his better judgment. “She was. She’d been trying to convince me to go to a cabin in the mountains with her that weekend. She thought spending time alone together, away from the city and my work, would give her a chance to bring me around to her point of view.”

  “You were going to go with her the weekend she disappeared?”

  Owen nodded.

  Mariana began to understand.

  “The last time I saw her,” he said, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment and self-recrimination, “she begged me to come with her. I refused. I told her I knew what she was hoping for and that I wasn’t ready to give that to her. There were tears in her eyes when she got into her car.”

  “I’m so sorry, Owen,” she whispered unsteadily, her heart aching for his long-ago pain.

  “I felt very guilty about it,” he said evenly. “I did everything I could think of to try to find her. But it was too late. While she was missing, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know whether to imagine her kidnapped and raped and tortured to death by some maniac or injured and alone and suffering for days on end from some accident. It was a relief to finally know what happened to her,” he said, his voice tinged in bitterness. “Seeing someone that I loved tagged as a Jane Doe, with no one there when she was found, that hurt.”

  His eyes flashed angrily, and his gaze bore into Mariana’s without apology. “So, yeah, when I realized you were a Jane Doe, that brought back a lot of bad memories. And, yes, I tried to make up for what I hadn’t been able to do for Madelon by being there for you while you were unconscious. And later, when you were awake but didn’t know who you were, I wanted to keep your spirits up, because I knew your friends and family would have given everything they had to be there for you, if they only knew where you were.”

  Mariana looked away and nodded. “It was much more than most of us do for a stranger,” she said thoughtfully. “And if doing those things for me helped you heal the pain and lessen the guilt you felt about not being there for Madelon—” she turned her steady gaze back to his and smiled slightly, although not too happily “—I’m glad. Perhaps that repays a little of the debt I owe you.”

  He reached out and yanked her half onto his lap.

  “You don’t owe me a damn thing,” he growled. “And while I may have been there in the beginning partly because of what happened to Madelon Hurst, the most important reason I kept driving up there, kept calling about you, kept finding excuses to keep involving myself in your life has nothing to do with her at all.”

  Mariana felt the tension rippling through his body as she sat wedged between him and the steering wheel. The gray in his eyes was illuminated with the angry sparkle of dark green now. His lips were flattened, and a small muscle worked in his jaw.

  He moved the palm of his right han
d up across her cheek and ear, then sank his fingers into the luxuriant softness of her hair. She felt the pressure pulling her closer to his mouth, and as she closed her eyes, his lips touched hers.

  It was not kind. It did not plead for understanding. It was not gentle or hesitant in any way.

  The kiss was one of anger and frustration and a touch of anxious despair. It quickly melted into the heat of burning desire. Moving back and forth across her mouth, easing the pressure and then increasing it, he demanded and returned in full measure profoundly intimate pleasure.

  He lifted his head slightly and looked into her passion-dazed eyes.

  “Does that feel like guilt to you?” he demanded roughly.

  His mouth sought hers, and he renewed the onslaught. His tongue glided along the sensitive ribbon of inner lip. He suctioned hers into his own mouth. He slid his mouth warmly across the tingling flesh of her neck until she moaned out loud and tilted back her head, yielding in ecstasy. Breathing unevenly, he lifted his head.

  “Does that feel like a man repaying an old debt?” he growled.

  Mariana tried to make her eyes focus, but the world seemed to be swirling. She shook her head in a daze.

  “Not really,” she had to concede.

  He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair.

  “I may not be absolutely sure whether you’re Mariana Sands or Maryanice Roualt,” he confessed huskily. “But I know damn well you’re not Madelon Hurst.” He leaned back and looked into her eyes. “The only thing that’s worrying me now is whether or not you have a husband.”

  Mariana smiled at him and placed her hand tenderly on his cheek.

  “In that case,” she said softly, “you have nothing to worry about.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look completely convinced.

  Mariana pushed away from him firmly but gently.

  “I hired you to investigate,” she reminded him firmly. “I think the sooner we’ve gathered the facts, the less you’ll have to worry about.”

  Owen sincerely hoped so.

  “Tell me about this twin sister of yours,” he suggested, attempting to get his mind off the lingering imprint of Mariana’s body. “Why didn’t you remember her relationship to you earlier?”

  Chapter 13

  As they drove toward the late Fred Lowe’s house, Mariana explained.

  “Maryanice and I lived with our parents until we were three years old. We lived in western Colorado in a little town where the houses were tumbling down and most people had moved away to find work in other places. Remember that snapshot in Maryanice’s wallet that I said was of me? It was taken when we went to visit my mother’s brother in Durango. Maryanice had one taken at the same time with the same tricycle but with her favorite doll, which was a different color and style from mine. About two months later, our parents were killed in a flash flood while they were driving into the mountains to talk to a rancher about hiring out as a cook and a ranch hand.” Mariana smiled a little and glanced at Owen. “You and I both had humble beginnings.”

  Owen flickered a glance at her, then returned his gaze to the highway.

  “Anyway,” Mariana continued. “Maryanice and I were orphaned, and our uncle took us in but asked a local lawyer to find homes for us to go to. Our uncle was a single man and he had just signed up to go into the infantry. He couldn’t raise a couple of children. He didn’t want to, either.”

  Owen felt a very personal surge of anger against Mariana’s uncle, who had refused to shelter and care for her as a child. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

  “The lawyer had contacts in a lot of big cities. Lots of people wanted to adopt babies or toddlers or young children. We were healthy and not too bad to look at,” she said modestly.

  She still wasn’t too bad to look at, he thought.

  “Unfortunately, the lawyer didn’t know anyone looking for two small children. He did know of two couples who each wanted one child. So, Maryanice was placed with one family and I was given to the other.”

  “Were the two families living in the same town?” he asked.

  “No. Maryanice’s family lived in the Texas panhandle, My family lived in eastern Nevada.”

  Mariana looked at the passing countryside and tried to get a grip on her feelings. This was always a hard part of the story to tell.

  “Our uncle left me with a baby-sitter and took Maryanice away. When he came back, he told me I was going to go live with the couple who had come to see me at the lawyer’s office and who had taken me to play at the park several times. That was the last time I ever saw my uncle or Maryanice. Before my new parents arrived, my uncle told me that something awful had happened to Maryanice, that she’d been hit by a car and was dead.”

  “How the hell could an adult lie to a child like that?” he demanded angrily.

  “I don’t know. I was distraught. Crying my eyes out. Completely inconsolable. My new parents were quite shocked to see me in that condition when they arrived to pick me up. They had been told that my sister had died in the crash with my parents. Mom and Dad, my adoptive parents who raised me, were good-hearted people. They would not have wanted to separate us, if they’d known about Maryanice. But they couldn’t have taken both of us. The lawyer knew that, so he kept the truth from them. And they were left to soothe me and comfort me for months. When I told them about playing with Maryanice at our uncle’s house, they assumed it was childish fantasy that comforted me in my loss of my twin and my birth parents. Eventually, I moved on with friends and school and my new home. I dreamed about Maryanice at first, but after a while, it was hard to remember her. I couldn’t quite make out her features in my mind’s eye. Maybe that’s what my uncle had hoped for when he told me she was dead.”

  “They didn’t leave you with any photos?”

  “My uncle had mistakenly given me Maryanice’s photo and Maryanice had been given mine. He couldn’t tell us apart, and he didn’t recognize which dolly belonged to which child. So we each had a photograph. I believed that Maryanice was dead.”

  Owen nodded, guessing what was coming next.

  “But Maryanice knew that you were alive?” he said.

  “Exactly. Unfortunately, her new parents weren’t very happy people. They took out the fears and disappointments in life on Maryanice. She was never submissive enough for them. She was too pretty. Too lively. Too artistic. They wanted a shy, studious, plain daughter.”

  “That sounds like a recipe for adolescent rebellion,” Owen noted dryly.

  “And that’s what happened. Maryanice ran away from home when she was seventeen. She got a bus ticket to New Orleans and worked there long enough to earn bus fare to New York City. When she arrived in New York, she got herself a job waiting tables in a restaurant, and shared a small, overcrowded apartment with several aspiring actors she met there. She went to their modeling agency and was offered a few low-budget advertising jobs. That’s how she met Louie Roualt.”

  “New York?”

  Mariana grinned. “If she’d met you, her story would have had a happier ending.”

  Owen gave her a quizzical look, but let the comment pass.

  “She was ripe for someone like Louie,” Mariana mused. “He flattered her, bought her nice things, took her to fine restaurants and generally swept her off her feet As soon as she was nineteen, they got married.”

  “But her prince turned out to be less than charming after the honeymoon,” Owen supplied.

  “Much less. As the years went by, Maryanice realized that some of his friends were...crooks. She had no higher education, no job skills of any particular importance, no money. AU she had were her looks and Louie’s willingness to support her.”

  “So she looked the other way when he philandered, gritted her teeth when he badly used her and told herself there was nothing she could do when he bent the law in his business dealings.”

  Mariana gave Owen a startled look.

  “Do you know Louie?” she asked in a
mazement.

  “No. But your sister sounds a lot like mine. So, I just guessed that my sister’s disreputable husband behaves a lot like Louie Roualt.”

  “Unfortunately, it seems that they have that in common,” Mariana agreed, grimacing.

  “You said that your sister went to look for you.”

  “Yes. Poor Maryanice,” Mariana murmured pityingly. “She’d been married for ten increasingly hellish years. She’d wanted to leave him for close to five years, but Louie...” Mariana felt the familiar wave of fear ripple over her. “Louie sensed her withdrawal from him, and began tightening his control over her.”

  “How?”

  “He kept her on a cash allowance, insisting that she account for her expenses. He became suspicious if she refused his advances.”

  “His advances? In bed?”

  “Yes. If she seemed unenthusiastic or...reluctant...he questioned her relentlessly about other men in her life. The more she tried to move away from him, the more he tried to tie her to him.”

  Owen frowned. “That kind of possessiveness can be dangerous.”

  “Oh, it was. Louie’s the primary reason that she developed a serious drinking problem. I’m sure of that.” She glanced at Owen. “And by the way, I don’t have a drinking problem. I distinctly remember having an occasional margarita with my dinners back home. And white zinfandel wine. Light beer. But just a glassful with a meal.”

  Owen’s mouth curved into a slight smile. She was sounding quite confident, downright zealous, about her identity and lifestyle.

  “So your sister decided to search for a relative to flee to.”