by Lynne Graham
Lorenzo had been in an early board meeting when the phone call came. He had been so shocked by the news that Brooke had recovered consciousness that he had walked out without a word of explanation. Now that he was on the brink of speaking to her again, he was, for once, at a loss. Brooke didn’t remember him? Could he believe that of a woman willing to use anything and everything to create a furore in the media? What better way to spring back into the public eye than with an interesting story to tell? When he had first met her, such suspicion would have been foreign to him and momentarily he was furious that he had to consider that she could be faking it. But he had learned the hard way that Brooke was a skilled deceiver.
* * *
The door opened and Brooke froze against the pillows, her chest tightening as she snatched in a breath. And there he was in the doorway and there was nothing familiar about him. Indeed, it immediately occurred to her that no normal woman could possibly have forgotten such a man.
He stood well over six feet tall, wide-shouldered, lean of hip and long of leg, and he wore a dark pinstriped suit with a blue tie and white shirt. And he was, undeniably, absolutely breathtaking in the looks department. His hair was black and cropped short and it was the sort of thick springy hair that a woman wanted to run her fingers through. His bronzed features were all high cheekbones and interesting hollows, dissected by a narrow blade of a nose, while his wide sensual mouth was accentuated by the faint dark shadow of stubble surrounding it. His eyes, deep set and very dark and framed with lashes lush as black fans, were even more arresting and resting on her now with a piercing gleam. She could feel her skin heating because that appraisal could have stripped paint.
No, he couldn’t be her husband, she decided immediately. He had to be some sleek, highly qualified consultant come to suss her out. Instinct seemed to be telling her that her husband would be a much more ordinary sort, maybe a bit homely, a bit tousled, but when his wife woke up after being in a coma, he would, at least, be smiling with relief and happiness. This guy didn’t look as if he smiled very often. He was downright intimidating even in the way he stood there, radiating raw masculinity and authority.
‘Brooke...’ he murmured without any expression at all, walking in and shutting the door behind him and then those amazing eyes were locking to her again and it was a challenge to breathe. ‘How are you feeling?’
Her heart was hammering so hard with nerves she felt her throat close over, her already sore throat, still tender from the removal of the breathing tube. But when he spoke, she froze in wonderment because his voice was familiar. ‘I know your voice... I know your voice!’ she gasped with a sense of attainment. ‘In fact it’s the first thing I’ve recognised since I woke up...but I don’t recognise you. Who are you?’
‘Lorenzo Tassini.’
‘I’m married to you?’ Brooke yelped in open disbelief.
Lorenzo’s brows drew together. He was trying very hard not to stare at her because she was a vision of natural beauty, this woman he had married who had only shown him the ugliness she kept hidden on the inside. With her dishevelled hair hanging across her shoulders, framing her entrancing heart-shaped face, and those huge incredible dark blue, verging-on-violet eyes, she looked utterly angelic. And different, startlingly different, because he didn’t think he had ever seen Brooke without her cosmetic enhancements. Brooke would climb out of bed at dawn to put her make-up on, no matter how often he had told her she didn’t need it to look good.
But, of course, there were differences in her appearance. She was thinner, for a start, painfully thin in spite of the nourishing diet she had been fed by tube. She looked frail and somehow younger. The surgeons had restored her to perfection, but his acute gaze had already spotted the changes. Her mouth seemed a little wider, a little lusher in its pout, her nose shorter, less defined, and her eyes, those beautiful violet eyes were as bright and inquisitive as a bird’s. And he had never ever seen such an expression on Brooke’s face before. Brooke rarely showed emotion of any kind but, right now, he was seeing uncertainty, shock and intense curiosity fleeing across her face and it was a novelty for him to be able to interpret her feelings.
‘Yes, you’re married to me,’ he confirmed flatly, recalling the doctor’s warning, striving to abide by it when his conscience wanted him to throw the truth out there and be damned for it because he wanted no more lies between them. But if he told her about the divorce, he would lose her trust, her ability to depend on him, and she needed him right now. She needed to trust that he would not harm her and that she could rely on him because he knew there was no one else to take his place.
Brooke swallowed painfully and closed her eyes. A headache was beginning to pulse behind her brow. She was ridiculously tired for someone who had only been awake for a couple of hours.
‘Would you like a drink?’ Lorenzo prompted, lifting the glass with the straw in it.
‘Yes...thanks.’ Her eyes flickered open again and she sucked eagerly on the straw, the cool water easing her throat. ‘I’ve got so many questions.’
‘We’ll answer them one by one.’
‘But why don’t I remember you when I remember your voice?’ she exclaimed in frustration. ‘How long have I been here? Nobody would tell me.’
‘You’ve been here over a year.’ Lorenzo watched her eyes round in further disbelief and once again savoured the newness of being able to read her face. ‘After the first few weeks, when you failed to come out of it, the prognosis wasn’t optimistic, so it is a source of great satisfaction for me to see you awake.’
‘It is?’ Brooke repeated, brightening in receipt of that acknowledgement. ‘Then why don’t you show it?’
‘Show it?’ He frowned.
‘Smile, look happy. You walked in here looking like the Grim Reaper,’ she told him, reddening at her boldness in being that blunt. ‘I feel so alone here.’
Ramming his ever-present doubts about Brooke’s veracity to the back of his mind, Lorenzo closed a hand over her limp fingers. ‘But you’re not alone.’
‘Sit down beside me...here, on the bed,’ she heard herself urge.
He looked as startled as if she had suggested he get into the bed with her and she stiffened in mortification. Instead of doing as she asked, he backed away and sank into the chair by the window. He was very reserved, she decided, adding to her first impression of him, not a guy who relaxed or who was easy with informality. It was impossible to imagine that she had ever been in bed with him and, at the thought, her face burned.
‘How long have we been married?’ she pressed.
‘Three years now.’
Then, she had definitely been in bed with him, Brooke realised, and she would have squirmed with embarrassment had she had the ability to move normally. But nothing was normal about her body or her brain throwing up random embarrassing thoughts, she conceded ruefully, and nothing was normal about their situation either, and it had to be causing Lorenzo equal discomfort that he had a wife who didn’t remember him.
‘I’m sorry about all this. I’m sorry I don’t know you and that I’ve caused you all this trouble.’
‘You haven’t caused me any trouble whatsoever,’ Lorenzo lied, wondering what was wrong with her because Brooke’s view of the world was generally one-sided. She didn’t consider other people or their needs. She valued those around her strictly in accordance with the benefits they could bring her. She could be charm personified to get what she wanted but would then dispense with a person’s services the instant she achieved her objective. But, of course, he reminded himself darkly, he was valuable to Brooke at this precise moment when she had nobody else to fall back on.
‘It’s kind of you to say that but all these months I’ve been lying here like a rock and I must’ve been the most awful worry for you,’ she mumbled, her words slurring.
‘I think you need to rest now,’ Lorenzo told her, rising from his seat. ‘I need to make arrangements fo
r you to be moved to a more suitable facility where you can convalesce.’
Her head heavy, she turned her eyes back to him. ‘I just want to go home,’ she whispered weakly.
‘I’m afraid that’s not an option. Right now, you need a rehabilitation programme to regain your strength and medical support to deal with your amnesia,’ Lorenzo explained smoothly.
‘How did we meet?’ she muttered drowsily, her brain spinning on and on, in spite of her exhaustion, wanting answers to countless questions.
‘At a party in Nice. I was there on business.’
‘You’re a businessman?’ she slurred.
‘A banker,’ he advanced.
‘I don’t like banks,’ she mumbled, and then thought in surprise, Where did that thought come from?
Brows pleating, Lorenzo paused at the door to look back at her searchingly. ‘Why don’t you like banks?’
With an enormous effort she opened her eyes again and there he was, standing directly below the lights, his hair blue-black, his eyes transformed into liquid-gold pools of enquiry. He looked devastatingly handsome and she smiled at him sleepily. ‘I don’t know. It was just a random thought that came out of nowhere,’ she admitted.
‘Go to sleep, Brooke,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘No kiss goodbye?’
Lorenzo froze at what struck him as an almost childlike question, which was laughable, he told himself, for anyone acquainted with Brooke’s past history. ‘No kiss. You’re too sleepy and I like my women awake.’
‘That’s mean,’ she mumbled.
Lorenzo stood at the foot of the bed watching her sleep. He should’ve been on the phone looking into convalescent facilities. He should’ve been seeking out a top psychiatrist to treat her. He should’ve told her that he wouldn’t see her tomorrow because he was flying to Milan for an international banking conference. But he did none of those sensible things. He stood and he watched her sleep, feeling guilty at leaving her but all the while thinking in rampant disbelief that he might have married Brooke, but suddenly he was feeling as though he didn’t know her either. Everyone had layers, he told himself irritably. Maybe this was how Brooke was when she was unsure of herself and no longer knew who she was. Restored to her fantastic wardrobe and her make-up and her headlines, she would once again become the woman he remembered.
* * *
Brooke sank into a seat in front of Mr Selby, her psychiatrist, and stowed the stick she was using. After a physio session she was always very sore and the slight limp she still had made her clumsy as she tired towards the end of the day, but she didn’t complain because just being able to walk again felt like a precious enough gift.
‘How have you been over the last few days?’ the psychiatrist enquired over the top of his eccentric half-moon glasses.
‘Great, but no flashes, no memories yet,’ she said uneasily. ‘Everything still feels so strange. Lorenzo brought me this giant metal case of cosmetics to replace the one that was destroyed in the accident and I think he was expecting me to be ecstatic, but I couldn’t identify half the stuff in the box. I used a bit of it for his next visit. I didn’t want him to think his present was a disappointment.’
‘You seem to care about Lorenzo a great deal,’ her companion remarked.
‘Surely that’s healthy when I’m married to him?’ Brooke replied.
‘Of course, you’ve been forced to depend on him, but it will be even more healthy for you to embrace a little independence as you recover your physical strength.’
Brooke’s nod of acknowledgement was stiff. Over the past two months, she had learned just to let advice she didn’t relish pass over her head. Everyone she met in the rehabilitation centre seemed to want to give her advice. She had dealt with surprise after surprise since her arrival. She had discovered that she was married to an extremely wealthy man and piece by piece she had learned that, before the crash, she had been a minor celebrity, a known fashion icon and often a source of media interest.
Those revelations hadn’t felt natural to her and hadn’t seemed to fit in very well with the quieter, less confident image she had slowly been developing of herself. But when she asked Lorenzo when she could go on the Internet to research her own previous life, he had insisted that it would be the wrong thing to do and that her memories would have a much better chance of returning if they weren’t forced.
‘What will I do if the memories never come back?’
‘You will rebuild yourself. You’ve been very lucky. Your injury was severe, but you have no other ongoing problems,’ Mr Selby reminded her bracingly.
Except a husband she still couldn’t remember, a reality that tormented Brooke every time he visited her. But he wasn’t able to visit her as often as he had hoped because he was an exceptionally busy banker, who went abroad several times a month. And her initial impression of Lorenzo had been spot on in its accuracy. He was very reserved. He rarely touched her in even the most fleeting way. It was a little as though she had an invisible force field around her, she conceded with a regretful grimace. Obviously he was deeply uncomfortable with the fact that she didn’t remember him but his hands-off approach wasn’t helping her to feel any closer to him. It was a subject she needed to tackle...and soon, she told herself ruefully.
He hadn’t walked away while she was in a coma, so why was he keeping his distance now? Did he love her? Did he still find her attractive? Or was their marriage in trouble?
She agonised over the options in the giant box of make-up because he was coming to see her that evening. She even leafed through the totally impractical garments he had had brought to her, which hung in the wardrobe, and selected a dress because greeting Lorenzo in the yoga pants that she wore for physio sessions hadn’t got her anywhere. Lorenzo was used to a fashion queen, so she would strive to please and maybe that would warm him up.
Her skin heating at that enterprising thought, she did her face and put on the electric-blue dress that she thought was hideously bright, almost neon in shade, but presumably she had bought it and liked it once. She slid into it and then embarked on the matching shoes. She wasn’t supposed to wear heels yet but she wouldn’t be moving around much, which was just as well because the shoes pinched painfully at the toes.
* * *
Lorenzo stepped out of his chauffeur-driven limo and studied the modern building with disfavour as he braced himself for another visit to his wife. If she didn’t recover her memories soon, he was likely to be forced to the point of telling her the truth about their marriage. And the psychiatrist had warned him that Brooke wasn’t ready to deal with that reality, that he had become her ‘safe place’ and if that support was suddenly withdrawn, it might well disrupt her fragile mental state and send her hurtling back into panic mode, which would set back the recovery process.
He was already in major conflict with his lawyers’ warnings. They didn’t take a humane approach to the situation he was in, merely cautioning him that frequent visits to his estranged wife would only convince a judge that granting him a divorce would get in the way of what could be viewed as a potential reconciliation. And he didn’t want to do that, no, he definitely did not want to stay married to Brooke. There had to be a hard limit to his compassion and care. But that wasn’t what was really bothering him, was it?
He wanted her: that was the real problem. In fact, he lusted after her more, it seemed, than he had ever lusted after her. Why? Because she was different, so different he couldn’t believe it sometimes and, quite ridiculously, he liked her now. How was that possible? Logic told him that he was seeing Brooke as she might have been before the lust for fame and the infatuation with her own beauty had taken hold of her. Even more shockingly, Brooke au naturel was a class act.
Only he didn’t think it was an act any longer because he was convinced that the woman he remembered could never ever have carried off that outstanding mix of artless naiv
ety and innocence she showed him. In short, Brooke was all sorts of things she had never been before with him...caring, unselfish, undemanding. She had made him like her again, but he was determined not to be sucked back into that swamp a second time, he reminded himself grimly. She was recovering well and soon he would be able to cut their ties again and slot her into that penthouse apartment.
Lorenzo strode in and Brooke leapt upright at speed, wanting him to see that she had made the effort, wanting him to see that she was truly getting back to normal...and ready to go home.
‘You look...more like yourself this evening,’ Lorenzo commented as she regarded him expectantly.
Her violet eyes, bright with what he recognised as excitement, unsettled him.
‘I think I’m ready to leave here...to come home,’ she told him urgently. ‘I’m sure it would be better for me to be in a familiar place. They’re very kind to me here but I’m going crazy cooped up like this and it’s so boring and uneventful. Your visits are the only highlights in my week.’
With difficulty, Lorenzo mastered his consternation. ‘I’ll speak to your doctors tomorrow. We don’t want to rush into anything. After all, you couldn’t even walk two months ago.’
‘I’m getting stronger every day!’ Brooke argued. ‘Why don’t you see that?’
‘I do see it,’ Lorenzo countered levelly. ‘But until you recover your memory, it’s too risky.’
Brooke’s hands coiled into tight fists, the sudden burst of temper that ignited inside her an explosion of the frustration she had been fighting off for days. ‘Am I going to stay here for ever, then, as a patient?’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘Because I’ve already been told, and you must also know, that I might never get my memory back!’
Lorenzo gritted his teeth. He did know that, but he had confidently put the warning to the back of his mind because every time he saw her, he expected to see her change back into the woman he remembered. ‘Sit down,’ he urged. ‘We’ll discuss this calmly.’