by Lynne Graham
Brooke dropped down on the side of the bed. Lorenzo studied her. She had been all built up to ask him to take her home and now she was upset, and he felt as if he was being cruel even though he knew that he had no other choice. Sitting there, she was a picture with her tangled ringlets half concealing her piquant face, the faint pout of her luscious pink mouth, the long length of her legs displayed to perfection in that dress and those shoes. A punch of lust tightened his groin and he tensed, willing back his desire, fighting for control. The yoga pants had driven him crazy, showing every curve, every indent, but Lorenzo wasn’t easily tempted, not where Brooke was concerned, and he had fought that reaction every rigorous step of the way. He stood by the window gazing out at the tranquil courtyard garden in the centre of the building, striving to calm himself.
‘Before the accident...’ Brooke began hesitantly. ‘Our marriage was in trouble, wasn’t it?’
At that moment she didn’t want the positive answer she suspected to be her new reality. Even so, she felt she still had to ask and had to be strong enough to confront such an unwelcome truth because, in that scenario, pretending wasn’t fair to either of them.
Disconcerted, Lorenzo froze in position. ‘What makes you think that?’ he enquired in a deliberately mild tone.
‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist,’ she framed a little unevenly. ‘You never touch me unless you can’t avoid it. You never mention anything personal and if I ask questions in that line you stall. You don’t want me home either. Just be honest, Lorenzo. I can take it. And then, just go home or back to the bank because you seem to work eighteen hours a day.’
Lorenzo almost ground his teeth in frustration. It would have been the perfect moment to speak had he not had to consider her condition. He glanced across at her and saw the tears shimmering like sunshine on water in her eyes.
Angrily aware of the tears prickling, Brooke dashed them away with an impatient hand. ‘Stop treating me like a child, stop choosing your words. I’m twenty-eight years old, for goodness’ sake, not a little girl! It’s bad enough not remembering stuff, but it’s a torment to be sitting here wondering all the time what sort of relationship we have...’
In disconcertion, Lorenzo strode forward just as she leapt up in haste, determined not to cry in front of him. ‘Just go home!’ she told him fiercely as she headed for the door and the sanctuary of the patients’ lounge. ‘I’ll see you another day—’
But she tried to move too fast in the high heels and her weaker leg flailed and tipped her over. She was within inches of crashing down painfully on the hard floor when Lorenzo snatched her up, lifting her clean off her tottering feet and settling her down in front of him in the circle of his arms. The scent of him that close was like an aphrodisiac to her senses, an inner clenching down in her pelvis instantly responding. She closed her arms round his neck because she had decided that if he couldn’t even kiss her, obviously he no longer felt attracted to her, and she would get her answer to how he felt about her one way or another.
Lorenzo collided with her wonderfully unusual eyes and, involuntarily, he bent down and kissed her, damning himself for even that momentary surrender. But he was too clever by half with women not to guess that she was giving him the green light to test him. One brief kiss and nobody was catching it on camera, he reminded himself, and then her soft, succulent mouth opened invitingly under his and suddenly all bets were off because the taste of her went to his head and his groin like a bushfire licking out of control.
She tasted like...she tasted like... His primal nature threatened to take over, almost made him forget that since she had lost her memory this was their first kiss as far as she was concerned. Quite deliberately he tried to rein himself back. But Brooke was still blown off her feet by the explosion of passion Lorenzo delivered with his mouth. His lips were hard and urgent and demanding, somehow everything she had been craving without realising it for endless weeks, and he crushed her to his tall, powerful frame.
It was off-the-charts exciting.
Her hands bit into his broad shoulders to keep her upright while the intoxicating chemistry of his mouth on hers left her breathless and dizzy and afflicted with all sorts of reactions that felt entirely new to her. Of course, they couldn’t be new to her, but her heart was racing and her nipples became tight and almost sore in their sensitivity beneath her clothes. At the apex of her thighs, there was a burn, a sort of pulsing ache that inflamed her senses and, against her abdomen, she could feel the literal effect she was having on Lorenzo as well and somehow that shocked her when it shouldn’t have done.
Indeed, for Brooke, Lorenzo’s sizzling kiss was the first true gift she had had in all the weeks of her frustrating convalescence while she worried and wondered about who she truly was and wondered even harder how Lorenzo wanted her to behave. She was in constant conflict, struggling between what little she knew about her past self and the newer and equally unknown self that often prompted her to behave differently. But that kiss restored her equilibrium. It was acceptance, it was proof positive that her husband still wanted her and that she had been fretting herself into a state about nothing.
As he lowered Brooke down onto the bed and broke their connection with a slight shudder of recoil, Lorenzo was reminded very much of a saying a teacher of his had been fond of recounting to him: ‘between a rock and a hard place’. ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ struck him as more apt. Still, what was one kiss? he reasoned wrathfully, instantly going into damage-limitation mode and stepping back from her. He was awesomely aware of the arousal he couldn’t hide below the finely tailored trousers, the coolness he couldn’t yet slide into place, and so furious with himself for succumbing to her again that his lean brown hands clenched into fists.
Lorenzo had once liked to pride himself on being an unemotional man like his late father but the unemotional man who had married Brooke had discovered otherwise. He had felt tortured by the endless dramas and he had shut that weak and disturbing part of himself away again, closed it down, re-embraced his calm, his control, his...sanity. He wasn’t going back there, no, not even for the sake of honour or decency!
‘That was wonderful.’ Brooke gave him a huge smile, utterly impervious to his feelings at that moment. ‘I feel so much better about us.’
‘Good,’ Lorenzo gritted between his perfect teeth, because it felt like another nail in his coffin that she had come alive in his arms as she never had before. He was in shock, he conceded, acknowledging the fact that Brooke had never kissed him back that way in their entire acquaintance, had never shown him an atom of the desire he had assumed she had for him when he married her. He shook his handsome dark head slightly as though to clear it. She was so different, but hadn’t the doctors warned him of that possibility?
He trained his dark deep gaze on her. ‘I’m not an emotional man, Brooke.’
‘You don’t really need to tell me that. It’s kind of obvious,’ Brooke pointed out. ‘You’ve never shown me any emotion in your visits and it worried me about us but obviously we managed to get married anyway and right now I can see how tense you are.’
Lorenzo was starting to feel like the accused in the dock. ‘I’m not tense,’ he insisted.
But the tension was engraved in his lean, darkly handsome features, Brooke recognised with relief. Lorenzo might be locked up tight in his reserve, but he had shown her wonderfully strong emotion in that kiss...hadn’t he? Or had that only been sexual hunger? And why didn’t she know the difference? The way she seemed to just know other things? Like the names of the seasons, the days of the week? She swallowed hard, afraid to get carried away by her expectations of him, afraid to expect too much.
‘Will you bring me home this week?’ she just asked him baldly. ‘I’m ready even if the doctors fuss about the idea. I can’t stay here for ever...unless that’s what you’d prefer?’
That anxious question shot through Lorenzo much like a
whip because he could see the stress and the level of concern she was trying, very poorly, to hide from him, and he marvelled all over again at the complete absence of her once unrevealing shuttered expressions. ‘Of course not,’ he responded by rote. ‘I’ll speak to them.’
Content to have received that response, Brooke slid off the bed and walked over to him. ‘I won’t be any trouble to anyone. It’s not like I’m depressed or mentally troubled in some way. I’ve only lost my memory. I just want my life...’ and my husband, she added inwardly, ‘back.’
Suddenly, Lorenzo found himself smiling at the almost enthralling prospect of reuniting Brooke with her wardrobe, her jewellery and her precious scrapbooks and files of headlines and articles. Nothing surely was more likely to revive her memory than her possessions and her media triumphs? What the hell had he hoped to achieve when he kept her in a sterile medical environment? Deprived of everything she valued and enjoyed in life? Nothing in the private clinic was familiar to her and nothing here would appeal to her tastes. In such a place there was no stimulation that could help her to recover her memory. Sì... He would take her to her supposed home and in all likelihood she would recover there and remember that she hated him. He could bear a few more weeks—couldn’t he?
Even more enchanted by his rare smile, Brooke went pink. She had virtually thrown herself at him and, while it had taken a lot of initiative to act that way with him and had felt horribly pushy, the ploy had indisputably worked. As long as she didn’t mention their marriage or love or anything of that nature, Lorenzo could handle it, but for the first time she was questioning what in their marriage or in his background had made him so uncomfortable about ordinary feelings.
CHAPTER THREE
IN THE LIMOUSINE that wafted her down the long driveway towards the giant building that sat at the bottom, Brooke sat wide-eyed with wonder but striving to conceal the fact. It seemed that she was married to a man who was very much wealthier than she had understood, and that was a shock too. But acting shocked got old quickly and she was slowly trying to learn how to school her face into less revealing reactions every time she got a surprise about herself. This was her life, after all, she reminded herself soothingly, her home.
And Madrigal Court was gorgeous, she thought helplessly, as the sunlight glinted off the rows of windows and the old brick with its intricate designs and so many chimneys—a country house that must’ve been hundreds of years old. Tudor? she wondered with a frown, disconcerted to find that term popping up in the back of her brain. Seemingly she knew more about old buildings than she had assumed, or could it have been a memory? She was desperate to recall something concrete: an event, an image, a face, a fact, anything really, she acknowledged ruefully, but so far there had been nothing and that had to be incredibly frustrating for Lorenzo.
Without even thinking about it, she reached for his hand because she had been so very flattered that he had taken a day off to share her homecoming with her. She was extremely conscious that he worked very hard and for very long hours and she thought that might have been why she had concentrated equally hard, it seemed, to make a separate role and career for herself. Clearly, Lorenzo had married a strong, independent and confident woman and Brooke was desperately trying to shore up those traits in herself.
There would be no clinging, no whinging, when he disappeared abroad for days at a time, no mention of the truth that she missed him terribly when he was gone. He wouldn’t want to hear that kind of stuff and he would be disappointed in her. And hadn’t he had enough disappointment already, sufficient to end many a marriage, she reminded herself, when his wife wakened and didn’t know him from a stranger in the street?
* * *
Totally shocked by that gesture, Lorenzo flicked a covert black-lashed glance down at their linked hands and breathed in deep and slow to embrace calm. His enthralling vision of her walking into her wardrobe and shrieking in delight, ‘I’m home!’ still refused to retreat. But this new version of Brooke didn’t shriek, and her voice was low-pitched, just one of the many, many changes in her that unsettled him. It was almost as though she had had a personality transplant, he mused. Per Dio, she had cried when he told her that her parents had passed away before he met her and that she had no other relatives, nobody, who could fill in the blanks of the memory loss she was enduring now. Of course, there might be photos of her family somewhere in Brooke’s stuff, he reflected hopefully, because he knew that would please her.
At her request, he had retrieved her wedding ring from the home safe and she had threaded it on as though it were something special, not the plain band that she had originally dismissed as ‘not very imaginative’. Nothing that didn’t glitter with valuable jewels had once incited Brooke’s admiration.
She listened to his advice now as well. She hadn’t asked for a phone or even the Internet again, which impressed him as being even more weird, for Brooke had lived on her phone. How could she not be missing it? Of course, she didn’t know who or what she had to miss, did she? Lorenzo’s lean bronzed face hardened. Not least the very married film star who had recently had an aide contact Lorenzo to enquire after his wife’s health, evidently having heard a rumour that Brooke was recovering from the accident. Lorenzo suspected there had been an affair between them, but he reminded himself that Brooke’s sex life was, thankfully, no longer any of his business. They might remain legally married but there was nothing deeper involved.
Brooke walked up the worn stone steps into the house and smiled at the middle-aged man opening the door for their arrival. ‘And you are?’
‘Stevens, madam,’ the older man supplied in surprise.
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, moving indoors and stopping dead to take in the big imposing entrance hall made cosy by the low fire burning in the ancient fireplace to one side. ‘Oh, this is beautiful!’ she claimed, startling Lorenzo.
‘You hated this house,’ Lorenzo heard himself murmur in soft contradiction. ‘You wanted a modern home, a McMansion. I refused to move because this was my mother’s family home and, although I never knew her, I enjoyed the knowledge that she had once lived here.’
‘Hated it?’ Brooke exclaimed in disbelief, spinning round to look at him. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’
Watching her flounder with uncertainty as soon as she had spoken and accepted that such a former attitude was perfectly possible, Lorenzo registered his error in being that honest and at speed he strode over to a door to throw it wide. ‘Lots of married couples have different tastes.’ He dismissed that hint of contention smoothly. ‘This room is more your style.’
What style? Brooke almost asked for every piece of furniture was gilded and the drapes, the upholstery and even the carpet were pristine white. Even the vase of flowers on the low table was filled with white blooms. In her opinion, it was stark and uninviting, but it certainly gave a striking effect.
‘And this is you...’ Lorenzo indicated the large professional photograph on the wall in which she posed on the same sofa for a Dream House magazine interview she had, according to him, given only weeks before the accident.
Brooke stared in fascination at the woman in the photograph and her fingers went up to pluck uneasily at her loose ringlets as she studied that smooth straight fall of hair in the image. ‘I should be straightening my hair!’ she gasped suddenly.
‘I like it natural,’ Lorenzo dared to impart.
‘Honestly?’ she queried tautly as she stared at that flawlessly groomed, almost inhumanly perfect image with a sinking heart. It was undeniably her, but it was not the version of her that she was currently providing him with.
‘Honestly.’
In that moment, Brooke felt overwhelmed. Coming home was proving more of a challenge than she had expected. Was it possible that the head injury had altered her tastes? She supposed it was. When she had expressed her concern about such changes to Mr Selby, he had been very reassuring, never failing t
o remind her that she was lucky to be alive and relatively unscathed as if the loss of her every memory from childhood was something she simply had to accept. And perhaps it was, and there was nothing less attractive than self-pity, she told herself fiercely, moving back into the hall.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Lorenzo urged. ‘I’ll show you your room.’
Your room, Brooke noted. ‘Don’t we share?’
Lorenzo cast her a lazy, careless smile because he was fully rehearsed on that answer. ‘You like your own space and you often took your stylist up there to decide on outfits. Sharing wasn’t practical.’
‘You know more about my life than I know about yours,’ Brooke couldn’t help commenting.
‘I don’t think that there’s anything in the world of finance that would interest you,’ Lorenzo parried. ‘Unless, of course, you’ve decided to set up a business or something of that nature.’
‘Not just at the minute, no,’ she quipped, breathing in deep.
So, separate bedrooms, little wonder Lorenzo was so physically detached from her and prone to treating her as though she were a friend rather than a wife. Even though they lived in an enormous house, they didn’t seem to share much as a couple. Not a bed, not taste, not their lives. It was unhealthy but perhaps Lorenzo liked his marriage that way even if it didn’t appeal to her, she ruminated worriedly. How had she let the man she loved move so far from her in every way?
Obviously she loved him. She couldn’t believe that she would have married him for any other reason. His money, his giant house and his servants all made her feel intimidated. But he didn’t intimidate her, he made her...happy. Mr. Selby had urged her to think about whether or not that was just her insecurity talking and had asked her how she could possibly still love a man she didn’t remember. But she knew that she did in the same way she knew that the sun would rise in the morning. She had remembered Lorenzo’s voice and it was the only thing she remembered, which to her signified and proved his overwhelming importance in her life.