“Ring?”
“Your engagement ring!”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Briefly she sketched the circumstances under which she’d been found, injured and without identification, on the Oregon beach. “There’s a possibility that I may have been attacked and robbed and then dumped on the beach. Mrs. L. says I was probably carrying a fair amount of cash.”
“And wearing a four-carat diamond ring!”
“I’m sorry.” She suddenly felt guiltily careless about losing something so valuable, guilty about not remembering she’d ever worn such a ring, guilty about not remembering him and feeling only uneasiness with his nearness. This was her fiancé.
“The ring doesn’t matter.” His hands closed over hers, bending her fingers against her palm. “All that matters is that you’re here and safe.” He lifted her hand to his lips and tenderly kissed the empty ring finger. “A ring is replaceable. You aren’t.”
But the missing ring was more reason than ever to believe robbery had been the motive for what had happened to her. Missing money, missing ring; it added up.
He suddenly looked stricken, as if the same thought had just occurred to him. “I hate to think that the ring may have been the cause of all this! But it would have been a terrible temptation to someone unscrupulous, of course.”
Did she know unscrupulous people? Katy wondered uneasily. Or had it been a chance encounter with a stranger?
“Look, the ring doesn’t matter,” Barry said firmly. “We’ll get another one. What’s important is, as you said a minute ago, that we get reacquainted.”
Reluctantly she finally said, “You might begin by telling me about our relationship.”
“We’ve been engaged a little over a year.” He kept a firm hold on her hand as he spoke, as if afraid she might disappear again. “We met when I photographed you on a swimsuit shoot in the Caribbean. You were with the Carlson modeling agency at that time, but when I opened my own agency, Alexander Models, you saw the possibilities and decided to join me. Later, after we became engaged, we flew out here together so I could meet your parents. Who were wonderful people, by the way. But you don’t remember them either?”
Katy shook her head. “Mrs. L. said you were here another time, shortly before I left the ranch?”
She felt a jerky tightening of his fingers, but his voice was smooth when he said, “Yes, that’s right. I needed your signature on a spectacular new contract as model and spokeswoman for a cosmetics company.” He smiled. “And I was missing you desperately anyway, so it seemed a good reason to fly out.”
“But, from what I’ve been able to figure out, I’d apparently decided to quit modeling and not return to New York. I had Mrs. L. have my roommates ship all my belongings out here.”
He shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no, you weren’t quitting modeling. We had an awesome townhouse lined up to live in after we were married, but it was being remodeled and you couldn’t move your things into it yet. So you decided you’d just have everything shipped out here.”
That seemed an odd course of action, but, as Katy was often discovering, her pre-amnesia thought processes were not necessarily clear to her now.
“Your roommates. . .” He paused, and then, with a certain delicacy, selected a tactful phrasing. “They were envious of your success in coming with my new agency, perhaps even a bit vindictive, and you were anxious to move on and get away from them.”
The assessment of her roommates sounded plausible to Katy, given the carelessly packed condition of her belongings. “What happened on the contract with the cosmetics company?”
“When you seemed to disappear into thin air, they canceled. But don’t worry. We’ll come up with something even better.”
“Not soon, I suspect.” Katy instinctively fingered the skimpy tuft trying to curl in front of her ear. “I’m not exactly model material at the moment.”
Barry leaned back and appraised her thoughtfully. “I’m thinking about that.”
Mrs. L. appeared in the arched doorway and announced that lunch was ready. Barry jumped up from the sofa and solicitously helped Katy with her crutches. Mrs. L. served lunch in the dining room rather than the breakfast nook, where Katy usually ate when alone. Barry turned surprisingly entertaining as the two of them ate salad, chicken sandwiches and iced tea, relating bits of spicy gossip and news from New York. Katy had no memory of the people he mentioned, but his little anecdotes were amusing anyway, and he seemed pleased to hear her laugh.
“Kat—” he began.
“Katy,” she broke in to correct him.
“Katy, I hate to get back to troublesome matters, but do your doctors give you any idea when your memory may return?” He spoke as if she must have a team of experts working on this problem.
She offered him Dr. Fischer’s earlier assessment. “Maybe soon. Maybe never.”
“I see.” He paused reflectively. “It doesn’t really matter, of course. You’re still tall and slim and elegantly beautiful. Whether you remember the past is irrelevant. It’s the future that matters. And we can build a fantastic future for you. For us.”
She laughed and stretched a wisp of hair to its skimpy limits. “With this?”
“I admit it was a shock when I first saw you, and I apologize for my insensitive reaction. The fact is, of course, that your hair will grow back, and we could get a wardrobe of wigs for you until then. But I think we should simply take advantage of the way things are. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to head in a totally new direction with a complete new persona.”
“What do you mean?”
“An entirely new look for you, Kat. What you are now is different, striking, attention getting!” His hand hovered over her head like a caressing halo, not quite touching the blond velvet. “We’ll create a whole new image for you. Sleek and haughty and aristocratic, disdainful of women who need hair to make them beautiful. We’ll get that great new makeup artist Leticia to create a dramatic new look for your face. Kat, it’ll be absolutely fantastic! We’ll have every high-fashion magazine editor and trendy advertiser in the country begging for you.”
Katy just sat there trying to keep her mouth from dropping open. Until this moment, during the times she’d vaguely tried to peer into her future, the idea of going back to modeling in New York had not seemed a viable possibility. It simply wasn’t real. But Barry not only seemed to think it was real and possible, he saw a glittering, rising-star future for her!
Chapter Ten
That evening, as they sat on the sofa with the sound turned down on the TV, Barry expanded on the possibilities, and Kat found herself peering into a glittering world of glamour and excitement. Her dramatic, shorn, “new look” face on magazine covers, a cosmopolitan life in a New York townhouse, lunches at elegant restaurants, interviews on television, perhaps hostess of her own TV show or a movie career before long! He dangled it all like a shimmering hologram, with an iridescent spotlight targeted on her.
“You don’t seem particularly excited about any of this,” he finally grumbled when she sat there without responding.
“Actually, I’m quite dazzled. I don’t know what to say. It’s all rather breathtaking.”
He turned on the sofa to face her, his tone suddenly urgent. “Come back to New York with me, Kat. Now. We can be married here before we leave, or as soon as we get back to New York. Whatever you want. But I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“I’m not alone,” she protested.
“I want you with me. Without a memory, I’m afraid for you. Someone might try to take advantage of you. Please, come with me.”
Katy swallowed. “I’ll have to think about it. Right now, I just don’t feel I can make any critical decisions.”
“I understand. But I love you, Kat. Just remember that.”
He leaned over to kiss her, but at the last moment she dodged his lips, and the kiss landed on her cheek. She felt his body stiffen, but then he patted her a
rm reassuringly.
“That’s okay. I know I still feel like a stranger to you. But we’ll work things out.”
***
The future prospects he offered were quite dazzling, Katy reflected as she lay in bed later. What woman wouldn’t be drawn to the glamorous life he offered? Yet here in the dark bedroom, outside the glittering web he’d spun, some of the glow of enchantment dimmed. Was this really what she wanted to do with her life? It was what she’d done in the past, but wasn’t there a certain shallowness to dedicating her life to using her face and body to sell shampoo and perfume and overpriced clothes?
She sat up and pulled aside the heavy drapes at the window beside the bed. From here she couldn’t see the dark buildings or yard lights of Damascus, only the wild beauty of the moonless night. The meadow shimmering in faint starlight, the forest dark and silent, the snowy mountain gleaming in silver and shadows in the distance. Above, each star glittered like a diamond tossed on midnight velvet, undimmed by city lights or urban haze. All so beautiful that it brought an ache to her throat.
A small click of the phone jolted her out of her drifting reverie of the beauty of the night, the sound unnaturally large in the dark silence of the bedroom. Her hand tightened around the fold of drapery. The tiny sound was nothing, of course. Some peculiarity of the phone setup made this phone give that tiny click whenever another phone in the house was used. It only meant Mrs. L. or Barry was dialing out. She’d mentioned to him earlier that right here at the house there was no cell phone service. The hour was late for a call, but there was nothing unusual or odd about it. And yet . . .
For no reason an inexplicable uneasiness flickered through her. She tried to examine the feeling with detached logic. Why did she feel uneasy? Perhaps because she didn’t quite believe Barry’s dazzling vision of the future? Perhaps because here, outside the golden circle he drew around them as a couple, his talk about the glamour and success of life with him in New York sounded just a bit like the spiel of a used-car salesman trying to sell a shiny sports car with a fatal defect in the transmission?
Yes, there was that. Yet there was more. She stared out the window at the moonless night again, and a strange, other-worldly feeling drifted around her, an eerie aura of unreality. Yes, the stars and forest and mountain were real enough, but here in this man-made house, reality wavered, like a reflection in water disturbed by a ripple or waves, or a photograph just a little out of focus.
She shivered, not from cold but from a sudden jolt of fear.
She instantly scoffed at the electric jolt. Fear? What was there to fear? That someone might “take advantage” of her, as Barry suggested? Who? Or perhaps what she really felt was a certain apprehension about Barry himself? She pondered that possibility briefly but abandoned it. His visions of glamour and success might be overblown, but there was nothing to fear from him.
Yet the unfocused fear lingered, gathering out of the darkness like some noxious cloud enveloping her. A fear of something unknown, of illusions and secrets shivering behind the glossy façade of her life, mysteries lurking in the empty pit of her past.
The phone rang, and she jumped, suddenly afraid to answer it. But she must answer, of course. The other phones in the house would also ring and could waken someone. She raised up on one elbow and fumbled for the instrument in the darkness.
“Hello?” she said cautiously.
“Did I waken you? The lights in the house are out, but I can’t see your bedroom window from here, and I was worried about you.” Jace broke off awkwardly as if it had suddenly occurred to him he could be intruding on some intimate reunion.
She dropped back to the pillow in relief at the sound of his familiar, husky voice and cradled the phone against her ear. “I wasn’t asleep. And I’m glad you called.” So very glad!
“Is something wrong?” Jace asked sharply. “I saw him arrive. Is he giving you a bad time or upsetting you?”
“No. Everything is fine. I was just lying here having an attack of nerves, I guess.”
“Pre-wedding jitters?” he asked lightly.
“No!” Less vehemently, but no less positively, she added, “Definitely no plans for a wedding. In fact, it seems that somewhere along the way I lost his engagement ring. Do you remember my wearing it?”
“No.” His unspoken thought lingered, and she couldn’t deny the ugly possibility. Perhaps she had simply removed the ring when she was around Jace so he wouldn’t know she was engaged. He jumped to a less loaded subject. “Is he bringing back memories?”
“Not a one.”
A small silence and then Jace said awkwardly, “Well, I’ll let you go, then. I didn’t call to pry. I was just concerned about you.”
“No, don’t go yet! Please.” Jace was solid reality, no deceptive façade or secrets here. “It feels reassuring to talk to you.”
“Reassuring?”
“He wants me to come back to New York with him. Along with being engaged to him, I’m a model with his agency. He thinks my ‘new look’ could be a big success.”
“I don’t know anything about the fashion or advertising business, but I suppose that could be true. Is that what you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“How do you feel about him, Katy?”
“As owner of the modeling agency or as my fiancé?”
“Whatever.” She heard a deliberate shrug in the word, as if he didn’t want to admit a personal concern if she was madly in love with Barry.
She searched through the maze of impressions and reactions that had accumulated during the day. A little lamely she finally said, “He seems nice.”
Unexpectedly Jace laughed, a husky chuckle holding honest amusement. “I would hope, if I’m ever engaged, that my beloved has something more dynamic than ‘he seems nice’ to say about me.”
She had to laugh with him at her insipid statement. “But I must have been in love with him or I wouldn’t be engaged to him?” An unplanned upswing made a question of what she had thought was a statement.
“People change. Feelings change.” He hesitated and then added lightly, “You’ve changed. And my feelings about you have changed.”
“I still don’t share your spiritual faith.’
“No, but God is working on you.”
Katy strongly doubted that. If there was a higher power, she still felt abandoned, not worked on, by him. But she was sure of something else. “I’m glad you called,” she said with husky sincerity.
He hesitated and then said softly, “So am I. And remember, if you need me. I’m here. And so is the Lord.”
She replaced the phone and snuggled back under the covers. The odd feeling of unreality had receded now, fading like an unpleasant dream, and with it went that inexplicable fear. Solid, steady Jace was there. She could count on Jace.
***
Next morning after breakfast Mrs. L. reminded her that her appointment with the doctor in Yreka was that afternoon, and Barry offered to drive her to it.
“I don’t want to put you to all that trouble,” Katy protested. “You’d have to drive back here again instead of going on to catch your plane.”
Barry smiled. “You’re not rushing me off to a plane just yet, my dear Kat. I intend to take you back to New York with me when I go.”
She detoured the New York issue. “I wish you’d call me Katy.”
“Katy doesn’t really fit the dramatic, ultrasophisticated image I want to project for you.”
“I don’t feel ultrasophisticated. I’m not sure I want to be ultrasophisticated.”
Barry simply laughed indulgently, as if she were acting like a sulky child.
On the almost two-hour drive on the rough, winding road to Yreka, Katy questioned Barry about her career and her personal life in New York. He told her about photographic shoots they’d been on together, parties they’d attended, even little squabbles they’d had, but everything was as foreign as if she were reading it
for the first time in a novel.
The doctor examined and x-rayed her leg through the cast, and said everything looked good. He also said he should be able to remove the cast in another three weeks. On the drive home it was Barry’s turn to ask questions about everything that had happened in the last few weeks. He also probed gently at the blankness before that. Katy was tired by the time they got home and excused herself for a nap. When she woke, she wandered out to the kitchen.
“Where’s Barry?” she asked.
“He said he was going for a walk. I think he headed toward the river.” Mrs. L. opened the oven door and expertly added a smidgen of garlic to the roast already sending out savory scents.
“Somehow he doesn’t seem like a walk-in-the-woods sort of person,” Katy mused, although she remembered he had mentioned working out at a health club. She snagged a freshly toasted crouton from a tray on the stove and crunched appreciatively. “He wants me to go back to New York with him, as you heard. He thinks I can start working again as soon as the cast comes off, perhaps even before.”
“That may be just what you need.”
Katy’s hand stopped in surprise as she reached for another crouton. She’d expected Mrs. L. to raise a protective fuss if Katy even thought about leaving the ranch again so soon.
“Katy, I think he loves you and has your best interests at heart. I think you should go back to New York with him and get into the groove of the life you loved there.”
“But if I’d already decided to leave that life, maybe I didn’t love it.” She hesitated. “Did my parents like Barry?”
“Why, yes, I believe they did.”
“But I can’t marry him if I can’t remember him!”
“Katy, you have to consider the possibility that you aren’t going to remember, that you just have to go on from where you are now,” Mrs. L. said gently. “You can still have a wonderful life even if you never remember, and going back to modeling as soon as possible can get you started on it.”
“That’s true, you know.”
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