The Second Mrs. Adams

by Sandra Marton

  He frowned, turned away and strode to the closet. “You said you preferred to join the club,” he said brusquely, “that it was where all your friends went and that it was a lot more pleasant and a lot safer to run on an indoor track than in the park. Have you decided what you’re going to wear tomorrow?”

  “But how could it be safer? If you and I ran together, I was safe enough, wasn’t I?”

  “It was better that way, Joanna. We both agreed that it was. My schedule’s become more and more erratic. I have to devote a lot of hours to business. You know that. I mean, you don’t know it, not anymore, but…”

  “That’s OK, you don’t have to explain.” Joanna smiled tightly. “You’re a very busy man. And a famous one. The nurses all keep telling me how lucky I am to be married to you.”

  David’s hand closed around the mauve silk suit hanging in the closet.

  “They ought to mind their business,” he said gruffly.

  “Don’t be angry with them, David. They mean well.”

  “Everybody ought to mind their damned business,” he said, fighting against the rage he felt suddenly, inexplicably, rising within him. “The nurses, the reporters—”

  “Reporters?”

  For the second time that night, David cursed himself. He could hear the sudden panic in Joanna’s voice and he turned and looked at her.

  “Don’t worry about them. I won’t let them get near you.”

  “But why…” She stopped, then puffed out her breath. “Of course. They want to know about the accident, about me, because I’m Mrs. David Adams.”

  “They won’t bother you, Joanna. Once I get you to Bright Meadows…”

  “The doctors say I’ll have therapy at Bright Meadows.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of therapy?”

  “I don’t know exactly. They have to evaluate you first.”

  “Evaluate me?” she said with a quick smile.

  “Look, the place is known throughout the country. The staff, the facilities, are all highly rated.”

  Joanna ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. “I don’t need therapy,” she said brightly. “I just need to remember.”

  “The therapy will help you do that.”

  “How?” She tilted her head up. Her smile was brilliant, though he could see it wobble just a little. “There’s nothing wrong with me physically, David. Or mentally. I don’t need to go for walks on the arm of an aide or learn basket-weaving or—or lie on a couch while some doctor asks me silly questions about a childhood I can’t remember.”

  David’s frown deepened. She was saying the same things he’d said when Bright Meadows had been recommended to him.

  “Joanna’s not crazy,” he’d said bluntly, “and she’s not crippled.”

  The doctors had agreed, but they’d pointed out that there really wasn’t anywhere else to send a woman with amnesia… unless, of course, Mr. Adams wished to take his wife home? She needed peaceful, stress-free surroundings and, at least temporarily, someone to watch out for her. Could a man who put in twelve-hour days provide that?

  No, David had said, he could not. He had to devote himself to his career. He had a high-powered Wall Street firm to run and clients to deal with. Besides, though he didn’t say so to the doctors, he knew that he and Joanna could never endure too much time alone together.

  There was no question but that Bright Meadows was the right place for Joanna. The doctors, and David, had agreed.

  Had Joanna agreed, too? He was damned if he could remember.

  “David?”

  He looked at Joanna. She was smiling tremulously.

  “Couldn’t I just…isn’t there someplace I could go that isn’t a hospital? A place I could stay, I mean, where maybe the things around me would jog my memory?”

  “You need peace and quiet, Joanna. Our town house isn’t—”

  She nodded and turned away, but not before he’d seen the glitter of tears in her eyes. She was crying. Quietly, with great dignity, but she was crying all the same.

  “Joanna,” he said gently, “don’t.”

  “I’m sorry.” She rose quickly and hurried to the window where she stood with her back to him. “Go on home, please, David. It’s late, and you’ve had a long day. The last thing you need on your hands is a woman who’s feeling sorry for herself.”

  Had she always been so slight? His mental image of his wife was of a slender, tall woman with a straight back and straight shoulders, but the woman he saw at the window seemed small and painfully defenseless.

  “Jo,” he said, and he started slowly toward her, “listen, everything’s going to be OK. I promise.”

  She nodded. “Sure,” she said in a choked whisper.

  He was standing just behind her now, close enough so that he could see the reddish glints in her black hair, so that he could almost convince himself he smelled the delicate scent of gardenia that had always risen from her skin until she’d changed to some more sophisticated scent.

  “Joanna, if you don’t like Bright Meadows, we’ll find another place and—”

  She spun toward him, her eyes bright with tears and with something else. Anger?

  “Dammit, don’t talk to me as if I were a child!”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to reassure you. I’ll see to it you have the best of care. You know that.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, her voice trembling not with self-pity but yes, definitely, with anger. “You just don’t understand, do you? You think, if you have them fix my hair and my face, and ship me my clothes and make me look like Joanna Adams, I’ll turn into Joanna Adams.”

  “No,” David said quickly. “I mean, yes, in a way. I’m trying to help you be who you are.”

  Joanna lifted her clenched fist and slammed it against his chest. David stumbled back, not from the blow which he’d hardly felt, but from shock. He couldn’t remember Joanna raising her voice, let alone her hand. Well, yes, there’d been that time after they were first married, when he’d been caught late at a dinner meeting and he hadn’t telephoned and she’d been frantic with worry by the time he came in at two in the morning…

  “Damn you, David! I don’t know who I am! I don’t know this Joanna person.” She raised her hand again, this time to punctuate each of her next words with a finger poked into his chest. “And I certainly don’t know you!”

  “What do you want to know? Ask and I’ll tell you.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “For starters, I’d like to know why I’m expected to believe I’m really your wife!”

  David started to laugh, then stopped. She wasn’t joking. One look into her eyes was proof of that. They had gone from violet to a color that was almost black. Her hands were on her hips, her posture hostile. She looked furious, defiant…and incredibly beautiful.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean, what am I talking about? I said it clearly enough, didn’t I? You say I’m your wife, but I don’t remember you. So why should I let you run my life?”

  “Joanna, for heaven’s sake—”

  “Can you prove that we’re married?”

  David threw up his hands. “I don’t believe this!”

  “Can you prove it, David?”

  “Of course I can prove it! What would you like to see? Our marriage license? The cards we both signed and mailed out last Christmas? Dammit, of course we’re married. Why would I lie about such a thing?”

  He wouldn’t. She knew that, deep down inside, but that had nothing to do with this. She was angry. She was furious. Let him try waking up in a hospital bed without knowing who he was, let him try having a stranger walk in and announce that as of that moment, all the important decisions of your life were being taken out of your hands.

  But most of all, let him deal with the uncomfortable feeling that the person you were married to had been a stranger for a long, long time, not just since you’d awakened with a lump on your head and a terrible blankness
behind your eyes.

  “Answer me, Joanna. Why in hell would I lie?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even saying that you are. I’m just trying to point out that the only knowledge I have of my own identity is your word.”

  David caught hold of her shoulders. “My word is damned well all you need!”

  It was, she knew it was. It wasn’t just the things the nurses had said about how lucky she was to be the wife of such a wonderful man as David Adams. She’d managed to read a bit about him in a couple of old magazines she’d found in the lounge.

  On the face of it, David Adams was Every woman’s Dream.

  But she wasn’t Every woman. She was lost on a dark road without a light to guide her and the only thing she felt whenever she thought of herself as Mrs. David Adams was a dizzying sense of disaster mingled in with something else, something just as dizzying but also incredibly exciting.

  It terrified her, almost as much as the lack of a past, yet instinct warned that she mustn’t let him know that, that the best defense against whatever it was David made her feel when he got too close was a strong offense, and so instead of backing down under his furious glare, Joanna glared right back.

  “No,” she said, “your word isn’t enough! I don’t know anything about you. Not anything, what you eat for breakfast or—or what movies you like to see or who chooses those—those stodgy suits you wear or—”

  “Stodgy?” he growled. “Stodgy?”

  “You heard me.”

  David stared down at the stranger he held clasped by the shoulders. Stodgy? Hell, for Joanna to use that word to describe him was ludicrous. She was right, she didn’t know the first thing about him; they were strangers.

  What she couldn’t know was that it had been that way for a long time.

  But not always. No, not always, he thought while his anger grew, and before he could think too much about what he was about to do, he hauled Joanna into his arms and kissed her.

  She gave a gasp of shock and struggled against the kiss. But he was remorseless, driven at first by pure male outrage and then by the taste of her, a taste he had not known in months. The feel of her in his arms, the softness of her breasts against his chest, the long length of her legs against his, made him hard with remembering.

  He fisted one hand in her hair, holding her captive to his kiss, while the other swept down and cupped her bottom, lifting her into his embrace, bringing her so close to him that he felt the sudden quickened beat of her heart, heard the soft little moan that broke in her throat as his lips parted hers, and then her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him back as hungrily as he was kissing her…

  “Oh, my, I’m terribly sorry. I’ll come back a bit later, shall I?”

  They sprang apart at the sound of the shocked female voice. Both of them looked at the door where the night nurse stood staring at them, her eyes wide.

  “I thought Mrs. Adams might want some help getting ready for bed but I suppose…I mean, I can see…” The nurse blushed. “Has Mrs. Adams regained her memory?”

  “Mrs. Adams is capable of being spoken to, not about,” Joanna said sharply. Her cheeks colored but her gaze was steady. “And no, she has not regained her memory.”

  “No,” David said grimly, “she has not.” He stalked past the nurse and pushed open the door. “But she’s going to,” he said. “She can count on it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALL right. Ok. So he’d made an ass of himself last night.

  David stood in his darkened kitchen at six o’clock in the morning and told himself it didn’t take a genius to figure that much out.

  Kissing Joanna, losing his temper…the whole thing had been stupid. It had been worse than stupid. Joanna wasn’t supposed to get upset and he sure as hell had upset her.

  So why hadn’t he just gone home, phoned her room and apologized? Why couldn’t he just mentally kick himself in the tail, then put what had happened out of his head?

  They were all good questions. It was just too bad that he didn’t have any good answers, and he’d already wasted half the night trying to come up with one.

  He’d always prided himself on his ability to face a mistake squarely, learn from it, then put it behind him and move on.

  That was the way he’d survived childhood in a series of foster homes, a double hitch in the Marines and then a four year scholarship at an Ivy League university where he’d felt as out of place as a wolf at a sheep convention.

  So, why was he standing here, drinking a cup of the worst coffee he’d ever tasted in his life, replaying that kiss as if it were a videotape caught in a loop?

  He made a face, dumped the contents of the pot and the cup into the sink, then washed them both and put them into the drainer. Mrs. Timmons, his cook cum housekeeper, would be putting in an appearance in half an hour.

  Why should she have to clean up a mess that he’d made?

  David opened the refrigerator, took out a pitcher of orange juice and poured himself a glass. You made a mess, you cleaned it up…which brought him straight back to why he was standing around here in the first place.

  The unvarnished truth was that if he’d divorced Joanna sooner, he wouldn’t be in this situation. By the time she’d stepped off that curb, she’d have been out of his life.

  He’d known almost two years ago that he wanted out of the marriage, that the woman he’d taken as his wife had been nothing but a figment of his imagination. Joanna hadn’t been a sweet innocent whose heart he’d stolen. She’d been a cold-blooded schemer who’d set out to snare a rich husband, and she’d succeeded.

  Because it had taken him so damned long to admit the truth, he was stuck in this sham of a marriage for God only knew how much longer.

  David slammed the refrigerator door shut with far more force than the job needed, walked to the glass doors that opened onto the tiny patch of green that passed for a private garden in midtown Manhattan, and stared at the early morning sky.

  Corbett and his team of white-coated witch doctors wouldn’t say how long it would take her to recover. They wouldn’t even guarantee there’d be a recovery. The only thing they’d say was that she needed time.

  “These things can’t be rushed,” Corbett had said solemnly. “Your wife needs a lot of rest, Mr. Adams. No shocks. No unpleasant surprises. That’s vital. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  David understood it, all right. There was no possibility of walking into Joanna’s room and saying, “Good evening, Joanna, and by the way, did I mention that we were in the middle of a divorce when you got hit by that taxi?”

  Not that he’d have done it anyway. He didn’t feel anything for Joanna, one way or another. Emotionally, mentally, he’d put her out of his life. Still, he couldn’t in good conscience turn his back on her when she didn’t even remember her own name.

  When she didn’t even remember him, or that she was his wife.

  It was crazy, but as the days passed, that had been the toughest thing to take. It was one thing to want a woman out of your life but quite another to have her took at you blankly, or speak to you as if you were a stranger, her tone proper and always polite.

  Until last night, when she’d suddenly turned on him in anger. And then he’d felt an answering anger rise deep inside himself, one so intense it had blurred his brain. What in hell had possessed him to haul her into his arms and kiss her like that? He’d thought she was going to slug him. What he’d never expected was that she’d turn soft and warm in his arms and kiss him back.

  For a minute he’d almost forgotten that he didn’t love her anymore, that she had never loved him, that everything he’d thought lay between them had been built on the quicksand of lies and deceit.

  He turned away from the garden.

  Maybe he should have listened to his attorney instead of the doctors. Jack insisted it was stupid to let sentiment get in the way of reality.

  “So she shouldn’t have any shocks,” he’d said, “so big deal, she shouldn’t hav
e played you for a sucker, either. You want to play the saint, David? OK, that’s fine. Pay her medical bills. Put her into that fancy sanitarium and shell out the dough for however long it takes for her to remember who she is. Put a fancy settlement into her bank account—but before you do any of that, first do yourself a favor and divorce the broad.”

  David had puffed out his breath.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Jack. But her doctors say—”

  “Forget her doctors. Listen, if you want I can come up with our own doctors who’ll say she’s non compos mentis or that she’s faking it and you’re more than entitled to divorce her, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “Nothing’s worrying me,” David had replied brusquely. “I just want to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I survived four years being married to Joanna. I’ll survive another couple of months.”

  Brave words, and true ones. David put his empty glass into the dishwasher, switched off the kitchen light and headed through the silent house toward the staircase and his bedroom.

  And survive he would. He understood Jack’s concern but he wasn’t letting Joanna back into his life, he was just doing what he could to ease her into a life of her own.

  She didn’t affect him anymore, not down deep where it mattered. The truth was that she never had. He’d tricked himself into thinking he’d loved her when actually the only part of his anatomy Joanna had ever reached was the part that had been getting men into trouble from the beginning of time…the part that had responded to her last night.

  Well, there was no more danger of that. He wouldn’t be seeing much of his wife after today. Once he’d driven her to Bright Meadows, that would be it. Except for paying the bills and a once-a-week visit, she’d be the problem of the Bright Meadows staff, not his.

  Sooner or later, her memory would come back. And when it did, this pretense of a marriage would be over.

  * * *

  Joanna sat in the back of the chauffeured Bentley and wondered what Dr. Corbett would say if she told him she almost preferred being in the hospital to being in this car with her husband.