The Stranger and Tessa Jones
Christine Rimmer
“Stop right there. Don’t come one step closer. ”How could Tessa turn away this injured stranger who’d stumbled onto her property in the middle of a blizzard? A man who didn’t know who he was or how he’d ended up in the California Sierras. He couldn’t recall his name, but there was no mystery about his tender passion for the woman who’d saved his life.With no memory of the past – only recurring images of a Texas ranch – what could he offer Tessa? Just a life together, if she was willing to take a risk on the future, no matter where it led…
“I think maybe you’re thinking…of kissing me.”
“You do, huh?”
“Well. Are you?”
He crinkled his brow, as if deep in thought.
“Are you?” she demanded.
He smiled at her. Slowly. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
He touched her chin. He traced the back of a finger down the side of her neck, just beneath the soft fall of her hair.
“I…um…” Tessa’s breathing was agitated. “You shouldn’t. Really.”
“Yeah. I should.”
He took her mouth. Because he had to kiss her. And also to make her stop telling him not to.
Christine Rimmer came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been everything from an actress to a salesclerk to a waitress. Now that she’s finally found work that suits her perfectly, she insists she never had a problem keeping a job – she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day.
She lives with her family in Oklahoma. Visit Christine at www.christinerimmer.com.
The Stranger And Tessa Jones
By
Christine Rimmer
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
For Gail Chasan, my fabulous editor. You are the best!
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u033d15db-579a-5a95-8477-77f35be23cc1)
Excerpt (#u15683801-f8b0-5e0f-9861-f97652d91cf0)
About The Author (#u0e896393-736b-589f-8c54-b38ee59afd3d)
Title Page (#u203093d9-e8b3-57c3-860d-cf2a963d2936)
Dedication (#uf89a13de-1595-5d5a-bde8-38062e8c782f)
Chapter One (#u1b7f5f79-994a-5717-81e7-60256ef31962)
Chapter Two (#ub62984c5-6cd8-50de-993c-ce0c4e0cfb41)
Chapter Three (#udb119b03-c51f-5095-9681-ea3f604a283b)
Chapter Four (#u598fc403-a19c-510b-8e68-a20140bb2cbf)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Preview (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
“More snow on the way.” The truck driver, a fifty-something guy in insulated pants and a plaid flannel shirt, fiddled with the radio dial.
The man in the passenger seat made a low sound in his throat, a sound of agreement that discouraged further conversation. He had a killer headache. Talking only made it ache all the harder. And he kept smelling alcohol.
He sniffed the sleeve of his jacket. Definitely. Booze. Was he drunk? He didn’t feel drunk, exactly. He just felt bad. Bad all over.
The two-lane road, dangerously slick in spots, treated with road salt and dotted with slushy ridges of brown snow, twisted and turned down the mountain. Piled snow, hard-packed and dirty, rose in twin walls to either side, so the big rig seemed to roll through a dingy white tunnel, a tunnel rimmed above with evergreens and roofed higher still by a steel-colored sky.
The passenger shut his eyes, tuned out the drone of the radio and leaned his pounding head against the seatback. For a while, he dozed. When he opened his eyes again, the walls of snow on either side had diminished. He spotted a sign that said this road was Scenic Highway 49.
With a hydraulic moan and hiss, the trucker slowed the rig as they came to a sharp turn. Another turn after that and they were slowing even more.
They passed an intersection, a road winding off into the tall trees, and then another. The passenger read the street sign at that second road: Rambling Lane. And Main Street. They were on Main Street. The two-lane highway had now become the central street of some hole-in-the-wall town.
Another turn in the road and they were rolling past a town hall and a one-room post office on the right. On the left, a café and a mountain bike shop and a store called Fletcher Gold Sales, followed by a couple of tourist-trap gift shops. The place was like something out of an old western movie—or maybe, thought the passenger, like a small town in Texas, except with everything crowded together and tall mountains all around.
Texas. The passenger frowned. Am I from Texas? No answer came to him. His head pounded harder.
“Welcome to North Magdalene, California, population two-thirty on a very busy day,” said the driver, as he pulled the rig into a parking lot across from a restaurant called The Mercantile Grill, which was next-door to a bar fittingly named The Hole in the Wall. The hydraulic brakes sighed as they rolled to a stop in a long space surrounded by piles of gray snow. The driver flipped levers and worked the big gearshift. Finally, the huge truck was silent. “It’s lunchtime and I skipped breakfast.” The trucker scratched his chin. “I’m heading up the street to the café, get a quick burger to go, fill my thermos. Then I’m on to Grass Valley. I figure, just a little bit of luck and I’ll make it before the road shuts down.”
The passenger frowned. “Shuts down?”
The driver reminded him, “More snow comin’, remember? Weatherman said the storm on the way’s gonna be a doozy. Hungry?”
The passenger winced and touched the wound on his forehead. “Uh. Thanks. No.”
The trucker shook his head. “Listen. I never like to mess in a man’s business, but you don’t look so good. There’s a clinic a few miles from here. Come on with me to the café, I’ll find someone to run you on over there and—”
“No.” The passenger put up a hand, not sure why he didn’t want to see a doctor—not sure of anything, really. Except that he wished his head would stop pounding and he really hoped he didn’t throw up. “Thanks. I’ll get off here.” He leaned on the door and it opened. Icy air flowed in around him. He swung his legs over and jumped to the frozen blacktop, slipping in his smooth-soled boots—but catching himself in time to stay upright.
The trucker tried again to offer aid. “I got an extra coat in the back.” He was leaning across the seat. “Let me get it for—”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” The man shut the door on the driver and turned toward the sidewalk, not caring that he was headed back the way he’d come. It seemed as good a direction as any right then. Behind him, he heard the driver’s door open and slam shut, but the trucker didn’t call to him.
Good. The man flipped up the collar of his lightweight jacket, hunched down into it for what warmth it could provide, stuck his hands in his pockets and concentrated on crossing the ice-slick parking lot without landing on his ass.
He made it. The sidewalk, beneath the old-timey wooden cover, was dry. He walked faster, keeping his eyes focused downward, careful not to make eye contact with the few bundled-up people he passed. His headache beat a jarring accompaniment to each step he took and his stomach roiled.
Too soon, he was leaving the gift shops and the bike store behind, emerging from under the sidewalk cover and into the open. Now he was unprotected from the punishing wind that blew against his face like frozen needles and quickly penetrated the thin fabric of his jacket and his slacks. He had to watch every step. The boots he looked down on were expensive. But they weren’t made for trekking along the side of an icy road. His feet were cold and getting wet, his toes like lumps of ice. His body ached, in a whole bunch of different places. Like he’d taken a serious beating. His tan slacks were torn at the knees, the fabric bloody from cuts beneath. And his jacket not only stank of booze, it was streaked with black marks that might have been grease or oil or maybe plain dirt. It had a rip down one side.
Whatever the hell had happened to him, it must have been bad.
The occasional pickup or SUV went past. Sometimes the drivers honked. The man had a feeling if he’d signaled one of them, they would have stopped.
But then there would be talking. And questions. The man didn’t want any questions. After all, he had no answers. Questions made his head hurt worse. They were black holes he might fall into and never get out.
He forged on, passing Rambling Lane again. When he reached that other tree-shaded road farther up, he stood for a moment staring blankly at the street sign: Locust Street. With a shrug he started down it, thinking that it might be warmer within the relative protection of the evergreens.
It wasn’t. The trees cut the wind, yes, but the shadowed spaces beneath the spreading branches seemed colder, somehow, than the open road. A cold that seeped into his bones.
What the hell was he doing? How had he gotten here?
He no sooner thought the questions than the pain in his head bloomed into agony. His breath hissed in and out through his clenched teeth. “No questions,” he chanted in a whisper. “No answers. Don’t ask…”
Wallet.
The word came into his mind and he paused on the shadowed, snow-drifted road. Of course. If he had a wallet, he might learn his name, at least. And where he lived…
Hope rising, he felt in his pockets with numb fingers. First in the jacket, then in the back pockets of his pants…
Nothing.
He even unzipped the jacket to look for a hidden pocket. There was one. Too bad it was as empty as the others. He saw the soft sweater he wore. It was streaked with grime like the jacket. Blue. The right word for what the sweater was made of came to him: cashmere.
Expensive, he thought, zipping back up again. He had that gash on his forehead and various other bruises and scrapes. And no wallet. No watch or rings, either. No jewelry of any kind. His clothes were the best quality, but all wrong for a frozen winter day high in the mountains.
California, the truck driver had said. He was in California. In the mountains.
The Sierras, he thought, and almost smiled. Even though the pain in his head continued, it didn’t instantly jump to a screaming throb. I’m in the Sierra Mountains of California, in or near a town called North Magdalene.
“Could be worse,” he mumbled. “I could be dead…” That struck him as funny, for some unknown reason. He started to laugh.
But then the ice-pick jabs of pain attacked his head again. His stomach lurched and rolled. He bent at the knees, braced his hands on his thighs and sucked in air, blowing it out hard, in steaming puffs, willing the agony in his head to fade to an aching throb and his stomach to stop churning.
A sudden image filled his mind: Early morning. Cold. Astride a horse that chuffed and shook a dark mane. High desert prairie stretched out around him, shadowed but for the slender ribbon of orange sun at the horizon. Someone beside him, also on horseback. He turned to look and see who it was…
The image vanished.
He closed his eyes and let out a low moan as he forced himself to rise from his crouch. The pain, which came in waves that swelled and diminished, was backing off again and his stomach had settled down. He lifted his face to the dark trees overhead.
Snow. As the truck driver had predicted. On his cheeks. His brows. His eyelids. He opened his eyes. Yes. Snowing. Hard enough now that it even found its way through the dense canopy of evergreen above his head.
And the wind was picking up, rustling the branches of the trees, making high-pitched moaning sounds. He started walking again, putting his head down, doggedly, into the wind, staggering a little in the deepening drifts, pondering the idea that he was probably going to die and just cold and miserable and hurting enough that death was starting to seem like a welcome relief.
But then, out of nowhere, he heard the strangest sound. He paused in mid-stride and cocked his head, listening, not sure if the sound was inside his head.
But no. There it came again—something shattering. Pottery or glass or…dishes.
Someone was breaking dishes? Deep in the Sierras in the middle of a snowstorm?
The white flakes whirled around him. And then he heard a voice.
“Bill. How could you?” A woman’s voice. Another dish exploded. And another after that. “I hate you, Bill. You lied to me.” More dinnerware crashed against what was probably the trunk of a tree.
Forgetting for the moment about encroaching death, almost certain he must be losing what remained of his mind, he left the road to forge into the trees and get closer to the bizarre sounds. It seemed crucial, for some reason, to see for himself if there was really a woman out here in the middle of nowhere, a woman throwing dishes and ranting at some guy named Bill.
Not far into the trees, he stopped. Maybe thirty yards from where he stood, the trees ended in a clearing. At the far edge of the clear space, he saw a small, wood-sided house with a steep, red tin roof, smoke spiraling skyward from a gray metal chimney pipe. He sniffed. The smell of woodsmoke came to him sharply. He should have noticed it before.
And there really was a woman. She was alone, as far as he could tell, and standing at a point about midway between the edge of the trees and the house. No sign of the guy she was yelling at. Just her and a big box of dishes near her snow-booted feet, and her target: a broad-trunked cedar tree.
Littering the fallen snow at the base of the tree were a thousand shards of broken pottery in a variety of bright colors, all swiftly being buried by the increasingly heavy fall of new snow.
Sudden dizziness assailed the man, accompanied by another bout of powerful nausea. He braced himself against the nearest tree. Blinking to clear his head, gulping to keep from hurling whatever he had in his stomach onto the pure, white snow, he focused on the woman.
She was tall. A big woman, not fat, but…sturdy. Probably in her twenties. She wore a purple quilted jacket and a striped knit hat with a pom-pom on top. Tendrils of blond hair escaped from under the hat, clinging to her red cheeks and bunching at her collar. Beside her, the card-board box held plenty more dishes where the ones she’d thrown had come from. They were all different colors, those dishes. A rainbow of dinnerware waiting at her feet.
As he gulped down his nausea and blinked to try and clear the dizziness, she bent and grabbed up a plate the color of a sunflower. “You jerk!” She growled the words low in her throat. For a moment, he was sure she must be talking to him. But no. She stared into the middle distance, totally unaware of him. Crash. He winced as the plate hit the target and yellow shards went flying. She bent for another. “You promised. Promised.” She tossed a purple soup bowl. It found its mark and exploded. She grabbed two plates—turquoise and light green—one in each hand. “You said you’d be here for the wedding, Bill. I told everyone—everyone—that you were coming.”
She fired one plate and then the other, so fast that the second hit the first. Bits of pottery flew in all directions.
“But no,” she growled. “Oh, no. You couldn’t just come to North Magdalene the way you always promised you would. Uh-uh. Instead, you took a little trip to Vegas to try your luck. Vegas…” A dark blue cup and a shamrock-green saucer met their end. “You fell in love with a showgirl. And she fell in love with you. A showgirl? You?” Another plate flew and shattered.
The man in the trees knew he shouldn’t be hearing all this. He should show himself or go. But he did neither. He held on to a tree trunk to keep from passing out, as the big blonde in the clearing continued to rail at a guy who wasn’t there.
“Tell me, Bill. How does a skinny tour bus driver with a space between his teeth, a guy too shy to string more than two sentences together in the presence of a woman, end up married to a showgirl? You tell me, Bill Toomey. How does that happen?” She fired three bread plates—white, black and orange—in swift succession.
As soon as the last one hit, she went on, “Especially when last September you swore, Bill, you swore with all your heart that you loved me.” She threw a pink serving bowl. “Me, Bill.” The snow swirled around her and the pom-pom on her hat bounced in sympathetic fury. The hair that curled along her cheeks blew across her eyes. She swiped it away and bent to grab more ammunition. “You swore you loved me and wanted to spend your life only at my side…” A cardinal-red dish met a crashing fate.
The man in the trees was frowning. He muttered, “Another damn drama queen,” and wondered a second later why he’d said that.
And then he stepped forward, although some remnant of a survival instinct within him cautioned that it was unwise to approach a furious woman with a box full of dinnerware and an excellent throwing arm. She might choose him as her next target.
He walked toward her anyway, slowly at first and then faster, as the snow came down harder and the wind whistled in the branches of the tall, green trees. In seconds, as dishes continued to shatter and the big blonde with the bobbing pom-pom went on telling off some guy named Bill, he emerged from the shelter of the pines.
She’d just tossed a serving platter when she spotted him. A yelp of surprise escaped her. “What the…?” She reached into the box and came out with a second big platter. She waved it, a threat. “Stop. Don’t come one step closer.”
He kept coming. The platter was big and heavy-looking. If she hit him with it, it would probably make his headache a whole lot worse. But somehow, he couldn’t stop moving toward her. “I need…I…Please…”
She raised the platter higher. “Final warning. Stop right there.”
He croaked, “Don’t…” as in his head a thousand bells began to ring. “Don’t…” He put his hands over his ears, a move he knew to be pointless. There was no protecting his ears from the ringing. It was coming from inside his head. And the ice pick was stabbing in there again. He groaned as he felt himself slowly dropping to the ground.
It took forever to get there. It seemed to him that as the ice pick stabbed and stabbed again and the thousand bells kept pealing, he drifted downward—floating, like a leaf or maybe a feather.
Then, after forever, he found himself on his back in a thick drift of snow. He stared up at the gray sky, or tried to. But the snow was falling so hard by then, it was difficult to see more than a few feet above his face. The cold white flakes caught on his eyelashes. He blinked them away. The bells had gone silent. The ice pick had stopped its stabbing. A sigh of sweet relief escaped him.
Someone was beside him in the snow. The blonde. She was on her knees, looking down at him, bending closer. Her nose was as red as her cheeks with the cold. She smelled good. Fresh. Clean. Her breath, across his face, was warm and sweet.
As if it had happened long ago, he recalled her fury and the shattering dishes, the way she’d told off that tour bus driver named Bill. Now she wasn’t angry, though. Now she just looked worried.
Worried and…kind. He thought, She’s good. A good woman. I could use a good woman in my life.
Whatever his life was…
A hell of a mess he was in here, on his back in a blizzard, without a name, without any idea of who he was or where he’d come from, dressed for a much warmer place than the Sierras in a snowstorm.
She touched him, laying her mittened hand on the side of his face. He felt the warmth of her through the wool. “I’m sorry…”
He frowned at her. “Sorry?”
“For threatening you with that platter.”
“Oh, that. ‘S nothing.”
“I should have seen you were hurt. But you came out of nowhere…”
“Didn’t mean…scare you…” His lips felt strange and thick. They didn’t want to talk.
“I’ll call and get help.” She started to rise.
He grabbed her arm to hold her with him. “No. Stay.”
“You need a doctor.”
“Stay.”
She sighed and touched his face again. “Oh, you poor thing.”
“I look…bad, huh?”
Her soft eyes, gold-flecked green, grew softer still. She asked in a gentle whisper, “What’s happened to you?”
“I wish I knew,” he heard himself mutter, with effort. “Tell me. Your…name?” His tongue wasn’t working any better than his lips. Each word took form with tremendous difficulty.
“Tessa. Tessa Jones.”
He repeated, “Tessa. Nice. Like it…”
The woman said something else. But he didn’t hear her. He shut his eyes and let the strange white world and the big, kind-eyed clean-smelling woman drift away from him.
Chapter Two
The stranger’s strong grip on Tessa’s arm loosened and then dropped away.
A low cry of distress escaped her. Oh dear Lord, was he dead?
She ripped off a mitten and touched the side of his throat. The skin was cool beneath her fingers. His face had a grayish cast. But there was a pulse. She felt it beating, steady and true, against the pads of her first and middle fingers. And when she bent her head so her cheek was near his mouth, she felt his breath. Slow. Warm.
Alive.
His breath was sweet. But his jacket reeked of alcohol. Strange. But not the issue.
Help. Getting the man help. That was the issue.
She jumped to her feet. Thick snow whirled around her. She longed for a cell phone. But she rarely carried hers with her in town. No point in it. In North Magdalene, the mountains messed with the signals and a cell worked intermittently, at best.
She stared down at the man again. It seemed wrong to leave him alone in the snow, but what else could she do? Try and move him to the warmth of the house?
No. They always said it wasn’t safe to move the badly injured, that you should wait for the EMTs.
Swiftly, she struggled out of her heavy jacket. Kneeling again, she settled it over the top of him, tucking it close. “I promise,” she whispered, smoothing his snow-dusted black hair off his forehead, careful not to touch the angry-looking gash there. “I’ll be right back…”
Again, she jumped up. That time, she made for the house, racing as fast as she could through the deepening snow. Inside, Mona Lou, her aging, deaf bulldog, and Gigi, her skinny, white, shorthaired cat, were sitting side by side in the front hall.
“Woof,” said Mona Lou.
“Reow?” asked Gigi.
She dodged around them, headed for the wall phone in the kitchen, pulling off her mittens as she went.
Silence greeted her when she put the phone to her ear. She jiggled the hook. Nothing. A snow-laden tree branch had probably taken down a line somewhere. And judging by the look of the storm out there, the PG&E crews would be a while getting to it. She couldn’t count on it coming back on any time soon.
What now?
She hustled to her bedroom, her dog and cat at her heels, and grabbed the cell she’d left by the bed. She tried 9-1-1. Nothing happened, except a pair of short beeps a few seconds later that meant the call had been dropped before it ever connected. She tried again.
No good. So all right. She would have to move the unconscious stranger herself, after all. Somehow.
And quickly. The snow was coming down so fast and thick now, it was going to be hard to see two feet in front of her face out there. At least her Subaru wagon had all-wheel drive. She would have to get the stranger into it and take him to the clinic herself.
Somehow…
Sled, she thought. She had a small one, a gift from her dad years and years ago, propped up on the enclosed front porch. She put her mittens back on, whispered, “Wish me luck,” to Mona Lou and Gigi, and grabbed another jacket. She got a wool blanket from the closet and snatched her car keys from the key rack in the kitchen. As ready to face the near-impossible challenge as she was likely to get, she rushed back out the way she had come, only pausing to command Mona Lou, “Stay.”
The dog couldn’t hear much, but she picked up expressions and body language. She dropped to her haunches with a disgruntled whine.
On the porch, Tessa grabbed the sled and hoisted it under her free arm. The porch door bumped shut behind her as she emerged into the storm.
Lucky she’d put her purple coat on the man. The wind was blowing so hard, the heavy-falling snow swirling and eddying. She would have had to spend several precious minutes walking in circles until she stumbled on him—if not for the bright purple quilted fabric wrapped around his chest.
Muttering unheard apologies for moving him, she managed to hoist his head and torso onto the too-short wooden slats. She tucked the coat around him tighter and wrapped the blanket around the coat and under his legs. He didn’t look comfortable, not in the least. His poor head was canted at an odd angle on the red steering bar, his legs and feet dragging in the snow.
But it couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t carry him—she was strong, yes. But not that strong. What there was of the sled would have to do most of the work. Pausing only to check one more time and make sure he was still breathing—he was, thank the Lord—she looped the sled’s towrope over her shoulder and hauled him, with considerable effort, toward the Subaru, which was parked in her driveway not far from the house.
How she did it, she hardly knew. But grunting and puffing, she dragged the man’s limp body to the door behind the driver’s seat. She even managed, by bracing herself in the open door and getting him firmly beneath her arms, to hoist him up across the backseat. Then she threw open the other door, wedged herself at the end of the seat, and dragged him the rest of the way inside. Finally, she raised his knees enough to get his boots clear of the door, tucked the coat and blanket around him again and shut both doors on his still form.
Panting, starting to sweat in spite of the frigid wind, she got behind the wheel and turned on the engine. Switching the heater on high, she aimed the defrost jets at the frozen, snow-thick windshield, which wouldn’t be clearing any time soon unless she gave it a hand.
With a low moan of impatience and frustration, she found her scraper in the console, got out and scraped at the icy snow frozen to the glass, aware the whole time that precious seconds were ticking past and the stranger needed aid immediately. When she had the glass mostly cleared, she climbed behind the wheel again, shifted to reverse and backed the wagon toward the snow-covered road.
Luck was with her. She got turned around and pointed in the right direction, even got onto the road. But the snow was coming down so hard and so fast, she could hardly see, even with her wipers going full speed—which they weren’t, since the snow had piled up so swiftly on the windshield, her wipers were laboring almost from the start. She saw that the snow would stop them. So she put it in park, got out and tried again to clean the snow out of the way.
Behind the wheel once more, she forged ahead. But the wipers were laboring again almost immediately, even though she had the defroster going full blast. The snow was just too much. She’d never seen such a storm.
Then the wipers stopped.
She turned them off, and then started them again. They made half an are of the windshield, scratching ice, dragging snow, and then quit. So again, she turned them off. She stopped the wagon, got out, and again went through the process of brushing as much of the snow free of the wipers and windshield as she could.
When she got back behind the wheel, she tried them again. They worked. For a minute or two. But it was no good. No wipers in the world could keep up with the sheer volume of the white stuff tumbling down from above.
She tried leaning her head out the side window and driving that way. But the whirling snow made it almost impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her nose.
It wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t dare go on.
Moaning in distress for the unconscious man on the seat behind her, she put the Subaru in Reverse and backed it the way she had come. It was rough going, agonizingly slow.
But she made it at last, sliding into the parking space, right where she’d started, only pointed the opposite way. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she told the man in back, as if he could hear her. “I’m so sorry. It was just too dangerous to go on.”
Tessa put her head down on the steering wheel and let out a low moan—of fear for the stranger, of hopeless frustration. But no sooner had that moan escaped her than she drew herself up.
She was a Jones. She came from hardy, determined stock. A Jones man was the toughest, orneriest, unbeatable-est guy around. And a Jones woman? She was tougher still—after all, a Jones woman spent most of her life standing up to Jones men.
The man in the back seat needed warmth and shelter and a soft place to rest, at the very least. Tessa could do that much for him.
And she would.
Chapter Three
Warmth.
Impossible, but somehow, he was warm again. He moaned and opened his eyes. A ceiling. He was in a room. In a bed, his head on a white pillow, his body covered in a clean-smelling sheet and thick blankets. There was a dresser against the wall and a rocking chair in the corner. A shut door—to the closet or a bathroom?—on one side of the dresser, and an open one to a hallway on the other.
Gray daylight shone weakly in the wide window to the right of the bed. It was snowing hard, the white flakes hurling themselves at the glass.
A clock on the nightstand said it was 4:15 p.m. Vaguely, he recalled passing out in the snow. It had been sometime after noon then, hadn’t it? That would mean he’d been out for at least a few hours. That is, if it was still the same day.
He looked around some more. There were lots of framed photographs on the wall and on the dresser beside the dark eye of a small TV. They were, for the most part, pictures of a lot of people he’d never seen before.
But he did recognize the big blonde, the one who threw dishes and yelled at a guy named Bill. She was in several of the pictures. Laughing, with her head thrown back in one. Smiling broadly in another. And shyly in a third.
I’m in a bedroom in the blonde’s house. He remembered the house—the tin roof, the chimney pipe with its trail of smoke spiraling into the gray sky…
When he’d passed out cold in the snow, the blonde must have brought him in here. Somehow. Or maybe someone else was here, someone who’d come out of the house after he was unconscious, someone who had helped her.
His mouth was dry as a desert ravine. He needed water. There was a white pitcher and an empty glass on the nightstand. He reached out his hand to the pitcher—and then let it drop. He’d have the pitcher’s contents all over him if he tried to fill the glass lying down.
Okay, then. He would sit up.
With a groan, he popped to a sitting position. His head spun. So he dropped back flat again.
After a moment, he dragged himself up more carefully. That time, he managed to stay sitting until the spinning slowed a little. About then, he realized that beyond a wide variety of bruises and welts, his torso was bare. He pushed away the warm blankets.
She had taken his pants, too, leaving him in his boxers—black ones. Of silk, it appeared. Or was that satin? He felt a pained smile curve his lips as he realized that he didn’t even recognize his own underwear.
The smile faded to a scowl as he continued the inventory of his battered body. His bare feet and legs were crisscrossed with strange, violent-looking bruises. She’d bandaged his cut-up knees.
He touched his face, felt gauze over the cut on the left side of his forehead. Weakness claimed him and he knew he didn’t have the energy required to reach over, lift the pitcher and fill the glass.
Pitiful. Just pitiful. Wincing, flopping back down onto the pillow and dragging the blankets over himself again, he looked around the bedroom for his clothes and his shoes.
If they were there, he couldn’t see them.
From somewhere in another part of the house, he heard conversation. A low drone of voices. At first he thought the blonde must be talking to someone, maybe whoever had helped her get him inside and into this bed—but then he heard music, a vaguely familiar commercial jingle, and he figured it out: Someone was watching TV.
He considered simply lying there until he felt up to trying to drink water again, to getting on his feet. Or until someone entered the room and saw he was awake. But in the end, he needed to know if the blonde was there, to be certain he wasn’t alone in a strange house, with a TV left on in the other room.
“Hello?” It came out a raspy whisper. As if his voice had stopped working with the rest of him. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello?”
A moment later, she appeared, tall and strong and so healthy-looking, in the doorway. She wore a yellow sweater and blue jeans and a shining, hopeful smile. Her blond hair fell, thick and loose, on her shoulders.
There was a dog, too. A bandy-legged bulldog with a patch over one eye. When she stopped in the doorway, the dog lumbered around in front of her and sat at her feet.
“You’re awake!” She sounded absolutely thrilled.
Her excitement at his merely being conscious had the strangest effect on him. It warmed him within. He made his lips form a smile to answer hers.
“Water?” He croaked the word. “I can’t…manage it.”
She came to him and sat on the edge of the bed. He watched as she filled the glass from the pitcher. Gently, she slid a cool hand behind his head, lifting him enough that he could sip, and then putting the glass to his lips with care. “Easy,” she whispered. “Take it slow…” The water moistened his dry mouth and soothed his parched throat.
“More,” he croaked, when she took the glass away.
“Careful, okay? Not too much, not at first.” She tipped the glass to his mouth again and he drank—less than he wanted. But enough that he no longer felt so dry.
She lowered his head back to the pillow and smoothed the covers around him. “Better?”
He breathed in that special, clean scent of hers. “Thank you.”
“Give it a few minutes, to see if it stays down. Then if you want more—”
“Wait. No…”
She tipped her head to the side and the soft waves of her hair swung out. He wanted to touch those curls. They seemed so…vibrant. So full of that special warmth and goodness he had already come to associate with her. Her smile had changed, became a little puzzled. “No?”
“I mean, I’m not only thanking you for the water. Thank you for…everything. For saving me. Before I saw you, I was starting to think I would die.”
She did what she’d done out in the snow, pressed her hand to the side of his face. It felt good there. “You did scare me, I have to admit. I thought more than once that I’d lost you. But here you are. Safe. Warm. And conscious. And that’s just…” Her soft mouth bloomed into another sweet smile. “Terrific.”
He remembered the trucker, his offer of a doctor, and realized he’d been pretty out of it, refusing medical care that way. “I guess you called a doctor, huh?”
She swallowed, glanced away.
He untangled an arm from under the covers and touched her—a brushing touch, on the side of her arm. “What? Is something wrong?”
She looked at him again. He did like her eyes, that light hazel color, green rayed with gold. Between her smooth brows there was a slight frown.
“Just tell me,” he said. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”
She shrugged. “Well, that depends on what you call bad.” A quivery sigh escaped her. “The phone’s dead. And the snow is really coming down. It’s just the two of us here and we’re not getting out for a day or two, at least. Nobody’s getting in, either. Including a doctor.”
He took her hand then, and twined their fingers together. Strange, but it seemed the most natural thing, to hold her hand. She thought so, too—at least, she didn’t try to pull away. He asked, “You’ve got plenty of wood for the fire, right?”
She nodded. “And propane heat, too. The tank out back is full, which is great.”
“And food.”
“That’s right.”
“And water and electricity. I even heard a TV.”
“Yep. Everything’s working fine. Except the phone.”
“Tessa—it is Tessa, right?”
“Yep.”
“Tessa,” he said again, because he liked the sound of it. “I’ll be okay now. I’m sure I will.”
“Yes.” She said it in a passionate whisper. “You’ll be fine. Of course you will. Fine…” With the hand not captured in his, she touched his forehead, on the side without the bandage, in the tender, protective way his mother used to do when he was small.
His mother. He frowned. For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he’d almost seen her face. But the image was gone in an instant. And his head was aching again. Not the ice-pick-stabbing ache, but the low, insistent throb.
“What is it?” Tessa leaned closer. “What’s wrong?”
He squeezed her hand. “Headache.”
“I can give you a mild painkiller—acetaminophen.”
The way she said it made him smile. “You can?”
“Just now, before you called for me, I got out my trusty Family Medical Guide and did a little reading on traumatic brain injury.”
Traumatic brain injury. It didn’t sound good. “That’s what I’ve got?”
“I’m no doctor, but it looks that way to me.”
“And?”
“It’s a myth that you can’t have Tylenol. And you know how they always say don’t let patients with head injuries sleep? That’s a myth, too. You can sleep as much as you want.”
“Good to know. What else?”
Something happened in those green-gold eyes. He suspected that a lot of what she’d read hadn’t been especially reassuring. “Long story,” she answered at last. “You can read it all yourself. Later.” She pulled open the drawer in the nightstand and took out a bottle of Tylenol. Once she’d given him two and helped him swallow more water to wash them down, she tucked the covers up beneath his chin. “Rest a little. I’ll be back to check on you every fifteen minutes or so. And if you need me, just give a holler.”
“Will do.”
She rose and started to go.
He stopped her in the doorway, where the bulldog waited. “One more thing…”
She turned back, her hand on the doorframe. “Yeah?”
“What did you do with my clothes?”
She made a sound in her throat. “Yikes. I guess that was kind of a shock, huh? Waking up in your underwear?”
“I got through it. And the whole process was a lot easier for me than for you—I mean, since I was out cold at the time and did nothing but just lie there.”
She looked so earnest then. “I thought you’d be more comfortable, you know, without them. And then I did need to patch up your knees. That was easier without your pants in the way.”
“Good call,” he reassured her. “I just wondered where they were.”
“They’re laid out in the basement to dry now, but it’s not looking real hopeful. Everything but the socks were dry clean only. I did what I could with them—mending them and cleaning them up, I mean. But most of those greasy black stains wouldn’t come out.”
“My boots?”
She folded her arms and leaned on the doorframe. “I put them near the woodstove in the other room—not too close, but close enough they’ll dry a little faster.”
“Thank you,” he said, seriously now. “Again. For everything. ” They looked at each other across the short distance from the bed to the door. He liked looking at her.
She said, kind of shyly, “I have a question, too.”
“Anything.” He said it automatically, and then realized there were hundreds of questions—thousands—to which he had no answers. But he’d do his best.
For her.
“I don’t know your name.” She glanced downward, still shy. He thought how she’d managed to drag him in here, how she’d stripped him to his boxers and bandaged him up and put him in bed. How she’d mended his clothes and washed them and put his boots near—but not too near—the fire. All without even knowing his name.
Don’t feel bad, he wanted to tell her. I don’t know my name, either. But something had him holding back those words. He sensed that whoever he was in his real life, he wasn’t a man who’d go around admitting that he had no clue who he was or where he’d come from. Uh-uh. Not even to the woman who had saved his life.
He smiled. Slowly. “You mean I failed to introduce myself?”
“As a matter of fact, you did.”
“Bill,” he said. “My name is Bill.”
She laughed then, softly, leaning into the doorframe, that patch-eyed dog looking up at her. Then she drew herself up to her full six feet or so. “Oh, come on.”
But he only insisted, “Call me Bill.” Why not? It was as good a name as any. Maybe he’d be a better Bill than the idiot who’d jilted her for that showgirl. “Did you leave the rest of those dishes out there in the storm?”
She hitched up her chin. “You bet I did. They’re buried already, not to be seen until the spring thaw.”
“You’ve got quite an arm on you.”
“I played basketball in high school. Shooting guard. Varsity team. Boys’ varsity team.” She spoke with pride. “It’s a small school. They need every good shooting arm they can get.”
“Wow. Impressive.”
A modest nod. Then, firmly, “Rest.”
“Rest, Bill,” he corrected.
“All right. Have it your way.” Softly, she repeated, “Rest, Bill.”
He did rest. When he woke again, his headache had faded away and it was dark in the room. The curtains were drawn over the windows and no light bled in from outside. It must be nighttime.
The door to the hall was open. There was a light on, low, out there. The clock on the nightstand said it was 5:46 p.m. He started to call for Tessa, but then thought he’d try sitting up by himself again first.
His sore stomach muscles complained, but he did it. He reached for the switch on the bedside lamp and turned it on. Then he twisted to bolster the pillows against the headboard for support, and winced at the sharp pain down low on his belly.
What the hell? Wasn’t there any part of his body that hadn’t been bruised or bloodied?
He pushed back the blankets, eased the elastic of the boxers wide and peered inside. Good news: The family jewels were there, intact. But a deep bruise had imprinted itself in purple, green and black, across his lap. From some kind of belt restraint, maybe?
Car accident?
Was that it? He’d been in a car crash?
He studied his torso, checking for the mark of a chest restraint among all the other bruises. There wasn’t one. Just a rainbow of black and purple splotches at random intervals on his ribcage and across his upper belly.
His head had started to pound again. He shut his eyes, breathed in and out through his nose. It worked. Slowly, the pounding faded. With a sigh of relief, he leaned back against the pillows. A minute or two ticked by as he gathered his strength for the next effort.
When he thought he could manage it, he tried for water—and succeeded. He reached over and poured some into the glass and brought the glass to his lips. It tasted like heaven, cool and refreshing. He was careful, as Tessa had warned him to be, not to gulp it down. He savored it—one swallow. Two.
So far, so good. He set the glass on his chest and rested again. Then he took a third sip.
“You are feeling better.” She stood in the doorway, beaming.
He felt absurdly proud and raised the glass to her in a toast. “Yes, I am.”
“I heated up some chicken broth. Think you’re ready for that?”
He reached over and set the glass on the nightstand. “Bring it on.”
She fed him the broth. Yeah, okay, he probably could have managed to feed himself by then. But it felt good, to be spoiled by her. So he shamelessly accepted each salty, hot spoonful from her tender hands.
After that, she told him to rest again. He didn’t argue. Obediently, he stretched out and let her smooth the covers over him. She turned off the light before she went out.
But the minute she left the room, he realized he needed a trip to the john. He considered calling her back.
But come on. Hadn’t she done more than enough already? He could certainly deal with taking a whiz on his own. So he sat up, flipped the light back on and pushed back the covers. He swung his battered legs over the side of the bed. And then, one hand on the nightstand for balance, he pushed himself upright.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Eyeing the shut door in the corner, he gauged the odds it would lead to a bathroom. Might as well find out. He started moving. It wasn’t pretty. He shuffled along like a crippled old man. But at least he was on his feet and moving forward.
When he reached the door at last, he pulled it open on a combination closet and bath. The closet consisted of a recessed space to the left. Straight ahead was the bathroom. He hobbled on in there and took care of business.
After that, he washed his hands, taking his time over it as he stared at the stranger in the mirror. Black hair, blue eyes. A groove in his chin—what they called a cleft. A bandage covering the gash on his forehead. Bruises and scrapes everywhere…
There were lotions and creams on the sink counter. He picked up one of the bottles and read the tiny print on the back, which taught him not only that the lotion contained glycerin and almond oil, but also that his eyesight was pretty damn good.
Whoever he was, he probably didn’t need glasses.
Once he’d dried his hands and hung the hand towel back on its hook, he snooped around some more.
One drawer held makeup in trays, another brushes and combs. A third, a blow-dryer and one of those curling-iron things.
Taking it slow, he returned to the bedroom.
She was waiting for him. “I thought I heard the toilet flush…” She started toward him. “Here. Let me—”
He put up a hand. “Tessa.”
“Hmm?”
“Leave a man a little damn dignity, will you?”
She stopped in midstep. “Have it your way…Bill.” She turned her back, giving him at least a show of privacy, as he shuffled his way to the bed, got in and arranged the covers over himself.
“This is your room, isn’t it?” he asked when he was settled.
She faced him with a nod. “I have a spare sleeping area, but it’s a loft. No way was I dragging you up the stairs. Not good for you, way too much work for me.”
“I’m sorry to put you out of your room.”
“Couldn’t be helped. And if you want to show you’re really grateful, get well.”
“I’m working on it.”
“You do seem better.”
“I am. Is there a remote for the TV?”
“In the nightstand drawer.” She was leaning in the doorway again.
He opened the drawer and took out the remote and pointed it at the TV, which came on to a commercial of a woman in an evening dress mopping a kitchen floor. “Local news?”
She told him the channel. He switched to it and got the weather report. A sexy brunette stood in front of a Doppler-radar map of the western states. “This is a bad one, folks. A blizzard for the record books. The front is slow-moving, which means it will be hanging around over the northern Sierra, dumping up to eight feet of snow before it’s over…”
Tessa said, “Funny about the weather report. Half the time it’s nothing you couldn’t learn by looking out the window.” And she left him.
He sipped more water and waited for the rest of the news, which came after the weather, the blizzard being the main event.
The second story had him sitting up straighter: a Learjet had crashed in nearby Plumas County, in a snowy field not far from the intersection of Highway 49 and Gold Lake Road. The business jet, owned by a Texas-based company called BravoCorp, had been en route to the Bay Area, and blown off course by the storm.
He was reasonably certain the highway that went through North Magdalene was Highway 49. Although he couldn’t recall when or how the trucker had picked him up, he remembered the ride. More or less. There had been a sign, hadn’t there, one that said it was Scenic Highway 49?
His heart pounded faster to match the ache in his head as he waited for a picture of the face he’d seen in the bathroom mirror to flash on the screen, to hear his real name, and that they were looking for him.
But then the pretty, sincere-sounding newscaster said the pilot, copilot and single passenger had miraculously all survived the crash and were hospitalized in fair-to-critical condition…
All present and accounted for. His pulse stopped galloping and the throb in his head diminished. If he’d been in a crash, it hadn’t been on that particular plane.
The news continued. No stories of car crashes or men in clothing inappropriate for freezing weather going missing somewhere in the Sierras. If anyone was looking for him, they hadn’t managed to get it on the news.
He flipped channels for a while. There weren’t many of them. Eventually, he gave up and turned it off. He put the remote on the nightstand and dozed.
After the stranger in her bedroom managed to make it to the bathroom on his own, Tessa decided that checking on him every fifteen minutes was probably overkill. She looked in on him at 7:00 p.m. and again at 7:30. That second time, after he’d been asleep for a while, she crept in to turn off the light and ended up standing by the bed, gazing down at him. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
In the light that bled in from the hallway, she studied his face. It was a very handsome face, square-jawed, with a cleft in the chin and a blade of a nose. His mouth had a certain sexy, tempting curve to it. His hair was black as night and thick, the kind of hair any normal woman would want to run her fingers through. The white bandage on his forehead stood out against his tanned skin. He needed a shave. But the shadow of beard on his sculpted cheekbones only made him look more handsome. More masculine…
Bill, he’d called himself. She felt her lips curve in a smile at the thought. The man was a whole other kind of Bill from the one who had dumped her for a showgirl.
She turned off the light and tiptoed out the door, where Mona Lou was waiting for her, looking slightly puzzled as to why there was a strange man in her human’s bed. Tessa knelt and gave the dog a scratch right where she liked it, in the folds of her neck. She pressed her cheek to Mona’s warm, short coat and whispered, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”
The dog let out a low whine and wagged her stumpy tail in response.
In the kitchen, Tessa dished up wet food for both Mona Lou and Gigi. Then she made herself a sandwich and ate in the great room with the TV on, changing the channels, looking for a news bulletin about a tall, blue-eyed, black-haired man who’d gone missing in the Sierras wearing lightweight slacks, a buff-colored jacket and a cashmere sweater.
There was no bulletin. She cleaned up after her meal and went back to her chair in front of the TV. With Gigi cuddled up beside her and Mona stretched out at her feet, she switched channels some more, looking for news of the stranger. She wished she had the Internet—her service was dial-up, no good with the phone dead. Only last summer, North Magdalene had gotten broadband service. She should have switched over, but somehow she’d never gotten around to it.
After checking on her patient again and finding him sleeping, she tried to read. It was hard to concentrate. She was worried about him.
He seemed to be doing pretty well—clear-headed when awake and enjoying normal sleep. But he’d been comatose for hours in the afternoon. According to her FamilyMedical Guide, extended unconsciousness after head trauma was not a good thing. The book advised calling an ambulance when a head trauma victim passed out. He might have a subdural hematoma, blood on the brain. And if he did have one of those and it was acute, even with treatment, which he was not getting, he could die.
The book also said that, as she’d suspected, she shouln’t have moved him. She should have covered him and made him as comfortable as possible where he was and then waited for professional help. Too bad the book didn’t say what to do when you were stuck in a blizzard with the phone line down.
The phone. Maybe it had come on again.
She checked. Still dead.
He’s fine, she kept telling herself. He’s going to be fine.
And then she would stew over how he’d told her nothing about himself except that she should call him Bill. He hadn’t mentioned who might be worried for him, who might be wondering where he’d gone off to and if he was okay.
She had a feeling he didn’t know who he was.
Amnesia. It was one of the symptoms—along with headache, unconsciousness and mental confusion—of acute subdural hematoma. Amnesia. She reached for the medical guide again and looked up the scary word. The book said there were several different types of memory loss. It could happen from emotional trauma. Or head trauma—which it was obvious he’d had.
Then again, maybe he knew exactly who he was. Maybe he was just a closed-mouth kind of guy. Or maybe he had done something…bad. Something he was keeping—along with his identity—strictly to himself.
Maybe he had some other totally valid reason to keep who he really was a secret. She just couldn’t believe he had evil intent. He seemed a good man.
Didn’t he?
How could she tell? How could she know?
Look at Bill Toomey. Tessa groaned and shook her head. The tour bus driver had not been her first romantic disappointment. She had to admit that she wasn’t any great judge of male character. The Bill in her bedroom could be a bad man. Or a good one. He could be hiding something—or simply have forgotten who the heck he was.
Wait, she thought. Why think the worst? The man in her bedroom had been grateful and respectful. And polite. He’d done nothing to make her think ill of him. Until he did something out of line, she would believe in his basic decency and leave it at that.
She went in to check on him at 10:20. He was sleeping peacefully. She took her cell out with her when she left the room.
In the great room, she dialed her dad’s number. Nothing. Feeling slightly frantic, she tried the kitchen phone again. Silence.
She was alone with the stranger and she’d better get used to it. There was no need to panic. He was going to get well. After all, he had been sleeping normally when she checked on him—or at least, she thought he had.
No. Think positive. She knew he had. He was getting better. She was certain of that.
He started shouting at 10:45 p.m.
Chapter Four
A woman was screaming. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, we’re going to die! I can’t die. Somebody help me! Help me, Ash. Help me, please!”
Then a man’s voice shouted, “Sit still! Be calm!”
The shouting startled him to wakefulness. Only then did he realize that the shouting had come from his own mouth. “Wha…?”
A tall figure appeared in the doorway. He saw broad, shapely shoulders, a halo of golden hair. Was this the one who had screamed?
No. The screaming had only been inside his mind.
And then he remembered: This was the woman who had saved him…
He lifted his head, straining, off the sweat-drenched pillow, and whispered her name on a rough husk of breath, “Tessa,” as she came to him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she promised in a gentle whisper.
He felt her cool hand on his sweaty brow, drank in her soothing voice. It wasn’t enough. He came up off the pillow again and grabbed for her, needing the feel of her, the living reality of her.
The warmth.
The softness and the strength. He wrapped his arms hard around her, buried his face against her sweet-smelling throat.
She didn’t resist him, didn’t try to pull away. She only stroked his back and let him hold her way too tight and whispered, again, “Okay. It’s okay…”
He was breathing like he’d just run a damn marathon, his sore ribs aching as he gulped in air. The sweat poured off him.
“You’re okay. You’re safe,” she whispered. “You’re here. In my house. Safe…” In spite of his powerful grip on her, she managed to reach out and turn on the lamp.
Still struggling to catch his breath, he blinked against the sudden brightness. But then, in no time, his breathing began to even out and his eyes adjusted to the light. He shifted his hold to her sweet face and cradled it between his palms. He stared hard into her beautiful eyes.
“It’s okay,” she promised him, meeting his gaze without wavering, seeming to will him to trust her. To believe. “It’s all right. All right…”
Slowly, he came back to himself—whoever that self was. He released her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab you. So damn sorry…”
She only plumped the pillows against the headboard for him. And then she poured him fresh water from the pitcher. He drank. She took the glass when he was finished and set it back on the nightstand.
“Better?”
He nodded. “I was dreaming. It was a nightmare, that’s all.”
“A nightmare about…?”
He tried to remember, but it was pointless. “I have no idea. I heard a woman screaming. And then someone shouting. It woke me up, the shouting. Then I realized the shouting was coming from me.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. That’s it. That’s…all.”
She asked, so gently, “Who are you, really?”
Her question was the toughest one, the one that brought pain. He waited for the ice pick to go to work on his brain. But there was nothing. Only emptiness.
His own life was lost to him. He wished he had an answer for her. And for himself.
She prompted, “Do you know who you are?”
He opened his mouth to lie, to remind her that his name was Bill and yeah, damn right he knew who he was. But then he realized he couldn’t do it. It seemed…wrong, somehow. Disrespectful. To keep on trying to hide the truth from her. If not for her, he’d be curled up in a snowbank somewhere. Dead.
He confessed, “I have no clue who I am. Or where I came from.”
She made a low sound of sympathetic distress, a world of kindness and understanding shining in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. You, of all people, have nothing to be sorry about.” He clasped her shoulder, thinking again how much he liked touching her. “Bill, okay? I’m serious. Let me be Bill. I’ll be a better Bill than that other fool. I swear it. I would never leave you at the altar.”
She frowned, clearly confused. “The altar? Bill Toomey didn’t leave me at the altar.”
Maybe it hurt her too much to admit it. He back-pedaled. “Well. Okay. I must have, er, misunderstood.”
“Misunderstood what?”
“Tessa. It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, yeah. It does. I want to know where you got the idea that Bill and I were engaged.”
“Out in the snow. When you were breaking the dishes? You talked about ‘the wedding,’ how Bill had promised you he’d be there for the wedding.”
A low laugh escaped her. “Oh, that.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “That.”
“I meant the wedding of a friend of mine. Bill promised he’d come to town for it. It’s Saturday, the twenty-sixth, two weeks from today.”
“Saturday.” So strange. Not even to know what day it was. “It’s Saturday, today?”
“That’s right. Saturday the twelfth.”
“Of?”
She gave him one of those looks of hers—a look of sweet and tender understanding. “January.”
“Well, all right. And so your friend’s having herself a winter wedding?”
“Uh-huh. Tawny—Tawny Riggins, my friend and my second cousin by marriage—always wanted a January wedding, even though everyone kept telling her she was crazy, that bad weather could ruin it. But Parker Montgomery, her fiancée, who also happens to be a second cousin by marriage, only a different marriage…” Her voice trailed off. She slanted him a look. “Sorry.”
“What for?”
“More information than you could possibly have needed or wanted.”
“Did I say that?”
She shrugged. “No. You were being polite.”
“Not so. I’m hanging on every word.”
She laughed. “Oh, I’ll bet.”
“Honest truth.”
“It’s only…small towns, you know. Everybody’s related to everyone else. Anyway, it’ll be a winter wedding and Bill said he would be my date for it.”
“So it’s not as bad as I thought, then.”
“What isn’t?”
“The idiot didn’t jilt you.”
“No. He only dumped me. But I broke half the dishes he gave me. That really helped me put things in perspective. I’m so over him.” She laughed. “All of a sudden, I can’t even remember his name.”
“Wait a minute. The fool gave you…dishes?”
“Oh, yeah. FestiveWare, it’s called. It comes in all these great colors, used to be popular back in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. They started making it again in the nineties. I told him I always wanted a place setting in every color. So he bought them for me. I was thrilled at the time. That was when our love was new, you might say.”
“Back when you could still remember his name, you mean?”
“That’s right, during the first week we spent together, when I went to Napa to tour the wine country last summer.”
“And Bill drove the tour bus…”
“I’ve gotta say. Your memory is certainly crystal clear on the subject of…what was his name again?”
He grinned. “You, in the snow, throwing dishes. That, I’ll always remember. Every plate you threw, every word you said.”
“Great.” She sounded resigned.
“Tell me the rest.”
“The rest of what?”
“Well, how did you find out about the showgirl?”
“Seriously, you do not need to know.”
“I do,” he insisted. “Tell me.”
“You should be resting.”
“Tell me.”
“Oh, fine.” She wrinkled her nose. “A letter. He broke up with me in a letter. I suppose I should count my blessings. At least he didn’t do it by e-mail.”
“You got the letter today, then?”
She nodded. “I heard the storm was coming in, so I closed up my store—I own a shop on Main Street—and I picked up my mail at the post office and I came home. I’d seen the letter in the stack and I was all excited, looking forward to hearing from him-whose-name-I-can’t-recall. I sat at my kitchen table and put the bills and junk mail aside. And read the letter. After I read it, I burned it. Then I got the dishes he gave me and lugged them out into the snow…and the rest, you know. I suppose you might say I kind of lost it, went a little crazy, when I read that letter.”
“A little?”
“Okay. It was more than a little. I went crazy…a lot.”
“Luckily, though, you’re past all that now.”
“I am. It’s a miracle. My broken heart is totally mended.”
“So call me Bill. Take me to the wedding of Tawny and Parker. After all, you did tell everyone that I was coming…”
She laughed. And then she grew serious. Gently, she reminded him, “We just met. You’re not well. And two weeks is…a long time from now.”
He couldn’t argue with that one. “Fair enough. For now, I’ll be satisfied if you’ll just call me Bill.”
“Bill,” she said. “All right. Bill.” When she looked at him like that, he thought that being some guy named Bill wouldn’t be half-bad. “Tell me,” she coaxed, “I mean, if you feel up to it. Tell me what you do know. What you remember…about your life. About yourself.”
“That’ll be over nice and quick.”
“I would like to know.” The bulldog, which had been sitting in the doorway until then, lumbered over. Tessa bent and scratched its wrinkled head. “Unless you’re too tired…”
He couldn’t refuse her. “I’m okay. Really.” She was, after all, his hero, the one who had saved him from certain death. “I remember riding in a big rig down Highway 49. That was today, some time before noon…” He shared what little he had to call memory—the ride into North Magdalene, the driver who tried to help him, the trek through town and along the highway to the tree-shaded road that led to her house. As he’d predicted, it took hardly any time to tell: the sum of his life, all he could recall of it, in a few sorry sentences. At the end, he shrugged. “The rest you know better than I do.”
She laid her palm, as she had twice before, along the side of his face. “It will be okay. You’ll see. It will all work out.” She spoke fervently.
He put his hand over hers. “Whatever happened to me before this, I finally got lucky. I found you.” Okay, it sounded sappy as hell. But too bad. It was the truth.
Tessa gazed at him so tenderly—or she did until she seemed to catch herself. She pulled her hand away, sat back from him a little and cleared her throat. He knew she was striving for just the right words—words that wouldn’t hurt his feelings, but would make it clear she wasn’t interested in getting anything romantic going with him.
He changed the subject before she found a way to tell that lie. “Two things I want now. Don’t say I can’t have them.”
“Well, that depends,” she said, all brisk and business-like, “on what they are.”
“Solid food.”
A tight, careful smile. “I can do that.”
“And even before food, I really need a shower—and don’t give me that look.”
“What look?”
“Doubtful. Worried. I can hack a shower.”
“Your bandages…”
“A bath, then. I can be careful of my knees and my head. I mean, if you’ve got a tub…” The bathroom he’d used earlier only had a shower stall.
“There’s a tub in the hall bath.” She still looked unsure. But then she sighed. “I suppose if your bandages get wet, we can just change them.”
“Exactly.”
“And I’ve got some sweats that are a little too big for me. They might fit you, or close enough. And some wool socks left here by…never mind.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I am not.”
He teased, “I want to know all your secrets, Tessa Jones.”
She made a humphing sound. “Only if you tell me yours.”
“Too bad I don’t have any—at least, none I can remember.”
She gazed at him so intently. “It’ll come back, your memory. In time. You’ll see.”
He liked her simple faith in positive outcomes. She made him think of those bumper stickers that commanded, Expect a miracle. Only she was the miracle.
“A bath,” he said again. “Please.”
“All right. If you really think you have to…”
She gave him a stack of stuff to take in there with him: the sweats, the socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste. “There are clean towels on the rack and shampoo and soap in the cabinet.” She even offered one of her pink disposable razors and a can of feminine shaving cream. He took it all with a grateful smile.
Once the tub was full, he sank into it with a long sigh, careful to keep his bandaged knees above the water. He could have stayed in there forever, soaking his aches and pains away. But his stomach kept complaining. He needed food. So he washed and got out and shaved with the razor she’d given him, lathering with her shave cream that smelled like tropical flowers. He brushed his teeth and put on the sweats, which fit well enough, although given a choice, he would have gone for something that wasn’t light purple. The socks—whoever they’d once belonged to—were thick and warm.
And the bandage on his forehead was coming loose. He pried it off the rest of the way and studied the injury in the medicine cabinet mirror. It wasn’t pretty. It also wasn’t bleeding anymore, so he figured he’d just go without a bandage for now.
In the kitchen, she told him he looked fabulous in lilac. She took his boxers to wash, disappearing downstairs to start a load. When she came back up, she checked the wound and agreed it was probably okay to leave it uncovered. She gave him half a roast beef sandwich. He wolfed it down and she passed him the other half. And an apple. And a tall glass of milk.
By then, he was tired again. But he was also enjoying himself. A lot. He was warm and his stomach was full. His headache seemed to have taken a break. Sitting there with her at her kitchen table…well, he couldn’t think of anywhere else he would rather be.
True, he didn’t have a lot to compare the moment to, given that he couldn’t recall being very many places: the highway known as 49, the town called North Magdalene and this small, plain house of hers. They were his whole life, as of now. They were all he knew, all he’d ever known.
It was damn scary.
But when he looked across the table at her, all he could think was that he never would have met her—if whatever had happened to him hadn’t happened. That seemed impossible, not to have met Tessa Jones. Impossible and wrong.
From where he sat, he could see most of her great room. The bulldog was asleep on a rag rug a few feet from the woodstove. There was a white cat on the sofa. An old-fashioned clock on the rough mantel over the stove chimed midnight, softly. He’d known her for almost twelve hours. It was forever. It was his whole life.
She left him to go down to the basement and move the load of laundry to the dryer.
“You’re drooping in that chair,” she said, when she came back up.
“Sit down.”
She shook her head, but she did sit.
He asked, “What’s the dog’s name?”
“Mona Lou.”
“And the cat?”
“Gigi.”
“Tell me about your family.”
“Bill, did you hear me? You should go back to bed.”
“I will. In a while. Are your parents still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Still married?”
She shook her head. “My mom lives in Arkansas. My dad’s still here, in North Magdalene. He got married again when I was twelve, to Miss Regina Black. Gina was what they used to call a spinster in the old days. She was in her thirties when my dad swept her off her feet. They eloped to Reno. We were living in Arkansas then, but when my dad and Gina married, my mom let us come back home and live with them.”
“Us?”
“I have a sister, Marnie. She’s three years younger than me.”
“Tall and blonde like you?”
“Not so tall. Brown hair. Completely different personality.”
“Different, how?”
“Come on. I know you’re tired…”
He didn’t budge. “Uh-uh. I want to hear about your sister. How’s she different from you?”
She gave him a long look of disapproval. But in the end, she did answer his question. “Marnie was a crazy and wild little tomboy with a bad attitude when she was a kid.”
“You were the good sister?”
“Too good.”
“No.”
“Yeah. Too good. Seriously. We were always fighting, back then, Marnie and me. But since we’ve grown up, we get along fine. She lives with her boyfriend, Mark, now. In Santa Barbara. Mark and Marnie have been best friends since they were kids. Mark’s dad is Lucas Drury. He’s a bestselling author. Writes horror stories? And Lucas is now married to my cousin, Heather. But Lucas had Mark by his first wife.” She laughed. “Like I said before, it’s a small town. A girl can’t turn around without running into a relative.”
He liked listening to her talk and he liked hearing about her family. “And you get along okay, then, with your stepmother?”
“Gina? I love her. We all love her. My dad was a mess before he got together with her. He was troubled and wild, like most of the men in my family. He drank too much and went out with a woman named Chloe Swan. Big trouble, that Chloe. Once she even shot him.”
He laughed. “You’re not serious.”
“Oh, I am. She was trying to shoot Gina, actually. But my dad got in the way.”
“He took a bullet for your stepmother?”
“Yeah. That’s love for you, huh?”
“But he recovered?”
“Fully. And Chloe went to prison for a few years. Since she got out, she’s had the good sense to leave my dad alone. Guess she finally figured out that Gina is the only woman for Patrick Jones. With Gina, my dad found out how to be happy. With Gina, we all
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