Husbands and Other Strangers. Marie Ferrarella
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“No,” Gayle cried, grabbing Jake’s arm. She didn’t want to be alone with this man. “Don’t.”
Very gently Jake peeled her fingers away from his forearm.
“We’ll be right outside, Gayle,” he promised, backing out of the area. A beat later Sam followed. Leaving the two of them alone.
For a moment Taylor stood there in silence. It was killing him, seeing her like this. Ever since he’d known her, Gayle had been vibrant, feisty. He couldn’t ever recall her being frightened, the way she so visibly was now.
And then it came—that look he’d become so familiar with in the past year and a half. Defiance. Relief flooded over him, emotions threatening to close his throat. His Gayle was in there somewhere and he was going to go in and find her, even if he had to drag her out, kicking and screaming.
It would be like old times.
“Well?” she demanded, doing her best not to let this man see that she felt as if she was falling apart. She’d never been this frightened….
Except that she had, she suddenly realized. Something, just now, had flashed through her brain, a glimmer of a memory moving so fast she couldn’t catch hold of it. All she could grasp was the hem of a fragment of fear. But fear of what or who, when and why, none of this had any answers.
Damn it, this was so frustrating. She felt like a book with all the even numbered pages missing. Nothing made any sense to her. Least of all why she couldn’t remember this man everyone told her was her husband.
“We’ll take this slow, Gayle,” Taylor promised. “One day at a time.”
He fought the urge to take her into his arms and just hold her. Knowing that it was the last thing he should do. A hint of a smile formed as it occurred to him that if he did do that, she’d probably toss him across the room with one of those martial arts moves of hers. Martial arts had become her newest passion. Gayle did nothing by half measures. Whatever she undertook, she did so wholeheartedly.
It was the same when they made love.
God, he just had to bring her around. Had to make her remember their life together. And he didn’t care what the doctor had said, he couldn’t help but take this personally. She’d remembered everything. But him.
There had to be an underlying reason for that. The trouble was he wasn’t sure he was going to like the answer once he found it.
She never took her eyes off him. He’d seen old tapes of Gayle at swim meets. She always watched her opponents the same way. Was that how she saw him? As an adversary?
“And meanwhile,” she said, “I’m supposed to come home with you.”
“It’s where you live.”
Gayle frowned. That’s what he said, but how did she know for sure? If she was his wife, wouldn’t there be a degree of familiarity somewhere, however deep in her subconscious? If he was really her husband, the man she supposedly loved, would her mind really have shut down, excluding him from every thought, every memory?
She’d spent the past two hours sitting in a drafty hospital gown, waiting to be scanned and probed while she desperately tried to summon any kind of memories with him in them. All she’d managed to do was come up against a blank wall.
It had led her to an inevitable conclusion. If this man was her husband, then he must have been a terrible one. There was no other explanation why his very presence had been burned away from her memory banks.
Gayle drew herself up as high as she could manage. “I can stay with Sam or Jake.” Her tone was deliberately dismissive. On a whim she added, “Just until I remember you.” She thought that would put an end to any argument he might have.
Taylor shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from shaking her. A part of him still felt maybe this was payback for some imagined sin. She’d spent the first six months of their marriage testing him, as if she couldn’t believe that he was going to stay and wanted him to go before she became used to her status. Used to him. He’d just dug in and waited her out. He didn’t know if he had the stamina to do it again.
“The familiar surroundings might make you remember faster,” he finally told her.
“Why should they be familiar if you’re not?” she countered.
He threw up his hands, then struggled to regain control over his temper. Shouting at her wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She wasn’t testing him, he told himself. She was thrashing around in the same choppy waters that he was. It was up to him to lead her out of them. How, he had no idea, but he knew he was going to. There was too much at stake to just give up.
“I don’t have any answers here, Gayle. The doctor doesn’t have any answers,” he emphasized. “This is all new territory for me.”
She raised her hand as if she were sitting in a classroom, trying to catch the teacher’s eye. “Let’s not forget me here.”
“I’m not forgetting you,” he said so fiercely he knew he scared her. “Not for one damn second am I forgetting you. And I don’t know why you seem to have forgotten me.”
“Seem?” Gayle echoed, her temper flaring at the single word. She cleaved to the familiar feeling as if it was an old friend. This, this she could remember. Getting angry. Having no fear over voicing her opinions. She was her own person, no matter who this man was or wasn’t to her. She had to remember that. “You think I’m faking this? That I’m pretending not to know you?”
For just a moment the bars he’d placed around his own temper seemed in danger of melting.
“Right now I don’t know what to think,” Taylor shot back. “You’re not above doing things to bedevil me for reasons that I could never fully understand. You—”
Abruptly he stopped himself.
This wasn’t the way to go, even though for him the ground was familiar. Arguing with Gayle might just push her farther into this black hole that had somehow eaten away at the part of her mind that had contained him.
Struggling for control, Taylor blew out a breath. He didn’t need this. He pushed the plastic bag with her clothes closer to her. “Get dressed, Gayle. I’m going to take you home.”
She clutched the bag against her, tossing her head the way he’d seen her do a hundred times before. Her long, blond hair flew over her shoulder. “No, you’re not.”
He leaned in close to her, his lips against her ear. “Yes,” he said quietly, firmly, “I am.”
His breath slipped along the curve of her neck. The shiver along her spine mimicked its path. Something in the distance stirred, although she could put neither name nor description to it.
She dropped it.
Although she didn’t know him, something in the man’s voice told her he wasn’t someone to be messed with, to be disregarded. Certainly not a man she could order around the way she could so many of the others in her life. Even her brothers bent from time to time.
Just her luck, her so-called husband had a steel pole stuck up a place that should never be visited.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he told her. With that Taylor pushed the curtain aside and walked out of her space.
He found Sam and Jake waiting for him in the hall where they’d talked to Peter.
Sam pretended to look him over carefully. “Well, no wounds,” he observed. “That’s a positive sign. Is Gayle coming around?” Taking a look at Taylor’s face, Sam saw the answer to his question. Disappointment followed. “Guess not.”
Taylor was struggling to take this newest development in stride, the way he had everything else that involved Gayle. “The woman’s got the disposition of a wounded warthog.”
Jake laughed. “Then she is coming