Diagnosis: Attraction. Rebecca York
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was and why she had crashed her car. The easy answer was that she’d been speeding. As she pictured herself driving, she realized she knew the part of town where they’d told her the accident had occurred.
That stopped her. She’d come up with another memory—this time on her own. Well, not a memory of anything personal.
The observation about Baltimore—that was the city she was in—brought up another question: What else did she know? Maybe not about Elizabeth Doe specifically but about the world around her.
She stopped and asked herself some questions she imagined would be standard for someone in her situation. She couldn’t dredge up the correct date. But she knew who was president. And she knew... She struggled for another concrete fact and came up with the conviction that she could make scrambled eggs that tasted a lot better than what the hospital had served her this morning.
“Your clothes are in the closet,” Nurse Kramer said through the bathroom door. “Do you need help?”
“I think I can do it myself,” she said, because she wasn’t going to depend on other people if there was a chance for independence—even in small things.
By the time she stepped back into the room, Mrs. Kramer had gone back to her duties and Dr. Delano wasn’t there, either. She felt a stab of disappointment but brushed it aside. Probably he was wishing that some other doctor had examined her. And staying as far away as possible from her was probably the way to go, from his point of view.
After crossing to the closet, she took out the clothes that someone had hung up for her. Dark slacks. A white shirt and a dark jacket. A very buttoned-up look, except that the outfit was a little scuffed around the edges from the accident.
She looked at the labels of the garments. They were from good department stores. Not top-of-the-line but good enough. Another piece of information that she found interesting.
She’d been wearing knee-high stockings and black pumps with a wedge heel. Not the shoes she’d wear if she had wanted to impress someone. These were no-nonsense footwear. Did that mean she walked a lot as part of her job? Or maybe she had bad feet.
There was also underwear on the hanger, and that was more interesting than the exterior clothing. She’d been wearing a very sexy white lace bra and matching bikini panties. Apparently she liked to indulge in very feminine underwear. She took everything back into the bathroom, then decided that she might as well take a shower before she left. It would feel good to get clean. Too bad she didn’t have a change of underwear.
She thought about her name as she stood under the shower. Elizabeth. A very formal name. Did people call her Beth? Betty? Liz? Or any of the other variations of the name? She didn’t know.
But she noted that she’d washed her hair before soaping her body, and it had been in the back of her mind that she’d better do that first—in case the hot water went off and she was caught with shampoo in her hair.
An interesting priority. Did it mean she lived in a house or an apartment where there was a problem with the hot-water heater? Or had she traveled abroad like Dr. Delano?
She clenched her hand around a bar of soap, annoyed with herself for switching her thoughts back to him. He’d made it clear that there couldn’t be anything personal between the two of them, and she understood that. Yet, at the same time, she couldn’t stop thinking of him as her lifeline to her own past.
After turning off the water and stepping out of the shower, she reached for a towel and began to dry herself. There was no hair dryer, so she worked extra hard on her hair, rubbing it into fluffy ringlets.
Was that the way she usually wore it? She didn’t think so, but it would do for now. Her coiffure was way down on her list of priorities. It didn’t matter what she looked like if she didn’t know who she was and how she’d gotten herself into deep kimchi. Because it was clear from the memory Dr. Delano had dredged up that she’d done something to bring trouble on herself. Was it something she deserved? Or something that wasn’t her fault?
She made a small sound of frustration as she tried to work around the holes in her memory, then stopped and started again. It was more like her entire past was a great void—except for the memories Matt Delano had brought to the surface. With that nagging side effect he hated, she reminded herself.
Well, that probably wasn’t true. She was pretty sure he didn’t hate the sexual pull between them. He’d responded, after all, but he was determined not to cross a line with her.
She clenched her fists in frustration. If she couldn’t fill in all the blank places in her mind, they were going to drive her crazy.
Chapter Three
At the nurses’ station, Matt was thinking about the moral issue that was tearing at him. Because he was very conscious of the sexual awareness between himself and Elizabeth Doe, he should stay away from her. But at the same time, how could he refuse to help her?
Mrs. Kramer came down the hall, her strides purposeful, and he looked up questioningly when he found her standing in front of him.
“Yes?”
“Do you get the feeling that Elizabeth is in some kind of trouble?” she asked. “I mean not just the memory loss.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps she was fleeing from someone. There was a report of a man dragging her out of her car at the accident scene. Maybe he took her purse.”
Matt nodded.
“Would it be all right, do you think, if I didn’t tell anyone that I was taking her home with me? Well, I mean, anyone besides you.”
“If someone is looking for her, wouldn’t that make it harder to locate her?” he said.
“But I’m thinking, it’s likely to be the wrong kind of person, and it might be better for him not to find her.”
“Or it could be her husband, frantic for information.”
“You think she’s married?” Kramer asked.
“No,” he answered immediately, then tried to assess his firm conviction. His certainty came from her mind, but he couldn’t tell that to Kramer. Instead, he said, “No ring.”
As the nurse nodded, he took his private speculation a step further. The best he could figure was that he hadn’t gotten any hint of a husband from her memories. Or any indication of a current relationship. Just from that brief trip into her mind, he thought that she was like him—disconnected from any meaningful relationship. Only for a few moments, the two of them had connected in a way he’d thought impossible for himself.
He clenched his teeth.
“Is something wrong?” Kramer asked.
Quickly he rearranged his features. “No.”
“You look tense.”
He wished she hadn’t noticed.
When he didn’t speak, the nurse said, “I’ll let you know how she’s doing.”
“Thanks.”
He did care, more than he should, but he couldn’t admit it or anything else that would give away the out-of-kilter personal involvement that had flared between them. He turned and left the ward before Elizabeth came out, and he did something he knew he shouldn’t—like touch her again.
Thinking about it made his nerve endings tingle, but he ignored the sensation as he headed for the other end of the hall.
* * *
POLLY KRAMER WATCHED Dr. Delano stride off. She could tell he was trying to react on a strictly professional level, but he wasn’t succeeding. Which was interesting. Since he’d come to Memorial Hospital, she’d thought of him as closed up. Maybe even a cold fish. But something about the woman with no memory had created a change in him. He seemed to really care about her, although he was trying