Father Found. Muriel Jensen
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had, but you’d turned me down.”
They were climbing the porch steps, and through a hanging basket of ivy the sun dappled her face. It was a beautiful peaches-and-cream oval, plumped a little by her pregnancy. In it were wide, deep blue eyes, a small, nicely shaped nose, and an expressive mouth that was now parted in interest. Her hair was deep red, and there was lots of it mounded loosely atop her head. The sunlight made it look molten.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’ve been a cop, a soldier, a CIA agent and now a detective, and you said I must have suicidal tendencies to be that reckless. That you wanted a home and children and a husband with a nine-to-five job.”
She thought that all over, frowned as though trying to remember it and finally shook her head. “Well, what changed my mind?”
He pushed the cabin door open and ushered her inside. “I like to think it was my winning personality.”
She teased him with a smile. “No, really,” she said.
He laughed as he picked up the wood he’d dropped onto the porch table and carried it inside. “If that’s not the reason, I guess I don’t really know. You didn’t say. You just asked me to marry you.”
She held the door open for him. “Then we were happy?”
She followed him inside and perched on the arm of the pink-and-green-flowered sofa as he lowered the wood into a copper box. That question concerned him. He wanted the circumstance surrounding the birth of their baby to be perfect. He didn’t want her to worry about anything.
She hadn’t asked that many questions since they’d been here, had mostly occupied herself with preserving the garden’s bounty. In fact, she’d dedicated herself to it as though relieved to have something she obviously understood to occupy her mind.
“Yes, we were,” he assured her, turning to face her. “Why? Don’t you feel happy? Despite the amnesia, of course.”
She looked him in the eye for a long moment and he held her gaze, determined she would read nothing to the contrary there.
She finally shrugged a shoulder and said, almost with apology, “I don’t know what it is. Something makes me feel that this…” She waved a hand between him and herself. “That it isn’t right. That one of us is—” She gave up trying to explain and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.”
He made an airy stack of three logs, stuffed kindling and rolled-up newspaper in the pocket underneath, then lit it and gave her a quick smile as he reached for the poker.
“You’ve always had good instincts,” he said, giving the top log a slight nudge to open up the air space. “Things aren’t right between us. We’re usually very affectionate and physical and we have a lot of fun together. This having to sleep apart and treat each other like strangers probably seems wrong to you on some level other than memory. We understand why it has to be, but something elemental in you recognizes it as wrong behavior.”
He couldn’t tell if she was encouraged or discouraged by his reply.
She got to her feet and came closer to the fire, spreading her hands out as it began to catch. “And I’m affectionate and physical with you even though you’re always telling me what to do, or getting in the way of what I want to do?”
He replaced the poker. “You appreciate it as my concern for you.”
“That’s the honest truth?”
He avoided her eyes as he put the wrought-iron gate back in place. “Yes, it is.”
“I’m very tolerant.”
“Yes, you are.”
She walked into the kitchen on the other side of the fireplace and shouted back at him, “Coffee?”
“Please,” he replied as a breath that had been caught in his lungs escaped in a soundless sigh.
“What kind of cookies do I make you?” she called as puttering sounds came from the stove.
“Chocolate chip with pecans are my favorite,” he shouted back, turning his back on the small twinge of guilt. “Peanut butter, date bars, this candy thing you call a ‘buckeye’ that’s a peanut butter ball half-dipped in chocolate.”
Her head appeared around the doorway. “How come you’re not fat?”
He went to lean in the doorway to answer. He pointed to her stomach. “Because you also help me burn the calories.”
Her cheeks pinked and she looked just a little flustered. “Insidious of you,” she said. “So I get fat instead of you.”
“You’re always eager to cooperate.”
“Says you.”
“There again,” he said, putting a hand gently to the curve of her stomach, “you bear the evidence.”
He should not have touched her. It shocked both of them—not the shock of surprise, but the electrical charge of a powerful connection.
She’d had a lot to deal with during the past few weeks, and though she’d been very concerned about her memory when he’d taken her to California, the garden had helped relax her when they’d arrived.
But he’d known something had been changing inside her the past few days. She’d been thinking about her place in life as an individual, and about the two of them as a couple. She was worrying about their relationship.
And that worried him.
Her fingers fluttered in the air between them, as though she wanted to touch him but didn’t dare. He caught them in his hand and kissed her knuckles, needing to break this spell.
“I’ll get the coffee,” he said, and walked around her to the coffeemaker.
Though he knew things could not go on forever as they had since he’d taken her from the hospital, he couldn’t help wishing they would. She knew only what he wanted her to know.
But the harder she thought, the more likely she was to remember.
Then she’d know what had really happened.
And that would not be good.
Chapter Two
All right, maybe they did have a good thing going.
Gusty examined that likelihood as she added chocolate chips and pecans to the smooth cookie batter. She and Bram had gone into town for plumbing supplies, and she’d picked up a few additional groceries before they headed home. She had game hens and a casserole dish of dressing baking in the oven, potatoes boiling on top of the stove, cauliflower steaming and ice cream in the freezer.
She wasn’t sure why she was making the cookies. She couldn’t recall having made them for him in the past, but she did have very recent memories of his consideration and his determination to keep her safe, of his taking her to old Dr. Grayson the first day they arrived in Paintbrush, and establishing her last-trimester care. At this point in time there was little she could do to pay him back but provide him with a favorite treat.
Her hands slowed in their work as she remembered the sexual sizzle that had taken place earlier when Bram had touched her abdomen. She’d felt something ignite inside her and had seen a small explosion in his eyes.
He’d walked around her into the kitchen easily enough, but he had to have felt as affected as she—and she didn’t even remember anything they’d shared.
He’d suggested they’d been eager lovers. With what she’d come to know of him—his kindness, despite his insistence on her compliance in matters of her safety—she found that notion both exciting and daunting. She must have had to fight constantly to protect her individuality. And yet she’d married him, so she must have accepted