Ruthless Reunion

Sanchia hesitated. He was a stranger to her, and yet his compelling authority forced her to respond. ‘I had an accident. When I was in Northern Ireland.’

‘Ireland?’ He sounded surprised, but he let her go on.

‘I stepped out in front of a car and was knocked unconscious. When I came to I couldn’t remember a thing. Not what had happened, where I lived, or who I was. Gradually things began to come back. Things further back in the past. I remember my parents. When they died. Where I was. I remember everything until my late teens. But after that some things remain hazy.’ No, not just hazy, she thought. Totally obliterated. ‘Sometimes things just don’t tie up. Like walking in here today…’

‘What about walking in here today?’ Restrained urgency over-laid the deep tones.

‘Sometimes I feel as though I’ve done things before, though I know I couldn’t have.’

‘How do you know you couldn’t have done them?’

‘I just know,’ she answered lamely. ‘There’s a portion of my life I can’t recall, but I can’t have done anything that important or significant.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’m sure I’d remember it if I had. It’s just a matter of a year or so. Two, maybe. Like where I was before the accident, what I was doing. I’ve never been able to find the link.’

‘How long were you in Ireland?’

A slender shoulder lifted beneath the fluid jacket of her trouser suit. ‘I’m not really sure. I think I’d just moved there before the accident, because I was still in a bed and breakfast. Apparently I’d told the landlady I was an orphan and totally foot-loose and fancy-free, and that I was using a post office box address until I got myself some permanent digs.’

‘How long have you been back in England?’

‘Just a couple of months. I knew I’d lived in London. I just couldn’t remember where, or when I’d left, or why. Until then I was afraid to leave the safety of the places I knew. The doctors said things would probably come back in time, given the right stimulus, but…’ She gave another dismissive little shrug. ‘It’s been over two years now, and they haven’t. They say there might possibly have been something so traumatic in my life before the accident that my brain refuses to remember it. They call it psychogenic amnesia.’ Her tone derided the phrase, as well as her own inability to recover from it.

‘And you?’ He stood up then, with a subtle waft of rather pleasant aftershave lotion. Sanchia was very relieved. Crouched down in front of her like that, his masculinity was far too disturbing. ‘Do you believe that?’

She shook her head, more out of bewilderment than negation. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. How can I know?’ Vaguely sometimes she thought there must have been some boy; she caught a snatch of a voice, a bleary outline of features, a suspicion of being cruelly and brutally hurt.

Perhaps she’d gone to pieces afterwards—had a nervous breakdown. Who knew what was locked away in the depths of her mind?

‘Had you no friends who were able to help you? To try and retrace your steps?’

‘Apparently not. The doctors said I’d told the landlady that I’d been travelling round Britain—going where I pleased—but that I was definitely going to settle there in Ireland. They didn’t give me any reason to suspect I wasn’t telling the truth.’ And then as she remembered, ‘You said—you’d…been looking for me.’ She tilted her face to the strong features that wiped away any trace of the flimsy images in her brain. ‘That I ran away. What from? What was I running from?’ A cold, sick fear crept through her. She’d always known she’d been running from something.

‘…never dreamt it was so abhorrent to you that you’d actually run away.’

As the significance of those words hit home, Sanchia lowered her gaze to stare at the floor, as though she would find the answers stamped on the worn polished boards, her thoughts scouring the dark areas of her mind for the worst possible scenario. She had done something awful! Or been accused of it at the very least. ‘Were you defending me or something?’ The eyes she raised to his were dark with appeal. ‘Is that how we know each other? What did I do? Tell me!’

‘You didn’t do anything.’ A faint smile touched his mouth and was gone again, like a glimpse of the sun in an overcast sky. ‘Nothing unlawful anyway. Though that isn’t to say that what you did do, my lovely Sanchia, couldn’t be construed as criminal.’

Which meant what? she wondered, swallowing, detecting the inflection in his voice, the biting emotion behind the disturbing way he had addressed her held in check, she sensed, only by a formidable will. Involuntarily her gaze moved over his taut robed body, coming to rest again on the strong, hard contours of his face.

‘Who are you?’ she asked shakily, suddenly—inexplicably—afraid.

Alex hesitated. To tell her the truth would be to make a mockery of himself if she were just stringing him along with this preposterous story. And if she weren’t…

One strong masculine forefinger lifted insolently to trace her cheek, making her breath catch from the disturbing intimacy of his action. ‘You really don’t remember?’

She shook her head, recognising the disbelief that still laced the deep tones. Her heart was racing in her breast.

‘Anything?’

In the stillness of the room his voice, like his touch, was caressingly soft.

She didn’t know him, and yet her body responded as though she did—as though he had done this to her before and she had responded in exactly the same way. She closed her eyes at the shocking impulses that rocked her with devastating sensuality.

‘Let’s just say we…’ his hesitation was marked ‘…were acquainted. Very briefly.’

Her wan features were wary, the only colour a splash of pink along her cheekbones from the mind-shattering awareness that had gripped her just now from the lightest brush of his hand. ‘Acquainted?’ Mercifully he wasn’t touching her any more. ‘What do you mean? In what way acquainted?’

He didn’t elaborate at once, as though he were weighing her reactions, his every move calculated, geared to eliciting the truth.

She shot him a sidelong glance, nervous again as she asked, ‘Were we…dating?’

He gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘Dating?’ Was that scorn or simple rejection in his voice?

‘I just meant…were we…seeing each other?’

‘If that’s what you want to call it.’

Oh, good grief! Then did that mean that she…that they…?

‘What happened?’ she asked tremulously, her throat contracting from the wild imagery her brain had started processing, afraid of the answers without fully understanding why.

‘It ran its course.’ It wasn’t true, of course. Not by a long chalk, Alex thought grimly. But if she really had lost her memory she wasn’t ready for the explicit details of their far too brief acquaintance.

He sounded cold and unmoved, Sanchia thought, her mind racing, desperately trying to grasp a thread of memory that faded even before it had taken shape.

Despairingly, she got up, moving over to the window.

In the street below, the city’s traffic was flowing unusually freely for a weekday morning in high summer. Pedestrians jostled with each other along the busy street, tourists and workers alike reflecting a world going about its business—while she was marooned up here, with this man who both terrified and excited her, groping like a blind person for a safe footing on a slippery precipice.

‘How…?’ She didn’t want to have to ask—couldn’t turn around as she tried to formulate the question that was burning through her brain, managing eventually to croak, ‘Just how…deeply were we…involved?’

Through the muted sounds in an outer corridor—a man’s sudden cough, the echo of footsteps across the floor—Alex Sabre’s sharp intake of breath was unmistakable. When he spoke, however, his voice gave nothing away.

‘You can’t remember?’

She tried. Put her hand to her head. Goodness knew, she wanted to. Blindly she shook her head.

‘If by involved you mean were we lovers…?’ The unfinished sentence was laden with meaning.

Sanchia’s back stiffened. Violently she shook her head again. No! Not with him! she thought, every nerve pulsing with an outrageously sensual rhythm as her brain determinedly denied it. She would have known. Remembered something like that. Remembered him…

‘I would have remembered,’ she said hopelessly to the window.

In the succeeding silence she was conscious only of his daunting presence, his scent, even his hard, steady breathing, her every sense painfully acute.