Husbands and Other Strangers

Gayle turned her head and winced as pain accompanied the simple movement. “What happened?” she asked Sam. “What am I doing here?”

“I fished you out,” Taylor answered. “You insisted on diving off the bow of the sloop.” He pointed to where they’d all watched her dive off. It had been on a stupid dare. Taylor had raced over to stop her, but it was too late. “Probably just to annoy me.”

When he’d looked down in time to see her slice cleanly into the water, he’d felt his temper rising at her defiance. But it was admittedly mingled with admiration. He couldn’t help it. The sight of her form affected him that way. She’d always moved like sheer poetry.

At first when she didn’t emerge, he was sure she was doing it just to get back at him for that disagreement they’d had yesterday. Taylor knew she could hold her breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time. Her father, Colonel Lars Elliott, retired, an Olympic gold medalist, had thrown all three of his children into the water long before they could walk, determined to make serious Olympic contenders out of them, just as his father had made of him. More than that, he’d demanded winners. Gayle had been his winner.

But thirty seconds after her dive today, an uneasiness had taken hold of Taylor. Even as Jake and Sam quickly checked the perimeter of the sloop to see if Gayle had come up somewhere away from them, Taylor was diving in to find her. Something told him this wasn’t one of the pranks she was so fond of pulling. This was on the level.

He almost hadn’t found her. By the time he’d brought her up to the surface, it had been at the last possible moment for him. His lungs had been bursting, screaming for air. He could have made it up faster without her, but he would rather have died with her than let Gayle go and risk anything happening to her.

She blinked, her eyes stinging as she looked at the man beside her in wonder. What he said didn’t make sense. “Why would I want to annoy you?”

Taylor rose to his feet, looking down at her. He shook his head and smiled once more. “That’s something I ask myself a lot. My only conclusion is that annoying me seems to be a hobby of yours.”

Gayle frowned as she stared back at him. As if she didn’t know what he was talking about. As if she were looking at him for the first time.

The uneasiness returned, though he couldn’t put a name to it.

“I think that blow to the head might have finally succeeded in doing something none of us had ever managed to do. Make you docile,” Sam elaborated when she turned her sea-blue eyes on him quizzically. At the helm, Jake laughed.

“Fat chance,” Gayle said. Pulling her legs to her, she tried to sit up again.

Taylor started to stop her. “I told you to lie back.” Why did she always have to be so damn stubborn? If she had a concussion, movement might make it worse. He was prepared to carry her in his arms from the shore to the hospital if he had to. After what he’d just gone through, he’d prefer it that way.

Rather than lie down, Gayle pulled her arm out of his reach. Who the hell did he think he was? “Why should I listen to you?”

A grin slicing his face, Jake shook his head, relief flooding him. “She’s ba-ack.”

Taylor ignored him. His eyes were on Gayle’s. “Because I’m making sense. Now lie back, damn it.” He glanced at the butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead and saw a small, angry red line forming beneath it. “You’re still bleeding.” He looked over his shoulder at his brother-in-law at the helm. “Jake, can’t you make this thing go any faster?”

The waters were getting choppier. The storm was coming sooner than they’d expected. Jake was already pushing the engine to the limit. “I’m trying,” Jake answered. Frustration outlined his voice. “This isn’t a speedboat.”

“Try harder,” Taylor snapped. Though he didn’t often lose his temper with people other than Gayle, the near tragedy they had narrowly avoided had turned his patience to the consistency of dried kindling. His temper flared easily.

Gayle rallied, taking immediate offense. “Hey, stop yelling at my brothers. Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

“What?” Taylor looked at her incredulously. Now what was she trying to pull?

The question unsettled her a little as she tried to ignore the vague, irritating feeling that she should know the answer to her own question. Gayle licked her lips, tilting her chin slightly.

“I said, who are you?”

Taylor sank down again, his eyes fixed on her face. “What do you mean, who am I?”

Was he deaf as well as belligerent? “Just what I said.” Gayle slowly repeated the question. “Who are you? Are you a friend of Sam’s?”

He has no idea what kind of a game she was playing, but because she’d just given him the worst scare of his life, and because he still felt a little shell-shocked, he momentarily played along.

“Yes, I’m a friend of Sam’s. And a friend of Jake’s, too,” he added for good measure.

The answer made Gayle frown. She thought she knew most of her brothers’ friends. Certainly the ones they had in common. It was what made them such a close-knit family. But she had absolutely no recollection of the brooding, dark-haired man who seemed to think it his God-given duty to order everyone around.

The ache in her head grew even as she tried to ignore it. Gayle peered at his face, searching for some sort of recollection. “Then why have I never met you before?”

Hands on the wheel, Jake turned around. He and Sam exchanged looks. Their unspoken question mirrored each other.

What the hell was Gayle up to this time?

Taylor sat back on his heels, studying Gayle’s face. A face he’d long since memorized, every nuance, every fiber. All deeply embedded in his brain.

“Oh, we’ve met, all right.” The deep voice was pregnant with meaning.

Gayle shook off the almost hypnotic effect. Met? She sincerely doubted it. She would have remembered a face like that, even if she’d only seen it just in passing: chiseled, stern, perhaps even hard, to the undiscerning eye; an odd collection of planes and angles that somehow arranged themselves to make the man impossibly handsome.

The total is greater than the sum of the parts, the vague thought echoed through her throbbing head.

But handsome or not, that didn’t give him a right to lie to her or play a trick at her expense, especially when her brain felt as if it was the consistency of Swiss cheese.

“No, we haven’t met,” she insisted stubbornly.

Maybe some other time, when his nerves hadn’t been pulled thinner than the thread used for suturing an internal wound, Taylor would have been willing to play along a little longer. But not now. Not when he’d been to hell and back in what could have been a watery grave for both of them. He wasn’t in the mood for it.

He reached out to touch her shoulder. “Gayle, I don’t feel like playing games.”

She shrugged him off again. What made him think he could just touch her like that? As if he had a right to? Why weren’t her brothers protesting?

Weakness passed over her, bringing with it a volley of heat that drenched her in perspiration. Gayle would have drawn herself into a ball if she could, locking out everything. For a moment she had to struggle just to hang on to consciousness again. But she refused to surrender.

Gayle gritted her teeth together against it, against the probing fingers of pain.

“Good, because neither do I.” Her eyes became dark penetrating slits of blue green as she looked at this man pushing his way into her life. “My head feels like it’s coming apart.” She held it as if she were afraid that it would. “So, are you going to tell me your name or not?”

Concern returned like a clap of thunder. Sam sat down in front of his sister. He fanned out the fingers of one hand before her face, ignoring her question to Taylor. “Gayle, how many fingers am I holding up now?”

The sharp headache sapped any patience she might have had to spare.

“Three.” Gayle closed her hand over Sam’s and pushed it aside. “We all know it’s as high as you can count. I don’t want to play count-the-fingers with you, Sam. I want someone to tell me who this man is and why he’s trying to boss everyone around.”

Despite the tension in the air, his sister’s comment made Jake laugh. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.” His dark eyes darted toward his brother-in-law. Taylor’s face did look pretty strained. Both he and Sam had often marveled how Taylor could have lived with their sister for the past eighteen months and still remained sane. “Not that I mean to imply you’re a kettle…” His voice trailed off, having nowhere to go.

Fear began to rear its head again, bringing with it an uneasiness that nibbled away at Taylor. Jake’s comment didn’t even register. Taylor stared at Gayle, at the woman he had ultimately loved more than the allure of the free life he had abandoned for her.

“You don’t know who I am.” It sounded absurd even to say out loud. After what they had shared, he would have said that the pyramids would have become mounds of sand and blown away before she forgot him, or he her. This had to be some kind of game, a cruel prank to get back at him for the argument and God only knew what.

“Yes,” Gayle replied. But before he breathed a sigh of relief in misunderstanding, her next words took it away from him—and cleared up the minor confusion while ushering in a complete new truckload. “I don’t know who you are.”

If she was putting him on, he was going to kill her. Slowly.