Private Vows

“I don’t know.” He grinned wryly. “You see? You’re not the only one who has to admit that. If you want my opinion, though, I’d say you did. The blood was several minutes old by the time I got to you. That could be one reason that guy approached you. He could have been trying to help a beautiful woman who might be hurt.”

An involuntary, unexpected thrill darted through her and she touched her face, examining the unfamiliar contours. “Am I beautiful?”

“You don’t know what you look like? No, I guess you don’t.”

“Nobody had a mirror in the emergency room. They told me to wait until I got up here, but I haven’t looked yet. I’m not sure I can deal with seeing a stranger staring back at me.” Even as she said it, she felt shame for her cowardice, for being so frightened of everything, even her own face.

“To answer your question, yeah. You’re beautiful.” His words were complimentary but his tone was cold. For a brief instant, green fire seemed to flicker in the depths of his eyes, a fire that could heat a woman to the boiling point, past that and beyond, a fire that brought her body to tingling awareness. But that green flame died as quickly as it came.

If it had ever truly been there in the first place and not just her imagination, something she wanted to see.

“You’re beautiful like one of those cups with flowers painted on them that you see in antique shops,” he continued, his words so detached she was sure she’d imagined that brief spurt of flame. “The kind a guy’s afraid to pick up because it might break if he held it too tight.”

It was a pretty accurate description of the way she felt, but she bristled anyway. “Wouldn’t you be feeling a little fragile and a whole lot scared if you suddenly lost yourself?” She blurted the defense as much for herself as for him.

“Yeah, I guess I would be.” His square, black-stubbled jaw and the straight line of his lips contradicted his words.

With the clarity about others that must have come when she lost herself, she knew that Cole Grayson had met the devil and challenged him on his own turf. Considering the torment that lived behind his eyes, he might have lost the battle, but even so, he’d survived and nothing frightened him anymore.

“Would you hand me that other hospital gown from the foot of the bed?” she asked. “It’s the only pretense of a robe they could give me and I want to see what I look like.” She wasn’t sure whether her sudden courage came from the fact that Cole had enough strength for two people and she was able to absorb some of it, or whether his stoic demeanor shamed her into the action.

He rose from the bed, handed her the gown and waited.

She wrapped it around, covering the open back of the first gown.

Even so, when she stepped out of bed, she felt naked and exposed…and acutely aware of Cole’s masculine presence in the small room.

That was silly. The gowns, one tied in the back and the other in the front, hid her body effectively. Anyway, Cole was there as a rescuer. He had certainly not given her any reason to think he was interested in her body. He’d all but said she looked as if she might break if a man held her too tightly…and he looked like a man who would hold a woman very tightly.

She moved around the bed, carefully avoiding the mirror above the sink in the corner of the room. Facing herself wasn’t going to be easy.

Cole came up behind her, so close she could feel his body heat, smell his masculine scent combined with something else…something dark and dangerous and scary and exciting.

He flipped on the light above the sink then put both hands on her shoulders. “Go ahead,” he urged, his voice as startlingly gentle as his touch. “Maybe when you see yourself, everything will come back. You said the doctors thought the sight of a familiar face might help. You can’t get much more familiar than your own.”

She lifted her gaze slowly, as if she could sneak up on the strange woman she knew she would find in the mirror.

It was a pale, thin face with prominent cheekbones and overly large eyes. Long blond hair failed to add any color.

The image belonged to her, housed the brain she used to speak and walk. It was the woman other people saw when they looked at her. She ate with that mouth, smelled with that nose, saw through those eyes, combed that hair.

Though she couldn’t say the features were familiar, the tight, frightened expression somehow was.

She raised her eyes to Cole’s, looking for something—reassurance, courage, answers he couldn’t possibly have.

What she found instead was a flaring of the green flame she’d seen so briefly before, a fire that reminded her he was, after all, a man, an attractive, virile man, and she was a woman wearing nothing underneath the short hospital gowns.

For an instant, inappropriate thoughts and feelings flooded her mind and her body. Though Cole didn’t move, she could feel his heat against her skin, tracing down her spine and over her bottom, warming her thighs just as his breath warmed the nape of her neck.

He blinked, took his hands from her shoulders and stepped backward. “Recognize anybody?” he asked, his voice gruff with angry overtones. Anger at her? At himself?

“No.” Her answer came out on a breathy sigh and she was appalled to find her body yearning for him to return, to stand behind her, to touch her again. Her memory might be gone, but her hormones were working overtime.

Stress, she told herself. A reaction to the accident, to everything that had happened. So much stress that she’d imagined for a second time the brief flicker of desire in Cole’s eyes, imagined it and overreacted.

She cleared her throat and tried again to answer his question. “If I’d seen a picture, I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as me, but I would have known it was familiar.” At least, the expression was.

“That’s a good start.” He walked away, giving her plenty of space to return to the bed without getting close to him.

She hurried back and pulled the sheet up to her neck. “Thank you,” she said. “For being there just now, I mean. And for saving my life.”

He nodded, compressed his lips and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Well, I just came by to see if there’s anything I can do for you, anything you need, other than your memory, of course. I took that away from you, but I’m afraid I can’t give it back. No matter what you say, I blame myself that you’re here.”

“I don’t need anything.” She tried to sound more certain than she felt. “I’ll probably wake up in the morning with all my memories intact.” Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t still be terrified.

“I hope so. I hope that by this time tomorrow you’ll be home with the man who gave you that diamond.”

The sparkling ring looked incongruous lying on the nightstand between the plastic tray and plastic water pitcher. She swallowed hard and fought back the resurgence of unreasoning terror and disgust it evoked.

“You need to put it on,” he said. “Jewelry has a bad habit of disappearing in hospitals.”

She continued to stare at the ring, unable to force herself to move closer, to reach for it.

Cole picked up the diamond with one hand and took hers with the other.

His hand was warm and big and capable and she fought down a rekindling of that inappropriate response to his touch that she’d felt while standing in front of the mirror. He was being considerate and kind. That was all.

He touched the tip of her finger with the ring, and terror suddenly overwhelmed her again, a black void that drove out any other emotions and threatened to swallow her up, a nameless, pervasive fear that encompassed everything because she couldn’t recognize its face.

She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to divert herself, to maintain contact with reality. It was only a ring, not some instrument of torture, nothing to cause her breathing to become labored and her mouth dry.

The metal burned as he slid it onto her finger, then stopped at her second knuckle. “Your finger’s swollen, probably from the accident. You’d better wear your ring on a smaller one.”

“No!” She snatched her hand away, curling it to her chest and leaving him holding the ring. “It’ll fall off,” she improvised desperately. “I’ll lose it. You take it.”

Cole sighed and stepped back. “Lady, do you have any idea how much this ring is worth? Way too much for you to entrust it to a stranger.”

“You’re no more of a stranger to me than I am to myself. I trust you.”

“You don’t have any reason to.”

“I don’t have any reason not to. You asked if there was anything you could do for me. You can take that thing away. Please.”

He shook his head then reached inside his pocket and withdrew a battered leather wallet.

“I’ll tell you what. I just cashed a check and I’ve got—” He counted out bills. “Three hundred eighty-five dollars. It’s probably not even close to what this rock is worth. But I’ll take the ring with me and leave you this so you’ll have some money in case your fiancé doesn’t show up immediately and so you can have some reassurance that I’ll get your diamond back to you.”

“All right.” She refrained from telling him that she didn’t want the money, didn’t care if she ever saw the ring again. That would sound crazy.