The Baron and The Bodyguard

The doctor looked up from the chart he was studying. “You were brought in the day before yesterday. We worked on your injuries for a couple of hours, then you were semicomatose for another twelve and sleeping the rest. All up, you’ve been here two and a half days.”

“So how can I have lost a year?”

The doctor came closer, chart in hand. “My diagnosis is post-traumatic amnesia. Happens a lot in cases of closed-head injuries and shock. The mind can’t deal with what happened so it skips backward, to a more tolerable memory, giving the brain time to develop coping mechanisms.”

“You mean that whole year of my life is just…gone?” Mathiaz let his tone reflect his disbelief.

“Sounds that way. There’s no sign of any physical injury to the brain, but you were knocked unconscious by the blast, striking your head against the carved doors of the treasury as you fell. I’ll consult a specialist, since this is out of my field, but she’ll probably confirm my diagnosis.”

No wonder Mathiaz felt as if a team of miners were drilling through his brain. The treasury doors were eight feet tall and almost as wide, and made of foot-thick iron-wood. “No physical injury? That means my memory is intact. All I have to do is recover it, right?”

Dr. Pascale nodded. “That’s the good news.”

Mathiaz’s gut clenched involuntarily. “And the bad?”

“I can’t say when you might get your memory back.”

Mathiaz refused to accept that his memory of everything that had taken place in the last year was gone forever. Giving up wasn’t in his vocabulary. But some things were beyond even willpower. “You mean I might never recover those memories?”

“You have to consider the possibility.”

Mathiaz’s anger warred with his confusion. Having a headache the size of Carramer didn’t help. “What about hypnosis, therapy of some kind?” he demanded.

The doctor sighed. “This kind of retrograde amnesia is the mind’s way of dealing with the stress of major trauma. Trying to force a recovery could do more harm than good. Better to let yourself remember in your own sweet time.”

“Or not.” Mathiaz’s voice was edged with bitterness.

“Or not.” The doctor’s professionally calm expression didn’t change. Only his pale blue eyes registered the depths of his concern. “Give yourself time to recover before you start worrying too much.”

“Easy for you to say, Dr. Pascale. You don’t have a hole where the last year of your life is supposed to be.”

“It could be worse. The hole could have been in your head, if not for…”

“The angle of the explosion,” Jacinta said, cutting the doctor off in midsentence. “Another few feet closer to the source and you wouldn’t be here to complain about a few lost memories.”

Mathiaz intercepted a look between the two that he couldn’t interpret. Annoyed at being so obviously excluded, he glanced at the tubes feeding into his arm. “Are these really necessary?”

The doctor snapped the chart shut and replaced it at the foot of the bed. “One thing you didn’t acquire in the last year is a medical degree, Lord Montravel.” He made the title sound vaguely insulting. “I’ll be the judge of what you need and when you need it. Now just lie there and be glad you’re still in one piece.”

Jacinta asked, “Is he always this abrasive?”

Mathiaz grinned tiredly. “The time to worry is when he starts being nice.”

The doctor growled a negation. “You were easier to deal with when you were asleep.” But he managed to sound pleased at the same time.

“What else has happened that I don’t remember?”

“I’ll let Ms. Newnham fill you in on whatever you want to know. She’s the specialist when it comes to Lord Montravel. I have work to do.”

The doctor left and Mathiaz turned his head toward Jacinta. “What did he mean, you’re the specialist on me?”

She looked uncomfortable. “When they had trouble getting you to wake up after the surgery, Dr. Pascale called me in, hoping that I could get through to you.”

She had succeeded better than she knew, but her impersonal manner made him wonder if his erotic fantasies about her were just that, fantasies. “Why did he have to call you in? Don’t you work for me anymore?”

She glanced at the surgical monitors over Mathiaz’s bed. The readings evidently gave her cause for concern, because she said, “We don’t have to cover everything now. You should get some rest.”

His hand clamped around her wrist. “From the sound of things, I’ve had too much rest. I want to know what went on between us.”

Something flared in her unusual eyes, but was gone before he could identify it. “Nothing went on between us, as you put it. Fourteen months ago, you hired me following a security scare at the Château Valmont. Your valet, Andre Zenio, was fired for showing people around the palace without clearing them with the Royal Protection Detail. Zenio blamed you for getting him fired, although you weren’t the one who reported him. He started stalking you and making threats. Eventually the police caught him, and I went back to my work at the academy. End of story.”

Mathiaz remembered most of this. He knew that she ran a personal defense school in Valmont’s capital city of Perla. Mathiaz’s younger brother, Eduard, had taught a course at the academy and came back singing Jacinta’s praises. When Mathiaz started getting threats and being followed, the police advised hiring extra security. Jacinta had been the logical choice. She had the appropriate skills, but could be presented as Mathiaz’s girlfriend rather than as a bodyguard, saving the need to go public about the security scare.

“There was nothing more between us?” he asked, wondering why the question sounded so ridiculous, as if part of him already knew that there was.

She hesitated. “We were attracted to one another.”

Why did he get the feeling that was the understatement of the year? He sure as blazes was attracted to her, but in the incendiary kind of way that usually ended up in bed. He could hardly believe that she didn’t share his feelings. “How far did we take this—attraction?” he asked.

“We didn’t.”

Was he imagining things, or was her answer a little too glib? “I don’t believe you.”

She sketched a bow from the neck. “You have the right to believe what you choose, Lord Montravel.”

Pain fueled his irritation. “You can drop the Lord Montravel bit. We both know you never call me anything but Mathiaz or Baron when we’re alone.” They were alone now.

“As you wish, Baron.”

Her ready agreement didn’t fool him, either. “I may have forgotten the last year of my life, but I remember you were never awed by my rank and titles.”

“I’m an American, I was brought up in a democracy,” she reminded him, as if her California accent hadn’t already done so. “We don’t believe in bowing and scraping.”

He doubted if she would bow or scrape to anyone, regardless of her nationality. “You sure you’re not related to Alain Pascale?” he asked.

“Only by attitude.” She hefted a capacious shoulder bag off a chair. “I’d better leave you to get some rest.”

He felt the need to keep her with him. “What brought you to Carramer?”

She hesitated. “We have talked about this before.”

“Humor me.”

“Carramer is a beautiful, peaceful kingdom, and Valmont province is one of the most attractive regions.”

“With about as much use for a self-defense expert as a fish has for a bicycle,” he pointed out. Apart from an occasional problem like the security scare, Carramer had one of the lowest crime rates in the world. What wasn’t she telling him?

She shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I wanted to live here. The skills I teach are as useful for honing self-discipline and fitness as they are for fighting crime.”