The Cowboy's Gift-Wrapped Bride

Something popped into her head then, as she looked at the man claiming to be her rescuer. But it didn’t have anything to do with her. It was some kind of odd flash that instead made her think she knew him. Although that didn’t make sense.

“Are you Matt McDermot?” she asked tentatively.

He looked almost as confused as she felt. “That’s me,” he confirmed.

“And we are in a place called Elk Creek? In Wyoming?”

“We are,” he said.

“Did you just move here? From Texas?”

His lips stretched into a smile as his full eyebrows creased over dark green eyes the color of fir trees. “Right,” he said, clearly surprised and somewhat confused.

Another of those strange flashes hit her, causing her to recall him saying his brother was the doctor here.

“Bax McDermot—is that your brother?”

“Did I hear someone say my name?”

The voice coming from another man suddenly standing in the doorway startled her so much she jolted as if she’d been hit. But one look at him and Jenn knew he was Matt’s older brother.

He stepped into the room then with a warm, friendly smile on a face that bore a striking resemblance to Matt’s.

And behind Bax McDermot came an attractive auburn-haired woman with topaz-colored eyes.

“Carly Winters,” Jenn said as much to herself as to everyone else.

“You’re close. Carly McDermot,” the other woman amended.

“Of course,” Jenn nearly whispered. “You just married the doctor.”

The two new arrivals to the room both smiled but they looked as if they were waiting for the punch line to a joke.

The trouble was, the joke was on Jenn and it wasn’t a very nice one. Her mouth went dry and her heart started to pound all over again in a fresh wave of alarm at the thought that she still couldn’t tell them anything about herself.

“Uh, we have a bit of a hat trick going on here,” Matt McDermot offered then, his expression once more showing his own confusion. “Our girl seems to know everyone but herself.”

The intensely attractive cowboy went on to explain what had transpired since Jenn had regained consciousness. All the while Jenn let herself focus on him as if he were her anchor.

He was a big man with wide, straight shoulders and a broad chest that narrowed to a sharply V’d waist. His hips didn’t have an ounce of spare flesh—or any room for more—in the tight jeans he wore along with the plaid flannel shirt that stretched across the muscles of his upper body.

And as for his face…well, it was about the best face she’d ever seen on a man. At least as far as she knew. With a high forehead and a long, thin, slightly pointed nose; straight, not-too-thin, not-too-full lips; a strong, square jawline; and a chin with a slight dent in the center of it.

He had great hair, too—thick, coarse and shiny golden-brown in color. He wore it short around the sides and a little spiky on top.

And there were also the eyes she’d noticed before. Slightly soulful, kind and amused at once, and as dark a green as a dense mountain forest.

When Matt McDermot had finished updating his brother, the doctor switched into a more businesslike mode, drawing Jenn’s attention with questions aimed directly at her.

“You can’t tell us anything about yourself? Where you live? If you were on your way to Elk Creek or would have just passed through?”

Jenn again tried to reclaim the information from the storehouse of her brain as Bax McDermot shined a light in her eyes and took a closer look into them. But it was as if that part of her mind was locked behind a steel door to which she didn’t have the key.

“I know I should know and somewhere I do, but I can’t get hold of it,” she confessed with a hearty portion of frustration in her tone.

Bax McDermot shined the light higher up, into the hair he parted with his fingers, looking at about the spot from which her headache seemed to originate.

“How about numbers? Can you remember your phone number or your address?”

Once more Jenn tried. And failed. And felt another surge of panic at the further evidence that she didn’t know the most rudimentary things about herself.

“Do you know your mother’s name? Or your father’s? Or a friend’s?”

Jenn shook her head slowly, feeling tears of pure fear well up in her eyes. But she couldn’t lie there and cry like a baby, she told herself. No matter how terrified she was of what was happening to her. So she worked hard to blink the moisture away and tried to keep her voice from quivering. “No. Nothing. I don’t remember anything.”

“Except a whole lot of details about us and our lives,” Matt reminded from the opposite side of the examining table where he still stood, almost with an air of protectiveness.

“Do you know how you know so much about us?” Carly inquired.

But Jenn didn’t have an answer for that, either. In fact, it was just another thing that unnerved her.

“Could you have been coming to Elk Creek to visit someone for Christmas?” Carly suggested in what seemed to be her capacity as assistant to her husband who was ordering Jenn to follow his finger with her eyes and generally examining her while they all talked.

“Christmas, “Jenn repeated. “Christmas is in a week,” she said, remembering that at least and hanging on to that small victory. “I guess I could have been coming to visit someone for the holiday.” But that was as far as she could go in answering the other woman’s question. And even that had no basis in fact.

“Do you think you’ve been to Elk Creek before?” Matt asked. “Maybe you grew up here or have family here?”

It was as if this had become a guessing game.

Jenn tried to play along, considering the possibilities presented to her as if she were trying on clothes to see how they fit. Wishing something would fit. But again she just drew a blank.

“I can’t be sure if I’ve ever been here before or not. And as for family, I just don’t know.”

“How about anything about where you came from?” the doctor tried. “There’s a Denver address on your driver’s license but we haven’t been able to try contacting anyone there because the phone lines are down. Do thoughts of Denver spark any memories?”

Jenn could only shake her head woefully.

“What do you think?” Matt’s query was aimed at his brother, but Jenn’s glance went to the doctor, too, hoping he had an answer not only to Matt’s question, but to her own dilemma, as well.

“I don’t have a lot of experience with this but I’d say we’re looking at selective amnesia,” Bax McDermot said to the room in general. Then more directly to Jenn he said, “There weren’t any signs of a concussion when I examined you when Matt brought you in and there still aren’t now even though you took a bad bump on the head. And because it doesn’t appear to be an injury serious enough to have caused the amnesia on its own, I’m wondering if you may have suffered something emotionally disturbing or traumatic. Maybe something that spurred you to come to Elk Creek in the first place if this is where you were actually headed. Maybe that, coupled with the blow to the head, has put you into a psychological amnesia. But one way or the other, amnesia is a tricky phenomenon that can obliterate certain parts of memory while other portions are left intact. I’m guessing that’s what we’re dealing with.”

“So what do we do about it?” Jenn asked, hating that she sounded so weak, so small, so afraid.

“We’ve already sent word to the sheriff. He’ll be here any minute,” Carly offered. “But what if we get a message to the local radio station and have them put out an announcement asking if anyone knows a Jenn Johnson?”

Both men agreed that was a good idea and Jenn was more than willing to go along with it. To embrace it, in fact, hoping someone would come forward and fill in a few blanks for her.

And while she waited, left alone in the examining room to rest, she put some effort into working up to sitting in a chair without feeling as if she might faint and regaining some warmth by sipping hot tea that Carly brought in to her.