Claiming His Runaway Bride / High-Stakes Passion: Claiming His Runaway Bride / High-Stakes Passion

“Tautara Estate is southeast of Lake Taupo. Perhaps being back there will assist in triggering a memory for you.”

“Lake Taupo, but that’s almost a four-hour drive from here. What if…?” Her voice trailed away helplessly. What if, indeed? There’d be no one there to help her if the fears that plagued the edge of her consciousness became more than she could bear.

“What if…?” Luc prompted, his lips a thin implacable line across his face.

“Nothing.” Belinda dropped her head slightly, allowing the fullness of her hair to cover her face, to hide the sudden tears that stung her eyes. Everything inside her screamed that this was wrong, but she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember why. The doctors had told her her memory should return in time, that she should stop trying to force things, but right now the black void in her mind threatened to overwhelm her.

“Then let’s go.”

Belinda walked two steps with Luc then halted, her sudden stop sending him slightly off balance. She noticed he used the cane to regain his stability. Was he fully recovered himself? She already sensed it was a question she couldn’t ask, sensed he was too proud to admit to physical failure or weakness. Pulling from Luc’s hold, she turned to her father, holding her arms out for a hug.

“I’ll see you later, then, Dad. You’ll give my love to Mum?” She searched his face once more for any inkling of why she felt as if she’d been shucked off like last year’s haute couture, but he refused to fully meet her gaze. Instead he wrapped her in his arms and held her as if he’d never let her go.

“Yes, I will. She wasn’t up to today’s visit but we will see you soon,” Baxter Wallace said, his voice thick.

“Baxter.” Luc’s voice cut through the air with the precision of fine steel, and her father’s arms dropped to his side.

“Go on, darling, everything will be all right. Just wait and see,” he urged.

“Of course everything will be all right. Why wouldn’t it be?” Luc tucked Belinda’s arm in the crook of his and guided her out the door.

Later, as the helicopter lifted from the pad, Belinda tried to remember why she’d been so excited when the doctor had told her she’d be discharged this afternoon. Now she felt anything but. She had nothing with her but the clothes on her back and the rings on her finger—rings that felt as foreign to her as the man who was her husband. She didn’t even have so much as a pair of sunglasses to ward off the sharp late-summer-afternoon light.

She cast a glance forward to her husband who sat next to the pilot in the cockpit. Her husband. No matter what they said, he was a stranger, and deep in her heart she knew he’d remain that way for a long, long time.

You loved me before. You will love me again.

His words echoed in her mind and as they did it occurred to her he’d said nothing of his feelings for her. Not one word of love had passed his lips from the moment she’d set eyes on him. The realisation sat like a cold ball of lead in the pit of stomach.

Relief poured through Luc’s aching bones as his Eurocopter Squirrel neared Tautara Estate—so named because of its position on the hilltop overlooking a small tributary river to New Zealand’s largest lake. He consciously fought to stop himself from rubbing his hip to ease the ache of sitting in the confines of the cockpit of the helicopter. He’d accepted he was unable, at this time anyway, to pilot the craft himself. His recovery from the broken hip and torn spleen had taken longer than expected when a bone infection had delayed his rehabilitation.

The knowledge that his wife lay only a couple of floors away from him, locked in a coma that had baffled her doctors, had done much to hasten his recuperation. Her emergence from the coma had come just as he commenced intensive physical therapy and had begun to welcome the challenge of restoring his body to its customary strength. He’d had no desire to appear as a cripple the first time she saw him after the accident. He’d pushed himself hard this past fortnight, but it had been worth it. He was nearly home.

With her.

The chopper followed the path of one of the lake’s tributaries, where he often hosted trout fishing expeditions for his celebrity guests, and Luc took comfort in the familiar landscape, the energy of the land below reaching out to him. Yes, he’d heal more quickly here, in charge of his own progress. In charge of his life. The way it should be.

He cast a look backward to where Belinda sat staring out the side window. A fierce wave of possession swept through him. She was his. Lost memory or not, things would return to the way they should have been all along—before the accident.

Her misty blue-grey eyes were serious as she gazed at her surroundings, her face pale, her hands curled into tight fists in her lap. She’d barely moved for the duration of the flight. Frozen in the past he supposed. She didn’t remember meeting him, their courtship or their wedding. She didn’t remember the crash. A part of him hoped she never would.

As the helicopter gained height, then circled over Tautara Estate, Luc allowed a smile of satisfaction to play across his lips. The estate was a monument to his success and power and was renowned worldwide amongst the wealthy, the famous—even royalty—for its facilities and attractions. And it was home in a way he’d never had a home before. The words his father had beaten into him on a regular basis—“You’ll never amount to anything. Nothing you have will stay yours.”—echoed in his head.

“You were wrong, old man,” he swore silently. “I am and I have everything you never were or ever had.”

Yes, now they were back all would be well again.

The pilot set the chopper down on the designated pad and Luc disembarked, turning to help Belinda from the cabin. They walked in silence toward the main house, which sprawled before them. Belinda halted beside him.

“Is something wrong?” Luc asked, forcing himself not to scoop her up in his arms and carry her to the front door through his sheer will.

“I’ve been here before?” she asked, her voice tentative.

“Of course. Many times before our wedding.”

“I should remember something, but I don’t. There’s…nothing there.”

Luc sensed the frustration that held her in its grip and unbidden, felt a brief but undeniable pull of sympathy for her. The feeling left him as quickly as it had come.

“Come into the house, perhaps something there will jog your memory.”

He took her hand in his and felt a measure of relief when her slender fingers curled around his, almost as if she was frightened to take the next step without him at her side. A grim smile settled on his face, and the fingers of his other hand gripped the head of his custom-made cane, its solid weight against the palm of his hand a reminder of the disability that would forever remain a legacy of their short marriage.

Whether she remembered again or not, he had her back at Tautara Lodge, where she belonged. As they crossed the threshold onto the New Zealand native parquet floor in the imposing cathedral-ceilinged entrance, Luc fought to hold back a roar of triumph. Nothing would interfere with his plans now.

No one reneged on Luc Tanner and got away with it—least of all his beautiful wife.

Two

Belinda stared around her. She felt as if she’d been totally displaced in her world. Nothing about the ornate stained-glass and rimu wood-framed doors at the front entrance felt familiar, and as her heels clicked on the highly polished wooden floor the faint echo rang out as a taunting reminder of the echoes in her mind. Fleeting. Intangible. Lost in a moment.

“Let me show you our suite.”

“Our suite?”

“Yes, I run Tautara Estate as a luxury lodge for overseas visitors. They pay handsomely for their privacy, I demand mine. Our rooms are to this side.”

Luc led her through another set of panelled rimu doors and down a wide, high-ceilinged, carpeted corridor. To her left was a panel of floor-to-ceiling glass windows giving an exquisite view down through the valley, with Lake Taupo, sunlight glinting off its surface, far in the distance. The tranquil beauty of the scene lay in direct contrast to the nerves leaping and dancing in her stomach.

At the end of the corridor Luc swiped a key card and thrust open the door. Belinda stifled a gasp at the stepdown lounge that spread before her. It was twice the size of her parents’ formal sitting room at their palatial St. Helier’s Bay home in Auckland. Twice the size and, by the looks of it, twice as expensively comfortable.

She walked down the stairs ahead of Luc. Her hand stroked the fronds of the potted palms that guarded the base of the shallow stairs and trailed over the surface of the baby grand piano nestled in an alcove of the room to her left.

“You play?” she asked.

Her fingers grazed the cool ivory of the keys, sending a single discordant note to hover on the air.

“After a fashion,” Luc answered noncommittally.

Belinda lifted her head and met his gaze fully for the first time since they’d left the hospital.

“Did you play for me?”

Suddenly she needed to know. The piano was a beautiful instrument—an instrument of passion, capable of expressing deepest desires and yearnings even when words failed. As she waited for Luc’s response his eyes changed, deepening in colour, becoming the stormy green of a storm-tossed lake. The scar across his cheek paled and she noted the tension in the set of his jaw.

“Luc?” she prompted.

“Yes. I played for you,” he finally ground out.