Husbands and Other Strangers Read online

  They’d given him six months to complete the job. This was month number two. His method was to gut all the rooms before he began transforming them. Usually he had a few day laborers to help, but this morning, except for Carlos whose only job was to cart away the debris, he’d decided to go at it solo.

  “Something like that.” He swung hard again. His arms began to feel rubbery. That meant he was going to have to take a break soon. “What are you doing here?” The hammer made contact with the wall again. “Don’t you have some fire to put out or a Dalmatian to wash?”

  Sam stood off to the side, for the most part avoiding the dust coming from the fallout. “It’s my two days off and the Dalmatian and I have an agreement. I don’t wash him, he doesn’t lick me.”

  Exhaling, Taylor decided to take a break and put the sledgehammer down, its head resting on the floor while its handle pointed straight up. “You just had a couple of days off. What about this Sunday?” That was why they’d all gone on Jake’s sloop. It was one of the rare times that all four of them could coordinate their schedules so that they could get together.

  Sam smiled fondly at his brother-in-law. Technically, Taylor was right. Concern had him down here today, just as it had taken him to first look in on Gayle. He’d caught her just as she was hurrying off to the studio. For a woman who had nearly drowned and was now walking around without any memory of her husband, Gayle seemed in amazing health and spirits. But then, his sister had always been able to mask what was going on inside of her. He’d let it go for the time being, promising himself to look in on her later.

  “I just put in for some personal time,” Sam said dismissively, “but I’m not down here to talk about my work schedule.”

  “Why are you down here?” Taylor checked his growl at the last moment. He was still trying to get used to this all-for-one-and-one-for-all mentality that governed his wife and her brothers’ approach to life. He’d grown up keeping to himself and the transition wasn’t easy. But he was working on it.

  “To find out how things went last night.” Sam’s mouth curved again. “I guess that growl kind of answers my question. Gayle still doesn’t remember being married to you, huh?”

  “Or so she says,” Taylor said.

  He saw the wary look on Sam’s face, as if his brother-in-law was torn between whose side to take. Thirsty, he went over to his cooler and took out a bottle of water. He offered another to Sam, who passed.

  Unscrewing the top, Taylor took a long drag from the plastic bottle before continuing. “I’m still not a hundred percent convinced this isn’t some trick she’s playing.” Especially after she’d kissed him back.

  Sam shook his head. “I really don’t think she’d carry on a joke like that for more than a few hours, Taylor.”

  Granted, she hadn’t up until now, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, for one thing, she loves you. For another, she gets bored easily.”

  “Maybe it’s not a joke, maybe it’s payback of some kind.”

  Sam stared at him. “Payback? For what?”

  Taylor drained the rest of the water, then tossed the bottle into a special container separate from the rest of the garbage. That was Gayle’s doing. She’d made him promise to put recyclables in a special pile. Everywhere he turned, she’d left an imprint, an indelible mark on his life to show that she’d passed through. Why hadn’t he left an indelible mark on hers?

  “Who knows? With Gayle, it could be anything. There was that time she thought one female client of mine was coming on to me.” He still remembered that jealous expression on her face, how it had made her seem even sexier. “I slept on the couch for a week until I convinced her there was nothing going on, that even if the woman was standing there, stark naked, I wouldn’t care because I loved only her.” They’d had the best makeup sex that night, he recalled.

  Damn it, he wanted his wife back.

  “Making you sleep on the couch sounds like Gayle,” Sam agreed, following him back to the half-demolished family room wall. “The amnesia bit doesn’t.”

  Reluctantly Taylor nodded. “Maybe you’re right.” Facing that frightened him most of all. A prank he knew how to handle, was good at retaliating. But how did he deal with a mind that had suddenly shut him out in earnest? What did he do to get through to her again?

  At a loss, he dragged his hand through his hair. “But if you are, then I’m really up the creek, Sam. How do I make her remember me?”

  “The wedding album didn’t work?”

  “She recognized all of you, but not the event. And not me. Not from that day, anyway.” Frustrated, he scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m just the guy hovering at her elbow, claiming to be her husband.” It wasn’t easy admitting that, but he was as close to Sam and Jake as he was to anyone.

  Except for Gayle. But it wasn’t as if she was exactly available to him at the moment.

  Taylor gave voice to the biggest fear that haunted him. “What if she never remembers me?”

  Although he was a fireman, Sam never dealt in worst-case scenarios. He always looked on the positive side of everything, even if the light had been temporarily turned off.

  “Not going to happen,” he assured Taylor. “Look, until you came along, Jake and I thought she’d never get married. That no one could get into the ring and last even three minutes with her. You not only lasted the three minutes, you lasted the whole damn championship match.” He grinned at the man he’d come to regard with affection as another brother. “All fifteen rounds. We never saw her like that with anyone else, and believe me, there were a lot of guys who came around. Most of them, she didn’t even pay any attention to. You’re the one who melted down her resistance. Because you hung in there.”

  The words in the last sentence were uttered slowly, each word a little slower than the one that came before it as he tried to reinforce his sentiment.

  Taylor looked at him. “Okay, Sam, what are you thinking? I can almost see the smoke coming out of the top of your head.”

  Sam’s grin went from one ear to the other. “Court her.”

  Taylor looked at his brother-in-law as if he’d lost his mind. “What?”

  “Court her,” Sam repeated. “Do whatever it was you did the first time around. It worked once, who’s to say it won’t work again?”

  “Court her?” Taylor echoed incredulous. Men didn’t court their wives. Jumping through those kinds of hoops was for before the vows. There was a whole different set to jump through after the wedding took place. “That’s ridiculous, Sam. She’s my wife, not my girlfriend.”

  “But she doesn’t remember being either,” Sam pointed out. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with courting your wife.”

  Spoken like a man who’d never been married, Taylor thought darkly. Besides, he didn’t have time to go through what he had initially. He had a house to finish.

  But then he thought of how he’d felt, spending the night on the floor of one of the other bedrooms last night. They’d spent time apart before, when she was on the road. But he’d always known when she was coming back to him.

  He didn’t know that anymore.

  Taylor frowned. Gayle would never go for it. She was far too suspicious. “There is when she acts like you’re some sexual predator.”

  “You lost me.” And then, just as quickly, the light dawned on Sam. “You didn’t try to get her into bed, did you?”

  “I kissed her,” Taylor snapped. Getting her into bed had been a goal—for purely altruistic reasons, he told himself. Intimacy might have triggered something in her head. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”

  “She’s my sister and part of her brain cells have gone missing, so, yes, for the time being it is my business,” Sam countered evenly. “Once she’s okay, you guys can act out all the parts of Hamlet stark naked for all I care.”

  “There’s a thought,” Taylor muttered, shaking his head.

  It occurred to Sam that both his sister a
nd Taylor were bullheaded and stubborn. “Here’s another one. Did you two have some kind of a major fight before you came to the sloop on Saturday?”

  Taylor shook his head. “No, nothing out of the ordinary.” He thought back beyond Saturday. “Maybe she’s been a little moody lately, but I just chalked that up to jet lag. The station sent her out on assignment five times last month. She was looking a little pale. That’s why I thought going out on the boat would be a good idea.”

  “So there’s no reason why she’d try to forget you.”

  “Of course not,” Taylor said, doing his best to suppress his anger.

  Sam spread his hands. He was out of ideas. “Back to courting her.”

  Taylor blew out a long breath, resisting the notion. “It’s a dumb idea.”

  Sam plucked a plastic bottle out of the cooler and took off the cap. He cocked his head, looking at Taylor before he took a swig. “Got a better one?”

  Taylor hated to admit it, but right now, he was stumped. “No.”

  Sam took only a sip before saying, “Then give it a try until something else comes up. You won her once, you can do it again.”

  “I don’t have to ‘win’ her, I have her,” Taylor protested, but there was a lack of feeling behind his words. If he had her, she wouldn’t have shut him out of their bedroom.

  Sam gave him a long, searching look. “Do you?” Before Taylor could say anything in protest, Sam glanced at his watch. “Look, I’ve got to run. I told Cynthia I’d help paint her bedroom.”

  Sam had a very healthy love life. Taylor wasn’t sure, but he thought this was a new name. He wasn’t exactly thinking clearly this morning. “Cynthia?”

  A brilliant smile lit up Sam’s boyish face. “This really hot little dental assistant I saved when her sister’s place caught on fire. Cynthia was house-sitting for her at the time.”

  And not doing the best job, Taylor thought. But then, Sam didn’t go in for the brainy type. He liked them long-legged, curvy and blond. Being a nuclear physicist was never a requirement. “Sounds like you got yourself a winner, there.”

  “The fire wasn’t her fault,” Sam replied already making his way toward where the brand-new double doors had been put in. “And think about what I said.”

  “Yeah yeah, I’ll think about it,” Taylor said, picking up his sledgehammer again. Braced, he turned his attention to the wall. He began swinging even harder this time.

  “You do that, Tay,” Sam murmured under his breath as he closed the door behind him.

  Gayle waited until she heard the car pull out of the driveway and she was sure that Taylor had left the house. The moment she was, she hurried back upstairs to the bedroom she didn’t remember beyond last night. After closing the door, she then crossed to the richly carved armoire and opened the bottom drawer. There, right on the top was the wedding album Taylor had shown her the night before.

  Holding her breath, she took it out. She wanted to look at the photographs again, this time without having him hover over her. Gayle carried it over to the four-poster bed and sat down. Very carefully, she examined it page after page, as if she was hunting for a clue to an unsolvable mystery.

  The album was at least five inches thick, and every page had at least one photograph of her with her so-called husband. Holding hands, kissing, laughing. It looked as if she’d had a wonderful time at the wedding, as if she was very happy.

  Gayle sighed. The day a woman got married was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life. So why couldn’t she remember that day?

  Why couldn’t she remember him?

  “What happened between us, Taylor?” she whispered to the man in photograph. It was of the two of them, kissing in front of the wedding cake. “What did you do to make me forget you?”

  Maybe it wasn’t his fault, she thought. Maybe she had done something, and the guilt she’d felt had leaped into action at the accident, causing her to wipe him out of her memory banks.

  Her heart began to hammer. Gayle snapped the album shut on her lap. Could that be it? Could she have done something, maybe been unfaithful to Taylor in a moment of weakness and her mind couldn’t deal with that so she’d just shut down that part of her brain that kept everything about him, about them, stored away?

  “That’s ridiculous,” she declared heatedly to the silence around her.

  Maybe she couldn’t remember him, but she remembered herself, and she knew she’d never do something like that. Getting off the bed, she went to the armoire and put the album back in the bottom drawer. To the best of her recollection, she’d never been a party girl. She dated a lot, but sleeping with men took an emotional commitment she wasn’t willing to volunteer.

  She enjoyed being with men, enjoyed their company. Enjoyed flirting with them, she always had. As long as it remained on a harmless level. Everyone knew that she didn’t hop into bed as a way of ending an evening of partying. So there was no reason to believe that she would have violated her marriage vows on a whim.

  Marriage vows she didn’t remember taking, she thought, holding her head.

  It was beginning to ache again, just as it did yesterday in the E.R. Normally she tried to tough it out through any pain, but she didn’t feel up to it right now. Not this early in the day. She had a segment to tape at the studio.

  With a sigh Gayle went into the master bathroom to take one of the painkillers the E.R. doctor had prescribed. Unlike the rest of the house, it, too, was finished. Done in cool blues and white. Like the bedroom, the bath area was huge.

  She could have held a party right here, she mused, opening the mirrored cabinet. There certainly was enough room.

  The thought whispered along her brain, as if trying to coax something forth. Had she hosted a party here? A party for two, maybe? With Taylor?

  But as she concentrated, even the wisps of a distant memory disappeared.

  Swallowing the tablets, she closed the cabinet again. If she didn’t hurry, she was going to wind up late to the studio. And she was never late. That was something her father had ingrained in her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The makeup girl had just vacated the small, neat dressing room where, Monday through Friday, she got ready for in-studio broadcasts. By her watch, Gayle had fifteen minutes before she was to tape part of the loop that was to be shown for the rest of the day as well as the evening and night broadcast. It would feature her recounting of yesterday’s sports highlights. Now, at the tail end of summer, the baseball play-offs were getting closer and closer and the Angels were still battling for the number-one spot in the American League’s western division. Her Friday interview with Damien Miller, by all accounts, hottest new pitcher in the league was going to be used in the loop before she segued into the baseball scores.

  She’d just been going over all the main points she had to get in for the three-minute segment when her door opened again. Flew open, actually. And this time there’d been no knock.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” The repeated question echoed in the clutter-free dressing room.

  Tall, muscular, with silver-gray hair and an air of unshakable strength about him, the man strode into the dressing room as if he owned it. Like the kings he claimed were in his ancestry, Colonel Lars Elliott seemed to own every piece of ground he crossed. It remained his until he chose to relinquish it.

  “Hello, Colonel,” Gayle said mildly, putting down her notes. The look she gave him was studied innocence. “Tell you what?”

  His dark eyebrows came together like two iron-gray tufts. “That you almost drowned.”

  “But I didn’t,” she said cheerfully. “Otherwise, you’d be bursting into someone else’s dressing room.”

  His look only grew darker. “Don’t get flippant with me.”

  Her smile remained in place. She found that usually undermined some of his frontal attacks. “Just pointing out the obvious.”

  The colonel snorted. The look on his face had been known to weaken the knees of a good many brave men. �
��The obvious is that you don’t seem to have a brain in your head.”

  He’d stopped scaring her somewhere around the age of five. That was the first time she’d stood up to him. The battle had gone on ever since.

  “Oh, but I do,” she told him brightly. “The technicians at Blair Memorial Hospital took quite a few scans of it and according to them there was something there every time.”

  “What are you doing here?” He waved one powerful hand around the dressing room. “You should be home resting,” he told her, his face close to hers.

  She struggled to keep her expression cheerful. “I’m fine.”

  His temper was in danger of igniting. “Then why don’t you remember your husband?”

  She gave up the charade as a hint of her own temper surfaced. “Who talked to you? And why aren’t you in Nevada, visiting Aunt Nell?”

  “I’m here because Jake called to tell me about your accident.”

  There were times when her big brother was just too damn responsible. “Good old Jake, looks like I owe him one.”

  “At least Jake has some sense in his head.” As the colonel drew himself up, the room somehow became smaller. “You’re coming home with me.” His tone said he would brook no nonsense from her.

  He took her by the arm but Gayle pulled her hand back. She wasn’t about to be ordered around like some five-year-old. She had resisted then and she certainly wasn’t going to go along with it now. “Why would I be coming home with you?”

  The colonel struggled to hold on to the edge of his temper. Gayle had been a trial since the day she was born. “Because your so-called husband obviously doesn’t think enough of you to take care of you.”

  A shimmer of protectiveness toward Taylor rose within her. She could only attribute it to the fact that there were times when her father said “black” that made her want to shout “white.” It had nothing to do with Taylor.