Husbands and Other Strangers Read online

  “No one takes care of me but me, Colonel. Now the E.R. doctor checked me out from head to toe. I put up with a lot of pricy scans to prove it. He signed me out, saying I was fine.”

  “If you’re so ‘fine,’” her father countered, “why can’t you remember Taylor?”

  “The doctor said that when a blow to the head is involved, sometimes people get amnesia.”

  “Amnesia, maybe, but they don’t just forget one person. Not unless something terrible happened. I’ve seen it with soldiers.” He was talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, she thought. That wasn’t what was responsible for the gaping hole in her memory, was it? “Now I won’t pry and ask what the trouble is between the two of you,” her father was saying, “but until it’s resolved, you can stay in your old room.”

  She knew he was only trying to be kind in his own fashion, but she wasn’t about to slip under his thumb this way.

  “Thank you, but no. I’m working this out on my own, Colonel. Now, thank you for worrying about me, but please go back and finish your visit with Aunt Nell. I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “I am fine.”

  He glared at her. “Never could talk any sense into that fool head of yours. If you were a soldier, I would have had you thrown into the brig.”

  She smiled up at him brightly again. “Then I guess I’m lucky I’m not a soldier.” And then she grinned in earnest. “If I’m stubborn, you have no one else but yourself to blame, Colonel. Everyone says I take after you.”

  His expression was impassive as he looked at her. “I knew my place.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she countered, her grin never fading. “Aunt Nell told me stories.”

  “The old blabbermouth.” And then his expression softened. “You’ll call me if you need me?”

  She pointed to her cell phone on the vanity table. “Got you on my speed dial.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  There was a knock on her door. “Two minutes, Gayle.”

  “That’s my cue,” she told her father, getting up. “I’ve got to go.”

  The colonel took hold of her by her shoulders and looked at her for a long moment. Then he released her without saying a word. She knew that, while she drove him crazy because they clashed so often, her father was proud of the fact that she never visibly buckled.

  Even when she would have secretly wanted to.

  Keeping her smile in place, Gayle left the dressing room.

  Chapter Seven

  Taylor stopped dead the moment he closed the door behind him. Almost immediately he came up against what appeared to be yellow tape, run amok.

  Gayle was on the far side of the living room. Her head had jerked up the second he’d walked in. Their eyes met as he demanded, “What the hell is this?”

  He’d been purposely late getting home, secretly hoping that once he walked through the doorway, he’d find that things had gone back to normal.

  Or as normal as they could be, given that he was married to a woman who insisted on making everything around her a challenge of some sort. She brought excitement into the word hello and while at times he found keeping up with her exhausting, the life he was living now was a considerable improvement over the existence he’d had before he met Gayle.

  Funny thing was, he hadn’t realized just how lack-luster his life had been until he had something to compare it to. Like the difference between living in the recesses of a cave and camping out in the sunlight.

  Gayle, God help him, was his sunlight.

  Except that, with one look at her face he knew that his sun was in danger of going nova.

  It didn’t help matters to discover yellow tape running through the length of the newly gutted living room.

  Gayle took a few steps toward him. “Oh, you’re home.”

  She did her best to sound nonchalant and not as if her stomach was knotting up, the same awful way it had whenever she’d been faced with a particularly difficult swim meet. To the world, she’d always appeared blasé. Cool under fire. Confident to the nth degree. No one ever knew the hell her insides went through each time. The confidence she radiated only went skin deep. She made sure that she met each challenge, but always, just under the surface, there was the fear that she wouldn’t win, that she’d wind up disappointing her father.

  She hated disappointing him for a number of reasons. The first because, somewhere in his chauvinistic heart, he had trouble accepting the fact that of his three children, it was his daughter, not his sons who won those medals he so proudly displayed. She wanted to show him that she was just as good as any male, and because to disappoint the colonel meant to leave yourself open for long, long lectures and endless, exhausting training.

  The knot in her stomach was identical to the one she felt when she was competing in swim meets and, eventually, Olympic tryouts. Back then she knew why she felt the way she did.

  This, however, was something different. Why her stomach now threatened to rise up in her throat, bringing with it everything she’d tasted or eaten in the past twenty-four hours, was completely beyond her. For heaven’s sake, she didn’t know this man from Adam, why did she even care about his reaction?

  He said he was her husband. So did her brothers. But the fact that she and this Taylor person had had a relationship didn’t mean anything to her beyond being the cause of frustration because she couldn’t remember it. None of it. The sensation that there were memories out there that refused to come to her was a little like having an itch just under a layer of scar tissue. Scratching didn’t alleviate the itch because she couldn’t really feel the contact between nails and skin.

  The itch just continued to annoy her.

  Just as this did.

  “Yeah, I’m home.” He raised a piece of the tape. It gave with the movement, remaining tied. He fought the strong urge just to yank it all away. “What the hell is all this?” he asked again.

  She was going to be the better person, she told herself. She was going to hang on to her temper even as he lost his. “What does it look like?”

  He frowned deeply. Just what did she think she was doing? “Like you’re marking off a crime scene.”

  “No,” she said evenly, careful to keep a smile she didn’t feel on her face. “I’m dividing up the house.” She’d decided that this was the only way for now, if they were going to have to share the same living quarters.

  The situation between them was difficult enough to deal with as it was. Having this yellow tape threading its way through what he assumed was every room was like having her thumb her nose at him.

  Taylor glared at her. “What the hell for?”

  Just as with her father, Gayle had the feeling that backing off from this man just allowed him to run right over you. She wasn’t about to be run over. “I’d think that would be obvious.”

  He wrapped some of the tape around his hand but still managed to refrain from pulling it down. Just barely. “Enlighten me.”

  She went toe-to-toe with him. “This way we can go around the house without getting in each other’s way.” She bit back the part about if he were a gentleman, he’d move out until they resolved this, one way or another. She had a feeling that would only set him off and she wasn’t trying to argue. She wanted to find a way to coexist in this bizarre situation. “Since you say this is my house and it appears to be your house, as well—”

  It had always struck him as uncanny the way she could pluck exactly the wrong word out of the air and annoy the hell out of him. “‘Appears’?”

  She ignored his tone. “We need a plan for peaceful coexistence. I can’t have you coming into my space when I’m getting ready to go to work.”

  He felt as if he was being baited. “You read scores off a teleprompter,” he pointed out. “It’s not exactly brain surgery.”

  There were things she could put up with. Having her job at the station belittled was not one of them. “No, it’s certainly not.” Sarcasm entered her voice. “Not like swinging a sledgehammer.”


  Taylor had never had a problem with her being in the spotlight and his standing in the shadows. Self-image had never been something that was shaky with him, even when someone had once referred to him as Mr. Gayle Elliott. He’d always been his own man. But to have her throw a comment like that at him did hurt.

  “I do a lot more than swing a sledgehammer,” he informed her. He almost said “And you know it,” except that she didn’t, he realized. Not anymore.

  He was going to have to tell her this all over again. Tell her that after he’d discovered that he liked changing the face of existing structures, he’d gone to a nearby university at night and gotten his degree in architecture. What he’d learned enabled him to take what was and create something that had never been in the original plans. Something that he felt suited the owners’ personalities. Working on houses had turned into a form of art for him.

  She didn’t let him continue. Instead she fisted her hands at her hips and angrily glared up at him. “And I do a hell of a lot more than read off a teleprompter.”

  “Yeah, you interview half-naked men in the locker room.”

  He bit off a curse. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t mean that. Had he not felt as if his whole world was in danger of falling apart, he would never have said something like that to her, never allowed a comment like that to come out.

  But right now there was this desperate feeling in his chest, as if he was trying to cross over an abyss using a bridge made out of oatmeal.

  Gayle’s blue-green eyes narrowed. Hot words rose in her throat. She took a deep breath. It didn’t help. Every time this so-called husband was around her, or even when she thought about him, all her nerve endings rose to the surface.

  With effort, she deliberately ignored his last comment. “I divided the kitchen in half. The stove and the refrigerator are in neutral territory.”

  “Neutral territory,” he repeated. He still couldn’t believe this was happening. “What is this, a war?”

  She drew herself up to her full height. He was still more than half a foot taller than she was. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

  The war part was supposed to be long over with. They’d gotten past that. “Gayle, you’re my wife.”

  He was going to take her in his arms, she sensed it. Gayle took a step back before he could make contact. Something about his touch made her forget things. And she needed to remember, not forget.

  “But if I can’t remember being your wife, it doesn’t count, does it? As far as I’m concerned, you’re a complete stranger. An irritating stranger,” she added because her feelings still smarted from his terse, unfair summation of her career. “And I don’t jump into bed with strangers. Never have, never will.”

  There, he thought, he had her. “But you did with me.”

  Almost from the very first moment, sparks had flown between them. As much as they initially attempted to stay away from each other, they couldn’t. He found excuses to be where she was, and he suspected she did the same. Within a month, she’d stopped seeing Rico. The very day she told him that she had, they wound up making love. He wasn’t even sure who had initiated it. All he knew was that it had happened and that they came very close to incinerating the house he was working on.

  It was the first time he’d ever felt lightning surge through his veins.

  She sniffed at his statement. Inside she could feel everything turn to jelly again. She had to put a stop to that.

  “According to you.”

  “Yes, according to me. You can’t seem to remember, and I was the only other person there besides you. We didn’t exactly take out an ad in the trade papers.” He looked at her, his frustration becoming close to unmanageable. “Isn’t any of this coming back to you?”

  A section of her brain felt as if it was packed in cotton. The section where memories of him undoubtedly resided. What he said could have happened. He certainly had the photographs to prove that they were married.

  But she needed more than visual aids. She needed to feel they were married, that they were connected. And she didn’t. Right now all she felt was adrift. And confused.

  Gayle shook her head as she looked into his eyes. “No.”

  For just a moment she could have sworn she saw a sadness in his eyes. The next moment it was gone, as if some kind of a curtain had gone down, shutting her out.

  A hiss of frustration escaped Taylor’s lips as he backed away from her. He gestured around at the area with its offending tape. “And you’re going to keep this stuff up?”

  Because his voice challenged her, she was defiant. “Yes.” And then she added, “Until I remember.”

  He’d had just about all he could take for now. Angrily he crossed back to the front door. “Well, give me a call when you do.”

  Just for the tiniest part of a moment, a memory flashed across her brain. She tried to capture it in vain. It refused to be summoned back. Exasperation strummed along her soul.

  “Where are you going?”

  He yanked open the door. She could make him burn up his fuse faster than anyone he knew. “Somewhere where I can get some peace.”

  Gayle almost ran to the door to stop him, reflexes taking over where there was no thought process involved. This has happened before, a voice whispered in her head.

  Again she couldn’t grasp the memory or even pieces of it.

  “I don’t have your number,” she called after him. But her voice didn’t carry above the sound of the slamming door.

  Jerk! she thought. She had no idea why she felt like crying.

  It didn’t hit Taylor that he had no change of clothes until he was a good three blocks away from the house. But he refused to turn back and get them. He would come back and change tomorrow, when he knew she was at the studio.

  He had no one to impress where he was going. Hands gripping the wheel, struggling to contain the irritation he felt, both with her and himself, Taylor drove back to the house he was renovating.

  To help facilitate working conditions, the owners had both the electricity and the water turned on. So, even though the house looked as if it had suffered through a medium-size earthquake, it was basically livable. He didn’t require much. He never had.

  As he pulled up in front of the house he’d left not more than an hour ago, he realized that at least he’d done one thing right. He hadn’t cleaned out the back of the truck’s cab. Which meant that the sleeping bags were still there.

  He pulled out his. He and Gayle had taken the truck to the Angeles National Forest last month and gone camping. Roughing it for Gayle meant staying at a motel instead of a hotel, but she did this for him, because he enjoyed it so much.

  Taylor paused, remembering that although they’d brought two sleeping bags, they’d wound up in one.

  He shook off the memory. Thinking about that now wasn’t going to do him any good. Taylor forced himself to focus on the positive. At least he had something to sleep in. If he could sleep.

  Which he couldn’t.

  After approximately four hours of tossing and turning on the hardwood floor, he gave up. The fast-food hamburger that constituted his dinner lay on his stomach like a leaden hockey puck. The fries had been too greasy and threatened to nauseate him. Taylor attributed his sleeplessness to that, though in his heart he knew better.

  Knew that it didn’t have anything to do with over-cooked food.

  He missed her. Missed “them.” And more than that, he was beginning to fear that maybe she was never coming back into his life. That they wouldn’t be “them” again.

  Rolling over, he stared up at the ceiling, watching the moving shadows cast by the full moon weaving through the trees outside the window. Gayle was stubborn enough to keep him at bay, he knew that. And he knew she meant what she’d said. She didn’t sleep with strangers. What if she intended to keep him a stranger until her memory came back?

  Taylor stared into the empty fireplace beside him, trying to think.

  Trying to visualize the rest of his
life without Gayle.

  He couldn’t.

  Hell, every time she went away on one of her business trips, he threw himself into his job, working sometimes eighteen hours at a clip because he couldn’t face the emptiness in the house without her. Sam and Jake always tried to get him to come out with them, but Gayle’s brothers were both bachelors and that life no longer interested him. He didn’t want it anymore.

  So what were his options? If Gayle had no memory of him…

  If she had no memory of him, he was going to have to give her new memories, he decided suddenly. Much as he hated the idea of having to start from scratch again, Sam was right in what he’d said to him this morning. He was going to have to make up his mind to win Gayle all over again.

  To “court” her.

  Taylor covered his face and groaned. After having enjoyed the delicious intimacies of marriage for the past eighteen months, it was going to be damn hard to go back to square one. To take baby steps until he was finally able to reach the same footing he’d been on just a few days ago. Damn hard.

  But then, he didn’t have any other option left. Other than to walk away completely, and it went without saying that he would have rather died than do that. Gayle was the center of his world, even though he’d never told her as much. Without her, there was no reason to go on.

  Okay, he decided, that was the plan. Pretending that the woman he loved more than anything wasn’t his wife but someone he had to win over. He’d done it once, he could do it again. How hard could it be, right?

  Taylor frowned. Very hard, as he recalled. Part of the reason was that he’d never had to go out of his way to get companionship before. Women always came on to him. It was a little like living in the middle of an orchard. If he wanted an apple, all he had to do was put out his hand and one all but fell into his palm. With Gayle he’d had to actively pursue her, once he’d made up his mind that he wanted her. The road to the altar had been bumpy, because with Gayle nothing ever went according to plan.

  But that was okay. That was what made her Gayle. And desirable.