Husbands and Other Strangers

As long as he kept his eye fixed on the light at the end of the tunnel—as long as he kept telling himself the light was there even when he couldn’t see it—he could get through this.

“The doctor said Gayle could go home,” Taylor said aloud, more to himself than to Sam and Jake.

Jake nodded, as if to say that this was a good next step. “Then let’s go get our girl,” he said.

Taylor returned the nod, grateful for his brother-in-law’s support. He knew that he could count on both Jake and Sam. Not just because Gayle was their sister, but because he was part of the family. There were times when he caught himself thinking how odd that felt. Eighteen months and he was still adjusting to the idea that he had more than himself to lean on. That he wasn’t alone anymore. It was a fringe benefit for getting involved with Gayle.

Flanked by Jake and Sam, Taylor entered the curtained area, ready to pick up the fight where they had left off. Gayle had called him a liar just before the nurse had drawn the curtain around the gurney so that she could change into a hospital gown.

Words melted from his tongue and his head the moment he looked at the woman who no longer remembered that she was his wife. He couldn’t recall ever seeing Gayle looking so small, so vulnerable as she did lying in that bed—and yet so defensive at the same time.

She was probably scared. But then, who wouldn’t be, in her position? Part of her memory had been whisked away like a so-called alien abduction. That would have rattled anyone. And although she was outgoing, Gayle had never been what he would have called the blindly trusting type.

Which was why she’d been so suspicious of him. Why she was still suspicious of him, if that look in her eyes was any indication of the state of her mind.

This was going to take a hell of a lot of patience, he warned himself. More than he’d ever had to dig up before. Taylor really hoped he was up to it.

You have to be up to it, he upbraided himself. The prize was far too precious. And he had no intention of losing it.

“The doctor said you could go home now,” Taylor told her.

Gayle deliberately looked toward her brothers. The less encouragement she gave this poor joke of theirs, the better. Not that she wouldn’t have been interested in spending some time with this guy her brothers had dug up. The man had definite potential, especially around the mouth and eyes.

His dark-blue eyes looked as if they’d been the inspiration that had led someone to coin the phrase about eyes being the windows of the soul. His looked as if they were almost bottomless. And his mouth—there was something incredibly sensual about his mouth even though, so far, she’d only seen it looking unhappy.

Or maybe her reaction to him was because his mouth was pulled back into a frown.

This wasn’t the time. She was letting her mind wander, taking her thoughts on a wild and very obviously purposeless chase.

She had to keep her mind on her goal. Getting out of here.

“Good,” she declared.

Gayle began to look around the small enclosure for her clothes. And then another thought struck her. With a sense of foreboding, she had the uneasy feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer to her question.

Anticipating what he thought was Gayle’s next move, Taylor bent down and removed the plastic shopping bag tucked just above the wheels of the gurney. When the nurse on duty had brought Gayle her one-size-fits-all hospital gown, she’d placed Gayle’s bathing suit, as well as the shorts and tank top Jake had thought to bring with them, into the bag.

“Looking for these?” He held up the bag.

She took the bag from him mechanically, mumbling a thanks she was hardly aware of uttering. Gayle looked at Jake. There was only one way to find this out, and she might as well get it over with.

“Um, Jake, I can’t remember.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and then forged ahead. “Where do I live?”

Taylor didn’t wait for Jake to answer. “With me,” he told Gayle. “You live with me.”

She hadn’t been prepared for the intense wave of panic that washed over her. It all but robbed her of her breath. “No, I don’t,” she insisted.

“Yes,” Jake said to her, quietly but firmly, “you do.”

Sam was right there to back him up. “He’s right, you do.”

She wanted to scream “No.” To shout that the joke was over. But beneath it all was the strong, underlying fear that they weren’t playing a trick on her. That for whatever reason, part of her memory was gone.

“Guys, you’re scaring me.”

“No more than you’re scaring us,” Taylor told her evenly.

She looked from one face to another, ending up with the man she wanted to believe was an impostor. Her eyes reverted back to Jake. Her throat suddenly felt dry, and her head began to spin again. She fought to keep from getting dizzy.

“Really?” she asked Jake, her voice hardly above a whisper. She stared into her older brother’s eyes, certain that if he was lying to her—the way she was fervently praying he was—she could tell. She could always tell when Jake was lying. He squinted.

“Really.”

Jake wasn’t squinting.

Shaken down to her very core, she sighed.

“Then why can’t I remember?” she demanded, looking at Jake. Ever since she’d taken her first step, she’d fought to be independent, to be taken seriously on her own merit. But right at this moment, she wanted her big brother to take care of her. To make things right. “Why can’t I remember anything about him?”

Jake ached for her as he struggled to make sense of all this. He took Gayle’s hand in his. “We don’t know, Gayle.”

“The doctor said he doesn’t even know,” Sam chimed in, as if that could somehow make her feel better. That she wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand.

“Guys, could you leave us alone for a minute?” Taylor asked his brothers-in-law.

Panic returned, as raw and nearly as unmanageable as it had been that very first time her father made her jump into the water and swim on her own as he stood on the side of the pool. She’d flashed a confident smile, wanting to be his golden girl. But inside she’d been trembling. She’d been four at the time.

“No,” Gayle cried, grabbing Jake’s arm. She didn’t want to be alone with this man. “Don’t.”

Very gently Jake peeled her fingers away from his forearm.

“We’ll be right outside, Gayle,” he promised, backing out of the area. A beat later Sam followed. Leaving the two of them alone.

For a moment Taylor stood there in silence. It was killing him, seeing her like this. Ever since he’d known her, Gayle had been vibrant, feisty. He couldn’t ever recall her being frightened, the way she so visibly was now.

And then it came—that look he’d become so familiar with in the past year and a half. Defiance. Relief flooded over him, emotions threatening to close his throat. His Gayle was in there somewhere and he was going to go in and find her, even if he had to drag her out, kicking and screaming.

It would be like old times.

“Well?” she demanded, doing her best not to let this man see that she felt as if she was falling apart. She’d never been this frightened….

Except that she had, she suddenly realized. Something, just now, had flashed through her brain, a glimmer of a memory moving so fast she couldn’t catch hold of it. All she could grasp was the hem of a fragment of fear. But fear of what or who, when and why, none of this had any answers.

Damn it, this was so frustrating. She felt like a book with all the even numbered pages missing. Nothing made any sense to her. Least of all why she couldn’t remember this man everyone told her was her husband.

“We’ll take this slow, Gayle,” Taylor promised. “One day at a time.”

He fought the urge to take her into his arms and just hold her. Knowing that it was the last thing he should do. A hint of a smile formed as it occurred to him that if he did do that, she’d probably toss him across the room with one of those martial arts moves of hers. Martial arts had become her newest passion. Gayle did nothing by half measures. Whatever she undertook, she did so wholeheartedly.

It was the same when they made love.

God, he just had to bring her around. Had to make her remember their life together. And he didn’t care what the doctor had said, he couldn’t help but take this personally. She’d remembered everything. But him.

There had to be an underlying reason for that. The trouble was he wasn’t sure he was going to like the answer once he found it.

She never took her eyes off him. He’d seen old tapes of Gayle at swim meets. She always watched her opponents the same way. Was that how she saw him? As an adversary?

“And meanwhile,” she said, “I’m supposed to come home with you.”

“It’s where you live.”

Gayle frowned. That’s what he said, but how did she know for sure? If she was his wife, wouldn’t there be a degree of familiarity somewhere, however deep in her subconscious? If he was really her husband, the man she supposedly loved, would her mind really have shut down, excluding him from every thought, every memory?

She’d spent the past two hours sitting in a drafty hospital gown, waiting to be scanned and probed while she desperately tried to summon any kind of memories with him in them. All she’d managed to do was come up against a blank wall.

It had led her to an inevitable conclusion. If this man was her husband, then he must have been a terrible one. There was no other explanation why his very presence had been burned away from her memory banks.

Gayle drew herself up as high as she could manage. “I can stay with Sam or Jake.” Her tone was deliberately dismissive. On a whim she added, “Just until I remember you.” She thought that would put an end to any argument he might have.

Taylor shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from shaking her. A part of him still felt maybe this was payback for some imagined sin. She’d spent the first six months of their marriage testing him, as if she couldn’t believe that he was going to stay and wanted him to go before she became used to her status. Used to him. He’d just dug in and waited her out. He didn’t know if he had the stamina to do it again.

“The familiar surroundings might make you remember faster,” he finally told her.

“Why should they be familiar if you’re not?” she countered.

He threw up his hands, then struggled to regain control over his temper. Shouting at her wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She wasn’t testing him, he told himself. She was thrashing around in the same choppy waters that he was. It was up to him to lead her out of them. How, he had no idea, but he knew he was going to. There was too much at stake to just give up.

“I don’t have any answers here, Gayle. The doctor doesn’t have any answers,” he emphasized. “This is all new territory for me.”

She raised her hand as if she were sitting in a classroom, trying to catch the teacher’s eye. “Let’s not forget me here.”

“I’m not forgetting you,” he said so fiercely he knew he scared her. “Not for one damn second am I forgetting you. And I don’t know why you seem to have forgotten me.”

“Seem?” Gayle echoed, her temper flaring at the single word. She cleaved to the familiar feeling as if it was an old friend. This, this she could remember. Getting angry. Having no fear over voicing her opinions. She was her own person, no matter who this man was or wasn’t to her. She had to remember that. “You think I’m faking this? That I’m pretending not to know you?”

For just a moment the bars he’d placed around his own temper seemed in danger of melting.

“Right now I don’t know what to think,” Taylor shot back. “You’re not above doing things to bedevil me for reasons that I could never fully understand. You—”

Abruptly he stopped himself.

This wasn’t the way to go, even though for him the ground was familiar. Arguing with Gayle might just push her farther into this black hole that had somehow eaten away at the part of her mind that had contained him.

Struggling for control, Taylor blew out a breath. He didn’t need this. He pushed the plastic bag with her clothes closer to her. “Get dressed, Gayle. I’m going to take you home.”

She clutched the bag against her, tossing her head the way he’d seen her do a hundred times before. Her long, blond hair flew over her shoulder. “No, you’re not.”

He leaned in close to her, his lips against her ear. “Yes,” he said quietly, firmly, “I am.”

His breath slipped along the curve of her neck. The shiver along her spine mimicked its path. Something in the distance stirred, although she could put neither name nor description to it.

She dropped it.

Although she didn’t know him, something in the man’s voice told her he wasn’t someone to be messed with, to be disregarded. Certainly not a man she could order around the way she could so many of the others in her life. Even her brothers bent from time to time.

Just her luck, her so-called husband had a steel pole stuck up a place that should never be visited.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he told her. With that Taylor pushed the curtain aside and walked out of her space.

He found Sam and Jake waiting for him in the hall where they’d talked to Peter.

Sam pretended to look him over carefully. “Well, no wounds,” he observed. “That’s a positive sign. Is Gayle coming around?” Taking a look at Taylor’s face, Sam saw the answer to his question. Disappointment followed. “Guess not.”

Taylor was struggling to take this newest development in stride, the way he had everything else that involved Gayle. “The woman’s got the disposition of a wounded warthog.”

Jake laughed. “Then she is coming around,” he commented dryly. And then he looked at his brother-in-law. “Look, Tay, maybe Sam or I should take her in for a couple of weeks. I mean, if she doesn’t remember you’re married—”

Taylor cut him off. “She’s going to remember, Jake. She’ll see something, hear something, it’ll trigger a memory and we can go from there. I’ve got to be there for that. Got to give her every opportunity to remember me. To remember us.” He struggled to keep the hopelessness from absorbing him. “Maybe I’ll show Gayle the wedding pictures.”

“Might just do the trick,” Sam agreed cheerfully, a strained smile pasted on his lips.

“You’re a lousy actor, Sam,” Taylor told him. “But thanks for trying.”

He realized that Sam was no longer listening to him. Instead he was looking at something over his shoulder. Taylor turned around and saw that Gayle had emerged from out of the curtained area, wearing a white pair of impossibly short shorts and a white-and-pink-checkered blouse that tied above her midriff.

Her hair had long since dried and was hanging about her face and shoulders in tiny curls. She’d always told him that she hated the way that looked. He thought she looked beautiful.

Except for the hairstyle, she looked exactly the way she had when she’d stepped onto Sam’s sloop this morning.

And yet she was different. She wasn’t his Gayle anymore.

But she would be, he vowed. She would be.

“God, I look like Orphan Annie,” she complained, spiking her fingers through her hair and trying to pull it straight. It was an exercise in futility.

“Orphan Annie she remembers,” Taylor muttered under his breath.

But Gayle heard him. “Sure, I used to read the comic strip every day when I was a kid,” she said as she moved closer to Jake and away from him.

Closer to what was familiar. Away from what was not.

Chapter Four

“Well, this place isn’t going to win the Good Housekeeping award anytime soon.”

Gayle stood in the doorway of the house her “husband” claimed to be theirs. A distant feeling of déjà vu whispered through her, but then in the next moment it was gone.

She didn’t recognize the house, and she had a feeling she would have, given its unique state.

Gayle remained where she was, holding on to the doorknob. Not wanting to let go.

Not wanting to take a step farther into this house she didn’t recognize, into this life she didn’t know with a man who was a stranger to her.

Stalling, she looked around. A clear plastic tarp hung from the ceiling to the ground and furniture clustered together in the middle of the room like marooned survivors of a shipwreck. The furniture, a sofa, love seat, coffee table and two side tables were covered with more plastic tarp.

The wall to her left had holes in it, courtesy of the sledgehammer leaning against it. Sanders, saws and a variety of equipment she didn’t readily recognize were scattered throughout the area she assumed had once been a living room. Here and there, hints of olive-green wallpaper still clung for dear life to the walls that remained intact.

It looked like the center of her worst nightmare. She lived here?

Taylor slowly pocketed his key. He couldn’t close the door because she was still blocking the sill. His eyes never left her face as he waited and prayed for some ray of recognition to cross it. All he saw was startled wonder.

“We live here,” she finally said, looking at him. It wasn’t so much a question as a statement rimmed in disbelief.

“Yes.” It was a work in progress and because of another job he’d taken on, progress had been slow and limited. The shoemaker’s children went barefoot, he thought cryptically. “Why don’t you come away from the doorway, Gayle?”

She gave no indication that she heard him. Instead Gayle looked up at the unfinished ceiling.

Squinting, she could see that it had been recently scraped and then textured. The surface seemed brighter than the rest of the room, even though it was obviously waiting for a final coat of paint.

Gayle’s eyes shifted to his. “I’m afraid something might fall on me if I come in.”

Taylor looked around, trying to see through her eyes. It wasn’t easy. What he usually saw even when he looked at a place that was crumbling was potential. Always potential. He supposed that was where he channeled whatever optimism he possessed.

“Don’t be. The house is rock solid. I thoroughly checked out the foundations before we signed the mortgage papers.”

Mortgage papers. For some reason she’d just assumed they were renting the house. It was more in keeping with this temporary feeling that nibbled away at her.

She looked at him. Why in heaven’s name would they have wanted to buy such a place? “We own this.”

“Yes,” he answered evenly. He knew her well enough to know that he should be bracing himself for the onslaught of something.

Gayle moved away from the doorway. Proximity did not improve on her impression. This was a disaster area. All it needed was to be declared so by the governor.

“Why?” she asked. “Did we lose a bet?” Gayle crossed to the ventilated wall. The gaping holes where sledgehammer had met plywood gave her a view of another room. The latter was decorated in colors and styles that had been popular roughly thirty years ago. She did her best to stifle a shiver and succeeded only marginally. “This place is falling apart.”

“No,” he corrected, following her as she conducted her inspection. “I’m taking it apart.”

When she was growing up, her father had considered hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture major construction. For anything else he always hired help, laborers. Physical labor was something to be avoided. “Why?”

He could remember Gayle taking an interest, not only in this house, but in the ones he worked on. Had she feigned that? Or was she now just trying to find the path back and, once there, her interest, her enthusiasm would return? “Because it’s what I do for a living.”

Gayle looked around again, then back at him. She’d always assumed that when she did get married, it would either be to a professional athlete or a professional something, like a doctor or a lawyer. But apparently she was supposed to have tied the knot with a laborer. “You destroy houses for a living?”

“Renovate,” Taylor corrected evenly, “the word is renovate.”

He thought he saw her frown slightly. Before he could tell himself that it was his imagination, impatience bit into him. He’d been pushed to the edge today and wasn’t sure just how much more he could take before he was on overload. He’d been half-terrified out of his mind when he thought that he’d lost Gayle, then relieved when he’d found her.

But now he was faced with the same situation, only in a different form. He had lost Gayle, at least temporarily. Because she couldn’t remember him. Couldn’t react to him the way only a wife could to the man she entrusted all her secret hopes and dreams to. A man who’d been privy to all the private moments that went into making Gayle who and what she was.

Or had been, he amended silently.

Frustrated, Taylor wanted to shout “Game over!” and have her the way she’d been just this morning, before they’d taken off for Jake’s sloop.

Damn, he wished they’d never stepped foot on that stupid hunk of overpriced, floating ballast. More than anything in the world, he wanted her to look at him the way she did when it was just the two of them, and the world was fading away.

Instead it seemed as if he was the one who had apparently faded away for her.

“You don’t remember this?” He asked the question even though he already knew what her answer would be.

Gayle turned on her heel to face him. “I don’t remember you,” she needlessly reminded him.

She pressed her lips together, trying desperately to keep the sharp edge of panic from growing into unmanageable proportions the way it had earlier.

She needed to keep moving. If this man looking at her so intently really was who he said he was, well, he had to prove it to her, to make her remember him. He had all the cards. She had nothing to draw on. No special place to retreat to in order to start all over again, rebuilding memories.

She had no memories, at least none of him. He had to do something that would change that, not her.

It suddenly occurred to Gayle that she was lacking the most basic form of information. She tried to remember if one of her brothers had called out to her would-be husband and failed to come up with anything. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Taylor. Taylor Conway.” He shoved his hands into his back pockets. This felt so stupid, introducing himself to his wife of eighteen months.

“And I’m Gayle Conway?” She rolled the name over on her tongue, testing it out. Tasting it. Listening to the way it sounded. No sense of the familiar came washing over her, yet she did recognize the name as belonging to her.

“Privately,” he told her. “Professionally you’re still Gayle Elliott. You work at—”

“KTOC, yes, I know.” She had a very clear image of her small dressing room. Her section of the desk on the set, beneath glaring lights. She loved the life.

He felt as if a paring knife had slipped in beneath his third rib. And he had to wait awhile before this stopped bothering him so much. Maybe they’d get lucky and she’d regain her memory by then. “You remember your job.”

“I like referring to it as a career.”

There were times when she thought it was somehow unethical, being paid for doing something she loved so much. She would have paid the station to allow her to mingle with professional athletes, follow certain teams when they went on the road to play in other cities, reporting it all back to hungry viewers who weren’t as lucky as she was.

He felt as if something was about to snap inside of him. What if she never remembered him? Never remembered the past eighteen months?

Taylor grasped her by the shoulders. “Damn it, Gayle, if you’re putting me on—”

She watched him unflinchingly, the strength of his fingers registering as they pressed hard against her biceps. “Why would I put you on about that?”

Belatedly he realized he must be holding her too tightly, that he was channeling his frustration through his fingers.