Modern Romance April 2020 Books 1-4

But, of course, there were differences in her appearance. She was thinner, for a start, painfully thin in spite of the nourishing diet she had been fed by tube. She looked frail and somehow younger. The surgeons had restored her to perfection, but his acute gaze had already spotted the changes. Her mouth seemed a little wider, a little lusher in its pout, her nose shorter, less defined, and her eyes, those beautiful violet eyes were as bright and inquisitive as a bird’s. And he had never ever seen such an expression on Brooke’s face before. Brooke rarely showed emotion of any kind but, right now, he was seeing uncertainty, shock and intense curiosity fleeing across her face and it was a novelty for him to be able to interpret her feelings.

‘Yes, you’re married to me,’ he confirmed flatly, recalling the doctor’s warning, striving to abide by it when his conscience wanted him to throw the truth out there and be damned for it because he wanted no more lies between them. But if he told her about the divorce, he would lose her trust, her ability to depend on him, and she needed him right now. She needed to trust that he would not harm her and that she could rely on him because he knew there was no one else to take his place.

Brooke swallowed painfully and closed her eyes. A headache was beginning to pulse behind her brow. She was ridiculously tired for someone who had only been awake for a couple of hours.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Lorenzo prompted, lifting the glass with the straw in it.

‘Yes...thanks.’ Her eyes flickered open again and she sucked eagerly on the straw, the cool water easing her throat. ‘I’ve got so many questions.’

‘We’ll answer them one by one.’

‘But why don’t I remember you when I remember your voice?’ she exclaimed in frustration. ‘How long have I been here? Nobody would tell me.’

‘You’ve been here over a year.’ Lorenzo watched her eyes round in further disbelief and once again savoured the newness of being able to read her face. ‘After the first few weeks, when you failed to come out of it, the prognosis wasn’t optimistic, so it is a source of great satisfaction for me to see you awake.’

‘It is?’ Brooke repeated, brightening in receipt of that acknowledgement. ‘Then why don’t you show it?’

‘Show it?’ He frowned.

‘Smile, look happy. You walked in here looking like the Grim Reaper,’ she told him, reddening at her boldness in being that blunt. ‘I feel so alone here.’

Ramming his ever-present doubts about Brooke’s veracity to the back of his mind, Lorenzo closed a hand over her limp fingers. ‘But you’re not alone.’

‘Sit down beside me...here, on the bed,’ she heard herself urge.

He looked as startled as if she had suggested he get into the bed with her and she stiffened in mortification. Instead of doing as she asked, he backed away and sank into the chair by the window. He was very reserved, she decided, adding to her first impression of him, not a guy who relaxed or who was easy with informality. It was impossible to imagine that she had ever been in bed with him and, at the thought, her face burned.

‘How long have we been married?’ she pressed.

‘Three years now.’

Then, she had definitely been in bed with him, Brooke realised, and she would have squirmed with embarrassment had she had the ability to move normally. But nothing was normal about her body or her brain throwing up random embarrassing thoughts, she conceded ruefully, and nothing was normal about their situation either, and it had to be causing Lorenzo equal discomfort that he had a wife who didn’t remember him.

‘I’m sorry about all this. I’m sorry I don’t know you and that I’ve caused you all this trouble.’

‘You haven’t caused me any trouble whatsoever,’ Lorenzo lied, wondering what was wrong with her because Brooke’s view of the world was generally one-sided. She didn’t consider other people or their needs. She valued those around her strictly in accordance with the benefits they could bring her. She could be charm personified to get what she wanted but would then dispense with a person’s services the instant she achieved her objective. But, of course, he reminded himself darkly, he was valuable to Brooke at this precise moment when she had nobody else to fall back on.

‘It’s kind of you to say that but all these months I’ve been lying here like a rock and I must’ve been the most awful worry for you,’ she mumbled, her words slurring.

‘I think you need to rest now,’ Lorenzo told her, rising from his seat. ‘I need to make arrangements for you to be moved to a more suitable facility where you can convalesce.’

Her head heavy, she turned her eyes back to him. ‘I just want to go home,’ she whispered weakly.

‘I’m afraid that’s not an option. Right now, you need a rehabilitation programme to regain your strength and medical support to deal with your amnesia,’ Lorenzo explained smoothly.

‘How did we meet?’ she muttered drowsily, her brain spinning on and on, in spite of her exhaustion, wanting answers to countless questions.

‘At a party in Nice. I was there on business.’

‘You’re a businessman?’ she slurred.

‘A banker,’ he advanced.

‘I don’t like banks,’ she mumbled, and then thought in surprise, Where did that thought come from?

Brows pleating, Lorenzo paused at the door to look back at her searchingly. ‘Why don’t you like banks?’

With an enormous effort she opened her eyes again and there he was, standing directly below the lights, his hair blue-black, his eyes transformed into liquid-gold pools of enquiry. He looked devastatingly handsome and she smiled at him sleepily. ‘I don’t know. It was just a random thought that came out of nowhere,’ she admitted.

‘Go to sleep, Brooke,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘No kiss goodbye?’

Lorenzo froze at what struck him as an almost childlike question, which was laughable, he told himself, for anyone acquainted with Brooke’s past history. ‘No kiss. You’re too sleepy and I like my women awake.’

‘That’s mean,’ she mumbled.

Lorenzo stood at the foot of the bed watching her sleep. He should’ve been on the phone looking into convalescent facilities. He should’ve been seeking out a top psychiatrist to treat her. He should’ve told her that he wouldn’t see her tomorrow because he was flying to Milan for an international banking conference. But he did none of those sensible things. He stood and he watched her sleep, feeling guilty at leaving her but all the while thinking in rampant disbelief that he might have married Brooke, but suddenly he was feeling as though he didn’t know her either. Everyone had layers, he told himself irritably. Maybe this was how Brooke was when she was unsure of herself and no longer knew who she was. Restored to her fantastic wardrobe and her make-up and her headlines, she would once again become the woman he remembered.

Brooke sank into a seat in front of Mr Selby, her psychiatrist, and stowed the stick she was using. After a physio session she was always very sore and the slight limp she still had made her clumsy as she tired towards the end of the day, but she didn’t complain because just being able to walk again felt like a precious enough gift.

‘How have you been over the last few days?’ the psychiatrist enquired over the top of his eccentric half-moon glasses.

‘Great, but no flashes, no memories yet,’ she said uneasily. ‘Everything still feels so strange. Lorenzo brought me this giant metal case of cosmetics to replace the one that was destroyed in the accident and I think he was expecting me to be ecstatic, but I couldn’t identify half the stuff in the box. I used a bit of it for his next visit. I didn’t want him to think his present was a disappointment.’

‘You seem to care about Lorenzo a great deal,’ her companion remarked.

‘Surely that’s healthy when I’m married to him?’ Brooke replied.

‘Of course, you’ve been forced to depend on him, but it will be even more healthy for you to embrace a little independence as you recover your physical strength.’

Brooke’s nod of acknowledgement was stiff. Over the past two months, she had learned just to let advice she didn’t relish pass over her head. Everyone she met in the rehabilitation centre seemed to want to give her advice. She had dealt with surprise after surprise since her arrival. She had discovered that she was married to an extremely wealthy man and piece by piece she had learned that, before the crash, she had been a minor celebrity, a known fashion icon and often a source of media interest.

Those revelations hadn’t felt natural to her and hadn’t seemed to fit in very well with the quieter, less confident image she had slowly been developing of herself. But when she asked Lorenzo when she could go on the Internet to research her own previous life, he had insisted that it would be the wrong thing to do and that her memories would have a much better chance of returning if they weren’t forced.

‘What will I do if the memories never come back?’

‘You will rebuild yourself. You’ve been very lucky. Your injury was severe, but you have no other ongoing problems,’ Mr Selby reminded her bracingly.

Except a husband she still couldn’t remember, a reality that tormented Brooke every time he visited her. But he wasn’t able to visit her as often as he had hoped because he was an exceptionally busy banker, who went abroad several times a month. And her initial impression of Lorenzo had been spot on in its accuracy. He was very reserved. He rarely touched her in even the most fleeting way. It was a little as though she had an invisible force field around her, she conceded with a regretful grimace. Obviously he was deeply uncomfortable with the fact that she didn’t remember him but his hands-off approach wasn’t helping her to feel any closer to him. It was a subject she needed to tackle...and soon, she told herself ruefully.

He hadn’t walked away while she was in a coma, so why was he keeping his distance now? Did he love her? Did he still find her attractive? Or was their marriage in trouble?

She agonised over the options in the giant box of make-up because he was coming to see her that evening. She even leafed through the totally impractical garments he had had brought to her, which hung in the wardrobe, and selected a dress because greeting Lorenzo in the yoga pants that she wore for physio sessions hadn’t got her anywhere. Lorenzo was used to a fashion queen, so she would strive to please and maybe that would warm him up.

Her skin heating at that enterprising thought, she did her face and put on the electric-blue dress that she thought was hideously bright, almost neon in shade, but presumably she had bought it and liked it once. She slid into it and then embarked on the matching shoes. She wasn’t supposed to wear heels yet but she wouldn’t be moving around much, which was just as well because the shoes pinched painfully at the toes.

Lorenzo stepped out of his chauffeur-driven limo and studied the modern building with disfavour as he braced himself for another visit to his wife. If she didn’t recover her memories soon, he was likely to be forced to the point of telling her the truth about their marriage. And the psychiatrist had warned him that Brooke wasn’t ready to deal with that reality, that he had become her ‘safe place’ and if that support was suddenly withdrawn, it might well disrupt her fragile mental state and send her hurtling back into panic mode, which would set back the recovery process.

He was already in major conflict with his lawyers’ warnings. They didn’t take a humane approach to the situation he was in, merely cautioning him that frequent visits to his estranged wife would only convince a judge that granting him a divorce would get in the way of what could be viewed as a potential reconciliation. And he didn’t want to do that, no, he definitely did not want to stay married to Brooke. There had to be a hard limit to his compassion and care. But that wasn’t what was really bothering him, was it?

He wanted her: that was the real problem. In fact, he lusted after her more, it seemed, than he had ever lusted after her. Why? Because she was different, so different he couldn’t believe it sometimes and, quite ridiculously, he liked her now. How was that possible? Logic told him that he was seeing Brooke as she might have been before the lust for fame and the infatuation with her own beauty had taken hold of her. Even more shockingly, Brooke au naturel was a class act.

Only he didn’t think it was an act any longer because he was convinced that the woman he remembered could never ever have carried off that outstanding mix of artless naivety and innocence she showed him. In short, Brooke was all sorts of things she had never been before with him...caring, unselfish, undemanding. She had made him like her again, but he was determined not to be sucked back into that swamp a second time, he reminded himself grimly. She was recovering well and soon he would be able to cut their ties again and slot her into that penthouse apartment.

Lorenzo strode in and Brooke leapt upright at speed, wanting him to see that she had made the effort, wanting him to see that she was truly getting back to normal...and ready to go home.

‘You look...more like yourself this evening,’ Lorenzo commented as she regarded him expectantly.

Her violet eyes, bright with what he recognised as excitement, unsettled him.

‘I think I’m ready to leave here...to come home,’ she told him urgently. ‘I’m sure it would be better for me to be in a familiar place. They’re very kind to me here but I’m going crazy cooped up like this and it’s so boring and uneventful. Your visits are the only highlights in my week.’

With difficulty, Lorenzo mastered his consternation. ‘I’ll speak to your doctors tomorrow. We don’t want to rush into anything. After all, you couldn’t even walk two months ago.’

‘I’m getting stronger every day!’ Brooke argued. ‘Why don’t you see that?’

‘I do see it,’ Lorenzo countered levelly. ‘But until you recover your memory, it’s too risky.’

Brooke’s hands coiled into tight fists, the sudden burst of temper that ignited inside her an explosion of the frustration she had been fighting off for days. ‘Am I going to stay here for ever, then, as a patient?’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘Because I’ve already been told, and you must also know, that I might never get my memory back!’

Lorenzo gritted his teeth. He did know that, but he had confidently put the warning to the back of his mind because every time he saw her, he expected to see her change back into the woman he remembered. ‘Sit down,’ he urged. ‘We’ll discuss this calmly.’

Brooke dropped down on the side of the bed. Lorenzo studied her. She had been all built up to ask him to take her home and now she was upset, and he felt as if he was being cruel even though he knew that he had no other choice. Sitting there, she was a picture with her tangled ringlets half concealing her piquant face, the faint pout of her luscious pink mouth, the long length of her legs displayed to perfection in that dress and those shoes. A punch of lust tightened his groin and he tensed, willing back his desire, fighting for control. The yoga pants had driven him crazy, showing every curve, every indent, but Lorenzo wasn’t easily tempted, not where Brooke was concerned, and he had fought that reaction every rigorous step of the way. He stood by the window gazing out at the tranquil courtyard garden in the centre of the building, striving to calm himself.

‘Before the accident...’ Brooke began hesitantly. ‘Our marriage was in trouble, wasn’t it?’

At that moment she didn’t want the positive answer she suspected to be her new reality. Even so, she felt she still had to ask and had to be strong enough to confront such an unwelcome truth because, in that scenario, pretending wasn’t fair to either of them.

Disconcerted, Lorenzo froze in position. ‘What makes you think that?’ he enquired in a deliberately mild tone.

‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist,’ she framed a little unevenly. ‘You never touch me unless you can’t avoid it. You never mention anything personal and if I ask questions in that line you stall. You don’t want me home either. Just be honest, Lorenzo. I can take it. And then, just go home or back to the bank because you seem to work eighteen hours a day.’

Lorenzo almost ground his teeth in frustration. It would have been the perfect moment to speak had he not had to consider her condition. He glanced across at her and saw the tears shimmering like sunshine on water in her eyes.

Angrily aware of the tears prickling, Brooke dashed them away with an impatient hand. ‘Stop treating me like a child, stop choosing your words. I’m twenty-eight years old, for goodness’ sake, not a little girl! It’s bad enough not remembering stuff, but it’s a torment to be sitting here wondering all the time what sort of relationship we have...’

In disconcertion, Lorenzo strode forward just as she leapt up in haste, determined not to cry in front of him. ‘Just go home!’ she told him fiercely as she headed for the door and the sanctuary of the patients’ lounge. ‘I’ll see you another day—’

But she tried to move too fast in the high heels and her weaker leg flailed and tipped her over. She was within inches of crashing down painfully on the hard floor when Lorenzo snatched her up, lifting her clean off her tottering feet and settling her down in front of him in the circle of his arms. The scent of him that close was like an aphrodisiac to her senses, an inner clenching down in her pelvis instantly responding. She closed her arms round his neck because she had decided that if he couldn’t even kiss her, obviously he no longer felt attracted to her, and she would get her answer to how he felt about her one way or another.

Lorenzo collided with her wonderfully unusual eyes and, involuntarily, he bent down and kissed her, damning himself for even that momentary surrender. But he was too clever by half with women not to guess that she was giving him the green light to test him. One brief kiss and nobody was catching it on camera, he reminded himself, and then her soft, succulent mouth opened invitingly under his and suddenly all bets were off because the taste of her went to his head and his groin like a bushfire licking out of control.

She tasted like...she tasted like... His primal nature threatened to take over, almost made him forget that since she had lost her memory this was their first kiss as far as she was concerned. Quite deliberately he tried to rein himself back. But Brooke was still blown off her feet by the explosion of passion Lorenzo delivered with his mouth. His lips were hard and urgent and demanding, somehow everything she had been craving without realising it for endless weeks, and he crushed her to his tall, powerful frame.

It was off-the-charts exciting.

Her hands bit into his broad shoulders to keep her upright while the intoxicating chemistry of his mouth on hers left her breathless and dizzy and afflicted with all sorts of reactions that felt entirely new to her. Of course, they couldn’t be new to her, but her heart was racing and her nipples became tight and almost sore in their sensitivity beneath her clothes. At the apex of her thighs, there was a burn, a sort of pulsing ache that inflamed her senses and, against her abdomen, she could feel the literal effect she was having on Lorenzo as well and somehow that shocked her when it shouldn’t have done.

Indeed, for Brooke, Lorenzo’s sizzling kiss was the first true gift she had had in all the weeks of her frustrating convalescence while she worried and wondered about who she truly was and wondered even harder how Lorenzo wanted her to behave. She was in constant conflict, struggling between what little she knew about her past self and the newer and equally unknown self that often prompted her to behave differently. But that kiss restored her equilibrium. It was acceptance, it was proof positive that her husband still wanted her and that she had been fretting herself into a state about nothing.

As he lowered Brooke down onto the bed and broke their connection with a slight shudder of recoil, Lorenzo was reminded very much of a saying a teacher of his had been fond of recounting to him: ‘between a rock and a hard place’. ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ struck him as more apt. Still, what was one kiss? he reasoned wrathfully, instantly going into damage-limitation mode and stepping back from her. He was awesomely aware of the arousal he couldn’t hide below the finely tailored trousers, the coolness he couldn’t yet slide into place, and so furious with himself for succumbing to her again that his lean brown hands clenched into fists.

Lorenzo had once liked to pride himself on being an unemotional man like his late father but the unemotional man who had married Brooke had discovered otherwise. He had felt tortured by the endless dramas and he had shut that weak and disturbing part of himself away again, closed it down, re-embraced his calm, his control, his...sanity. He wasn’t going back there, no, not even for the sake of honour or decency!

‘That was wonderful.’ Brooke gave him a huge smile, utterly impervious to his feelings at that moment. ‘I feel so much better about us.’

‘Good,’ Lorenzo gritted between his perfect teeth, because it felt like another nail in his coffin that she had come alive in his arms as she never had before. He was in shock, he conceded, acknowledging the fact that Brooke had never kissed him back that way in their entire acquaintance, had never shown him an atom of the desire he had assumed she had for him when he married her. He shook his handsome dark head slightly as though to clear it. She was so different, but hadn’t the doctors warned him of that possibility?

He trained his dark deep gaze on her. ‘I’m not an emotional man, Brooke.’

‘You don’t really need to tell me that. It’s kind of obvious,’ Brooke pointed out. ‘You’ve never shown me any emotion in your visits and it worried me about us but obviously we managed to get married anyway and right now I can see how tense you are.’

Lorenzo was starting to feel like the accused in the dock. ‘I’m not tense,’ he insisted.

But the tension was engraved in his lean, darkly handsome features, Brooke recognised with relief. Lorenzo might be locked up tight in his reserve, but he had shown her wonderfully strong emotion in that kiss...hadn’t he? Or had that only been sexual hunger? And why didn’t she know the difference? The way she seemed to just know other things? Like the names of the seasons, the days of the week? She swallowed hard, afraid to get carried away by her expectations of him, afraid to expect too much.

‘Will you bring me home this week?’ she just asked him baldly. ‘I’m ready even if the doctors fuss about the idea. I can’t stay here for ever...unless that’s what you’d prefer?’

That anxious question shot through Lorenzo much like a whip because he could see the stress and the level of concern she was trying, very poorly, to hide from him, and he marvelled all over again at the complete absence of her once unrevealing shuttered expressions. ‘Of course not,’ he responded by rote. ‘I’ll speak to them.’

Content to have received that response, Brooke slid off the bed and walked over to him. ‘I won’t be any trouble to anyone. It’s not like I’m depressed or mentally troubled in some way. I’ve only lost my memory. I just want my life...’ and my husband, she added inwardly, ‘back.’

Suddenly, Lorenzo found himself smiling at the almost enthralling prospect of reuniting Brooke with her wardrobe, her jewellery and her precious scrapbooks and files of headlines and articles. Nothing surely was more likely to revive her memory than her possessions and her media triumphs? What the hell had he hoped to achieve when he kept her in a sterile medical environment? Deprived of everything she valued and enjoyed in life? Nothing in the private clinic was familiar to her and nothing here would appeal to her tastes. In such a place there was no stimulation that could help her to recover her memory. Sì... He would take her to her supposed home and in all likelihood she would recover there and remember that she hated him. He could bear a few more weeks—couldn’t he?