The Italian's Forgotten Baby

She stared into his eyes, looking for any tiny sign of regret he might be willing to bestow. Just a hint. It might have made her feel better.

For just a moment, she remembered how he used to laugh with her, his white teeth flashing against his tan skin. She would give almost anything to see that laughter now, that warmth. Instead, she saw amusement, but she couldn’t tell if he was smiling with her or against her. He had a sense of reserve in his face as he looked at her. She wanted passion and he was giving her polite appreciation instead. A little passion, a bit of memory, would have cancelled out a lot of her resentment.

But instead, he asked her a question she wasn’t expecting.

“Do you always tell the truth, Shayna?”

That startled her. She turned away. He knew the answer to that. He knew she’d lied to him about who she was for two weeks, just like she lied to everyone. She supposed it was only fair that he bring it up, since she’d brought up his lies. But still…

He went on, speaking softly.

“Truth can be a slippery thing. You know what they say. One man’s truth is another man’s fairy tale.”

She sighed. It seemed he did want to make her suffer. Well, she could give as good as she got. She gave him a direct look.

“Telling stories did seem to be a talent of yours when you were here before,” she noted.

He barely acknowledged her dig, waving it away as though he had larger things on his mind.

“Okay, here’s some truth for you, Shayna.” He paused, took a deep breath, and let it out. “I don’t know you.”

Her head whipped around and she stared at him. For a few seconds, she went back over his words in her head. Had she really heard what she’d thought she heard?

“What are you talking about?”

He met her gaze firmly. “I don’t have any idea who you are. I feel like I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

For a second or two, she felt sick. The room seemed to sway. She closed her eyes and steadied herself, then looked him in the eye again, searching hard. The man she’d spent all that time with just a few weeks ago had to be in there somewhere, but she couldn’t find any sign of him at the moment.

“Is this some kind of game, Marco?”

“No. It’s not.” He shook his head, holding her gaze. “I’m serious as a midnight clock.”

She pulled her arms in close around her. It was a steamy tropical day, but she was shivering. Something in his words, something in his attitude, had chilled her to the core.

“I do not know who you are. I can’t remember a thing.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I KNOW THIS IS HARD to believe,” Marco said, running a hand distractedly through his thick dark hair. “I can hardly accept it myself.”

Shayna drew her breath in softly, then let it out again. “Accept what, exactly?” she asked, surprised that her voice wasn’t trembling. “Please explain.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then laughed shortly. “You see, that’s the problem. How can I explain what I can’t remember?”

“Marco…”

“Okay, I’ll try.” He grimaced. “When I left here, on my way back to Rome, I must have taken a regular flight, since that’s all that comes through here. But somewhere along the way, I transferred to a small plane, a commuter flight, and we went down in the Mediterranean off Sicily.”

She gasped. “Oh, Marco!”

“The pilot and another passenger were killed, but somehow I was rescued. I woke up in a hospital in Napoli. I couldn’t even remember who I was, much less where I’d been.”

She had to hold herself back. Every instinct cried out to go to him, to touch him, to convey her feelings as best she could. Despite everything, she cared about him more than she’d ever cared for any other man. Whatever it was she felt for him was pretty darn close to love. You couldn’t just throw that away at will. It tended to linger.

“Were you hurt? Are you all right?”

He looked at her and managed a slight smile. “I’m fine, Shayna. Physically. And over a few days, most of my memory came back.”

She nodded slowly, feeling very much at sea. These were circumstances she’d never dealt with before. It was hard to imagine how this could be true.

“But not all.”

“No, not all. I seem to have totally lost those two weeks I spent here on Ranai. I can’t remember a thing about them.”

She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around this weirdness. And at the same time she had to decide whether or not she believed him. Could this really be true? Was there any reason he might want her to think this in order to gain some sort of advantage—though she couldn’t say what that might be. Just the thought of that made her feel a bit guilty. After all, didn’t she trust him?

Hell, no! The man had lied to her from the beginning. Marco Smith indeed.

She didn’t say it aloud, but her eyes flashed and she wondered if he realized this whole story was a bit hard to swallow. Memory loss. Amnesia. She’d never known anyone to have it before. Why him? Why now? What did he want?

“How odd,” she said softly.

“Yes. Odd and awkward.”

Her brow furrowed as she purposely tried to harden her heart toward him. She had to stay objective if she had any hope of finding out the truth. There were certain questions that came up about this. Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. Time to see if he had answers.

“If you couldn’t remember anything about those weeks, how did you know where you’d been?” she asked.

He didn’t seem surprised that she had questions. “I had a copy of my plane tickets, and records of my reservations at home in my office.”

“In Naples?”

He nodded. “Yes. That is where I live most of the year.”

She nodded. That seemed reasonable enough.

“Do you know why you came?”

He hesitated. “I was probably looking for a vacation of sorts. A getaway. A place to work in peace on…some ideas and problems I had.”

Hah. That wasn’t the half of it. But maybe he didn’t remember that part. It hadn’t been until that last day that she’d even known he was a world-famous racing yacht designer—and worked with her father. Glendenning Hudson loved competitive sailing and had the money to hire the best. Marco DiSanto was his designer, his ace in the hole when he competed in some of the biggest offshore races. And Marco had very carefully kept all that from her for those two weeks and probably wouldn’t have told her at all if she hadn’t walked in on him in his hotel room and seen the evidence with her own eyes.

“Why did you come here in the first place?” she challenged. “To Ranai, I mean.”

He frowned, shaking his head. “Damned if I know,” he muttered. “That’s part of the mystery.”

“Uh-huh.” Okay, she could either buy that he didn’t remember or she could suspect him of all kinds of nefarious things. It was up to her. Which way was she going to bend?

And finally, the pièce de résistance.

“So tell me this,” she began slowly and carefully. “If you don’t remember anything about your time here, how is it that you knew to come and find me?”

A slow smile began to spread over his handsome face. He knew what she was doing and it obviously amused him. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a crumpled photograph and flattened it on the surface of the counter before her.

“When they recovered my luggage from the wreck, I searched it as soon as I could get to it. I was looking for souvenirs, mementoes, pictures, anything to jog my memory.” His dark eyes sparkled as he smiled at her. “And this was all I found.”

She stared down at the image of pure joy the photo had captured. Her heart beat faster. She remembered that day. Kimo had taken the picture. It was the day before Marco left, the day she had decided she just might be in love. The day before she’d realized that Marco was not who he pretended to be.

“So you came to find out who this overly friendly female might be,” she managed to say lightly.

“The clerk at the airport pointed me in the right direction and gave me your name.” He shrugged with Mediterranean charm. “And you know the rest.”

She could hardly stand to look at her face in the picture—or his, either. She had been so happy. She’d been so sure…

Rising from the bar stool, she walked across the room and went out onto the lanai, folding her arms across her chest and staring out at the ocean in the distance. She wanted to go for a swim. A long, cleansing swim. The water looked cool and clear and refreshing.

He’d come up beside her and was looking out at the horizon, as well.

He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him quickly. “Sorry? But surely you didn’t do this on purpose. It’s not your fault.”

He shrugged. “The result is the same.” He grimaced, obviously loath to go on. But he seemed to think it was necessary.

“You see, to you, I’m a man you think you know well. Very well.” He winced slightly and glanced at her, then away again. “To me, you’re a stranger.”

She stared at him. Yes, she did see. And what she saw was about as disturbing as it could get. If what he was telling her was true, he didn’t feel any ties to her at all. No passion. No friendship. No memories of the good times they created together. No memory of that one enchanted night they spent together. For him, all that never happened.

If a tree fell in an empty forest and there was no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Was it real? If she was the only one with the memories, would they fade away, like old photographs left out in the sun? Had they ever really happened? Or would they become misty dreams that only she knew anything about?

Despite her shock and her surprise, she very quickly understood a number of things about this situation. First, any feelings he might have had for her didn’t exist. All her dreams were in ashes. There was hardly any point in going on with this.

Second, she now realized he had never gone back and told her father where she was because he didn’t remember that he was supposed to do that. Right now, he didn’t even seem to remember who she was. And that was why her father hadn’t shown up yet. He still didn’t know she was here.

That was the good, she supposed. But it hardly compensated for all the rest.

“So in the end, you came back here,” she said softly. “Why?”

He thought for a moment before he responded. “To recreate a personal narrative,” he responded carefully. “I need to find the pieces of the puzzle and put them into the picture so that I can feel whole and go on with my life.”

“Oh.” So it was all about him, was it? But she really couldn’t criticize him for that. After all, how could he care about people he didn’t remember he knew?

“And there’s one more thing,” he said, looking around the room as though he’d lost something. “I was working on some plans. New designs. They weren’t in my luggage when it was recovered. I was hoping to find someone who might know what I did with them.”

“Plans?” She looked at him expectantly. She hadn’t seen any evidence of him working on any plans until the last day when she’d gone to his hotel room. That was when she’d first seen the large, detailed papers, spread out all over the floor. And that was when she’d seen the logo for her father’s company on one of them and realized Marco was not who he was pretending to be. “What sort of plans?”

She held her breath, waiting to see if he would tell the truth this time, but he didn’t hesitate.

“Shipbuilding blueprints. And some experimental designs. Some ideas I was working on.”

“Designs?” she asked, as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

“I design open class monohulls. Racing yachts.”

“Ah.” Yes, she knew that now. “Are they important? Something you can’t replicate easily?”

He gave a short laugh. “Something I probably can’t replicate at all. It’s very important I find out what happened to them.”

Shayna had a sad epiphany. She’d found the answer to one of her main questions. His plans—that was why he’d come back. It had nothing to do with her. She should be happy about that. He was a liar and a sneak, and she didn’t want any part of him.

No, Marco hadn’t come back to find her. Maybe he had come back to fill in the blanks in his memory—if there really were any. But that was also beside the point. What he’d really come back for were his plans.

“Is it very important to find them?” she asked.

He gave her the most candid look he’d allowed so far. “It’s the only important thing,” he said firmly. “It’s my legacy, my life.”

At least he was honest about it, but unease churned inside her as she considered the facts. The plans were all that mattered to him. As far as he was concerned, she didn’t exist except as a means of finding his precious plans. She sighed. It was almost a relief to know the truth. This way, there was no question. She had to push him out of her life and she had to do it right away. He’d already done enough damage.

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