Ruthless Reunion
‘It ran its course.’ It wasn’t true, of course. Not by a long chalk, Alex thought grimly. But if she really had lost her memory she wasn’t ready for the explicit details of their far too brief acquaintance.
He sounded cold and unmoved, Sanchia thought, her mind racing, desperately trying to grasp a thread of memory that faded even before it had taken shape.
Despairingly, she got up, moving over to the window.
In the street below, the city’s traffic was flowing unusually freely for a weekday morning in high summer. Pedestrians jostled with each other along the busy street, tourists and workers alike reflecting a world going about its business—while she was marooned up here, with this man who both terrified and excited her, groping like a blind person for a safe footing on a slippery precipice.
‘How…?’ She didn’t want to have to ask—couldn’t turn around as she tried to formulate the question that was burning through her brain, managing eventually to croak, ‘Just how…deeply were we…involved?’
Through the muted sounds in an outer corridor—a man’s sudden cough, the echo of footsteps across the floor—Alex Sabre’s sharp intake of breath was unmistakable. When he spoke, however, his voice gave nothing away.
‘You can’t remember?’
She tried. Put her hand to her head. Goodness knew, she wanted to. Blindly she shook her head.
‘If by involved you mean were we lovers…?’ The unfinished sentence was laden with meaning.
Sanchia’s back stiffened. Violently she shook her head again. No! Not with him! she thought, every nerve pulsing with an outrageously sensual rhythm as her brain determinedly denied it. She would have known. Remembered something like that. Remembered him…
‘I would have remembered,’ she said hopelessly to the window.
In the succeeding silence she was conscious only of his daunting presence, his scent, even his hard, steady breathing, her every sense painfully acute.
‘Sanchia. Turn around.’
She couldn’t have done so but for that soft command in his voice. Even then it was only to fix her troubled, confused gaze on his white wing collar and tabs, a vivid contrast with the dark austerity of his gown.
‘Don’t worry,’ he advised, and then, in a tone that was almost hostile in its coldness, ‘I would take your answer from the way your mind so keenly rejects the possibility.’
She noticed how harshly those masculine features were etched in the light coming from the window as her shoulders sagged with almost disproportionate relief. If double-crossed, she thought, he would make a formidable adversary.
‘If it puts your mind at rest, I stopped looking for you a long time ago,’ he went on. ‘Even so, I’d like to help you.’
‘Help me?’ Amber eyes widened in amazement.
‘If, as you say, you’ve lost a whole chunk of your life, then I’d like to help you try and retrieve it.’
‘How?’
‘Whatever it takes.’
Others had tried before—doctors, psychiatrists—and with no satisfactory outcome or hope of her memory ever coming back she had discharged herself over six months ago, resigned to the fact that it never would. But was it possible after all this time, she wondered, both fearful and excited by the prospect, that she could regain the lost pieces of her life, as this confident and obviously brilliant man seemed to think?
Whatever it takes, he had said. She shivered, trying not to imagine the methods a man like him might employ to delve into the intricacies of her locked, dysfunctional mind. She was afraid, and yet contrarily, with a bone-deep instinct she couldn’t even begin to understand, she knew that in doing so he wouldn’t harm her. Not any lasting physical harm, at any rate…
‘Why?’ Her slanting eyes were guarded as she looked at him askance. ‘Why would you want to help me?’
‘Why?’ The firm lines of the sensual mouth moved as though he were contemplating her question. ‘What about because the subject intrigues me? Because you intrigue me, Sanchia?’
‘Because I—?’ There had been an edge to his voice which made her break off, her features harden with sudden challenging anger. ‘You don’t believe me! You still don’t believe me, do you?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, but you’re thinking it.’
‘How do you know what I’m thinking when I’m not even sure myself?’
‘And you claim to know me.’ She wasn’t sure why she felt such bitter disappointment, but she did. ‘How can you? How can you know anything about me if you think I’d make something like this up?’ She wasn’t sure of him. She wasn’t sure of anything. But one thing she knew was her own character. That couldn’t have changed, no matter how many months or years of her life had gone missing. Could it?
‘Believe me, I want very much to make sense of it all. To believe you—’
‘But you don’t!’
She swung back across the floor, her high heels expressing her agitation. She felt that after this she would be walking out of here to face a greater, more frightening void in her life than she could ever have imagined possible.
The loneliness was suddenly terrifyingly overwhelming. A low moan came from her throat like that of an injured animal, but as she made to push past him his arm shot out, his fingers clamping hard around her wrist.
‘For heaven’s sake, Sanchia! Virtual strangers we might be, but do you really think I’m letting you walk out of here like this?’
‘Like what?’ Her pulse was hammering crazily under his broad thumb.
‘Like a little lost child—not knowing where she’s going, let alone where she’s come from.’
‘Let me go!’ she protested as her struggle to free herself only served to tighten his hold on her. ‘I was perfectly all right before I came in here today!’
‘I don’t think you were. When you looked at me in that court you looked…ridden by some sort of terror that could destroy you if it isn’t rooted out. Like you were being hounded by some nightmare you couldn’t ever wake up from.’
A chilling sensation shivered along her spine. How could he be so perceptive? How could he know?
Shaken, she tried not to let him see how his words—how he—was affecting her as finally she wrenched free from his clasp. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Psychoanalysing me now?’
A thick eyebrow arched as he noted the disparagement with which she said it, but slipping a hand into the pocket of his well-cut trousers, all he said in response was, ‘I gather you’ve had your fair share of that.’
She didn’t need to answer, wondered if the desolation she felt showed in her eyes.
Unwillingly she noticed how the way he was standing, with his robe pushed back, revealed the hard lines of his body. A body honed to peak fitness with the same punishing stamina with which he must have honed that keen intellect—single-minded determination and ruthless resolve.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Sanchia.’
‘I know that.’ How? How could she know? she wondered hopelessly, and after a moment asked, ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth?
‘That I know who you are?’
The neat hair that had once felt like tumbling silk beneath his hands gleamed darkly as she nodded. Alex swallowed to ease the pressure that seemed to be restricting his windpipe.
He wanted to tell her. Prove it to her. Take that hunted look out of her eyes by forcing her to remember, because he was beginning to shake off all doubts that this was any performance. And, curse it though he had just now, maybe—just maybe—her loss of memory might work in his favour. He felt unscrupulous, yet decidedly excited by the prospect as he responded, ‘To echo your own words: why would I lie?’
Sanchia frowned. Why would he? He was a barrister. Honourable. Respected.
And ruthless.
That other juror’s words sent a little shiver down her spine.
‘You’re going to have to trust me,’ he suggested softly.
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘I can’t.’ It was like a small hopeless plea in the darkness.
‘No.’ He moved closer to her, his cool, clear gaze penetrating hers, plumbing the depths of her fear and anxiety with merciless precision. ‘No,’ he repeated, as though coming to some hard decision. ‘I don’t believe you could. But all I’m asking is that you allow me to see you again—starting with this evening. I’ll take you out to dinner. That way you won’t even have to worry about being alone with me.’ And that would be for the best all round, he decided wryly, for himself, as well as Sanchia. Because he didn’t know how he was managing to stand there without reaching for her, pulling her against him, feeling her softness melting against him as he plundered that sweet, moist mouth…
‘I can’t,’ she said quickly, aware of the hint of sarcasm clothing his last remark. Nor did she particularly regret having to say it. Because, much as she wanted to recapture her missing memories, she was afraid of unlocking doors her mind clearly wanted to keep sealed. Which was as ridiculous, she thought, as fearing any kind of involvement with Alex Sabre. But nevertheless she did. ‘Not tonight. I’ve arranged to meet someone tonight.’
‘Then you’ll just have to ring him and tell him you can’t make it,’ he replied, causing her hackles to rise. She hated being bossed about. He was also wrong in his assumption that she was seeing another man, but she held back from telling him that. It was none of his business anyway. Before she could say anything, he tagged on, as though he were speaking to a rather stubborn child, ‘Isn’t this more important?’
Which, of course, it was, she thought, having already decided to telephone her friend to postpone their cinema trip.
‘That’s settled, then,’ he said, and it seemed it was.
CHAPTER THREE
‘WOW! No wonder you decided to call off an evening with me in favour of a night out with him!’
Jilly’s enthusasm brought Sanchia over to the window, to see Alex Sabre, in casual jacket and dark trousers, just locking his car. It was a shiny black BMW, long and sleek, a statement of his wealth and position.
‘He says he can help me,’ Sanchia murmured, reiterating what she had told her friend and neighbour earlier, when she had reluctantly postponed their night out at the cinema. ‘But I don’t know.’
A blonde and bubbly thirty-year-old divorcee, Jilly Boston knew about Sanchia’s amnesia. Sanchia had taken the older woman into her confidence quite soon after moving into the small garden flat, when she’d realised what a kind and helpful neighbour Jilly was—always willing to take her photographic deliveries in for her and feed the fish. Now, though, steeling herself to meet Alex Sabre again, she couldn’t explain the doubts and fears that were nagging away at the perimeters of her subconscious.
‘He says we knew each other—only briefly, by the sound of it—but he’s a link with the part of my life that’s missing, and I do want to know what I was doing then. Only…’
‘Only what?’ Jilly prompted gently.
‘I don’t know why, but I’m afraid.’
‘Just because that psychiatrist said that there must be something so traumatic lurking there behind all that grey matter that you’ve blanked it out, it doesn’t mean there is. Perhaps it’s completely the opposite, and things were so mundane at that period of your life that there’s nothing really significant to remember.’ Jilly grimaced. ‘I should know. Most of my life is like that.’ The self-deprecating quip made Sanchia smile. ‘But if a man like that offered to help me, I’d lie down at his feet, plead total incapability, and tell him to take all the time he needed.’
Which was so far from the truth that Sanchia burst out laughing.
The nerves that had been eating away at her insides for the past hour, however, had her stomach muscles tightening up seconds later as the doorbell pealed.
‘He’s here! I’ll make myself scarce,’ Jilly announced, grabbing the nail lacquer remover she had popped in to borrow. ‘And don’t worry.’ This with a comforting little smile. ‘You’ve already assured me he’s a respected barrister. And from the look of him I’d say you were in extremely good hands.’
‘Were you having your flatmate look me over?’ Alex enquired dryly five minutes later, putting the car into motion as Sanchia secured her seatbelt.
So he had noticed Jilly’s interest, she realised, sinking back against the plush grey leather, guessing that there wasn’t much that would escape him.
‘Jilly isn’t my flatmate,’ she responded edgily. ‘She’s my neighbour.’
‘And a good friend?’
‘Yes. And she wasn’t looking you over,’ she supplied, rather less truthfully, wishing Jilly hadn’t been so obvious in her appreciation of those dark good looks and the compelling authority of this man sitting beside her. ‘She was just a little surprised, that’s all. I don’t normally go out with men like you.’ What a stupid thing to say, she chided herself, feeling gauche.
‘Oh?’ He flicked the indicator switch to signal his intention to turn right at the end of the road. ‘What type do you normally go out with?’
Was she imagining it, or was there a sudden abrasive edge to his voice?
Certainly her type wasn’t big and commanding and powerful, and he was all of those things, she decided. In fact, over the past couple of years she hadn’t really gone out with any men, except perhaps for a blind date someone else had arranged without telling her, and to which she had only reluctantly agreed because it had been in the safe company of friends.
‘Not prominent barristers,’ was all she offered.
His eyes made a cursory survey of her simple cream top and tailored trousers, sending a small ripple of awareness right down through her body.
‘And how do I differ from all the other men you’ve known?’
Was he kidding?
‘You move in different circles, for a start.’
‘How do you know what circles I move in?’
Sanchia pursed her lips. She didn’t, did she? ‘You’re also very, very clever.’
‘And does that unnerve you?’
Was it that apparent? she wondered despairingly, but said, ‘No,’ rather firmly, just in case it was. ‘It just warns me to be careful, that’s all.’
He smiled lazily, a smile that displayed the sheer power of his steel-edged magnetism. ‘Why? Because I might uncover things about you that you might not want revealed?’
A little shudder played across her nerves. ‘That’s your job,’ she reminded him, glancing out of the window.
‘Only in court,’ he said, and then, with a sudden softening in his tone, ‘And even then I can be gentle when I need to be.’
But at other times he would be merciless. She didn’t need memory to assure her of that.
Nevertheless, a leap of the reckless excitement she had experienced that morning sent her blood accelerating through her veins as her mind processed the scenarios to which his gentleness might extend.
‘Do you know of anything in my past,’ she asked, suddenly dry-mouthed, ‘that I would rather wasn’t revealed?’
‘Like you robbed banks for a pastime? Or were caught up in some exotic web of intrigue, with any number of double agents after you?’
‘I’m serious.’
Straightening the car after taking the junction, he sent her a glance that was hard and searching. ‘You tell me.’
Frustration gnawed at her with the cold probability that he might still not wholly believe she was telling him the truth.
‘I can’t,’ she said dully, with a sudden weary slump to her shoulders.
The look he directed at her now was reflective—questioning. ‘Then let’s just take it one step at a time,’ he advised, his voice quiet but firm.
The restaurant to which he took her was an intimate little bistro, patronised Sanchia decided, seeing its popularity, by a regular clientele.
She felt Alex’s searching regard as a waiter pulled out her chair for her, supplied them with menus and placed a napkin ceremoniously over her lap.
It was just the place to bring someone on a first date. Relaxed, but with impeccable service, Sanchia thought. Only it wasn’t a first date, was it? Or a date of any kind, if it came to that.
She met grey eyes across the table that were watchful, darkly assessing. ‘Have I been here before?’
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Her gaze strayed across the softly lit tables, touched on the decorative climbing plants, the low painted ceiling, the bright, sparkling glasses at the bar. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured, frowning. ‘It seems familiar, but it could just be reminding me of half a dozen other places I’ve visited. And yet…’
‘And yet what?’
‘You said you wanted to help me remember, and I don’t think you’re a man to waste time with anything that doesn’t further your immediate objectives.’
An eyebrow lifted in subtle acknowledgement, the smile playing around his mouth not quite reaching those clear, penetrating eyes.
‘An accurate assessment of my character, but it does rather make me sound as though I care for very little but my own ends.’
She surveyed him obliquely, her eyes both wary and challenging. ‘And do you?’
‘Why? Is there something in your subconscious that’s warning you to be on your guard against me?’
Was there?
‘I don’t know,’ Sanchia answered truthfully. ‘Should there be?’
He laughed. ‘This conversation’s going nowhere,’ he remarked. ‘But, yes, I think you’ll find you have been here before.’
With you? For some reason she bit back the unsettling words. Forehead puckering, she glanced around her again, seeing things that had supposedly touched her life and yet which now bore no testimony to that other time, feeling ghost-like, because nothing intruded on the void, leaving her feeling empty and invisible.
‘Sanchia?’ From across the table Alex’s voice shook her out of the haze that had been threatening to engulf her. Her wrist, lying casually on the table, was encircled by fingers that were warm and strong.
‘I don’t remember,’ she murmured, her bloodless features ravaged from the effort of trying to.
‘Are you receiving any treatment that might help you?’
‘No,’ she admitted, disentangling herself from that disturbing hand.
‘Why not?’
So she had to tell him she had given it up as pointless, and saw his eyebrows arch in undisguised criticism. ‘Wasn’t that a rather foolish thing to do?’
‘Perhaps, but you try it,’ she retorted, acquainting him with the endless sessions of therapy, the eternally false hope and, at the end of it all, the acceptance of defeat, that that part of her life was lost, never to be retrieved. ‘I had to get on with my life,’ she finished quietly.
‘And you think you’re doing that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And making a good job of it?’
‘Yes,’ she said adamantly.
‘You don’t ever wonder if you might be missing something of vital importance to you?’
She shrugged. ‘I did at first. In fact, for a long time. But I know I don’t have any living relatives, so I knew there wouldn’t be anyone looking for me or missing me. I don’t know why I lost my memory—or even what I was doing before I stepped out in front of that car. Maybe I was stressed out over something—money, my job, a boyfriend—and that’s what made me step off the pavement without looking. Or maybe I was perfectly happy and just taking a quiet stroll—I just don’t know. But in the end I thought that if the psychiatrist was right, and I had been through something so awful that my mind had blocked it out, then perhaps it would be better not to know.’
‘Isn’t that rather a short-sighted view?’
‘A coward’s way out, you mean?’
He didn’t say as much, although from the compression of his lips he was certainly thinking it.
‘Perhaps from where you’re sitting that’s what it looks like. But I’m perfectly happy as I am, and if my memory doesn’t want to come back, why try and make it?’
‘And yet you came out with me.’
Across the table their eyes clashed, and something about the dark intensity in his made her pulse throb with the acknowledgement of a powerful sexual chemistry she had recognised from her first glance at him in the courtroom that morning. Although even before she had looked at him she had felt something…
However casual their relationship might have been, however insignificant, she was sure of one thing. That dark fascination he possessed, which must have attracted her to him originally, hadn’t died with her lost memories or with time. It flared into vibrant life every time he looked at her, molten and incandescent—and she knew it would consume her with its dangerous power if she let it. She didn’t know how she knew that. She just did.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, answering him now.
‘Why?’
Why?
She wanted to tell him lightly that it was out of curiosity that she had accepted his offer of dinner tonight, that it was nice to be invited out, and if he could give her memory a prod in the right direction all well and good. But the pull of his dark attraction rendered her incapable of such a performance, so it was all she could do to suggest rather unsteadily, ‘Why don’t we talk about you?’
From the smile curving that strong mouth he had obviously guessed why she had changed the subject, but he went along with her, saying, ‘All right. What do you want to know?’
‘Interests?’
He sat back on his chair, mouth firming before he answered, ‘Good literature. Good wine. Good music.’
She laughed. ‘Naturally. And you aren’t wearing a ring, so I would hope you aren’t married.’
His eyes narrowed beneath the thick fringes of his lashes. ‘You think that my being here with you might mean I’m cheating on someone else?’
‘It isn’t unheard of.’
‘Rest assured,’ he said, sitting forward again, ‘I’m not.’
‘Any family?’ She sipped the aperitif he had bought her from the bar.
‘My parents are dead. I still have a stepmother somewhere.’
Somewhere. Was she imagining that sudden hardening in his voice? ‘What about brothers or sisters?’
‘What about them?’
‘Do you have any?’ She suddenly felt as though she were wading through mud.
‘I had a brother. Half-brother,’ he amended, almost distractedly, and reached for his glass.
‘Had?’ Sanchia prompted cagily, setting hers aside, not sure she should be asking when she saw the lines that were etched into that strong face.
‘He believed in living life on the edge. One day it just caught up with him.’
He was watching her, she thought, with eyes that were hurting, yet direct and unfaltering too. ‘What happened?’ It came out on a whisper.
He glanced down at his glass. ‘He took up a plane he wasn’t authorised to fly—with disastrous consequences.’ As he had done everything he shouldn’t have, Alex thought, feeling bitter and torn inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sanchia murmured, sympathising, especially in view of how young he must have been.
A smoothly clad shoulder moved almost imperceptibly. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
Obviously Alex was still affected by it, and Sanchia was happy to comply. She was glad that the waiter reappeared just then to take their order, and the next few minutes were spent discussing the various choices on offer.
‘That’s my favourite,’ she remarked, after the waiter had gone, approving the expensive bottle of Sancerre Alex had chosen to accompany their meal.
‘Yes,’ he affirmed softly, taking her by surprise, until she remembered.
Of course. He knew her—probably knew things about her she hadn’t retained any knowledge of herself. Suddenly she felt much too vulnerable, totally and uncomfortably disadvantaged.
Under the soft lighting his hair was gleaming like jet, and the unfastened neck of the black and grey striped shirt he wore beneath his jacket exposed the crisper hair of his body, curling against skin that would tan easily.
Unconsciously Sanchia’s gaze slid down over his torso, visualising, as clearly as though she knew every contoured muscle, the lean, hard power and sinewy strength of him beneath those expensively tailored clothes.