Chapter 11 Sydney #2
“Your wife could forget . . . your name . . . forever?” If he isn’t lying and really does love me, he’d be better off if I’d died.
He meets my eyes in the mirror. “You’ll probably start remembering soon. If you don’t, we’ll figure something out. My name is Gabriel, but you can come up with a new nickname for me every time, and I won’t mind. Call me ‘pool boy’ or ‘cowboy.’ I’m into role-play.”
He winks, and I can tell he wants me to smile. It’s some inside joke he has with his wife.
But I’m not her. She’s gone, and I don’t find a thing funny about not remembering my own husband’s name.
I look back into the mirror, trying to find something, anything, worth fighting for.
I’m not Sydney Walsh McRae anymore. She didn’t survive whatever hell she went through.
I’m nothing but a broken creature with fine lines near my mouth and eyes.
He told the truth. I’m not seventeen. I’m a thirty-year-old woman. “I look like a corpse.”
“You’re beautiful.”
I shake my head. I was never beautiful. I was athletic and “pretty” when I put in an effort, and I was happy with that, but now . . .
“Look at yourself,” he says.
“I am.”
“If you didn’t know the person in the mirror was you, what would you see?”
I look harder and try to understand what he wants me to. If I didn’t have expectations of who I was supposed to be, would I notice the scars and lines?
No. I’d be looking at her haunted eyes and emaciated frame.
“I’d want to give her a sandwich and a hug,” I say, the words stilted and slow.
He turns me toward him and brushes hair from my forehead. “Can’t you offer yourself the same kindness?”
Vaguely, I have a picture in my mind of this man bracing me against his chest, singing quietly as he sprayed my hair with detangler and combed it while I stared vacantly into space.
Then I woke up from the weird waking dream I’d been in and refused to let him help me. It’s been at least a week since I allowed him, or anyone else, to take care of me.
I attempt to run my fingers through the dark, tangled mass on my head, but my fingers catch on a snarl halfway down.
Shame and embarrassment flood through me. I didn’t let him do it, but didn’t do it for myself either.
“I’m ugly. Awful,” I mutter.
“You. Are. Beautiful,” he says. “I can’t look at you and see anything else.
Don’t tell me to try. You’re brave and tenacious and smart as hell.
You have a huge, generous heart. You’ve got skin I never want to stop touching.
The most damned expressive eyes I’ve ever seen, and a mouth made for kissing. ”
A mouth made for kissing.
An image of this man from another time, well before this, flashes in my mind. He’d been sitting on a street bike, waiting for me on the tarmac of a small private airport. He’d given me a jerk of his head. “Climb on.”
I heard an innuendo in there, somewhere. “Is that code for something?”
He flipped up the visor on his helmet and raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but you’ll be on the back. If anything physical happens between us, it’ll be 97 percent you. Now, let’s go.”
That makes sense. “Wait. What’s your 3 percent? What can you do from the front?”
“Get on the bike, Walsh.” The words were a demand, but there was a teasing exasperation in it.
I huffed and climbed on, then shifted behind him, careful to keep my denim-covered thighs from touching his.
He turned slightly toward me and spoke over his shoulder. “You have to hold on to me. Can’t have you flopping around back there.”
I grabbed a handful of his jacket. “Ready.”
“You need to be more secure than that.” He extricated my right hand and slid it under his leather jacket, pressing my palm against his warm . . . hard . . . abdomen.
His black T-shirt and my thin leather gloves barely counted as a barrier between us. The intimacy bombarded me with sensation. HolyGodAlmighty. He was worried I’d fall? This would make me fall. I’d go splat, boobs first, flat against his broad back, and die.
“Both hands for balance. I’d never forgive myself if you got hurt,” he said.
“I guarantee your sister doesn’t put her hands under your jacket.”
“Bronwyn has her own bike.”
I slid my left hand down, then back up and under, pressing against his lower abdomen—an abdomen that clenched into rock-hard ridges under my fingertips. A full-body shiver of lust rippled through me.
“Are you cold?” he asked solicitously.
“I’m fine.”
He reached behind him, one big hand on each side, and cradled my thighs from below. “Scoot a little closer, sunshine. Can’t let air get between us. It creates wind resistance.”
Okay, he was being a ridiculous flirt.
I slid forward anyway, plastered myself against him, and tightened my legs until I made contact with his.
He gave my thighs a light stroke and squeeze. “Good girl.”
Oh, God, I wanted this man.
I knew him in my past. I wanted him. He isn’t a stranger. And I’m nowhere near seventeen. I was a grown woman in that memory.
I stare back at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “My nose looks bad.” Does that flirty, sexy man from the bike mind?
“If it bothers you, you can get surgery to correct it once you have your strength back. But I don’t even see it when I look at you. What I see is my sunshine. Here. Alive. Getting stronger every day.”
I can’t be his. I’m not even my own. “I don’t have money . . . for a nose . . . job,” I say, more confused than bitter.
“You have more money than you could spend in five lifetimes.”
“Maybe you. Not me.”
“First, you’re good with money. You had a million dollars in your savings account before you even married me.
Second, you’re too smart not to have had your lawyer create a prenup that looked out for your interests.
Even if you leave me, you’re entitled to continue to live in the lifestyle you’re accustomed to. ”
I’m an orphan from central Pennsylvania.
What could I possibly be “accustomed to”?
Mom died when I was three. And even before Dad died, I bounced between foster homes while he got sober, until the next time they took me, because his sobriety never lasted.
His example is why I never touched drugs or alcohol.
I’d never trust someone who drank at all. Now, I can’t trust myself.
Someone like me having a nest egg makes no sense. “What did I d-do to make money?”
“You’re a chemical engineer for one of our companies.”
Anxiety spikes inside me, the weight in my chest turning to solid concrete. A wall slams down inside so fast I can almost hear the clang of metal. “I don’t know anything. About chemistry.”
He runs a hand over my hair. “It could come back, but if it doesn’t, you can do something else, or you could learn it again. The cards and flowers on the table in the front hall are from your friends and co-workers.”
“I don’t want to talk to them. Keep them a-away.”
“I will.”
I sway on my feet. He lifts me into his arms and carries me into the bedroom, but when he bends to lay me on my bed, my mouth goes dry. Memory flares. A hospital bed. Velcro straps. So bright.
I turn in his arms and hold on as hard as I can. Spots dance in my vision, and I claw to drag air into my frozen lungs. “Don’t put me there. Get that out of here. T-take it out. Get it out!”
“I will. Right away. I promise.”
He walks with me straight to the king-sized bed and lays me on top of the comforter.
The fire ants crawling through my brain burrow in. I close my eyes, but the pain doesn’t ease. Lethargy steals through my limbs. I should be as floppy as a rag doll, but my teeth chatter, my muscles so tight that I wouldn’t be surprised to snap a bone.
He wastes no time, releasing the brakes on the hospital bed and pushing it straight to the door. A short, muffled conversation with someone in the hall later, and then it’s gone.
He returns and pulls a soft blanket over me then climbs in beside me, over the covers, and puts his arm around me.
A man’s voice in my head: “If you sell this family out, I’ll kill you myself.”
“You already betrayed him.” The voice of someone I should recognize.
“Don’t touch me,” I whisper.
He removes his arm, then stands and walks to the windows, drawing heavy draperies closed until the room is bathed in quiet shadows.
He makes a phone call, murmuring questions I can’t fully hear and instructions to someone. Then he returns to sit beside the bed where I’ve curled in on myself, shaking and shivering.
My gaze lands on the wretched wedding photo of the woman he says I was. I’m nothing like the adventurous, flirty woman who climbed on his bike. “I don’t look like her. I’m not smart or s-strong like she was. I can’t t-talk or laugh. You can’t have sex with me. Why are you here?”
“I love you—”
“You love her. Don’t watch me sleep,” I mumble. “It’s frickin’ creepy.”
“I’ll be nearby. Call me if you need me.”
When I say nothing in response, he leaves, and I sink under the weight on my heart. Because I needed him to go, but I wanted him to stay.