Sudden Recall Page 16

  She was in equal jeopardy with her whole length welded like this to his. The feel of his strong, naked flesh was incredible. She no longer shivered with cold. The heat of him banished even the memory of being cold.

  “There’s a place I want to touch,” he confessed in a low, husky voice. “Something that’s been driving me wild since that first morning in your apartment.” He paused and then amended himself. “All right, so most of your anatomy has been driving me wild, but this spot tops my wish list. Permission?”

  She hesitated while he waited hopefully. Yes, she decided, she wanted him to touch her. Treacherous or not, she wanted it. “Feel free,” she said. “No pun intended.”

  She expected his hand to travel to an intimate area. Her breasts, her hips, or the juncture of her thighs. To her complete surprise, his forefinger came to rest on the tip of her nose.

  “Ah,” he said, gently caressing the spot as if it were an erogenous zone.

  “That’s it? That’s what turns you on? I’ve heard of things like foot fetishes, but—”

  “It isn’t your nose. It’s this little valley here at the bottom of it.”

  Eden groaned. “You would go and pick out a flaw. Even as a little girl this dent you’re so fascinated by gave me grief.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I can remember Pop taking me on his lap after I was teased about my nose. Saying something about God being so pleased with his work after he finished making me that he placed his thumb on the tip of my nose. The little depression it left was a mark of his special favor, and I should be proud of it. I wonder how many fathers have told their daughters that.”

  “You should have listened to him. He was right. It is special.” Shane demonstrated his conviction by placing his mouth where his finger had been and tenderly kissing the tip of her nose.

  Eden sighed. “Where were you when I was in high school?”

  “What needed kissing then?”

  “My whole body. I put on pounds whenever I so much as looked at food. Kids can be cruel about things like that. I no longer have that problem, though I still have to fight weight gain. But then most women do.”

  It was a revelation of an old vulnerability that didn’t come easily to Eden, and something about the way she said it had Shane drawing back to gaze at her solemnly in the dimness.

  “Charles Moses wasn’t the first guy to hurt you, was he?”

  “No,” she admitted. “There were others before him.”

  “No wonder it’s so hard for you to trust. Is that what you think I’m going to do, Eden? Hurt you like the others hurt you?”

  “Not willingly, but maybe in the end you won’t be able to help yourself.”

  She didn’t have to name it. He understood the concern that lingered with her. “What I said earlier in the taxi, I meant it. There is no one.” He paused a beat before adding a fervent, “Only you.”

  “Shane—”

  He silenced her by placing the forefinger that had been touching her nose against her lips. “Let me kiss something else that’s had me on fire since day one.”

  “Like what?”

  “This quivering bottom lip of yours. It’s sexy as hell.”

  Replacing the finger that had been resting against her lips with his mouth, he kissed her. It was the kiss of a man who was in no hurry, who took time to express his sensual nature by pausing to nibble at the bottom lip that intrigued him, then soothing it with the tip of his tongue.

  “I thought,” Eden managed to croak when he finally released her mouth, “you said nothing was going to happen that I didn’t want to happen.”

  “I lied. And, anyway, we’re doing something important here.”

  “Such as?”

  “Building confidence in yourself as a desirable woman.”

  “I guess I do want that to happen.”

  “Let’s work on it then.”

  When he kissed her now, he was far less leisurely about it.

  His performance was eager, deeper and more thorough. This time it was the kiss of a man who might have been branding the woman he had chosen as his lifetime mate.

  Eden lost herself in the kiss, inhaling the masculine aroma of him, savoring the clean taste of him in her mouth. Her lips and tongue were as busy as his. And so were her hands as they learned the contours and textures of him. The battle scars he wore on his body, the wound across the bridge of his nose that was nearly healed now, the stubble on his jaw. They were all material for her sensitive fingertips.

  She was so occupied she was scarcely aware of what his own hands were doing. Not, anyway, until she realized he had lifted her nightie to permit him access to her breasts. That his palms were stroking the heavy fullness of her exposed breasts, massaging the peaks into hard buds.

  And where his hands went, his mouth followed, suckling each breast in turn as she gripped his lowered head, her fingers digging into his scalp beneath the thatch of his sun-bleached hair.

  She was so inflamed by then she would have abandoned all caution without hesitation. But Shane managed to hang on to his last shreds of reason for both of them, though his ragged breathing betrayed his massive effort at self-restraint when he finally lifted his head and stared into her eyes.

  “You have to say if it stops here, Eden,” he said, and there was nothing playful in his manner now. “Because there’s no turning back if we go on.”

  For a moment she didn’t respond. Then, with a catch in her voice, she pleaded with him for the moral right to lower the last barrier between them. “How can you be so positive there’s no one waiting for you?”

  “I can’t be positive. You know there’s no way I can be.” He paused to choose his words with care. “All I can tell you, Eden, is I’ve been thinking about this since the night I landed on your doorstep. Wondering, just like you, why I was so convinced the first time I laid eyes on you that I’d come home to my wife.”

  “There is a simple explanation, you know. After all you’d been through, you badly needed a connection that was familiar. Not that I was, of course, but since I was there on the spot, I qualified. Something like that.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I think it went much deeper than that. I think it was because I recognized you.”

  “Shane, we’d never met before, and if you’re talking about reincarnation—”

  “Nothing like that. But, yeah, it was an immediate connection for me. The kind of thing that happens when—” He paused again and then continued in a voice raspy with defiance. “All right, so it sounds sappy, but I just knew that on some level I’d recognized my soul mate in you.”

  It wasn’t sappy. It was beautiful, an admission spoken from the heart, and Eden loved him all the more for it, especially when she knew that expressing such a sentiment couldn’t have come easily to a man like him.

  “I’m going to start blubbering here if you go on,” she warned him, “and that wouldn’t be at all romantic.”

  “How about going on with action then instead of words?”

  She hesitated only briefly. “I’m all for it.”

  But Shane understood her better than she understood herself. He knew what that hesitation meant. That a part of her was still torn by guilt. The fear that she would never be able to forgive herself if they went all the way and it turned out he was committed in some form to another woman.

  “You can’t bear to hurt her, can you?” he said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “The girlfriend I don’t have, the other wife who doesn’t exist. Even yourself if we take the chance and it turns out I’m wrong.”

  “Shane, no. I want us to make love.”

  “I know you do, maybe even as desperately as I want it, but it’s not going to happen.”

  He released her, drew away from her a scant few inches. But the loss of his embrace felt like miles to her.

  “I’m making the decision for both of us,” he said. “We’re going to wait until I recover my memory. Until we can be together with n
o shadows between us. It’s all right, sweetheart. Fooling around with you was as good as sex would have been with any other woman. Better. I can imagine how spectacular the whole nine yards will be. Definitely worth waiting for.”

  Eden couldn’t deny the emotion that seized her, a sense of relief under her disappointment. And a profound gratitude to Shane for making the choice she’d been unable to make, though she knew by his raging arousal she’d felt just before he let her go what it must have cost him.

  “Go to sleep,” he murmured, leaning toward her just far enough to plant a chaste kiss on her forehead. Then he turned over on his back again and closed his eyes.

  His even breathing seconds later told her that he’d managed to conquer his frustration and was sleeping soundly. Eden, wide awake beside him, unable to overcome her own frustration, listened to the patter of rain at the window.

  Shane had told her he’d recognized his soul mate in her. But he hadn’t told her he loved her. Was one possible without the other? If not, why hadn’t he declared his love? Maybe he had decided this, too, had to be withheld until his memory was restored. That unless he had an identity, he didn’t deserve her. And if he never recovered that identity—

  It was a cruel possibility. It left her aching inside. Forced to remind herself that Shane wasn’t her husband, just pretending to be, and that she might never be the wife to him she now longed to be in reality.

  “I SUPPOSE WE ARE taking a risk in being here,” Eden admitted.

  Shane didn’t answer her, which didn’t surprise her. He knew she was already aware of his feelings on this issue. They had discussed plans before their arrival this morning in Savannah.

  Being a man of action, he had wanted to tackle Charles Moses first. To go directly to the private investigator’s office and demand answers. That is, if Charlie was even in Savannah. He could be anywhere on a case, perhaps off somewhere still trying to locate Nathanial on behalf of the Jamisons. He might even be back in Charleston.

  What Shane didn’t want to do, Eden knew, was to lurk here in the shrubbery like this. He must regard it as a useless endeavor. Staring at a house that could provide them with no explanations.

  How could he possibly understand this wasn’t just a building for her. It was the house in which her son had spent the last three years of his life. She’d needed to see it, had to try to imagine Nathanial’s existence here. Had he been loved, happy?

  “I hope the cops in Savannah are sympathetic,” Shane said, “because they’re sure to turn up if anyone in there spots us spying on the place.”

  Eden was fairly confident there was no danger of that. Being that much farther south, Savannah’s vegetation was even more luxuriant than Charleston’s. It was particularly lush in this square, one of the many historic old squares the city was famous for, where she and Shane were concealed behind a mass of early azaleas. They were just beginning to flower, and through their blooms Eden could see the Jamison house that dominated one end of the square. It was an imposing Italianate mansion behind cast-iron railings.

  “Hell,” Shane said, tempering his impatience, “I suppose we did have to start here. If looking at the place gives you any kind of connection at all to your kid, that’s important.”

  He did understand.

  Eden turned her head to gaze at him. It didn’t matter that the Jamison mansion failed, after all, to offer her either the comfort or reassurance she’d sought. It was enough to have Shane’s support.

  “What about you?” she asked him. “Does anything here stir up any kind of recognition at all?”

  “Eden, there isn’t anything in this whole town that looks vaguely familiar to me.”

  This was a disappointment. They had hoped that Savannah would hold some memory for Shane, that if Nathanial had come into his possession he might even have originated from here.

  “Look,” he said softly, drawing her attention back to the house. “Someone is coming out.”

  Eden peered again through the azaleas. The front door had opened. A figure appeared and came down the steps. He stood there, looking expectantly up and down the street.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Shane muttered.

  It was a surprise, Eden thought. The figure turned out to be the burlier of the two blond brutes who had been after them back in Charleston. And he wasn’t alone. Another man emerged then from the house and joined him down on the sidewalk. His towheaded partner.

  “What are these two characters doing here?” Shane wondered.

  “Well, they couldn’t have followed us to Savannah, not as careful as we were. And they don’t know we’re in the city, and yet they’re here themselves and just walked out of the Jamison house—”

  “Yeah, they’re working for the Jamisons. Maybe. And wouldn’t I just love to know.”

  Eden could sense Shane’s anger. Knew he was itching to confront the two men. But it would be a mistake to reveal themselves. She laid a restraining hand on his arm, fearing he was about to charge recklessly across the square.

  “Wait. They’re both looking up and down the street. They’re expecting something.”

  “No, someone. And he’s here.”

  A sleek, silver Mercedes-Benz rounded the corner and pulled up in front of the house. It looked like the same car that had arrived in front of Harriet Krause’s apartment building back in Charleston. The driver stepped out and spoke to the two men.

  He was thinner than she remembered and much better dressed, as if funds were no longer a problem for him. But she immediately recognized him.

  “It’s Charlie,” she whispered.

  “Then whatever this whole thing is all about, it seems like Moses is somehow in on it with them.”

  “And that he could have been somewhere in Charleston at the same time they were. They’re going.”

  Charlie had climbed behind the wheel again. The other two joined him in the sedan.

  “Let’s try to follow them,” Shane urged.

  “Shane, it’s too late. They’re already rolling. We’d never get back to my car in time to catch up with them.”

  “Damn. And there’s no point in going now to Moses’s office when he isn’t there.”

  “No, but there is something else I would like to do. Research.”

  “Do I hear a P.I. talking?”

  “Arming yourself with information is the best thing an investigator can do to solve a case. The Jamisons are a prominent family in this town. There must be all kinds of material on them in the public library, and if we could hunt down one solid lead, maybe even something that would trigger your memory…”

  Shane agreed to her plan, though he didn’t look happy at the prospect of digging through endless records for something that might not be there.

  One of the trolleys that conducted tours through the historic district of Savannah was parked at the other end of the square to permit its passengers to take photographs of a fountain. The trolley’s driver supplied them with directions to the main library.

  Within minutes of their arrival in the building on the other side of town, a resource librarian had them in front of a pair of microfilm readers situated in an alcove.

  “Not computers?” Shane had asked.

  Eden, whose work as a P.I. made her familiar with this kind of research, had explained it to him while they’d waited at the desk. “The local newspaper is always the best way to start. In most cases, the subjects of their stories are indexed online but not the stories themselves. You have to go to microfilm for that.”

  “In other words, start looking, huh?”

  Seated side by side in front of the two machines, that’s exactly what they were now doing.

  “How are you making out?” Shane asked her fifteen minutes later.

  “Well, there’s no shortage of stories on the Jamisons. They seem to be a pretty active family socially. Or they were before Sebastian Jamison’s death.”

  “Amen. It’s going to take us forever to plow through this stuff.”

  Eden
went on scrolling the microfilm the librarian had loaded into the machine for her. Many of the accounts she read dealt with projects the wealthy Sebastian had helped to fund. It seemed that Nathanial’s grandfather had been something of a philanthropist. It was all interesting, but Eden could find nothing useful in it where she and Shane were concerned.

  At some point she became aware that he was being awfully quiet. Curious, she turned her head to look at him. And discovered him sitting there in a frozen silence, staring rigidly at the screen.

  “What is it? Have you found something?”

  Shane didn’t answer her. She got up from her chair, feeling a mixture of excitement and uneasiness, and went to look over his shoulder at the image on the screen.

  It was a photograph of a silver-haired Sebastian Jamison attending a charity benefit. Beside him, a startled, reluctant expression on her face, as if the camera had caught her off guard, stood a woman who was probably somewhere near Eden’s age. She was slender, light-haired and attractive. The caption identified her simply as the mother of Sebastian’s grandson.

  Eden swung her gaze from the face on the screen to the face of the man in front of the microfilm reader. He continued to be mesmerized by the woman who stared out at him.

  Eden could see it this time. It glowed from Shane, a light of recognition. There was something else she could see. The wall that had blocked his memory was crumbling at last, its bricks tumbling down one by one.

  “It’s her,” Eden whispered. “It’s Lissie Reardon. And you know her, don’t you?”

  “She’s Beth,” Shane said slowly, his voice raspy with emotion. “She’s my Beth.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “I can’t look at this anymore,” Shane said, shoving back from the microfilm reader, surging abruptly to his feet. “I’ve got to get out of here. I need to move.”

  Limp or no limp, his gait was so swift as he headed for the exit that Eden could barely keep up with him. She tried to ask him about Nathanial, whether he knew now where Nathanial was. But he wouldn’t talk to her about any of it, kept telling her to wait until they were outside.