The Second Mrs Adams. Sandra Marton

cards we both signed and mailed out last Christmas? Dammit, of course we’re married. Why would I lie about such a thing?”

      He wouldn’t. She knew that, deep down inside, but that had nothing to do with this. She was angry. She was furious. Let him try waking up in a hospital bed without knowing who he was, let him try having a stranger walk in and announce that as of that moment, all the important decisions of your life were being taken out of your hands.

      But most of all, let him deal with the uncomfortable feeling that the person you were married to had been a stranger for a long, long time, not just since you’d awakened with a lump on your head and a terrible blankness behind your eyes.

      “Answer me, Joanna. Why in hell would I lie?”

      “I don’t know. I’m not even saying that you are. I’m just trying to point out that the only knowledge I have of my own identity is your word.”

      David caught hold of her shoulders. “My word is damned well all you need!”

      It was, she knew it was. It wasn’t just the things the nurses had said about how lucky she was to be the wife of such a wonderful man as David Adams. She’d managed to read a bit about him in a couple of old magazines she’d found in the lounge.

      On the face of it, David Adams was Everywoman’s Dream.

      But she wasn’t Everywoman. She was lost on a dark road without a light to guide her and the only thing she felt whenever she thought of herself as Mrs. David Adams was a dizzying sense of disaster mingled in with something else, something just as dizzying but also incredibly exciting.

      It terrified her, almost as much as the lack of a past, yet instinct warned that she mustn’t let him know that, that the best defense against whatever it was David made her feel when he got too close was a strong offense, and so instead of backing down under his furious glare, Joanna glared right back.

      “No,” she said, “your word isn’t enough! I don’t know anything about you. Not anything, what you eat for breakfast or—or what movies you like to see or who chooses those—those stodgy suits you wear or—”

      “Stodgy?” he growled. “Stodgy?”

      “You heard me.”

      David stared down at the stranger he held clasped by the shoulders. Stodgy? Hell, for Joanna to use that word to describe him was ludicrous. She was right, she didn’t know the first thing about him; they were strangers.

      What she couldn’t know was that it had been that way for a long time.

      But not always. No, not always, he thought while his anger grew, and before he could think too much about what he was about to do, he hauled Joanna into his arms and kissed her.

      She gave a gasp of shock and struggled against the kiss. But he was remorseless, driven at first by pure male outrage and then by the taste of her, a taste he had not known in months. The feel of her in his arms, the softness of her breasts against his chest, the long length of her legs against his, made him hard with remembering.

      He fisted one hand in her hair, holding her captive to his kiss, while the other swept down and cupped her bottom, lifting her into his embrace, bringing her so close to him that he felt the sudden quickened beat of her heart, heard the soft little moan that broke in her throat as his lips parted hers, and then her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him back as hungrily as he was kissing her...

      “Oh, my, I’m terribly sorry. I’ll come back a bit later, shall I?”

      They sprang apart at the sound of the shocked female voice. Both of them looked at the door where the night nurse stood staring at them, her eyes wide.

      “I thought Mrs. Adams might want some help getting ready for bed but I suppose...I mean, I can see...” The nurse blushed. “Has Mrs. Adams regained her memory?”

      “Mrs. Adams is capable of being spoken to, not about,” Joanna said sharply. Her cheeks colored but her gaze was steady. “And no, she has not regained her memory.”

      “No,” David said grimly, “she has not.” He stalked past the nurse and pushed open the door. “But she’s going to,” he said. “She can count on it.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      ALL right. Ok. So he’d made an ass of himself last night.

      David stood in his darkened kitchen at six o’clock in the morning and told himself it didn’t take a genius to figure that much out.

      Kissing Joanna, losing his temper...the whole thing had been stupid. It had been worse than stupid. Joanna wasn’t supposed to get upset and he sure as hell had upset her.

      So why hadn’t he just gone home, phoned her room and apologized? Why couldn’t he just mentally kick himself in the tail, then put what had happened out of his head?

      They were all good questions. It was just too bad that he didn’t have any good answers, and he’d already wasted half the night trying to come up with one.

      He’d always prided himself on his ability to face a mistake squarely, learn from it, then put it behind him and move on.

      That was the way he’d survived childhood in a series of foster homes, a double hitch in the Marines and then a four year scholarship at an Ivy League university where he’d felt as out of place as a wolf at a sheep convention.

      So, why was he standing here, drinking a cup of the worst coffee he’d ever tasted in his life, replaying that kiss as if it were a videotape caught in a loop?

      He made a face, dumped the contents of the pot and the cup into the sink, then washed them both and put them into the drainer. Mrs. Timmons, his cook cum housekeeper, would be putting in an appearance in half an hour.

      Why should she have to clean up a mess that he’d made?

      David opened the refrigerator, took out a pitcher of orange juice and poured himself a glass. You made a mess, you cleaned it up...which brought him straight back to why he was standing around here in the first place.

      The unvarnished truth was that if he’d divorced Joanna sooner, he wouldn’t be in this situation. By the time she’d stepped off that curb, she’d have been out of his life.

      He’d known almost two years ago that he wanted out of the marriage, that the woman he’d taken as his wife had been nothing but a figment of his imagination. Joanna hadn’t been a sweet innocent whose heart he’d stolen. She’d been a cold-blooded schemer who’d set out to snare a rich husband, and she’d succeeded.

      Because it had taken him so damned long to admit the truth, he was stuck in this sham of a marriage for God only knew how much longer.

      David slammed the refrigerator door shut with far more force than the job needed, walked to the glass doors that opened onto the tiny patch of green that passed for a private garden in midtown Manhattan, and stared at the early morning sky.

      Corbett and his team of white-coated witch doctors wouldn’t say how long it would take her to recover. They wouldn’t even guarantee there’d be a recovery. The only thing they’d say was that she needed time.

      “These things can’t be rushed,” Corbett had said solemnly. “Your wife needs a lot of rest, Mr. Adams. No shocks. No unpleasant surprises. That’s vital. You do understand that, don’t you?”

      David understood it, all right. There was no possibility of walking into Joanna’s room and saying, “Good evening, Joanna, and by the way, did I mention that we were in the middle of a divorce when you got hit by that taxi?”

      Not that he’d have done it anyway. He didn’t feel anything for Joanna, one way or another. Emotionally, mentally, he’d put her out of his life. Still, he couldn’t in good conscience turn his back on her when she didn’t even remember her own name.

      When she didn’t even remember him, or that she was his wife.

      It