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Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, he said, then adding, probably because of the desperation he saw in her face, that if she hurried, she might catch the bus that had left maybe ten minutes ago. It had been almost empty and the few passengers on board had grumbled because the coffee counter at the terminal had shut down early because of the weather. The woman who ran it had an old car and she didn’t like to drive in snow or ice and whenever that happened, the bus driver had permission from his dispatcher to make a five minute stop at the Tick Tock Café a couple of blocks away.
“Ariel? Cara? What is it?”
It was all unfolding in her head, one clip after another, just like a video. She saw herself running out of the terminal, stepping off the curb and she heard the growl of an engine, and she jerked her head toward the sound and saw the car pull away from the curb and come at her, straight at her, saw the blinding glare of its headlights and she tried to sidestep it…
“Ariel!”
She hadn’t realized she was screaming until she felt Matteo’s arms around her, Matteo shaking her, Matteo saying her name, her name, her name…
For the second time in her life, she fainted dead away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She came to on the living room sofa with Matteo squatting beside her, tightly clasping her hand.
“Ariel?” he said hoarsely. “Honey. What happened?”
I saw me almost getting killed, but even thinking the words made her dizzy.
“My mouth is so dry,” she said. “Would you get me a glass of water?”
He got to his feet. “Don’t move.”
“I won’t.”
“Not an inch.”
Somehow, she managed to smile. “Didn’t we have this conversation before? I promise, I’ll stay put.”
He hurried to the kitchen. She heard the clink of a glass, then the sound of water running. When he returned, he had a glass in one hand and a damp towel in the other.
“Wait,” he said, as she started to sit up. He put the glass and the towel on the lamp table and bent toward her. “Let me help you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Right. That’s why you fainted. Because you’re fine.”
“I am. Honestly.”
“Drink,” he said, picking up the glass and bringing it to her lips.
The water was cool, a balm to her throat. She drank, then rolled the glass against her forehead.
Matteo took it from her, replaced it with the damp, cool cloth. She closed her eyes and willed her heart to stop racing.
“Better?”
She opened her eyes and saw the worried face of her lover.
“Much better.”
“The hell you are,” he growled. Okay. That’s it. That’s twice you’ve fainted. It’s time we found the nearest doctor.”
“No. I don’t need a doctor.”
“Ariel. We have to find out why—”
“I know why.” She swallowed. “I fainted because I remembered what happened that night. I saw the car hitting me.”
The color drained from his face. He sat down next to her and lifted her into his lap.
“Saw it?”
She nodded. “Like a video. It’s hard to explain, but I saw myself in the bus terminal at Lake Serene.”
“And?”
“I wanted to buy a ticket to Plattsburgh. It’s a town that’s almost on the Canadian border.” She ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. “But the ticket counter was closed so I asked a guard what time it would reopen. In the morning, he said. I told him I wanted to go to Plattsburgh. He said I’d just missed the bus, but if I hurried, I might catch up to it. He said the driver was probably going to stop at a coffee shop and….” She stopped, drew a long, shaky breath. “I went out the door. I stepped off the curb and—and I heard a car starting up. I looked to my right. I saw a car. It waited until I was in the middle of the road and then—and then it speeded up. I tried to get away, but it was moving so fast, so fast…”
She shuddered, and Matteo’s arms tightened around her.
“It came at you deliberately?”
“Yes. I think so. Why? Why would someone want to—to—”
He wanted to tell her, if for no other reason that because knowing what they were up against might help her. And then he thought, how would knowing such an awful thing help her? He’d say, Your husband wants us both dead. And she’d say, Husband? And he’d say, Yes, you’re married to a savage. And she’d say, Why would I have married such a man?
And then what?
Not only would he have endangered her emotional state by telling her what she wasn’t able to recall on her own, he’d have to tell her what Zach had told him. Her mother’s terminal illness and subsequent death, her father’s monstrous fraud, the fact that he’d all but sold her to Pastore to keep her dying mother from learning the truth.
“You know,” she said softly. “You know the reason, but you won’t tell me.”
“I can’t, cara. You must trust me. It would be a mistake for me to—“
She pulled away from him.
“Suppose I never remember. Suppose the rest of my memory is gone forever. What will you do then, huh? Will you just—just let me remain in the dark?”
“Ariel. Baby…”
“Don’t call me that!” She shot to her feet, face flushed, eyes blazing. “Do not ever, ever, EVER call me baby. Do you understand?”
He didn’t, but this was no time to ask questions.
“I understand.”
“Good. Because I hate that word. I hate hearing it. I hate—I hate…” Her words ended in a flood of tears. She looked at Matteo, anguish in her eyes, and he got to his feet and reached for her, gathered her to him and held her, stroked her until the flood of tears stopped.
“I hate this,” she said in a fierce whisper. “I hate being so helpless.”
Matteo sat down before the fire, Ariel in his arms, and knew that the promise he’d made to Zach, that he would do to Pastore only what had to be done, had a meaning Zach could probably not have imagined.
* * *
Night had fallen, and with it came more snow, driven by blowing wind. They could hear it roaring through the surrounding forest.
“Sounds like a train,” Ariel said as they cleared the remains of their meal from the living room.
Matteo nodded.
He was relieved to see that she had calmed down, but he sensed an edginess to her. Stafford had warned him that the return of her memory would be an unpredictable process. Matteo, all too aware of what she would ultimately remember, had figured it would be difficult, but he hadn’t foreseen that each small bit of returning memory would tear her apart.
If only there were a way to make this easier on her…
But there wasn’t.
The last time he’d been at El Sueño, one of the Wilde toddlers had fallen and banged up her knee. She’d cried and cried, and Travis, her father, had held her in his lap and comforted her. “I know it hurts,” he’d said to his daughter, and then he’d looked at Matteo and said, with a rueful smile, that there were few things as painful as seeing someone you loved, hurting.
Matteo had said yes, sure, but he hadn’t fully understood that feeling until now.
Ariel’s pain was his pain. He wasn’t foolish enough to think it was harder for him to see her in such terrible distress than for her to experience it, but there was a special agony in standing by, knowing he was helpless to ease her suffering.
He put the last of the dishes in the dishwasher, rinsed his hands, dried them and watched her bustle around the kitchen. It was an old-fashioned word, bustle, but it was the one that best described what she was doing. She recorked the bottle of wine, put away the salt and pepper mills, wiped down the countertop, scrubbed out the sink as if keeping busy would keep reality at bay.
What was going through her mind? He figured asking might not be the best plan. When she reached for the cast iron skillet, he saw a way to stop her almost frenzied behavior without her realizing t
hat was what he was doing.
“Unhand that skillet, woman.” He flashed a teasing smile as he took the pan from her hand. “My mother would have gone wild if she saw you scrubbing out a cast iron pot.”
“I’m not going to scrub it. I know better than that. I’m just going to wipe it down.”
“My job,” he said, tearing off a handful of paper towels. “You’ve done enough for the night.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I know about cast iron skillets?”
Matteo kept his eyes on the pan. There was a note of challenge in her voice and he wasn’t about to rise to it.
“I figured you’d tell me if you wanted to.”
Silence. Then she sighed and sat down on one of the leather stools drawn up to the granite counter.
“Plattsburgh. The place I was heading for? I know why I was trying to get there. I started in Manhattan and I wanted to go to Vermont. Burlington, Vermont, but I couldn’t get a bus that went straight there right away and I had to get moving, so I looked at a map and figured I’d get as close as I could, and that meant a bus to Lake Serene and then another bus to Plattsburgh and then—and then—”
“Hey.” Matteo took a stool beside her and wrapped her hand in his. “Easy, okay?”
“Yes. Okay.” She cleared her throat. “My grandparents had a summer house in Vermont. That log cabin I told you about, remember? I used to spend long weekends there when I was little.” She looked at him. “I loved being there. It was so different from being home, you know? My mother was involved with what seemed like a million charities, my father was always at his office, and I was always doing something I didn’t really want to do. Field hockey. Piano lessons. French lessons. Etiquette classes.”
“Etiquette classes?”
She nodded. “‘Miss Barlow’s School of Etiquette. Don’t laugh. It was a serious place.”
“Where you studied, what?”
“Frivolous things.”
He laughed. “Such as?”
