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He looked as startled as if she had suggested he get into the bed with her and she stiffened in mortification. Instead of doing as she asked, he backed away and sank into the chair by the window. He was very reserved, she decided, adding to her first impression of him, not a guy who relaxed or who was easy with informality. It was impossible to imagine that she had ever been in bed with him and, at the thought, her face burned.
‘How long have we been married?’ she pressed.
‘Three years now.’
Then, she haddefinitelybeen in bed with him, Brooke realised, and she would have squirmed with embarrassment had she had the ability to move normally. But nothing was normal about her body or her brain throwing up random embarrassing thoughts, she conceded ruefully, and nothing was normal about their situation either, and it had to be causing Lorenzo equal discomfort that he had a wife who didn’t remember him.
‘I’m sorry about all this. I’m sorry I don’t know you and that I’ve caused you all this trouble.’
‘You haven’t caused me any trouble whatsoever,’ Lorenzo lied, wondering what was wrong with her because Brooke’s view of the world was generally one-sided. She didn’t consider other people or their needs. She valued those around her strictly in accordance with the benefits they could bring her. She could be charm personified to get what she wanted but would then dispense with a person’s services the instant she achieved her objective. But, of course, he reminded himself darkly, hewasvaluable to Brooke at this precise moment when she had nobody else to fall back on.
‘It’s kind of you to say that but all these months I’ve been lying here like a rock and I must’ve been the most awful worry for you,’ she mumbled, her words slurring.
‘I think you need to rest now,’ Lorenzo told her, rising from his seat. ‘I need to make arrangements for you to be moved to a more suitable facility where you can convalesce.’
Her head heavy, she turned her eyes back to him. ‘I just want to go home,’ she whispered weakly.
‘I’m afraid that’s not an option. Right now, you need a rehabilitation programme to regain your strength and medical support to deal with your amnesia,’ Lorenzo explained smoothly.
‘How did we meet?’ she muttered drowsily, her brain spinning on and on, in spite of her exhaustion, wanting answers to countless questions.
‘At a party in Nice. I was there on business.’
‘You’re a businessman?’ she slurred.
‘A banker,’ he advanced.
‘I don’t like banks,’ she mumbled, and then thought in surprise, Where did that thought come from?
Brows pleating, Lorenzo paused at the door to look back at her searchingly. ‘Why don’t you like banks?’
With an enormous effort she opened her eyes again and there he was, standing directly below the lights, his hair blue-black, his eyes transformed into liquid-gold pools of enquiry. He looked devastatingly handsome and she smiled at him sleepily. ‘I don’t know. It was just a random thought that came out of nowhere,’ she admitted.
‘Go to sleep, Brooke,’ he urged. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘No kiss goodbye?’
Lorenzo froze at what struck him as an almost childlike question, which was laughable, he told himself, for anyone acquainted with Brooke’s past history. ‘No kiss. You’re too sleepy and I like my women awake.’
‘That’s mean,’ she mumbled.
Lorenzo stood at the foot of the bed watching her sleep. He should’ve been on the phone looking into convalescent facilities. He should’ve been seeking out a top psychiatrist to treat her. He should’ve told her that he wouldn’t see her tomorrow because he was flying to Milan for an international banking conference. But he did none of those sensible things. He stood and he watched her sleep, feeling guilty at leaving her but all the while thinking in rampant disbelief that he might have married Brooke, but suddenly he was feeling as though he didn’t knowhereither. Everyone had layers, he told himself irritably. Maybe this was how Brooke was when she was unsure of herself and no longer knew who she was. Restored to her fantastic wardrobe and her make-up and her headlines, she would once again become the woman he remembered.
Brooke sank into a seat in front of Mr Selby, her psychiatrist, and stowed the stick she was using. After a physio session she was always very sore and the slight limp she still had made her clumsy as she tired towards the end of the day, but she didn’t complain because just being able to walk again felt like a precious enough gift.
‘How have you been over the last few days?’ the psychiatrist enquired over the top of his eccentric half-moon glasses.
‘Great, but no flashes, no memories yet,’ she said uneasily. ‘Everything still feels so strange. Lorenzo brought me this giant metal case of cosmetics to replace the one that was destroyed in the accident and I think he was expecting me to be ecstatic, but I couldn’t identify half the stuff in the box. I used a bit of it for his next visit. I didn’t want him to think his present was a disappointment.’
‘You seem to care about Lorenzo a great deal,’ her companion remarked.
‘Surely that’s healthy when I’m married to him?’ Brooke replied.
‘Of course, you’ve been forced to depend on him, but it will be even more healthy for you to embrace a little independence as you recover your physical strength.’
Brooke’s nod of acknowledgement was stiff. Over the past two months, she had learned just to let advice she didn’t relish pass over her head. Everyone she met in the rehabilitation centre seemed to want to give her advice. She had dealt with surprise after surprise since her arrival. She had discovered that she was married to an extremely wealthy man and piece by piece she had learned that, before the crash, she had been a minor celebrity, a known fashion icon and often a source of media interest.
Those revelations hadn’t felt natural to her and hadn’t seemed to fit in very well with the quieter, less confident image she had slowly been developing of herself. But when she asked Lorenzo when she could go on the Internet to research her own previous life, he had insisted that it would be the wrong thing to do and that her memories would have a much better chance of returning if they weren’t forced.
