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He turned to face her, propping his hip against the kitchen cabinets. ‘Even though the sweater was a gift from you?’ he said with a hint of censoriousness.
She shrugged. ‘It’s not as if I bought it as a sentimental keepsake. I know Karl prefers to keep up with the trends where his clothes are concerned.’
Then the implications of his remark struck her.
‘I’m glad we’re not going to have to repeat everything we said to you last night,’ she said, trying to pitch her words casually, hoping to prompt a spontaneous response. ‘You’re obviously feeling a lot better this morning. It must be a relief to be clear-headed again. Dave gave me his mobile phone, so if you want to call anyone…’ He didn’t pick up the hint, so she tried something more obvious. ‘I’m sure you must want to be on your way.’
He folded his arms across his chest. ‘And which way is that?’ he demanded flatly.
The coffeepot clunked against the lip of one of the pottery mugs. ‘You don’t know?’
He began to shake his head and winced in midmotion.
‘But I thought…’ She broke off, her nerves jumping.
‘What? That because I wanted to make love with you I must therefore be in full command of all my intellectual faculties?’ He bared his teeth in a cynical smile. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but clarity of mind isn’t a prerequisite for sex. Males on the borderline between sleep and waking are usually operating on the most primitive level of human consciousness.
‘I float up out of my dreams to find a familiar warm, soft, luscious-smelling woman in my arms who’s gloriously responsive to my kisses, it stands to reason I’m not going to be racking my brains for meaningful conversation. All I could think of was that you were available and willing.’
Nina flushed at how easy he made her sound. ‘Available doesn’t always mean willing—’
‘Oh, you were willing, right up to the point you got that annoying attack of scruples—’
‘Annoying?’
‘Frustrating, then,’ he corrected himself with a shrug that pricked her like a goad.
‘You think it would have been more moral of me to go ahead and make love with a perfect stranger?’ she struck out angrily. ‘A man with no name, no personal history? That can be a death sentence these days! You seem to be more concerned about the fact you didn’t get any sex this morning than you are about your loss of memory!’
The muscles of his face went tight, his eyes dilating. ‘You gave me a name,’ he said quietly. ‘Ryan.’
Nina’s flush became one of shame for letting her temper fly with hurtful words against which she knew he could have no defence. Neither of them looked away as Zorro swiped his last bite and yipped a warning that he was popping out for his morning constitutional.
‘I’m sorry—’ she began to the accompaniment of the rattling flap on the door.
‘You think it doesn’t bother me?’ Ryan cut her off roughly. ‘You think I like being this damned helpless? You think I should weak and wailing…sit all alone beweeping my outcast state? And yes, by the way, I do know that I’m paraphrasing a Shakespearean sonnet. I’m a storehouse of useless information like that! Ask me to quote you sonnets, the names of the planets, the recipe for bearnaise sauce and Einstein’s theory of relativity and I’ll dazzle you with my breadth of knowledge. I’m full of the whole, damned civilised world—I’m just empty of me!’ He thumped his chest violently with his clenched fist.
Nina felt a faint, empathetic shudder in the smooth, high, featureless wall that sectioned off a small segment of her life. At least she had the security of knowing that her barrier, invisible yet inexorably solid, was finite. Imagine how she would feel if it stretched into infinity in all directions, preventing her from having any insight into her own personality? She had been wrong to think that Ryan hadn’t fully realised the true horror of his situation, wrong to think that he wasn’t desperate to regain everything that he had lost. He simply put up a very good front.
She had no right to try to batter it down just because she felt safer viewing him as a victim rather than a man.
