with just a few weeks ago had to be in there somewhere, but she couldn’t find any sign of him at the moment.
“Is this some kind of game, Marco?”
“No. It’s not.” He shook his head, holding her gaze. “I’m serious as a midnight clock.”
She pulled her arms in close around her. It was a steamy tropical day, but she was shivering. Something in his words, something in his attitude, had chilled her to the core.
“I do not know who you are. I can’t remember a thing.”
Chapter Three
“I KNOW THIS IS HARD to believe,” Marco said, running a hand distractedly through his thick dark hair. “I can hardly accept it myself.”
Shayna drew her breath in softly, then let it out again. “Accept what, exactly?” she asked, surprised that her voice wasn’t trembling. “Please explain.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then laughed shortly. “You see, that’s the problem. How can I explain what I can’t remember?”
“Marco…”
“Okay, I’ll try.” He grimaced. “When I left here, on my way back to Rome, I must have taken a regular flight, since that’s all that comes through here. But somewhere along the way, I transferred to a small plane, a commuter flight, and we went down in the Mediterranean off Sicily.”
She gasped. “Oh, Marco!”
“The pilot and another passenger were killed, but somehow I was rescued. I woke up in a hospital in Napoli. I couldn’t even remember who I was, much less where I’d been.”
She had to hold herself back. Every instinct cried out to go to him, to touch him, to convey her feelings as best she could. Despite everything, she cared about him more than she’d ever cared for any other man. Whatever it was she felt for him was pretty darn close to love. You couldn’t just throw that away at will. It tended to linger.
“Were you hurt? Are you all right?”
He looked at her and managed a slight smile. “I’m fine, Shayna. Physically. And over a few days, most of my memory came back.”
She nodded slowly, feeling very much at sea. These were circumstances she’d never dealt with before. It was hard to imagine how this could be true.
“But not all.”
“No, not all. I seem to have totally lost those two weeks I spent here on Ranai. I can’t remember a thing about them.”
She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around this weirdness. And at the same time she had to decide whether or not she believed him. Could this really be true? Was there any reason he might want her to think this in order to gain some sort of advantage—though she couldn’t say what that might be. Just the thought of that made her feel a bit guilty. After all, didn’t she trust him?
Hell, no! The man had lied to her from the beginning. Marco Smith indeed.
She didn’t say it aloud, but her eyes flashed and she wondered if he realized this whole story was a bit hard to swallow. Memory loss. Amnesia. She’d never known anyone to have it before. Why him? Why now? What did he want?
“How odd,” she said softly.
“Yes. Odd and awkward.”
Her brow furrowed as she purposely tried to harden her heart toward him. She had to stay objective if she had any hope of finding out the truth. There were certain questions that came up about this. Her eyes narrowed as she studied his face. Time to see if he had answers.
“If you couldn’t remember anything about those weeks, how did you know where you’d been?” she asked.
He didn’t seem surprised that she had questions. “I had a copy of my plane tickets, and records of my reservations at home in my office.”
“In Naples?”
He nodded. “Yes. That is where I live most of the year.”
She nodded. That seemed reasonable enough.
“Do you know why you came?”
He hesitated. “I was probably looking for a vacation of sorts. A getaway. A place to work in peace on…some ideas and problems I had.”
Hah. That wasn’t the half of it. But maybe he didn’t remember that part. It hadn’t been until that last day that she’d even known he was a world-famous racing yacht designer—and worked with her father. Glendenning Hudson loved competitive sailing and had the money to hire the best. Marco DiSanto was his designer, his ace in the hole when he competed in some of the biggest offshore races. And Marco had very carefully kept all that from her for those two weeks and probably wouldn’t have told her at all if she hadn’t walked in on him in his hotel room and seen the evidence with her own eyes.
“Why did you come here in the first place?” she challenged. “To Ranai, I mean.”
He frowned, shaking his head. “Damned if I know,” he muttered. “That’s part of the mystery.”
“Uh-huh.” Okay, she could either buy that he didn’t remember or she could suspect him of all kinds of nefarious things. It was up to her. Which way was she going to bend?
And finally, the pièce de résistance.
“So tell me this,” she began slowly and carefully. “If you don’t remember anything about your time here, how is it that you knew to come and find me?”
A slow smile began to spread over his handsome face. He knew what she was doing and it obviously amused him. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a crumpled photograph and flattened it on the surface of the counter before her.
“When they recovered my luggage from the wreck, I searched it as soon as I could get to it. I was looking for souvenirs, mementoes, pictures, anything to jog my memory.” His dark eyes sparkled as he smiled at her. “And this was all I found.”
She stared down at the image of pure joy the photo had captured. Her heart beat faster. She remembered that day. Kimo had taken the picture. It was the day before Marco left, the day she had decided she just might be in love. The day before she’d realized that Marco was not who he pretended to be.
“So you came to find out who this overly friendly female might be,” she managed to say lightly.
“The clerk at the airport pointed me in the right direction and gave me your name.” He shrugged with Mediterranean charm. “And you know the rest.”
She could hardly stand to look at her face in the picture—or his, either. She had been so happy. She’d been so sure…
Rising from the bar stool, she walked across the room and went out onto the lanai, folding her arms across her chest and staring out at the ocean in the distance. She wanted to go for a swim. A long, cleansing swim. The water looked cool and clear and refreshing.
He’d come up beside her and was looking out at the horizon,
