it back. When they first brought you in we didn’t think you’d last through the night. But I hoped …” She let her voice trail off and again her cheeks filled with color.
“I know, and it was your hope that made the difference.” He knew his words pleased her. He also knew that the connection she’d felt for him had been more than patient and nurse.
In a perfect world he would have loved to explore the crazy connection they shared. He would have loved to pursue a normal relationship with her, but this wasn’t a perfect world and he wasn’t a normal man.
“There’s a twenty-four-hour discount store two blocks from here. I’ll go now and pick up some clothes for you,” she said. “Will you be okay here alone for thirty minutes or so?”
“I’ll be fine, but shouldn’t you get some sleep?” he asked.
“Right now I’m too wound up to sleep,” she replied.
“I’ll get you some things you need and then we’ll figure everything else out in the morning.”
“Willa, thank you.”
For the first time since she’d walked into his hospital room she smiled and it was just as he’d imagined—warm and inviting and lovely. “Don’t thank me yet. I still think that sometime between the time I left work and the time I walked back into your room I went completely and totally crazy.”
She walked back into the kitchen and he heard her grab her purse from the counter, then a moment later the sound of the garage door opening and then closing.
Jared listened to the sounds of the house, so different than the noise in the hospital. Rest. He needed to rest and get his strength back as quickly as possible. The men who were after him wouldn’t just go away.
Somehow they’d figured out that the John Doe in the hospital in Grand Forks was the man they sought. They knew he was in the area and he wouldn’t be safe until he could get far away and even then safety was just a desirable fantasy. Why it had taken them so long to find him, he wasn’t sure. But now that they had, they wouldn’t give up.
Willa. Thoughts of her jumped back into his mind. He’d told her the truth when he’d said that she’d been what had brought him through the darkness of the coma. He’d not only looked forward to her gentle touch and the pleasant scent of her perfume, but also the sound of her voice as she spoke to him and her thoughts that were both exciting and interesting in their very normalcy.
He would have loved to pursue something with her, something deep and meaningful, something hot and wild and like nothing he’d ever experienced before, but he was afraid for her. He brought nothing but danger to her and he couldn’t forget that.
He closed his eyes and wondered if he would ever be safe, if he would ever know what normal felt like.
THREE O’clock in the morning and she was in a store getting clothes for a man who had just come out of a six-month coma and insisted bad men were after him. She had to be out of her mind.
Willa pushed the shopping cart toward the men’s jeans section and hoped she guessed his size right. She could have waited until morning to do this, but she’d needed to get away from him for a few minutes and besides, she hadn’t wanted to see him in the morning with that skimpy butt-baring hospital gown. “And what a fine butt it is,” she muttered as she grabbed two pair of jeans that she thought would fit him.
Was he really in some kind of danger or was he delusional? she wondered as she headed to the T-shirts. She tossed a packet of three T-shirts in different colors into her basket and then frowned as she thought about underwear.
Boxers or briefs?
Briefs.
A gasp escaped her. It was definitely his voice she heard in her head. It was as if he stood next to her in the store and whispered in her ear.
And it wasn’t the first time he’d been inside her head. She grabbed a packet of briefs off the shelf and then hurried toward the checkout.
She felt as if she’d stepped into the middle of some sort of science-fiction flick. The only problem was the movie was halfway over and nobody would explain to her what she’d missed.
She’d never really believed in psychic abilities like mental telepathy and precognition. She never looked up in the sky for UFOs or worried about seven years of bad luck if she broke a mirror.
She was rooted in reality, with no flights of fancy, and yet she knew with an unsettling certainty that somehow he was able to communicate with her inside her head.
Had the dream been real? Had he somehow really been with her in her bedroom, made love to her through some sort of spirit world?
Her cheeks burned with her blush as she paid for her purchases. Funny, she didn’t even consider paying with a credit card because she knew charge card transactions could be traced. She’d already half bought in to his assertion that somebody evil was after him.
She had just gotten into her car and started the engine when her cell phone rang. She jumped and grabbed it from her purse and looked at the caller ID. It was the hospital.
Play dumb. Please, don’t tell. The words thundered in her head.
She shut off the car engine and drew a deep breath. “Don’t worry,” she said dryly. There was no way she could say anything about what happened. Jared would potentially be put in danger, but she’d definitely lose her job and be locked up in a mental ward.
She answered the phone, trying to make her hello sound groggy, as if she’d been asleep for hours.
“Willa, it’s Casey.” Casey Durham was the night supervisor on the floor. “Where are you?”
“Where do you think I am? At home, in bed.” The lie tasted badly on her tongue. She wasn’t used to lying to anyone.
“Sorry to wake you, but I thought you’d like to know.”
“Know what?”
“You’re never going to believe what’s happened. A man came in and said he thought our John Doe might be a relative of his. I took him to John Doe’s room and he was gone.”
“Who was gone?” Willa asked, as if confused.
“John Doe. His bed was empty and he was nowhere to be found.”
“What?” Willa tried to inject shock into her voice. “How is that possible? He was in a coma! What do you think happened?”
“I have no idea. The doctors are speculating that maybe he came out of his coma and didn’t know where he was and somehow stumbled outside the building. Security is checking the immediate area. I just knew you’d want to know what’s happened.”
“Wow, I’m just stunned. Thanks for calling me. Oh, what about the man who said he thought he knew John Doe. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I guess he took off. Too bad we don’t have security cameras. Anyway, things should be calmed down by the time you come in on Monday morning. Maybe by that time we’ll have located our John Doe. The good news is it looks like he woke up. I
