“Tell me about Paul,” he said.
She nearly dropped the saucepan in his lap. “How do you know about him?” she asked as she carried the pan back to the stove burner.
His electric-blue eyes held her gaze. “All I really know is that you thought about him a lot over the past six months and when you did, you were sad.”
She returned to her chair. “It definitely isn’t fair, this gift of yours,” she exclaimed. “You know way too much about me and I don’t know anything about you.”
“Paul was your lover?” he asked, obviously ignoring her comments. He placed his spoon down on the table and looked at her with a single-minded intent.
She leaned back and worried a hand through her hair. “Paul Callahan was my high-school sweetheart, the only man I really dated and the one I thought I was going to marry. About eighteen months ago he broke up with me. He told me he wanted to see what was out there, date other women and explore new experiences.”
“He hurt you,” Jared said.
She sighed. “For months after it happened, I was devastated. He’d given me no warning signs, no clue that he was unhappy, that he wanted anything different than me. The breakup was particularly hard because we shared the same friends, hung out in the same places. I finally decided I needed a fresh start in another city, a place to make new friends and build a new life, so I moved here from Kansas City.”
“Your Paul was a fool,” he said with conviction.
She laughed, surprised to discover that thoughts of Paul no longer hurt. “I like to think so,” she agreed. “Actually, I suppose I should be grateful to him that he decided he wanted out before we got married. A breakup is definitely easier than a divorce. What about you, any old lovers running around in your past?”
The spark of light in his eyes was instantly doused and he picked up his spoon once again. “No, nothing like that,” he replied.
She was twenty-six years old and she guessed him to be at least her age, perhaps a year or two older. She wanted to press him on the subject. Surely there had been some woman in his life who had meant something special to him, but there was a darkness in his eyes, a knotted muscle in his jaw, that let her know the subject was closed.
“I called the hospital while you were asleep. The consensus is that you awoke from the coma and were disoriented and wandered off. They’ve contacted the local authorities, hoping that somebody will find you and return you to the hospital.”
“Did they mention if anyone else had been by to see me?”
“I asked,” she replied. “And the answer was no, nobody else has made any inquiries about you.”
“That’s because they already know I’m gone.” He frowned and stared down into his soup bowl. “I hope nobody saw us leaving together last night.”
“I think if anyone would have seen us, we’d already know by now.” Despite the fact that she had no idea who was after him and what they might want, a small chill stole through her.
He finished the soup and she carried the bowl to the sink, where she rinsed it and placed it in the dishwasher. “You have no family?” he asked.
“My mother died five years ago after a long battle with cancer.” She leaned with her back against the cabinet, reluctant to return to the table where the scent of him made her remember the wild and wonderful dream they’d shared.
“It was during her illness that I decided I wanted to become a nurse,” she continued. “My father walked out on the two of us when I was four years old. I really don’t have any memories of him. So, no, I don’t have any family.” She’d once believed that Paul would be her family, that together they would have children and build a life filled with love and laughter.
Jared got up from the table and approached where she stood. “One of the strongest emotions I felt from you, one of the thoughts that was uppermost in your mind, was your loneliness.”
He stopped just in front of her, so close she only had to lean forward a little bit to touch him. Her mouth went ridiculously dry at his nearness. “I just haven’t taken the time to make too many friends here.” A nervous laugh escaped her. “You must never get lonely. I mean, anytime you feel that way you can just jump into somebody’s mind.”
“You’d be surprised at how unpleasant being in somebody else’s mind can be,” he replied. “But I never found it unpleasant to be in yours.”
He reached out and touched a strand of her hair that had escaped from the ponytail holder at the nape of her neck. Her breath caught in her throat. “So soft,” he murmured more to himself than to her. “I knew it would feel that way.”
Her heart slammed a quickened rhythm in her chest as he took a step closer to her, his fingers still entwined in her lock of hair.
At that moment her cell phone rang. She jumped away from him and he dropped his hand to his side. “Maybe that’s Jack,” he said, hope or some other emotion she was afraid to identify thick in his voice.
She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and answered, but it wasn’t Jack. It was Nancy from the hospital calling to chat about the gossip making the rounds with John Doe’s disappearance.
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