went to the head of her bed and stared down at her. The cut on her forehead had been covered by a bandage, but he could see the whole spot had begun to swell and redden. Someone had undressed her and put her into a flimsy hospital gown. He tried not to notice the shape of her bare breast beneath the thin cotton. But it was next to impossible to keep his gaze from dipping to the full roundness pushing against the fabric.
“Or something,” he said, while fighting the odd urge to reach down and brush the tangled hair away from her cheek. He’d been around a lot of pretty women in his thirty-one years—Texas was full of them. But there was something different about this one. Something that, God help him, made him want to protect her.
“I told you I wouldn’t leave. What did the doctor say?” he asked.
Sighing, her gaze dropped to the sheet spread across her legs. “He said I had a concussion and that I’ll have to stay in here for observation. At least until tomorrow.”
“Have you remembered anything?”
“No. But he thinks everything will start coming back to me soon.”
She glanced to the foot of the bed where Matthew was busily scanning her chart. “Who are you?” she asked him.
He glanced at Wyatt, then to Gabrielle. “I’m—one of the staff doctors here at the hospital.”
“Are you going to be my doctor?”
He smiled gently at her. “That depends.”
She motioned to the chart in his hand. “What does that say?”
“It says you’ve had a trauma to your head. But you’re going to be all right.”
She looked up at Wyatt and flashed him a crooked smile. “Sorry to disappoint you, Sheriff, but the doc here says I’m going to live.”
She was obviously trying to be flip and indifferent, but Wyatt didn’t miss the quiver at the corner of her lips. She was as frightened as hell. But whether it was from her loss of memory or because she was up to something, he had no way of knowing.
He pulled his gaze from hers and glanced at Matthew. “Have you seen enough?”
“Yes. I’ve got to start my rounds.” He came to stand by Wyatt and looked down at Gabrielle. “Has your vision cleared any, Miss Carter?”
Her eyes squinted as she tried to focus on the doctor’s face. “At times it’s clear, and then it gets fuzzy again. Right now you look a little blurred.”
“That’s understandable.” He slipped a penlight out of his lab coat and shined it in each of her eyes. “I imagine you’ve got quite a headache.”
“They gave me something down in Emergency. It’s beginning to ease a little.”
“That’s good.
She swallowed nervously as her gaze vacillated from one man to the other. “Doctor, what if I don’t remember tomorrow? Is there something you can give me or do to me to make me remember?”
Matthew patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry about your memory, Miss Carter. Just rest and let your body try to heal itself. Right now that’s the best thing you can do.”
She nodded, and Matthew made a motion to Wyatt that they should leave the room.
“I’ll be back later, Gabrielle,” Wyatt promised. “After I’ve searched your car.”
He saw her study his face, then deliberately turn her head toward a window to her right. The light coming through the slatted blinds spread a soft glow behind her, and the sight of her tender profile hit a spot smack in the middle of Wyatt’s chest.
“It’s a cinch you’ll know where to find me,” she said quietly.
He cleared his throat while mentally shaking himself. “Just make sure you don’t try to sneak off from this place. I’ll find you wherever you go.”
Outside in the hallway, Wyatt deliberately put several feet between them and Gabrielle’s door before he questioned his friend. “Well, what do you think, Matthew?”
“I think you were rather hard on her.”
Wyatt’s eyes widened with surprise. “Hell! I already know I’m not a pleasant man. What I need to hear from you is whether Gabrielle Carter is faking her memory loss.”
“I don’t think so.”
Wyatt let out a long breath. He’d never wanted to believe anything so much in his life. But several reasons held him back. The biggest one being Gabrielle was a woman. And a white one at that. “You think. You can’t say for certain?”
“No. Like I said before, amnesia isn’t something doctors encounter routinely. And even when it’s genuine, it’s tricky to deal with.”
“Have you ever seen this woman before?”
Matthew shook his head. “Never. I’m sure of it. But Wyatt, I really think you’re barking up a wrong tree here. Miss Carter hardly seems the sinister type. I can’t imagine her being connected to Bryan’s kidnapping, or even to Taylor’s winding up on the ranch.”
“You couldn’t imagine your own child being stolen from its crib either!” Wyatt bluntly reminded him. Then, muttering a curse under his breath, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Matthew. I know I’m scratching at a wound that hasn’t healed, and I don’t want to hurt you any more than you already have been. But we can’t afford to trust this woman. At least, not until I find out more about her. It might turn out she’s the mystery mother of baby Taylor.”
Matthew quickly shook his head. “Her chart reads she’s a virgin. Apparently she told the admitting doctor she had some abdominal pain. Since she couldn’t remember her medical history, she agreed to a full physical—including a gyn—just to make sure there were no internal problems. So it’s clear the woman hasn’t even had sex with a man, Wyatt. Much less given birth to a child.”
For some reason Matthew’s words spread a dull flush over Wyatt’s dark face. The idea of Gabrielle Carter being pristine and untouched had never occurred to him.
“That doesn’t make her innocent in other ways.”
The young doctor sighed as he pinned Wyatt with a regretful look. “You’ll never trust women, will you?”
“Not in this lifetime.”
Matthew threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“All right, Wyatt, so what if you find out Miss Carter was up to no good when she headed out to the ranch? What are you going to do—arrest her on suspicion?”
Gabrielle’s pale, haunted face crept into Wyatt’s mind, but he pushed it out. If he wasn’t careful, that lost, vulnerable look in her pretty eyes would lead him right down a path to ruination.
“I don’t know,” Wyatt answered. “I’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.”
Gabrielle
