“You don’t know your name?” He looked at her skeptically.
The level of exasperation rose in her voice. What was he, an idiot? “I wouldn’t be asking you if I did.”
Trevor still wasn’t buying into this a hundred percent. Maybe she just had a macabre sense of humor. “This isn’t a joke?”
Fighting a wave of uneasy fear, the redhead spat out, “Do I look like I’m joking?”
“I have no idea,” he told her honestly. “I don’t know you.”
Fear mushroomed within her. There was something about lying here, horizontal, under this man’s intense perusal that stripped her of her strength, not to mention her capacity to think. She grabbed the side of the bench and pulled herself upright.
He’d said something that offered her a glimmer of hope in the appalling darkness. At least he’d cleared up one thing for her.
“So, my not remembering you, that’s okay?” She saw his brows draw together. She knew she wasn’t being very clear, but everything was still hopelessly jumbled in her head, like puzzle pieces thrown haphazardly out of a box. “I mean, I don’t know you, right?”
Trevor shook his head. He would have remembered if a woman the likes of this one had passed his line of vision. “No, not from Adam.”
“Adam?”
She thought he meant an actual person, Trevor realized. It would have been funny—if the situation weren’t so real. “It’s just an expression. Never mind.” He blew out a frustrated breath, thinking. “What’s the last thing that you remember?”
She closed her eyes, as if that could help her focus. By the expression on her face when she opened them again, it hadn’t.
“Water.”
“Okay,” he said gamely. Obviously this was going to require a bit of patience on his part. “Before that.”
The woman took a deep breath. He watched her eyes. In the light from the streetlamp just to the right of the bench, they looked to be a deep, intense green. And troubled. Very troubled.
“Nothing,” she answered.
He saw that her eyes glistened. Oh, God, not tears. He had no idea what to do with tears. Ordinarily, he’d pretend they weren’t there, but he was looking at her face deadon. If those tears took shape and started to fall, no way could he act as if he didn’t see them.
He hadn’t a clue what to say.
“I don’t remember anything,” the woman told him. He heard the fear mounting in her voice.
She was really trying not to panic. Trevor could all but see the struggle going on within her. She clenched her hands into fists on either side of her body.
“No, that’s not true,” he contradicted in a calm, soothing voice.
But his words only seemed to fan the fires already threatening to go out of control.
“Look, you’re not inside this head—I am and there’s nothing. Not a damn thing.” She pressed her lips together to keep a wave of hysteria from bursting out.
Trevor went on as if she hadn’t said a word. “You remember how to talk. You speak English without an accent, international or regional, so most likely, you’re a native Californian, most likely from around here.”
“Terrific, that makes me one of what, forty million people?”
“You remembered that,” he pointed out. “Things are coming back to you, just waiting to be plucked out of the air.” Before she could utter another sarcastic contradiction, Trevor instructed, “Close your eyes again and think.”
“About what?” she demanded. “I don’t remember anything—except how many people there are in Southern California,” she qualified angrily before he could mention that extraneous bit of information again.
Trevor took the display of temper in stride. “I think we can safely rule out that you’re an anger-management counselor. Humor me,” he told her. “Close your eyes and see if anything comes to you.” Obviously annoyed, the woman did as she was told. “Anything?” he asked after she said nothing for several seconds.
“Yeah.” She opened her eyes. “I’m hungry. And cold.”
That wasn’t what he was hoping to hear. “Anything else?”
She pressed her lips together. “And I need to go to the bathroom.”
He would have laughed then if he didn’t feel almost as frustrated as she did. “There’s one right there,” he said, pointing to the public bathroom.
The bathroom was located less than fifty feet away from their bench. Directly in front of the square, stucco building were two outdoor showers, there specifically for people to wash the salt water off their bodies before going back into their cars. Occasionally, in the dead of summer nights, the showers were used by homeless people who longed to feel clean again.
As the woman got up, so did Trevor. There was unabashed suspicion in her eyes as she stopped walking and glared at him.
“You’re not going in with me, are you?”
“Wasn’t planning to,” he answered mildly. “Just want to make sure you’re steady on your feet. You already passed out once,” he reminded her. By the way she frowned, he surmised that somewhere within her now blank world was a woman who liked her independence. Possibly more than the average female, he judged.
“And then what?” she asked as she crossed over to the short, squat building. To her horror, there was no outer door.
“Excuse me?”
She turned around, blocking the building’s entrance. “After you walk me to the bathroom, then what?” She appeared uneasy as she asked, “Are you going home?”
That had been the plan, to go home and recharge for tomorrow. But now things had grown complicated. He couldn’t just abandon her, yet who was she to him? And she obviously resented his being around her. So, instead of answering her directly, he answered, “You said you were hungry.”
“Yes,” she admitted warily.
Trevor couldn’t help wondering if she as always this suspicious, or if her present situation had transformed her. “I’ll take you to Kate’s Kitchen and get you something to eat.”
“Kate’s Kitchen,” she repeated. The words meant nothing to her. “Is that like a homeless shelter, or someone’s house?”
“Neither. That’s my restaurant.”
Even within the context of this minor conversation, mentioning his restaurant filled him with pride. It always did. Having it, running it, had been his goal for a very long time.
She made what seemed to her a logical assumption. “You work in a restaurant?”
Trevor
