thrust out her hand to shake his. He accepted it, feeling the familiar tingle dance across his skin. Touching her that first night had set his nervous system ablaze and that hadn’t changed. The tension in her grip was new, though. It didn’t lessen as he touched her. In fact, her hand grew stiffer until she finally pulled away and gestured toward the nearby guest chair.
“Please sit down. We have a lot to discuss.”
Aidan took a seat across from her with the massive cherrywood desk separating them. The chair was more comfortable than he expected, the whole office being more an extension of the woman he remembered than the one fidgeting with her paperwork at the moment. It wasn’t the typical, sterile business office. There was a seating area with plush chairs and colorful fabrics. The walls had bright pieces of art and photographs of beautiful locations with white buildings against turquoise-blue waters. Where was the woman who decorated this office? The one who strolled into Murphy’s Pub looking for something and someone to help her forget her troubles?
“Before we discuss your grant application, I feel like I need to apologize,” Violet began. “I’m sure you think quite poorly of me for disappearing. At the moment, I feel awful for doing it.”
“I just want to know what happened to you,” Aidan replied and that was the truth.
She wasn’t the first woman in the world to sneak out of a hookup at dawn, but she never texted or came by the pub again. He practically lived at Murphy’s. She could’ve found him there any time she wanted to, but she hadn’t. Their time together had made a huge impact on him, so it had surprised him that she could just walk away from it without a glance back. He’d wanted to look for her a dozen times but had had no way to go about it.
“I was in an accident.” Violet frowned at the desk as she visibly strained to piece together her story. “I guess it must’ve been right after I left your apartment. My stupid taxi slammed into the back of a bus and I hit my head on the partition. I woke up in the hospital.”
Aidan’s heart started to sink. He’d never imagined that she hadn’t contacted him because she couldn’t. He’d been home grumbling into a bowl of cereal and she’d been in the hospital. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “I had a good knot on my head, but mostly just bruises. No lasting damage aside from some memory loss. I basically lost the week leading up to the accident. The last thing I remembered when I woke up was leaving my office after a big meeting the week before. I’ve tried everything over the past few months to recover those memories, but nothing worked. I didn’t contact you because I didn’t remember you, or the time we spent together, until you walked into my office and said your name just now.”
* * *
“Are you saying you’ve got amnesia?”
Violet wanted to cringe at the way Aidan said the word. It was the same way whenever someone said it. Amnesia sounded like something that only existed in a soap opera, not a real-life medical condition. And yet that was what it was. An entire week of her life had been erased from her brain as though it never happened.
The doctors told her that eventually, the memories would return, but they couldn’t predict when or how. She might get little flashes over time or a sense of déjà vu, or it might come back suddenly like a tidal wave washing over her.
It had been the latter. When he looked at her with those big, blue eyes and said his name, it was like the earth had shifted beneath her feet. In an instant, her mind was flooded with images of the two of them together. Naked and sweaty. Laughing. Eating takeout in bed and talking for hours. She fought the urge to blush in embarrassment having such intimate memories about a virtual stranger. But those thoughts were quickly wiped away by the realization of what it all meant for her.
That was what had caused the tears.
She’d spent fifteen months wondering what she’d forgotten when she’d lost that week of her life. Right after the accident, she’d been determined to recover her memories. Eventually she’d put those worries aside when she’d realized she was pregnant. From there on out, her attention turned to her engagement with her longtime boyfriend, Beau Rosso, and planning for the arrival of their first baby together.
Then the baby arrived and the missing week of her life became more important than ever before.
“I know,” she said, raising her hand to halt any argument he might have. “It sounds crazy. Until it happened to me, I would’ve said it was ridiculous, but that’s what the doctors told me. I’ve spent nearly a year and a half trying to get those memories back. But there was nothing, not a flicker of that week of my life, until just now.”
Aidan ran his hand through the shaggy ginger curls of his hair and arched his brow. “So, what exactly did you just remember about me?” He awaited her response with a smug curl of his lips.
This time, Violet couldn’t prevent the blush the memories brought to her cheeks. She didn’t like feeling as though she were at a disadvantage in any situation and knowing he had the ability to ruffle her was unsettling enough. “I, uh,” she began, “remember coming into the bar. You worked there?”
At that, he grinned. “Worse. I own it.”
Violet nodded, trying not to sigh in relief. She wasn’t one to make a habit of having flings with bartenders. She was a shipping heiress to one of the largest family fortunes in Europe and she’d been raised to act accordingly. Her grandfather would roll in his grave if he thought Violet was slumming with a bartender. Then again, she wasn’t prone to having flings with bar owners, either, but at least he was a business owner and not a hot guy who paid his rent with a seductive smile and tips.
Violet bit at her lip, trying to sort through all her new memories. She remembered going to the bar, although she didn’t know why. It wasn’t a place she’d ever visited before. She could recall the exact moment she’d laid eyes on Aidan. Laughing, talking, closing the bar down. “I remember going back to your place.”
Her cheeks were burning. There was no way her blush wasn’t obvious now. If the red-hot memories weren’t enough, the way Aidan looked at her from over the desk would do it. “I think we both know what happened after that,” she said.
Aidan nodded slowly. “I’ve relived that weekend with you in my mind dozens of times, trying to figure out what I did wrong.”
Violet pushed aside the stirring images, suppressing the heat that had started circling in her belly. “What do you mean? I may not remember everything yet, but I don’t remember you doing anything wrong.”
“Well, you left, didn’t you? I woke up Sunday morning with a cold stretch of mattress beside me. When did you even leave? I didn’t hear a thing.”
Violet tried to remember. She had left his apartment early in the morning, but why? Had she had something she’d needed to do? She felt like that was the answer, although she didn’t know what it could be. Whatever it was, she’d never made it since she’d ended up in the hospital instead. “I had somewhere I needed to be. I didn’t want to wake you up. I was going to call you later.”
“But you got amnesia,” Aidan interjected with a flat, disbelieving tone.
“Yes. My phone was crushed in the accident, so I lost any new data since my last backup, which probably included your number. Any memories or traces of our time together were erased from my life.” Well, most of them. One huge daily reminder remained—she
