“Why would I think that?” he asked, wondering if she could just be playing him. It was too much of a coincidence that she’d come into his life twice—both times in trouble, on Christmas Eve and supposedly with no memory. At least, this time, no memory of him, it seemed.
“The help I need is rather unusual.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Try me.”
She seemed to relax a little now that he wasn’t towering over her, but she still clutched her handbag, still looked as if she might take off at a moment’s notice. Is that what had happened last time? She’d gotten scared? Scared of what he was going to find out about her? Or had she just planned to rip him off the whole time? And all these months he’d been telling himself that she’d just gotten cold feet about what was happening between the two of them.
“I think someone stole my baby.”
He stared at her. She had a child? “Wouldn’t you know if someone had taken your child?”
“I know it sounds…crazy, but, you see, that’s just it, I’m not sure.”
Déjà vu. This would have been a good time to tell her he couldn’t help her. Wasn’t about to get involved in her life again. But he had to know who she was and where she’d been all this time. And why. Why she’d conned him. Why she’d stolen from him. Mostly, how much of it had been a lie.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he suggested. “Like with your name.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with obvious embarrassment. She kneaded nervously at her purse and he could tell she was having more than second thoughts about coming here.
He gave her a smile. “Take your time.”
Her answering smile was like bright sunlight on snow. Dazzling. And it had the same effect on him it had had a year ago.
“My name is Holly Barrows. I’m an artist. I live in Pinedale.”
Pinedale? Just fifty miles over a mountain pass from here. Had she really been that close all these months? “How long have you lived there?” he had to ask.
“All my life.”
So is that what had happened? Her memory had returned last year and she’d just gone home? It seemed a little too simple given that she’d been so convinced someone was trying to kill her. Not to mention that she’d stolen his money and case files—then apparently forgotten him. And Christmas past.
“Please go on,” he encouraged.
“When I gave birth….” she said, the words seeming to come hard. “…I have little memory of the delivery. I think I was drugged.”
“You gave birth in Pinedale?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know where it was, just that it wasn’t a normal hospital. I think the room was soundproofed and the doctors…” She looked away. Her hands trembled. “When I woke, I was in County Hospital. I was told that my baby was stillborn. I don’t know how I got there. But I keep remembering hearing my baby cry. When I asked to see my baby at the hospital—” She stopped, seeming to be fighting to compose herself. “—I knew the infant they gave me wasn’t mine.”
He stared at her in shock. “The hospital let you see your stillborn baby?”
“See it, hold it, name it,” she said in that same blank, distant voice. “So the mother knows it’s really gone.”
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t imagine. “What made you think the baby wasn’t yours if you never saw it right after the birth?”
She shook her head. “A mother knows her own baby.”
He wondered if that was true. “What is it you think happened to your baby, presuming you’re right and the baby was born alive at this other place?” Then replaced with a dead one? How plausible was that?
“I know how insane it sounds, but I keep having these flashes of memory. My baby was alive. Someone stole it.”
Someone? The same someone she’d thought was trying to kill her a year ago?
She was wasting his time. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get his money—or his case files—back. Nor any explanation, let alone satisfaction, for the heartache she’d caused him. She was a nutcase. A beautiful, desirable nutcase.
She fumbled to open her purse.
The movement should have concerned him. She might be going for a weapon. As crazy as she was, she might shoot him. But the way her hands shook, she wouldn’t have been able to hit the broad side of a barn even if she pulled a howitzer from the bag.
She tugged out a tissue and wiped her eyes.
He’d heard enough, but still, he had to ask. “Why would someone want to take your baby?”
She glanced up, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know. I just have this feeling that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. That there have been other babies they’ve stolen.”
She was worse than he’d thought.
He rubbed a hand over his face, remembering something she’d said. “During the delivery, you mentioned the doctors. You saw them then?”
She shook her head, one glistening tear making a path down her perfectly rounded cheek. “Not their faces.” She seemed to hesitate as if what she was about to say could be any worse than what she’d already told him. “They wore masks.”
“Masks? You mean surgical masks?”
“Halloween masks with hideous monster faces.” She avoided his gaze as she rooted around in her purse again. “I will pay you whatever you want to prove that I’m not crazy and to get my baby back.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. And to think he used to fantasize about finding her. “When was this anyway?”
“Five weeks ago.”
He nodded distractedly, wondering why it had taken her five weeks.
When he opened his eyes, she had the checkbook in her hand, her expression filled with hopefulness as she looked up at him again.
Sweet heaven. He couldn’t believe that a part of him would gladly leap on his noble steed and ride off to battle evil for this damsel in distress yet again. Except that she’d punctured a hell of a hole in his armor the last time around. She’d gone straight for his heart, and he wasn’t apt to forget it, no matter how desirable, how beautiful or how crazy and in need of help she was this time around.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said, getting to his feet.
Slowly, she lowered her gaze to her lap. He watched her put the checkbook back into her purse and rise from the chair.
“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” she said without looking at him.
He
