“The scent you’re wearing. I don’t remember that either, just the whiffs of it I caught last night when you were helping me and my thinking how much I liked it. Something floral, huh?”
“Lily of the Valley.”
“Nice,” he said, putting the mug back on the tray.
Before she could back away from the side of the bed, he reached out, wrapping his big hand around her own hand and dragging it up to his face. Turning it over, he buried his nose into the back of her wrist, inhaling deeply.
“Yeah, very nice,” he growled softly.
Eden was so startled that she failed to react. Failed to stop him when his bold mouth covered the place where his nose had been. He planted a warm kiss on her wrist, the tip of his tongue caressing its vulnerable pulse point. The action was so unexpected, and so instantly tantalizing, that a jolt of electricity raced up her arm. Gasping, she snatched her hand away from his provocative assault.
He chuckled. “What’s the matter? Can’t a man nuzzle his own wife?”
“What did you say?” she whispered.
“Nothing, just that I was appreciating how my wife smells.” He laughed again. “Among other things.”
Eden stared down at him, so stunned that she was speechless. This was incredible, much more involved than just his impression they knew each other. He thought he was her husband! That they were actually married!
Tell him. Why aren’t you telling him?
Eden didn’t know what was holding her back from immediately and emphatically correcting his mistaken belief. Or was it that she didn’t want to know, because a remorseless little voice was already telling her that she could take advantage of this situation? Unthinkable! How could she even consider it? And yet…
“Do you suppose I could have some breakfast to go with this coffee? I’d fix it for myself if I remembered where things are.”
Eden managed to find her voice then, shaky though it was. “Do you think you’re well enough to eat?”
“My insides tell me I am.” Demonstrating his rapid recovery, he swung his long legs over the side of the bed and eased himself to his feet. To her relief, he kept the quilt wound around his hips. “See? Perfectly steady. Now, if you could point me to my clothes…”
She nodded in the direction of the adjoining bathroom. “In there. I laundered and folded them for you.”
What if he asked for a change of outfit? Clothing he hadn’t been wearing last night? What would she tell him? But he accepted her choice without question.
She watched him, making certain that he was capable of reaching the bathroom without her assistance. When the door closed behind him, she picked up the tray and retreated from the bedroom.
Her brain couldn’t be any more numbed than his had been as she moved around the kitchen, preparing a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, trusting that he wouldn’t expect cereal instead. Or, for all she knew, steak and potatoes.
Am I home?
The words he had uttered last night before passing out on the piazza floor made sense now. He’d been convinced he had fought his way home to his wife and was safe. All the rest were clear as well. The way he had looked at her so intimately, his thinking he was supposed to remember Tia, grasping her hand and kissing it like that. Those made sense, yes, but nothing else did.
Man and wife. How could he think it? What in his jumbled mind had led him to such a fantastic conclusion?
And you’re planning to make use of it, too, aren’t you? That’s why you haven’t told him the truth. You see this as an opportunity.
All right, so it was wrong of her to let him go on thinking she was his wife, even cruel. But the temptation was too strong for her to resist, because his assumption that she was his wife meant that he trusted her. Trusted her fully. And only if he continued to trust her would he willingly share with her whatever he knew about the photograph she had discovered inside his jacket.
Only for a little while, she promised herself, silencing the guilt that was gnawing at her conscience. Just long enough for her to tap into whatever memory he might still possess, and then she would set him straight. She had to know.
“I think I’m ready for action again.”
Eden swung around at the sound of his deep voice behind her. Her first thought when she caught sight of him standing there in the doorway was how appropriate his declaration was. He’d meant it as a simple assurance that he was feeling better, but no adult female with functioning vision could have failed to put a spin on his words. He was that impressive, with the kind of athletic body meant to be wrapped around a woman.
He definitely knew how to fill a pair of jeans to maximum effect. She hadn’t noticed it last night, but the cut of both those jeans and his shirt were western in character. She recognized the style because of her brother, Roark, who lived and worked in Texas. There was something else she observed. His skin was bronzed and his brown hair streaked in front to shades of blond, like a man who has been exposed to a desert sun. Did they mean nothing, or were they clues to his origin?
“Sit down,” she instructed him. “Breakfast is almost ready.”
He started toward the table she had been setting at one end of the parlor, when she noticed what the trailing quilt had concealed in the bedroom. He had a faint but definite limp.
“Your leg,” she said, voicing her concern over what she assumed was another of last night’s injuries. “If you’re in pain, then maybe you shouldn’t be on it. Maybe you should have stayed in bed.”
He stopped midway across the room and gazed down in puzzlement at the leg to which she referred. “I don’t have any pain in my leg,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Eden assured him, suddenly remembering that Tia had directed her attention last night to an old scar on his right leg. Then his slight lameness wasn’t the result of any recent injury but something that had happened in the past and become so much an accepted part of him he was no longer aware of its existence, particularly now when he had no memory of its cause.
After he’d settled himself at the table, she went back into the adjoining kitchen. When she returned with eggs and toast, she found him gazing with interest at his surroundings. She knew he was seeing for the first time all the elements of the parlor that she so loved—the delicate molding that had suffered scuffs and marks over the decades, the cracked but elegant marble surround of the fireplace, the worn boards of the polished floor.
But, of course, he didn’t know that he’d never viewed any of these things before. It was painful to watch him struggling to renew a knowledge he had never possessed. So painful that she was tempted then and there to tell him the truth. But, remembering Nathanial, she held her tongue.
“The painting,” he said, his gaze settling on the framed scene above the fireplace. “Do I know that place? Where is it?”
“It’s a watercolor of the houseboat that—” she’d been about to say I but corrected herself in time “—we keep up along the Ashley River.”
“For
