He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “My ID must have burned with the car, and when the police ran a fingerprint check, they didn’t find a match.”
“But that’s imposs—” Leah broke off the sentence and clamped her mouth shut.
“What?” he asked. When Leah refused to answer and shook her head, he narrowed his eyes. “You were about to say something. What was it?”
“Nothing.” She forced a smile, hoping it would take the wary edge off her tone. And suddenly, she was wary, big-time wary, and growing more so with each passing minute. Too much of what he’d told her simply didn’t make sense. After all, the police were the ones who had told her he was dead in the first place.
Leah shuddered. They had said he’d been burned beyond recognition, burned to the bones, and she’d buried those bones in the same tomb that held her grandmother’s remains. Then, there were the fingerprints. Hunter was a cop from New York City who had been on leave for medical reasons. His fingerprints would definitely be on file somewhere.
Why would the police have lied to her…and to him? What reason could they possibly have for such a deception?
And whose bones had they given her to bury?
Chapter 2
Leah’s mind raced as she tried to find answers. Her stomach grew queasy just thinking about the hell she’d gone through the night Hunter disappeared. It had been her twenty-eighth birthday. They’d just returned to the hotel room after having dinner, and she’d sent him to the drugstore. She’d waited for Hunter to return…one hour…two hours, then three, until she couldn’t stand to wait a minute longer.
Now, she realized she should have thought it strange that when she finally called the police, they showed up almost immediately. But by the time they had knocked on the hotel-room door, she’d been in such a state she hadn’t been thinking straight. And afterward, after they told her what she’d dreaded the most, she’d been too distraught to think of anything but her loss and her guilt. And she’d spent four months grieving and blaming herself for his so-called death.
But grieving wasn’t all she’d done in that time. She’d spent a lot of it thinking, mostly about their hasty courtship and marriage.
Under normal circumstances, there was no way she would have married a man, any man, after only knowing him for a few weeks.
Leah swallowed hard against the tight ache in her throat. But that particular time had been anything but normal, and Hunter wasn’t just any man. She’d been in mourning when she’d met him, mourning for her beloved grandm’ere, the woman who had raised her since she was five. With her parents’ deaths, her grandmother had become everything to her. When her grandmother had died, the world as Leah had known it, along with the love and security she’d always felt, had disappeared.
Hunter had been on an extended medical leave from the New York City Police Department for psychiatric reasons. He’d been involved in a bad shoot-out, and had accidentally shot and killed an innocent bystander, a ten-year-old girl. As a result, he’d been unable to fire a gun ever since.
For Leah, it had been a time of adjustment and mourning, of coming to grips with being all alone in the world. For Hunter, it had been a time to heal.
They had both been vulnerable and needy and had taken solace with each other and within each other’s arms.
Leah suddenly went still as yet another strange discrepancy occurred to her. “There’s something I don’t quite understand,” she told Hunter. “You say you have amnesia. But if you have amnesia, and you didn’t even know your name, why are you here on my doorstep? What made you think that I might know you? In fact, how did you even know where I lived?”
He shrugged. “I guess that does seem kind of strange, even a contradiction of sorts. But I do have an explanation,” he hastened to add. “I was told that there was a good chance I would regain my memory.”
A momentary look of embarrassment crossed his face and he got to his feet. “This might sound weird,” he said as he rubbed the back of his neck and paced the width of the porch in front of her. “But about a month ago I began having flashbacks—memory flashes. Most of them didn’t make sense to me. But in one particular flashback I kept seeing a woman’s face, and an address kept running through my mind.”
He stopped in front of her and motioned toward her. “Your face,” he said. “The same auburn hair, the same brown eyes, the same face.”
Hunter felt heat climb up his neck as he stared at her. He’d seen more than just her face in his recurring flashback, much more. In his mind he’d seen her completely naked. He’d seen himself hovering over her, stroking her, felt her smooth, silky skin, felt her writhing beneath him in the heat of passion, her hands urging him to…
He squeezed his eyes shut. There was no way he could tell her the rest, not until he knew if it what he’d seen in the flashback was true or simply wishful dreaming on his part. With a shake of his head, he opened his eyes then gestured broadly. “And this address. I’m not sure why—” He raked his fingers through his hair. “But, like I said, this address kept flashing through my head. It took me days of hitchhiking to get here from Orlando, but I felt I had to do it or I might not ever find out who I am.”
He dropped down beside her then turned to face her, his left arm across the back of the swing. “I was right, wasn’t I?” Tilting his head to one side he held her gaze. When she nodded, he said, “I need to know what else you can tell me about myself. Please,” he added.
Leah’s mind raced as she considered just how much she should tell him, and after a moment, she decided that divulging some of the facts couldn’t hurt.
“You’re thirty-two years old, and you’re a police officer with the New York City Police Department,” she said. “We met when you took an extended vacation to New Orleans after you were placed on medical leave. You said that you had always wanted to see Mardi Gras but had never had the time off.”
A frown creased his forehead as he mulled over what she’d said, and Leah laced her fingers together tightly in her lap to keep from reaching up to smooth the frown away.
“Medical leave for what?” he finally asked.
As Leah explained about the shoot-out and the ten-year-old girl, a multitude of emotions played over his face. But when she told him the part about him being unable to fire a gun, he stared at her as if she’d just grown horns.
“So it wasn’t just a simple medical leave? I wasn’t physically injured?”
Leah shrugged. “I—I don’t know all the details,” she hedged.
“Who does?”
Leah shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe your captain or your doctor.”
“You mean my shrink, don’t you?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” she repeated slowly, emphasizing each word.
“Then, how do you know me?” he retorted. “And just what was our relationship?”
The answers to his questions stuck in Leah’s throat. She’d known he would eventually ask, and she’d
