white ceiling. Her gaze followed it to the wall, where a muslin curtain was gathered back beside the bed. Beside her, a plastic bag hung from an aluminum stand, and clear tubing filled with fluid snaked from it to her wrist. When she flexed her left hand, a needle pinched her vein.
She was in a hospital.
She gazed through a wide window across from the bed at a broad, boulder-filled river, frothy with whitewater tinted pink by the sun’s slanting rays. Beyond the river, a stand of towering evergreens formed an impenetrable barricade. She knotted her forehead in concentration, but try as she might, she couldn’t identify where she was or whether the sun was rising or setting.
Her next discovery banished all thoughts of time or place. A thirty-something man sprawled in the chair beside the window, sound asleep. Who was he?
Her doctor?
He was dressed more like a cowboy, in well-worn jeans that enveloped long legs, a chambray shirt stretched taut over powerful muscles, and tooled leather boots that could stand a good polish. The sun streaks in his mahogany-colored hair and the tanned, rugged planes of his attractive face suggested someone who worked outdoors.
She flushed when she realized he’d awakened during her scrutiny and was staring back with eyes as serene and brown as the river boulders outside the window.
“Welcome back.” His agreeable voice rolled through the room, a rich baritone.
“Back?” She attempted to draw herself to a sitting position, but the effort exhausted her and she collapsed against the pillows.
“You’ve been unconscious almost three days.” He shoved himself to his feet in a graceful movement and approached her bed with the rolling gait of a man more comfortable on a horse than on his feet.
Giddiness and disorientation washed over her. “What happened?”
He hooked his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans and lifted dark eyebrows with a look so galvanizing she averted her eyes. “You don’t remember?”
“No.” She fidgeted beneath his piercing inspection and wished she was wearing something more substantial than a thin hospital gown.
“I’d better get the doctor.” His probing expression relaxed as if he was pleased by an excuse to bolt.
Loneliness and an unnamed yearning overwhelmed her. Between the pounding in her head and the weakness of her body, she couldn’t pinpoint who—or what—she longed for. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be alone.
“Please, don’t go,” she begged.
The skin around his eyes crinkled in appealing lines and his mouth angled in a reassuring smile. He reached above her pillow and depressed a call button.
“Nurses’ station,” a chirpy voice responded.
“Tell Dr. Sinclair Miss O’Riley is awake,” he said.
“That’s good news,” the voice said. “I’ll page the doctor.”
When he started to move away, she grasped his sleeve. “Who’s Miss O’Riley?”
He frowned before composing his face into a neutral expression. “Don’t you know?”
Her misgivings multiplied by the second. She concentrated on the tenacious squareness of his jaw, the dark hair tumbling across his broad forehead, a tiny scar across one dark eyebrow—anything to block the other questions that assaulted her.
The one about O’Riley terrified her enough.
She gathered her courage with a deep breath. “Who is Miss O’Riley?”
His widened eyes conveyed his surprise. “You are.”
The answer stunned her, and the questions she’d tried to evade converged until she slipped again toward the black void from which she’d just emerged. In a futile attempt to conquer confusion, she thrashed her aching head from side to side on the pillow.
“Whoa, hold still.” The stranger cupped her cheeks with firm but gentle hands. “You’ve had a bad concussion. You don’t want to aggravate it.”
Closing her eyes to avoid his warm, searching gaze, she relaxed against the soothing pressure of his palms. “You don’t understand.”
“Try me.”
His simple, direct proposal inspired her trust. When she opened her eyes, tears misted her vision, and she observed the stranger through a watery haze.
“I don’t know who I am.” She choked back panic. “I can’t remember anything.”
“Nothing?” he asked, as if disbelieving.
Her throat tightened with anxiety, and she clasped his hands as if they were a lifeline. “Not even my own name.”
He freed himself from her grasp, fumbled in his shirt pocket and pulled out a letter. “Maybe this will jog your memory. It’s from you.”
She seized the pages and scanned the lines of looping scrawl, but nothing connected. No name, no remembrances. She blinked back tears of frustration. “This means nothing to me.”
More concerned with the stranger than the letter, she handed back the pages. Reeling from lack of memory, she battled her befuddling attraction to the good-looking man.
A disturbing possibility struck her. “Who are you?”
“Wade Garrett.”
She glanced at her left hand and her unadorned ring finger. “That’s a relief. I thought for a moment you might be Mr. O’Riley.”
“No.”
The mysterious glint in his eye intrigued her, but his lack of information was irritating. “Are you related to me?”
He shook his head.
Her disappointment stung. Wade appeared to be the kind of man she could lean on in a crisis—not only physically strong, with broad shoulders and hard muscles, but with a disposition that didn’t rattle easily.
If he wasn’t her relative or her husband…a tremor shook her at the very idea…who was he? “Do I know you?”
“Not yet.”
Behind a facade of calm, she hid her irritation at his refusal to provide more information. Obviously he wasn’t ready to tell her why he was here, but maybe he’d answer other questions.
Again she experienced the unsettling but sourceless longing. “What about my family?”
Uncertainty flickered over his handsome face. “We’ll discuss your family later.”
Between the ache in her temples and an avalanche of unanswered questions, she couldn’t think straight. The mysterious Wade Garrett, talking in generalities, was no help at all.
Fatigue depleted her last reserves of strength, and she closed her eyes. Maybe she was only dreaming, and once
