you and Tom have been so good to me. I don’t know what I would have done…what I’ll do.”
Tom had helped Connie get up the courage to leave her abusive husband. She was still fragile.
“Just know Tom would be proud of you for taking care of your son,” Megan said softly. “And he’d want you to be strong, to keep doing that.”
Connie pulled away, trying to compose herself, and nodded. “If you need me, Megan, I’m here.”
Megan thanked her, weariness settling in her bones as Connie turned and walked away. The long line of people wanting to speak to her stretched in front of her and she felt herself sway.
April grabbed her elbow. “Here, you’d better sit down.”
Megan nodded dumbly and sank into a metal folding chair, the sea of people blurring in front of her. Tears streamed down her cheeks, mingling with the rain. She didn’t want to be here amidst this crowd of strangers. She wanted to be alone to mourn. Oh, God, there were so many things to mourn for.
The marriage that should have lasted forever.
The man who had died before she could make him happy.
The chance to make things right that was lost forever.
COLE HUNTER WATCHED the casket being lowered into the ground, a bitter chill engulfing him. Oddly, Tom Wells had turned up missing the same day Cole had had his own accident. It could have been his body being lowered into that hole just as easily as Wells.
And for a brief second when he’d seen the casket and the hole in the ground, he’d had a flash that it was him being lowered. That he was Tom Wells and he had died.
Warner Parnell, the doctor at the research center who’d been helping Cole with his recovery after the accident, frowned solemnly. “He was a good man. We’ll miss him at the center.”
“It…it seems strange that I survived, but he died on the same day.”
Parnell gave him a sympathetic look. “Don’t succumb to survivor guilt,” he said in a low voice. “As a doctor, you know that’s dangerous.”
Cole folded his hands. The harsh reality of the timing obviously hadn’t escaped him and had played with his head. He had felt guilty that luck had been on his side that day and he had survived. Granted he had a new face, his memory was shaky and his stride hindered by a slight limp, but hell, at least he was still able to walk.
He shuddered, wondering if he should have come. He hadn’t wanted to. In fact, he had the oddest feeling that he normally didn’t attend funerals, but he couldn’t remember why. He’d hoped seeing so many of the research center’s staff in one place might jog some memory cells.
“I didn’t know him very well, did I?”
Parnell shrugged. “No. You met only once. At the center when you came for the interview. I believe you corresponded through e-mail about your research, but I’m not certain.”
Shaking off the uneasy feeling, Cole stared across the smattering of faces, a few of them familiar from the three days he’d spent getting acquainted with the research center.
His gaze settled on Tom Wells’s wife. Megan.
A nurse in the psychiatric ward.
Another eerie sensation skittered across his nerve endings, a flash of some kind of memory tugging at him. He must have met her before, probably at the facility or at one of the dinners for the center when he was being interviewed. She wouldn’t be an easy woman to forget.
She had the face of an angel, the figure of a temptress and the lips of a lover.
But he had no right to even think such lurid thoughts, especially at a funeral.
From her grief-stricken face, she’d obviously cared for her husband deeply.
During those long, lonely days in the hospital, he had thought about his life, the fact that he had no one. No family who’d come looking for him. No woman who searched him out, sat by his bedside, vowed that she loved him.
Apparently he hadn’t made any friends in Oakland, either.
In a strange way, he envied Tom Wells.
He knew that was sick. The poor man was dead, for God’s sake, and here he stood, alive and breathing, feeling sorry for himself.
One by one, the visitors stopped to speak to Megan.
“I’m going to give her my condolences,” Parnell said.
Cole hesitated. Finally he took a deep breath and shuffled across the damp ground through the throng of people. Her gaze rose and met his across the crowd. Raindrops dotted her face, mingling with tears, the raincoat shielding her honey-colored hair and shapely body. But it was the shadows beneath her haunted blue eyes that made his gut clench.
An older man and woman Parnell had pointed out as Wells’s parents stopped beside her. Megan stiffened, clasping her hands tightly together. Cole moved into the shadows of the funeral home tent, close enough to hear.
“You will send us Tom’s things, won’t you?” the woman asked in a clipped voice.
“Yes, if you want them.”
“Of course we do.” Mrs. Wells flashed Megan a cold look. “He never should have come here, you know.”
Megan jutted her chin in the air. “I’m not going to argue with you at Tom’s funeral. I don’t think he’d want that, Kathleen.”
Mr. Wells pulled at his designer tie. “Let’s go, honey.” He threw a sorrowful glance over his shoulder at the grave. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
The couple strode off, huddled together. Hurt strained Megan’s features. A fleeting feeling that he’d lived that moment before struck Cole, then disappeared as quickly as it had hit him.
Without remembering how he reached her, Cole found himself standing in front of her, not knowing what to say, but extending his hand, wanting to take away the sting of the Wells’s attitude.
She slowly lifted her small hand and placed it inside his, the whisper of her soft skin brushing his callused fingertips. A small surge of awareness skated through him. Her lips parted slightly as if she, too, felt the odd connection between them.
A wave of images suddenly flashed through his head like a movie trailer. Images of Megan Wells looking at him with those haunted blue eyes. Images of her crying on his shoulder. Images of her raising on tiptoe to smother his mouth with kisses. Images of her lying naked in his arms and calling his name in the darkness of the night.
He snapped his hand back and felt himself grow weak. What in the hell had just happened? Those flashes seemed so real. But they couldn’t have been memories.
Could they?
Chapter Two
Megan’s hand trembled as she pulled it from the stranger’s, a slight chill slithering up her spine. She pulled
