The Texan's Baby Bombshell Read online

  Adam’s head throbbed. He wasn’t getting into that argument again. A craft brewery cost money. More money than he’d managed to save so far. And way more now that he’d signed Dr. Granger’s paperwork.

  He wasn’t going to worry about that when he had more important things to worry about—like a son he hadn’t known he had until a few days ago. A son he hadn’t even been able to see except through a window because of the strict protocol surrounding his transplant.

  “Sandwich’s getting cold,” he said again. “I’ll talk to you when I get back.” Before Kane could say anything else, he ended the call and wearily tossed the phone aside.

  He lay there for a while, listening to the click and whirr of the air conditioner beneath the window.

  But when Laurel’s aquamarine eyes and luscious lips swam into his mind, he rolled off the bed.

  He finished pulling off his shirt, pitched it into a corner and went into the bathroom.

  The room was dinky, with barely enough space to turn around between the toilet and the shower stall. But the water in the shower ran good and hot, even though he stood beneath the spray for a small eternity until his muscles finally began to relax and his brain finally mastered the art of keeping Laurel out of it.

  At least for the moment.

  * * *

  Her breath caught in her chest, and gasping, Lisa sat bolt upright in her narrow bed.

  Her heart pounded hard. Not like it used to after she’d had a good run. This was more like she was running from the devil looming inches behind her.

  She pressed her shaking fingers to her sweaty forehead. Even though she knew it wasn’t actually the scar that ached, she explored the ridge of tissue as though it did.

  She forced herself to breathe deeply. Evenly. Waiting for the feeling of dread, of doom, to abate and for her churning stomach to calm.

  The last time this happened, when she’d been in the common room working a puzzle with Mr. Grabinski during the evening news, it had taken twenty minutes and Dr. Granger had stuck a needle in her arm and ordered bed rest for a day. Only later, when Lisa was calmer, was she able to convince the doctor that she’d recognized the man in the news story.

  She exhaled shakily, bending forward until her head touched her raised knees.

  She was making progress, she supposed, when seventeen minutes later, she collapsed onto her pillows again, her racing heart finally slowing.

  Then realization hit.

  She’d been a runner. She could remember standing on a platform with other girls. The track team. The Laurel Grove Middle School Marauders girls’ track team. The name of the school was quite clear in her mind. Why wasn’t it clear as being her own name, too?

  Laurel. She whispered the name into the dark. It felt as meaningless as the name Lisa had when she’d chosen it two months ago.

  Not true. The nurses called you Lisa first.

  “Better than Jane Doe,” one of them—Selena—had told her cheerfully as she’d fastened a delicate gold chain with a tiny L around her neck. She’d held up a mirror so that Lisa could see herself.

  She’d still had stitches in her forehead, courtesy of the plastic surgery to minimize the facial scar. The stitches had looked like a tiny zipper running straight down between her eyebrows.

  The gold chain was a far preferable sight.

  The emergency room staff had saved the necklace for her. Everything else she’d possessed—comprised only of the clothes on her broken body—had been cut off her by the team keeping her alive those first hours after she’d been extricated from the mangle of metal that had once been a car.

  Against everyone’s advice, she’d insisted on seeing the pictures from the accident.

  A three-car pileup near the northern border of Washington State. Not even the blinding snowstorm had been enough to douse the inferno that had turned the vehicles into hideous twists of metal and ash.

  Lisa’s had been in the center of the mess.

  Fresh Pine Rehabilitation had a computer in the common room. She might not be able to remember her name, but she’d remembered how to search the internet. Four and a half months after the accident that had changed her life, Lisa had finally read the full account of the crash.

  A middle-aged salesman on his way from Vancouver had been in the first car. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, veered into her lane, hitting her head-on. Then the third vehicle—an old pickup truck that predated airbags and was driven by a local farmer—had smashed into Lisa from behind, unable to stop because of the icy road.

  She’d survived only because she’d been thrown clear by way of her car’s side window. And for the first several days, even that had been questionable.

  The news stories she’d found spoke about her “walking away” from the accident. But of course, she hadn’t walked anywhere. Not at first.

  No matter how many accounts she’d read, none of the facts extended to the details of her condition. Everything else—the fact that the car and everything in it had been destroyed by fire—had been detailed time and time again. But none had mentioned the small problem when, having emerged from her coma-cocoon three months later, Lisa could walk and talk, dress herself and function in all the usual ways but she couldn’t recognize her own face in the mirror.

  She didn’t know where she came from. Didn’t know who she came from.

  She didn’t know where she belonged and was desperately afraid she’d belonged...nowhere.

  There were tears on her face.

  Stop dwelling.

  She sniffed hard. “Right,” she answered the voice in her head. She swiped away the tears with the corner of her sheet and then pushed out of bed.

  Despite the fact that Fresh Pine served individuals without healthcare insurance or other financial means, all of the rooms were private. They were small, yes. But each possessed a comfortable bed, a side chair for visitors—until today, Lisa had never had any—and its own bathroom with a shower stall.

  She’d gotten used to the shower, though somewhere in her mind she knew she really preferred a deep bath with bubbles up to her chin.

  Of course, that might just be a fantasy that she’d adopted as a memory. How was she to know when she didn’t even know her own name?

  She blinked under the bright light when she flicked on the bathroom light and squinted at her reflection in the mirror over the plain white sink.

  “Laurel.” The name bounced against the white tiles. Her eyes were light blue and they peered into themselves as if she could see into the blankness inside her mind.

  The effort was no more successful now than it had been any other time when she’d stood just like this, trying to divine the secrets trapped in her brain.

  The various experts who’d examined and poked and prodded her over the last two months were all agreed. The trauma of her accident followed by months of coma was at the root of her amnesia. Since the moment she’d regained consciousness in a hospital bed surrounded by strangers, she could remember everything that occurred.

  In that regard, her memory was perfectly intact.

  She remembered the scrambled eggs she’d had for breakfast that morning. The bagel from yesterday. She knew that Mrs. Grabinski visited Mr. Grabinski every day at exactly 4:00 p.m. and that she brought a new puzzle for them to work on every third day.

  Lisa knew all sorts of things that were entirely useless when it came to remembering the things that came “BA.” Before Accident. Like why Adam Fortune’s handsome face plucked a visceral chord inside her.

  The porcelain sink felt cool against her fingers where she gripped it hard. She closed her eyes against her reflection.

  It took no effort to conjure his image.

  He had deep, dark brown hair. Short, but thick. And it sprang with a slight wave away from his forehead. He had the kind of slashing, masculine brows and a squared off, faintly clefted c
hin that graced some movie actors with timeless appeal.

  She’d filled an entire sketchbook with his face before she’d ever seen him on the news.

  Was it serious?

  He’d shrugged off her question about their past relationship. His eyes—such a dark brown that the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises—had met hers head-on. She hadn’t had the sense that he’d been lying.

  And yet—

  She opened her eyes and looked at herself again. It didn’t matter if he’d been lying or not. Because of him, she knew who she really was. That was what she needed to focus on.

  “You’re not Lisa Jane Doe,” she reminded herself firmly. “You’re Laurel Hudson. Get used to it.”

  Then she turned away from the mirror. She rubbed the center of her chest as if she could rub away the hollow sensation inside. Because it was easy to tell herself not to be distracted by Adam Fortune. And another matter entirely to actually succeed at it.

  Adam was the epitome of tall, dark and broad-shouldered. He had a face that was definitely memorable.

  Surely no more memorable than the faces of her own parents, though.

  So why would she remember him? Someone from nearly ten years past? Why couldn’t she remember why she’d been driving in a snowstorm in upstate Washington? Why couldn’t she remember the fiancé that Adam had said she had? Was this Eric person the devil she ran from in her nightmares?

  She thumped her fists none too lightly against the sides of her head as she padded through the dark room to the bed. She threw the tangled bedclothes back so they hit the floor and the thin pillow followed. Then she lay down and stared blindly up at the ceiling.

  The plain sheet covering the mattress beneath her felt vaguely scratchy against her arms and legs.

  Mother would never have approved. Nothing but one hundred percent Egyptian cotton would do.

  Her mother was dead. Laurel felt certain of it.

  But, like the whole bath thing, perhaps it was simply an idea that she’d adopted as truth.

  She exhaled deeply, working through the relaxation exercises that her physical therapist had taught her to help combat the sleeplessness she suffered most nights. It was either master the techniques or resort to the prescription drugs she’d been refusing for the last month.

  And she had no intention of going back to those.

  So she breathed in and counted. She breathed out and counted. She flexed muscles and released and flexed again. Working up and down her body, one muscle at a time, until she thought she’d go mad.

  And, like most nights, she didn’t begin to doze off again until thin light shined around the edges of the faded window curtains.

  Only when her mind was in that infinitesimally narrow space between sleep and wakefulness, did the thought slip inside.

  He’d been the first boy she’d ever loved.

  Chapter Three

  He brought donuts.

  Not just for Laurel but for everyone. Patients, staff and even the security guard who sat next to the front door to make sure that everyone who came calling had a proper reason to do so.

  Personally, Laurel believed the guards were really there to make sure none of the patients got out when they weren’t supposed to.

  At the sight—and smell—of fresh donuts, everyone from guard to Grabinski gathered around the two boxes that Adam set out on the table in the common room.

  “Like watching a shark attack,” Laurel said, standing to one side as everyone else swarmed around the boxes. She looked up at Adam, who was standing by her side.

  Even with her shoes on—white canvas sneakers with yellow smiley faces provided by a local women’s shelter—Adam stood at least a half foot taller. He wore blue jeans—the same as the evening before—and another button-down shirt. This one was Prussian blue. Yesterday’s had been slate.

  And he hadn’t shaved. The dark whiskers didn’t manage at all to blur his perfectly sculpted square jaw.

  “People like donuts,” he said easily. His deep brown eyes skimmed over her face. “You always did.”

  Pleasure flowed through her, swift and sweet. “I did?”

  His smile was very faint. “Why do you think I brought them? Deep-fried puffs of heaven, I think you called them.” He gestured toward the swarm. “Are you going to get in there or not? There was a maple bar with your name on it when I walked in the door but now I’m not so sure.”

  She realized she was tugging at the sleeve of her long-sleeved blouse and made herself stop as she worked her way to the table and the heavenly puffs.

  One box was totally empty. But there was, indeed, an oblong donut glistening with a caramel-colored glaze still remaining in the second.

  She snatched it from the box only moments before Mr. Grabinski did. Considering he already had a pink-frosted donut dangling on one finger and a chocolate-frosted one on another, she didn’t feel particularly guilty.

  Feeling more than a little triumphant, she took a napkin and moved back to Adam’s side.

  “Cheers.” She lifted the donut in a little toast before she sank her teeth into the end of it.

  The sweetness exploded on her taste buds, the maple flavor strong and pure. “Almost as good as Howie’s Food Truck in Larkin Square.”

  She felt Adam tense. “You remember Larkin Square?”

  “Not really. The name just came to me.” She ducked her head, sucking maple icing off the side of her thumb. “Sorry.”

  He stepped in front of her and, when she didn’t look up at him, tucked a long finger beneath her chin.

  Her breath got hung up in a hidden spot she’d never discovered during her nightly breathe-and-count sessions. His warm finger urged her chin upward, but her eyes only lifted as far as his masculine chin because meeting his dark, dark eyes just then seemed like the most dangerous thing she could do in this world.

  Why did she remember him?

  “Don’t be sorry for having memories,” he said quietly.

  She couldn’t help herself. She chanced a quick glance higher. Right up to those eyes. Heat flushed over her. For no earthly reason at all.

  “It happens like that,” she admitted thoughtlessly. “Words come out without even thinking about them and then I realize afterward what they mean.”

  “Yeah, well.” The corners of his lips lifted slightly and his finger fell away from that spot just beneath her chin. “You always did have the habit of speaking first and regretting later.”

  “Oh,” she managed faintly. She still felt warm. From her face to her toes.

  His gaze dropped to the donut that she held between her fingers. “You also used to devour a donut like that in about thirty seconds flat.”

  “Mother thought donuts were déclassé.”

  His faint smile turned sardonic. “I’ll bet.”

  She started to ask him if he’d known her parents but Dr. Granger came into the room, holding a coffee urn aloft.

  “Here we are,” the director said brightly as she sidled between her patients to set the urn on the table. Lesley, one of the day nurses, followed close behind her with disposable coffee cups. “If we’re going to have donuts, we must also have coffee.”

  Since Laurel didn’t drink coffee, she hung back. Adam, on the other hand, took a coffee from Dr. Granger. But if he’d eaten one of his treats, he’d done it before he’d arrived at Fresh Pine.

  He drank his coffee black and unsweetened, she noticed. Maybe he didn’t like sweet things in general.

  “Want to go for a walk?”

  She stared, surprised, then looked from him to the windows overlooking the back of the building. “The garden outside is pretty nice, but it’s not exactly large enough to accommodate a walk.”

  “Not in the garden. Dr. Granger said we could take a spin around the neighborhood. If you’re feeling up to it, that is.”


  She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d announced they were taking a spin around the horn of Africa. But along with the surprise came a warningly unsteady thump in her heart and a faint agitation in her stomach.

  You are not going to have a panic attack. Not now.

  She polished off the remainder of her donut, though it suddenly tasted like cardboard, and nodded wordlessly.

  He smiled slightly in a way she decided looked a little forced. “I’ll let Dr. Granger know.”

  She nodded again. The donut churned inside her.

  While he went over to Dr. Granger, she moved to the rear window and looked out on the blooming azalea plants.

  Her eyes traced the edges of the delicate petals. She imagined painting them. Watercolors would be best. Melting the magenta in the centers, drawing outward to the faint blush of the outer ruffles.

  Her stomach twisted even harder and she inhaled deeply. Exhaled slowly.

  It was only ten o’clock in the morning. The sky was clear. Perfect for a leisurely spin.

  She could do this.

  She would do this.

  She turned away from the window only to find Adam right behind her. She bounced off his chest and his hands closed around her shoulders, steadying her. “Sorry about that.”

  She was both relieved and regretful when his hands dropped away from her. “Shall we?”

  She nodded jerkily and preceded him from the common room, aiming blindly down the corridor for the lobby.

  “D’you want a sweater? You used to get cold at the drop of a hat.”

  Her mind felt blank in a totally non-amnesia way. “My room is upstairs.” She didn’t know what on earth was motivating her. “Do you want to see it?”

  His eyebrows pulled together a fraction. “Probably better for me to wait for you in the lobby.”

  Her cheeks felt hot. She wasn’t inviting him in for coffee after a date. Which she didn’t drink anyway. And which they weren’t doing anyway. “I—I’ll be right back.”

  “No rush.” The words were easy. The turbulent look in his eyes was not.