he shouldn’t care. Shouldn’t have cared. Not beyond the care he offered his other patients. By all testimonies, he went above and beyond the demands of duty and the dictates of compassion for each one. He shouldn’t have neglected everyone and everything to remain by her side, to do everything for her when he could have delegated her care to the highly qualified professionals he’d painstakingly picked and trained, those he paid far more than money to keep doing the stellar job they did.
He hadn’t. During the three interminable days after her surgery until she woke up, whenever he’d told himself to tend to his other duties, he couldn’t. She’d been in danger, and it had been beyond him to leave her.
Her inert form, her closed eyes, had been what had ruled him. The drive to get her to move, to open her eyes and look at him with those endless inky skies that had been as inescapable as a black hole since they’d first had him in their focus, had been what motivated him.
Periodically she had opened them, but there had been no sight or comprehension in them, no trace of the woman who’d invaded and occupied his thoughts ever since he’d laid eyes on her.
Yet he’d prayed that, if she never came back, her body would keep on functioning, that she’d keep opening her eyes, even if it was just a mechanical movement with no sentience behind it.
Two days ago, she’d opened those eyes and the blankness had been replaced by the fog of confusion. His heart had nearly torn a hole in his ribs when coherence had dawned in her gaze. Then she’d looked at him and there had been more.
He should have known then that she was suffering from something he hadn’t factored in. Finding her distance and disdain replaced by warmth that had escalated to heat should have given him his first clue. Having her nuzzle him like a feline delighted at finding her owner, then that kiss that had rocked him to his foundations, should have clenched the diagnosis.
The Cybele Wilkinson he knew—his nemesis—would never have looked at or touched him that way if she were in her right mind. If she knew who he was.
It had still taken her saying that she wasn’t and didn’t to explain it all. And he’d thought that had explained it all.
But it was even worse. She didn’t remember herself.
There was still something far worse. The temptation not to fill in the spaces that had consumed her memories, left her mind a blank slate. A slate that could be inscribed with anything that didn’t mean they had to stay enemies.
But they had to. Now more than ever.
“I see you’re still not talking to me.”
Her voice, no longer raspy, but a smooth, rich, molten caress sweeping him from the inside out, forced him to turn his eyes to her against his will. “I’ve talked to you every time I came in.”
“Yeah, two sentences every two hours for the past two days.” She huffed something that bordered on amusement. “Feels like part of your medication regimen. Though the sparseness really contrasts with the intensiveness of your periodic checkups.”
He could have relegated those, which hadn’t needed to be so frequent, or so thorough, to nurses under his residents’ supervision. But he hadn’t let anyone come near her.
He turned his eyes away again, pretended to study her chart. “I’ve been giving you time to rest, for your throat to heal and for you to process the discovery of your amnesia.”
She fidgeted, dragging his gaze back to her. “My throat has been perfectly fine since yesterday. It’s a miracle what some soothing foods and drinks and talking to oneself can do. And I haven’t given my amnesia any thought. I know I should be alarmed, but I’m not. Maybe it’s a side effect of the trauma, and it will crash on me later as I get better. Or …I’m subconsciously relieved not to remember.”
His voice sounded alien as he pushed an answer past the brutal temptation, the guilt, the rage, at her, at himself, at the whole damned universe. “Why wouldn’t you want to remember?”
Her lips crooked. “If I knew, it wouldn’t be a subconscious wish, would it? Am I still making sense only in my own ears?”
He tore his gaze away from her lips, focused on her eyes, cleared thorns from his throat. “No. I am not having an easy time processing the fact that you have total memory loss.”
“And without memories, my imagination is having a field day thinking of outlandish explanations for why I’m not in a hurry to have my memories back. At least they seem outlandish. They might turn out to be the truth.”
“And what are those theories?”
“That I was a notorious criminal or a spy, someone with a dark and dangerous past and who’s in desperate need of a second chance, a clean slate. And now that it’s been given to me, I’d rather not remember the past—my own identity most of all.”
She struggled to sit up, groaning at the aches he knew her body had amassed. He tried to stop himself.
He failed. He lunged to help her, tried not to feel the supple heat of her flesh fill his hands as he pulled her up, adjusted her bed to a gentle slope. He struggled to ignore the gratitude filling her eyes, the softness of trust and willingness exhibited by every inch of her flesh. He roared inwardly at his senses as the feel and scent of her turned his insides to molten lava, his loins to rock. He gritted his teeth, made sure her intravenous line and the other leads monitoring her vital signs were secure.
Her hands joined his in checking her line and leads, an unconscious action born of engrained knowledge and ongoing application. He stepped away as if from a fiery pit.
She looked up at him, those royal blue eyes filling with a combo of confusion and hurt at his recoil. He took one more step back before he succumbed to the need to erase that crestfallen expression.
She lowered her eyes. “So—you’re a doctor. A surgeon?” He was, for once, grateful for her questions. “Neurosurgeon.”
She raised her eyes again. “And from the medical terms filling my mind and the knowledge of what the machines here are and what the values they’re displaying mean—I’m some kind of medical professional, too?”
“You were a senior trauma/reconstructive surgery resident.”
“Hmm, that blows my criminal or spy theories out of the water. But maybe I was in another form of trouble before I ended up here? A ruinous malpractice suit? Some catastrophic mistake that killed someone? Was I about to have my medical license revoked?”
“I never suspected you had this fertile an imagination.”
“Just trying to figure out why I’m almost relieved I don’t remember a thing. Was I perhaps running away to start again where no one knows me? Came here and …hey, where is here?”
He almost kept expecting her to say gotcha. But the notion of Cybele playing a trick on him was more inconceivable than her total memory loss. “This is my private medical center. It’s on the outskirts of Barcelona.”
“We’re in Spain?” Her eyes widened. His heart kicked. Even with her lids still swollen and her face bruised and pallid, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “Okay, scratch that question. As far as my general knowledge can tell—and I feel it remains unaffected—there is no Barcelona anywhere else.”
“Not that I know of, no.”
“So—I sound American.”
“You are American.”
“And you’re Spanish?”
“Maybe to the world, which considers all of Spain one community and everyone who hails from there as Spanish. But I am Catalan. And though in Catalonia we have the same king, and a constitution that declares ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation,’ we were the first to be recognized as a Nacionalidad and a Comunidad Autónoma or a distinct historical nationality and an autonomous