A Hard Man to Forget (2 page)

Then she came far enough down the steps to see that his eyes were
focused on the stairs to the building.

Staring right at her.

Their gazes locked across the distance.

Black
, she registered in the back of her mind. He had the
blackest eyes she’d ever seen. Also the hardest. The coldest.
And they were unmistakably pinned on her.

An icy rush of...something swept through her from head to toe. An
emotion she couldn’t quite identify, she wasn’t at all
sure it was a positive one.

Slowly making her way down the rest of the steps, she tried a
tentative smile.

Whatever she may have been hoping for, she didn’t get it. Not a
smile. Not a nod. Not a single hint of acknowledgment. Just a
relentless, unblinking stare that seemed to bore straight through
her.

Unnerved, Laura tried to turn her attention to the rest of him, to
see if she could figure out the reason for his intense gaze. He had a
handsome face, so handsome she was surprised it wasn’t the
first thing she noticed. His strong jaw, clenched in an obstinate
pose, underscored a generous mouth, the lips full even when thinned
into the uncompromising line they now bore. Black hair matched the
darkness of his expression. A few dark strands ruffled in the slight
breeze.

And yet it was those narrowed eyes, hard and uncompromising, that
drew her. She couldn’t look away, even as they filled her with
an awareness that disturbed her. A nervous fluttering built in the
pit of her stomach. There was almost a sense that she knew him,
though she wasn’t at all sure whether it was actual recognition
or the instinctive attraction a healthy woman might feel for a
good-looking man.

Anyone with any sense at all would break off the eye contact at first
glance and avoid him at all costs. He was a stranger, quite possibly
a dangerous one. Yet despite the severity of his expression, the
coldness in his eyes, there was something about him that compelled
her, something she wasn’t sure she understood.

“Laura, are you all right?”

She jerked her head up to find a man standing at her side. Officer
Greg Hendricks, a regular in the courthouse, had come up beside her
without her noticing. He peered down at her, his brow furrowed.

“Yes, I think so. It’s just—" She glanced back
across the street.

There was no one there.

She felt him follow her gaze to the empty bench. “Laura?”

She quickly scanned the area again in disbelief. The rest of the
scene was unchanged—the children, the professionals milling
about. But the man was nowhere in sight. He’d vanished, as if
he’d never been there at all.

The heat was instantly forgotten, replaced by a chill that rolled
down her spine. He had been there. She couldn’t have just
imagined him. She’d seen him.

Hadn’t she?

She felt the policeman’s hand on her arm. “Do you need me
to call someone? You seem disoriented…”

That made sense. She felt disoriented. Foggy, she shook her head, as
though waving off the remnants of a bad dream. “I’m
sorry. The heat’s probably getting to me or something.”

“Maybe you should get back inside—"

Embarrassed, she forced a smile and waved him off. “I’m
meeting someone for lunch. I’m sorry to have worried you. I
just wasn’t expecting it to be so hot and it caught me
off-guard for a second.” The excuse sounded weak even to her.
It was the best she could come up with. She wasn’t about to
tell him she’d been staring at a man who might not have even
existed.

“If you’re sure…”

“I am,” she said firmly, more than ready to get this
humiliating encounter behind her.

“All right, then. I’ll catch you later.”

He brushed by her to climb the courthouse steps. She sensed when he
turned back to look at her, and quickly started across the street.

But when she was halfway down the block, she couldn’t resist
one last glance around the park.

Nothing.

Feeling foolish, she turned her back on the scene and hurried on,
wishing she could shake the sudden chill that had come over her on
this steamy summer day.

AS SOON AS SHE TURNED her head, he stepped out from behind the
shelter of the tree to watch her hurry away.

She’d recognized him. He’d seen the stricken expression
on her face when she caught sight of him, watched the color drain
from her skin as she realized who he was. She’d realized that
she’d been found. Maybe after three years, she’d thought
she was safe from discovery.

Yet here he was.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d hidden when the police
officer had approached her. It was obvious the two of them were
familiar with each other. They might even be friends. The wave of
jealousy that had come over him at the sight of the man’s hand
on her arm returned with a vengeance. If they were intimate, she
could have told the policeman anything. The officer could have
arrested him, giving her enough time to run again. He wasn’t
about to let that happen.

The angry energy he’d forced down threatened to boil over and
he launched himself forward. Startled, a female pedestrian eyed him
warily and gave him a wide berth as she moved down the sidewalk. He
hardly noticed. There was too much going on inside of him, emotion
pulsing through his veins too fast for him to process. It was times
like this that he wished he had some vice—alcohol, smoking—with
the power to help him deal. But there was none.

Pivoting on his heel, he stalked down the sidewalk after her. Now
that he’d found her, he wasn’t about to let her out of
his sight, not until he had answers.

He sure as hell had waited long enough to get them.

“ARE YOU EVEN HERE, or should I try talking to the
centerpiece?”

“Huh?” Jerking her gaze up, Laura caught the amusement in
Jason’s expression. She winced at her own inarticulate reply.
“Not doing a very good job hiding my short attention span, am
I?”

He smiled across the table at her, flashing perfect teeth. “I’d
say you weren’t hiding it at all.”

“I’m sorry.” She reached for her glass, hoping a
cold drink of water would calm her down a little. “I can’t
stop thinking about this strange thing that happened on my way here.”

Jason’s handsome features softened in concern. “What is
it?”

“I thought I saw someone staring at me as I left the
courthouse, but before I could do anything, he just…disappeared.”
She shook her head. “It was probably nothing, but there was
just something about him...”

Jason didn’t say anything for a moment. When he did, he seemed
to be forcing the words out. “Do you think he’s someone
you knew...before?”

Laura felt the blood drain from her face. She didn’t have to
ask before what. It was a question she should have asked herself long
ago. If the stranger hadn’t gotten her so frazzled, she might
have.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. Had the feeling
she’d experienced been nothing more than recognition? Had she
known him before? Before an unknown assailant had attacked her,
leaving her for dead, leaving her without any recollection of the
first thirty-odd years of her life?

Her earliest memories were of two years ago, half-realized glimpses
of the nurses in the hospital sitting at her bedside holding her hand
as she slipped in and out of consciousness. Everyone had been so sure
she would die. The back of her skull had been bashed open, her face
had been battered, numerous organs were damaged and the internal
bleeding had been severe. She’d been beaten literally within an
inch of her life. She’d been told that no one in the small
hospital could recall a case so horrific, an act of pure violence so
heinous committed against one person by another. The nurses had been
there out of pity, hoping to make her passage from this world to the
next just a little bit easier if they could. After all she’d
been through, it was the best they could hope for.

And yet, she’d survived. She’d fought back from the brink
of death when most people would have simply succumbed. There were
some days she wondered why she had, if there was some reason she’d
wanted to hang on to life so badly. Jason liked to say she was too
stubborn to die. She freely admitted that she was often too obstinate
for her own good, though she didn’t know if the trait was one
she’d had before the incident or one caused by it.

For while her strength had come back and her wounds had healed, the
one thing that wouldn’t return was her memory.

The doctors weren’t sure whether the memory loss had been
caused by the horror of what had happened to her, the event so
traumatic her mind simply did not want to remember, of if her
attacker had beaten it out of her. Whether psychological or
trauma-induced, the doctors seemed to agree that it was perhaps best
if she never remembered. There were very few days when she didn’t
agree with them.

There was a great deal of difference though, between not remembering
the attack and not remembering anything at all. And even worse, no
one seemed to remember her either.

She’d waited for two years for someone to come forward and
identify her. She was still waiting. It wasn’t supposed to be
possible in this computerized age for a person to simply drop off the
face of the planet without anyone noticing.

Yet in two years, there hadn’t been a missing persons report
filed in the state of California for someone fitting her description
and no one had come forward to identify her. She’d eventually
expanded her search to encompass the entire country. Poring over all
of the missing persons reports filed nationwide had been a depressing
endeavor to say the least. So many people vanished without a trace
every day, all with people missing them, wondering what had happened
to them.

She just wasn’t one of them.

Whoever she had been, she wasn’t missed. At first it hadn’t
mattered that much. She’d had more than a year of physical
therapy to deal with, learning how to use her restructured body. Once
the cuts and bruising of her face had gone down, it was discovered
that there had been remarkably little structural damage to her face.
The doctors guessed she looked much like she did before the attack.

As her progress continued, the need to know who she was and who she’d
come from increased. No answers were forthcoming.

Perhaps she should be happy with her life as it was now. She had a
name, Laura Morgan, put together from the names of two of the nurses
who'd taken care of her in those early days. She’d applied for
and received a Social Security number. She had a job, an apartment,
co-workers. Most of the time it was easy to pretend that she was just
like every other woman, living a nice, normal life.

Yet sometimes, in the darkest hour of the night, she’d jerk
awake in a cold sweat, terror pounding through her veins. After two
years, she knew the nightmare was the same, even if she still
couldn’t remember the details. There were only vague
impressions. A fist heading straight at her face. The shadow of some
heavy object swinging toward her in the dark. The police guessed
she’d been beaten with a steel pipe. The very thought made her
hope she never remembered what had happened that night, even as her
dreams seemed to be prodding her to cognizance.

“Must have been some guy,” Jason murmured.

Startled, Laura was jerked out of her pensive thoughts. She caught
the displeasure in Jason’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, lowering her gaze to her
plate. “I’m probably putting more into this than it
deserves.”

“Not necessarily. Not if he is someone you knew...before. You
should talk to Walker about him.”

“I will,” she agreed quickly. Dr. Walker was the
therapist she’d been seeing ever since she left the hospital.
He hadn’t had any luck unlocking the secrets in her mind, but
she continued to see him. There was something comforting about the
man, something reassuring. He’d become a constant in her life
she wasn’t ready to let go of. She wondered what he would say
about her response to the man in the park. Unfortunately, her next
appointment wasn’t until next week, and she wasn’t
comfortable bothering him about it now.

“So what did he look like?” Jason pressed. “This
mystery man?”

Laura sighed. She knew what he was getting it and wasn’t
comfortable with it. “Dark hair. Tall and lean. Aristocratic
nose.” The last popped out before she thought about it.

Jason arched a brow. “Good-looking?”

“I suppose,” she hedged.

“Of course he was,” Jason muttered. “I doubt you
would have noticed what his nose looked like if he wasn’t.”

All too aware why he was upset, Laura tamped down the unease bubbling
in the pit of her stomach. She’d hoped to avoid this today.
Jason had never made a secret of the way he felt about her. If
anything, he constantly seemed to be pushing her toward moving their
relationship to a new level.

There was no reason why she shouldn’t be attracted to him.
Jason was successful. He was handsome, with wheat blond hair and a
lean, pleasant face. Other than Dr. Walker, she was closer to him
than anyone in the world, and her relationship with her therapist was
something else altogether.

Across the table, Jason was stabbing at his salad with a fork. He was
doing a poor job hiding the fact that he was sulking, if he was even
trying.

Though she knew it was no one’s fault, Laura couldn’t
help but feel a little guilty. She wished there was something she
could say to reassure him, but there wasn’t. She didn’t
return his feelings. She looked into his handsome face and saw a
friend, her closest friend in the whole world. There was nothing more
there, certainly not the stomach-clenching emotion that had filled
her when she’d looked into the stranger’s eyes.

Even now, the thought of the stranger made her stomach do a flip-flop
deep in her belly.

She knew eventually she’d have to tell him. She simply didn’t
want to lose him as a friend, and she knew Jason well enough to know
that was where her rejection would lead.