Lover, Stranger Read online

  But she was reluctant to let him out of her sight. He’d sustained a concussion, among other injuries, and probably shouldn’t be alone. And, contrary to what he’d said, she was almost certain the parrot had triggered a memory for him. Why wouldn’t he admit it? Why wouldn’t he tell her?

  “I’m a little worried about you,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone tonight.”

  He shrugged. “You said yourself, this place is like a fortress. Now that I know how to arm the alarm system, I should be safe enough.”

  Grace bit her lip. “Maybe. But I’m not just talking about that. You’ve got some pretty serious injuries. A head trauma. That’s nothing to take lightly.”

  He looked at her then, his expression ironic. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a doctor, remember?”

  His words did nothing to reassure her. But there was very little Grace could do, short of forcing him at gunpoint to let her stay. She fingered her purse strap, considering.

  “If you’re sure...”

  “We can talk more tomorrow.” His tone was final.

  “Well...I guess I’ll see you in the morning then,” Grace said reluctantly.

  They started down the stairs together, and he put his hand on her elbow to guide her. Grace was surprised that she didn’t pull away, and even more surprised that she didn’t want to pull away. The touch of his hand sent a shiver of awareness down her backbone. It should have frightened her, but instead, it reminded her that she was still alive. Still a woman. And it had been a very long time—too damned long—since any man had done that for her.

  They paused in the foyer while Ethan turned off the alarm system. Then he opened the door, and pressing another series of buttons, disengaged the lock on the courtyard gate. He followed her outside, and they stood in the driveway to say their goodbyes.

  It was nearing midnight. The air had finally cooled, and a lazy breeze drifted through the ancient trees, sounding like rain. The moon was still up, almost full. The freshly watered lawn glistened like diamonds in the milky light, and on a trellis outside the courtyard, a moon flower opened to her lunar mistress.

  The night was beautiful, clear and starry, but Grace knew the darkness could be deceptive. She peered into Ethan’s eyes, wondering what secrets were hidden deep within those fathomless depths.

  Moonlight softened his bruised and battered face, and for a split second, Grace had a glimpse of what he really looked like. She caught her breath, remembering what she’d told him earlier. He was a good-looking man, but she thought his allure had little to do with his physical appearance, and everything to do with the man beneath. The mysteries he had unwittingly buried.

  She had the sudden and unexpected urge to kiss him, to see if it would stir his emotions enough to uncover those secrets.

  As if sensing her scrutiny, he turned and captured her gaze. Grace wondered fleetingly if he could tell what she was thinking. If he knew what she wanted at that moment

  She was almost certain that he did.

  “I’d better be going,” she murmured, realizing too late just how dangerous her situation had suddenly become.

  But when she would have walked away, he caught her arm, turning her back to face him. Their gazes met again, his deep and mystical; hers, she feared, open and far too revealing.

  “Thank you for bringing me home tonight,” he said. His voice, deep and raspy, had an unnerving affect on Grace.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she said. “I had my own reasons for doing so.”

  “Still—” He broke off, his gaze moving away from her. “I’m sorry about Amy. I hope you believe that.”

  At the mention of Amy, an image of Grace’s sister came rushing back to her, reminding her of exactly why she was here. What she had to do.

  “If you really mean that,” she said softly, almost regretfully, “then I shouldn’t have to convince you to help me find her killer.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to find him,” Ethan said, his gaze suddenly alert as he searched the darkness around them. “I think he’ll find us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out there right now, watching us.”

  Grace’s gaze shot over her shoulder at his words. She shivered as her hand tightened on her purse, the urge to remove her weapon almost overpowering. “Do you really think so?”

  He shrugged in response.

  Grace released a long breath. “Look, you’ve really spooked me. Are you sure you’ll be all right here alone?”

  “He won’t make another move tonight. It’s too soon.”

  She frowned. “How do you know that?”

  Ethan gazed down at her, bewilderment flashing across his features. “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how I know that.”

  ETHAN WATCHED AS Grace eased her car around the circular drive, then pulled onto the main street. Within moments, the taillights disappeared from his sight, and only then did he walk back into the house, locking the courtyard gate and resetting the alarm behind him. He climbed the staircase again, and for several seconds, stood at the edge of the junglelike room, reluctant to enter.

  A deep uneasiness came over him, but he tried to tell himself it was only natural. He had amnesia. He’d almost been killed tonight, and the sister of the woman he’d been having an affair with had all but implicated him in her murder. Why wouldn’t he feel uneasy?

  But it was more than that. Something other than that. He wondered if his discomfort had more to do with Grace herself than with her accusations, or even the bizarre situation in which he found himself.

  She wasn’t telling him everything. He knew instinctively that there was more to Grace Donovan than she’d let on, but Ethan had no idea why he felt this way. He’d seen the grief in her eyes, the pain in her expression when she talked about her sister. He was sure her emotions were genuine, and yet his earlier doubts about her came rushing back. Her reaction was not that of a woman who had just learned of her sister’s murder. The guilt, the anger, the obsession to find a loved one’s killer were emotions that would come much later.

  So what was going on here? Why did Ethan have the feeling that he was a pawn in some very dangerous game?

  Was Grace a player, or was she, too, a pawn?

  She had explained her relationship with Amy. They hadn’t been close. A man had come between them, and they hadn’t spoken in years until recently. Until Amy had contacted Grace and told her of the affair with Ethan.

  He foraged his mind for a memory of Amy Cole, some remnant of his feelings for her. But there was nothing, and for some reason he couldn’t explain, he was almost certain that she’d never meant anything to him.

  So was that the kind of person he was? The kind of man who would use a woman for whatever he wanted or needed from her and then discard her without a second thought? Had he done that with his wife?

  The cloying scent of the orchids made his head hurt. Ethan hurried out of the room, seeking the shelter of the study he’d found earlier. He didn’t want to think about his wife or Amy Cole, and since he didn’t remember either of them, it was easy enough to put them out of his mind.

  Grace Donovan, however, was a different matter.

  At the thought of her, Ethan’s uneasiness returned full force, and suddenly he realized where his discomfort was coming from, at least in part. He was attracted to her. He had been from the first.

  She wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but she was attractive in her own way, and definitely intriguing. And those eyes...

  Those eyes could melt a man’s soul. He was sure of it.

  Her figure wasn’t tall and thin, but lush and womanly, and when he’d grabbed her earlier in the hospital parking lot, he’d felt the hardness of her muscles, the toned grace of her body.

  If push came to shove, he knew she could hold her own, and that made her all the more alluring. She didn’t need taking care of. She didn’t need protecting, and that should have rubbed Ethan’s male ego the wrong
way, but instead it piqued his interest. Made him wonder things he had no business wondering. He was still a married man, even if he couldn’t remember his own wife.

  He’d left the light on in the office earlier, and now as he entered the room, he tried to put Grace out of his mind and concentrate on his surroundings. There had to be something in here that would trigger a memory for him. Something that would give him a clue as to what he’d been involved in. What had gotten Amy Cole killed.

  Slowly, he walked around the room, studying the framed diplomas and certificates that he’d only taken the time to glance at earlier. He’d been educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He was a board-certified plastic surgeon. He’d received dozens of awards and citations, and had corresponded with dignitaries all over the world.

  Among the framed letters on the wall was one from the president of the United States, commending him on his work with underprivileged children born with disfigurements.

  Ethan studied his hands. Did he really have the ability to wield a scalpel, the power to change people’s lives? Children’s lives?

  Could that ability and power, all that training and instinct, be subdued by amnesia?

  According to the letters and articles, Dr. Ethan Hunter was not only a brilliant surgeon, but a renowned humanitarian. But if he was such a great guy, why the hell was someone trying to kill him?

  One whole side of the office contained dozens of framed newspaper articles written about him, but only one carried a photograph. For some reason he couldn’t define, Ethan had been reluctant to do more than glance at the picture earlier. He knew it was a photo of him. In spite of the battered condition of his face now, he’d recognized the features. The brown eyes, the dark hair, the angular jaw and chin were the same ones he’d seen in the mirror in Grace’s car.

  And yet...

  The man in the picture was him and it wasn’t.

  He couldn’t explain it any better than that. He didn’t feel connected in any way with the image in the photo, and the moment he’d seen it earlier, a dark haze had descended over him. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to compel himself to take that picture from the wall and study it more closely.

  He removed it now and carried it with him to the desk, snapping on a brass lamp as he sat down. Placing the picture before him, he fought off a wave of dizziness as he forced himself to look down at his likeness, to study and absorb his own features.

  In the photograph, he was standing in front of a white, one-story building with a lush, tropical backdrop. An older, shorter man with a thin, black mustache was in the picture, too, and Ethan’s arm was draped over the man’s shoulder. They both wore khaki pants and white shirts, both were smiling for the camera, but there was something about Ethan’s expression...

  Something about the other man’s eyes...

  He was frightened, Ethan thought suddenly. In spite of the smile and the reassuring arm Ethan had thrown over his shoulder, the mustached man looked scared half to death.

  Shaken, Ethan forced himself to read the accompanying article concerning the reopening of the clinic in the Mexican jungle after a half dozen or so banditos had destroyed the place once they’d raided it for drugs. The other man in the picture was a Dr. Javier Salizar, a pediatrician who worked full-time at the clinic and who had been on duty the night the banditos attacked.

  Fortunately, there had been no overnight patients at the hospital. Dr. Salizar had been all alone, and he’d been forced to flee into the jungle and hide until the terrorists had gathered what they wanted and left, burning the clinic to the ground in their wake.

  According to the article, Ethan had provided his own personal funds to restore the clinic, and had used his own hands to help rebuild it. He’d spent months of his time getting the clinic operational once again, and the people in the surrounding villages revered him almost like a god.

  Ethan didn’t understand why, but the article deeply disturbed him. He sensed something bad had happened at that clinic. Something had made him flee, like Dr. Salizar, into the jungle, but not because he had been pursued by banditos.

  In his dream, Ethan hadn’t seen the men chasing him, but he had known just the same that they wore uniforms. They carried guns. He had almost been killed by the Mexican authorities, but Ethan had no idea why.

  All he knew was that in some dark and dangerous way, he was tied to that clinic. To that jungle. And the killers that had pursued him in Mexico had followed him here to Houston. To his home.

  Hands trembling, Ethan put the picture away and rifled through the paperwork on top of the desk. He turned on the laptop computer and perused the directories, but the files meant nothing. The case studies, medical notations, and patient consultations may as well have been written in a foreign language. Nothing clicked for him. Nothing at all.

  Why didn’t anything in this office trigger a memory? Why couldn’t he remember being a doctor?

  Almost frantically, Ethan searched through the desk. At the bottom of a drawer, a gold frame caught his eye. It had been stuffed face-down under a stack of folders. He pulled it out and stared down at a picture of a woman.

  This was no snapshot or newspaper clipping, but an elegant studio shot with lighting that complimented the woman’s ebony eyes and her full, ruby lips. Thick, glossy black hair had been pulled back to reveal a face as beautiful as it was flawless.

  Movie-star glamorous, the woman stood in front of a grand piano, wearing a strapless black evening gown and opera-length, black gloves. Her body was thin, but incredibly shapely. The word that came instantly to mind was statuesque.

  She wasn’t smiling for the camera, but her lips were parted seductively and her eyes were heavy-lidded and sensual. At the bottom of the picture, scrawled in red ink, were the words: To my husband, with much love and gratitude, Pilar.

  So this was Ethan’s wife. He knew instinctively she’d had the picture made especially for him, and he’d put it away in a drawer face-down.

  ...the acid...your car...

  Ethan stared at the photograph for a very long time, wondering how long they’d been married and what had gone wrong between them. She was an exquisite woman on the surface, but somehow her utter perfection left him cold.

  Did I do this to you? he wondered. Did I make you into this... work of art?

  A work of art without a soul, something told him.

  He thought of Grace suddenly, of the unevenness of her features, the short, red hair, the lips that were neither lush nor thin, but in his mind, just right. Her light blue eyes held more life, more mystery, than this woman’s ever could.

  Disturbed by his thoughts, Ethan put the picture away and closed the drawer. It wasn’t fair to give a woman he didn’t remember unfavorable attributes in order to justify his attraction to Grace. And that was exactly what he’d been doing.

  Had he also tried to justify his affair with Amy Cole? Had there been other women in his marriage?

  What kind of husband would treat his wife in such a manner?

  What kind of doctor would be pursued through the Mexican jungle by the policía?

  Ethan wondered if he really wanted to know the answer to any of those questions.

  GRACE CLOSED AND locked the door of her hotel room, then slung her jacket toward a chair. Flopping down on the bed, she kicked off her shoes, leaned back against the headboard, then removed her cell phone from her purse and punched in a number she knew by heart.

  In spite of the late hour, a woman with a throaty voice answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “It’s Grace.”

  There was a brief pause before the woman asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Amy’s dead, Myra.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What the hell happened tonight?” Grace exploded. “What went wrong?”

  “Everything. God, it’s all a mess. Hunter wasn’t supposed to come back to Houston for at least another two weeks. We would have had plenty of time to set up a sting, but now...” Myra Temple trail
ed off while she lit up a cigarette. Grace heard her exhale angrily. “As it is, we’ve rushed the whole operation. We’re down here without proper backup or support, and we screwed up. It happens.”

  “Yes, but this particular screwup cost a woman her life,” Grace said angrily. Myra seemed more concerned about the potential damage to the operation than about Amy’s death, but that should have come as no surprise. The woman was coldly and consummately professional. Nothing got in her way, and until tonight, Grace had thought she was becoming exactly like her mentor. She’d thought she had the guts to do whatever had to be done to bring a killer to justice.

  But after tonight...

  “Amy should have been under surveillance. Why wasn’t she?”

  “She was,” Myra snapped. “But somehow she managed to slip through. My guess is that after speaking with us yesterday, she panicked. She had second thoughts about what she’d done, and so she got in touch with Dr. Hunter, probably by cell phone, and warned him that the Feds would be waiting for him when he landed here in Houston. Then she devised a way to get out of her apartment without us knowing.”

  “How?” Grace demanded.

  “Maybe she donned a wig and borrowed her neighbor’s car. How the hell should I know? It doesn’t help matters that these idiots in the field office down here don’t know their butts from a hole in the ground. We can’t count on much help in that regard. In any case, Amy appears to have been a lot smarter than I gave her credit for.” Myra’s tone was a mixture of disgust and admiration.

  “So how did Eth—Dr. Hunter manage to get away from us? You were watching the airport yourself.”

  A loud silence. “He didn’t land at Bush Intercontinental Airport,” Myra finally said testily, clearly annoyed by Grace’s veiled criticism. “I guarantee you, I would have recognized him if he had. We’re checking all the private airfields in the area now, but he undoubtedly chartered a plane. Sometime during the flight, he contacted Amy again, and they made plans to meet at the clinic.”

  Something in her tone made Grace’s heart thud against her chest. “Myra, you don’t think—”