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  But, even with the protective shield of his lips still on hers, a sudden doubt slithered through her. Had she really changed, deep down and permanently? Or was it only a ‘lipstick smear” of change, surface deep, destined to vanish when her memory returned?

  “Jace,” she said huskily when he finally lifted his head, “have you ever kissed me before?”

  “No.”

  “I’m glad you did now.”

  “So am I. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?” He kissed her again, lightly this time, as if aware of danger here.

  Katy stared at the door after Jace closed it quietly behind him, and an astonishing thought blazed across her mind: she was falling in love with him.

  She leaped back from that conclusion as quickly as she had plunged toward it. It was too soon for love, much too soon! She had known Jace only a few days, far too brief a time for any thought of love.

  Yet she instantly stumbled over that sensible argument because, technically, it wasn’t true. She had known him much longer. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind as her thoughts spiraled in a disorienting spin that tangled forgotten past and bewildering present.

  Shakily she refilled the cup with lukewarm coffee and gulped it down.

  The real problem was, she had known herself much too briefly.

  Yet even as she steadied herself with that rational, level-headed conclusion, one truth burned through the logic and soared her spirits with sweet possibility: she could fall in love with Jace. Oh, yes, she could!

  Chapter 9

  Katy was in her bedroom when the phone rang next morning. Mrs. L. was outside industriously weeding her small garden, so Katy hobbled to the phone on the table beside the bed.

  “May I speak to Kat, please?” A male voice, unfamiliar. Not surprising, she thought wryly, because almost no voice was familiar. A small frisson of excitement brought a dampness to her palms. Someone out of her past who knew her, who might jog her memory?

  “This is Kat,” she said, deciding not to bother explaining her small name alteration at the moment. She waited expectantly for him to identify himself.

  But what she got was silence, then, “Kat?” spoken in that same incredulous tone that had crackled in Jace’s voice the first time she spoke with him. “Kat?”

  She found what was beginning to feel like a standard male reaction to her name more annoying than amusing. If he was calling her, why was he so astonished when she answered?

  “Yes, Kat. And this is?”

  “Your voice sounds odd.”

  She could explain that she’d been in an accident, or that last night’s chilly escapade had left her with a scratchy throat, but with no idea who he was she instead said cautiously, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

  “C’mon, Kat, it’s Barry.”

  He sounded exasperated, as if he expected her to recognize not only the name but the voice as well, and she didn’t recognize either, of course. “Barry who?” she asked tentatively.

  “Alexander, Kit. Barry Alexander.”

  Her spine stiffened at his sarcastic tone, but perhaps it was justified if he was someone she should know and didn’t. She didn’t want to tell a stranger too much, and yet, from the way he spoke, he wasn’t a stranger, and she had to offer some explanation. Cautiously, editing the situation down to skeletal facts, she said, “I’m sorry. I was in an accident recently, and sometimes things slip my mind.”

  “What kind of things?” His voice changed, as if that information had suddenly wired it with electricity. She heard a small rustle of movement, perhaps a shifting of the phone to his other ear.

  “Well, like who you are,” she admitted.

  “You don’t remember me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is this some kind of trick, Kat, pretending I’m someone you never heard of?” he demanded, suspicion now foremost in his voice. “Where have you been for the last few months?”

  “No, it isn’t a trick.” Again, the similarity to Jace’s reaction sent a shiver of surprise and uneasiness through her. Because she once had tried to trick Jace, of course, with her story about a prowler. Had she also done something unscrupulous to Barry Alexander? Warily she said, “I left the ranch to do some thinking, and I was in an accident and now I have a bit of a memory problem.”

  Charged silence, as if he were processing that through some mental maze. “How much of a problem? What do you remember?”

  “Not much, actually,” she admitted. Mrs. L. wouldn’t approve, but Katy didn’t like tap-dancing around the truth and abruptly decided simply to come out with the flat fact. “The doctor calls it amnesia. I don’t remember anything.”

  “The accident, did it change your looks?”

  The shallowness of the blunt question shocked her. She’d just admitted she had amnesia, couldn’t even remember him, and he was concerned about her looks? “I do have this large, rather unflattering cast on my leg, but I assume it isn’t permanently attached.”

  Another silence, this one not so much charged as puzzled by the tart comment. Then a tardy laugh, as if he finally realized she was being facetious or sarcastic.

  “Okay, I’m coming out there, Kat.”

  “No!” she objected with instant alarm. “Don’t do that.”

  He ignored the rebuff. “I’ll catch a flight to San Francisco later today and rent a car there, or get a commuter flight up to— What was the name of that town we flew into that other time?”

  She dropped to the edge of the bed, surprised. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Of course. We flew out together a few months before your parents were killed, shortly after you joined my agency. Oh, I remember now. Redding, that’s the name of the town. But I’ll probably arrive in the middle of the night, so I’ll get a motel room and see you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Wait.” He must have been a good friend if she’d brought him to the ranch, but she didn’t know him, and she felt only panic at the idea of this disembodied voice descending on her. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  He laughed, sounding at ease and comfortable now. “I’m in New York, of course, and I am, among other things, your fiancé.”

  He hung up, leaving her staring at the phone.

  She grabbed her crutches and clomped outside. Mrs. L. was kneeling beside a mound of tiny carrots she’d thinned from the row of feathery-green sprouts. The garden smelled of fresh- turned damp earth, rich and fertile, but now Katy barely noticed the lush scents. She simply blurted out her question.

  “Mrs. L., do I have a fiancé named Barry?”

  Mrs. L. leaned back against her heels and with a gloved hand brushed a wisp of gray hair away from her nose. She looked up from beneath the floppy hat that shaded her eyes. “I don’t know, Sweetie. I suppose you could have. I believe a man named Barry came with you to visit your folks.” She smiled. “But I have a hard time keeping track of your fiancés. After the second or third one I decided I wouldn’t get excited until I actually saw you in a wedding gown.” She paused reflectively. “Although, come to think of it, this Barry is probably the one who was here shortly before you left the ranch. And he called a time or two afterwards.”

  “He didn’t mention being here a second time.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe I’m mistaken, then,” she said vaguely. She added another handful of slender, golden-orange carrots to the neat pile.

  “He’s coming again. He said he’d arrive tomorrow.”

  “He is?” Mrs. L. stood and brushed dirt off her knees. She looked mildly alarmed. “Do you think that’s wise, Sweetie, letting him come here?”

  “I didn’t ‘let him.’ He said he was coming and hung up. What do you remember about him?”

  Mrs. L. shook her head. “Not much. Tall and blond, I think. Good looking. They always are! He may have been a photographer or something like that.”

  “He said something about my joining his agency.”

  “Oh, Katy, th
is does worry me! If he’s your fiancé, he’s bound to know you well enough to see that you have memory problems, and if he spreads that gossip to people in the modeling business in New York—“

  “Actually, he already knows,” Katy admitted. “I had to tell him when I couldn’t remember him on the phone. But he surely isn’t going to spread gossip if he’s my fiancé.”

  She stumbled over the word, feeling it collide with the bloom of her tentative new feelings for Jace. If she was engaged to Barry Alexander, she must be in love with him. Except that it was the woman she used to be, the old Kat Cavanaugh, who was in love with Barry. And she felt only an uneasy blend of curiosity and dismay at the prospect of his arrival.

  Then another thought slammed into her, a shocking and appalling thought. Before her injuries, she was engaged to Barry Alexander. Yet at the same time she’d also tried to tempt Jace into a temporary fling. What kind of woman was she?

  ***

  Jace and Joe came over that evening, with two boys whom Jace introduced as Mike and Ramsey from the school. Mike was a big, shy redhead with freckles, Ramsey a small-for-his-age, African-American boy with a wooden earring and a mischievous smile.

  All four males gathered around the disabled convertible as if it were some fabulous, newfound treasure, and words such as carburetor and air cleaner and battery terminals drifted up from the four heads bent under the raised hood. Greasy hands occasionally reached for tools on the nearby workbench, and once Ramsey, in spite of the slight limp with which he walked, slid with youthful agility under the car. Katy, sitting on the steps that descended from the house to the concrete floor of the garage, appreciated their rapt involvement in her vehicle’s problem, but she also had a grumpy suspicion that she could have been wallowing in pneumonia after the chilly escape and they wouldn’t have been nearly as concerned or interested. Although once Jace did glance up and give her a friendly wink.

  The heads finally emerged, and Joe slid into the driver’s seat to turn the key. The engine roared to life and purred smoothly. After a few more minutes correcting the problem with the stubborn convertible top, Joe pronounced the vehicle good as new. Kay lumbered to her feet, never a graceful procedure with the cast.

  “Thanks, to all of you,” she said, making sure to include the two budding young mechanics. “And what do I owe you?”

  “Coffee or milk and more pie?” Jace suggested.

  “I wasn’t in a pie-making mood today, but Mrs. L. always has some of her marvelous cookies on hand.”

  The men and boys trooped inside and, because of their generally greasy aura, stood to gulp the cookies and drinks, filling the kitchen with a rich masculinity, scents of grease and oil, and more talk on mechanical subjects. When they started out the back way, Katy touched Jace’s arm and asked if she could talk to him for a minute. He stayed behind while the others went on.

  “I hope you didn’t mind my bringing the boys along. We don’t have a formal mechanics training program, but we try to help the boys develop their individual interests whenever we can.”

  “Bringing them along was fine.”

  “Would you like to go to the river with us again in a day or two?”

  Katy didn’t give her news any preliminary small talk. She just blurted it out. “Jace, I just found out today that I have a fiancé.”

  “You do?” Jace blinked in surprise and took a step backward, as if suddenly on guard.

  ‘I never mentioned him?”

  “No.”

  She ruefully filled in his unspoken thoughts. “But just because I didn’t tell you about him doesn’t mean he didn’t exist. Mrs. L. says he was here not long before I left the ranch.”

  “Could be. I wouldn’t necessarily have known he was here if he arrived after our wine-throwing incident.”

  “He’s coming again. Tomorrow.”

  Two crease lines formed between Jace’s heavy brows, but his comment was carefully noncommittal. “That should be interesting.”

  “Sometimes I feel as if I’ve blundered into someone else’s body and life, like some weird science-fiction story! I’m engaged to him, and I don’t even know him. What am I going to do?”

  Jace put his arms around her, but with much more caution than when he had kissed her the night before. It was a friendly gesture of comfort, no more. He was, she knew, recognizing the fact that if she had a fiancé, the situation between them was considerably changed. “Don’t panic. Maybe seeing him will be just what you need to bring everything back to you.”

  “I’m not sure I want to remember everything! From what I know so far, I don’t think I like myself very well. I don’t appear to be a particularly admirable person. Who knows what kind of man I might be engaged to!”

  Jace didn’t argue that point. But his arms tightened fractionally when he said almost roughly, “If he causes problems or gives you any trouble, you call me, okay?”

  She leaned back and smiled up at him, still apprehensive but not so panicky. “Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you.”

  ***

  Katy planted herself in a chair with a clear view of the driveway. A cool dampness from a night of rain hung in the air, and clouds still lingered low in the sky. She nervously flipped through an old Good Housekeeping magazine with her mother’s name on the mailing label, then a Better Homes and Gardens, without really seeing either. About eleven o’clock a white, midsize car pulled into the driveway.

  She watched, too curious not to be fascinated as the man slid out of the car. Her fiancé. Tall and blonde, as Mrs. L. had said. And yes, definitely very good looking. Angular face, tanned complexion, dark sunglasses. His build was long-torsoed and lean rather than ruggedly brawny like Jace’s. He closed the car door almost cautiously and paused with an odd alertness, as if sniffing for danger as he inspected the house and surrounding meadow and forest. He wore gray slacks and a black turtleneck, and there was an air of urban sophistication about him as he moved toward the house. A man who’d feel comfortable in a ritzy restaurant with a haughty maitre d’, and with a woman who liked limousines and three-hundred-dollar haircuts. Was it something to do with him, she wondered, that triggered that I’ve-forgotten-something-vital feeling that still nagged her?

  She opened the front door when he reached the deck. He stopped short when he saw her, as if he’d just slammed into an invisible wall. He yanked off the sunglasses.

  By now Katy had lost much of her self-consciousness about her lack of hair and seldom thought about it. But with Barry staring at her she was acutely aware that it was still little more than a see-through haze of blond velvet on her scalp. And the last time he’d seen her she’d had that lush golden mane of the magazine photos.

  “Kat, you didn’t tell me! I know you said you were in an accident and had your leg in a cast, but you didn’t say anything about this.” He gestured accusingly toward the missing mane. “It’ll take years to grow out.” He sounded stunned, aghast, as if the lack of hair made her something less than a whole woman.

  “I guess this gives new meaning to the phrase having a bad hair day, doesn’t it?” she snapped.

  He stopped short in the process of circling her as if she were some defective new species. He was big and blond and good looking, but he obviously had all the sense of humor of a frozen-faced male mannequin. He finally managed a smile.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just something of a shock.” He reached out, apparently intending to take her hands in his but couldn’t because she gripped the crutches fiercely. He cupped his palms over her shoulders instead. “How are you, Kat?”

  She resisted a desire to step away. This was, after all, her fiancé. “Katy,” she corrected. “I go by the name of Katy now.”

  “Kat . . . Katy . . . you honestly don’t remember me, not even when I’m standing right here?” His blue eyes probed hers as if trying to see beneath the blue of her own eyes.

  “No. I’m sorry.” She wanted to know how long he intended to stay, but it seemed rude
to ask. She detoured the question by asking tentatively, “Do you have a suitcase or overnight bag?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll run out to the car in a minute and get it.”

  Which meant he intended to stay longer than a midday lunch. She swallowed and rushed into something that she was determined to get out of the way immediately, before any awkward misunderstandings arose.

  “Barry, I don’t know what kind of relationship we had in the past.” She paused, determined, but flustered with the prospect of having to plunge into details because he was looking at her so blankly. “I mean, I don’t know how . . . intimate our relationship was.”

  The blank look lasted a moment longer, and then she had to give him credit for a certain amount of insight. He might be short on sense of humor, but he wasn’t totally insensitive or obtuse. “Of course. I understand perfectly.”

  Which was a relief, even though it didn’t set her mind at ease about what their prior relationship may have been.

  He carried his suitcase in from the car, and Mrs. L. showed him to an upstairs bedroom. He returned a few minutes later, dark hair freshly damp from a quick shower, and sat beside Katy on the ivory leather sofa. He smiled, a white flash that was as handsomely impressive as his angular face.

  “I don’t know quite what to say, since you don’t remember me.”

  “I suppose we need to get acquainted all over again?”

  “Yes! Exactly.” He picked up her left hand and caressed her taut knuckles lightly with his fingertips, his eyes holding hers. Then, apparently feeling something amiss, he glanced down. “Kat, where’s your ring?”