Her Forgotten Betrayal(24)

She glanced at her electric clock on the table beside her bed. He’d been gone for ten minutes. She closed her eyes and ran her hands through Esme’s fur, her cat contentedly drifting back to sleep at the foot of the bed now that the evening’s entertainment was winding down. But whether or not Esmeralda was at Shaw’s side for the rest of the night, maybe for longer, Shaw would no longer feel alone in this.

I’ll stick as close to you as I can…

And as she thought of the sizzling warmth of him—his strong body, strong will, dark coloring, forceful determination, and those bright blue eyes—close seemed to be exactly where her subconscious wanted Cole Marinos to be.

“Stop it!” she chastised herself. “Stop romanticizing things into something they’re not. Be grateful for the company and make the most of it. Don’t screw this up, Shaw.”

When he came back, she wasn’t going to cling to him the way she had when he’d left. She was stronger than that. At least, she was determined to be.

She’d endured her solitary exile on High Lake so far, and she could continue to do so. She’d been told she was a hard-as-nails career woman—even if she didn’t feel much like one at the moment—with advanced degrees in both business and nuclear physics. With every ounce of energy she’d regained, she’d been searching this place for clues to her life, as thoroughly as she’d like to think she’d researched projects at Cassidy Global. Talking to Cole was merely another way for her to ease into her memories.

She was going to take him up on his offer, and then hope that borrowing his memories would conjure up some of her own. And she was going to keep her romantic notions to herself.

Her doctors said doing too much might trigger more panic attacks, like the ones she’d endured after the shooting. Well, she hadn’t done anything of consequence since she’d moved into this place, and she was having freak-outs anyway. How much more damage could spending time with her neighbor do? Hang her stress level.

She slammed closed the photo album she’d started flipping through when she’d first come upstairs. She dropped it back to the pile she’d stacked up beside the bed. It contained images from the years just before her brother, Sebastian, disappeared from her family’s pictorial history. The final few pages in the album held only one or two unsmiling photos of her and the disapproving man her father had evidently been. Then nothing.

She had no idea why she’d dug out that particular album tonight. But after cleaning up the silverware in the kitchen, she’d felt an almost frantic need to stare at pictures from what had evidently been some of her last days on High Lake Mountain.

She’d been told dispassionately by Dawson as he’d driven her here that her brother, just a few years older than she’d been, had died in his late teens. Her father had passed five years later, leaving her alone in the world, since her mother had died in childbirth the day Shaw was born. Dawson had suggested she try to focus on her High Lake memories first. It might be a way to ease into recalling more important things about now.

The flashes of insight she’d experienced since meeting her childhood friend, Cole, certainly seemed promising. And then there were the odd changes in her nightmare after running into him, the few bits she could remember. Had there been a fire of some kind up here? Would Cole know anything more about that than she did? She pressed a hand to her stomach. Just contemplating talking with him about it made her feel sick. Wondering how long it would take for him to come back, or if he might change his mind and not come back, made the queasiness worse.

She paced across her bedroom, then back, analyzing everything she didn’t know, going over every disconnected detail, grasping for clues. Despite her vow to get her emotions under control, her chest tightened with the same anxiety that had sent her fleeing into the woods earlier.

“Knock it off!” She whipped off her robe and nightgown, and tossed them onto the unmade bed beside a now-snoozing Esme. She stomped to her chest of drawers for underwear, then to the closet. “Find something to wear that doesn’t scream ‘damsel in distress’ or ‘please hold me’ before the poor man comes back.”

They’d been friends. He hadn’t said more, which meant there wasn’t any more to say. Why on earth did it suddenly feel as if she needed him beside her or she’d never get through this ordeal?

The problem was, every time Cole drew close or looked at her the way he kept studying her, as if he wanted to know every intimate thing she was thinking, it felt like more. Just being with him, she’d sensed more of herself coming back. She kept feeling them, together, in an increasingly un-friends-like way. Her body even now was growing heavy with an awareness that had nothing to do with the last few hours, making her wonder what their friendship had once meant to her.