Her Forgotten Betrayal(32)

Even when they’d been too young to do anything about it—she the beautiful daughter of a man who owned half the mountain, and he the rough-and-tumble son of the town drunk, running wild together through the woods where they’d found each other one fateful spring afternoon—there’d been something intense, almost desperate about their bond. There’d been no stopping their relationship from blooming into more over the years—much more, screw the fact that Shaw’s father and brother disapproved.

“You already seemed skittish enough about having me here,” he reminded her, holding tight to his growing response to the passion-filled memories she’d dug up.

“Because something about you felt…”

“Wrong?” he asked at her hesitation.

The best part of Cole had died the day she’d sided with her bastard of a father against him. He’d walked away from their mountain and never looked back. Not because of Old Man Cassidy’s threats, but because he couldn’t face Shaw and hear from her own mouth the piece-of-crap reasons why she’d turned her back on him. Reasons that didn’t matter anymore, now that she could no longer remember them.

“No. Not wrong.” She walked back to her father’s chair and sat, the cruise ship–size desk now between them. “You felt…familiar but different, and I had no idea what that meant.”

“Different?”

“Than all the rest of this.” She waved at the office and the mansion beyond its paneled walls. “In the parlor last night, in the kitchen, and finally in here. None of it felt real or personal before.”

“Before?” He sounded like a damn parrot, repeating everything back to her, but they were making unprecedented progress. He didn’t want to underestimate—or miss—a single thread of what was returning to her.

“Before I woke and found you here, acting, feeling as if you belonged with me, when I could have sworn we’d never met, let alone been…”

“Intimate?”

It was too tame a word for what they’d shared. He was jumping off a dangerous cliff, taking them further down the road to exploring their teenage love affair. And he was dragging Shaw with him. But taking her in his arms again, an impulse he’d given in to after her impossibly arousing kisses in the hallway, had jump-started her mind this time. What else was waiting there, on the tip of her awareness, poised to secure her safety and her legal footing if only he could shake the memories loose?

No way could he back off now. If anything, he had to push harder. Guilt over how much he was keeping from her churned in the pit of his stomach. But their twenty-four-hour grace period would be up too soon for him to take a lighter hand.

“I trusted you.” Her unfocused gaze told him she was once again seeing the past rather than the world around them. “I was afraid of…someone. And you were going to face him for me, with me, and we kissed, and you promised you’d never leave me.”

“I didn’t.” He braced his feet apart and snapped his hands behind his back, military style.

At ease.

Like hell.

“You didn’t promise me?” she asked.

“I didn’t leave.”

She seemed to shrink in size behind the desk that was shielding her. “But we haven’t seen each other for how many years?”

“Fifteen.”

“Why?” She was rubbing where the bullet had damn near taken her head off.

“Why do you think you’re recalling this now?” he asked, the answer to his question far more valuable to her recovery. “Does your head hurt because you’re remembering?”

“I don’t know.” She curled into the chair’s aged leather, her wariness deepening to brooding. “And yes, sometimes my head hurts when I try too hard to make sense of things. At the moment, everything seems to be hurting.”

Cole retreated to the couch, cautious of her pain level. Her doctors had warned that the debilitating migraines she’d experienced since the shooting could return. She needed a bit of space. Some breathing room. They both did.

He couldn’t afford to ignore the price tag that came with each new brush with her past. His job was to move her closer to being healthy, not to trigger another breakdown. They’d mine for more memories, but not until she was ready to dig deeper. There was nothing to gain from her burning out just as they were getting started.

Good thing there was a reason he’d been grateful she’d led him toward her father’s study. First chance he got, he’d planned on checking it out. He doubted she had any conscious recollection of the possible weak point to the mansion’s security that lurked just over her shoulder.