Dare (27 page)

Harley

“He’s not your fiancé,” my father said, the words swirling around in my head as the air was sucked out of the room. “In fact, you had a restraining order issued against him that expired just a day before the accident.”

I stared at his familiar features, trying to make sense of what he was saying. I knew him, knew every inch of his face. There were a few new wrinkles that weren’t there the last time I remembered seeing him, but he was still my father. And my mom, sitting beside me holding my hand, was the same as she had always been. And then there was the man standing just inside the room, a shadow darkening his handsome features. Less than ten minutes ago I was kissing that man, touching him. Convinced that he was the man I pledged to marry months ago. But the thing is, I don’t remember him. In fact, I remember very little about the last three years of my life. More than I did when I woke from a medically induced coma, but not enough.

I was in an accident weeks ago. Xander told me I’d been jogging when I was hit by a car that forced me into a tree. I had an injury to my head, and I was in a coma for fifteen days before I finally woke up with a cast on my leg, several broken ribs, a broken clavicle, and the last three years of my life completely erased.

I woke to an impossibly handsome man staring at me. Xander Boggs. My fiancé.

I had no idea who he was.

He told me we were in love and I’d lived in this house with him and we were planning our wedding when the accident happened.

Well, he
said
we were planning our wedding. He never actually said when or where or how. In fact, he never told me any details about the wedding itself.

“I don’t understand.”

My mom patted my hand. “I know it’s confusing, sweetheart. That’s why we’re here. We want to take you home.”

My father knelt in front of me. “You’ll be safer back in Texas with us.”

“Is that what you’re worried about? That I’ll hurt her in some way?” Xander asked.

“You already have,” my father said. “How dare you convince her that your engagement was still on!”

“The doctor—”

“Don’t talk to me about doctors,” my father said, standing to confront Xander. “You never should have been at the hospital in the first place. Why didn’t you call us? Why didn’t you let her family know what was happening?”

“I tried. You were on a cruise—”

“You could have called our attorney!”

“And I could have hired a pilot to fly out to your cruise ship and bring you back.”

The sarcasm dripping from Xander’s voice was so different from the man I’d been getting to know over the past week or so. I could see anger rushing over my father’s face, anger mixed with something that was a lot like hatred. I didn’t understand. If I was going to marry this man…

“Why was there a restraining order?”

Everyone turned to look at me, as though they’d forgotten I was in the room. My father almost smiled. My mom seemed a little chagrined. And Xander…the color drained from his face.

“Because he wouldn’t leave you alone,” my father announced.

“I was trying to convince her to come back to me.”

“You were harassing her!”

“I was romancing her.”

My father laughed, the sound bitter and darker than anything I’d ever heard come out of his mouth before. “You waited for her outside her place of work every day for two weeks. And then you parked outside her apartment and chased her into the building when she wouldn’t talk to you, breaking the glass on the security door when she managed to get away from you.”

None of this rang a bell for me. Yet, I could see from the look on Xander’s face that there was truth to it.

I may not remember him, but he had a surprisingly expressive face. And that face was telling me there was some truth to what my father was saying.

“You didn’t want to have anything to do with him, Harley,” my father said. “You wanted to finish your obligation to that art project, and then you were coming home. Your mother already had your bedroom all fixed up back at the house.”

I looked at my mom, and she nodded. “You were coming home at the end of the month.”

“I don’t understand,” I said again. “Why did we break up?”

I remembered our engagement, remembered lying in bed with him talking about the children we would have one day. He said a baseball team would be fine with him and I objected, insisting that two was a perfect number. I remembered that. And all the pictures he’d shown me…we seemed so happy in them all. We were always laughing, always smiling at each other. His arm was always around my shoulder, my waist, or his fingers intertwined with mine. I must have loved him.

Why would I leave him?

“He lied to you,” my mom said softly.

“That’s not it,” Xander said, crossing the room. However, my father grabbed his arm before he could come within six feet of me.

“Don’t touch her!”

Xander shoved my father’s shoulder. “This is my house. How dare you come in here and tell me how to behave with my fiancée!”

“She’s my daughter!”

They were seconds from blows. Xander’s hands were both balled into fists, my father’s hand still clamped on his arm. They were doing that thing that guys do when they’re trying to prove which is the dominate one, standing nose to nose, glaring at each other and waiting for the other to make the first move.

I could just see it. My father thought he was pretty tough, but Xander would flatten him with a single blow.

“Stop it!”

They both turned and looked at me, both looking a little ashamed of themselves. Xander stepped back, the anger immediately washing from his stance. He held up his hands to show that he meant no one any harm. My father, on the other hand, remained tense, his shoulders so tight I thought for a minute he might go after Xander and knock him out. But then my mother was at his side, whispering something in his ear.

“We should go,” my father said a moment later. “I’d like to get to the hotel before things get too crowded at the front desk.”

Xander backed away again. He buried his hands in the front of jeans again, standing back against the arch that led out into the entryway. He was watching me, his dark blue eyes intense. I was so confused; I wasn’t sure what to think. Yet, instinctively, I knew I couldn’t just go back to my life as if the last three years hadn’t happened. And if I was going to remember my life, I was going to have to stay with the one person who was a part of it every day for the last year.

“I’m not going with you, Daddy,” I said quietly.

You’d think I’d threatened to kill him the way my father spun on me.

“Excuse me?” he asked, his voice low. Dangerous.

People didn’t defy my father often. And when they did, they had better have a damn good reason for it. I knew that. Yet, I was doing it here and now.

“Harley,” my mother said softly, “don’t you think it would be better for you to come home? To go where you’re safe?”

“Why was I still in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t I at home before the accident?”

“Because you didn’t want to leave,” Xander said.

My father shot him a dark look, even as he came toward me with his hands extended.

“You didn’t come home because you had obligations here. But those are over now.”

I looked from my mother, to my father, to Xander, and back again. I didn’t know whom to trust. I mean, I remembered my parents, remembered leaving them when I went to college, remembered coming home frequently for visits—since I didn’t choose to go more than fifty miles from home for college. I remembered introducing them to Philip, my college boyfriend. I’d been excited that day, already looking into a future that clearly hadn’t happened, a life that should have unfolded with Xander instead, but didn’t for reasons I still didn’t understand. It was my life, yet I was so lost in it.

“If I’d wanted to go home, I’m sure I would have,” I said softly. “There’s a reason why I stayed, and I want to find out what that is.”

“Harley—”

My father began to object, but my mother took his arm and he stopped immediately. They stared at each other and shared some sort of communication that the rest of us couldn’t hear. It was that kind of closeness I had always wanted and that I must have thought I could find with Xander. I was engaged to him, right? I was going to marry him. I just couldn’t remember it. Staying here seemed to be a better option than leaving. If I left, I would likely never remember what happened these last few years.

And I wouldn’t know if breaking off the engagement to Xander was the right choice, or the wrong one.

This one time, I really hoped I was wrong.

Xander

I stood in the doorway and watched them leave, a part of me still unable to wrap my mind around the fact that she’d chosen me over her parents. Over her father. Harley had never stood up to her father, at least not in front of me. To see her do it now was like seeing a side of Harley I’d never known before.

She was changing, this Harley. She was no longer the girl I once knew. She was different. The jury was still out on whether it was a good different or a bad one.

I turned and found her back in her wheelchair, watching me from just inside the foyer.

“I suppose you have questions,” I said, as I slowly closed the door.

“And I’m hoping you have answers.”

I inclined my head slightly. “I hope so, too.”

I gestured for her to go back into the living room. She was getting around quite well in the wheelchair. Independent as ever, she wouldn’t let me help her much. That was a side of Harley to which I was very well accustomed. I followed her, wondering how much longer it would be before she was walking out the door, especially after physical therapy started.

“Where do you want to start?” I asked, as I slowly lowered myself to the couch.

Harley didn’t answer right away. She’d rolled herself to the back of the room and was staring out at the backyard. She’d always liked the view. I remembered when I first brought her to my house, she made a beeline for that back door and stood out on the patio, studying the lines of the garden and the pool as if she’d never seen a suburban backyard before. She didn’t even want to see the rest of the house. It was the artist in her, always looking for the perfect lines, the perfect vision. It was the first thing I fell in love with when I fell in love with her.

“Do you want to go outside?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

There was the question. It was the same thing she asked me three months ago.

“Why would you lie to me? Don’t you know what that does to me, to know that the one person who should have been most honest with me was the one who told me the biggest lie?”

I dragged my fingers through my hair. “It wasn’t exactly a lie.”

“You told me you were my fiancé, but we apparently called off the wedding months ago.”

That lies.

“Because you didn’t know who I was when you woke up. I didn’t think a long explanation about our relationship was really in order at the time.”

“But it’s been over a week. Don’t you think the time has arrived?”

I nodded slowly, as my mind moved over the time we’d spent together this past week. If we weren’t discussing the things she wanted to know, we were going to doctor appointments and discussing her recovery. There wasn’t exactly a lot of time to explain the intricacies of our relationship.

“You had the card I gave you that named me as your next of kin when the car hit you. You obviously wanted me there, wanted me to make decisions for you; otherwise, you would have taken it out of your fanny pack.”

She nodded. That clearly made sense to her even though I knew Harley. She likely left it there because she was too lazy to put forth the effort it would take to remember it existed, let alone replace it. The fact that the card still existed in her fanny pack didn’t mean anything—no matter how badly I wanted it to.

“When did we call off the wedding?”

Again I dragged my fingers through my hair. “Almost four months ago.”

Three months, three weeks, and four days to be exact.

“Why?”

And there was the rub. I still wasn’t quite sure. I knew she was angry with me, but I didn’t think what I’d done was bad enough for her to call off the wedding. But she did. And that was all that mattered, right?

“It was a week before the wedding. We went to the county courthouse to get our marriage license, and there was a snafu with the paperwork.”

Harley maneuvered her wheelchair so that she could face me. Her eyes were searching my face, looking for the truth in my words. I used to joke with her, tell her that her eyes were a natural lie detector. She thought I was joking, but it wasn’t as much a joke as an expression of fear. I could never lie to her, and that scared the crap out of me.

“What kind of snafu?”

I looked down at my hands where they were clutched between my legs. Funny how something that had seemed so inconsequential for so long was suddenly the most important thing in my life.

“I was married before. Years and years ago. And, for some reason, the divorce wasn’t coming up on their database when we went in for the marriage license. They wouldn’t issue it until we produced the original divorce decree.”

“But you were divorced?”

“Long before I ever met you, Harley.”

A small frown marred her beautiful face, threatening to break my heart. I wanted to touch her, but I was afraid that after everything that had happened today, she wouldn’t appreciate it very much.

“Why would that upset me so much?”

“Because we’d never talked about it. Because of what Philip had done to you.”

She nodded slowly, as she ran her hands over the top of her cast. I knew she was still having a significant amount of pain in her leg, and I also knew it was time for her pain meds. I could see the pain in her eyes; I could see her wrestling with her need to know what she’d forgotten and her need to deal with her physical health. I was hoping health would win out, but then she looked at me and I could see that it wouldn’t.

“I still don’t understand,” she said, that frown still dancing over her face. “I remember you proposing. I remember how happy I was. Why would your past be such an issue?”

“Let me take you to your room, give you your pills. We can talk about this later.”

She shook her head. “I want to talk about it now.”

“Harley, you’re clearly in pain—”

“I want to know why I just defied my parents, why I need to stay here. If you can’t tell me, I can go to them and I’m sure they’ll tell me their side of things…”

I sat back, biting my tongue to keep from saying what I wanted to say. It wouldn’t do to piss her off right now, especially since I didn’t know how she would respond. But I also wasn’t entirely sure that dumping the truth on her like this was good, either. The doctor had said to let her memory come back slowly, to only tell her what she needed to know.

Did she need to know this?

“Fine. I’ll go—”

“No,” I said, grabbing the edge of her wheelchair as she tried to roll past me. “I’ll tell you.”

She stared at me, that old, defiant Harley back in her eyes. I took a deep breath, releasing her chair and pressing my hands together again.

“When you and I began seeing each other, you were extremely reluctant. Philip broke your heart, and you didn’t trust many people. Then I come marching into your life, this cocky person from Los Angeles, and I was the last person you were likely to trust, so it took a while before you would even go out with me, let alone let yourself care about me. We didn’t even sleep together…” I hesitated, watching her face closely for her reaction. She seemed okay, so I continued. “When we grew close, we had a discussion about our previous lovers, and you asked me not to tell you about my past. I honored that a little too well, I think.”

“I asked you not to tell me?”

I nodded. “You said you wanted to pretend that the day I met you was the beginning of everything. You said it wasn’t important to you to know whom I’d dated, whom I loved, whom I didn’t.”

She rubbed her casted leg again. “So you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. And then you moved out here; we got engaged; and we planned a wedding. It was going to be a beautiful affair here in Los Angeles. We rented out a beautiful garden downtown, had a priest, all the guests coming. Everything was set.”

“And I called it off because of a snafu at the county office.”

She made it sound so trivial. It hadn’t felt trivial at the time.

“You wouldn’t let me explain. All you could hear was that I was married, and that convinced you that I’d been lying to you all along. I tried to convince you that I wouldn’t do that, that I wouldn’t have taken you down there if I had known you would find out that way, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“I moved out?”

“You rented a little house downtown, not far from where you were working on the mural for Margaret.”

“Why didn’t I go back to Texas?”

“I don’t know, really. I was hoping it was because it wasn’t really over between us. I wanted to believe that it was because you were upset, but you weren’t ready to end things between us completely.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“I don’t.”

She adjusted her position in the chair, a low moan slipping from between her lips as she did. I wanted to insist she go back to her bedroom, take her pill, and relax a little. But I knew she didn’t want to be fussed over. Not now.

“I want to see it,” she said after a few minutes.

“What?”

“The house I was renting. Maybe it’ll help me remember.”

An image flashed through my mind, the high steps in front of the house covered in roses I’d bought and had delivered. Every day. For a week.

“The steps are too steep. We’d never be able to get the wheelchair up there.” I sat forward and touched her knee lightly. “There’s plenty of time. The doctor said you shouldn’t push things, that it would come back naturally if it comes back at all.”

She nodded. “I know. I just…I feel like something is missing, you know? I just want to get on with my life.”

“Patience was never your strong point.”

She smiled then, her eyes meeting mine for the first time since her father barged into the house.

“Thank you,” she said, touching my hand. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

I shrugged. “I love you, Harley. And I’ve always believed that what happened three months ago was just a blip. We’re meant to be together.”

Her smile widened briefly, but then pain shot through her expression. I’d had enough. I stood and swept her out of the wheelchair, carrying her to the small bedroom at the back of the house she’d been living in since coming home from the hospital. Her pills were on the bedside table. I fed one to her, then got the heating pad that seemed to be the only thing that could relieve the worst of the pain before the pill began working.

She let me stretch out on the bed beside her; she even allowed me to cradle her head against my chest. As we lay there, I could almost believe that everything was going to be okay, that Harley was coming back to me. I held on to that hope with everything I had.