The Bliss Factor (10 page)

“What manner of craftsman made this?” he asked, brushing his fingertips across the incredibly smooth, impossibly thin sheet of what she called aluminum covering her refrigerator.

She didn’t respond—not with words, but when he turned to look at her he found in her eyes the answer to a different question.
Touch me
, her eyes said,
take me
.
Right here, right now.

She covered her weakness with animosity. “I know this is your first time away from Holly Grove, but you must have seen a television before, and there’s a refrigerator in my parents’ Airstream.”

“Not like this one.” He opened the door. “Your parents had food in theirs.”

“Some things,” Rae said, “are timeless.”

“Aye,” he replied, knowing she meant his stomach, and thinking of an entirely different hunger, “but I think we should dine instead. I would enjoy some Scottish chicken.”

She sighed. “I’ll get my purse.”

 

 

“YOU MOWED THROUGH EVERYTHING EDIBLE IN THE house, listened to music, and watched television,” Rae said several hours later—once she’d exhausted her repertoire of heavy sighs, eye rolls, and polite hints that it was getting late. Conn had ignored all the histrionics so he could avoid the inevitable reality that he was going to be sleeping alone—likely somewhere uncomfortable, but alone was the real problem.

He wasn’t sure what it was about Rae Blissfield, but he wanted her. Bad. It was that simple. His memory loss, coupled with his friendship with her parents, made it very complicated. And made her untouchable—at least in most of the ways he wanted to touch her.

It made no sense at all. She could have taught a bow-string lessons, she was strung so tight. She had never opened up to herself, let alone anyone else, and she kept him at arm’s length, except when he’d rubbed her shoulders. He’d only wanted to relieve some of the tension there, but for a moment, just a second really, he’d felt her begin to relax against him. And what had been a gesture of aid and warmth had turned hot and selfish, just wild enough to scare him, and very little scared him. If she’d give him the least encouragement . . . And if he kept thinking like that he would surely test the waters again, which he had no business doing. A man who didn’t even know himself had no right becoming involved with someone else.

“And my water bill is going to be astronomical,” she was saying, “because you flushed the toilet about a hundred times . . . Yeah, I know, Porta-Johns. I’m exhausted. Can we go to bed? And by bed I mean me. You’re sleeping on the couch.”

“My second choice,” Conn said, but he kept his eyes off her.

The couch turned out to be comfortable enough, if a little solitary. It was too short, as well. He tossed and turned all night. And dreamt, although he had a pretty good idea they hadn’t been dreams at all, but flashes of memory. Each had been more disturbing than the last, and each one was stronger, longer, harder to step away from.

He rose just as the first flush of dawn pearled the eastern horizon, cat-footing it to the doorway of Rae’s bower, which she’d insisted on leaving open. In case there was a problem, she’d said with a meaningful look at him, as if he were a two-year-old who needed watching. He figured it was really all those years of sleeping in a tiny trailer. She probably couldn’t stand being closed in.

She certainly slept like a woman who treasured her space, sprawled across the bed, her skin rosy with sleep, her rich red hair tousled. She looked so relaxed Conn almost wished she could stay asleep. Waking her meant watching that pinched look settle around her mouth and eyes. She only thought she was happy, but then, he could say the same of himself. Why else would he lose his memory and not want to get it back?

And that, he thought as he eased quietly away from her doorway, was a question for another time. The sun would soon shine in what promised to be a cloudless sky, the birds already sang in the trees, and the neighbors had yet to emerge.

He went out the back door, stepping barefoot onto the well-clipped ground covering behind her house. Gardens surrounded the lawn, and the Hummer sat on the paved area to his left where Rae had parked it, everything enclosed by a tall wooden fence with stone posts. It was all peace and perfection. And then the sounds of an intruder came from Rae’s carriage house.

Between heartbeats Conn snapped from relaxed to ready, slipping across the grass, his footfalls silent as he rounded the yard. He approached the small building from an angle that wouldn’t expose him to either the door or the windows, creeping up to the side of the carriage house, the wall chilly against his shoulders as he eased around the front corner, far enough to spy the intruder. Which turned out to be an old man clad in a robe decorated with swirls of burgundy and midnight blue and gold down to his spindly bare ankles, his feet shod in deep red velvet slippers with fur lining.

“Do you require assistance?” Conn asked him.

The old man spun around and whacked him over the head with a clear sack filled with metal, glass, and plastic containers, cocking back for another blow.

“’Swounds!” Conn caught the arm holding the sack and the collar of the conjurer’s robe, then quickstepped him into the house, the old guy sputtering objections and digging his heels in the entire way to Rae’s bedroom door. Even without factoring in the age difference, it was no contest since Conn had at least a foot and fifty pounds of muscle on the other man.

Rae must have heard the commotion because she sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chest, blinking and rubbing her eyes. “I know, you’re hungry,” she said around a yawn, clearly not entirely awake. “I’ll scare up something for breakfast if you give me a minute to wake up.”

“Breakfast?” the old man said before Conn shook him and he decided it might be a good idea to hold his tongue, even though it was too late because Rae went still, just her head swiveling to land on Conn, shift to the old man for a beat or two, then move back to Conn. She didn’t look happy about the situation. Conn got the distinct impression she was blaming him.

“Mr. Pennworthy?”

He drew himself up, as much as he could with a relative giant clutching the collar of his robe. “Your house-guest has accosted me. I’d like to borrow your phone to call the police.”

“It looks like you’ve already borrowed a few things from me,” Rae said. She tossed the covers back, long, bare legs swinging over the side of the bed, distracting Conn enough that he almost let the thief go. “I thought we agreed you could steal my returnables, but the paper is off limits.”

“Alchemy must not provide a decent livelihood in this time,” Conn put in.

“Alchemy?”

“Aye, and magic.”

Rae looked Mr. Pennworthy over from head to toe, grinning. “He’s not a magician, well, not the kind you mean. He’s a CEO—he runs a big company. Considering his track record with my newspaper, I don’t doubt he’s familiar with creative accounting, but I’d bet he’s been honest since Sarbanes-Oxley weighed in after Enron.”

Conn caught about every other word.

Mr. Pennworthy apparently understood it all—and took offense to it. “I will not stand here and be discussed by the likes of you as though I were a common criminal.”

Conn smiled politely. “Some cultures cut off a man’s hand for stealing. The Moors, the Infidels we battled in the Crusades, even some of the titled lords where I come from.”

Mr. Pennworthy took one look at Conn’s face and gave a little bleat of fright.

Rae rolled her eyes. “We’re not going to cut anything off.” But she took her newspaper away from him. “Go home, Mr. Pennworthy.”

He squared his shoulders when Conn let him go, straightened his robe and, the bag of returnables cradled tightly in his arms, sidled away from Conn, picking up speed as he got out of arms’ reach.

“I will retrieve the containers, if you like,” Conn offered.

“What I’d like is a cup of coffee,” Rae said. She pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen.

Coffee Conn understood, although preparing it seemed to belong to his area of lost memory. He followed her, watching carefully while she measured aromatic grounds into a small white paper bowl and placed it into a machine sitting on her counter. Water followed, and in seconds steaming hot coffee spilled out into the glass pot below.

He closed his eyes and inhaled, and when he opened them again, she’d replaced the large pot with a mug, switching back again when the mug was full and holding it out to him.

“It’s going to be strong,” she said.

He wrapped his hands around hers on the mug and met her eyes. “I like strong.”

Watching her react to his touch was fascinating. Color flooded her face and she seemed to soften. Her eyelids fluttered as her breath sighed out. She never broke eye contact, though, even as she pulled her hand from beneath his and covered her desire with irritation.

“You also like to eat,” she said, and turned her back to get another mug as if nothing had happened.

Conn took it as a challenge, and he had never backed down from a challenge. He couldn’t say how he knew that; it probably had something to do with all the fighting in his memory flashes, along with the way he’d reacted to the two altercations the day before. Or maybe it was the feeling building inside of him, the urge to
win
that had him saying, “You feel attraction toward me. Why do you deny it?”

“Because I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours, for starters.” She turned, a package of bread in her hands. “You live the kind of life I couldn’t wait to leave behind, and then there’s the memory loss, which is a pretty big problem by itself, but you don’t seem to care if you ever get it back, which is the bigger problem if you ask me. If I accept your memory loss is real I have to wonder what happened in your past that you don’t want to revisit.”

He thought about that, a muscle working in his jaw. Rae felt bad for pushing him. But he wasn’t meeting her eyes, either.

“Is anything familiar to you?” she asked, opening the bread and popping two slices into the toaster.

“Yes and no. Things seem familiar, but when I attempt to build on a shred of recognition it only slips away.”

“Don’t try to remember, just answer without thinking about it. How old are you?”

“I cannot say.”

“Where do you come from, do you have family somewhere?”

He shrugged.

“Wife, kids, parents, siblings?” God forbid he had a brother. One of him was almost too much to imagine. “You must at least have a feeling when you hear these questions, a gut reac—”

“I do not,” he ground out, scrubbing his hands back through his hair. “Why do you seek to tally and measure?”

It felt pretty damn important that he didn’t have a wife. But the toast popped up just then, saving her from blurting that out. He might be struggling with his memory, but he had a very agile mind otherwise. He wouldn’t miss the implications. And take advantage of her for them.

“It’s what I do,” she said instead, turning away from him to butter the toast. “I’m a CPA—Certified Public Accountant.”

“And what does a . . . certified public accountant,” he repeated carefully, “do?”

“Tally.” She put the toast on a paper towel and carried it to the small table in her breakfast nook. “Measure.”

He sat, picked up a slice of toast and studied it. Not a lot of toast at the Renaissance festival, she thought.

“You ate everything else in the house last night, so this will have to do for breakfast. We can go to the market later.”

He took a tentative taste, then ate the rest of the toast in three bites. Rae sighed, putting two more slices in the toaster.

“Tell me more about your work,” he said. “What do you tally and measure?”

“Money. Profit and loss for businesses, income for people. I keep track of that income, calculate what taxes a person or business owes so they don’t get in trouble with the government.”

“The king must have his share. That, at least, has not changed.”

“We don’t have a king, contrary to the opinions some of our elected officials hold of themselves, but I guess it amounts to the same thing.”

“Then you are a steward.”

“In a way.” She ferried more toast to the table.

“Do you have a man?”

“No.”

“For someone who wants roots, you have not established any. You have a home, but no husband, no family.”

Rae went back to her toast production line, dropping two more slices into the toaster and buttering the ones she’d just removed. “I’ve been busy,” she said, “and we’re supposed to be talking about you.”

“I have precious little to report of myself.”

“Then I suggest you spend some quality time with your brain, see if you can tap into your memory banks,” she said, dropping the last two pieces of toast in front of him. “I’m going to take a shower.”

Conn looked toward the bathroom, back at her. “And you expect me to concentrate on a task I already know cannot be accomplished? I have always been a man of action.”

“Typical,” she said. Not that she should be surprised that he was a man who thought he could muscle his way through a problem; he had all the right equipment for that particular mindset.

“I could be of service to you. In my time it was common to have an attendant when you bathe. To wash your back.”

“
This
is your time,” she reminded him. “Come anywhere near that bathroom and you’ll be getting conked on the head again, whether it helps your amnesia or not.”

“I would not impose myself on you.”

“Of course not.” Rae was worried she’d impose herself on him, and then where would she be?
Satisfied
, a traitorous little voice whispered.
Probably several times
. “But it wasn’t my back you were thinking of.”

He grinned. “Perhaps not only your back.”

RAE THOUGHT OF HER BACK THE ENTIRE TIME
she was in the shower. It was better than the other body parts she wanted to think about, most of them belonging to Connor Larkin. And it was better than not thinking. Not thinking left her with feeling. Feeling might lead to acting, and acting wasn’t a good idea. Acting was the furthest thing from a good idea she could imagine, no matter how incredible acting was in her imagination.