LITMIR.BIZ

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I mean, if she doesn’t remember you’re married—”

      Taylor cut him off. “She’s going to remember, Jake. She’ll see something, hear something, it’ll trigger a memory and we can go from there. I’ve got to be there for that. Got to give her every opportunity to remember me. To remember us.” He struggled to keep the hopelessness from absorbing him. “Maybe I’ll show Gayle the wedding pictures.”

      “Might just do the trick,” Sam agreed cheerfully, a strained smile pasted on his lips.

      “You’re a lousy actor, Sam,” Taylor told him. “But thanks for trying.”

      He realized that Sam was no longer listening to him. Instead he was looking at something over his shoulder. Taylor turned around and saw that Gayle had emerged from out of the curtained area, wearing a white pair of impossibly short shorts and a white-and-pink-checkered blouse that tied above her midriff.

      Her hair had long since dried and was hanging about her face and shoulders in tiny curls. She’d always told him that she hated the way that looked. He thought she looked beautiful.

      Except for the hairstyle, she looked exactly the way she had when she’d stepped onto Sam’s sloop this morning.

      And yet she was different. She wasn’t his Gayle anymore.

      But she would be, he vowed. She would be.

      “God, I look like Orphan Annie,” she complained, spiking her fingers through her hair and trying to pull it straight. It was an exercise in futility.

      “Orphan Annie she remembers,” Taylor muttered under his breath.

      But Gayle heard him. “Sure, I used to read the comic strip every day when I was a kid,” she said as she moved closer to Jake and away from him.

      Closer to what was familiar. Away from what was not.

      Chapter Four

      “Well, this place isn’t going to win the Good Housekeeping award anytime soon.”

      Gayle stood in the doorway of the house her “husband” claimed to be theirs. A distant feeling of déjà vu whispered through her, but then in the next moment it was gone.

      She didn’t recognize the house, and she had a feeling she would have, given its unique state.

      Gayle remained where she was, holding on to the doorknob. Not wanting to let go.

      Not wanting to take a step farther into this house she didn’t recognize, into this life she didn’t know with a man who was a stranger to her.

      Stalling, she looked around. A clear plastic tarp hung from the ceiling to the ground and furniture clustered together in the middle of the room like marooned survivors of a shipwreck. The furniture, a sofa, love seat, coffee table and two side tables were covered with more plastic tarp.

      The wall to her left had holes in it, courtesy of the sledgehammer leaning against it. Sanders, saws and a variety of equipment she didn’t readily recognize were scattered throughout the area she assumed had once been a living room. Here and there, hints of olive-green wallpaper still clung for dear life to the walls that remained intact.

      It looked like the center of her worst nightmare. She lived here?

      Taylor slowly pocketed his key. He couldn’t close the door because she was still blocking the sill. His eyes never left her face as he waited and prayed for some ray of recognition to cross it. All he saw was startled wonder.

      “We live here,” she finally said, looking at him. It wasn’t so much a question as a statement rimmed in disbelief.

      “Yes.” It was a work in progress and because of another job he’d taken on, progress had been slow and limited. The shoemaker’s children went barefoot, he thought cryptically. “Why don’t you come away from the doorway, Gayle?”

      She gave no indication that she heard him. Instead Gayle looked up at the unfinished ceiling.

      Squinting, she could see that it had been recently scraped and then textured. The surface seemed brighter than the rest of the room, even though it was obviously waiting for a final coat of paint.

      Gayle’s eyes shifted to his. “I’m afraid something might fall on me if I come in.”

      Taylor looked around, trying to see through her eyes. It wasn’t easy. What he usually saw even when he looked at a place that was crumbling was potential. Always potential. He supposed that was where he channeled whatever optimism he possessed.

      “Don’t be. The house is rock solid. I thoroughly checked out the foundations before we signed the mortgage papers.”

      Mortgage papers. For some reason she’d just assumed they were renting the house. It was more in keeping with this temporary feeling that nibbled away at her.

      She looked at him. Why in heaven’s name would they have wanted to buy such a place? “We own this.”

      “Yes,” he answered evenly. He knew her well enough to know that he should be bracing himself for the onslaught of something.

      Gayle moved away from the doorway. Proximity did not improve on her impression. This was a disaster area. All it needed was to be declared so by the governor.

      “Why?” she asked. “Did we lose a bet?” Gayle crossed to the ventilated wall. The gaping holes where sledgehammer had met plywood gave her a view of another room. The latter was decorated in colors and styles that had been popular roughly thirty years ago. She did her best to stifle a shiver and succeeded only marginally. “This place is falling apart.”

      “No,” he corrected, following her as she conducted her inspection. “I’m taking it apart.”

      When she was growing up, her father had considered hammering a nail into the wall to hang a picture major construction. For anything else he always hired help, laborers. Physical labor was something to be avoided. “Why?”

      He could remember Gayle taking an interest, not only in this house, but in the ones he worked on. Had she feigned that? Or was she now just trying to find the path back and, once there, her interest, her enthusiasm would return? “Because it’s what I do for a living.”

      Gayle looked around again, then back at him. She’d always assumed that when she did get married, it would either be to a professional athlete or a professional something, like a doctor or a lawyer. But apparently she was supposed to have tied the knot with a laborer. “You destroy houses for a living?”

      “Renovate,” Taylor corrected evenly, “the word is renovate.”

      He thought he saw her frown slightly. Before he could tell himself that it was his imagination, impatience bit into him. He’d been pushed to the edge today and wasn’t sure just how much more he could take before he was on overload. He’d been half-terrified out of his mind when he thought that he’d lost Gayle, then relieved when he’d found her.

      But now he was faced with the same situation, only in a different form. He had lost Gayle, at least temporarily. Because she couldn’t remember him. Couldn’t react to him the way only a wife could to the man she entrusted all her secret hopes and dreams to. A man who’d been privy to all the private moments that went into making Gayle who and what she was.

      Or had been, he amended silently.

      Frustrated, Taylor wanted to shout “Game over!” and have her the way she’d been just this morning, before they’d taken off for Jake’s sloop.

      Damn, he wished they’d never stepped foot on that stupid hunk of overpriced, floating ballast. More than anything in the world, he wanted her to look at him the way she did when it was just the two of them, and the world was fading away.

      Instead it seemed as if he was the one who had apparently faded away for her.

      “You don’t remember this?” He asked the question even though he already knew what her answer would be.

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