LITMIR.BIZ

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mixed with resignation on her pretty girl-next-door face.

      “And she asked for you,” Kerri stated in a monotone as she pulled the sheet up over her breasts and held it in place with her arms pinned to her sides.

      Bruce didn’t bother tucking in his T-shirt; he ran his fingers through the front of his silver-laced black hair several times to push it off his forehead before he put his cowboy hat on. He checked to make sure his wallet was in his back pocket, then grabbed the keys to his truck off the top of the dresser.

      “I’m sorry. I have to go.” When he leaned in to kiss her on the lips, she turned her head so her mouth was just out of reach.

      Bruce straightened; he understood Kerri well enough to know that this was the beginning of a fight they were going to have later.

      Kerri looked up at him, and he genuinely regretted the raw hurt he could easily read in her eyes.

      “If this hadn’t happened,” Kerri reminded him, “you’d already be divorced.”

      She was right about that. He’d spent the last two years paying for his lawyer to fight with Savannah’s lawyer. He’d received the final draft of the divorce agreement a couple of days before the accident. For now, the divorce was on hold. And, even though they hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, legally he was Savannah’s husband.

      “She’s still my wife,” Bruce paused in the doorway to say. “I’ll call when I can.”

      * * *

      The night of Savannah’s accident, and every day since, had felt more like a surreal dream sequence than reality. For the last week, when he wasn’t working, he was with the Scott family, crammed into the small waiting room designated for families who had a loved one in the critical care unit. Truth be told, he’d never expected to speak to any of Savannah’s kin again, much less spend several hours a day in a confined space with them drinking burnt coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and trying to make sense out of the sudden detour his life had just taken.

      When he arrived at the hospital, the feeling in the waiting room had changed dramatically from somber to celebratory. Savannah’s two sisters, Joy and Justine, were smiling with tears of relief and happiness drying on their faces. The peaches-and-cream color had returned to Carol’s plump face, and John, Savannah’s burly father, was actually smiling broadly enough so that the tips of his upper teeth, normally hidden from view behind his thick salt-and-pepper mustache and beard, were visible. But there was one person in the room who didn’t seem to be happy at all.

      “Hi, Carol.” Bruce stopped next to Carol and the cowboy Savannah had been dating. He didn’t offer his hand when he said, “Leroy.”

      Beside the fact that the cowpoke was dating his wife, Bruce had a hard time keeping his cool around Leroy. It was Leroy’s high-powered muscle car that Savannah had been driving the night of the accident. Leroy had been in the passenger seat and had walked away from the accident with a broken wrist and a couple of scrapes and bruises, while Savannah had shattered the windshield with her skull.

      Leroy had a stricken look on his narrow face. “She doesn’t remember me.”

      Carol put her hand on Leroy’s arm to comfort him. “She will, Leroy. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days. We just have to be patient and give her some time.”

      The cowpoke left with his head bent down, and it occurred to Bruce, for the first time, that Leroy was in love with Savannah.

      “What’s he talking about?” he asked Carol.

      The Scott clan closed ranks and surrounded him as if they were worried he would try to escape.

      Now Carol’s hand was on his arm. “Savannah’s neurologist thinks she may be experiencing some...temporary memory loss.”

      No one spoke for a second, but all of the Scotts were watching him like a cat watching fish in a fishbowl. “How temporary?”

      “They don’t know.” John spoke directly to him for the first time, instead of communicating through his wife and daughters as was his usual route.

      “Bruce.” Carol’s fingers tightened on his arm. “Savannah doesn’t seem to remember the divorce.”

      Until right then, Bruce hadn’t felt like he needed to sit down. Now he did. Wordlessly, he took a couple of steps backward and settled in a nearby chair.

      Savannah’s family moved as one unit as they followed him, making loud scraping noises on the floor as they pulled chairs closer to him, boxing him in again. Bruce realized now that Savannah’s tight-knit family wasn’t trying to protect him—they were trying to make sure he didn’t leave.

      As much as his in-laws knew about Savannah’s condition and potential recovery, they shared with him. Savannah was awake and talking; her speech was a little slurred, but she was making sense. But she had lost, at least temporarily, memory of the last several years. As far as Savannah was concerned, there was no divorce, they hadn’t spent the last two years fighting through their lawyers and she had never moved out of their home. In her mind, they were still happily married. Now he understood why she had been asking for him. Savannah needed her husband.

      * * *

      Waking up from a coma had felt like swimming up to the surface from the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pool. Savannah had felt tingly all over right before the awareness of the throbbing, stabbing pain coming from the left side of her head along with the achiness and stiffness that she felt all over the rest of her body. She had been petrified, unable to understand why she was in a hospital hooked up to monitors with needles in her arms. She didn’t have any memory of the accident; the last thing she could remember was kissing Bruce goodbye as he left to start his day on the Brand family ranch. Her husband, her one and only true love, was the first person she asked for when she had awakened from the coma. Savannah could count on Bruce to make everything okay for her. He always did. So, when she finally saw her husband walk through the doorway of her hospital room, Savannah reached out to him weakly, palm facing up, and the tears of confusion and terror she had been holding back began to flow unbidden.

      “It’s okay, Savannah.” Bruce quickly dried her tears with a tissue. “I’m here now.”

      She tried to pull the full-face oxygen mask off, so she could talk to him, to tell him that she loved him, but he stilled her hand by taking it into his and holding on to it firmly.

      “You have to get your strength back,” Bruce told her.

      The mask on her face made her feel claustrophobic, and she wanted to talk. Perhaps her memory was fuzzy about the events that had landed her in the hospital, but she had very distinct memories of her family and Bruce and nurses and doctors all talking around her when she was in the coma. She could hear them murmuring, but no matter how hard she tried to respond, she couldn’t. Now that she could talk, she wanted to talk.

      “I love you,” she said, her words muffled by the mask.

      Bruce looked at her with an expression she couldn’t place. Why didn’t he respond right away, as he always had before?

      Finally, he squeezed her fingers gently, reassuringly. “I love you.”

      Behind the mask, her smile was frail, her eyelids slipping downward from exhaustion.

      “I’d better let you get some rest.” The sound of Bruce’s voice made her fight to open her eyes.

      When he tried to let go of her hand, she held on, moving her thumb over the empty spot where his wedding band should be.

      “Ring?” Her voice was so raspy from having a trachea tube down her throat.

      Again, an odd expression flashed in Bruce’s sapphire-blue eyes as he glanced down at the ring finger of his left hand.

      “It’s at home.”

      “My...ring?”

      “I have it,” Bruce told her after he dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “I

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