He sounded so ready to listen, Paige actually blinked. “Talk about . . . ?”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “You.” He gazed out the windshield. “Your life.”
An uninvited sadness crept into her voice. “I can’t remember most my life. I have frighteningly little to tell.”
She had never spoken about this openly. Not even with Mom. Paige had tried to stay cheerful and positive with the grieving woman, and kept to herself how unsettling her lack of memory was.
The detective hardly reacted to her powerful words. Still as a granite sculpture, he seemed to be waiting for her to offer more.
“Well,” she ventured sheepishly. “What would you like to hear?”
“I don’t know. That you’re happy.”
A rueful smile appeared. “Happy. What does that even mean?” Since he did not enlighten her, she lifted a challenging brow. “Are you?”
“We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”
“Aha! So you’re not happy, either.”
His teeth shone blinding white, his smile so charming it brought the light out in his eyes. A shaft of yearning pierced through her, and Paige dropped her head and drew circles on her thighs, biting her lower lip. Who was he? “I left the city several years ago with my mother,” she told her lap. “My father was, well, he was . . . um . . .”
“Murdered.”
A breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding left her in a whoosh. “Yes.” Of course. Everyone in town must be acquainted with the happening. “And I lost my memory.”
He braked at a stoplight, and their gazes held. A sensation that he was trying to see beyond the surface, that those intense green eyes were searching for Paige Avery, spread through her entire being. With his scrutiny came an unexpected feeling of discovery . . . as though for the first time in her life, another human being could see her.
“What do the doctors say?”
His question was feathery, undemanding, but it made her twine her fingers into a knot on her lap. Because she’d asked herself a similar question every morning and night, but hers started with “why.”
Why can’t I remember?
“I’m sick of doctors,” she confessed, rubbing her thumbs together. “And cops. Not . . . not you, of course. I’m just sick of their questions. And feeling so frustrated. Sometimes it was as though the entire case depended on me. The harder I tried to remember the more physically ill I became. Mother had to take me away. A second chance, she said. Start over.” But how could she?
She was an emotional cripple, damaged and deeply affected by events she couldn’t even remember. On more than one noisy, rainy Seattle night, she had awakened in hysterics to shake her mother awake. I have to go back, I have to go back . . . Mom, we have to go back!
Paige, calm down! Calm down, you’re dreaming.
But she’d been wide awake and struggling to grasp the barest hint of a memory teasing at the fringes of her mind. Her mother couldn’t understand her ramblings. Paige could never give her a reason to return. She only knew that there was this big hole inside her. That she felt lost. That at night she felt anxious to visit the same place she didn’t want to face, either: her past. She craved to know everything her mind had forgotten.
A faint streak of sunlight lingered on the horizon, casting an orange hue across the evening skies. Poignant somehow. She had never expected Phoenix to suddenly feel . . . welcoming.
Zach parked at an abandoned parking lot spread out before an old, one-story building. A weathered sign that read dixie’s leaned against the dusty windows. The land surrounding the building seem
ed to have once been a miniature golf course. Despite the puddles of sooty soil scattered here and there, it still boasted a few hills covered with synthetic grass, and a wall of jutting rocks decorated its perimeter.
“Ohmigod, I know this place,” she gasped.
Out of the car more quickly than he in her excitement, she rushed toward the side entrance, one that seemed somehow separated from the rest of the building. She ran her fingers up the weathered dark wood of the small door, then one long suntanned arm reached out to unlock and push it open for her.
An apartment. It was small, but cozy and inviting. The essentials— sofa, TV, coffee table littered with magazines— sparsely furnished the area, and the air smelled clean and potently masculine.
Unable to resist the tug of the room at the far end of the narrow hall, Paige peered inside. A large bed, one nightstand, one lamp, one pillow. So odd, the magnetic draw of it, the way it called to her most basic, instinctive self.
Walking inside, she whirled around with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. “I’ve been here.”
His broad shoulders filled up the doorway, and he nodded, and his face just . . . broke. His aloof, detached expression transformed, his brow became marked with lines, and he closed his eyes tight enough to make her think it was paining him to do so.