Colleen Thompson - Lone Star Survivor

“So, dear,” said the neatly dressed, silver-haired woman over the gold rim of her teacup, “you were saying, you met my son in California?”

Andrea didn’t answer, too distracted by the heat rising to her face as the maid offered her some cookies. “Th-thank you very much. These are lovely.” Andrea chose a chocolate-centered square to be polite, nearly choking on the thought of how her mother, who had waited on more than a few pampered rich ladies in her day, might have looked a lot like “Miss Althea” had she lived.

The maid nodded and excused herself, leaving Mrs. Rayford to repeat her question.

Andrea nodded. “Sorry. Yes, we met on a country road not far outside of San Diego. I was out riding when the chain came off my bike and sent me flying.” She shivered in the air-conditioning, remembering the moment she’d gone over the handlebars. “Fast as I was moving, it’s a wonder I didn’t split my skull along with my helmet.” As it was, she’d been a bloody mess, with the frame of a bike she’d scrimped and saved for for two years bent so badly it was never again race-worthy.

Mrs. Rayford frowned. “You don’t mean to tell me you were riding one of those noisy motorcycles , do you?”

Andrea nearly laughed aloud at the horror souring the woman’s prim face, as if a female on a motorcycle would have been the scandal of the century. “Not a motorcycle, no. A racing bike, for the triathlons I used to compete in before that crash. I tore up my knee pretty badly in the fall. If it hadn’t been for Ian pulling off the road to help me, I could’ve lain there for a long time before anyone else came along.”

She remembered the moment she’d first seen the tall, dark-haired man jumping out of his SUV and racing toward her, gorgeous as any guy she’d ever met in real life, but in a masculine, clean-cut way that left actors and male models in the dust. Hurting as she’d been, she’d still felt sucker punched by his blue eyes, the intensity and concern in them as real as anything she’d ever seen.

“He was always a bighearted boy,” his mother reminisced. “Always dragging home strays.”

Jolted by her words, Andrea wondered if she’d just joined their ranks in his mother’s eyes, if the woman somehow saw through the tan slacks and coral shell she wore with a light jacket, through the fake gold earrings and the thrift-store beige pumps and all the way back to the scabby-kneed, motherless girl she had once been. Telling herself that couldn’t be, that Nancy Rayford only knew her as Zach’s former fiancée, a psychologist who happened to work an hour away in Marston, Andrea said, “He didn’t exactly drag me home, but he did drive me to the ER.”

Behind her, the floor creaked, and she turned to face the man she’d met that long-ago day. Though his face was leaner and his tan deeper, she recognized those deep blue eyes and came to her feet at once. But his eyes were different, too, she realized, haunted by events he could not consciously remember.

“Ian,” she managed, pulse revving as she fought an instinct to run to the man she’d once loved and throw her arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you, so relieved that you’re...”

He stared into her face, his gaze as unreadable as it was disconcerting. Her stomach fluttered in response, and she felt an outbreak of tiny beads of perspiration.

“He won’t remember you, of course,” his mother announced. “He didn’t know any of us here at all, not for days and days—”

“Andrea?” he asked, taking two steps closer. Close enough that she saw his color deepen and recognized what looked like pure relief wash over him. “Andie, is it really you?”

Andie , he had called her, using the nickname no one else did...

Before she could react, his mother scolded, “You’ll need a shower before you come in on the good furniture. I can smell the horse on you from here.”

Paying her no mind, Ian took two more steps and claimed Andrea, pulling her into his arms and kissing her for all he was worth.

The connection arced through every nerve ending, raising each fine hair and jolting her with memories of how incredibly well their bodies worked together. The searing contact made her ache for more, forgetting all the ways they’d wounded one another.

Forgetting, at least for a few moments, the other woman who stood gaping at them and the man Andrea herself had so recently promised to marry, a man whose face she struggled to recall.

Finally, she pulled away, a red-hot tide of embarrassment scorching her face. Shaking her head, she stammered, “I—I’m sorry. S-sorry, Ian, but what you’re remembering—that was two years ago. It’s been a long time since we—”

“I remember the trip we took together to Key West in Florida,” he said, the words coming in a rush as she took two steps back. “There was a little bed-and-breakfast, and you wore—there was this blue bikini. I’ve been dreaming of that trip, of all that color, of you for so long now.”

The professional in her noticed the way his eyes had dilated and the light that had come into them, extinguishing the pain she’d first glimpsed. As much as she hated dimming that excitement, she told herself that letting him go on believing would be crueler.

“You’re right,” she said. “What you remember really happened. But afterward, so did a lot of other things. We’re not—we’re not together anymore, not in that way. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about what’s happened to you. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be your friend.”

“We’re not...we’re not together anymore?”

Confusion shifted through his handsome features, followed by a sorrow so profound it reminded her of the day she’d told him they were finished. Of course , she realized, because for him, it was happening again right now, the boom lowered only seconds after he’d consciously accessed the memory of one of the happiest times of their eight-month relationship, a time before she’d grown aware that it was all built on a raft of lies.

“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it—and acutely aware of the disapproval emanating from his mother. She couldn’t say whether it was because he’d made the sexual side of their relationship so obvious or because Andrea had so clearly broken her son’s heart, but she knew one thing for certain: the woman didn’t like her.

Andrea shook it off, reminding herself her visit was about Ian’s well-being, his healing, not her comfort level. “We’ve been apart for two years,” she said. “I have a new fiancé.”

“So we’re engaged—or we were?” He shook his head, offering the wry smile she’d always found so irresistibly disarming. “I must’ve been an idiot, letting a woman like you go.”

She smiled back at him, pretending not to hear the fresh grief behind his words. “Your brother thought that we might visit for a while and talk. He thought that seeing me might help you remember.”

Ian snorted. “Well, at least you’re a damn sight better looking than any of those shrinks they keep pushing at me.”

She sighed but realized there was no way around what was sure to be another troubling disclosure. “Do you remember why we went to Key West? What we were celebrating?”

He shook his head.

“You surprised me with the trip after I completed my doctorate.”

“So you’re a doctor? Like an MD?” He winked at his mother. “I always did go for the smart girls, at least, the pretty ones.”

“I’m a psychologist,” Andrea admitted.

He laughed, his smile turning bitter. “So that explains why you’re here. One more shrink to poke around my skull. Tell me, are you working for the army these days, or the Department of Defense?”