Kathryn Shay - A Man She Couldn't Forget

It was so potent, so familiar that it took her breath away.

“Something wrong?” he asked. “You’re flushed.”

Her hands went to her cheeks. “Must be the heat from the stove.”

She’d lied. It wasn’t that. It was heat…but from Brady himself.

Because when she got close to him she felt her body tighten, her pulse speed up and a low coil of reaction in her belly.

All signs that were familiar.

All signs she remembered.

How could this be? She didn’t understand. Why was she aroused by Brady’s nearness, the male smell of him, the physical presence of him!

Brady, her best friend?

Dear Reader,

A Man She Couldn’t Forget is a combination of plotlines I’ve enjoyed as a reader. First, the story deals with amnesia. I researched the malady and it fit nicely into this plot. Next, there is a friends-to-lovers angle. It’s fun to develop characters who know each other, then fall in love—and are shocked by it! Finally, I like the concept of a love triangle, although I hadn’t realized how tricky it would be.

Another challenge was the characterization. The hero, Brady Langston, jumped off the pages—sexy, artistic, fun loving and head over heels about Clare. However, I did struggle with finding a way for the reader to know Clare when she doesn’t know herself. I hate dumping information in, so instead I filtered her personality into conversations, while giving a bit of background.

Last, Jonathan, the “other man,” had to be likable, though not too likable. What kind of heroine would Clare be if she was involved with someone who didn’t appeal to readers?

Of course, Brady and Clare are meant to be and the best part is that she somehow knows it even when she can’t remember him. Hopefully, her dawning awareness will keep you reading.

The story also has books. Brady writes children’s stories, while Clare writes cookbooks. By the way, my own family has passed the recipes in this book through generations, or they have created them after great trial and error. (It took my sister twenty-one tries to get the minestrone right.) You can find these recipes on my Web site at www.kathrynshay.com. Visit my blog there, and e-mail me through the site or at kshayweb@rochester.rr.com.

I hope you love Brady and Clare and their very complicated but heartwarming story.

Kathy Shay

Kathryn Shay is the author of twenty-three Harlequin Superromance books and nine novels and two novellas from the Berkley Publishing Group. She has won several awards. Among them are five Romantic Times BOOKreviews awards, three Holt Medallions, three Desert Quill awards and a Booksellers’ Best Award. A former high school teacher, she lives in upstate New York, where she sets many of her stories.

To my sister Joanie.

Thanks for the recipes in this book, for watching numerous cooking shows with me and for enduring all those amnesia movies!

I love you.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AS THE CAR PULLED INTO the driveway of a huge Victorian house with peaked roofs, slate-blue siding and luscious landscaping, Clare Boneli stared at the sprawling structure without a shred of recognition. A quick burst of panic shot through her, and her breathing sped up. The darkness inside her yawned, widened, threatened to take her under.

“It’s all right, Clarissa. Everything’s going to be fine.”

The man beside her spoke the soothing words, her panic abated somewhat. It went away more quickly now than it had before. When Clare had first awakened from the coma a week ago, she hadn’t even known her name. That had come back suddenly, unlike the memories of her past.

She managed to choke out, “This is where I live?”

“Yes.” Jonathan, who’d been at her bedside most days over the past two weeks, smiled sadly. He was dressed in an impeccable gray suit and pristine white shirt. He’d told her he owned the TV station they said she worked for.

And more. They were dating. Seriously, for over a year. But try as she might, Clare couldn’t remember him or this beautiful house or anything else about her life. Panic threatened again, and she grabbed for his hand.

“I don’t remember,” she murmured.

He linked their fingers. Even his touch was foreign. How could she not recognize someone she’d been so close to? Someone, he’d told her, she’d been intimate with? Shouldn’t she sense things about him? Again, her heart began to pound, like it always did when she tried to make herself remember and couldn’t.

“You’re going to be fine. It’ll all come back. Dr. Montgomery thinks when you’re in your own environment, familiar things will jog your memory.”

Retrograde amnesia, the neurologist had told her. The loss of memory of events that occur before a trauma. Usually it lasts a few hours.

In Clare’s case, the trauma had been a car accident on a rainy morning at two a.m. She’d crashed into a guardrail, lurched forward and banged her face on the steering wheel. Her head had ricocheted to the side, resulting in a huge bump on her skull and injuring her brain. Once the swelling had gone down, the tests revealed no permanent brain damage, and the doctors expected her memory to return soon. But it hadn’t. So she’d been referred to a psychiatrist, Anna Summers, whom she’d seen twice and would continue to see now that she had been released.

“Dr. Summers told me that sometimes it takes a while for memories to come back, even if there’s no visible brain damage.”

“As I said, I think being home will help.” He scowled. “I wish I didn’t have to go out of town today. It’s just that I postponed meetings in Chicago three times when you were in the hospital.”

“Of course you have to go. You put everything on hold for me.”

“I wanted to.”

She peered out the window again. The late-afternoon June sun sparkled off the black shingles on the roof and the many windows of the exterior. “Tell me about my condo before we go inside.”

“Your favorite room is the kitchen.”

Still facing away from him, she sighed. “Because I’m a chef, right?”

“The best.”

They’d told her a few things in the hospital so she wouldn’t go into shock when she got back to her life. She lived in Rockford, a medium-sized town in upstate New York, and was a chef and successful cookbook author. Jonathan was WRNY’s station owner and had offered her a cooking show, Clarissa’s Kitchen, three years ago. Her parents were dead, she had a sister who lived in Arizona—a teacher, divorced, no children. And though Clare was thirty-six, she wasn’t married. She wondered why.

Jonathan kept hold of her hand. “Let’s go inside.”

“In a minute.” Stalling, she pulled down the visor and opened the mirror to check her appearance, briefly wondering if she was vain. What stared back at her was a stranger with green eyes and short sandy-blond hair. Again the lack of recognition shocked her, and she had to take in deep breaths.

“Can you tell your hair’s different?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No.” But she knew it had been long. In the hospital, the doctors had to cut away a chunk of it on the left side and shave the area to take care of the bump on her head. When she awoke from the coma, Jonathan brought in the town’s best stylist to cut it flatteringly. “Did I like my hair long?”