Sandra Marton - The Second Mrs Adams

“Evaluate me?” she said with a quick smile.

“Look, the place is known throughout the country. The staff, the facilities, are all highly rated.”

Joanna ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. “I don’t need therapy,” she said brightly. “I just need to remember.”

“The therapy will help you do that.”

“How?” She tilted her head up. Her smile was brilliant though he could see it wobble just a little. “There’s nothing wrong with me physically, David. Or mentally. I don’t need to go for walks on the arm of an aide or learn basket-weaving or—or lie on a couch while some doctor asks me silly questions about a childhood I can’t remember.”

David’s frown deepened. She was saying the same things he’d said when Bright Meadows had been recommended to him.

“Joanna’s not crazy,” he’d said bluntly, “and she’s not crippled.”

The doctors had agreed, but they’d pointed out that there really wasn’t anywhere else to send a woman with amnesia... unless, of course, Mr. Adams wished to take his wife home? She needed peaceful, stress-free surroundings and, at least temporarily, someone to watch out for her. Could a man who put in twelve-hour days provide that?

No, David had said, he could not. He had to devote himself to his career. He had a high-powered Wall Street firm to run and clients to deal with. Besides, though he didn’t say so to the doctors, he knew that he and Joanna could never endure too much time alone together.

There was no question but that Bright Meadows was the right place for Joanna. The doctors, and David, had agreed.

Had Joanna agreed, too? He was damned if he could remember.

“David?”

He looked at Joanna. She was smiling tremulously.

“Couldn’t I just...isn’t there someplace I could go that isn’t a hospital? A place I could stay, I mean, where maybe the things around me would jog my memory?”

“You need peace and quiet, Joanna. Our town house isn’t—”

She nodded and turned away, but not before he’d seen the glitter of tears in her eyes. She was crying. Quietly, with great dignity, but she was crying all the same.

“Joanna,” he said gently, “don’t.”

“I’m sorry.” She rose quickly and hurried to the window where she stood with her back to him. “Go on home, please, David. It’s late, and you’ve had a long day. The last thing you need on your hands is a woman who’s feeling sorry for herself.”

Had she always been so slight? His mental image of his wife was of a slender, tall woman with a straight back and straight shoulders, but the woman he saw at the window seemed small and painfully defenseless.

“Jo,” he said, and he started slowly toward her, “listen, everything’s going to be OK. I promise.”

She nodded. “Sure,” she said in a choked whisper.

He was standing just behind her now, close enough so that he could see the reddish glints in her black hair, so that he could almost convince himself he smelled the delicate scent of gardenia that had always risen from her skin until she’d changed to some more sophisticated scent.

“Joanna, if you don’t like Bright Meadows, we’ll find another place and—”

She spun toward him, her eyes bright with tears and with something else. Anger?

“Dammit, don’t talk to me as if I were a child!”

“I’m not. I’m just trying to reassure you. I’ll see to it you have the best of care. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said, her voice trembling not with self-pity but yes, definitely, with anger. “You just don’t understand, do you? You think, if you have them fix my hair and my face, and ship me my clothes and make me look like Joanna Adams, I’ll turn into Joanna Adams.”

“No,” David said quickly. “I mean, yes, in a way. I’m trying to help you be who you are.”

Joanna lifted her clenched fist and slammed it against his chest. David stumbled back, not from the blow which he’d hardly felt, but from shock. He couldn’t remember Joanna raising her voice, let alone her hand. Well, yes, there’d been that time after they were first married, when he’d been caught late at a dinner meeting and he hadn’t telephoned and she’d been frantic with worry by the time he came in at two in the morning...

“Damn you, David! I don’t know who I am! I don’t know this Joanna person.” She raised her hand again, this time to punctuate each of her next words with a finger poked into his chest. “And I certainly don’t know you!”

“What do you want to know? Ask and I’ll tell you.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “For starters, I’d like to know why I’m expected to believe I’m really your wife!”

David started to laugh, then stopped. She wasn’t joking. One look into her eyes was proof of that. They had gone from violet to a color that was almost black. Her hands were on her hips, her posture hostile. She looked furious, defiant...and incredibly beautiful.

“What are you talking about?”

“What do you mean, what am I talking about? I said it clearly enough, didn’t I? You say I’m your wife, but I don’t remember you. So why should I let you run my life?”

“Joanna, for heaven’s sake—”

“Can you prove that we’re married?”

David threw up his hands. “I don’t believe this!”

“Can you prove it, David?”

“Of course I can prove it! What would you like to see? Our marriage license? The cards we both signed and mailed out last Christmas? Dammit, of course we’re married. Why would I lie about such a thing?”

He wouldn’t. She knew that, deep down inside, but that had nothing to do with this. She was angry. She was furious. Let him try waking up in a hospital bed without knowing who he was, let him try having a stranger walk in and announce that as of that moment, all the important decisions of your life were being taken out of your hands.

But most of all, let him deal with the uncomfortable feeling that the person you were married to had been a stranger for a long, long time, not just since you’d awakened with a lump on your head and a terrible blankness behind your eyes.

“Answer me, Joanna. Why in hell would I lie?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even saying that you are. I’m just trying to point out that the only knowledge I have of my own identity is your word.”

David caught hold of her shoulders. “My word is damned well all you need!”

It was, she knew it was. It wasn’t just the things the nurses had said about how lucky she was to be the wife of such a wonderful man as David Adams. She’d managed to read a bit about him in a couple of old magazines she’d found in the lounge.

On the face of it, David Adams was Everywoman’s Dream.

But she wasn’t Everywoman. She was lost on a dark road without a light to guide her and the only thing she felt whenever she thought of herself as Mrs. David Adams was a dizzying sense of disaster mingled in with something else, something just as dizzying but also incredibly exciting.

It terrified her, almost as much as the lack of a past, yet instinct warned that she mustn’t let him know that, that the best defense against whatever it was David made her feel when he got too close was a strong offense, and so instead of backing down under his furious glare, Joanna glared right back.

“No,” she said, “your word isn’t enough! I don’t know anything about you. Not anything, what you eat for breakfast or—or what movies you like to see or who chooses those—those stodgy suits you wear or—”

“Stodgy?” he growled. “Stodgy?”

“You heard me.”

David stared down at the stranger he held clasped by the shoulders. Stodgy? Hell, for Joanna to use that word to describe him was ludicrous. She was right, she didn’t know the first thing about him; they were strangers.