Read the book: «Montana Mail-Order Wife»

Chapter One

Wade Garrett awoke with a start, jerked upright in his chair and slammed his boots from the windowsill to the floor. Perspiration speckled his forehead, and his heart raced from the still-vivid nightmare. His son had been lost and calling to him, but he couldn’t find the boy anywhere.

He rubbed his eyes and shoved his fingers through his hair. Only a dream. Jordan was fine, at home with Ursula.

Rolling his shoulders to stretch his stiff muscles, he hoisted himself from the depths of the chair he’d slept in for the past two nights. A quick glance assured him he hadn’t disturbed the still figure in the hospital bed beside him. Rachel O’Riley lay bruised, battered and comatose, and in her vulnerable state, she tugged at his heartstrings, reminding him of his son, an angel when asleep.

Jordan, an angel?

Wade grimaced with bitter humor. Jordan awake was a holy terror. And Jordan was the reason Wade kept vigil in Rachel O’Riley’s hospital room.

He stumbled through the predawn twilight into the tiny bathroom. At the lavatory he sluiced cold water over his face to drive away the dregs of sleep, raised his head and confronted a memory in the mirror.

Six years ago he’d spent several nights in a hospital room, not caring then, either, about unkempt hair, eyes red rimmed with fatigue, or the three-day stubble on his chin. Maggie had been dying from complications of a stillbirth, and he’d kept watch, consumed with anger and pain at the circumstances that had brought her there.

Déjà vu.

Except the woman in the hospital bed wasn’t Maggie. She wasn’t dying. And he wasn’t angry. Or in pain. Why should he be? He’d never laid eyes on Rachel O’Riley until Sheriff Howard called him to the hospital after finding Wade’s name and address in her backpack.

Wade scowled at his mirror image, scrubbed his face dry with a rough paper towel and turned away, unwilling to admit, even to himself, that the mysterious Rachel had triggered a deep reaction and stirred emotions he had believed, hoped, had atrophied and died with Maggie. With the demands of the ranch and raising eight-year-old Jordan, he had no time for sentimental entanglements.

He swished cold water in his mouth, spit as if to expel his unwanted thoughts, and longed for hot, black coffee. A solid jolt of caffeine should banish his outlandish notions.

When he came out of the bathroom, the day nurse stood beside the bed, taking her patient’s pulse and making notes on a chart. Her round, pleasant face broke into a smile. “Good morning, Mr. Garrett.”

Wade nodded toward the bed. “How is she?”

“Her vital signs are strong. The doctor’s certain she’ll regain consciousness soon.”

When he headed toward his chair, the nurse waved him away. “You’re the one we’re worried about. Not enough sleep or food to keep a bird alive, much less a big man like you. Get some breakfast in the cafeteria. I’ll page you if there’s any change.”

Wade scrutinized Rachel, quiescent and pale, so slight her body barely mounded the hospital blanket above the mattress. Her tranquil face fired his interest in a disturbing way. High, sculpted cheekbones as ashen as her pillow were framed by thick blond hair that reminded him of his prize palomino in the sunlight. She had the kind of hair a man liked to run his fingers through.

The surprising sweetness of her bow-shaped mouth and the gracefulness of feathery brows arching across her smooth, high forehead were details her letters had omitted.

Her chatty correspondence had left him unmoved, so he’d been unprepared for the tightening in his gut and the heat surging through his blood at seeing her for the first time.

And every time he’d looked at her since.

Gritting his teeth until his jaw ached, he ignored the unwelcome hankering and squelched his preoccupation with her stunning face.

He’d need a whole bucket of coffee to purge the sentiment cluttering his mind—and the hormones tormenting his body.

He was overreacting to the woman because he was bone-tired, he assured himself. What he felt was only sympathy, same as he’d feel for anybody banged up as she’d been in the train accident. Once she was on her feet again and he’d had a good night’s rest, his emotional balance would return. Then he could handle the demands of the ranch he’d let slide since Sheriff Howard had called to say he was needed at the county hospital.

“You okay, Mr. Garrett?” the nurse asked.

She’d caught him gawking at Rachel like he was plumb weak north of his ears. He’d been under too much stress lately, what with Jordan’s troubles and the extra workload at the ranch, and his moonstruck behavior proved it.

“Call me if there’s any change.” Striding from the room, he ignored the impulse for one last glance.

He halted at the pay phone in the hall and dialed home. Ursula’s gravelly voice greeted him. “How is she?”

“Doc says she should be okay, but she hasn’t regained consciousness yet.” He massaged a crick in his neck. “Is Jordan staying out of trouble?”

The old housekeeper’s initial hesitation told him more than her words. “He’s fine. Just keeps asking when his daddy’s coming home.”

A mixture of guilt and frustration scoured through him, and he cursed silently. After all, the boy was the reason he was here. “I’ll be home tonight.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

He pretended not to understand. “About the train wreck?”

Ursula’s ironic expletive burst in his ear. “You know what I mean.”

“I’ll tell him. Eventually.”

He hung up the receiver and rammed his hands in his pockets. Trouble always came in threes. First Jordan’s rebellion, then the train derailment. God only knew what was next. The disturbing speculation accompanied him all the way to the cafeteria.

SHE NOTICED THE SOUNDS first. The clanking of an ice machine across the hall, the whir of rubberized wheels on a linoleum floor, hushed voices outside the door. And a strange, unrelenting pounding.

She lay quiet, eyes closed, absorbing the unfamiliar noises. The other sounds diminished, but the pounding persisted as blood rushed through her veins and her temples throbbed. She struggled against a consuming weakness and opened her eyes.

Directly above, a metal track etched the white ceiling. Her gaze followed it to the wall, where a muslin curtain was gathered back beside the bed. Beside her, a plastic bag hung from an aluminum stand, and clear tubing filled with fluid snaked from it to her wrist. When she flexed her left hand, a needle pinched her vein.

She was in a hospital.

She gazed through a wide window across from the bed at a broad, boulder-filled river, frothy with whitewater tinted pink by the sun’s slanting rays. Beyond the river, a stand of towering evergreens formed an impenetrable barricade. She knotted her forehead in concentration, but try as she might, she couldn’t identify where she was or whether the sun was rising or setting.

Her next discovery banished all thoughts of time or place. A thirty-something man sprawled in the chair beside the window, sound asleep. Who was he?

Her doctor?

He was dressed more like a cowboy, in well-worn jeans that enveloped long legs, a chambray shirt stretched taut over powerful muscles, and tooled leather boots that could stand a good polish. The sun streaks in his mahogany-colored hair and the tanned, rugged planes of his attractive face suggested someone who worked outdoors.

She flushed when she realized he’d awakened during her scrutiny and was staring back with eyes as serene and brown as the river boulders outside the window.

“Welcome back.” His agreeable voice rolled through the room, a rich baritone.

“Back?” She attempted to draw herself to a sitting position, but the effort exhausted her and she collapsed against the pillows.

“You’ve been unconscious almost three days.” He shoved himself to his feet in a graceful movement and approached her bed with the rolling gait of a man more comfortable on a horse than on his feet.

Giddiness and disorientation washed over her. “What happened?”

He hooked his thumbs in the back pockets of his jeans and lifted dark eyebrows with a look so galvanizing she averted her eyes. “You don’t remember?”

“No.” She fidgeted beneath his piercing inspection and wished she was wearing something more substantial than a thin hospital gown.

“I’d better get the doctor.” His probing expression relaxed as if he was pleased by an excuse to bolt.

Loneliness and an unnamed yearning overwhelmed her. Between the pounding in her head and the weakness of her body, she couldn’t pinpoint who—or what—she longed for. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be alone.

“Please, don’t go,” she begged.

The skin around his eyes crinkled in appealing lines and his mouth angled in a reassuring smile. He reached above her pillow and depressed a call button.

“Nurses’ station,” a chirpy voice responded.

“Tell Dr. Sinclair Miss O’Riley is awake,” he said.

“That’s good news,” the voice said. “I’ll page the doctor.”

When he started to move away, she grasped his sleeve. “Who’s Miss O’Riley?”

He frowned before composing his face into a neutral expression. “Don’t you know?”

Her misgivings multiplied by the second. She concentrated on the tenacious squareness of his jaw, the dark hair tumbling across his broad forehead, a tiny scar across one dark eyebrow—anything to block the other questions that assaulted her.

The one about O’Riley terrified her enough.

She gathered her courage with a deep breath. “Who is Miss O’Riley?”

His widened eyes conveyed his surprise. “You are.”

The answer stunned her, and the questions she’d tried to evade converged until she slipped again toward the black void from which she’d just emerged. In a futile attempt to conquer confusion, she thrashed her aching head from side to side on the pillow.

“Whoa, hold still.” The stranger cupped her cheeks with firm but gentle hands. “You’ve had a bad concussion. You don’t want to aggravate it.”

Closing her eyes to avoid his warm, searching gaze, she relaxed against the soothing pressure of his palms. “You don’t understand.”

“Try me.”

His simple, direct proposal inspired her trust. When she opened her eyes, tears misted her vision, and she observed the stranger through a watery haze.

“I don’t know who I am.” She choked back panic. “I can’t remember anything.”

“Nothing?” he asked, as if disbelieving.

Her throat tightened with anxiety, and she clasped his hands as if they were a lifeline. “Not even my own name.”

He freed himself from her grasp, fumbled in his shirt pocket and pulled out a letter. “Maybe this will jog your memory. It’s from you.”

She seized the pages and scanned the lines of looping scrawl, but nothing connected. No name, no remembrances. She blinked back tears of frustration. “This means nothing to me.”

More concerned with the stranger than the letter, she handed back the pages. Reeling from lack of memory, she battled her befuddling attraction to the good-looking man.

A disturbing possibility struck her. “Who are you?”

“Wade Garrett.”

She glanced at her left hand and her unadorned ring finger. “That’s a relief. I thought for a moment you might be Mr. O’Riley.”

“No.”

The mysterious glint in his eye intrigued her, but his lack of information was irritating. “Are you related to me?”

He shook his head.

Her disappointment stung. Wade appeared to be the kind of man she could lean on in a crisis—not only physically strong, with broad shoulders and hard muscles, but with a disposition that didn’t rattle easily.

If he wasn’t her relative or her husband…a tremor shook her at the very idea…who was he? “Do I know you?”

“Not yet.”

Behind a facade of calm, she hid her irritation at his refusal to provide more information. Obviously he wasn’t ready to tell her why he was here, but maybe he’d answer other questions.

Again she experienced the unsettling but sourceless longing. “What about my family?”

Uncertainty flickered over his handsome face. “We’ll discuss your family later.”

Between the ache in her temples and an avalanche of unanswered questions, she couldn’t think straight. The mysterious Wade Garrett, talking in generalities, was no help at all.

Fatigue depleted her last reserves of strength, and she closed her eyes. Maybe she was only dreaming, and once she awoke, she’d remember everything she was supposed to, including who she was and what part Wade Garrett played in her life.

All she wanted now was sleep.

WADE WATCHED HER DRIFT into unconsciousness again. He’d been totally unprepared for the impact of those eyes, the deep pine-green of a ponderosa, and so wide they almost swallowed her face. And her kick-in-the-gut smile had almost done him in, especially when he noted the fleeting unhappiness beneath it. That look reminded him of a stray dog Jordan had adopted years ago after its human family moved away and left it behind.

Maybe, like Shep, the woman would need lots of care before her loneliness left her. Wade’s thoughts snarled like barbed wire as he combed his fingers through his hair and massaged his neck, stiff again from sleeping in the chair. She hadn’t mentioned any unhappiness in her letters. And love definitely wasn’t part of their deal.

But she looked so vulnerable, lying there asleep, that he couldn’t resist reaching for her hand, fingers curled like a half-opened blossom atop the blanket. At the contact with her warm, smooth skin, testosterone bucked through his blood like an untamed mustang.

When the doctor entered, Wade jerked his hand away and blushed like a green adolescent caught necking on the porch.

Dr. Sinclair, a tiny, birdlike woman with enough nervous energy to power a city, marched to the bed and checked Rachel’s pulse. She removed a penlight from the pocket of her white coat, lifted Rachel’s eyelids and examined her pupils.

Straightening as if her back ached, the doctor brushed a strand of salt-and-pepper hair from her forehead and confronted Wade. “Did she speak to you?”

“Briefly.” Long enough for him to learn her voice was as soft as a mountain breeze.

“Was she lucid?”

“She was rational, if that’s what you mean.”

The doctor’s shrewd gaze skewered him. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Garrett?”

“Her memory’s gone.”

Her intense blue eyes behind gold-framed glasses gave nothing away, and she gestured toward the door.

He followed her into the hall before posing his question. “Is it a brain injury?”

Dr. Sinclair shook her head and stuffed her stethoscope into her pocket. “CAT scan and EEG are both normal, now that her concussion is subsiding.”

He rammed his fingers through his hair. He hadn’t expected this crimp in his plans. He should have been halfway home by now, as he’d promised Jordan, but how could he leave Rachel alone and frightened, not knowing who she was? “Why can’t she remember?”

“She suffered a bad bump on the back of her head. Amnesia caused by physical trauma should clear up within a couple of days.”

He expelled a sigh of relief. “So she’ll be all right?”

“Unless we’re dealing with hysteria.”

He frowned. “She seemed calm enough. But she did shed a few tears.”

Dr. Sinclair smiled and shook her head. “Not that kind of hysteria. Amnesia caused by psychological trauma. Imagine what she experienced, plunging into that deep ravine in a tumbling, burning railroad car.”

Wade nodded. Rachel had been air-lifted to Libby, partly because Wade was there, but mostly because the Kalispell hospital was filled to capacity with other wreck victims. He jerked his wandering attention back to the doctor.

“Her mind may be protecting her from reexperiencing that nightmare by shutting down her memories.”

“But she’ll get them back?”

Sinclair patted his hand, reminding him of his long-dead mother. “In a few days, if her memory loss is due to physical trauma.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“When she’s strong enough to face the memories.”

“Soon?”

The little doctor shrugged. “Maybe the next time she awakens, maybe in a few days.” Her voice had an upward inflection, hinting of things left unsaid.

“Or?”

Dr. Sinclair avoided his eyes. “Maybe never.”

“Never? But you said there’s no permanent injury to her brain—”

“In spite of medical advances, many mysteries of the human mind are still unsolved.” Her smile didn’t hide her weariness. “But you’re worrying prematurely. She may recall everything when she awakes again.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Her memories could come rushing back anytime, or they could return gradually in bits and pieces.”

He glanced into the room at the sleeping Rachel. If she didn’t remember soon, she’d be in for a rough time. She’d need care, attention and reassurance. The prospect of providing for her warmed him—until his common sense kicked in.

Feelings played no part in their relationship, and Jordan was enough to worry about. Rachel was supposed to ease his troubles, not add to them.

He hardened his heart and looked away. No point in worrying about what only time could cure. He glanced at his watch. If he hurried, he might reach home before Jordan’s bedtime. “What about her family?”

Dr. Sinclair shook her head. “The local authorities traced her to Atlanta, then back to Missouri. Her parents are deceased. She was their only child.”

“No aunts or uncles, cousins?”

The doctor shook her head. “Not that they could find.”

“What about close friends?”

“There’s no one.”

The tenderness he’d tried to suppress surged through him. “Poor kid.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Dr. Sinclair patted his hand again. “After all, she has you.”