“I was hit by a speeding car on my bicycle riding to uni. Bounced off the windscreen, tossed in the air, landed on the opposite side of the road.”
His fingers tightened around the glass and he winced. “Christ. That must have been...”
“It’s okay.” Arabella smiled. “Best part about amnesia? I don’t remember any of it.”
“Injuries?”
“Fractured pelvis, fractured ribs, fractured left ankle, fractured left femur, fractured left humerus and clavicle, a collapsed left lung, a head injury.” She took a breath. “And a partridge in a pear tree.”
He didn’t seem to find it funny, his grey eyes serious – intense.
“Fuck,” he whispered, paling beneath his tan.
“Indeed.” Arabella grinned because she was alive and all better now.
“What kind of a head injury?”
“Closed. Small subdural haematoma they managed conservatively.”
“Bad enough to knock out nine years of your life, though.”
“Yes. But it could have been a lot worse had I not been wearing a helmet.” The doctors had told her she’d have probably died without one.
“You seem to have recovered from it okay apart from the memory?”
“I was in a bit of a neurological fog for a couple of months after. Very confused. And my speech and cognitive function was mildly affected. But I slowly recovered from that.”
“Is it possible that you might recover from the amnesia too?”
His voice was light but she could see the whitening at the angle of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders. He clearly wanted her to remember. Hell, sitting opposite God’s gift to women, she wanted it too. She wanted to remember every second with this man. She wanted it all back. Everything. Even the bad stuff.
But... she’d given up wishing for something that was never going to be. It’d been hard but she’d abandoned hope. And whatever happened from here on out with her and Logan it was important that she didn’t give him any reason to hope either.
“No.” She locked her gaze with his. “It’s not.”
“But the brain’s a complex thing, right? So who really knows? And there must be new treatments coming out all the time?”
Arabella shook her head. “There is no treatment for amnesia.”
He dropped his gaze to his beer for a moment before returning his attention to her face shooting her an apologetic smile. “Right. Sorry. So... what about your limp? Is that pelvis, the leg, or the ankle?”
Arabella smiled back, thankful to him for dropping it when she could see how hard it was for him to grasp. “The pelvis. Mainly.”
“I imagine that took a little longer to recover from.”
She sipped her wine. “Two years of physio. But then my physiotherapist was kinda hot so I’m not entirely sure I wasn’t malingering for the last six months or so.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her. “You’re chipper for someone who was pretty banged up for two years and can’t remember a huge chunk of her life.”
Arabella laughed and quickly covered her mouth as his brows knotted together. “You sound like my eighty-year-old grandfather.” Except Logan was fit and vital and even all stern looking he oozed sex appeal. Whereas her grandfather’s face bore more of a resemblance to an old boot.
He blinked. “Christ. I did, didn’t I?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, I don’t usually have a stick jammed up my butt.”
“I’m alive, Logan,” she said, reaching across the table and squeezing his forearm.
The muscle tensed beneath her palm, hinting at the power leashed there. Involuntarily, her fingernails curled into the warm skin. His gaze zeroed in on her hand before shifting to her face. Her lips lost all their moisture as her tongue flicked over her mouth.
“Yes,” he murmured. “You are.”
Her hand was still on his arm but he made no attempt to shake her off. They were having a moment. Intense. Personal. Private.
In the middle of a busy inner-city bar.
All their history sat large between them and even though she was a stranger to it, she could sense its presence.
How was it possible to feel so attracted to this man she’d obviously once known very well but not be familiar with him at the same time? Not still have some sense of that?
Fanciful ideas of fated lovers tripped through her mind. Maybe their destinies had always been entwined. How else did she explain the fact that not even nine years and a case of amnesia had kept them apart?
But she was only here temporarily. For about three months depending on her work. And two weeks of that had already slipped away. She had a home and a job and a life in Melbourne. She was happy there.
Was it fair to succumb to whatever the hell this was when it was clear Logan had already been devastated once by what had gone down between them?
She withdrew her hand, a sense of loss and regret swamping her. There was a beat or two of awkward silence as they both sipped their drinks.
“You went on to finish your law degree,” he said after long moments. “I’m impressed.”
“Oh no.” She dismissed the suggestion with a toss of her head. “I’m not a lawyer.”
“Oh. You said you had to get back to court so I just assumed...”
Arabella shook her head. It had been her goal at fifteen and she had, apparently, been finishing up her law degree when she’d been hit by the car. But she hadn’t remembered any of her uni years and she was damned after two years of intense therapy if she was going to go and relearn all she’d forgotten, no matter how much her father had pushed for it.
Relearning basic functions had been hard enough.
“I’m a paralegal. I work for my dad’s firm.”
He nodded casually but she was already noticing even tiny details about him. Like the tightening at the angle of his jaw.
“It was easy to pick up and a lot less stressful when I was finally able enough to contribute to society again. Besides, what good are family connections if you can’t pump them, right?”
She smiled at him and her insides dissolved into a puddle when he smiled back.
“So what brings you to Brisbane?”
“The firm’s involved in a big civil class action suit up here that’s scheduled to run for few months. The barrister that’s handling the case needed a team to accompany him and I volunteered.”
“Because?”
Arabella shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was the honest truth.
She hadn’t thought about it overly at the time. The opportunity had arisen and it had appealed to her but with some distance she could see she’d been craving a change.
“I guess I felt like I was... treading water and I wanted to stretch my wings a bit. I’d been in Collins Street for two years and I was feeling restless, I suppose. We were having a heinous summer and a few months in sunny Brisbane sounded like bliss.”
Maybe it was destiny. Maybe she’d been fated to come to Brisbane so she could cross paths with Logan again. She didn’t really believe in any of that stuff but she couldn’t deny their reunion had been freakishly coincidental.
Nor could she deny the strong sexual attraction buzzing between them. She’d felt it on the street earlier, the second his hand had touched her arm but it had seemed... fanciful. Sitting opposite him right now it was very freaking real. The urge to lean across the table, grab the front of his shirt, and lay a kiss on his mouth, couldn’t be so easily dismissed.
She wanted nothing more than to invite him back to her place and get to know him again in all the ways possible.
She curled her fingers into the red leather of the booth seat.
“And there you were,” he said, his gaze intense as it searched hers, “outside my firehouse, as if you knew I was inside.”
The hairs on the back of Arabella’s neck prickled as the muscles on either side cranked tight. Hope and expectation glimmered in his eyes. Her chest constricted as dread ran hot and cold through her veins. She’d seen this before, too often. In the eyes of her family and friends, hoping something they did or said might trigger a memory for her or unlock the vault where the mother lode of those missing years was being kept hostage.
Their crushing disappointment when it didn’t happen had been hard to bear. And the guilt that she couldn’t remember – for them, the people she loved most in the world – had been exhausting.
“No, Logan.” She shook her head. She had to quash any idea he might have that she’d somehow been drawn to the building by a suppressed memory. “I just really love old architecture. Must be the Melbourne girl in me.” She shot him a self-deprecating smile. “The building is beautiful. And those big red doors are so eye-catching.”
“So you didn’t –”
“No.” She cut him off. “I didn’t recognise it. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Okay, sure,” he said, slowly nodding his head disguising his disappointment well but disappointment was something Arabella was particularly attuned to. “It is kinda random though, don’t you think?”
“Life’s random,” she dismissed, neck muscles clenched tight, because the fact that the universe had brought them together for a second time seemed eerily calculated rather than random.
“Yeah. I guess,” he mused. “Still, it’s very strange meeting up again like this. It feels... weird.”
Welcome to my life, buddy.
She smiled but it felt strained. “Yes... well... amnesia is weird.”
“I know, right? Like... why fifteen? Why cut off there? Do the doctors know?”
“Nope. They have no idea why.”
“How did they even pinpoint that? Is there some kind of scan for that?”
Arabella laughed. “Nothing as sophisticated as that. It’s a simple case of elimination, really. I remember my fifteenth birthday because some friends and I went to St. Kilda Beach for the day. But a week later the family went to Bali for a holiday and I don’t remember any of it or anything past it until I woke up in hospital. I don’t remember finishing high school or going to university or the Contiki tour or my sister getting married or my two nieces being born.”
He hunched forward, regarding her and she braced herself for more questions she couldn’t answer and more disappointment she couldn’t control.
But, after a long moment he relaxed back and half smiled. “Weird.”
“You have no idea.”
His gaze roved over her face, probing and insightful. The struggle she’d seen in his eyes as he’d grappled with his disappointment suddenly smoothed out. “Oh, yeah?”
He smiled, his cleft dimpling deliciously at her and the muscles either side of Arabella’s neck melted like marshmallow.
“Yeah. There’s been a lot of weird conversations with people that I was supposed to know but didn’t. Or about things I couldn’t remember doing.”
He laughed all low and easy and it soothed the residual ache in her neck muscles. “What’s the weirdest?”
Heat flooded her cheeks as the weirdest came readily to mind. Arabella appreciated the effort he was making to put his own feelings aside and pull her out of her funk but that conversation was probably best left in the past, never to be repeated. “Oh no, it’s too embarrassing.”
“The mind boggles,” he mused, a small smile playing across his mouth.
The laughter in his tone warmed her right down to the pit of her stomach.
“You know they say confession is good for the soul right?”
“I don’t think that applies unless you’re a priest. And you don’t look like any priest I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s true, I am having trouble with purity of thoughts at the moment,” he admitted, laughter infusing his voice with just the right note of flirtation.
Not too heavy, not too needy. But there if she wanted to pick it up and play.
And God help her, Arabella wanted to play.
She hadn’t had a pure thought since she’d met him. Again.
“But you should know, I’m a very good listener and I promise not to laugh.”
Their gazes locked. But for the table, Arabella would actually have leaned in a little more. She sucked in a breath which wasn’t big enough to fill the burgeoning capacity of her lungs.
Dear God. She wanted to tell him. “Well... it was more awkward than weird.”
“Awkward. Check,” he said, his voice serious, his chin smooth, no hint of dimple.
“I had to...” Her cheeks warmed again remembering it. “Ask my sister if I was a virgin.”
He didn’t bat an eyelid. His lips didn’t twitch. His eyebrows didn’t move. “And?”
“She confirmed I wasn’t but had no idea who I’d lost it to.”
Their gazes locked for long moments. He was straight-faced, his features calm and collected, carefully schooled at the revelation, like she’d just told him the sky was blue or something equally inane.
It was too much. Arabella broke first, her lips twitching at the absurdity of sharing something so private and personal with a guy who, for all intents and purposes, had been a stranger six hours ago.
She cracked first and he joined her. “You promised you wouldn’t do that,” she accused.
“You started it.” He chuckled.
“Oh, God,” Arabella said, half snorting as her laughter came to an abrupt halt at the realisation of a horrible possibility. “I didn’t lose it to you, did I?”
“No. You lost it to a guy called Travis Conner at uni in O week. You were eighteen.”
“Oh, my God!” Arabella blushed. “I told you that?”
A tiny flinch flickered across his features but his smile stayed firmly in place. “We didn’t have any secrets.”
Arabella didn’t doubt it. She’d known him for approximately six hours and she wanted to tell this man everything. “Well? Was he any good? Did I enjoy it?”
“You said he was a perfectly adequate lover,” Logan supplied, a small smile masking the bigger one he was clearly trying to hold back.
“Perfectly adequate?” Arabella’s heart banged hard against her ribcage as she stared at his mouth, a hint of his prowess in their fullness. “I don’t suppose I ever said that about you?”
She only had to look at Logan and those rough hands of his to know he’d be a thoroughly, mind-blowingly, head-bangingly, dirty lover.
“I bloody hope not.”
Arabella’s toes curled in her shoes. Actually curled. She blushed again and changed the subject. “And did you tell me who you lost yours to?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure I should kiss and tell. Twice.”
“Oh, come on, you know mine. I think it’s only fair I know yours.”
He shook his head in mock seriousness, his grey eyes dancing. “You barely know me.”
Arabella sucked in a breath at his teasing. Something expanded in her chest. Something big and warm, wrapping tentacles around her heart.
She bet she’d laughed a lot with this guy. She quirked an eyebrow. “So let’s start with this.”
“Fine.” He sighed, his smile amplifying his charisma tenfold. “Her name was Molly. She was the daughter of one of my father’s fire buddies. I was sixteen, she was seventeen.”
“Oooh.” Her eyes teased him as she drained the last of her wine. “An older woman.”
He grinned. “Well one of us had to know what we were doing.”
Arabella laughed. “Right, like you weren’t born knowing.”
He grinned but didn’t refute her statement. She found it hard to believe a guy who oozed sex didn’t just know shit like that. The man was practically melting her underwear off from his proximity alone. Add in the smile, the chin cleft, and his delicious banter and she was virtually commando.
Still, there was something endearing about a guy who freely admitted to a lack of sexual expertise without it mortally wounding his personality.
“So...” He shot her a speculative glance over the top of his beer, draining it before placing it back on the table. “I guess that means that you got to be a virgin all over again?”
“Well, not technically, there was Travis after all. And... you.”
Arabella held her breath as his gaze drifted to her mouth then back up again, a flash of heat like summer lightning sizzling in his grey eyes. “I’m really not sure you should count Travis.” She noted he didn’t discount himself. “I hope the second guy was better than perfectly adequate,” he teased.
Arabella had dated occasionally in the last couple of years including a fling with a visiting associate from the firm’s Sydney office. He’d been the first guy she’d slept with after the accident. There’d been two more since.
“Well, I didn’t really have anything to compare him to but it was nice.”
He blinked. “Nice?”
Arabella smiled at his curled lip. He looked like nice was an offence to the whole sexual act. It was almost comical. “Yes. Nice. Not every guy can be a Casanova in the bedroom, you know.”
Frankly, she’d just been glad she could manage it without aggravating her hip. There was nothing like the thought of pain or injury to put a dampener on both spontaneity and the urge to be adventurous.
Not that she felt any such restrictions under Logan’s continuing gaze. Something told her a dislocated hip would be a small price to pay for twisting herself into a pretzel with him.
“Maybe,” he murmured, “but I think you can do better than nice.”
Arabella sucked in a breath thick as syrup. He didn’t need to say that he’d happily volunteer; she could see it in the flare of heat in his eyes. She knew it in her gut.
“I’d like that,” she said.
He hadn’t specifically offered, she hadn’t specifically accepted but it was out there now. Sex hung between them, shiny and tantalising, waiting for one of them to reach out and take it. Arabella knew where this was heading. It was just a matter of time.
He cleared his throat. “You want another?” He pointed at her empty glass.
Arabella shook her head. If she had another wine, sex would be more than just an eventuality between them. He’d be lucky to get out of here without a bathroom quickie. “I really should get going. I have a lot of work to get through for tomorrow still.”
It wasn’t an excuse. She did have a lot of research to do from scribbled notes she’d taken today.
If Logan was disappointed he didn’t show it. He just said, “Where are you staying?”
“At some apartments in Mary Street.”
“Okay.” He stood. “I’ll walk you back.”
Arabella also stood. She didn’t protest his propriety. An hour in his company and she knew it was the kind of guy Logan Knight was.
And damned if that wasn’t a turn on too.