A Woman of Mystery Read online

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  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

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  “I can’t remember anything.”

  Jordan blinked. “Nothing?”

  “Not even my own name.”

  Biting back a curse, he shoved his fingers through his hair. Attractive and vulnerable as she was, his intention had been to walk away from this beautiful stranger. Amnesia threw an unexpected kink into his plan.

  “Didn’t I have a purse, a wallet, something with identification?”

  “You weren’t carrying anything last night.” Common sense screamed to let her go, but his conscience wasn’t listening. “But you did speak to my boss before you were attacked.”

  “Well?”

  “You didn’t tell her your name. You asked a question.”

  “Don’t make me drag it out of you.” Her throaty voice rose an octave. “What did I say to her?”

  Jordan sank into a chair, and stared at the woman in front of him with a gut-wrenching sensation of inevitability.

  “You asked her where to find me. You needed professional protection.”

  Dear Reader,

  You’ve told us that you love amnesia stories—and in response we’ve created a program just for these incredibly romantic, emotional reads. A MEMORY AWAY...from danger, from passion...from love!

  Charlotte Douglas knows about emotion. Her heroes always make us feel loved. But this author of several Harlequin American Romance novels and Harlequin Intrigue books has never forgotten her high school sweetheart—she married him three decades ago!

  We hope you enjoy this and all the special amnesia books in the A MEMORY AWAY... program.

  Sincerely,

  Debra Matteucci

  Senior Editor & Editorial Coordinator

  Harlequin Books

  300 East 42nd Street

  New York, NY 10017

  A Woman of Mystery

  Charlotte Douglas

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  “Angel”—She’s stalked by a past she can’t remember.

  Jordan Trouble—An ex-cop whose past and present live up to his name.

  David Swinburn—A man without a future.

  Frank Maricosso and Sidney Stepman—Hired killers.

  Henry and Fiona Erskine—Employees at Swinburn’s waterfront mansion.

  Michael Winslow—An attorney who tries to keep a woman with amnesia out of jail.

  Maggie Henderson—A detective, nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who’s on the trail of a killer.

  James Lassiter—David Swinburn’s real estate partner.

  Bunny Shelton—David Swinburn’s accommodating secretary.

  Carleton James—A millionaire whose money comes from unknown sources.

  Chapter One

  Jordan Trouble spotted her the instant she walked into the tiki bar. It wasn’t every night a class act in a white linen suit rubbed elbows with the tourists at Mary Tiger’s bar on Sunset Bay Beach.

  Vacationing college girls in wispy bikinis and clinging wet T-shirts, middle-aged grandmothers stuffed in too-tight Bermuda shorts and blue-haired, sun-dried retirees sporting floral shifts and flip-flops often drifted through, but this stunning blonde stood out from the typical midnight crowd like a flower in a sandspur patch.

  Jordan leaned back on a rattan stool at the far corner of the bar to enjoy the view—until his police training kicked in and made him notice details.

  The classy blonde moved with easy grace, but she cast anxious glances over her shoulder and tugged nervously at a gold hoop earring, marring her poise, which at first glance had seemed flawless. Where thick lashes swept her pale cheeks, violet shadows suggested exhaustion or illness, and wrinkles crisscrossed her expensive suit, as if she’d slept in it.

  The sudden tightening in his lower body surprised him. He had believed those responses dead.

  Like the rest of him.

  That his unexpected reaction included more than simple lust startled him most of all. The woman’s vulnerability had awakened his protective urge and a rampant curiosity. He wanted to buy her a drink and talk to her, then catalog the features of her attractive oval face, follow the graceful movements of her slender hands and absorb the music of her voice as she answered.

  The woman interested him.

  He grinned with satisfaction. Maybe he wasn’t dead after all.

  Mary Tiger, the plump Seminole bartender in a voluminous muumuu, refilled his club soda and added a wedge of lime. Her obsidian eyes followed his gaze and glistened with humor above nut-brown cheeks and a broad, toothy smile. “She a friend of yours?”

  He shook his head at the warmhearted woman who had rescued him from the brink of self-destruction a few months earlier. “She’s a knockout, but definitely a high-class knockout. Outta my league.”

  “Why?” Mary Tiger asked, huffy in his defense. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you—’cept a smart mouth and the occasional blues.”

  “A woman like that wouldn’t look twice at someone like me,” he teased, “who earns only the meager pittance you pay for providing security.”

  “Security?” Mary Tiger’s derisive snort wiggled her double chins, but affection lighted her eyes. “Damn fancy name for a bouncer.”

  With amazing grace for a woman of her dimensions, Mary Tiger moved to the opposite end of the bar. She plopped a paper cocktail napkin on the teakwood surface in front of the blonde, who was perched on a stool as if ready to take flight. As Jordan watched, the newcomer mouthed a question, and Mary Tiger jerked her thumb backward, toward him.

  The blonde’s gaze met his for an instant. Fear shone in her luminous eyes, but he read strength in the tilt of her chin and determination in the set of her jaw. The attractive, mysterious woman so captivated him, he didn’t notice two new arrivals until they had maneuvered to either side of her. As out of place as the well-dressed blonde, the strangers in dark business suits squeezed her between them.

  Without success, she attempted to pull from their grasp, and the sudden terror in her expression transmitted clearly to Jordan’s end of the bar.

  Menace crackled in the air like an electrical current, and he tensed. At Mary Tiger’s, any problem immediately became his problem, and the situation at the far end of the bar had disaster written all over it.

  He sighed. Of all the tiki bars in all the world, why did she have to walk into this one?

  The taller man had clamped the blonde’s right arm in a viselike grip, and the other had seized her left elbow. Between them, they lifted her from the bar stool and half carried her toward the streetside exit. They approached Jordan’s end of the bar, and her frightened gaze caught his. Panic had drained the color from her face.

  “Help me.” Her lips moved in a silent plea, and her fear-glazed eyes echoed her silent request.

  Reacting automatically, he slid from the bar stool, paced three long strides toward the door and turned. When the trio reached him, he greeted the unfamiliar suits in a low, easy voice. “Looks like the lady doesn’t want to go with you.”

  The taller
man contorted weasel-like features in a scowl. “What the lady wants isn’t your business. Get out of our way.”

  She stepped toward Jordan. “Please—”

  The shorter man jerked her back, silencing her low, husky voice.

  “Yeah,” the short guy said, “the lady says please leave us alone. This ain’t got nothing to do with you.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Jordan shrugged and pivoted away.

  Using the momentum of his turn, he wheeled back toward the trio and smashed his fist into the tall man’s jaw. Releasing the woman, the weasel went down like a building in a demolition blast. When Jordan seized the short man by his cheap tie and lifted him to his toes, he, too, let the blonde go.

  “Now—” Jordan unhanded shorty and stepped back “—either you and your pal clear out and leave the lady alone, or I call the cops.”

  As the short man adjusted his tie, his coat bulged, revealing an automatic in a shoulder holster. Jordan reached to his own back, but his hand closed over air where his weapon should have been. He hadn’t carried a gun in over a year, and the memory lapse cost him.

  His opponent, taking advantage of Jordan’s hesitation, shoved the woman away and slammed him above the eyebrow with a solid left hook. Jordan reeled from the blow, but quickly regained his balance and blinked a trickle of blood from his eye. His blurred gaze swept the now-quiet room.

  The dazed blonde had landed among a tangle of overturned chairs and remained slumped against the leg of a table. Beside her, the weasel had risen as far as his knees before Mary Tiger loomed over him with the Louisville Slugger she kept behind the bar.

  “Go ahead.” She choked the bat like a pro stepping up to the plate. “Make my day.”

  Aware of the weapon in the short man’s coat, Jordan said calmly, “Take your friend and get out, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  The short guy, suddenly alert to the attentive crowd, averted his face from the curious group. “Let’s go, Frank. Too damn many witnesses.”

  After a searing glance at the unconscious woman beneath the table, Frank followed his partner out the door, and they disappeared at a trot into the early morning darkness.

  Jordan knelt beside the stunned woman and brushed hair like pale gold off her colorless face. “You okay?”

  Her eyelids fluttered briefly but didn’t open.

  Concerned by her unnatural stillness, he lifted her in his arms. In contrast to her cool appearance, a seductive heat radiated from her body.

  “Call 911, Mary Tiger. We need police and paramedics.”

  Mary Tiger set her lips in a stubborn line and shook her head. “Don’t want no police. And ’less she’s hurt bad, no paramedics. They call the cops.”

  He nodded. After a near riot started by spring-breakers a week ago, Mary Tiger worried about losing her liquor license. After all she’d done for him, he couldn’t put her in a jam. As much as he disliked the obligation, the blonde was now his responsibility.

  “Call Doc Martin to meet me at my boat. Tell him to bring his bag.”

  He shifted the woman in his arms, stepped out into the night and checked the deserted street for any sign of the two strangers. The only movement he spotted was a night heron, straggling through the sand-strewn parking lot toward the deserted fishing pier.

  The humid air was heavy with salt spray and the fragrance of lemon blossoms and bougainvillea. Beyond the bar’s cypress poles and thatched-palm roof, the Gulf of Mexico glittered in the moonlight along a sugar-sand beach.

  Regret shuddered down his spine. Last year on a night like this, his life had ended. Sure, he still walked and breathed, but his soul had died that April night beneath a waning moon and an onshore breeze.

  Memories prompted a craving that twisted viciously in his gut. He thought longingly of the bottle of Absolut vodka, its unbroken seal a symbol of his victory, that sat in a galley cabinet of his boat. After finally accepting that drinking only weakened his defenses against unbearable memories, with Mary Tiger’s support, he had conquered that devil six months ago. He couldn’t fall off the wagon now if he intended to aid the woman in his arms.

  And he couldn’t let her down: His nightmare had begun when he failed another woman a year ago. Helping the blonde might begin to atone for his fatal mistake.

  Cradling her against his chest, he set off across the boulevard toward the marina.

  HER HEAD HURT.

  And she was floating, wrapped in a firm, warm cloud that pulsated beneath her cheek. Cool air, laden with the sharp bite of salt spray, caressed her skin and the rhythmic crash of distant surf soothed her.

  She was safe.

  She relaxed and surrendered again to the blackness.

  Later—she’d lost all track of time—a blinding light intruded on her darkness. She squeezed her eyelids against it, but steady fingers pried them open.

  The light flicked off, the hands released her and she closed her eyes again.

  Gentle fingers traced her scalp, and she flinched when they touched the spot where her head ached.

  “Nothing’s broken,” a voice like snow tires on a smooth road announced. “Just a bad bump on the noggin. Could be a slight concussion, so keep a close eye on her.”

  “That will be a pleasure.” Unlike the roughness of the first, this voice resonated like hot-buttered rum. Smooth and rich with a hint of laughter. Reassuring.

  She drifted back into nothingness, vaguely conscious of rocking like a baby to the lullaby of water lapping against a wall.

  Sometime later, she stretched in the narrow confines of an unfamiliar bed and opened her eyes. Through the window beside her, streaks of pink and gold stained a forest of defoliated trees.

  Sunrise or sunset?

  And where was she?

  She bolted upright in a rapid movement that blurred her vision and shot slivers of pain through her head.

  “Whoa, take it easy.” Someone eased her backward against a nest of soft pillows on a sofa.

  She gazed up at the owner of the buttered-rum voice. Her eyes focused on his familiar face, and she wondered how she could have forgotten the name of the man with midnight-blue eyes that seemed to bore straight through her. A faint stubble of beard shadowed the craggy lines of his square jaw, and thick brown hair, burnished gold with sun streaks, spilled across his brow as he leaned above her, his appealing mouth fixed in a concerned frown.

  She tore her gaze from the mesmerizing blue eyes and nodded toward the trees outside the window. “Where am I?”

  “Sunset Bay Marina.”

  She blinked, and the defoliated trees transformed into sailboat masts.

  “I’m on a boat? How did I get here?”

  “I carried you from Mary Tiger’s bar.” He nodded toward the west. “Across the boulevard on the beach.”

  She didn’t remember. Lifting her hand, she examined her throbbing scalp. As she probed her aching head with cautious fingers, her sense of safety evaporated, and her heart thudded with alarm.

  “Was I hurt before or after you brought me here?”

  He stepped away, but not before a look of disappointment flitted across his attractive face. “I saved you from a couple of kidnappers. Don’t you remember?”

  Standing on the threshold of sliding doors that opened to a deck at the cabin cruiser’s stern, he almost filled the frame with his broad, tanned shoulders. He wore nothing but white denim shorts slung low on narrow hips, canvas deck shoes and a devil-may-care smile.

  Maybe the bump on her head had skewed her reasoning, but she figured he wasn’t the one who had harmed her.

  Until she spotted the blood on her jacket.

  She scrambled to a sitting position, prepared to flee. “What—”

  “Don’t panic.” He returned inside, pulled a folding director’s chair next to the sofa and sat beside her. “That’s my blood, not yours.”

  “Your blood?” Her fear escalated. He had to be lying. His bare muscular torso and long, sturdy legs displayed no wound, although a
small pink scar, long healed, blossomed like a rosette in the sun-bronzed skin above his left collarbone. “You don’t look hurt.”

  He shoved the hair off his forehead to reveal several fresh stitches in the brow above his left eye. “Doc Martin sewed me up after he checked you over.”

  His sympathetic manner warmed her and eased her fear. He had come to her aid and been wounded in the process. She traced his injured brow lightly with her fingertip. “You were hurt on my account, and I don’t even know your name.”

  He jerked as if her touch had burned him, then stood and crossed into the galley, where he filled a coffeemaker reservoir with water and scooped grounds into the filter-lined basket. “My name’s Jordan.”

  “I’m indebted to you, Mr. Jordan—”

  “Jordan’s my first name.” He flashed a self-deprecating grin. “My last name’s Trouble.”

  Her mind fogged, as if she were dreaming and unable to force herself awake. Nothing about the morning seemed real, including the name of her rescuer. “Trouble? You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” His grin remained, but pain and an unbearable sadness seemed to flicker behind the dark blue eyes. “People who know me say it’s a fitting description.”

  He plunged his head into a counter-high refrigerator and removed bacon, eggs and a carton of orange juice. When he confronted her again, the misery in his eyes had disappeared. She guessed the look of elusive suffering had been a trick of light and not pain after all.

  “What’s your name?”

  My name?

  The hovering blackness, the yawning emptiness she’d struggled to ignore swept over her, swallowing her in its terrifying void.

  “Hey!” He rushed to her side. “You’ve gone as pale as that sheet. I’d better call Doc Martin.”

  She grasped his hands and clung to him. “No, I’ll be okay—”

  The woman’s voice cracked, and she stifled a sob.