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  Lisa gave a cracked laugh, pressing her fingers to her mouth when it ended on a sob. ‘You can say that again.’

  He reached out to give her hand a comforting pat. They both jumped like scalded cats at the unexpected jolt the contact gave them. Linda Brogan’s husband snatched his hand back and didn’t seem to know what to do with it for a few moments. Eventually he shoved it into the pocket of his chinos and said awkwardly, ‘I’ll come back and see you tomorrow.’

  Lisa didn’t bother to answer.

  Dan walked blindly down the corridor from Linda’s room, his mind frantically searching for answers. He was an orthopaedic surgeon so head injuries were not his specialty, but he knew it wasn’t unusual for people injured as seriously as Linda to experience some memory loss. The logical, educated part of Dan’s mind could accept this; he knew her recovery might be prolonged and incomplete. If the part of her brain responsible for speech had been damaged in the accident, it could explain why Linda seemed to be finding it difficult to talk. She sounded nothing like herself. In fact, it sounded to Dan as if she spoke with the long, flat vowels of a New Zealander.

  Linda never made self-deprecating jokes, so the suppositories remark had taken Dan aback, as had the observation about his trousers. Linda constantly made cracks about his rumpled appearance, but her remarks had long ago stopped being given jokingly.

  Dan felt like he was the one who’d just sustained a head injury. The woman in the bed had looked at him as if he were a complete stranger, and his heart had ached when he saw the bruised, frightened look in her eyes. Linda always tried to project an image of supreme self-confidence; Dan was one of the few people who knew the demons and low self-esteem that tormented her. She fought back by manipulating the people around her, which was just one of the reasons their marriage was over. Dan hadn’t forgotten what a consummate actress she could be—a part of him cynically wondered if she was fooling them all now.

  The head injury had to be the cause of her memory loss and bizarre claims. It had to be, unless he wanted to start believing some story about the wrong woman being put back in his wife’s body.

  It was either the head injury or something Dan had known for a long time—that his wife was a compulsive liar.

  3

  Dan Brogan had been born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and had attended medical school at the University of Colorado. He met Linda Mulholland while he was a resident at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was twenty-nine and she was twenty-two.

  The pair couldn’t have been more different.

  Dan was quiet and had a tendency to sound gruff. Only his close friends knew he was painfully shy and often struggled on a one-to-one basis, particularly when it came to girls. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them—far from it—he was as preoccupied as the next American male with the female sex and, well, sex in general.

  Because he tended to stand back and watch from the fringes, he often noticed a lot of things about girls that passed his friends right by. Dan’s powers of observation were razor-sharp, which made him an invaluable member of the Emergency Room team. He also didn’t feel the need to brag about himself, largely because he considered himself fairly ordinary. He didn’t understand that his big body and looks attracted women, and the fact he was a doctor certainly added to his charm. But what kept them with him was his ability to listen.

  And Dan never ever told what he heard.

  ‘Hey, Brogan! Is it true you managed to get Samantha into the sack? Theo said he saw you going into her apartment last Thursday night and your car was still there in the morning,’ his friends would ask.

  Dan would shrug and say vaguely, ‘Thursday night? Samantha? I thought that was the night I played poker at Mike’s.’

  As he was notoriously forgetful about anything other than his work, his friends usually gave up in frustration.

  Dan had a reputation among the females of his acquaintance for being the real thing—the strong, silent type. Although he might have a tendency to be forgetful, he certainly wasn’t stupid. He quickly came to the conclusion that it didn’t pay to tell women that the only reason he was silent was because he didn’t have the answers to their problems, or at least none they’d want to hear. Instead, he decided early on that the wisest course of action was to keep his mouth shut and nod sympathetically in the right places. He’d watched too many of his buddies shoot themselves in the foot by actually offering advice and then watching their girlfriends disappear into the sunset. In the meantime, he took women out and enjoyed their company—both in and out of bed.

  ‘Dan, you’re such a rarity,’ one of his dates once told him. ‘You know instinctively that women are from Venus and men are from Mars—and I bet you’ve never even read the book.’

  No, Dan hadn’t. With his nose constantly buried in medical texts, it was doubtful he’d even heard of it.

  Linda erupted into his life at a party. She was dressed in a tiny white top and tight blue jeans that emphasized her stunning cheerleader’s body, and was one of the few people besides Dan who was still sober. The only thing Dan saw her drink the entire night was Pepsi.

  ‘Holy cow!’ one of Dan’s friends mouthed reverently when Linda first sauntered into the room, which just about summed up the reaction of every man there, much to the annoyance of their dates.

  Linda was definitely aware of all the attention she was generating, and she loved it. Dan noticed her habit of stroking the ends of her glorious black hair idly across her lips or neck—or the exposed top of her breasts—when she spoke to a guy. The poor sucker went from a state of semi-arousal to rock-hard erection in the time it took to imagine a part of his own anatomy being that lucky strand of hair. Linda giggled and apologized when somebody pointed out what she was doing, saying it was an unconscious habit she really needed to break.

  Some unconscious habit, Dan thought wryly, sipping his beer. She was so beautiful she almost made his eyes cross. Every man at the party wanted her, and she played them off expertly one against the other the entire night while Dan stood against a wall with a beer in one hand and the other in the pocket of his jeans, watching her. She seemed to avoid any guy who was even slightly inebriated, as if the booze bothered her.

  As the night wore on, she looked across at him more and more frequently, a puzzled expression on her lovely face. Dan was the only guy in the room who hadn’t made a move on her. He’d only drunk two cans of Budweiser because he had to work in the morning. He wasn’t trying to be strong and silent that night either; it was more that he couldn’t imagine this extraordinary creature was (a) real and (b) would be remotely interested in somebody like him.

  Finally, she flounced across the room to lean against the wall beside him. ‘Don’t you talk, big guy?’ she demanded.

  Dan stared down at her for several long moments, thinking she was even more gorgeous up close. Linda reached up to wave a manicured hand in front of his face. ‘Hello? Anybody in there?’

  He tensed and pulled away, his nostrils filled with the musky scent of her perfume. His shyness grew as he imagined making a fool of himself in front of this girl.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said abruptly.

  Linda froze, her hand in mid-air, and blinked up at him in surprise. This wasn’t the reaction she was used to. ‘Don’t?’ she repeated uncertainly.

  ‘Sorry,’ Dan muttered miserably. ‘Didn’t mean to be so rude.’

  ‘Oh,’ she laughed, her expression brightening. ‘That’s OK. I was rude.’

  Trailing a hand across her breast, she lifted a strand of her hair and began stroking it just above her right nipple. Dan forced himself to keep his eyes on her face while the zipper on his jeans suddenly became way too tight.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, her blue eyes bright with mischief.

  ‘Dan. Dan Brogan,’ he replied gruffly, feeling increasingly nervous. A quick scan of the room showed no sign of Sally, his date.

  ‘Brogan?’ the beautiful nipple-twitcher cried. ‘Hey! You’re Irish too! My name’
s Mulholland. Linda Mulholland.’

  From the corner of his eye, Dan saw Linda’s fingers lower as she stroked her hair directly across her nipple. It immediately puckered against the thin, stretchy fabric of her white top.

  ‘Maybe we’re related,’ she suggested.

  Dan’s eyebrows rose in disbelief. He seriously doubted it. If she’d been a member of his family, he was certain he would have known about it.

  She continued to eye him appraisingly. ‘And what do you do, Dan?’

  Make a fool of myself at parties, he thought miserably and searched the room again for his date.

  ‘Bartender,’ he lied.

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, dropping her hair and looking disappointed.

  ‘Do you have to do that thing with your hair?’ Dan suddenly asked. ‘I mean, it isn’t as if the guys aren’t already looking.’

  Linda’s lush mouth formed an O of surprise. ‘What thing with my hair?’ she snapped.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Dan muttered, immediately regretting his outburst. Why the hell had he said it? He’d just broken his golden rule about never offering a woman advice.

  Sally came into the room and didn’t look too pleased when she spotted Dan with Linda. She fought her way through the crowd to reach them, immediately twining her hands around Dan’s arm and pressing herself into his side.

  ‘Hi, Linda,’ she said coolly, looking suspiciously at the other girl.

  Linda stopped glaring at Dan long enough to say tonelessly, ‘Hi, Sally. How are you?’

  ‘Pretty good.’

  Sally snuggled closer to Dan, unknowingly nudging him closer to Linda so her breasts were now pressed against his other arm. He closed his eyes briefly, a man torn between heaven and hell. The heaven of a pair of breasts snuggled up on either side of him and the hell of the owners of said breasts looking like they each wanted to sock each other in the eye. How had that happened? He had a sneaking suspicion things might get nasty if he didn’t intervene.

  ‘Sally?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sweetie?’ she gritted, glaring across his chest at Linda.

  Dan winced. Sweetie? Sally was overdoing it a bit. ‘I think we’d better hit the road,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, honey!’ she agreed, smirking at Linda. ‘I’d forgotten you have an early start at the hospital in the morning.’

  ‘The hospital?’ Linda asked sharply, her gaze flying to Dan’s face. ‘You’re a bartender at a hospital?’

  Sally frowned. ‘Dan’s not a bartender. He’s a doctor.’

  Linda stared at Dan.

  Dan stared at Linda.

  She chased him mercilessly for the next three weeks until he gave in, a man more than happy to go to this particular scaffold. He was completely smitten, although he did his best to hide it, sensing the best strategy was to keep her on her toes. As soon as she had the upper hand she would try to walk all over him. But she was charming, funny, unpredictable and very, very sexy.

  ‘Would you have been interested in me if I’d been a bartender?’ Dan asked her the first time they slept together.

  Linda considered her reply, but eventually answered truthfully. She had learned that Dan Brogan could spot a lie a mile off. ‘I would still have wanted to go to bed with you.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ he replied dryly.

  He was lying on his back with Linda draped across him, her long hair spilling across his naked chest and abdomen.

  She pressed a kiss into his belly, smiling when his muscles clenched in response. ‘You’re welcome, Dr Brogan.’

  ‘But apart from going to bed with me?’ Dan persisted, toying with her hair.

  She pursed her lips and admitted, ‘I would have dumped you. I didn’t fight my way out of a trailer park to slip right back again.’

  Dan respected her honesty.

  He’d known Linda about two months when her mother was admitted to the hospital where he worked. Linda had never mentioned her family. At the time this hadn’t overly bothered Dan as they were still in the early stages of their relationship, only getting out of bed long enough to go to work, eat and catch an occasional movie. The only reason Dan discovered Linda’s mother had been admitted was because a colleague involved with her care was having trouble contacting Linda, who was listed as Betty Mulholland’s next of kin. Knowing Linda was Dan’s girlfriend, he’d contacted him.

  Linda was reluctant to see her mother, explaining they’d never been close. ‘I haven’t seen her in almost two years.’

  Coming from a close-knit family, Dan found this hard to understand. He couldn’t imagine falling out with his parents and younger brother so badly that he wouldn’t speak to them for two years.

  ‘I’ll come with you, Linda, if it’ll make you feel better,’ he offered, feeling sorry he’d passed the message on in the first place.

  Linda hesitated, but finally accepted. ‘You might as well find out sooner rather than later what I come from,’ she said resignedly.

  Dan knew ten seconds after entering Betty Mulholland’s hospital room that she was suffering from delirium tremens due to alcohol withdrawal. She began to complain bitterly the moment Linda stepped over the threshold.

  ‘Now you’ve landed yourself some rich doctor you think you’re too good to see your mother.’ Her nicotine-stained fingers shook as they plucked at the covers on her hospital bed.

  From the hostile expression on Linda’s face, Dan suspected she had seen it all before. He suddenly understood her aversion to alcohol.

  Betty had probably once been as beautiful as her daughter, but booze and bitterness had wiped away all traces. She was a thin, withered husk of a woman, old before her time, with hard eyes, and she was out for her daughter’s blood. She looked Dan over the way he imagined a female praying mantis might just before it bit off the male’s head. ‘I always told you the only thing you had going for you was your looks,’ she sneered. ‘Sure as hell wasn’t your mind!’

  Dan glanced uneasily at Linda. Her face wore a blank expression, as if she was accustomed to tuning out her mother and her vitriol.

  Betty continued in a malevolent voice, ‘She’s dumb as a post, y’know. Always in the bottom of the class at school. Had to do fifth grade three times over! Never graduated.’ She gave a cracked laugh. ‘At least I managed that! You can say what you want about me, Miss High And Mighty, but at least I’m not dumb!’

  Linda pushed past Dan and ran out of the room.

  Dan stared at Linda’s mother. He couldn’t believe a parent would ever speak to their child the way Betty had just spoken to Linda.

  He walked slowly over to the bed. Bracing his hands on either side of the bedcovers covering Betty’s skinny legs, he thrust his face close to hers and growled, ‘Listen to me you crazy old bitch. If you ever so much as spit in Linda’s direction again, I’ll make it my business to make you sorry you were ever born.’

  Betty shrank back against the pillows. ‘You…you can’t threaten me!’ she quavered uncertainly. ‘I’ll get you fired for saying that! I’ll…I’ll get you struck off! Nurse!’ she began to shriek. ‘Nurse! There’s a madman in my room! Help!’

  Dan knew the nurses who worked on this floor. They had mentioned that Betty Mulholland spent much of the day yelling and being generally abusive to the staff. He didn’t expect they’d be along any time soon to rescue their patient. He straightened and waited. When Betty stopped yelling to draw breath, he took the opportunity to say, ‘As long as we understand one another, Mrs Mulholland. Hopefully we won’t be meeting again.’

  As he left the room Betty began to yell again, using language that would have put a sailor to shame.

  Linda was waiting in the car park leaning against Dan’s car, her arms wrapped about her waist and her eyes shaded by sunglasses. Dan’s heart contracted when he saw the way her shoulders were hunched defensively, as if she was waiting for a blow. ‘You OK?’ he asked, stopping in front of her and trapping her between his body and the car.

  She shrugged a
nd looked off into the distance. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said stiffly. ‘I don’t know why I let you come with me. You really didn’t need to hear that.’

  Dan grunted. ‘Forget about me. What about you? Is she always like that?’

  Linda looked at her feet. ‘Pretty much. But I’m used to it.’ She frowned at her pink-tipped toes peeping out of delicate, high-heeled sandals. ‘What took you so long?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘There were a couple things I wanted to clarify with your mom.’

  ‘Clarify?’

  Dan hesitated. He felt justified in what he had said to Betty Mulholland; however, he didn’t feel particularly proud of himself, a guy his size threatening a wizened little old lady, even if she did have a mouth like a sewer. He decided a highly edited version of the truth was the best way to go. ‘I told her I’d take it personally if she ever hurt you like that again.’

  Linda jerked her head up, making the silver hoop earrings she wore bang against her cheeks and her sunglasses slip down her nose. She gazed at Dan incredulously. ‘You what?’

  He sighed and swiped his palms across his face. ‘I told her I’d make it my business to make her sorry she was ever born if she did anything to upset you again.’ Risking a glance at Linda’s face, he added gruffly, ‘Sorry, but I couldn’t stand by and let her get away with treating you like that. You don’t deserve it.’

  Linda stared at him. ‘Don’t I?’ she asked in a wobbly voice.

  Dan almost groaned out loud when she began to sniff and the tears started sliding down her face. ‘Linda…hey, I’m sorry! She’s your mother and all, but damn! I couldn’t let her talk to you like that—’

  He was stopped mid-sentence when Linda flung her arms around his neck so tightly she almost strangled him. ‘That is the most wonderful thing anybody has ever done for me,’ she bawled in his ear.

  On the ride back to her tiny apartment, Linda said hesitantly, ‘She’s right about one thing, you know.’

  Dan gave her an are-you-serious look. ‘What?’

  ‘I am dumb.’