The Quiet Seduction Read Online Free Page B

It would help if she could come up with some logical reason for her reaction. A woman’s intuition? She could just hear him jeering at that. Men always did.
    â€œYou sent them away? Because you didn’t like their looks? Are you crazy, or what?”
    Okay, so she was crazy. She’d done what she thought best at the time. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever acted on impulse. If that made her guilty of somecrime, so be it. At the moment her guest was her responsibility. In his vulnerable state he was in no condition to defend himself against a couple of weirdos who came knocking on her door in the middle of the night.
    â€œSo sue me,” she muttered, collecting the supper tray on her way out.
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    The man called Storm struggled to absorb and process information, but it was slow going. One thing he knew—his head still hurt like hell. And he knew he wasn’t about to take any painkillers, not without knowing more about himself than he did. He’d heard of people taking a simple over-the-counter remedy and going into shock.
    He’d heard of it? Where? Who?
    â€œThink, man, think!”
    The trouble was, whenever he tried to reach out mentally and latch on to something solid—some glimmer of information hiding just beneath the surface of his mind—it slipped away. He didn’t have time to waste sleeping. He needed to stay awake long enough to put two and two together and come up with some answers, but he kept dozing off.
    It was still pitch-black outside. He seemed to recall being awakened several times. Gingerly feeling the knot on the side of his head, he winced.
    Head wound. Concussion. Check the pupils.
    He knew that much, at least. Maybe he was a medic, a doctor.
    The woman—Ellen Wagner—had been frantic over her son. “I knew he was on his way home from Joey’s,” she’d said. “But when I saw that sky…”
    She’d taken several deep breaths then, unable to goon. Oddly enough, he understood how she’d felt. There was a hell of a lot he didn’t understand yet, but that much, he did. She was a mother. Her kid had been threatened; she’d reacted. She was still reacting.
    So what did that mean—that he had a mother or that he had a son?
    The boy was sound asleep, she’d told him the last time she’d roused him to be sure he was still alive. Or maybe the time before that—he’d lost all sense of time. She should have gone to bed hours ago, but she’d stayed up to wake him periodically in case he started showing signs of a concussion. Sometime during the night she’d taken the trouble to heat a can of chicken noodle soup, telling him that her son used to call it chicken oogle soup. The small confidence hadn’t triggered any buried memories, but the soup had helped stave off the shakes.
    He knew now that he was in a downstairs bedroom she’d furnished for her husband after he’d grown too weak to climb the stairs. She’d told him that when he asked. He might not know who he was, but at least he knew where he was. In a pine-paneled room on a small ranch about five miles from the town of Mission Creek, in Lone Star County, in the State of Texas.
    That part felt right, anyway. The Texas part. It didn’t really ring any bells—he could have been from the planet Pluto for all he knew—but somehow, Texas felt right.
    It was just beginning to get light outside when she came to bring him her late husband’s shaving kit. “I thought shaving might make you feel better. I’m not sure about letting you stand long enough to take a shower, though. If you got dizzy and fell…”
    â€œMaybe you could roll me outside and hose me down.”
    She was obviously running on fumes. He wondered how much sleep she’d gotten during the night. Judging from the early hour, it couldn’t have been much.
    She took the time to give him a general description of the area.