Page 1 of Diagnosis Attraction (Soulmated #4)
CHAPTER ONE
Panic choked off Elizabeth Forester’s breath as she turned the car onto Mulberry Street, the wheels screeching when she took the corner too fast. Sparing a quick glance in the rearview mirror, she saw her pursuer still behind her. She was pretty sure she had picked up the tail after she’d left the motel where she’d been hiding out—using a car she thought nobody would recognize. She made a snorting sound. Too bad her precautions hadn’t been enough.
For the past week, she’d acted like she was in the middle of a TV cop show. But she’d known the evasive action was necessary. Today, it looked like she’d been right to cover her tracks.
It had gradually dawned on her that a dark blue Camaro waslurking nearby on a regular basis—following her during the day—and that the mysterious car must be connected to the case she’d been working on.
She hadn’t started off understanding how big it really was. But a lot of little details had led her to conclude that she needed to protect herself by checking into a motel a few miles from her house and driving on alternate routes to work.
She spared another glance in the rearview mirror. The blue car was inching up, and she could see two tough-looking men in the front seat. She shuddered, imagining what they were going to do if they got their hands on her.
She’d almost decided to go to the police with what she knew until she’d concluded that it was dangerous to trust the authorities. They weren’t going to do a thing for her, but she had to operate on the assumption that they were protecting the man who’d hired the thugs to intercept her.
Her work took her all over Baltimore, and she had an excellent knowledge of the city. If she could get far enough ahead of the men tailing her, she could turn into the nest of alleys up ahead and disappear. And then what? For now, the prime objective was to get away.
She made another quick turn, slowing her Honda in case a kid came darting out from one of the fenced-in backyards.
She thought she was in the clear until she saw the Camaro whip around the corner, right on her tail. Damn.
Still on the lookout for pedestrians, she sped up again, turning onto the next street. To her horror, a delivery van had just pulled to the curb. And a car coming in the other direction made it impossible to escape by crossing to the other traffic lane.
She swerved to avoid the van, thinking she could squeeze past on the sidewalk. But a woman and a little boy were coming straight toward her.
The fear on their faces as they saw the car bearing down on them made her gasp as she swerved again. If a lamppost hadn’t suddenly materialized in front of her, she could have gotten away. But she plowed into the upright post and came to a rocking stop.
Although the old Honda she was driving didn’t have an air bag, the seat belt kept her from hitting the windshield. But she was stunned as she sat behind the wheel.
Before she could get out of the car, one of the men from the Camaro appeared at her window.
“Got ya, bitch.”
Yanking open the car door, he dragged her out, hitting her head on the car frame as he hurled her to the sidewalk. The blow stunned her, and then everything went black.
Doctor Matthew Delano’s first stop on his morning rounds was the computer at the nurses’ station, where he scanned for urgent cases and noted which patients had been discharged—or passed away—since his last visit to the internal medicine floor.
No deaths. He always counted that as a good sign. This morning most of the patients on the general-medicine floor were in for routine problems—except for one woman whom the cops had named Jane Doe because she didn’t remember who she was. As he read the notes from the ER, he gathered that the whole situation with her was odd. For starters, she hadn’t been carrying any identification. And she’d been driving an old car registered to Susan Swinton. But when a patrol officer knocked on Swinton’s door late in the afternoon, nobody was home, and the neighbors said the woman was on an extended trip out of the country. Which left the authorities with no clue to the identity of the mystery woman in room 22.
Matt noted the irony of the room number. As in Catch-22, the novel by Joseph Heller. The term had come to mean a paradoxical situation in which a person is trapped by conflicting circumstances beyond his control.
He skimmed the chart. The woman, who was apparently in her late twenties, had no physical injuries, except for a bump on the head. The MRI showed she’d had a mild concussion, but that was resolving itself. The main problem was her missing memory—leading to her missing identity.
Her dilemma intrigued him. But although he was curious to see what she looked like, he made his way methodically down the hall, checking on patients on a first-come, first-served basis. A woman with COPD. A man with a leg infection he couldn’t shake. Another man with advanced kidney disease.
They were all routine cases for Dr. Delano since he’d gotten back from a dangerous African war zone a couple of months ago and taken an interim job in Baltimore, where at least he could feel useful.
He hadn’t really wanted to return to the States because he’d felt there was nothing here for him. At home you had to do normal stuff when you weren’t working, and normal stuff was never his first choice.
He liked the rough-and-tumble life of doctoring in a war zone and the chance to help people in desperate need of medical attention. But now the rebels were systematically shooting any outsiders who were dumb enough to stay in their country and try to help the people. Since Matt wasn’t suicidal, he was back in Baltimore, working at Memorial Hospital while he figured out the best way to serve humanity.
He made a soft snorting sound as he walked down the hall, thinking that was a lofty way to put it, especially for a man who felt disconnected from people. But he’d learned to be an expert at faking it. In fact, he was often praised for his excellent bedside manner.
He stopped at the door to room 22, feeling a sense of anticipation and at the same time reluctance. Shaking that off, he raised his hand and knocked.
“Come in,” a feminine voice called.
When he stepped into the room, the woman in the bed zeroed in on him, her face anxious. He stopped short, taking her in from where he stood eight feet away. Under the covers, she was dressed in one of those hospital gowns that leave your ass hanging out the back when you get up. She wore no makeup. Her short dark hair was tousled, and she had a nasty bruise on her forehead, but despite her disarray, he found her very appealing, from her large blue eyes to her well-shaped lips and the small, slightly upturned nose in between.
She looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. About his own age, he judged. She sat forward, fixing her gaze on him with a kind of unnerving desperation.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Dr. Delano.”
“I’d say pleased to meet you, if I knew how to introduce myself,” she answered.
“I take it you’re still having memory problems?”
She shrugged. “Unfortunately. I don’t know who I am or what happened to me.”
He consulted his tablet. “It says in your chart that you were in a one-car accident.”
“They told me that part. It seems I hit a light pole. It’s the rest of it that’s a mystery.” She gave her arm a little flap of exasperation. “I don’t know why I didn’t have a purse. The cops said there was a crowd around me, and a man had pulled me out of the car. The best I can figure is that he took the purse and disappeared.”
She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I don’t even know if the guy who pulled me out of the car is somebody I know—or just a random thief taking advantage of a woman who had an accident. Either way, I don’t like it. He left me in a heck of a fix.”
“I understand,” Matt answered, keying into her fears. Some pretty scary things had happened to him on his overseas travels. In one African country, he’d been threatened with having his arms cut off—or worse—until he’d volunteered to remove some bullets from a bunch of rebels. He’d been shot at too many times to count. And he’d been on a plane that had made an almost-crash landing on a dirt runway in a little airport out in the middle of nowhere. Taking all that into consideration, he still wouldn’t like to be in this woman’s shoes. She had no money. No memory. Nowhere to stay when she got out of the hospital.
She must have seen his reaction.
“Sorry to be such a bother.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“Then what?”
“I was feeling sorry for you, if you must know.”
“Right. I’m trying to keep from having a panic attack.”
He tipped his head to the side. “You know what that means—panic attack?”
“Yes. You get shaky. Your heart starts to pound.” She laughed, “And you feel like you’re going to die.”
“You remember details like that but not who you are?”
“I guess that must be true.”
“Have you ever had one?”
That stopped her. “Either I have, or I’ve read about it.”
“Is the picture of the syndrome vivid in your mind?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s probably more than reading. Either you had one or you know someone who has.”
Her gaze turned inward, and he knew she was trying to remember which it was.
“Your chart says you’re doing okay physically. Let’s have a look at you.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“The lump on my head is still painful—but tolerable.”
“Good.”
“And I’m kind of stiff—from the impact.”
“Understandable. Let’s check your pupillary reflexes.”
She tipped her face up, and he looked into one eye and then the other with the flashlight, noting that the pupils were contracting normally.
“Okay, that’s good. I’m going to check your heart and lungs.” He pressed the stethoscope against her chest, listening to her steady heartbeat. “Good.”
Up until then, it had been a routine examination—or as routine as it could be when the patient had amnesia. As he put a hand on her arm, everything changed. At his touch, she gasped as though an electric current had shot through her, and perhaps he did, too, because suddenly, the room began to whirl around him, making it seem like the two of them were in the center of a private, invisible tornado. He knew the windows hadn’t blown in or anything. The air in the room was perfectly still, the same as moments before. The whirling was all in his mind. And hers because he was picking up on her confusion and sense of disorientation—as well as his own.
He should let go of her, but he felt as though he were riveted in place. With his hand on her arm, memories leaped toward him. Her memories—that she’d said were inaccessible to her. He was sure she hadn’t been lying, but somehow recollections that had been unavailable to her were flooding into his consciousness.
The first thing he knew for sure was that her name wasn’t Jane Doe. It was Elizabeth something. He clenched his teeth, struggling to catch the last name, but it seemed to be dangling just beyond his reach. Although he couldn’t get her last name, he caught hold of a whole series of scenes from her past.
Elizabeth, as a little girl, on her first day of nursery school, wasshy, uncertain, and then panicked, watching Mommy leave her alone in a room full of children she didn’t know. Elizabeth as a grade-schooler working on math problems from a textbook. Elizabeth refusing to eat the beef tongue her mother had bought —to save grocery money. Elizabeth alone in her room, reading a book about two lovers and wishing she could have the same feelings for someone. Elizabeth leaving the hockey field, distraught because she’d missed making a goal she thought should have been hers. And then, in a college classroom—taking a social studies exam and sure she was going to get a perfect score.
The old memories faded and were replaced by something much more recent. From yesterday. She was worried about being followed. She was driving an old sedan she’d borrowed from a friend, glancing frequently in the rearview mirror—seeing a blue car keeping pace with her.
She sped up, fleeing the pursuers, weaving down alleys and onto the street again. She thought she was going to get away until a truck blocked her escape. Trying to get around it, she plowed into a lamppost with bone-jarring impact. While she was still stunned from the crash, a man rushed to her, yanking her from the car, hitting her head on the doorframe as he pulled her onto the sidewalk, just as a crowd of onlookers gathered.
“Hey, what are you doing to her?” somebody demanded.
That memory of the accident cut off abruptly with a flash of pain in her head and neck. She must have passed out, and one of the people who’d come running had called 911.
The recollections flowing from her mind to his were like pounding waves, but they weren’t the only thing he experienced. As he made the physical connection with her, he felt an overwhelming sexual pull that urged him to do more than dip into her thoughts.
He was her doctor, which meant that ethically there could be nothing personal between the two of them; yet he couldn’t stop himself from gathering her close. Somewhere in his own mind, he couldn’t squelch the notion that letting go of her would be like his own death.
He knew from her thoughts that she felt the same overwhelming connection to him. It made her feel desperate. Aroused. More off balance than either one of them had ever been in their lives.
He told himself he should pull away. But he was trapped where he was because her arms came up to wrap around his waist. Well, not trapped. He wanted to be here, and she’d given him a reason not to break the connection. She pressed herself against him, increasing the contact and the frustration—and the sheer need. He breathed in her scent, picturing himself bending down so that he could lower his mouth to hers, imagining the taste of her and letting himself visualize what it would be like to kick off his shoes and climb into the hospital bed with her.
She made a small, needy sound, and he knew that the same image was in her head. Part of his mind was shocked and aghast at how far he was going with this fantasy. The other part ached to push her back onto the bed and roll on top of her so he could press his body to hers. Only first, he needed to drag off his shirt and pants and get rid of her hospital gown.
That last frantic thought was what finally made him come to his senses and pull away, breaking the physical contact and, at the same time, breaking the contact with her mind.
He stood beside the bed, dragging in lungfuls of air, feeling dizzy and disoriented and still achingly aroused.
And she was staring at him, looking like a woman who was ready for sex. Instead of reaching out his hand toward her, he forced himself to step farther back.
He cursed under his breath, ordering himself not to think about making love with her as he clawed his way toward rational behavior. For a few moments, he’d felt an overwhelming connection with Elizabeth—even though he was sure he’d never met her before. But he did know that she was a patient, and thinking about anything physical between them was completely out of bounds. It was morally wrong, and it could get him arrested, come to that.
Which left him trying to understand what had happened between the two of them in those seconds when they’d been touching. Both the flood of memories from her mind and the sudden overwhelming sexual attraction that had threatened to wipe any reasonable thoughts from his mind.
He shook his head as he gazed down at her. She sat on the bed, looking stunned, her blue eyes wide, her breath coming in little gasps as she clenched and unclenched her fingers on the sheet.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to say.
“Are you?”
“Of course. That was completely inappropriate.”
“I think it took both of us by surprise,” she said, making an excuse.
“You’re a patient.”
Ignoring the observation, she began to speak. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Touching you made me recall things I couldn’t remember for myself. And I got inside your mind, too. I didn’t know a thing about you before we touched. Now I know you always went in for dangerous sports. Like mountain climbing. Spelunking. And ice camping.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“They made me feel alive,” he said, unaccountably admitting something to this woman that he had always kept to himself.
“And recently, you were in Africa. In the middle of a nasty little war. They were shooting at you, and the guy next to you was killed. You stayed hidden, with him on top of you, soaking your clothes with his blood, until it got dark and you could sneak away.
He answered with a small, wordless nod. It was a memory he’d tried to forget, and she’d pulled it from his mind.
“You went there to help people, and you saved a lot of lives. But you never knew quite how to connect with anyone.” She gulped. “Just like me.”
The admission jolted him. “What do you mean?”
She kept her gaze fixed on him.
“You were in my head. You know I’m like you, with that feeling of never being able to quite—relate to people on the deep level you craved. You know, like everybody else has a secret handshake, only nobody ever taught it to you.”
He’d never thought of it quite that way, but he nodded because she had spoken the truth. All his adult life—all his life, really—he’d been searching for something he was sure he would never find. Something other people had but he lacked. Until now, with this woman. But that couldn’t be possible—not after all the years of being alone.
“Why you?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Because you can’t remember your past?”
“What would that have to do with it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“But touching you brought back memories I couldn’t reach a few minutes ago.”
He nodded.
“Let’s take it from the opposite angle. Why you?” she murmured.
“I have no idea.”
Neither one of them seemed capable of breaking the visual contact. But he took one more step away from her—to put more distance between them. He was so off balance that he wasn’t sure what else to do. Maybe something crazy like reaching for her again because touching her had been like every aching fantasy he’d ever experienced.
She moistened her lips. “What exactly happened?” she asked again.
“I don’t know. But I found out that your name is Elizabeth.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah, right. I have amnesia, but when you touched me, you brought some of my memories back.”
“Yes.”
“Before this, did you ever pick up someone’s memories by touching them?” she asked.
“No. Did you?”
“No.” She made a frustrated sound. “At least, I don’t think so. The only personal things I remember are what you gave me.”
There was no logic to what she’d just said. And she might have been lying, come to that. But he didn’t think so.
He saw the challenge in her eyes and heard it in her voice. “We could try it again. Maybe you can bring back more of me.”
“I can’t.”
“Even when I’m alone and desperate?” she asked in a low voice.
Her words and the pleading look in her eyes made his throat tighten. More than that, when he’d touched her, hesensed that she was a good person. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her, although he knew objectively that being good or bad didn’t have anything to do with what happened to people. Like the guy next to him getting shot. Jerry had been a good person, too. But you could lead an exemplarylife and end up being killed by a stray bullet that came through your living room wall.
He pushed the disturbing images out of his mind and managed to say, “It wasn’t just memories. At least for me. There was another aspect to it.”
He saw her flush. “Not just memories,” she agreed, then looked down at her hands. “Sexual arousal,” she whispered.
“But that was completely inappropriate. I’m your doctor. There can’t be anything personal between us.”
She took her lower lip between her teeth. “Even if your touching me makes me remember? I mean, isn’t that—medically beneficial?”
“I’m afraid I can’t stretch the definition that far.”
She played with the edge of the sheet again, pleating it between her thumb and finger. “That last scene—where the guy dragged me out of the car. I don’t think he was trying to help me. He looked relieved to have caught up with me—but not in a good way.”
“I think that’s right.”
“I think he was following me, and I was trying to get away. That’s why I crashed into a lamppost. I was desperate to escape from him and the other guy—the one who was driving.”
“Do you remember it that way?”
Anger flared in her eyes. “Not on my own. I think that’s what you picked up from me, right?”
He nodded.
“So, odd as it sounds, it must be true because you saw what I couldn’t.”
“Yeah.”
“Probably it would be a good idea to avoid running into him again. If I knew who he was and why he wanted to hurt me.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You sound like a computerized therapy program, agreeing with everything I’m saying but not adding anything—besides what you pulled out of my head.”
He felt his chest constrict. “I’m sorry.”
“How am I going to stay out of that guy’s clutches when I don’t even know who I am or who he is?”
He wanted to help her, but his hands were tied because of the professional demeanor that he was forced to maintain. In the end, all he could say was, “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
He stopped talking when he realized Elizabeth was staring at someone standing in the doorway behind him.