It Happened One Night
“Miss Kiley, can I go back to the carpet now?” Jimmy Joe asked from the “time out” corner.
“‘May I go back to the carpet,’” Kiley automatically corrected.
“May I?” the little boy asked, flashing his charming grin.
“Yes, you may,” she said, deciding that she could give more thought to Josh and his dinner invitation after the children had gone home for the day.
Kiley went through the motions of rehearsing the Christmas show the children would put on for their parents in a few weeks. But her mind kept straying back to Josh and his ridiculous invitation. Even if she were willing to go to dinner with him—which she wasn’t—she didn’t think he would be all that enthusiastic about dining with a two-year-old.
It wasn’t that Emmie wasn’t well-behaved. She was. But by the end of the day, she was tired and wanted nothing more than dinner, a bath and to go to bed. Besides, there was absolutely nothing Kiley felt the need to discuss with Josh. Now or in the foreseeable future.
* * *
As Josh drove his Mercedes through the gates of Pine Valley, the exclusive golf course community where several of the TCC members had built mansions, he couldn’t help but wonder what he’d been thinking when he asked Kiley to dinner. Why couldn’t he just drop what had happened that night three years ago?
He knew that would be the smartest thing to do and what Kiley wanted. But for reasons he didn’t want to delve into, some perverse part of him wanted her to admit that, although the circumstances that brought them together that night might have been an unfortunate accident, their lovemaking had been nothing short of amazing.
“You’ve lost your mind, Gordon,” he muttered as he steered his car onto Alex Santiago’s private drive.
Doing his best to forget the matter, he parked in front of the palatial home, got out of the car and climbed the steps to the front door. Before he could ring the doorbell, the door opened.
“Hello, Señor Gordon,” a round-faced older woman with kind brown eyes said, stepping back for Josh to enter. “Señor Alex is in the sunroom.”
“How’s he feeling today, Maria?” Josh asked as the housekeeper whom Alex’s fiancée, Cara Windsor, had recently hired led the way toward the back of the elegant home.
Maria stopped, then, turning to face him, gave Josh a worried look. “Señor Alex still has headaches and can’t remember anything before he was found.”
“I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before he recovers his memory.” Josh wasn’t entirely sure who he was trying to reassure—the housekeeper or himself.
Alex had been missing for several months before being found, suffering a head injury, in the back of a truck with a group of migrant farm workers smuggled across the border from Mexico. No one seemed to know how he wound up across the border or how he got into the back of the truck with the workers, and he couldn’t tell the authorities anything. There was strong evidence that he had been beaten several times and one theory was that he had been kidnapped. But no matter what had happened, Alex still had amnesia. It had only been recently that he’d been released from Royal Memorial Hospital. With Cara’s encouragement, Alex’s friends from the TCC had been taking turns dropping by to check on his progress. No one had said as much, but Josh knew they all hoped to help him recover his memory so they could find whoever had done this to him.
“How are you feeling today, Alex?” he asked, walking into the sunroom where his friend sat reading a book.
Alex smiled and slowly rose to his feet to extend his hand. “Josh, isn’t it?”
Nodding, Josh shook Alex’s hand. The man’s grip was firm and Josh took that as a good sign that his friend was regaining some of his strength. But he was still cautious about making sure he called his friends by the correct name, which indicated his memory wasn’t much better.
“I wanted to stop by and let you know that we’re all hoping to see you and Cara at the Christmas Ball.” Before his disappearance in the summer, Alex had been on the planning committee for the annual holiday gala. Josh hoped that referring to the event might spark a memory.
“Yes, Cara and I discussed it and we’re hoping that being at the Texas Cattleman’s Club with all of my acquaintances will help me remember something,” Alex answered. He sighed heavily. “It’s damned irritating not being able to remember anything about my life before waking up in the back of that truck.”
“I’m sure there will be a break in the case soon,” Josh said, hoping he was right. “The Royal Police Department’s detective unit is one of the best in the entire state and they’re letting Britt Collins, the state investigator, take the lead. With her FBI training and specialty in kidnapping cases, they’ll have whoever did this to you behind bars in no time.”