Husbands and Other Strangers

If Gayle was putting him on, Taylor was going to kill her. Slowly.

“You’re not kidding?” Taylor ground out each one of the words slowly, giving her every opportunity to recant. Praying she’d take it.

Why were her brothers doing this to her? “Sam, Jake, what’s going on here?”

Gayle looked from Sam to Jake, then her eyes came to rest on the stranger. Her brothers had played pranks on her before. But this was going a little bit too far.

Gayle gave each of them as much of a piercing, demanding look as she could muster, under the circumstances. “Jake, Sam, one of you tell me. I want to know. Just who is this man?”

Husbands and Other Strangers

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE FERRARELLA

This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author has written over 140 books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.

To Charlie, and remembering

Contents

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

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter One

His hands were gentle, so incredibly gentle. They passed over her body slowly, like a warm spring breeze. The hands of a lover. Caressing her. Stroking her. Making her yearn.

She knew instinctively that they were powerful hands—hands that could have just as easily snapped a neck in two if unrestrained anger had flashed through his veins. Which made it all the more wondrous that he could touch her this way. As if he were worshipping her.

As if he were making love to her with just his hands, just his fingertips.

He was making love to her.

A moan slipped from her lips, as if the pleasure that filled her was just too much to contain, to keep captive within the vessel of her body. It overflowed from every pore.

Drenching her.

Drenching him.

And then his hands were no longer blazing a trail along her skin. His lips were there instead, anointing her body. She could feel herself trembling as his mouth, ever so lightly, skimmed along her flesh, following the very same path that his fingers had traced just a moment ago.

A century ago, when time began.

She couldn’t see him.

Why couldn’t she see him? Why, when every fiber of her being felt him, knew him, wanted him, couldn’t she see his face? No matter how she tried, how she turned, she couldn’t see him. His identity remained hidden from her view.

Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see. She could only sense him. It was as if something inside of her prevented her from seeing him.

He wasn’t a stranger. How could he be? She knew who he was, at least in her soul. Somehow, deep within the secret recesses of her mind, she had always known, that he would be coming for her. Coming to her. Whoever he was, he was her soul mate, her intended, the one she had been destined for from the very moment destiny began.

Destined to love until the last sands of time blew away into the dark abyss of eternity.

So if her soul knew him so well, why couldn’t she see him?

Gayle Conway strained, trying to turn her head, aching for a chance to get a better view. Any view. Aching to see.

But something was holding her back, restraining her movement. A heavy weight was pressing down on her. And there was such exhaustion consuming her she couldn’t breathe. Still, with her last ounce of strength, she struggled against the iron bands on her arms.

A sense of overwhelming loss edged out the pleasure within her, like a blot of ink staining every square inch of the bright, colorful material it had been spilled on, obliterating it.

He was gone.

Gone as if he were nothing more than smoke, as if he hadn’t existed at all. But he had. She knew he had. He had been as real as she. Now she was left alone, shackled to a hard bed of loneliness.

The moan that came from her lips this time was devoid of pleasure. It was a keening sound, filled with the sorrow of bereavement and loss.

And then something else cut into it. Another sound, another voice.

Something…someone…

Someone was calling to her. Calling her from this oppressive, weighted darkness she was lost in.

The heaviness began to lift. Hands were on her again. But this time they were not gentle hands. Rough hands, trying to snatch at her consciousness. Trying to bring her back around. She could feel hands rubbing her arms, her legs, coaxing the color, the strength back into them. Back into her.

Gayle tried to listen. To recognize. But the voice calling her name belonged to someone she didn’t know. A stranger’s voice.

“Gayle, please wake up. Honey, please, just open your eyes. Just look at me. Please.”

Fingers. Gentle fingers, not running along her body but lacing her fingers with them. More words.

Supplications? Prayers?

Prayers. Someone was praying over her. She felt more than heard the words, as if they were being whispered into her subconscious.

Gayle tried hard to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t move. Each lid felt as if it had been sealed permanently shut.

She had to open her eyes to find who’d been loving her. She had to find the man who had so abruptly left her side.

The man she couldn’t see.

Slowly, mercifully, she could feel herself rising from the depths, the almost life-threatening heaviness leaving her. A moment longer and it would be all right. She would be out of this lonely, stark world and reunited with the man whose passion had set her on fire. Already she could feel her body warming again. Warming, as if touched by sunlight.

Sunlight.

It was the sun she felt on her face, on her body. The sun. Nothing more, just the sun.

The realization underlined the emptiness in her soul.

Something moist slid from her lashes and slithered in a zigzag pattern along both cheeks. Gayle opened her eyes and looked up at the concerned ring of faces hovering over her.

It took her a moment before she could focus on them. Sam. Jake. The emptiness within her shifted a little as she recognized the familiar faces of her two older brothers.

And then she saw someone else.

Taylor Conway wasn’t easily given to allowing his emotions to overtake him, but in the past twenty minutes he had unwillingly sped through an entire gamut of emotions. Every one of them had warred for complete possession of him as he had frantically worked over his wife’s body. Equal amounts of CPR and desperation had gone into his attempts to force air into her lungs again. He’d prayed every single prayer he could summon to his numbed brain, making deals with a god he hadn’t, until now, known firsthand.

Anything, as long as Gayle came back to him. He couldn’t lose her like this. No, not in any way at all. He refused to lose her.

Taylor had never tasted real fear before. It was metallic and bitter on the tongue, worse than anything he’d ever sampled. It had almost choked him.

Just the way the sea had almost choked the very life out of Gayle.

But she was alive. Beneath the green bathing suit top her chest was moving ever so slightly. She was breathing, thank God. Taylor was vaguely aware that at this point, he was into God for plenty, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered as long as Gayle was alive.

The next moment she was coughing, the water she’d taken in spilling from her nose and mouth. Taylor felt light-headed, giddy and only half-conscious of the hot tears stinging his eyes as what had almost happened began to take hold, getting a death grip on his mind.

Gayle struggled to sit up. He almost smiled. That was his Gayle. A fighter. She didn’t have enough sense to lie down. Taylor laid a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t try to get up,” His voice threatened to break. Damn, but she had scared the hell out of him.

Taylor quickly looked her over. There was a gash on her forehead just beneath the blond hairline. That would explain why she hadn’t come up. She must have hit her head against the side of the boat when she dove off the sloop into the choppy blue water. The gash was still bleeding. The blood trickled down, a few drops mingling with the ring of water that surrounded her body on the deck.

Now that she was safe, he could feel his temper beginning to rise. But he couldn’t shout at her yet, demanding to know what the hell she’d been thinking of to pull a stunt like that. Not when she was still so pale and weak.

So he bit back the hot words as best he could, turning instead toward his brother-in-law.

“Sam, where the hell is that first-aid kit you keep around here?”

Jake was already ahead of both of them. It was his sloop and his invitation that had brought everyone together in the first place.

“Right here.” Jake knelt beside Taylor, flipping the lock on the dark-blue box. “What do you need?”

“Something to stop the bleeding for now. That gash looks nasty.” Rummaging, Taylor found the last butterfly Band-Aid in the rusted box. He peeled off the wrapper and applied it along with pressure to the cut.

He frowned now. God, but she had scared him. Really scared him. Now that it was over, now that she was lying here on the deck of her brother’s sloop, alive and fully conscious, Taylor was aware of his own racing pulse, his own shaken feelings. If he didn’t love her so much, he would have wrung her fool neck. He might still do it, just on principle.

Shaken, Jake rose to his feet, the first-aid box in his hands. He pushed it toward Sam. “Right.” Sam looked down at his sister dubiously. She still looked really pale. “Is she going to be—”

“I’m okay,” Gayle cut in, waving away the concern buzzing around her like a swarm of bees.

Why were they talking about her as if she were in another dimension? She was right here. And she hated being fussed over. At least she thought she hated…yes, she did, she hated having a fuss made over her.

Despite the pounding going on inside of it, her head felt as if it was wrapped in cotton.

Gayle narrowed her eyes as she focused on the man who was rising. “Sam.” She said the name that came to her aloud, exploring it. Her vision and the fog about her brain slowly began to clear. Sam was her brother. One of her brothers. Silly that for a moment she hadn’t remembered. She could just hear what he’d have to say to that if he knew. They both teased her unmercifully as it was.

Sam quickly dropped back to his knees beside her. “What is it, Gayle?”

“Nothing.” It took effort to talk. Her throat felt incredibly raw, as if she’d swallowed then coughed up a seashell. “I just wanted to say your name.”

Sam and Jake exchanged looks. That sounded way too subdued for Gayle, but then, she’d never almost drowned before. Of the three of them, it was Gayle, the youngest and most agile, who could swim like a fish. Gayle on whom their father had pinned all his hopes from the very beginning.

Gayle took a deep breath. It was cut off by a sharp pain in her lungs. Jackknifing up, she began coughing violently. Half the ocean was still sloshing around inside her. Without being fully conscious of who she grabbed, she clutched at a strong arm, leaning against it as the cough racked her.

“Easy.” The same strong hands held her. The hands that had pressed her down before, when she’d struggled so hard to discover the identity of the man who was fading away. The man who’d made love to her. “Don’t try to get up just yet,” the deep voice warned her. “We don’t want you falling over and hitting your head again. I know it’s hard, but even your head has a breaking point.”

The familiarity and humor veiled an undercurrent of concern. She tried to smile at the words and succeeded only marginally.

“She’s not biting your head off. She must have done more damage to her head than we thought,” Jake murmured, then went back to the wheel.

Gayle turned her head and winced as pain accompanied the simple movement. “What happened?” she asked Sam. “What am I doing here?”

“I fished you out,” Taylor answered. “You insisted on diving off the bow of the sloop.” He pointed to where they’d all watched her dive off. It had been on a stupid dare. Taylor had raced over to stop her, but it was too late. “Probably just to annoy me.”

When he’d looked down in time to see her slice cleanly into the water, he’d felt his temper rising at her defiance. But it was admittedly mingled with admiration. He couldn’t help it. The sight of her form affected him that way. She’d always moved like sheer poetry.

At first when she didn’t emerge, he was sure she was doing it just to get back at him for that disagreement they’d had yesterday. Taylor knew she could hold her breath underwater for an inordinate amount of time. Her father, Colonel Lars Elliott, retired, an Olympic gold medalist, had thrown all three of his children into the water long before they could walk, determined to make serious Olympic contenders out of them, just as his father had made of him. More than that, he’d demanded winners. Gayle had been his winner.

But thirty seconds after her dive today, an uneasiness had taken hold of Taylor. Even as Jake and Sam quickly checked the perimeter of the sloop to see if Gayle had come up somewhere away from them, Taylor was diving in to find her. Something told him this wasn’t one of the pranks she was so fond of pulling. This was on the level.

He almost hadn’t found her. By the time he’d brought her up to the surface, it had been at the last possible moment for him. His lungs had been bursting, screaming for air. He could have made it up faster without her, but he would rather have died with her than let Gayle go and risk anything happening to her.

She blinked, her eyes stinging as she looked at the man beside her in wonder. What he said didn’t make sense. “Why would I want to annoy you?”

Taylor rose to his feet, looking down at her. He shook his head and smiled once more. “That’s something I ask myself a lot. My only conclusion is that annoying me seems to be a hobby of yours.”

Gayle frowned as she stared back at him. As if she didn’t know what he was talking about. As if she were looking at him for the first time.

The uneasiness returned, though he couldn’t put a name to it.

“I think that blow to the head might have finally succeeded in doing something none of us had ever managed to do. Make you docile,” Sam elaborated when she turned her sea-blue eyes on him quizzically. At the helm, Jake laughed.

“Fat chance,” Gayle said. Pulling her legs to her, she tried to sit up again.

Taylor started to stop her. “I told you to lie back.” Why did she always have to be so damn stubborn? If she had a concussion, movement might make it worse. He was prepared to carry her in his arms from the shore to the hospital if he had to. After what he’d just gone through, he’d prefer it that way.

Rather than lie down, Gayle pulled her arm out of his reach. Who the hell did he think he was? “Why should I listen to you?”

A grin slicing his face, Jake shook his head, relief flooding him. “She’s ba-ack.”

Taylor ignored him. His eyes were on Gayle’s. “Because I’m making sense. Now lie back, damn it.” He glanced at the butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead and saw a small, angry red line forming beneath it. “You’re still bleeding.” He looked over his shoulder at his brother-in-law at the helm. “Jake, can’t you make this thing go any faster?”

The waters were getting choppier. The storm was coming sooner than they’d expected. Jake was already pushing the engine to the limit. “I’m trying,” Jake answered. Frustration outlined his voice. “This isn’t a speedboat.”

“Try harder,” Taylor snapped. Though he didn’t often lose his temper with people other than Gayle, the near tragedy they had narrowly avoided had turned his patience to the consistency of dried kindling. His temper flared easily.

Gayle rallied, taking immediate offense. “Hey, stop yelling at my brothers. Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

“What?” Taylor looked at her incredulously. Now what was she trying to pull?

The question unsettled her a little as she tried to ignore the vague, irritating feeling that she should know the answer to her own question. Gayle licked her lips, tilting her chin slightly.

“I said, who are you?”

Taylor sank down again, his eyes fixed on her face. “What do you mean, who am I?”

Was he deaf as well as belligerent? “Just what I said.” Gayle slowly repeated the question. “Who are you? Are you a friend of Sam’s?”

He has no idea what kind of a game she was playing, but because she’d just given him the worst scare of his life, and because he still felt a little shell-shocked, he momentarily played along.

“Yes, I’m a friend of Sam’s. And a friend of Jake’s, too,” he added for good measure.

The answer made Gayle frown. She thought she knew most of her brothers’ friends. Certainly the ones they had in common. It was what made them such a close-knit family. But she had absolutely no recollection of the brooding, dark-haired man who seemed to think it his God-given duty to order everyone around.

The ache in her head grew even as she tried to ignore it. Gayle peered at his face, searching for some sort of recollection. “Then why have I never met you before?”

Hands on the wheel, Jake turned around. He and Sam exchanged looks. Their unspoken question mirrored each other.

What the hell was Gayle up to this time?

Taylor sat back on his heels, studying Gayle’s face. A face he’d long since memorized, every nuance, every fiber. All deeply embedded in his brain.

“Oh, we’ve met, all right.” The deep voice was pregnant with meaning.

Gayle shook off the almost hypnotic effect. Met? She sincerely doubted it. She would have remembered a face like that, even if she’d only seen it just in passing: chiseled, stern, perhaps even hard, to the undiscerning eye; an odd collection of planes and angles that somehow arranged themselves to make the man impossibly handsome.

The total is greater than the sum of the parts, the vague thought echoed through her throbbing head.

But handsome or not, that didn’t give him a right to lie to her or play a trick at her expense, especially when her brain felt as if it was the consistency of Swiss cheese.

“No, we haven’t met,” she insisted stubbornly.

Maybe some other time, when his nerves hadn’t been pulled thinner than the thread used for suturing an internal wound, Taylor would have been willing to play along a little longer. But not now. Not when he’d been to hell and back in what could have been a watery grave for both of them. He wasn’t in the mood for it.

He reached out to touch her shoulder. “Gayle, I don’t feel like playing games.”

She shrugged him off again. What made him think he could just touch her like that? As if he had a right to? Why weren’t her brothers protesting?

Weakness passed over her, bringing with it a volley of heat that drenched her in perspiration. Gayle would have drawn herself into a ball if she could, locking out everything. For a moment she had to struggle just to hang on to consciousness again. But she refused to surrender.

Gayle gritted her teeth together against it, against the probing fingers of pain.

“Good, because neither do I.” Her eyes became dark penetrating slits of blue green as she looked at this man pushing his way into her life. “My head feels like it’s coming apart.” She held it as if she were afraid that it would. “So, are you going to tell me your name or not?”

Concern returned like a clap of thunder. Sam sat down in front of his sister. He fanned out the fingers of one hand before her face, ignoring her question to Taylor. “Gayle, how many fingers am I holding up now?”

The sharp headache sapped any patience she might have had to spare.

“Three.” Gayle closed her hand over Sam’s and pushed it aside. “We all know it’s as high as you can count. I don’t want to play count-the-fingers with you, Sam. I want someone to tell me who this man is and why he’s trying to boss everyone around.”

Despite the tension in the air, his sister’s comment made Jake laugh. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.” His dark eyes darted toward his brother-in-law. Taylor’s face did look pretty strained. Both he and Sam had often marveled how Taylor could have lived with their sister for the past eighteen months and still remained sane. “Not that I mean to imply you’re a kettle…” His voice trailed off, having nowhere to go.

Fear began to rear its head again, bringing with it an uneasiness that nibbled away at Taylor. Jake’s comment didn’t even register. Taylor stared at Gayle, at the woman he had ultimately loved more than the allure of the free life he had abandoned for her.

“You don’t know who I am.” It sounded absurd even to say out loud. After what they had shared, he would have said that the pyramids would have become mounds of sand and blown away before she forgot him, or he her. This had to be some kind of game, a cruel prank to get back at him for the argument and God only knew what.

“Yes,” Gayle replied. But before he breathed a sigh of relief in misunderstanding, her next words took it away from him—and cleared up the minor confusion while ushering in a complete new truckload. “I don’t know who you are.”

If she was putting him on, he was going to kill her. Slowly.

“You’re not kidding?” He ground out each one of the words slowly, giving her every opportunity to recant. Praying she’d take it.

Because something deep inside her was suddenly afraid, afraid of what she couldn’t begin to understand, Gayle clung to temper.

“I’m bleeding. Why would I be kidding?” Why were her brothers doing this to her? Why were they putting her through this charade at a time like this? She looked from one to the other, silently asking them to stop. “Sam, Jake, what’s going on here? And how did I get here, on the boat, anyway?”

The three men looked at one another, not knowing whether they were all victims of an elaborate hoax and being played for fools—Gayle wasn’t above that—or if they should be seriously worried.

Gayle drew herself up to her knees, swaying just a little. “I said, what’s going on here?” She glanced from Sam to Jake, then her eyes came to rest on the stranger. Her brothers had played pranks on her before. It was a way of letting off steam that was a holdover from their childhood, when their father’s rigorous training would get to them. But this was going a little bit too far now.

“Jake, Sam, one of you tell me. I want to know. Just who is this man?”

Chapter Two

Jake was the oldest, and as such, he was apt to take things more seriously than his siblings. He looked at the woman he was fond of calling his baby sister, although it was not quite six years that separated them. There were times when Gayle had trouble knowing when to stop. He had no problem stepping in when it came to that.

“Okay, Gayle, quit fooling around now. You’ve had your joke and scared the hell out of the rest of us, including your husband.”

All she heard was one word. One frightening word. Was she going crazy? Or were they? Knowing her brothers, it was them. And she didn’t appreciate being the butt of the joke.

“Husband.” Gayle looked around angrily, deliberately not focusing on the stranger at her left. “What husband?” she demanded.