“Stop calling her ‘darlin’,” Cain growled. “And so what if waiting means you have to make another trip? She doesn’t need any pressure from you. She’s had it hard enough.”
She was relieved to have someone stand up for her. Right now, she needed that buffer. But she could also understand Ned’s impatience. He had an investigation to run, and he expected her to react like the professional she’d promised him she was and not the victim she’d become.
Somehow, frightening and painful though it was, she had to delve into the half memories that shrouded this most recent incident. But she couldn’t create clarity that wasn’t there. “Can you tell me more, some detail that might remind me?” she asked.
“Cain found you next to a half-dug grave in the forest near his old cabin. You were so beat-up he thought you were dead.”
His words reminded her, all right. She could barely breathe. “I—I…”
Cain cut in. “Damn it, Ned, give her a break.”
The rest of Ned’s good ol’ boy veneer disappeared. “So you can get to her first?” he snapped, the twang of his accent growing more marked. “Plant thoughts and memories that aren’t her own? Hell, no!”
Had Sheridan been more herself, she would’ve argued that no one could play with her memory that way. The truth was there; it was just temporarily locked inside her mind. But she felt too uncertain to argue about anything. “I’m going to need some time,” she said.
Ned wasn’t happy with her response, but most of the tension in the room existed independent of her. There was some kind of feud going on between him and Cain. Why? They’d known each other in high school. But they hadn’t hung out together. They’d barely—
“You married her,” Sheridan said, finally piecing one small mystery together.
Cain knew exactly who and what she was talking about. She could see it in his face. But Ned was still caught up in trying to get his own answers and didn’t clue in quite so fast. “Excuse me?” he said, wearing a scowl.
“Amy,” she explained. “Tina Judd wrote me a year after I left town.” Before her mother demanded she sever even that relationship. “She said Cain had married your sister. You two are in-laws—”
“Were in-laws,” Cain interrupted. “Amy and I are divorced.”
That didn’t surprise Sheridan. Amy had never been right for Cain. She was far too grasping. Sheridan wasn’t sure anyone was right for him. He held too much power in every relationship, or at least those she’d seen.
“You weren’t made for marriage.” As soon as she said it, she realized that was probably something she shouldn’t have spoken out loud, but with the medication, her brain hadn’t stopped her mouth in time. And once it was out, it was out.
Cain quirked an eyebrow at her as Ned laughed. “I guess she knows you better than I thought,” he gibed.
Whether the remark was appropriate or not, she was relieved to be able to reach into the past, even if it wasn’t the part she most needed to remember. “Dogs. That’s what you really loved, wasn’t it? Animals?” He gave his heart to his pets, but his body had been a whole other story. He’d gotten an early start with the girls….
And yet…Sheridan could still remember how gentle he’d been with her that night in the camper, how sweet. He’d been seventeen years old, only eighteen months older than she was at the time, but he hadn’t bumbled his way through an experience she found awkward at best and painful at worst.
Odd that she could recall so clearly how hard he’d tried to hold himself back when she could barely come up with her own name.
“Considering we barely knew each other, that’s more than I expected you to remember about me.” Cain’s voice was so clipped and his body language so indifferent, she figured he’d forgotten about those few minutes in the camper. Or the memory didn’t mean anything to him.
Most likely the latter. He’d been with a lot of girls. What was thirty minutes with a naive little virgin?
“I guess there are some things a girl never forgets,” she said, the words, as well as the memory, bittersweet.
She saw something in his eyes, something that seemed to indicate he remembered every detail as well as she did. But she refused to let herself care one way or the other. He obviously hadn’t changed. Why was he even in her hospital room? Ned had said she’d been unconscious for a week. What could Cain Granger possibly want that would keep him around for so long?
“I hope the details concerning your attack are some of those things,” Ned said, single-mindedly bringing the conversation back to the original topic. “We have to find the guy who did this to you.”
Sheridan curled her fingers into fists. “Why did this happen to me?” she asked Ned. “Why me again?”
“That’s what I want to know,” he replied. “The only answer I’ve got is that this has some connection to Jason’s shooting.” He continued talking, but what he said had no meaning to her. She couldn’t deal with what’d happened to Jason, not in conjunction with this. She cringed every time she heard his name. That memory had always been painful, but today it created an emotional overload like she’d never experienced before.
Instinctively, she turned her face into her pillow, trying to avoid his words, to avoid any thought of Jason, but he kept talking, saying things she didn’t want to hear. Go away. She’d awakened to so many questions. Questions that left her feeling lost and disoriented.
She needed an anchor—and looked up to find Cain.
“Whatever’s going on is based in the past,” he said when their eyes met. He was speaking over the blustery Ned, but Sheridan didn’t care. She had to tune Ned out, couldn’t tolerate his overbearing manner.
“I wish I could tell you more,” Cain added. “But that’s all we know. Someone believes you can expose him—or he’s been out to get you from the beginning.”
“But I don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt me. What could I have done to cause it?”
“With some people, you don’t have to do anything.”
Now silent, Ned shot Sheridan a sullen glance for allowing Cain to upstage him. But at the moment, Sheridan didn’t have it in her to worry about, or apologize for, the lack of courtesy. “There was no warning,” she said numbly. “Nothing to alert me to any danger. The last thing I remember is packing my suitcase to come to Whiterock.”