Page 8 of Diagnosis Attraction

“I’ll prepare the paperwork for you,” Dr. Delano said.

After he and Nurse Kramer were gone, Elizabeth climbed out of bed and stood for a moment, holding on to the rail. She’d been lying down too long, and her legs felt rubbery. Or maybe that was the result of having a concussion.

When she felt steadier on her feet, she crossed to the small bathroom and turned on the light. She’d deliberately avoided looking at herself until she was ready. Now, she raised her gaze to the mirror and stared at the woman she saw there. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but the face that stared back might as well have belonged to a stranger. Disappointed and unsettled, she stood for a moment composing herself. Trying not to look in the mirror again, she washed at the sink and brushed her teeth with the toothbrush the hospital had provided. Doggedly, she focused on the simple tasks to keep from thinking about anything more stressful—like how she would figure out who she was and why she had crashed her car. The easy answer was that she’d been speeding. As she pictured herself driving, she realizedshe knew the part of town where they’d told her the accident had occurred.

That stopped her. She’d come up with another memory—this time on her own. Well, not a memory of anything personal.

The observation about Baltimore—that was the city she was in—brought up another question—what else did she know? Maybe not about Elizabeth Doe specifically, but about the world around her.

She stopped and asked herself some questions she imagined would be standard for someone in her situation. She couldn’t dredge up the correct date. But she knew who was president. And she knew. . . She struggled for another concrete face and came up with the conviction that she could make scrambled eggs that tasted a lot better than what the hospital had served her this morning.

“Your clothes are in the closet,” Nurse Kramer said through the bathroom door. “Do you need help?”

“I think I can do it myself,” she said because she wasn’t going to depend on other people if there was a chance for independence—even in small things.

By the time she stepped back into the room, Mrs. Kramer had gone back to her duties, and Dr. Delano wasn’t there either. She felt a stab of disappointment but brushed it aside. Probably, he was wishing he’d never examined her. Staying as far away as possible from her was probably the way to go, from his point of view.

After crossing to the closet, she took out the clothes that someone had hung up for her. Dark slacks. A white shirt and a dark jacket. A very buttoned-up look, except that the outfit was a little scuffed around the edges from the accident.

She looked at the garment labels. They were from good department stores. Not top of the line but good enough. Another piece of information that she found interesting.

She’d been wearing short stockings and black pumps with a wedge heel. Not the shoes she’d wear if she wanted to impress someone. These were no-nonsense footwear. Did that mean she walked a lot as part of her job? Or maybe she had bad feet.

There was also underwear on the hanger, and that was more interesting than the exterior clothing. She’d been wearing a sexy white-lace bra and matching bikini panties. Apparently, she liked to indulge in very feminine underwear. For her own enjoyment, she thought, judging from the personal memories that had surfaced when Dr. Delano had touched her. Or lack of same.

She brought everything back into the bathroom, then decided that she might as well take a shower before she left. After turning on the water, she adjusted the temperature before stepping under the spray. It felt good to get clean. Too bad she didn’t have a change of underwear.

She thought about her name as she stood under the shower. Elizabeth. A very formal name. Did people call her Beth? Betty? Liz? Or any of the other variations of the name? She didn’t know.

But she noted that she’d washed her hair before soaping her body, and it had been in the back of her mind that she’d better do that first—in case the hot water went off and she was caught with a head full of shampoo.

An interesting priority. Did it mean she lived in a house or an apartment where there was a problem with the hot water heater? Or had she traveled abroad like Dr. Delano?

She clenched her hand around a bar of soap, annoyed with herself for switching her thoughts back to him. He’d made it clear that there couldn’t be anything personal between the two of them, and she understood that. Yet, at the same time, she couldn’t stop thinking of him as her lifeline to her own past.

After turning off the water and stepping out of the shower, she dried off. There was no dryer, so she worked extra hard on her hair, rubbing it into fluffy ringlets.

Was that the way she usually wore it? She didn’t think so, but it would do for now. Her coiffeur was way down on her list of priorities. It didn’t matter what she looked like if she didn’t know who she was and how she’d gotten herself into deep kimchi. Because it was clear from the memory Dr. Delano had dredged up that she’d done something to bring trouble on herself. Was it something she deserved? Or something that wasn’t her fault?

She made a small frustrated sound as she tried to work around the holes in her memory, then stopped and started again. It was more like her entire past was a great void—except for the memories Matt Delano had brought to the surface. With that nagging side effect he hated, she reminded herself.

Well, that probably wasn’t true. She was pretty sure he didn’t hate the sexual pull between them. He’d responded, after all, but he was determined not to cross a line with her.

She clenched her fists as her own determination surged through her. If she couldn’t fill in all the blank places in her mind, they were going to drive her crazy.

CHAPTER THREE

Out by the nurses’ station, Matt was thinking about the moral dilemma that was tearing at him. Because he was very conscious of the sexual awareness between himself and Elizabeth Doe, he should stay away from her. But at the same time, how could he refuse to help her?

Mrs. Kramer came down the hall, her strides purposeful, and he looked up questioningly when he found her standing in front of him.

“Yes?”

“Do you get the feeling that Elizabeth is in some kind of trouble?” she asked. “I mean not just the memory loss.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps she was fleeing from someone. There was a report of a man dragging her out of her car at the accident scene. Maybe he took her purse.”

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