Page 70 of Friends Who Fake It

His body was thinner, but it was still, unmistakably, him.

He was married – but he might as well have been dead to her.

She wouldn’t allow herself to dwell in the past.

That weekend had been a mistake, for both of them. But only one of them had to live with the consequences.

ChapterThree

Present Day

“STOP.” HE SPOKE WITH natural authority, but she kept going, her legs carrying her towards the door. She needed to escape; she needed to breathe air that wasn’t his.

She needed not to hear him, to see him, to have him within reaching distance.

“Tell me your name.”

The words were a command but she heard something deep within them. A plea. She ignored him.

They had a son together and he couldn’t even remember who she was!

He was a pig. A disgusting, dishonest, cheating pig of a man. “ I can’t believe you don’t remember!” She snapped, shaking her head at her own stupidity.

“A few years ago, I was in a car accident,” he said gruffly. “You might have heard about it. I was in a coma for a little over a month. When I came to, I had no idea who I was.”

Ellie bit down on her lip, tears stinging her eyes, surprise and pain etching in her heart.

“For days,” the words rumbled through the room, hitting her square in the chest. “I couldn’t have told you my name, or my age. Then, things started to come back. Gradually. Too gradually for me.” The words were said with self-deprecation, but she understood the ache beneath them.

“And then more things, so that I remembered much of my life. But not all of it.”

Ellie turned around slowly, to face him, to read the truth in his expression, and she knew he wasn’t lying. He looked… lost. A surge of something like confusion was flooding her body. He’d had amnesia?

He lifted a hand, running a finger over his scarred cheek. “I was left physically scarred, but my brain was broken too.”

She swallowed, his confession melting her heart, when it shouldn’t have. His mother’s words were lodged in her brain like a sharp object she couldn’t ignore. She’d insisted that they’d spoken about Ellie. That he’d regretted sleeping with her.

Was it possible the older woman had lied? And when Ellie had been phoning to tell them news of her pregnancy?

Mariahadlied. Hadn’t she heard something like panic in Maria’s voice? She’d wanted the wedding to go ahead and she’d said whatever she’d needed to in order to get rid of the other woman. And Ellie had believed her.

Did it matter? The man before her had lied too. He had been engaged. He’d married his fiancé. Nothing altered those facts, and so she focused on them rather than the sympathy that was threatening to soften her towards him.

“We were together before your accident,” she said stiffly. “You were very much engaged, with your memory intact, when you slept with me.”

Something glittered in the depths of his eyes. Emotions she couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t remember.” He took a step towards her, and she instinctively moved backwards. He expelled an angry sigh of impatience. “I’m not going to hurt you. God, what happened between us that you’re afraid of me?”

She arched a brow but he could see her pulse hammering, the fine flesh at the base of her throat utterly captivating. She wasn’t afraid of him, though. She was afraid of what she felt when he stood so close to her. “You basically dragged me to your hotel room just now,” she reminded him stiffly.

“Because I remembered you!” He said urgently and then shook his head. “I mean, not exactly. I just know that you meant something to me.”

She angled her head away.

“I have all these black holes in my mind – times and days and events that are foggy. I can’t catch hold of memories, no matter how hard I focus. I look at photos, I talk to friends. They’re gone – probably forever. I’ve come to accept that. But sometimes I have a feeling, almost like a premonition, and I know that a part of my past is before me. That’s what I felt tonight, when I saw you. A sense of recognition so powerful that I had to listen to it.”

His words hammered inside of her, pushing at her certainties, making her doubt everything and know nothing. She looked around, eyeing off the scotch he’d poured her earlier. On instinct, she moved towards it, lifting it to her lips and sipping a small amount. It went down easier, second time around, and warmth spread through her body.

Joshua.

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