He’d been wrong then. He didn’t know if that was because the hypothermia and pain had distorted his perception. Or because her looks were the type that snuck up on a person slowly.
Remy wasn’t a beauty in the same commercial way as the brunette. Yet her lookswerefascinating. Layered.
She had an old-fashioned face, the type of face that should have belonged to someone who lived three hundred years ago. Her wide mouth hinted at her passionate personality, but her ordinary nose did not. The apples of her cheeks were defined but only when she smiled, and she rarely smiled at him. She didn’t have enormous eyes made bigger with false lashes. Her eyes were dainty, the irises a gray that reminded him of fog over ocean, marked with a few lighter slivers like lightning and a few darker dots like storm clouds.
None of that explained her appeal, though. Her appeal was more about the energy that hummed beneath her skin. Sometimes that energy was soft and dreamy, when her mind went away to her art. And sometimes that energy was sharp and spiky.
When they were finally in her truck and he was driving them back to her cottage, she angled toward him on the bench seat. “What did the hypnosis reveal?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “It was depressing.”
“I’m just glad something came to you. Tell all.”
She’d worked harder than anyone, including him, to uncover his identity. He owed her this information, so he listed everything he’d seen and felt in the vision. “Do you think the brunette is my wife?”
“Probably so.”
“What does it mean? I definitely didn’t lock her up and forget to bring her food and water.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
Ordinarily he valued Remy’s sass, but he didn’t have the bandwidth for it right now. “Remy. The vision was genuinely disturbing.”
“Jonah,” she said, matching his seriousness, “you did not lock up your wife and forget to bring her food and water. I’m sure what you experienced during hypnosis was more like a dream in the sense that it personified your fears.”
“If so, why do I have fear tied to my wife? I mean . . . my head kills me every time I try to remember my past. Do you think that’s my body’s way of warning me that I won’t like what I learn when my memories come back?”
“I’d think not.”
“Then what?” The sound of the truck’s engine was like sandpaper to his ears.
“I think the part of your memory you can’t access right now knows how much you love your wife. Maybe the vision was about how deeply that part of you wants to be reunited with her. Subconsciously, you’re eager to release her from the separation between the two of you caused by your amnesia because you understand the pain she must be going through.”
He cut a quick look across at her. Remy dashed hair behind her ears. He refocused on the road.
Her theory struck him as over-the-top. But Remy’s interpretation was plausible, and, in it, he was more of a hero than a villain. So in the interest of his sanity he’d go with it.
“I view myself as a champion of your marriage,” Remy stated. “I’ll keep looking for her until we find her.”
If his subconscious self was desperate to find his wife, his conscious self was oddly detached from that goal. He wanted to remember his identity in general. Yet the subject of his wife in particular left him indifferent. He couldn’t remember her. He didn’t know the woman in the vision.
“Today was a success,” Remy announced. “Not only because of what you saw during hypnosis but because we’ve learned that you seem to be unusually knowledgeable about cars.”
“Don’t a lot of people know about cars?”
“I suppose. But ordinary people don’t have a sense for the tire pressure or mention things like responsiveness. Maybe you’re a mechanic.”
“A duke mechanic?”
“Well . . . yes. Now we have new angles to research. A man who might be a mechanic. A brunette woman. Whether or not any men with estates named Pemberley or Mansfield Park have recently gone missing.”
Remy seemed enthusiastic, but apprehension curled in the pit of his stomach. Was his brain refusing to remember because forgetting was to his benefit?
That night, the same vision from hypnosis visited him in his sleep.
The panic, the searching, the failure to find the brunette—
When Jonah jerked awake, he was panting. He lay on his back, fists gripping the sheets. “Remy?” he whispered raggedly.
