Why would she lie about her age?
He shrugged, the movement dragging her gaze across his emphatic shoulders and down to expressive hands that gestured dismissively. ‘I learned to take everything you said with a pinch of salt.’
Did he mean she exaggerated? Or that she outright lied?
She swallowed hard. The picture he conjured was anything but flattering.
What had happened to make him hate her?
Perhaps it was stupid to feel upset about something she didn’t recall, but who wanted their first snippets of self-knowledge to be so negative?
Surely this wasn’t right.
Surely she wasn’t the way he painted her.
As if you’d know. You don’t even know your own name!
She let her eyes slide closed, wishing the headache would go. She didn’t have the energy for these unpalatable glimpses into the past. Maybe if she slept again...
‘Alexa.’
Her eyes snapped open. Eyes the colour of espresso coffee stared down at her, intent as if they could read her very soul.
It scared her that this man, this disapproving man, knew her better than she knew herself. And that he didn’t trust her.
‘I don’t feel like an Alexa,’ she blurted. ‘It sounds...foreign.’
Slowly he straightened, his gaze still holding hers. For the first time she noticed a flicker of something that wasn’t hard and judgemental there.
‘On the beach you called yourself Ally.’
‘Ally?’
Her lips formed the name, her tongue lingering clumsily on the sound. Did that sound any more familiar?
The answer wasno. Nothing seemed familiar. Not even the sight of her ringless fingers and lightly tanned arms that she must have seen every day of her twenty something years.
‘Yes. Short for Alexa, presumably.’
She put the heel of her hand to her breastbone, pressing down against the flutter of distress battering her chest. Any minute now she feared she might have a full-blown panic attack.
Her mind whirled. How did she know what a panic attack was when she didn’t know anything about herself? It was totally bizarre.
‘Don’t worry about it now.’ To her amazement his voice dropped again to that low, lush note that made her think of rich caramel and comforting warmth. ‘Just shut your eyes and relax. The doctor will be here soon and someone will sit with you till he comes.’
She wanted to protest. To assert herself.
But to what end?
The last ten minutes had left her exhausted and wrung out. Talking and trying to think had taken all her strength.
She just hoped when she woke she’d be better.
With luck her memory would have returned. She’d enjoy proving to this disturbing, disapproving man that her name wasn’t Alexa or Ally and that she wasn’t the liar he believed her. She was someone else entirely. Of course she was.
Clutching that thought close, she felt her eyelids grow heavy and then the world went black.
Angelo kicked his heels in the hallway while the doctor examined Alexa.