Mona Lisa Eclipsing m-5 Read online

  “Ow!” I said for lack of anything else better to say as I stared up at a dark, masculine face. A stranger I didn’t recognize, sitting next to me as I lay in bed. Gingerly I sat up and took in my surroundings. A strange man, a strange, luxuriously furnished bedroom . . . and we were not alone. Two other Latino men were in the room with nasty-looking guns in their hands. Bodyguards. Their weapons weren’t pointed at me yet, but I had the feeling that they would be if I so much as blinked wrong, which was a complete puzzle. This whole thing was, actually.

  “Where am I? And who are you?” I asked woozily, fighting back a groan as my shift in position added in nausea to the mix. I had to swallow and close my eyes for a brief second before the headache lessened back down to not-wanting-to-puke-your-guts-out bearable.

  My eyes reopened and focused on the unfamiliar face in front of me. He was a very attractive devil, I observed distantly like someone viewing a lovely work of art. He had glossy black hair and dark eyes, but whereas my skin was fair, his was tanned, though not as swarthy as his two armed bodyguards.

  For the moment, my discomfort preempted feelings of anything else like alarm, but it hovered close, within touchable reach.

  “You are in my home in Cancun,” said Mr. Dark and Lovely. His English was perfect, accented lightly with a sexy Latin cadence and fluidity. “My name is Roberto Carderas. What is your name?”

  “Lisa. Lisa Hamilton.” I blinked again, as if that would help clear up his words better. “Cancun? You mean, like in Mexico?”

  Roberto nodded, his dark, intelligent eyes observing my reaction.

  “Why the hell am I in Mexico? I live in Manhattan. My job . . .” Worry spiked, intensifying the blistering headache.

  “What do you do?” asked Roberto.

  “I’m a nurse.” God, there was nothing but confusion in my head. Confusion and pain. “What day is today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Crap, I should be at work! It’s nighttime. Is Mexico in the same time zone as New York? What the hell am I doing in Mexico?” I muttered. “I have to call the hospital and let them know I won’t be able to come in tonight.” Carefully, I turned my head, searching for a phone.

  “Easy, lucerito.”

  I didn’t know what the heck lucerito meant, only that it sounded almost like an endearment. “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Meeting me on the island. On Cozumel,” he clarified.

  “No. Where’s Cozumel?” I’d heard of the popular vacation destination but didn’t know its exact location on the map.

  “It’s an island not too far from here,” he said. “You fell and hit your head, and I brought you to the mainland. The hospitals are much better here than the small clinic they have on the island. They x-rayed your head and determined that you had no fracture, just a bad concussion, so I brought you back to my home to rest. Did you come with anyone else? A boyfriend or perhaps a husband?”

  “No, no one. Just me.”

  “No family?” he persisted.

  “No.”

  “What about friends?”

  I shook my head, immediately regretting the action as another severe wave of pain pounded my skull, enough to make me cry out. When the sharp pain eased back to a bearable throb, I focused on . . . what was his name again? . . . Roberto.

  “Why did you help me?” I asked. “We obviously don’t know each other that well, do we?”

  “No, I saw you on the island. I was vacationing there myself. As to helping you—it was the decent thing to do.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured, touched by how much trouble and expense he seemed to have gone to help me. “I’ll pay you back,” I assured him.

  “De nada,” Roberto said, dismissing my pledge with the easy, telling grace of someone accustomed to wealth. “No need to pay me back. Medical care is much less expensive here in Mexico than in the United States. It pleases me to be of service to you.”

  “No, I insist.” Then wondered if I could make good on my words. I didn’t know how much money I had with me, much less why the hell I’d traveled here in the first place. “Where is my purse?”

  “You did not have one. Just your passport, credit card, and some cash you were carrying in your pocket—” Roberto gestured to the bedside table where the items he had mentioned were laid out. “—and a knife.”

  “A knife?” That was a surprise. The knife, I noticed, wasn’t with my other things. “Are you sure it was mine? I don’t carry a knife.”

  “You had it strapped in a sheath around your waist.”

  “I did? How odd. I wonder why.”

  My reply had him studying me more closely and no wonder. He was probably wondering if the strange woman he had played Good Samaritan to was crazy or violent. I was wondering that, too. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what had happened to me, or make any sense of where I was or what the hell I was doing in Mexico.

  I eased my way carefully over to the bedside table to look over my stuff. The passport was familiar, but I didn’t recognize the credit card. My uneasiness grew. It had my name printed on it, but it was as unknown to me as the knife they claimed to have been strapped to my waist, and was issued by a bank I didn’t recognize.

  I counted out a little over two hundred dollars in cash, American money, nothing converted to local currency yet. I held out two hundred dollars to Roberto. “I know it’s probably not enough—”

  “Keep it,” he said in that smoothly accented voice. “I insist.”

  It felt oddly vulnerable to be here, among all these strange people.

  “Are they your bodyguards?” I asked, glancing nervously at the men standing by the door.

  “Sí.”

  “Why do you have bodyguards?”

  “I am a wealthy businessman, and as such am a target,” Roberto said. “Kidnapping and ransom, unfortunately, is common here in my country.”

  “Oh, for a moment I thought they were here to protect you against me,” I said with a weak grin, inviting him to share in the humor of the ridiculous thought. But Roberto didn’t smile. Just gazed at me with careful, probing intentness.

  “Why would you think that, querida?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because they’re staring at me so suspiciously.” That and the fact that their guns were drawn, if not pointed.

  The reassuring smile he gave me made him even more attractive. “Forgive their diligence. They are paid to be suspicious, and you are, after all, a strange woman that I have brought into my house.” He murmured something in Spanish and his men holstered their weapons. And some tension I hadn’t known I felt eased within me.

  “Can I use your telephone to call my work?”

  “Of course,” Roberto said graciously. He stood up, and I noted that he wasn’t just handsome but tall as well, an inch, perhaps, shy of six feet. “I have a phone in the other room. I will get it for you.”

  It was only when he left the room that I noticed something I hadn’t noticed earlier, in those first confused moments after waking up with that dreadful headache. I felt him. Was aware of him in a way I wasn’t aware of the other two men in the room. When Roberto returned a few seconds later with a cordless telephone in hand, that sparking awareness shimmered between us again, growing stronger with each step he took closer to me, something I’d never felt before. A connection, for lack of a better word.

  My heart kicked up its rhythm with a few hard beats and my hand trembled, faint but visible, as I held it out for the phone.

  “Allow me,” Roberto said. “It’s a bit complicated to call out of the country. If you will be kind enough to give me the numbers, I can place the call for you.”

  He punched in a set of numbers then entered in the area code and phone number of the hospital I gave him. I heard the call go through, and he handed the phone to me. Four rings later I got an automatic recording that said, “This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service . . .
”

  I hung up. “I’m sorry, I got an out-of-service recording,” I said, thinking that he must have dialed it wrong. “Can we try again?”

  I waited until he had entered in the country code. “Can I try dialing the rest of it, please?”

  “Of course.” He handed me the phone.

  “Do I need to dial 1?”

  “No, just the area code and phone number.”

  I entered the numbers and got the same recording. “That’s odd.” I frowned. “I know for sure that’s the correct number. We must be doing something wrong.”

  “I have placed many calls to the United States and have had no trouble before,” Roberto said. “Is there someone else you can call?”

  Only one other number came to mind, a nearby restaurant where I frequently ordered takeout. Roberto entered the first string of numbers and allowed me to input the rest.

  “White Elephant,” answered a familiar voice. “How can I help you?”

  “Hi, Joey. It’s me, Lisa.”

  “Hey, Lisa. Long time no hear,” Joey said cheerfully. His strong Brooklyn accent made me feel almost homesick, though his words puzzled me. I didn’t think a day or two constituted a long time, even though I practically ate there every day. “Listen, Joey, I tried calling St. Vincent’s Hospital and got this no-longer-in-service recording. Did they change their number or something?”

  “What number did you call?” Joey asked. I could hear sounds of the small, busy restaurant in the background.

  I repeated the telephone number.

  “That’s the old number, honey.”

  “The old number?”

  “Yeah, before they moved to the new location on Twelfth and Seventh.”

  “The hospital moved?” I said, feeling as if the whole world instead of just the hospital had shifted.

  “Yeah, but they might as well not have. They went bankrupt shortly after you left and shut down, a couple of weeks ago, actually.”

  “I left?”

  “Yup, you quit and left New York.”

  I unconsciously gripped the phone tightly enough to make the plastic casing protest. Lightening my hold, I asked, “Do you know where I went?”

  Joey laughed. “What is this? You pulling my leg?”

  “No, I, um . . . I hit my head and have a concussion. I honestly don’t remember. I thought I still worked at St. Vincent’s.”

  There was silence at the other end for ten long seconds with nothing but the distant sound of customers and cooking drifting faintly over the line. When I heard Joey’s voice again, it sounded gruff and concerned. “Lisa, honey. You quit your job here almost six months ago. I haven’t seen or heard from you since then. Sorry, honey, I don’t know anything more than that.”

  After saying thanks, I numbly hung up, feeling dazed by more than just the blow to my head. “I think I asked the wrong question,” I said, looking up at Roberto. “What date is it?”

  When he told me, I felt a slight roaring in my head—a silent rush of feeling, of panic.

  I had lost more than half a year of memory!

  I had made a new life somewhere . . . and couldn’t remember a single moment of it!

  There are movies about people who lose their memory—total amnesia. It makes for a great story, with lots of drama and stuff. Having it happen to you, however, was not as much fun as watching it being enacted by talented actors. Granted, I only had partial amnesia. I knew who I was, knew my name—Lisa Hamilton—and where I used to live. I hadn’t lost myself completely. Just a significant chunk of time.

  I spent the next half hour trying to hunt up more clues of where I had moved to and what sort of new life I had built for myself. St. Vincent’s was completely shut down, as Joey had said, with no one in administration to talk to at all. What the landlord of my old apartment had to tell me was more helpful, and highly disturbing.

  There had been four men with me when I had moved out of my apartment and turned in my key.

  “Four men? Did they seem like friends?” I asked after my initial surprise.

  “Yeah, sure. Or why else would they help you move out of your apartment?”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Why?” he asked, suspicious.

  “Because I hit my head and”—a weak laugh at having to say the next part—“I can’t remember them or where I moved to.”

  “No shit!” My old landlord sounded impressed. “One was a real big guy—tall, six and a half feet at least, heavily muscled like one of those pro-wrestler types. Another was movie-star handsome. The third guy had this old-fashioned beard and mustache like those people in the Victorian age, and the last one was just average looking, you know.”

  None of this struck a familiar chord in me. One huge wrestler type, another looking like a movie star, another sounding like an Englishman? It didn’t describe any of the doctors, orderlies, or tech guys I knew from work. The average-looking fourth fellow might have been one the few guys I had dated, but none of those brief relationships had ended well, certainly not well enough for them to help me move out of my apartment. “Were they young, old?” I asked.

  “A little older than you. Late twenties, early thirties, maybe.”

  “Did I leave any forwarding address?”

  “Nah, you best check with the post office. Maybe they can help you.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Samuels.” I hung up with even more questions whirling in my damaged brain.

  “Do I have competition,” Roberto asked lightly, “these four men I heard you mention?” He had been sitting so quietly I had almost forgotten that he and the two bodyguards were still in the room. I blushed when I saw his smile and the intent look in his eyes. My headache and wooziness had lessened in the half hour of time I had spent hunting up more information. And the can of soda and analgesic he had brought in helped as well.

  What had Roberto asked? Oh, yeah. If he had any competition. He was teasing me, of course. Latin gallantry. As if the idea of a man as dashing and wealthy as he obviously was being attracted to me wasn’t ludicrous.

  “I have no idea who those men he described to me were. They don’t sound like anyone I know. Maybe my landlord mixed me up with someone else who moved out recently. I didn’t have any friends, just acquaintances from work.”

  “No old boyfriends?”

  “None that parted on good enough terms to help me move out of my apartment.”

  “They did not end well?” Roberto asked with warm sympathy.

  “Or last long. Only a couple of dates.” Just enough to hit the sheets once, after which it became clear that a physical relationship was not going to work out between us.

  “What about your patients? Did you befriend or get romantically involved with any of them?”

  For a moment, something tickled the edge of my mind, then was gone like a phantom breeze. “No,” I said slowly, “I never got involved with any of my patients.”

  “Was it, what you say, professional ethics?”

  “More like no interest, on their parts,” I said with rueful honesty.

  “A lovely woman like yourself?”

  “What is it, Latin genes or something, flattering any woman you come across? I know I’m a very average-looking woman. And, no,” I said, holding up my hand when he opened his mouth, “I’m not trying to fish for more compliments or flattery. I’m simply stating the truth. You are very gallant, and I am deeply in your debt for your help and letting me rack up a huge phone bill with all these telephone calls. I’ll pay you back, I promise . . .”

  Words died in my throat as he reached out and grasped my hand. That awareness, that strange humming energy between us intensified into sudden blazing brightness at physical contact, and all I knew and felt was him. Like he was my moon, my stars, my entire freaking orbit . . .

  “You are far from plain or average, Lisa. You are like me.” Cradling my fingers between his own bigger, broader hands, he clasped my hand as if he was savoring our contact, our connection. “Just like me.”
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  FIVE

  TOUCHING ROBERTO WAS overwhelming. I felt like I wanted to tear off his clothes and jump his bones . . . and that was just so not like me. I’d never felt physically attracted to anyone ever before. Never felt this overpowering urge to mate, like some irresistible force pulling him and me together. It scared me enough to tear my hand away from his, to stand up and back away from him. Distance, I found, helped. Whatever it was I was feeling, it lessened the farther I distanced myself from him.

  His bodyguards drew their guns at the sudden movement. And the fact that I had two deadly firearms pointed straight at me was less alarming than the way I reacted to Roberto: like he was a flame I wanted to bask myself in . . . to be consumed by.

  Lust.

  Holy crap! What I was feeling was lust. Me, the coldest fish in the world.

  My heart pounded like a giant drum gone crazy, and my breath sawed in and out of me as Roberto spat out harsh orders in Spanish. I smelled my sweat and some other unfamiliar odor emanating from my body as his men put their guns away, leaving the room.

  That, unfortunately, didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Easy,” Roberto murmured.

  “No,” I said, gritting my teeth, knowing my eyes were wide and wild. “I won’t let it control me.” With those words, that willful determination, I felt that maddening pull start to ease up between us.

  Silence followed, broken only by the sound of heavy breathing. Silence like what a bomb squad must hear after they’ve successfully prevented an explosion. Roberto eased closer to me, and I did nothing to stop him since his nearness no longer made me want to tear off my clothes and offer myself to him.

  His breath came as heavy and fast as mine. Farther down, his pants tented out stiffly with unmistakable prominence. My face flamed, and my unfortunate headache chose that embarrassing moment to reassert itself.

  “Argh!” I said, gripping my poor head. God, I ached, not just the bump on my head but the entire right side of me—shoulder, arm, leg, and hip. When the merciless pounding eased, Roberto was standing before me.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, breathless.

  “That, querida, was a miracle—it was attraction.”