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was not possible to avoid touching him. Each time her hand came in contact with his skin, or brushed across his warm, naked torso, she felt it, clear through to the soles of her feet. And in less acceptable regions.
    He knew it, too, the devil! He’d looked up at her in such an intimate, knowing way! How dare he embarrass her any further! She ripped a blanket off the bed and flung it around his naked back and chest, then she thrust the bowl and spoon at him. “Eat.”
    “Yes, Mrs. Carmichael,” he said in a tone of crushed obedience.
    She glanced at him in suspicion. His blue, blue eyes caressed her boldly. She glared at him, then began to tidy the room briskly.
    “You’re gorgeous when you’re angry,” he said in a deep, low voice and as her breath hissed in fury, he applied himself in a leisurely manner to the porridge.
    By the time she went up again to fetch his empty bowl, her wrath had dissipated. She was now more puzzled than angry. His behaviour made little sense. Why lie to her, when she was the one person in the world who would know it was a lie? And though he was teasing her now, he hadn’t been teasing when he’d claimed to be her husband. It was all very odd. She decided to ask him, straight out.
    “What is your name—no nonsense now. I want the truth, if you please.” She took his bowl and stood looking down at him.
    There was a long pause. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
    He said it with no inflexion at all. Ellie stared at him, and suddenly she knew he was telling the truth. “You mean you cannot remember who you are?”
    “No.”
    Ellie was stunned. She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, quite forgetting her resolve to keep her distance. She had heard tales of people who had lost their memories, but she had never thought to meet one. “You cannot remember anything about yourself?”
    “No. All morning I have tried and tried, but I cannot think straight. I have no idea what my name is, nor anything about my family, or what I do for a living, or even how I came to be here.” He smiled, a little sheepishly. “So you will have to tell me everything.”
    “But I don’t know myself!”
    He patted her knee and she skittered away. “No, not how I came to be hurt, but the rest. My name and all the rest.”
    “If you cannot remember anything, then why did you say you were my husband?”
    He frowned at the accusing note in her voice and said teasingly, “Am I not your husband, then?”
    “You know you are not.”
    He blinked at her in amazement. “You cannot mean it! But I thought—”
    Ellie shook her head.

    He considered her words for a moment and his frown grew. “But if Amy is my daughter…”
    “She is no such thing!” Ellie gasped, and jumped up, horrified. “I just said you were not my husband. How dare you suggest—?”
    “Then why does she call me Papa?”
    “You mean—? Oh…” She sank back down on the bed. “That explains a good deal.” She turned to him and said slowly, “Amy’s papa, my husband, Hartley Carmichael, died a year ago. She was just a little girl and she doesn’t quite remember him…” It was too difficult to explain, she realised. She finished lamely, “You have blue eyes, like her papa. And her.”
    “That doesn’t explain how you and I came to bsharing a b—”
    She knew what he was thinking and interrupted, “I never saw you before in my life until two nights ago when you arrived at my door, bleeding and frozen half-solid.”
    “What!”
    She stood up and added in a wooden little voice, “There is only one bed big enough for an adult. It was a bitter night, one of the coldest I can recall. You were hurt and in danger of freezing to death. I could not leave you on the floor.” She was unable to meet his eyes. “And as I did not want to freeze to death myself, I shared my bed with a stranger.”
    She flushed, recalling how the stranger had found her in his bed this morning. She had responded wantonly to his caresses. She did