He Said He Loved Me When He Forgot Me

Four years ago, I pulled a man with no memory out of the freezing sea. I took him back to my motor inn and named him Jay. He carried himself with effortless grace, and he spoke fluent French.

The lobstermen on the peninsula warned me: "He isn't one of us. Don't go falling for him."

I asked him whether he would leave me once his memory came back.

He stroked my hair and said, gently:

"Everything I want is in this inn. All of it is in you. I will never leave."

Then, one day, six black SUVs came up the drive.

Standing in the hallway, I heard a bodyguard address him with deference: "The board has voted unanimously for your return."

Jadon Phillips - the true heir to the Phillips Global Properties empire - did not even lift his eyes as he gave the order:

"Give her ten million. Make sure she doesn't go out and make a scene."

So he had never really lost his memory.

To keep me from disrupting his engagement to a shipping heiress, he handed me over to Arthur Garner - a widowed, small-time coastal freight operator on the brink of bankruptcy.

When I refused outright and tried to run, he let his bodyguards drag me across the docks. But he never knew I was already carrying his child.

Not until I lay in a pool of blood, watching our unborn baby slip away, did he try to hold me back.

I left his millions on the table and got on a plane to Seattle with sixty dollars in my pocket, and I swore I would build a business empire of my own with my own two hands.

Chapter 1

Gianna's POV:

The sea off Maine never forgives a mistake. I learned that as a child - the year my parents took the lobster boat out and never came back. On an October morning four years ago, the tide pushed a man onto the rocks behind the Anchorage Motor Inn.

There was a bullet wound low in his left side, packed with salt and grit. His coat was soaked dark red, and the pulse at his cold jaw was so faint I could barely find it.

I dragged him up the gravel path by myself. I fetched the retired doctor who lived at the end of the road, and he stitched the wound shut on my kitchen table without asking a single question.

When the man woke five days later, his gray eyes were blank. He didn't remember his parents. He didn't remember where home was. He didn't even remember his own name. I pointed at the Atlantic outside the window and called him Jay.

Jay stayed.

He learned to patch plaster walls and replace copper pipes split by frost, and he learned to keep the inn's books through the dead, lean winters. Hands that had never so much as touched a wrench grew rough with calluses. And yet something in him never fit this shut-in little town. He moved with an easy, polished grace, and he spoke fluent French.

More than that: when a local developer tried to muscle in and seize the fishermen's moorings, Jay drafted a countermeasure, and in under forty-eight hours the developer's lawyers withdrew by the weekend, briefcases and all.

Six months later that developer's law firm in Bangor received a letter of inquiry from a state's attorney in New York, asking who had prepared the filing. Jay took the truck and was gone for two days. When he came back he said only that he had been to look at a boat. After that he stopped going into town on the days the mail came.

People in town decided he was a Wall Street shark on the run. His past was not my business.

The second year after he healed, out on the wooden dock behind the inn, he bent a length of silver wire into a ring and slipped it onto my finger.

"I don't want anything the outside world could offer, Gianna," he said, pulling my wool coat tighter against the bitter northeast wind. "Everything I want is in this inn. All of it is in you. I will never leave."

I believed him.

Then, one Tuesday afternoon, the dream shattered. A convoy of six black SUVs ground up the gravel drive and crushed the wooden flower boxes I had painted myself that spring.

Men in charcoal suits and earpieces spilled out and ringed the lobby. A tall blonde stepped down from the lead car in a white cashmere coat and black sunglasses.

She was Bianca Owens, daughter of a Manhattan shipping magnate, and she had flown into Hancock County two days ahead of the convoy. The Owens family trust held enough preferred stock to guarantee her a seat at any table the Phillips family set, and she never let anyone forget it. Jadon's mother had picked her out for him years ago, before either of them had a vote; the engagement was to be announced at the autumn gala, and Bianca had already begun saying "our house" when she meant his.

She had found him the way money always finds people: she bought the file. A clerk at the Bangor firm that had answered the state's attorney's letter sold her a photocopy of the retainer for twelve thousand dollars, and a private investigator counted the miles from there. It took him eleven days.

I was in the laundry room folding towels for the guests when I heard low voices coming from the office. I went down the hall and stopped outside the scuffed wooden door, which stood ajar. Jay stood behind my desk, but his posture had changed entirely.

His back was straight, his chin slightly lifted; the mild, gentle manner of four years was gone.

A bodyguard was reporting in a lowered voice: "The board has voted unanimously for your return. They didn't even bother with a formal vote."

Jay's voice was cold and edged with menace. "They thought they could liquidate the Boston assets. I've taken back fifty-one percent of the voting stock. The hostile takeover is finished."

I stood against the plaster wall with my hand over my mouth and my heart going like a bird. Bianca stood across from him, studying her manicured nails at her leisure.

"And what about the innkeeper, Jadon?" A sour, cutting smile curled at the corner of her mouth. "You can't bring some girl you picked up on a beach to the charity gala next month. That's the night they announce our engagement. If your mother sees her standing beside you when the toast is made, she'll have a heart attack on the spot, and your sister will be only too glad to let it happen."

Jadon didn't hesitate for half a second.

"It's handled," he said, in the light, casual tone of a man scheduling trash pickup. "I had legal set up a ten-million-dollar trust. For a woman of her background, that's enough to live off for several lifetimes. Besides, Arthur Garner needs a docile wife to keep his house, and his coastal cold-chain freight routes happen to be the choke point on our East Coast line. We hold his notes now. That company won't last the spring."

He paused, then went on: "Rather than swallow Garner Freight whole and spend two years in court with the union and the local gentry in Bangor, I'll hand him a quiet, obedient wife, and use the marriage to dangle a line of commercial credit in front of him, so he keeps sailing for us. Her future is settled, and our shipping lane is in hand. Two birds."

"A trust with a marriage clause in it," Bianca said, and laughed. "That's the coldest thing I've ever heard you say."

"Legal built it that way on purpose." Jadon tapped one finger on the desk, twice, the way he did when he had already decided something. "The trust pays out only to a married beneficiary. If she is still unmarried at forty, the principal reverts to the Foundation and she keeps nothing but the annual stipend. Married, the money stays on a leash. Arthur needs a wife, the trust needs a husband, and I need the shipping lane. Nobody in this room is being romantic about it."

My phone was in my apron pocket. My thumb found the record button before I had decided anything, and the little red dot came on and stayed on. A wave of nausea rose up in me.

My stomach turned - not only from the blow, but because of the new life quietly growing inside me. Two days ago, in a clinic in Ellsworth, a nurse had confirmed what I had already guessed and had not yet said out loud to anyone.

I gripped the door frame until my knuckles went white. Four years. He had known his own name for four years, and he had let me call him Jay. He had never lost it. He had only ever lent it to me.

While his family tore itself apart over billions, he had been lying safe in my bed, waiting for them to come and fetch him. I got my hand around the phone, held it against my hip, and shoved the door open. The hinge shrieked and split the silence.

Jadon turned. Our eyes met, and there was no panic in his, no flicker of guilt. He simply put his phone away and slid a thick blue leather folder across the scarred oak desk.

"So you heard." His voice was flat.

"Ten million dollars," I said, fighting to keep control and failing; my voice shook. "And Arthur Garner."

"Arthur is a respectable man with a name, Gianna," Jadon said, taking a step toward me. "Garner Freight has run out of Bangor for thirty years. Nobody on the docks does business without tipping their hat to the Garners. He's short on cash right now, but once your trust is injected, that little difficulty amounts to nothing. You'll never have to break your back running this inn again. The trust pays you three hundred thousand a year. For you, that's the best ending there is."

"The best ending?" I repeated numbly, looking down at the wire ring on my left hand. "And what about the man who swore he'd never leave this dock? Is he dead?"

Jadon glanced down at the ring, then lifted his eyes to mine. He looked at me the way a man looks at a line item.

"Jay was a stopgap," he said, and every word struck me like a slap. "Jay had no money, no power, no future. I am Jadon Phillips. My life belongs to the Phillips Group board, not to a five-room motor inn in Maine. Wake up, Gianna. Sign the agreement, marry Arthur, and go live a comfortable life."

I ripped the wire ring off my finger. I walked to the desk and slammed it down in the middle of the blue folder.

"I don't want your ten million," I said, staring straight into his eyes. "And I will never marry Arthur Garner."

Jadon looked at the twisted wire and shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

"Keep it or throw it away, I don't care, Gianna," he said, turning to pick up his coat. "Legal will handle the paperwork. The wedding is Friday, at the Garner place. Don't make this harder on yourself than it has to be."

"Get out of my office," I said.

In the corner, Bianca laughed out loud with contempt.

"Look at the little innkeeper," she said, coming to stand beside Jadon, her voice thick with disdain. "She actually thinks she has a choice. Jadon, your car is waiting. Leave the rest of the trash for the cleaners."

I walked to the door, threw it wide open, and pointed outside.

"The two of you," I said, my voice low and flat, "get out. Now."

Jadon paused on the threshold. He looked at me for one brief second, as if searching my face for something familiar, then strode out across the gravel without looking back.

Bianca followed, and made a point of ramming her shoulder into mine as she passed.

"Poor thing, you were just a roof he sheltered under during a storm," she murmured at my ear. "Don't flatter yourself that you were ever his destination."

I slammed the door and shot the bolt. My legs gave out and I slid down the door, curling up with my knees against my chest. My hands trembled as they came to rest on my belly. The room smelled of salt and pine, and now of the expensive cologne Jadon wore - a scent that had never belonged here.

Outside, heavy car doors slammed one after another. Through the window I watched Jadon take a gold lighter from his pocket and light a dark cigar - in four years I had never once seen him smoke.

The Jay I knew hated the smell of tobacco. The man outside exhaled a thick cloud into the gray coastal sky, utterly indifferent to the wreckage he was leaving behind.

Bianca stood beside him, pointing toward the highway and talking fast. Jadon nodded to his head of security - a broad, close-cropped man.

"Make sure the Garners have everything ready by Friday," Jadon's voice carried cleanly through the thin glass. "Once she sees there's nowhere to run, she'll come around."

Engines roared, the convoy swept off along the coast, and the dust it raised settled over my dying hydrangeas. I picked the blue folder up off the desk. I opened it, and line after line of fine print swam before me.

The ten million came with brutal conditions: never speak a word to the press for the rest of my life; never set foot in New York or Boston again; my legal residence bound to Arthur Garner's old house for ten full years, with the annual stipend stopping the day the marriage did - a house that, along with Garner Freight's warehouse and refrigerated trucks, had long since been mortgaged to the Phillips Group.

If I broke a single clause, the entire sum would revert to the Phillips Foundation, and I would owe a ruinous penalty.

This was no gift. It was a prison sentence, paid out in installments. Then there was a sharp knock at the front door. I looked through the peephole.

Standing on the porch was Arthur Garner, in a bright yellow raincoat.