Time passed by, measured in appointments. Twice a day the physical therapist came, checked my progress, adjusted weights, and helped me with my exercises. Twice a day the doctor came. Eventually, they both started coming once a day. We all knew I wasn’t about to be released any time soon, but the doctor still had to check my progress.

And of course, there was Tiago.

My husband.

I couldn’t remember anything about my business but my second in command had taken over most of the duties, some things I still had to sign and approve. That terrified me because most of the time I had no idea what I was about to consent to. It was almost as scary as the moments when a new face popped up.

The first week I had so many people come to visit along with him, people I couldn’t remember, that it became too much. Faces, names, none of it was familiar. The little girl, Layla, that came with her parents, Ella and Tim, was the girl from my memory, the only memory I’d retained. The sound of her laughter was all that was familiar, and I knew that had to mean something.

Tiago was great, but it hurt that I couldn’t remember the man that had loved the old me so very much. It was obvious to me how much he’d cared for the woman I used to be. Was I still her, I often wondered now. I didn’t have her fears, her reserve, Tiago had told me.

Two weeks passed, and then three. The doctor deemed me well enough to go home, but I’d have to remain in traction, and a therapist was arranged, along with a nurse to come and check that the points where the pins for the frame were infection-free. I’d still have to spend most of my time in bed, but I could go back to more familiar surroundings.

We hoped.

Oscar was retrieved and taken back to the house, though I couldn’t remember him either. Tiago told me all about my love-hate relationship with the cat, how I adored the long-haired white creature, but it hated me. I couldn’t believe I’d love something that obviously didn’t like me. But I’d apparently dragged the angry little furball from the car when I escaped it, so apparently, I did.

Soon after I was identified, the accident was discovered. Somehow the paperwork had gotten buried, and then lost, but it was found as soon as someone started to put the pieces together. It turns out that I’d dragged myself quite a ways away from the scene of the crash before I was found, so people didn’t really put two and two together until finally it’d clicked with someone.

A cement truck. That’s what had smashed into me. The driver had been drinking, and had plowed right through a red light, straight into the side of my car. The truck driver had died instantly, and somehow, my car had caught on fire. We’d also been on a side-street when it happened, so there hadn’t been any witnesses. There being no witnesses and me having crawled off, when the emergency workers and neighbors did show up, everyone thought the guy had crashed into a parked, empty car.

I could have been identified by serial numbers on the car, or some such thing the policeman told me, but the heat had damaged the paper left on the car, and then the car had been towed to the wrong lot, and it was all a giant fiasco.

In the end, I’d been found, and identified. The fact that there’d been a camera at the light helped to identify the other driver as the one at fault. I felt terrible that he’d died, and it haunted me that I couldn’t remember any of it.

I went home to find that the cat I’d rescued, twice, didn’t hate me so much after all. The house wasn’t familiar at all, nor was Oscar, but he curled at my side through most of the day, content to purr and sleep. The visitors came to a slow trickle and I spent a lot of time going through photo files in my cloud storage, or through papers and books Tiago brought me from my old apartment.

And then, one day, a few weeks after my release, he told me the truth.

He told me everything—the truth about our marriage, and how we’d come to be. I watched, stunned, as he came clean about it all.

“I agreed to marry you for money?” I asked, horrified at my old self, how greedy was I?

But Tiago shook his head. “No, June. Not like that. You needed money for your nonprofit organization. Plus, that little girl? Layla? You marrying me helped me fulfill the terms of my father’s inheritance. It got money freed up—money that went right into getting that little girl the doctors and care she needed to survive.” He shook his head again. “So, no, June. It wasn’t greed at all.” He assured me, but I still felt dirty.

“How did I get pregnant if it was a marriage of convenience between us?” I put my hand on my stomach, a little rounder than it was but not by much.

“Well, on our honeymoon, we kind of…” He smiled, this smile that I felt right through my chest.

“We fell in love, I guess. We crashed into each other harder than either of us expected. We found something we weren’t expecting, June,” he said quietly, sadness in his eyes.

“But?” I could sense a but, there was something he hadn’t told me.

Tiago looked away.

“You were leaving me that night, the night of your accident.”

My heart sank as the silence draped over both of us.

“Why?”

I mean, seriously. This man was gorgeous, he clearly loved me, and I’d obviously loved him from the pictures I’d seen of us together. Everybody had sent me pictures, so I had plenty to judge my former emotions by.

“Because, June. Because we somehow let this wall build up between us. This fucking pressure from my dad’s will about us having a baby in order to fulfill the rest of the terms. It got to us, baby. He got to us, and we let it turn into this wedge between us. I didn’t even know whether I should mention all of this or just try to make you love me all over again.”

Tiago paused, and I was just too shocked to say anything else.

“I felt like trying to make you love me again was wrong. You fell in love with me the first time because you couldn’t help it, I didn’t make you do anything, you just did. And I wanted you to know the truth of it, all of the truth. I felt dishonest, not telling you before.”

That’s why I loved him. I knew it without even having to think about, the second he told me. Yeah, I got that a man who looked like Tiago could make my panties wet, if I could get them over the leg-brace. But I knew then that it was so much more than that. He was honest, and that was sexy, and insanely attractive to me. He also had eyes that could make me melt.

“I think...” I cleared my throat. I had to pause to figure out exactly what I thought. “I think you loved me, Tiago, and I think I’m pretty sure I loved you. If I left, then I was stupid, completely stupid.”

“No, I was. I wouldn’t let you use the fertility drugs or talk to me about IVF. Like I said, we have to produce a child within two years of our marriage for me to inherit all of it. You wanted to give me that money, for Layla, and I was too stubborn to admit we should try it.”

“Well, obviously you were right, Tiago.” I managed a small, shy smile. “I’m pregnant, so apparently we didn’t need it.”

He laughed quietly and shifted on the bed beside me. He’d arranged a very large hospital bed and we could both fit in it comfortably. I liked the fact that each side adjusted up or down independent of the other. It made me a lot more comfortable. Oddly enough, it hadn’t been strange to sleep with him beside me. It had felt right from the first night when I’d asked him to stay and talk to me and we’d fallen asleep together.

“Wait, why would I want you to have the money for Layla?” I frowned. I had some of the pieces, I just couldn’t place where the little girl fit into it all. A thought crossed my mind, and I pulled my head around quickly to look at him.

“Is she yours?”

He grinned, shaking his head. “No. She’s my goddaughter. Her parents are just really good friends of mine. No, she needed heart surgery, or a transplant, badly. She nearly died on the waiting list. I used some of the money I’d already been given to pay for her surgery in Canada. There was a doctor there with new techniques, and that was where Ella and Tim wanted to take her.”

I blinked, taking it all in. God, who was this man

“Wow. Yeah, I can see why I’d want you to have all of that money. Will she need more care? She doesn’t look sick now.”

“She’ll have to be monitored and may need more surgery later in life, but for now, her progress is better than we could have hoped for.” He found a lock of my hair and began to smooth it through his fingers with a smile. “We saved her, you and I. That was what was most important to us both.”

“She’s a sweet kid. She seems to be attached to me.” Ella had brought the little girl to the hospital every day, and to the house since I left.

“She adores you and always will, I suppose. She knows you helped to save her. Plus, you’re her June. She has always loved you, from the moment she met you.”

Tears blurred the corners of my eyes, and I turned away. But I could feel Tiago’s hand on my arm, soothing me.

“Hey, baby, what’s wrong?”

I sniffed, wiping my eyes and turning back to him. “When I woke up in the hospital, I thought I must be a terrible person.” I bit my lip to try to block the tears that filled my eyes.

“Why would you think that, June? You’re more wonderful than some people deserve.” He let go of my hair and took my hand instead.

“Because nobody came for me. I thought I must be alone in the world if nobody missed me at all. I must have been terrible if nobody came to find me.”

“I was looking for you from the first, my love. You weren’t alone at all. Everybody looked for you, not just me.”

I wish I could remember them all, but I couldn’t. That made me feel terrible.

“Hey, don’t worry, June. Your memories will come back.” He drew my face to his with a finger under my chin. “And if not, well, we’ll make new ones together. If you’d like?”

“I think I’d like that, Tiago.” My eyes were drawn to his mouth, his full red lips. I glanced up and his golden eyes snared mine.

He had such a handsome face, with black eyebrows and Mediterranean features that formed a face that should have been in films and on magazine covers. He was just so… beautiful. I felt my head draw closer to his as I closed my eyes. We’d skirted a physical relationship, but the tension had grown over the nights spent so close together. Our days were spent in an awkward place of “we’re married, and I’m pregnant with your baby, but I don’t know you. But I want you.”

And I did want him.

It was all odd, so odd, and the only thing that felt right was this moment. His lips breezed over mine, little more than a breath, a breath I held. My eyes fluttered open and I saw that he watched me in the same way. He wanted to ask something, but hesitated. I brought my right hand up to his face, a ring he’d bought me because the green reminded him of my eyes caught the light, and I smiled.

“This is the only thing that feels right, you know? I’m a stranger in my own home, I don’t know any of my employees, or the people that care about me, I don’t even know my own cat, but this, this feels right Tiago. Here in bed with you, it feels like I’m home again.”

“You are home, June. No matter what happens, where we go, or what the world does to us again, I will always be your home, baby. Always.” He caught my lips at last and I breathed in the smell of him. I drank in his taste and reveled in the feel of his skin on mine.

I leaned back into my pillows and he followed. A moan escaped one of us, but I don’t know which one of us it was. For all I knew, it was both of us, because we both forgot how to breathe at a normal pace, and our hands roamed to places I’d thought I’d forgotten. As my hand roamed down the hard, muscled plane of his flat stomach, beneath a red t-shirt, my fingers remembered how to touch him. Not too light because it tickled, not too hard, but just right, just the way he liked it.

His breath hissed between his teeth as my fingers went lower. Down to the loose shorts he had on. Beneath the elastic waistband, and lower. I looked up, into his eyes as my hand moved, excited to see how he’d respond. For a moment, I felt like a virgin, like I’d never done any of this before. I suppose, in a way, I was. The new me, the blank me, didn’t know what to do, but my body remembered.

I gripped his cock in my hand, my fingers tight but not too tight. Tiago’s breath hissed between his teeth and he groaned in surrender. I liked the way that sound made me feel, the way my thighs gripped together, and something deep inside of me clenched. I couldn’t move, not really, because of the brace around my leg, but my hands could move, and they moved now. One hand pushed up his shirt, so I could taste his smooth skin, while the other moved on his hard, throbbing cock.

“June.” He breathed my name and gave himself up to my touch. I stroked him, and watched him, my own desire an inferno between my thighs, but I wanted this, I wanted to pleasure him. I wanted to watch him. Something about the power I felt, made me want to squirm in glee.

“Stop baby, you’ll make me come.” His hand went over mine, and I could tell from the way he breathed that he really didn’t want me to stop.

I nudged his hand away and looked in his eyes. “You refused to let me go back to my apartment on my own, Tiago, because you wanted me where you could care for me. You’ve worked yourself to the bone to keep everything going and still be here for me. You haven’t asked for one thing in return. Let me give you something, let me give you this.”

“I, fuck that feels so good. I don’t want you to feel like you have to, though.” His eyes burned into mine, a question there.

“I think you’ll find I’m more than ready for anything you might have to offer, Tiago. I don’t feel like I have to make you come, Tiago, I want to. It might be a gift to you, but it’s for me just as much. Now, come for me, baby. Show me what I’m missing.”

He groaned as my hand gripped a fraction tighter, stroked a little faster, and his hands gripped at the duvet beneath us. I pushed his shorts away and wanted to lean down to take him in my mouth, but couldn’t, it was too awkward, so I left it at just my hand. When he came, his cock surged in my hand, and I couldn’t take my eyes from him. He groaned out his pleasure and I felt that clench all over again.

This was all familiar, so familiar, and I wondered if this was how I’d finally get my memory back. I looked up at him, my eyes wide with all that I felt. This was where I belonged, whether my memory worked or not. I knew that like I knew the color of the sky on a sunny day. This was my home, he was my home, and eventually, I’d remember it all. If not, like he said, we’d just make more memories. I fell down into his arms as the pulsations stopped, happy just to be in his arms.