The woman looked down at his hand, but didn’t reach for it. Her arms stayed wrapped around herself.
He continued to speak, dropping his hand. “I’m not a cop. I’m acquainted with a lot of them, as I work for Silverstone Towing, and I’ve gotten to know them over the years. Are you all right?”
She stared at him for a long moment before saying quietly, “You’re the first person to ask me that.”
Alarmed, Eagle’s eyes raked over her slender frame, trying to determine if she was injured. “You’re hurt?”
She shook her head. “No.” She glanced over at the policemen, then back at him. “And I’m nothing like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates,” she said, quietly but firmly.
Eagle was surprised at the ferocity in her tone, especially considering how fragile she looked.
She went on before he could comment. “I have prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. Tomorrow, I’ll remember everything about what happened here, I just won’t be able to identify the men who were involved.”
Making a mental note to look up prosopagnosia the second he got to a computer, Eagle nodded. “I’ve got the opposite issue. I’ve never forgotten a face or a name in my entire thirty-six years. Sometimes I have trouble if I met someone when they were a kid and now they’re grown, but I’ve never forgotten a name.”
“Ever?” she asked with a tilt of her head.
“Ever,” he confirmed.
Then Taylor smiled.
And it blew Eagle away. It transformed her face. He hadn’t thought she was anything special, looking at her earlier. She’d seemed just average. But when she smiled? Holy shit, her whole face lit up, and it was almost as if he could see a bit of her soul shining through. A little cheesy, and people would tell him he was crazy, but Eagle didn’t care.
“What are the odds?” she asked.
“The odds of what?” Eagle asked, still somewhat in a daze.
“Of us meeting. I don’t recognize anyone, and you recognize everyone.”
“Seems to me it’s fate,” Eagle told her.
Taylor rolled her eyes, and he could see her arms relax a fraction. The fact that he could relieve her stress meant a lot to Eagle. She was a stranger, but he could see a lifetime of pain in her eyes. Heard it in her voice when she had to defend her medical condition to him. He hated that.
He was concentrating so much on Taylor that Eagle didn’t hear one of the officers he’d been talking to earlier come up to them. Jerking in surprise at the officer’s voice, Eagle could only mentally laugh at himself. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had snuck up on him.
“Talked to the captain. She said we have what we need from the other witnesses. If we need to talk to you later, we’ve got your info,” Officer Brown said.
Taylor nodded at the officer, then turned and headed for the grocery store without another word.
Surprised at her abrupt departure, and somehow amused by the fact she’d completely turned her back on him, Eagle nodded at the officer and ran to catch up with Taylor.
“What’s the hurry?” he asked as he fell into step beside her.
“I hate grocery shopping. I always seem to run into someone who knows me, and it sucks when I have no idea who they are. I thought coming early might prevent that from happening, but instead, all it did was put me smack in the middle of two idiots fighting for a damn parking spot. I’m tired, hungry, and sick of people looking down on me because of something I have no control over. I’m going to get my food, go home, and eat a dozen doughnuts to try to forget this disastrous morning.”
“Mind if I tag along?” Eagle asked.
At his question, Taylor stopped in the middle of the entranceway to the store. She turned to look at him with a frown. “Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, because I have to shop too. And like you, I hate it. Not because people might recognize me, though. But because I hate to cook. I suck at it. I’m also responsible for shopping for Silverstone Towing, and I always buy the wrong shit. It’s like a game to everyone who works there, telling me everything I forgot to buy or how I bought whole wheat flour instead of the regular crap.” He shrugged. “I thought maybe two people who hate grocery shopping could muddle through if we worked together.”
Taylor stared at him for so long, Eagle was afraid she was going to turn around and leave him standing in the doorway like a fool. But she took a deep breath and held out her hand. “Hi. I’m Taylor Cardin.”
Eagle grasped her hand in his and shook it. “Kellan Trowbridge, but my friends call me Eagle.” Her palm was warm and smooth. His was covered in calluses from working on the tow trucks and from the missions he and his team went on.
She dropped his hand, and Eagle immediately wanted to grab it right back, haul her close, and see if her hair was as soft as it looked. But he did none of those things. He was attracted to the woman, but it was more than obvious she needed a friend. It was presumptuous of him to assume so, but there it was.
“I’m not sharing my cart with you,” she quipped as she headed for the row of shopping carts. “You’ll have to push your own.”
“I’m okay with that,” Eagle told her. “We just met—can’t have our food touching.”
She chuckled and shook her head at him, and just like that, Eagle wanted to get to know this woman. He wanted to know everything about her. What it was like growing up with prosopagnosia, who her friends were, where she lived, what her job was—everything.
He had a peculiar feeling that knowing her would change his life . . . for the better.
“I can hear you thinking,” Taylor said as they walked through the produce section.
“It’s just . . . I have about a million questions,” Eagle admitted. “I’ve never met someone like you.”
“Prosopagnosia is rare,” she explained. “Only about two percent of the population is born with it. I can’t recognize faces, even my own. If you showed me a lineup of pictures and included mine, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which picture was me. I can make out individual features—like the fact you have blue eyes—but if you then showed me ten pictures of blue eyes, I wouldn’t be able to pick out yours. But otherwise, I’m just like anyone else. I can make sound and rational decisions, and I wince when someone mixes polka dots and stripes in their outfits.”
“And I’m the opposite,” Eagle told her. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s fashionable and what isn’t, but if my second-grade teacher suddenly showed up in front of us, I’d not only be able to recognize her, but tell you her name.”
He blindly reached for a bunch of bananas, and Taylor reached out and put a warm hand on his wrist.
Eagle glanced at her. He liked her hand on him. A little too much.
“You aren’t seriously getting those, are you?” she asked with a little frown.
Looking down at the bundle of bananas he was about to put in his cart, Eagle shrugged. “Yes?”
“No,” she said firmly, taking the fruit out of his hand and putting it back on the stand. She reached for another bunch and held it out to him. “Here. These are much better.”