What kind of amnesia wiped away basic knowledge yet left a man the ability to read the pages of a book at a glance then retain everything he'd read?

Unless he hadn't been relearning but rather recovering knowledge. What if when he'd been pulled from that plane crash nine months ago, he'd been so badly injured he'd been put into a medicated coma that had also caused amnesia?

But, if he'd been in a coma, why weren't his muscles wasted? If he'd crashed in a plane, where were the burn scars? There had to be scars of some sort. Yet she couldn't remember there being a single blemish on him when he'd stood naked before her. She didn't even remember seeing his old appendectomy scar.

He turned to her, both cans in one hand...those beautiful, broad, unmarked, untanned hands. Maybe she'd been in too much shock to notice scars. Maybe her state of euphoria as she'd dressed him hadn't let her see the damage.

Or...

Maybe he had never even been on that plane that crashed.

Maybe the crash had been an elaborate hoax. That he'd been hidden away from her these past nine months, a captive kept subdued by drugs. Lucille would go to such lengths to separate them. But, was Eric's grandmother capable of murdering a man just to have a body to put in Eric's airplane?

Unless there hadn't been any body at all. Lucille had been the one who'd delivered the dreadful news. No one official had come to her. Just Lucille, who'd stood in the foyer of hers and Eric's Lake Shore condo and stated the details of Eric's death with no more emotion than if she were reporting the closing figures of the Stock Market.

He held the cans out to her.

She shook her head. "Tell me Lucille didn't do this to you. Tell me she isn't this cruel."

Confusion creased his brow.

"Did she hide you away from me? Did your grandmother drug you?"

"Grandmother: mother of one's mother or father."

She knocked the cans from his hands, grabbed him by the wrist, and towed him toward the door. "We have to get out of here."

"Out of the structure?"

She snatched her purse from the countertop, sending Lucille's special delivery letter skidding across the counter. "Out of the house, out of Copper Ridge, out of the country."

She opened the side door and hauled him across the porch toward the garage.

"No," he said, digging his heels into the gravel of the drive.

She got behind him and pushed him into the garage and along its dank stone walls. "We have to or Lucille is going to come after you and she is going to take you away." She reached around him and released the latch on the passenger side door of her Jeep. "Get in."

"No."

She gave him a shove. He didn't budge.

"Please, Eric. If Lucille gets her hands on you again, she's going to drug you."

"Drug: a chemical substance used to cure a disease or improve health."

"Or to stupefy," she charged.

He peered over his shoulder at her, his head tilted a questioning angle.

"Poison," she explained.

Understanding lifted across his features.

"Now will you get into the Jeep?" she pleaded.

"No."

"We don't have time to argue. Get in the car." She gave him another shove.

He faced her, an unmoving barrier between her and the open door. "I cannot leave here."

"You won't have a choice if Lucille finds you here. She'll take you away."

"She cannot."

"Don't bet on it."

"Bet. A pledge one loses should he not correctly predict the outcome of an event."

"You got it. Get in the Jeep."

He hooked one arm over the Jeep door and the other across its canvas top and looked her deep in the eye. "I can correctly predict the outcome of anyone trying to take me away from here."

A chill skipped up Rebecca's spine that had nothing to do with the cold stone walls surrounding them, a chill that made her think of a hand at her throat and a dead man at the base of their bluff. Much as she knew she did not want to know the answer, she asked the question.

"How can you know for certain that no one can take you away from The Bluffs?"

"Because I am authorized to kill anyone who tries to make me leave."