AVAILABLE FILE FORMATS: HTML for the standard computer, PDF for Adobe Reader, MS Reader for the PC and Pocket PC, Mobipocket for Palm Pilot

The light burned blood red through Rebecca's eyelids, as though a thousand watt, bare bulb had been switched on inches in front of her face. Stunned awake, she forgot for the moment where she was. She forgot she was in the Upper Michigan house built on a bluff overlooking the great Lake Superior and cloistered away from the main road by towering white pine. There were no street lights here to shine into her windows and only one car at a time could thread its way up the drive on the far side of the house.

In that first stark second, she'd also forgotten she should have been alone. There shouldn't be someone else in the house turning on lights.

Rebecca sat up and blinked into the brightness wedging from her open door across the floor and the foot of her bed. As a child lost in the foster care system, she'd learned an open door in the night invited terrors worse than any fear of the dark. At twenty-eight, she slept with the bedroom door left open for a husband who could never return.

She swung her legs off the bed. Air cooled by the fathomless Lake Superior sliced through the house, up her bare legs, and under the bottom hem of the over-sized T-shirt she wore. Eric's T-shirt. Its thin, cotton fabric clung to her sweat dampened spine...as she did to Eric's memory.

And memory was all she had left of him now. The reality tore at her soul and squeezed the life from her heart.

She fled the room where they'd slept and loved. Fled into the hall where that blinding light allowed no shadows and exposed a memory sharper even than those haunting the bedroom. She and Eric had made ravenous love on the top landing of the stairs, a pair of honeymooners too hungry to travel the final half dozen steps to their bedroom.

Memories too painful for a fragile soul to survive.

Yet, she had survived. She'd come back to the old Victorian house Eric's great-grandfather had built. She'd come back to the house where Eric had grown up. The house where he'd brought her when they'd first married so he could teach her about his past.

The house to which she'd returned when there was no more future.

No future. That's what an urn full of ashes reminded her of every time she looked at it. Maybe that's why she'd avoided the front parlor ever since bringing the urn there a week ago.

Maybe that's why she didn't hide from the light. Why she didn't fear that someone might be turning on lights in an old house that should be empty save for a shell of a soul.

Rebecca slid her foot over the hallowed patch of ancient carpeting onto the stairway. One step at a time, she sank into the brightness blazing up the stairwell, blinding her. She sank into an illumination brighter than any lamp or fixture in an old house could have produced. The scent of sulfur pinched at her nostrils. Fire?

But there was no heat, no crackling blaze, nor licking flames.

Then, just as Rebecca's foot touched down on the hardwood floor of the first floor hall, the light flickered...and went out.

She stood a moment, one foot on the floor, one yet on the bottom step, the banister post cool and smooth beneath her fingers. She listened for any sound beyond the tick of the hall grandfather clock, the howl of the wind buffeting the house, and the dull thud of her pulse in her ears. She listened as she stared into the blackness of the entry hall, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

The entrance to the parlor across from the base of the stairs focused into a yawing black rectangle. That's where the light had vanished into, whispered some remnant of memory burned onto her corneas. The parlor...where her husband's ashes waited for her to find the courage to let go of him.

She pushed off from the banister and caught herself against the doorframe of the parlor. Her fingers scrabbled across the parlor's bumpy layers of wallpaper for the light switch that would feed electricity into the room's electrical outlets. No overhead lights for this old house...except in the dining room chandelier. As Eric had explained, his grandmother had grown tired of candle wax dripping onto her prized mahogany table. Otherwise, the woman had wanted everything to remain as it had been when the house had been built.

Rebecca flicked on the light switch and a single table lamp popped on. It couldn't have sported more than a sixty watt bulb, so soft, so low was its illumination.

But it lit the man standing between the camelback couch and cold fireplace hearth, the soft yellow-gold glow of incandescent light shading his skin a deep, warm hue. He was splendid in his naked glory.

Splendid and...alive.

Alive!

Like a benediction, she spoke the name of the man standing naked in the parlor of The Great Lakes house.

"Eric."

"Eric!" She cried out, sprinting across the room and throwing herself at him. She wrapped her body around his and covered his mouth with hers.

But no lips parted to the urging of hers. No strong arms came up to catch her, support her...hold her. Not one muscle on the man flinched.

Her legs slid from his hips, the cold, hard floor once again a reality beneath her bare feet. A materialization of a desperate imagination, that's all this bronze hued form before her could be.

Because Eric was dead.

And she wasn't.

Rebecca crumpled to her knees, her shoulders shaking with her dry sobs. She was still in her living hell.

* * *

She woke to daylight with her cheek pressed into the threadbare oriental area rug that covered the center of the parlor floor. Her mouth felt like cotton and her eyes itched. She'd been crying again.

Or was it still?

People who called themselves friends would have told her to stop. As if commanding it was all it took to end grief and quell pain.

Then there was that bizarre dream she had during the night. Eric back from the dead and...

The sensation of his hard body within her embrace, of his lack of response telegraphed itself across her nerve endings. She winced. Another rejection. Damn. She couldn't even find solace in sleep.

Rebecca lifted her head a few inches off the floor and groaned with the promise of a stiff neck. Not good, falling asleep in a heap face down on the floor.

She elbowed herself up onto her hip and finger combed her unruly curls back from her face. She sat between the couch and coffee table...where she had seen the naked incarnation of Eric last night.

The threadbare cords of the carpet scraped at her bare legs. This was reality. An old carpet and the ashes of a dead husband. She must have only dreamed Eric in the flesh.

What would she have done had he been real?

She'd have locked the doors against the world and clung to him. She'd have never again let him out of her sight.

Provided he didn't reject her as the figment of her imagination had done last night. It had been a cruel nightmare.

Or payback.

She had clung to him in life. Depended on him more than a wife should have. They had fought about that very thing the last time she'd seen him. The very last time.

She closed her eyes against the guilt...and the truth. Her love had been smothering.

Wearily, she climbed to her feet, swayed, and sagged down onto the arm of the couch. Too little sleep. Too little food.

Too much grief.

And the reason for it littered the table at the end of the couch. Ashes...from Eric's urn...which lay on its side...as she'd left it the last time she'd tried to will her husband back from the dead as if he were a Phoenix that could rise from its own ashes.

She pressed her hand into the powdery ash, letting it squeeze between her fingers and fill her pores. It was all she had left of him. This ash...which Eric's grandmother had commanded her to deliver to the place Eric had most loved, deigning to allow her--the wife--this one last farewell.

That's why she'd returned to The Bluffs, as the house built high on a bluff overlooking the largest of The Great Lakes, Superior, was called by most...the place where they'd been the happiest, her and Eric. She'd returned to The Bluffs as Eric always had when he needed to lick his wounds.

She curled her fingers into the grit and dust. A bone fragment cut into her palm, but she wouldn't let go. Eric had once told her the house spoke to him. Now she waited for the house to tell her how to deal with the pain of losing the only love she had ever known.

Movement whispered from somewhere in the house. The wind? The settling of ancient timbers?

The answer she awaited?

She listened above the measured beat of the grandfather clock in the entry hall. The clock ticked away the seconds, a solid, measured beat. Tick, tock, tick, tock, didn't you lock the door last night?

What good did it do to lock a door against a nightmare?

The man in the parlor last night had been part of a nightmare, hadn't he?

She rose to her feet and strode out into the hall. The front door stood wide open, the tile floor littered with torn leaves and puddles of rainwater...and one more oddity. It had rained last night...stormed. Lightning could account for the bright light that had burned through her eyelids. But, no storm, wind, nor rainfall could explain the dried footprints marking the entry hall floor, prints of a bare, man-sized foot.

Nightmares didn't leave footprints.

Unless she was still asleep...still dreaming.

Still in her nightmare.

She lifted her hand, the one that still clutched the tiny bone fragment. She unfolded her fingers from the sharp shard that lay in her palm beside a dot of blood. Her blood. Real blood. She wasn't dreaming.

The footprints came into focus beyond her hand. The breath gasped out of Rebecca as though she'd just been plunged into Lake Superior's frigid waters. She hadn't imagined the naked man in the parlor last night...hadn't dreamed him.

Shoosh came the whisper of a sound from behind her. Reflexively, protectively, her fingers curled around the bone fragment as she spun toward the grand staircase at the top of which she and Eric had made love that first night of their honeymoon. But the sound didn't come from upstairs. It came from the end of the hall beneath the stairs, from beyond the partially open door there. It came from Eric's grandfather's library.

Had she valued life, she'd have turned and run. Instead, she moved toward the door at the end of the hall. She barely noticed the chill of the wood plank floor beneath her bare feet, so fixated she was on that slightly ajar door...on the sound coming from beyond it.

Whish, thump.

Why did it draw her?

Thump, ump, ump.

Why couldn't she turn and run?

Whiiish, snap.

What about that whispering scrape compelled her to seek it out?

She pressed the fist holding the fragment of her husband to her breastbone and flattened her free hand against the raised panel of the library door. The door opened a few more inches, exposing the shelves on the far wall of the room...revealing a hand cradling a book.

Whish, snap, thump, ump. The pages of the book flipped back to front beneath the command of long, blunt-tipped fingers. A man's fingers with knuckles lightly furred attached to a square, sturdy hand. She knew that hand.

She pushed the door wide.

He stood on the far side of the narrow room in front of the shelf-lined wall of books, as naked as he'd been in her nightmare. Eric.

Profiled before her with his tight stomach and muscled thigh, she wanted to run to him and scrub her hands across the hard flesh of the man she had loved...still loved. She wanted to throw herself at his feet and hug her cheek to the muscles bunching in his runner's legs. She wanted the sprigs of hair covering that strong thigh to tickle her nostrils as she inhaled his musky scent mingled with the talcum powder he always used.

She wanted to beg his forgiveness for the fight they'd had the night he'd died...for being the kind of wife whose suffocating love had chased him away.

But, last night, when she'd touched Eric, he'd rejected her...as he had the night he'd walked away from her and never returned...until now.

Until now.

But how? His private plane had gone down. He'd been the pilot. The flight plan said so. The witnesses who'd seen him fly away that day had said so.

The DNA had said so.

DNA taken from a body charred beyond recognition. A mistake could have been made. Her fingers flexed around the bone fragment.

"Eric?" She spoke his name barely louder than a whisper.

He didn't so much as flick an eyelash in her direction.

Maybe this was all in her imagination, the footprints, him standing just beyond her reach...naked. Why would he have come back to her naked? That didn't make sense.

Unless he'd returned in spirit form to punish her.

But punishing had never been Eric's way...not when he was alive.

Rebecca staggered into the room and caught herself against the edge of the massive, wooden desk that dominated the room...if you didn't count the naked replica of a dead man.

Dead?

Or alive?

Eric. Figment of her imagination or ghost?

She reached out with trembling fingers and touched him. Solid flesh. Cool, but not cold.

But just as unresponsive to her touch as he'd been to her speaking his name.

Just as unresponsive as he'd been last night in her embrace.

Eric...alive...here.

But, she'd thought that last night, too.

Maybe he was nothing more than wild hope.

But hope wouldn't reject a woman who loved as deeply as she.

He flipped the last of the pages, closed the book, and slid it back into its slot on the shelf. Hooking the spine of the next volume with a long, thick index finger, he tipped it forward, its cloth cover scraping out from between those on either side of it. An old book, a musty odor stirred from it.

She would never have expected an hallucination to bear such detail. But then, she'd felt the unforgiving flesh of that mirage last night, felt it within the loop of her arms and against her bare legs.

Forgive me, she wanted to cry out.

He cradled the book in one hand and knuckled it open with the other. Whish, snap, thump, ump went the rhythm of pages flipping under strumming fingers, fingers that had once played unerringly across her flesh.

Forgive me, she silently wept, swaying there against the edge of the desk, suddenly unable to catch her breath. She drew a deep, shuddering breath followed by another and another. She couldn't seem to get enough air into her lungs, couldn't seem to be quiet about it.

Still, he didn't look up from the pages flicking at measured intervals before his eyes. He must be deaf if he didn't hear someone nearly hyperventilating within arm's reach of him.

And she must be insane to expect a dead man to notice a tormented woman.

A dead man.

A ghost.

"Eric?" she ventured yet again. "Please. Speak to me. Look at me. Anything. Just let me know you're real."

But he did not respond. Not to his name. Not to her pleas.

Of course he wouldn't. Eric was dead. This man was an illusion of shadow.

Wasn't he?

Rebecca flung herself at the room's single window. She tore the drapes open. Sunlight poured over her, stirring through the dust shaken loose from the heavy brocade fabric and circling Eric's legs, Eric's torso, Eric's head.

Eric is dead, screamed reality through Rebecca's head while illogical hope thundered in her chest beneath the fist holding a piece of his bone.

He looked directly into the light, an index finger holding his place in the book. His Icelandic hued eyes were striking against Eric's dark skin, piercing from the frame of Eric's jet-black hair, and cold...dangerously, dispassionately cold.

She exhaled through her parched lips. "You are Eric, Aren't you?"

He didn't answer. He simply turned his attention back to the book in his hand. Focused, like Eric could be whenever a task demanded his attention.

Like he'd been when they'd made love.

But he wasn't loving her now. He wasn't even seeing her.

Rebecca edged around the perimeter of the room. The tender flesh at the backs of her knees bumped the corner of the chair behind the desk. She sank onto its seat and dropped the bone fragment onto the desktop. For a solid hour, she didn't look away from the man she wanted to believe was the husband she'd thought she'd never see again. For an hour she feasted on his physical presence and fancied their brief past.

Her chin braced between her palms, she watched her husband's strong fingers slide away Moby Dick and pull out Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea from the shelves laddering up the opposite wall of the small room. Book by book and row by row he examined the collection. Whether Lucille's old decorating books, her father's antique anatomy tomes, or Joe's volumes of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he applied the same methodical, page by page pattern of examination as he did the fictional classics. Not fast enough to be scanning for something hidden among the pages, too fast to be reading.

Unless he was able to take in full pages of text in a single focus like a camera lens. He did briefly focus on each page before turning to the next.

Beneath the casual sway of Rebecca's hips the wooden swivel chair behind the massive mahogany desk creaked. The seat was too deep for her, making her feet dangle inches off the floor. The first time she'd sat in it, she'd felt like a little girl and said so. Eric had laughed and shown her right then and there that she was no "little" girl. God, but he'd had the deepest, fullest, sexiest laugh she'd ever heard. She'd give anything to hear it again.

But something told her she'd never hear that laughter again. Insane of her to wish it.

And she was insane, wasn't she? Unable to accept Eric's death, her mind had simply conjured up this likeness of him right down to the illusion of wet footprints in the entry hall. Right?

A few frames of Jimmy Stewart talking to his imaginary Harvey rolled through Rebecca's head. She felt the lopsided grin tug across her lips.

Her make-believe friend was no invisible rabbit, though. The only thing comical about this apparition was her discovery that insanity wasn't pleasant. She'd expected it to be. Escape should be.

Another of her myriad flaws. Inability to execute a good insanity, to imagine a ghost that was happy to have been conjured. This one wasn't even friendly.

Rebecca fingered the bone fragment on the desk. She nudged it this way and that. She nudged it forward across the surface of the desk...toward the image of the man it supposedly had come from. She wanted him to notice the bone and recognize it...to notice her.

Never enough for you, is there? resounded a voice inside her head too painfully reminiscent of Eric's.

Rebecca's hands stiffened against the edge of the desk. The chair rolled back and struck the wall. The muscles across her apparition's back bunched.

One calculating, cool-blue eye glanced over one broad shoulder, one quick censuring jut of a razor-sharp jaw and he turned back to his book. Whish, snap, thump, ump.

He was aware of her!

Rebecca propelled herself out of the chair and across the room, scattering the dust moats floating lazily upon the beams of sunlight slanting through the panes of leaded glass. She stopped at his elbow, stared up into his passionless face at his motionless mouth. Had those keenly detailed lips spoken that damning phrase? Lips perfectly defined as a marble Adonis'. Lips full and firm. Lips guarding a mouth she could never get enough of.

"Is that why you're here, Eric?" she demanded, the truth like gravel against her heart. "Did you come back somber and silent because I wanted too much?"

The ice-blue eyes shifted page to page. Whish, snap, thump, ump.

Rebecca molded her hands to fit around his arm but held them a fraction from contact. She felt the heat rising from his flesh. She knew, should she allow herself to touch him, she'd find him to be of solid matter. He'd been last night when she'd thrown her body against his...when he'd spurned her with his lack of reaction.

"Are you punishing me? Or am I punishing me?"

Whiiish, snap, thump, ump.

She dropped her hands to her sides and took a step back from him. Rebecca stared at the man she'd prayed to be able to touch one more time, knowing once would never be enough. Knowing she couldn't bear another rejection.

But he couldn't prevent her from watching him. For as long as she succumbed to the insanity and played by her own inane rules, she at least had him to look at and memorize in ways she'd only thought she'd done before. Strange, the rational way a mad mind choreographed its world. Tragic, the painful course a broken heart traveled toward its death.

If only he would touch her back...one last time.

An air horn blared from the lake at the bottom of the bluff beyond the window. The steely jaw lifted ever so slightly. She saw his interest even though the translucent-blue gaze never left the pages before them, even though the rhythm of turning pages never faltered. She saw the fractional movement. He'd cocked his ear in the direction of that noise.

The air horn blasted a second time, closer.

Whi-ish, scrape. The pattern altered even though the eyes did not so much as blink. Rebecca's gaze slid from her apparition's face to the window toward which he'd cocked his ear.

She looked through the wavy glass of a less technological day, past the deck Eric had had built around the back of the house with its corner gazebo, and down the steep, rocky ledges of a glacially formed bluff. The steely waters of Lake Superior chopped violently in the wake of the Great Lakes cruiser jockeying up to the dock below the house.

"It's Ben Jarvey," she informed the husband she knew couldn't really be there. "Must be a slow charter day if he's got the time to come visiting."

Visiting. Rebecca stiffened. She couldn't have Ben Jarvey coming into the house and finding...

Finding what? A week's worth of picked at food and forgotten clothes strewn, dropped, and abandoned wherever a numb mind opened unfeeling fingers. She hadn't even aired out the house yet. Hadn't wanted to. Eric was here amongst the dust and stale air.

Eric was here!

Seen only by her.

Would Jarvey's presence chase her imagined Eric away?

Rebecca glanced past the jutting rocks at the boat bumping against the pylons of the pier. She bolted out of the library, through the hall behind the main staircase, and into the kitchen. Snagging a pair of denim cutoffs off the floor, she step-hopped into them on the way to the door that opened onto the deck where it wrapped around the side of the house.

She jammed the tails of her nightshirt inside their waistband as she hurried across the back deck, through the attached gazebo, and down the zigzagging steps of rain-soaked timbers linking house to dock. Her bare feet bumped down onto the dock just as Ben Jarvey straightened from tying up his boat. Ben smiled one of his wide, boyish grins that stretched a face already growing leathery with the effects of working in the wind and sun.

"A person could break her neck, galloping down those steps that way."

"Just saving you the climb, Mr. Jarvey," Rebecca panted out.

"I wasn't planning on making any." Ben's sun-bleached eyebrows wedged up beneath the brim of his Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap. "That's why I blew the horn. It's why I always blow it. So, don't you go risking that pretty little neck of yours racing down them steps no more."

Reflexively, Rebecca touched her fingers to her bare throat and crossed her arms over her braless chest. Ben Jarvey had a knack for noticing everything. It was part of why he made a good caretaker for houses used only seasonally, like the house on the top of the bluff behind her...where her dead husband lurked...she hoped.

"Sorry," she rushed out, afraid if she gave Ben Jarvey the space to offer condolences, reality would chase away her last fragment of insanity and hope. "I should have called ahead and let you know I was coming up to the house. But it was kind of a spur of the moment trip. And once here, well, with the house phone disconnected..." Rebecca let her voice trail off, intimidated by Jarvey's silence.

Ben's grin twitched. "Lucille always was tightfisted with that fortune of hers."

Rebecca's gaze jerked from Jarvey's mouth to his eyes. She'd never quite gotten used to how clearly the people of Copper Ridge saw Eric's grandmother. She'd have liked to be part of the conspiracy of those who could look Lucille in the eye when they talked to her and shrug her off when she raised her nose at them. Eric had been able to shrug her off.

Had been. Rebecca's heart tripped against her ribs. What if he were gone when she got back to the house? Specter or figment of imagination, he wasn't doing as she bid. If he did, he'd have wrapped her in his arms, buried himself inside of her, and never again let go.

Suddenly, she wanted to run back up the steps and make sure Eric still lurked in the shadowed rooms of his family home. She wanted that reassurance more than she wanted to keep Ben Jarvey from witnessing her insanity.

"The Mister didn't come with you this trip?" Jarvey asked, stopping Rebecca in mid pivot.

If Ben was asking about Eric, he didn't know about Eric's accident. And if the Jarveys didn't know, no one in Copper Ridge knew.

Benefit of a town with an economy too depressed to support a local newspaper? Benefit of a family matriarch who'd never shared anything but disdain for simple folk? Rebecca settled onto both her feet.

"Too bad." Ben sniffed, assuming his own answer in her silence...and not sounding the least sorry about Eric's absence as he continued. Ben had his own reasons for wishing Eric away. "Chinook are hitting good now. He'd have liked fishin' them."

"Yes, well." Rebecca forced a smile. "As you can see, everything is fine here. You can get back to your charters."

Ben shook his head. "Trip out here didn't take me away from nothin'. Business slacks off after Labor Day weekend. Was busy through the holiday, though."

An alarm sounded inside Rebecca's head. Ben also had a knack for conversation. And Rebecca didn't. Helplessly, she watched Jarvey fold his arms high across his chest and brace his legs apart like an old sea dog readying himself to ride out a rough sea...or settling in to tell a long tale.

"Families cramming in last minute vacations before the kiddies go back to school. Yup. Big shot Papa givin' his kids quality time."

Rebecca jammed the corner of an already gnawed thumbnail between her teeth.

"Drag 'em out in the middle of a big lake where they spend their day barfing over the side of my boat or grousing about the boredom while old dad complains about ungrateful kids who cost him an arm and a leg to hire a fishing charter then just lie around in the sun. I'm grateful for every minute I have with my little Mandy."

Rebecca flinched at the mention of Alice Jarvey, an automatic response born of insecurity and the knowledge that beautiful, blond Alice had been Eric's first love. Rebecca chewed at her finger, ripping at a hangnail, tasting the blood rising from the tear.

Jarvey glanced from her hand to her bare feet and back up again. Rebecca dropped her hand and curled her fingers self-consciously into her palm.

"Anyway, the Missus sent me. A registered package come to the post office for you."

"I hadn't expected any mail." Never mind she'd outright forgotten to have her mail forwarded. "I'll be sure and get into town and pick it up."

"No need." Ben pulled a large red, white, and blue envelope from under his arm and fingered a pen out of the breast pocket of his T-shirt.

Rebecca stared at the cardboard envelope the size of legal papers in Jarvey's callused hands. She read the name on the return receipt requested slip attached to it. Lucille Tierney. Rebecca knew what had to be in the envelope. She knew what her husband's grandmother wanted. She wanted Rebecca out of her life.

"You gotta sign. Right there on that line." Jarvey tapped the point of the pen against the thick blue X at the bottom of the receipt attached to the package.

Numbly, Rebecca accepted the pen from Ben and scribbled her signature on the designated line. He tore off the signed receipt, crammed it in his shirt-pocket, and shoved the stiff envelope into Rebecca's hands.

"There. Nice and legal. Just the way the Missus said it had to be done. Takes her job as post mistress right seriously, my Alice does."

One corner of the envelope dug into Rebecca's palm where the bone fragment had cut her. Hard fact. Like the fact that Alice Jarvey had once a long time ago been an intimate part of Eric's life. Like the fact that the contents of the envelope sent to her by Eric's grandmother would force her out of this place Eric had called home.

Like the reality that Eric was dead.

But not gone. Not as long as his ghost walked the rooms of the Tierney House on top of the bluff.

She couldn't leave this place. Not now. Not as long as Eric was here...whatever his form.

If he were still there...in the house. What if signing for a registered letter had chased him away?

Panic flared through Rebecca. Ben, tossing off the mooring lines from her dock, vaulted into the bottom of his boat, lifted his chin at her, and knuckled the brim of his baseball cap...his usual farewell gesture.

A few more seconds and the man would be gone. Just a minute more and she could be back in the house. Where Eric had to be waiting.

Where he must be!

Jarvey's sky-blue eyes glanced past her shoulder and he nudged the brim of his cap higher on his forehead. Rebecca froze as Ben's eyes scanned from the house to the hasty tuck of her nightshirt into the waistband of her shorts, as his grin turned sheepish and he tugged his hat brim down over his eyes. "You and the Mister make like I was never here."

Rebecca spun on her heel, her chin duplicating the angle Jarvey's had tilted while the rumble of the boat motor behind her counter-scored the dead stillness of her heart. She saw what Ben had seen. Beyond the latticework half wall of the gazebo jutting above the rocks stood her apparition.

Except, he couldn't be a ghost, a figment of her imagination if Ben Jarvey had seen him.

Rebecca charged up the steps. The naked man standing in the shelter of the gazebo at the top of the stairs was real. Jarvey had seen him, had even mistaken him for Eric.

But that had been from forty feet away, logic argued as she flung herself past the bench built into the landing at mid-point for those winded by the steep climb and up the next flight of steps.

She did want him to be Eric and she had seen him from a far closer range, countered hope.

Inside a dim old house, raged reason.

Rebecca stopped where the zigzagging steps broached the gazebo. The mid-morning sun reflecting up off the lake sliced between the spindled posts supporting the structure's octagonal roof. In the sharp light, not even the minutest of discrepancies would be hidden from her.

He turned toward her, slowly. A measured rotation that didn't reflect the torrent of emotion rolling through Rebecca like a Tsunami. The ice-blue gaze shifted from the departing boat to her. She raised her hand and spread her fingers toward the face she knew with wifely intimacy. He caught her by the wrist and held her fingers inches from contact.

"What did you tell him about me?" he asked in a voice that was gravel rough but, without a doubt, Eric's.

"Nothing."

Her answer puffed against his chin, a warm, soft breath. Softer than her lips had been last night against his. He hadn't been prepared for that kind of contact. He'd been caught off guard. But not today. Today, he'd stopped her before she could touch him.

Can't give her any edge. She's dangerous. Her with a softness he'd never before experienced. Her with an appeal that invited his fingers to linger upon the tender terrain of her wrist. Why hadn't he been properly warned about her sort?

Because there wasn't supposed to have been anyone here.

But there were...two of them. This woman and the man she called Ben Jarvey who had given her a package then looked up at him--seen him.

He tightened his grip on her wrist. "If you told him nothing, why did he look up at me? Why did he raise his hand?"

"He was only waving." Her pulse bumped heavily against the silky skin beneath the pads of his thumbs, echoing the uncertainty in her voice. An erratic heartbeat was a tangible he understood.

"Waving?" He leaned forward, using his size to intimidate her, a dictate of some instinct imprinted on an ageless brain. She shrank back on her heels. Right response.

"Just a friendly gesture." Her voice trailed off.

"Friendly?" he grilled in as low and menacing a voice as his body could muster and felt her pulse skitter under her thin skin.

"Ben's a friendly guy. Y-you know Ben. You use his charter when you fish. He takes care of the house when no one's here."

He stroked his thumb across her wrist, testing. For what? The lie in her answer? Her kind were no doubt as adept at deceit as his.

He eyed the flat package gripped in her other hand, the one the Jarvey man had given her. He tapped its stiff edge. "What is this he gave you?"

Her knuckles went white against the envelope and the pulse beneath his fingertips sputtered. "N-nothing important."

Lie.

He turned her hand so the printed label tipped upward.

"It-it's just some legal papers from Lucille," said the woman he held now by both wrists. "A letter from your grandmother."

The label read From Lucille Tierney. To...

"Reb-ecca. Re-becca. Rebecca," he read aloud.

"That's me, Eric. Remember?"

The eyes green as the horizonless lake pleaded up at him. She wanted something from him.

Remember.

Remember what? Whatever this Eric should know? But that was impossible.

Yet, some lingering impulse, some fragment of a memory made him circle his thumbs over the pulse points in her wrists, circling and circling. The urgency in her eyes melted away. The tightness around her mouth eased. Her eyelids sank and her head tilted to one side.

"Aaaah, Eric."

Her words vibrated in her throat, a low-pitched sound that touched something deep inside him, something in the core of the primitive creature he'd become. Blood surged through him. The cords of his muscles tugged deep in his groin. Arousal. Inside his brain, some hardwired fragment of memory recognized the sensation, knew its compelling, physical danger.

She peered up at him from beneath her heavy sable lashes. How did he know to name those lashes sable?

The same way he knew what to name each color splashed across the woods stretching to the horizon either side of the house. Primary colors he had never before seen. Brilliant greens, yellows, and reds. Such sensory overload had very nearly been too much to bear. He knew their names and their varying shades because of the decorating books he had searched with their color pallets.

But The Woman's eyes shimmered softly in the filtered light beneath the gazebo, an oasis in a world overwhelming with color. A cool, wet color that invited a man to slake his heat--that tempted a man beyond reason. A parched man could drown quenching such a thirst. Many had. He'd been warned. He'd read of them in the book of mythology from the shelves in the house. Sirens, one passage had told, lured their victims to watery graves. A potent package, this female a head shorter than he whose wrists easily fit in the circles of his forefingers and thumbs.

He released the hand holding the envelope as though the contact burned. But he could not release her other wrist--would not. Such a retreat would be read as weakness and he'd already been weak too many times in his life.

"Standing out here naked--" Her lulling voice wove around him like an invisible web. "--you'll catch your death."

Was that a warning or a threat?

* * *

Rebecca felt him pull back, a subtle shift in the weight of his fingers on her wrist. A living hell...to have the figment of your imagination reject you.

But he wasn't a figment of her imagination. Ben Jarvey had seen him. That made him real flesh and bone.

Eric was real and he was back. That's all that mattered.

Right?

He looked at her through cold blue eyes. No light of recognition warmed their chill. Not for Ben Jarvey. Not for her.

Amnesia would explain the lapse, she desperately reasoned. Amnesia could excuse the harshness of his questions. Amnesia justified his months of silence since the accident.

But amnesia did not explain the burned body found in the wreckage of Eric's plane.

An unlisted passenger?

But the DNA report...the ashes she'd come to scatter.

Mistakes were made all the time. All that mattered was Eric was here now. He'd somehow survived. Somehow, he'd found his way back to her.

He'd found his way back to her.

Joy fizzed inside of Rebecca like soda in a can that'd been shaken. It spritzed from her in uncontrollable spurts, threatening to bubble over.

She twisted her arm within his grasp and closed her fingers on his wrist. He started and loosened his hold on her. But she held him firmly. She'd never let him go again. Not now that Eric needed her...at last.

She just had to make sure that he knew he needed her...before his grandmother got wind of his miraculous survival.

Rebecca wheeled from the shelter of the gazebo, towing him through the sharp morning sunlight slanting across the deck into the shelter of the house. "Let's get you dressed."

With the same single minded devotion with which she'd plunged herself into despair, she tossed the special delivery envelope into the corner of the kitchen countertop, lead her no longer lost husband through the kitchen and up the back stairway to the second floor bedroom that had been theirs.

She hadn't noticed the room's stuffiness before. Hadn't cared enough to let air into it. But everything was different now that Eric was back.

She shouldered open the swollen door to the little balcony across from the bed where they had loved. She stood there a moment letting the stiff breeze off the lake wash over them. Unnecessary to close the essence of a husband in a musty house any longer, now that he was no longer absent.

"You promised me you'd never leave." She faced him in the doorway between bed and balcony. "Right here. You promised me."

He looked at her through narrowed eyes.

"My poor Eric." She reached to touch his face and he jerked away. She let her hand fall back to her side.

"I'm sorry. This all must be so strange to you." She glanced down his naked body, her voice trailing. "Very strange."

Amnesia could explain his not recognizing her. But it didn't explain why he came back naked, warned a little voice deep inside her head.

She shook away the nagging feeling that there was something far more wrong with him than amnesia and turned to the dresser. "Good thing you kept a few clothes here."

From a drawer, she pulled a neatly folded pair of chinos, a polo shirt, and pristine white jockey shorts. For an instant, the pain of having the essence of the man laundered out of every article of clothing he'd ever worn shuddered through Rebecca. But that wasn't something she had to suffer any more. Eric was alive. He was here...with her.

She led him to the side of the ornately carved bed where they'd countless times made love and held the clothing out to him. "Here. Put these on."

He stared at the items in her hand like he'd never seen clothes before. But of course that was impossible. Amnesia couldn't make a man forget what clothes were, could it?

Not a man capable of finding his way home.

No. Not home.

Reality check. Home was the executive condo in Park Ridge, Illinois. Home would have been the palatial colonial they'd been building in Wilmette.

Then why had she chased the memories of Eric to the Lake Superior house? Why, when memory failed him, had Eric returned here?

She didn't want to debate the issues of their past three years together. She wanted only to rejoice in the return of her husband. But the answer to these two questions was the same to the question of why, when Eric offered her the world, she had chosen the house where he'd grown up for their honeymoon. It was a good answer, worth remembering now. For both of them, this antiquated house built four generations ago during the boom days of copper mining had been the only secure home either had known.

How right it was that he come back to her here. How right that she had been here.

How right that she be the one to help him now.

Rebecca tossed the shirt and chinos onto the bed and held out the jockey shorts to him. But he continued to stare dubiously at them.

"Like this," she said and shook out the shorts, stepped into them, and tugged them up her legs and over her shorts and hips. She stripped them off and held them out again. Still, he did not take them from her.

"I'll help you," she offered and dropped to her knees in front of him. But the instant her fingers contacted his ankle, he jerked away, lost his balance, and toppled back onto the bed.

She rose...looked at him sprawled on the bed...raised on his elbows in a state of semi-arousal. Her cheeks warmed and her skin tingled. She wanted to stroke him. She wanted to press her cheek to his warm flesh. She wanted to shed her own clothes and crawl the length of his body, to feel him against her--in her.

She took a step toward the bed, toward him.

In one fluid move, he was on his feet between her and the bed. She looked up into his blue eyes, his cold blue eyes.

Too soon.

She held the shorts up between them. "You need to dress you so you won't catch a chill."

The cold eyes narrowed further.

"So you don't get sick," she explained.

Something flickered in his eyes. A memory? She hoped.

Then, in his oddly rusty voice, he stated, "Sick, as in you'll catch your death."

She nodded.

He snatched the underwear from her hand and pointed over her shoulder. "Step back."

She did as commanded. She always had...though he'd never spoken to her before with such abruptness.

He held the shorts in front of his face, stretched the elastic waistband between his long, blunt fingers, and frowned. He gave them a shake...like Rebecca had...lowered them, stepped into them one foot at a time, and pulled them up his long legs.

The cotton fabric brushed the dark hair on his legs. Their elastic snagged against that physical feature most defining his gender.

Rebecca giggled. He frowned and tugged at the shorts.

"Let me," she said, stepping forward, reaching for him.

He slapped her hands away and glowered at her.

"It's okay, Eric. I'm your wife."

The expression on his face, the look in his eyes warned her any further attempt at touching him would net her worse than slapped fingers. Though he'd never handled her roughly, had never even threatened her in any way...before today, she stepped backwards once again.

"Tuck yourself in," she said, pantomiming the motion with her hands.

He mimicked her movements and tucked himself into the close-fitting briefs.

Rebecca smiled. "See, you're remembering already how to put on your shorts."

He eyed her from beneath lowered lids. He looked...suspicious.

Rebecca ached for the smiles he had always given her less than refined comments. She ached for him to remember her.

She snorted. "What's wrong with me? Not half an hour ago, all I wanted from you was for you to notice me. And now that you have, I'm still not satisfied."

His dark eyebrows gathered above his staunchly straight nose. Disapproval would be more than she could bear right now.

Breaking eye contact with him, she grabbed the chinos off the bed, shook them out, and offered them to him. "They go on the same way."

He had a little trouble getting his foot through the long leg of the slacks. She had to instruct him about sitting on the edge of the bed in order to pull them up over his feet. Same with the pale blue polo shirt.

She watched him gather the fabric over his head, his arms clumsily threading their way into the armholes. What kind of brain damage made a man forget something as basic as dressing himself?

Brain damage?

Rebecca shuddered. She hadn't thought of any kind of damage until that moment.

She scanned the flesh disappearing beneath the descent of the pale shirt. Still the swimmer's torso, long and lithely muscled. Though it was devoid of tan lines.

And flawless.

Shouldn't she be wondering how a body could wander naked for months without weathering? Shouldn't she be wondering how he had traipsed from the smoking ruins of a downed airplane in an Indiana cornfield to the extremities of an upper Michigan peninsula without being noticed?

But something warned her she might not like the answers.

She instructed him about socks and shoes and watched him struggle with them. He finally sat on the edge of the bed and let her take over the task.

"Do you remember the accident, Eric?" she asked as she tucked his foot into the first shoe, her curiosity getting the best of her.

"Accident?" he said.

Not an unusual answer for a man without memory, Rebecca noted as she slid on his second shoe and pressed, "Do you remember how you got here?"

He pulled his foot from her grip and stood. She peered up at him from where she knelt on the floor. The perspective added to his six foot two frame, a height that had always made her feel like he could protect her against anything. But she didn't know the man looking back at her through cold, slitted eyes--wasn't sure this man would protect her at all.

She climbed to her feet and backed away from him, suddenly desperate to ignore the oddities, the mismatched puzzle pieces that failed to fit the scenario of an amnesiac wandering hundreds of inhabited miles...naked. She fought the doubts chafing at the perimeters of her mind. What if this isn't Eric?

A stiff breeze sliced up from the lake and through the open window. The curtains snapped against their rods, a fission of dust exploding from the loose weave of their fabric. A catastrophe of nuclear dimension to the microscopic universe expanding through the sharp beams of another world's mid-morning sun. The man in Rebecca's husband's body standing between her and their honeymoon bed sneezed. Eric was allergic to household dust.

Relief rushed through Rebecca, driving out her silly doubt. Of course this was Eric. Who else could he be?

* * *

He followed The Woman out of the room with the bed and along the second floor hall past the broad stairway that climbed from the center of the house. The shirt and pants confined his body even though their construction was flexible. The loafers, as the woman had called the rigid enclosures she'd pushed onto his feet, made his toes feel claustrophobic yet protected. Bare, they'd registered every detail of everything he'd stepped on. Distracting yet useful. But also potentially dangerous.

He couldn't decide whether enclosing his feet was beneficial or detrimental, especially since she had instrumented the confinement. Her with her slim shoulders, narrow back, and gently flared hips. Her with her loosely curled hair the hue of copper piping bobbing against the nape of her neck with each step she took down the narrow, twisting steps in the far end of the house.

He felt himself tighten against the weave of the shorts. He gritted his teeth and forced himself not to think about her. Difficult, because she moved within easy reach just a step or two ahead of him, because his skin yet buzzed with the after effects of her touches.

He didn't trust how she made him feel.

He didn't trust how quickly she could change.

One minute she'd been staring at him, immobile save for the shift of her eyes as they studied him. The next she was flying down the precariously pitched stairway. Would her gently curved mouth issue another warning like the one she'd made outside of the house where her sultry voice had linked the words naked and death? Would she command him to do more of her bidding in her deceptively tinkling tone? Would she ask him more impossibly direct questions in her breathy soprano?

This was a very potent species indeed, to be able to make a breeding male's anatomy respond with the most tenuous of touches...or without any at all. Potent and dangerous.

She released him at the base of the stairs, her energy spiking around her in brilliant rainbow hues as she moved through the room she called the kitchen. She snatched up crumpled papers from the tabletop, lifted the lid of a contraption constructed of a composite plastic, and dropped the balled up papers into the bin.

Gathering containers of various compositions from the surfaces at either side of the sink, she likewise dumped their contents into the wastebasket. Some she sniffed and recoiled from before tossing them after the others. She gave a tall, rectangular, cardboard box a shake, fingered open its top flaps, tilted back her head, and poured the contents into her mouth.

Hardly the pose of a vigilant woman, exposing her throat. A throat with an alluring curve, he amended. He suspected its flesh would be soft, softer maybe than the skin on her wrist above her pulse. That last was hardly the thought of a man in control.

Her pulse now bumped against the skin two finger widths beneath the hinge of her jaw. Its rhythm reached across the room and echoed in his own veins. What was she thinking that pulsated life through her at a rate indistinguishable from his irrational lust?

She swallowed, lowered her chin in his direction, and said through an intriguing smile, "The breakfast of champions."

He was capable of assimilating a page full of words at one glance. Yet he caught only the word flakes before she dropped the box into the wastebasket. What had she done to make his concentration fail?

She rubbed her stomach, again pressing the thin knit of her shirt against her ribs. A room apart and still her energy pulled at him, draining him of his power. She was the answer.

"You hungry?" she asked.

Another direct question and this one he didn't understand.

"Want me to fix you something to eat?"

She was pushing and he didn't know for what.

"Food," she said and rubbed her stomach again, pulling the cloth tight across the rigid points of her breasts. "Refueling."

He understood refueling. He had enough self-contained fuel to last the duration of his assignment...if he stuck to the plan.

"Can't run without fuel," she said, wheeling about and swinging open a small cabinet door.

She wanted him to run? Run where? And why?

"The cupboard is pretty bare," she said, fingering through a half dozen metal cylinders sheathed in brightly colored paper printed with such words as Campbell tomato soup, Green Giant cream corn, and Vande Camps pork and beans.

She turned with the Campbell's cylinder in hand. "Tomato soup will get you going."

Going...as in to move along.

As in...to leave a place.

"Do not want to leave," he stated, suspecting he now understood her motive...to get him away from the house so he could not search it further.

Her eyes widened and the color drained from her face. "I don't want you to leave, either."

"Me thinks the lady doth protest too much," he recited.

"Excuse me?"

"Shakespeare."

"I know who wrote it. I just don't understand why you said it."

"It means you are guilty of something."

* * *

He was right. She was guilty. Guilty of needing too much of his love.

So she'd backed off...at least about food. And when she'd followed him back to the library and he'd given her an annoyed look, she'd left him alone with his books. No sense risking his remembering how much she'd clung to him--smothered him...not before he remembered how much she loved him...and he her.

But she'd left the library door ajar and had returned frequently to peek in on him as she dusted her way through the house. Couldn't have Eric sneezing and wheezing away their reunion.

She paused in her polishing of the marble-topped, parlor coffee table and listened for the reassuring whish of turning pages. How she wanted to run down the hall to him. How she wanted to find in that library the man she'd fallen in love with the first time she'd looked up from her bank clerk's desk and met his wide, white smile set amidst a fresh Caribbean tan. Eric Tierney, a man strikingly handsome with Aryan eyes and ebony hair, had bothered to charm a freckle-faced waif of a woman. For that alone, she'd fallen in love with him. When he'd stood up to his grandmother after the woman had had a Private Investigator dig up every hideous fact of her heritage, she knew she would love Eric forever.

Rebecca looked up at the portrait of Eric's grandfather above the fireplace mantel. Eric had inherited Joe Tierney's strong jaw and welcoming smile...and the warmth that shown through the cool-blue eyes he'd gotten from his grandmother. "I'll put the warmth back in Eric's eyes. I promise."

Joe Tierney's gentle, hazel eyes peered back at her. Sad...like he knew why she really hadn't notified Eric's grandmother of his return.

"Is it so wrong of me to keep him to myself for just a while longer?" she pleaded, the portrait blurring through her tears. "You know how she is."

The compassionate eyes followed her as she paced the room. "Or maybe you don't. Maybe she wasn't as controlling when you were still alive."

Rebecca stopped in front of the painting.

"Or were you just some doddering fool infatuated by the girl you fell in love with?"

Joe Tierney's sad eyes peered down on her. She reached past the mantel and touched the gold gilt frame. It was the closest she'd ever get to the gentle man Eric had idolized.

"I'm sorry," she whispered the real truth, her fingers curling away from the frame. "I can't share him. Not yet. Not until he remembers me."

She turned her eyes from Joseph Tierney's portrait and left the room. She padded toward the library, a little quicker than she had the past trips but just as silently in her sneaker clad feet. She'd remove from Eric's hands whatever book he currently perused and make him remember. She'd shake him if she had to. That's what she'd do!

But the library was empty.

A flash of doubt that he'd ever existed at all shot through Rebecca. Maybe she had dreamed it all. Maybe she was just now waking up...just now hearing the grandfather clock at the end of the hall ticking away the seconds.

But the house hadn't smelled of pine cleaner when she'd fallen asleep. And there'd been cobwebs in the corners where walls and ten-foot high ceilings met.

If this was no dream, then where was he?

The snick of a latch turned her toward the doorway. A kitchen cabinet?

Or the back door?

The hairs on the backs of her arms stood on end and her stomach rolled over. She bolted from the room, past the closet built under the broad, main stairway and the enclosed, narrow back steps, and skidded into the kitchen.

He stood in front of the sink, the sight of his solid profile thrumming her heart in her throat. God help her, she'd never survive losing him again!

That's when she noticed the writing on the box he lifted to his lips. Flakes the white lettering on its blue wrapper read, Mothball Flakes.

"Nooooo," she howled, lunging for him, slapping the box away from his mouth.

In one fluid movement, he turned on her, caught her by the throat, and slammed her back against the old Frigidaire in the corner. She'd have screamed if the air hadn't been knocked out of her and if the hand of the husband she loved wasn't crushing her throat shut.

Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp. He hadn't planned to kill her. She'd attacked him and he'd reacted as ancient instinct had dictated.

Removing his hand from her throat, he let her slide down the front of the refrigerator to the floor. Her head flopped sideways onto her shoulder, stretching her skin over the flutter of a pulse below the hinge of her jaw.

So he hadn't killed her after all. He supposed that was good.

Though he wasn't sure why he should think it. Certainly he was better off without her incessant interruptions. Her uncertain energy had filled the library with bright light and harsh shadow each time she'd stepped into the doorway behind him.

At the time, he'd blamed her for causing his eyes to grow slow to focus on the pages of the books...until the words blurred at the edges of his creature's vision range when the woman was nowhere in sight. That's when he'd realized something more than her presence impeded his mind's photographic abilities.

That's when he'd gone to the kitchen for refueling.

And she'd attacked him and he'd very nearly killed her.

A reaction of self-survival. Survival hadn't had to be trained into him. He'd had a lifetime of protecting himself...one way or another.

What then prevented him from eliminating her now? His body's limitations? Her body's enticements?

Might the silky slip of her light-catching hair over his knuckles have persuaded him to release her throat a second too soon?

He stared down on the female slumped at his feet. When standing, the crown of her head barely reached his nose. Attacking him was a bold maneuver for one of such diminutive stature.

She stirred, blinked, and peered up at him through huge pupils. He should feel satisfaction at the fear emanating from their dilated depths. He didn't. Why?

A breeze blew across the mothball flake dusted windowsill above the kitchen sink. He wrinkled his nose. He hadn't questioned the flakes pungent lack of appeal before she'd knocked the box from his hand. Palatability was not a consideration among those lacking olfactory senses. But he had a keen nose now and he understood its anatomy. The knowledge was there inside his being even if its physical application was no longer of use.

Just as his understanding this antiquated form's need for ingesting fuel had come to him. He plucked the container from the bottom of the finish-worn enamel sink and lifted the box toward his mouth.

"Poison," she croaked up at him, pulling herself up onto her behind, her aura faint around the patchy dark spots on her throat. "P-Poison," she stammered in her bruised voice and he recognized the word her mouth had formed as he'd choked her. He knew its meaning. He'd seen it defined in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.

But why had she wasted her dying breath to speak that word to him?

He studied the box she'd slapped away from him. He turned it, examining all its surfaces. On its backside, under the heading of harmful preparations, were the printed words "may be fatal if swallowed."

He sniffed at the box. His nostrils pinched shut. Perhaps he had been hasty to dismiss the usefulness of a nose. Seems it acted as an early warning system.

And the woman who had knocked the box from his hand?

He peered down at her. She hadn't been attacking him. She'd been saving his life.

He snagged her by the upper arm and dragged her to her feet between him and the refrigerator. She flattened back against the appliance, her aura shuddering about her.

"I wasn't trying to hurt you, Eric," she said on a breath that trembled through the air between them.

He eyed her, trying to understand her attachment to the man she thought he was, to understand her need to protect him in spite of what he'd just done. With the tips of his fingers, he touched the purpling smudges marring the perfect, pale skin of her throat. She flinched.

"Pain?" he asked.

She swallowed hard, her voice dry sounding, "I-It hurts a little."

He cupped his palm over her throat and her eyes grew larger. Why did he waste his energy fixing what would heal in time? Why waste the effort on a woman whose eyes were filled with fear?

Maybe he thought he owed her something for saving his life. Maybe he thought her potentially useful.

Or maybe he simply wanted to feel her pulse skitter to his touch once more.

Her skin grew warm beneath his palm and her life light spiked around her. Amazing hues of color he'd never before seen--hues that made him want to keep touching her--keep giving her his energy. But the dizziness that had threatened him in the library spun once more through his body, pulling the blood from his legs and head.

Her pupils flared and he glimpsed a stark being of sharp contrasts mirrored in their dark centers, a creature with hair the shade of night and eyes the color of the sky in the morning. He recognized the creature reflected in her pupils...recognized himself in his earthly form.

He recognized, too, that she was draining him...and he couldn't make himself let go of her.

Her face blurred before him, the room spun, and the box of mothball flakes slipped from his fingers.

"Lean on me," she commanded, wedging her shoulder under his arm.

Why had she broken the connection of his hand to her throat? Why hadn't she finished draining him?

Why did she help him?

Her fingers were warm against his ribs and spine, her soft voice soothing in his ear as she guided him to the table tucked against the opposite wall. "Sit here."

The edge of the chair at the near end of the table cut into the backs of his knees and he collapsed onto its yellow vinyl cushion. "If you feel dizzy again, put your head between your knees."

Put his head between his knees? Was that possible? He peered up at her dubiously.

"It's your blood sugar level, Eric. It's dropping." Her voice sounded slurry in his ears. "You've always had trouble keeping it regulated. I'll find something for you to eat."

"Eat," he repeated hollowly, his whirling mind making the connection between eating and refueling.

She moved away, leaving him feeling cool. Not comfortably cool. And not cooled because she'd opened the refrigerator door and its chilled air spilled out into the room. Something was terribly wrong with the body he inhabited, something so debilitating he couldn't escape it. And the woman he did not trust, the woman he'd almost killed seemed to know the key to correcting it.

Through a shrinking tunnel of vision, he watched her come near again, an unsteady prism of light and dark. Her voice echoed hollowly in his ears. "Open your mouth."

He couldn't recognize the scent of whatever it was she held close to his mouth, but it smelled appealing. If his theory about the nose being an early warning system was correct, then appealing should be harmless.

He opened his mouth. Something metallic clinked against his teeth. Something cool slid onto his tongue. Cool and slick that made the back of his throat pucker. Was this good or bad?

"Swallow the jelly, Eric," she commanded. "It'll raise your blood sugar quickly."

He knew what blood was--knew its importance to the physical being. But sugar...

Sugar: Any of various water-soluble compounds that vary in sweetness.

The back of his throat puckered again. Good or bad. He was in trouble if what she fed him was hazardous.

He was in trouble anyway.

He swallowed.

Her fingers tightened on his elbow, an anchor to which his slipping consciousness clung. The drumming in his ears faded. Her face, close to his, sharpened into focus. Her full, pink lips tugged up and back, just enough to notch little dents into her cheeks.

With infinite curiosity, he watched the lips she'd pressed against his mouth last night now move around the words, "That's better."

Agreed, he might have responded, were he a man of words. Were he not preoccupied with the tentativeness with which she touched the backs of her fingers to his brow and cheek. They were warm against his skin, those fingers, warm and reassuring.

"But not a hundred percent yet," she said, her voice trembling like icicle-draped branches in a gentle breeze, a musical sound he'd once heard and never forgotten.

Their eyes met. Fear swam in her dark pupils. She dropped her hand from his face and backed a step. "Y-you do understand why I knocked the box out of your hands, don't you, Eric?"

"Flakes not good?"

Her fingers fluttered at her throat where the purple bruises had been. She shook her head.

"But you eat flakes," he said.

Her eyebrows bunched together above the bridge of her nose, a small appendage that tipped ever so slightly upward at its tip.

"Earlier," he managed, resisting the urge to trace her nose with a fingertip. "From a box."

"Oh. The cornflakes."

"All flakes are not the same?"

She rubbed her throat, something sad in the way her lips pulled at their corners. "No."

She sighed and let her arms fall to her sides. "Cornflakes are made from corn. Mothball flakes are meant to keep moths away."

"They are made from moths?"

A smile twitched at the corners of her lips that telegraphed a sense of sadness to him. "No. Mothball flakes are not made from moths.

"And they are poison?"

Her fingers curled into the fringe of her cut-off shorts and her sad smile trembled across her lips. "Yeah. Mothball flakes are poisonous to eat."

She turned away, quickly, churning up the air about them. "I better get some protein and carbohydrates into you."

He shivered against the breeze she created across his chilled flesh. A reminder that he shouldn't be wasting energy memorizing the taper of her legs where they narrowed to her ankles, or how they dimpled behind her knees with each stride, and disappeared beneath the frayed edges of her short pants. He should not be contemplating the fit of his hands over the flare of her hips and into the dip of her waist. He shouldn't let the protrusion of her shoulder blade beneath her cotton T-shirt as she reached across the countertop beside the sink concern him.

"Bread's moldy," she muttered, tossing a plastic bag containing something fuzzy and green into the receptacle of synthetic composite beside the back door.

"Not good fuel?"

"Not good fuel," she confirmed, giving him a glance that made him sense pain in her.

She opened the refrigerator and took out a tall, wax-coated carton. She opened the spout at its top, sniffed, and wrinkled her nose.

"Definitely never drink chunky milk," she said, dumping the contents of the carton into the sink.

Silently, he filed away the information for future reference.

She swung the refrigerator door shut with her thin, blunt fingers. "Bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard."

He made a mental note to find out who Mother Hubbard was as he watched the female scurry between the cabinets to either side of the sink. At least that word seemed to best describe her quick movements. But that haste, her darting this way and that seemed difficult for his eyes to focus on. In fact...

He grabbed the edge of the table as though he needed it to steady himself. It was cold, the edge of the table. Enamel, registered the fact in his head. Something more he'd taken from Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary? Or had this fact come from one of the encyclopedic volumes or one of the books on furniture?

In any case, he decided he did not like how enamel drained away his heat.

He shivered and the room tilted. Dizzy. She'd used that word before she'd given him the jelly.

Dizzy: 1. Foolish. Silly.

That did not fit.

2. Having a whirling sensation in the head with a tendency to fall.

That one fit.

What had she said if he felt dizzy again?

Put your head between your knees.

He looked down at his knees. Even if he dared release the table edge, was it physically possible to put his head between his knees?

"Sorry," she said, her legs coming into focus beyond his knees. "Crackers and peanut butter seem to be the only safe food left in the house."

He peered up at her.

"Eric?" The name was a breath across her pretty pink lips. "What is it? Do you remember something?"

He shook his head, not knowing how else to answer.

A sheen of moisture glazed her eyes and she set a brightly labeled jar and a box with bold blue lettering on the table. She didn't look at him as she fingered a square wafer from the cracker box and scraped the blunt blade of a knife down the interior walls of the jar labeled peanut butter.

She shifted from one foot to the other, the frayed edges of her shorts brushing her thighs. He wanted to know what that fringe felt like moving across his skin--what her skin felt like. He slid a finger under the fringe along her inner thigh. She went still.

"Re-bec-ca," he said, his voice sounding oddly husky in his ears.

The knife in her hand slipped against the wall of the jar.

"Rebecca." He rolled the syllables around his mouth and off his tongue, his finger stroking fringe and skin.

She trembled beneath his touch, the knife ticking against the wall of the peanut butter jar. The beat of that knife, the pulse of his blood, the charge crackling from her skin to his seemed to speak to something ancient within the cells of the body housing him.

Danger, prickled the warning at the back of his neck. He suspected he knew what danger made his nerve endings stand at attention and he pulled his hand away from her.

She teetered momentarily as though his touch had been all that held her upright. Eyes lowered, she drew the knife from the jar, spread peanut butter across the cracker, and held it out to him. "Here. Eat."

He accepted the cracker and stared at the faint impressions her fingers left in the creamy coating.

"Like this," she instructed in a quavering voice. She popped a peanut butter coated cracker into her mouth and bit down.

He followed her example. The hard edges of the cracker poked his gums and the peanut butter pasted itself to the roof of his mouth. He frowned.

The corners of her mouth twitched, but without a hint of sadness this time, and the pooling moisture in her eyes evaporated. "Use your tongue."

She tipped her head back and demonstrated stroking the tip of her tongue over the roof of her mouth. He mimicked the gesture, the spread coating his tongue and the inside of his mouth. He liked the texture, the sweet flavor.

She handed him another peanut butter coated cracker, and another, and another. He ate with relish and Rebecca seemed pleased with this. This was good. Peanut butter made his mouth feel good and Rebecca's smile pleased his eyes.

The dents were back in her cheeks, too. He wanted to touch them with his fingertips...and his mouth.

Earthly delights. No wonder others had succumbed.

No wonder he was tempted. Oh, so very tempted.

He leaned across the corner of the table, flicked a crumb of cracker from the corner of Rebecca's mouth with his forefinger. The smile on her lips slipped and she went still again. But the moisture did not come back to her eyes. Something told him this was okay, good even. Maybe it was the scent of her exploding pheromones. Maybe it was the heightened level of her breathing.

Maybe it was the light brightening at the edges of that black hole over her heart.

Her lips parted and that ancient need in the beastly body he inhabited made him lean close and brush his lips against hers. Her mouth smelled of peanut butter. He wanted to know if she would taste as good.

He stroked the tip of his tongue along the part in her lips, sampling her sweet, peanutty breath. Slipping his tongue between her lips, he probed her mouth as he had his own.

She tasted sweet and nutty...and of a hunger he recognized. A primal hunger he knew he should not explore. A hunger the urgent spread of Rebecca's fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck fed into. A hunger that eluded the reason battling through his surging senses.

If only she hadn't closed her eyes. If only he could search their depths for treachery.

If only he could see once more the face of the creature caught in the black holes of her pupils. He had something in common with that being of stark contrasts. Was that commonality entrapment? Had she trapped that other creature with the same intoxicant with which she lured him? Yet he was helpless to stop his lips from exploring the curled corners of her lips and searching her cheeks for those wondrous little dents that had so intrigued him.

"Eric," she murmured, sweetly, seductively, distractingly. It wasn't his name. He wished it was. And there was the danger--her danger. He pulled back from her even as he decided she was too dangerous to allow too far from his side.

* * *

She pulled a shuddering breath in through her yet open lips, a cooling trail across a heated path. She didn't want to lose the lingering heat of Eric's lips heavy upon hers. She didn't want to let go of the tingling memory of his tongue slowly sweeping the interior of her mouth. But he'd pulled away.

Slowly, reluctantly, Rebecca's eyelids lifted. His pale eyes came into focus, sharp now...and wary. These were not the eyes of the man who'd just kissed her like only a lover could. These were the eyes of the man who'd choked her.

Her elbow jerked, striking the peanut butter jar on the table. The protruding knife rattled against the empty glass. She steadied the jar with an unsteady hand when every nerve ending in her body screamed for her to run.

But, from Eric, her husband, the love of her life?

...Who had choked her unconscious.

No. The air had just been knocked out of her. She'd blacked out from lack of oxygen. That's all. Right?

But Eric would never have slammed her against an appliance, a wall, or anything.

Though the Eric she had known hadn't experienced a plane crash. He hadn't experienced near death. He hadn't wandered the countryside for months, not knowing who he was.

...Not remembering how to eat or dress himself.

What kind of amnesia caused that much damage? It was as if he had no human frame of reference.

She blinked at the man who looked so much like her Eric, yet...

She gave her head a shake. She didn't want to revisit the questions his odd behavior raised...this man who acted so unlike the Eric she had known.

Stranger, nagged the doubt pushing its way through her hope.

She took a step back from him. The cold blue eyes followed her. Not Eric's eyes. A stranger's eyes.

He curled his fingers against the surface of the table, fingers that had stroked the inside of her thigh--that had closed the air off from her...

Reflexively, she touched her throat.

What if she so badly wanted Eric back, she saw in a stranger only how alike he was to her husband rather than how different? It would explain his oddities--like how he'd been able to choke her unconscious, how he could look at her with eyes the color and shape of Eric's but cold as Eric's never had been. It would explain the apprehension dancing up and down her spine--the danger pulsing through her veins...and her sudden need to escape.

"We're out of peanut butter," she forced out around the bubble of air lodged in her throat, around the lump of fear threatening to choke her...as he had...as Eric never would have. "I'll go to the grocery store and get more."

She wheeled for the back door.

"Rebecca."

She didn't stop. Maybe if she pretended she didn't hear him, she could escape.

"What is grocery store?" he asked in his oddly cadenced voice.

"A place where you buy food," she answered, snatching the car keys off the rack by the door and turning the doorknob.

"Food. Fuel," he said.

"Yeah, fuel," she said.

"Where is grocery store?"

She went still and closed her eyes, willing him to let her leave. "In town. In Copper Ridge."

"I will go with you."

She heard the skid of chair legs and jerked the door open, saying as she stepped out onto the porch, "No need for you to interrupt your reading. Stay here. I won't be long."

She pulled the door shut behind her. Beneath the soles of her sneakers the porch steps creaked and the gravel in the driveway crunched. She flung open the garage doors and stepped into the dankness of the stone out-building.

She shivered from the coolness and from the sense of foreboding making the hairs at the nape of her neck prickle. Reaching for the door handle of the canvas-capped Jeep, she glanced at the rear of the narrow garage.

Had she expected to see him there, framed in that yawing opening and backlit by the bright afternoon beyond the dark stones? Hope or fear?

Fear of course.

She opened the canvas door with its plasticized window and stepped over the red metal running board onto the rubber-matted floorboards of the Jeep. The chilly vinyl seat cover sent another shiver up her spine.

She turned the key in the ignition. The cold engine, slow to turn over, cranked twice before firing. She jammed the stick shift jutting from the floorboards into reverse, her feet working the clutch and gas pedals.

She saw him then, framed in the rear view mirror, a silhouette in the doorway beyond the Jeep's blurry, plastic back window. Her right foot jumped from the gas pedal to the brake. Her left slipped off the clutch. The vehicle bucked and the engine coughed and quit.

Hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, she stared at the mirrored figure shaped like her husband. Was she in danger?

Her hand dropped from the steering wheel, unerringly finding the cell phone Eric had bought her so that if she ever broke down she would not have to depend on the help of a stranger. She'd left it between the seats in the Jeep so she wouldn't hear the ringing of Lucille's phone calls...even though it was doubtful a signal could get through the ore rich bluffs of Copper Ridge. She hadn't wanted to hear what Lucille had to say...just as she hadn't wanted to see how very unlike Eric the man standing in the garage entry was.

She eyed his silhouette in the mirror, saw Eric's broad shoulders, his tapered hips...his stance identical to the one Eric's grandfather posed in his portrait above the fireplace. Lucille had always said he had Joe's mannerisms.

What if Lucille had been trying to call her to tell about this man...this Eric look alike? Maybe he was some twin long hidden away?

Maybe Lucille's special delivery envelope wasn't filled with eviction notices, but an explanation about a long locked away twin brother or cousin with an uncanny resemblance to Eric. Or maybe her letter explained a brain damaged Eric. Maybe Lucille had hidden him away all these months and he'd recently escaped. That would explain the lack of weathering to his naked body.

It was just the sort of thing Lucille would do to get rid of an unwanted granddaughter-in-law. After all, what proof did she really have that Eric was dead? 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.

Why hadn't she seen that woman's lack of grief before? Of course Lucille hadn't grieved. She had nothing to grieve. She'd had her grandson to herself.

She had had Eric to herself.

Rebecca could understand that. She had wanted Eric to herself, too.

Rebecca stared at the man reflected in the rearview mirror. Of course he was Eric. A little damaged. But she could fix him. She'd make him remember. Something Lucille apparently hadn't been able to accomplish. She'd prove herself worthy of the Tierneys...of Eric.

But, what about the instinctive fear crawling up her spine?

Surely no more than her usual insecurity. The fear that, if she let him come to town with her, he'd remember someone else before he remembered her and there were people in Copper Ridge she'd rather he not remember. That's all it was.

Just as she now feared that, if she left him behind, he'd walk out of her life as easily as he'd walked back into it.

With cell phone in hand, Rebecca climbed out of the Jeep and strode toward Eric in his neatly creased chinos and crisp blue polo shirt.

She stopped in front of him, close enough that, when she inhaled, her rising breasts almost brushed the buttons on the placket of his shirt. She looked into his eyes, eyes of a stranger. But a stranger only because the man watching her back through them wasn't the man she had known.

He couldn't be. He had amnesia--had no memory of her.

And he didn't fully trust her. She saw that too in their narrowed depths.

But then, a few moments ago, she hadn't fully trusted him, either.