Strangers in the Night Read online

  She shivered again. “Yes,” she said, looking up at him. “In one way or another… yes.”

  Inexorably he drew her closer, until her flimsily clad body rested against him and the animal heat of his flesh dispelled the chill of the night air. Automatically she put her hands up to rest against his chest, and the feel of the rock-hard sheets of muscle made her breath catch. No other man she’d ever touched was as hard and vital as this—this warrior, whose life was based on death and destruction. She wanted to deny him, to turn away from him, but was as helpless as a leaf on the wind to defy the currents that swept her toward him.

  He brushed his lips against her hair in an oddly tender gesture, one she hadn’t expected from such a man. “Then lie down with me,” he murmured, “and I’ll show you the sweetest pain of all.”

  Thea awoke, the echoes of her own cries still lingering in the darkness of the bedroom. He had; oh, he had. She was lying on her back, her nightgown twisted around her waist, her legs open and her knees raised. The last remnants of completion still throbbed delicately in her loins.

  She put her hands over her face and burst into tears.

  It was more than disturbing—it was humiliating. The damn man not only took over her dreams, he dominated her body as well. Her entire sense of self was grounded in her sturdy normality, her good common sense. Thea had always thought of herself as dependable, and suddenly that description no longer seemed to apply. Because of the dreams, she had taken a two-week vacation right in the middle of her busiest time, which wasn’t dependable. What was going on with her now defied common sense, defied all her efforts to understand what was happening. And it certainly wasn’t normal to have frighteningly intense climaxes night after night, while sleeping alone.

  Choking back her tears, she stumbled out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom, where she stood under the shower and tried to rid her body of the sensation of being touched by invisible hands. When she felt marginally calmer, she dried off and relocated to the kitchen, where she put on fresh coffee and then sat drinking it and watching the dawn progress into a radiantly sunny morning.

  The kitchen was located at the back of the house, so the lake wasn’t visible from the window, and Thea slowly relaxed as she watched tiny birds flitting from branch to branch in a nearby tree, twittering to each other and doing bird things.

  She had to stop letting these dreams upset her so much. No matter how disturbing their content, they were still just dreams. When she looked at this rationally, the only thing about the dreams that had really affected her life was the unreasoning fear of water they had caused. She had come to the lake to work through that fear, to force herself to face it, and if she could overcome that she would be satisfied. Maybe it wasn’t normal to have such sexually intense dreams, or for the same man who brought her such pleasure to kill her in some of those dreams, but she would handle it. Who knew what had triggered the dreams? They could have been triggered by her eclectic reading material, or some movie she’d watched, or a combination of both. Probably they would cease as mysteriously as they had appeared.

  In the meantime, she had already wasted one day of her self-prescribed recovery period. Except for that one nauseating glance at the lake when she had first arrived, she had managed to completely ignore the water.

  All right, Theadora, she silently scolded herself. Stop being such a wuss. Get off your can and do what you came here to do.

  In an unconscious gesture of preparation, she ran her fingers through her hair, which had almost dried in the time she had spent drinking coffee and postponing the inevitable. She could feel the unruly curls, thick and vibrant, taking shape under her fingers. She probably looked a fright, she thought, and was glad there was no one there to see. For this entire two weeks, she could largely ignore her appearance except for basic cleanliness, and she looked forward to the freedom.

  For comfort, she poured one final cup of coffee and carried it with her out onto the porch, carefully keeping her gaze cast downward so she wouldn’t spill the hot liquid. Yeah, she thought wryly, that was a great excuse to keep from seeing the lake first thing when she opened the door.

  She kept her eyes downcast as she opened the front door and felt the cool morning air wash over her bare feet. She had simply pulled on her nightgown again after leaving the shower, and the thin material was no match for the chill that the sun hadn’t quite dispelled.

  All right. Time to do it. Firmly gripping the cup like a lifeline, she slowly raised her eyes so that her gaze slid first across the floor of the porch, then onto the overgrown grass, and then down the slight slope toward the lake. She deliberately concentrated on only a narrow field of vision, so that everything else was blurred. There was the willow tree off to the left, and—

  He was standing beneath the spreading limbs, just as he had in her dream.

  Thea’s heart almost stopped. Dear God, now her dreams had started manifesting themselves during her waking hours, in the form of hallucinations. She tried to blink, tried to banish the vision, but all she could do was stare in frozen horror at the man standing as motionless as a statue, his aquamarine eyes shining across the distance.

  Then he moved, and she jerked in reaction as she simultaneously realized two things, each as disturbing in a different way as the other.

  One, the “vision” was Richard Chance. The figure under the tree was a real human being, not a figment of her imagination.

  Two, she hadn’t realized it before, but last night she had been able to see her dream lover’s face for the first time, and it had been Richard Chance’s face.

  She calmed her racing heartbeat. Of course her subconscious had chosen his features for those of the dream lover; after all, she had been startled that very day by the similarity of their eyes. This quirk of her dreams, at least, was logical.

  They faced each other across the dewy grass, and a slow smile touched the hard line of his mouth, almost causing her heartbeat to start galloping again. For the sake of her circuits, she hoped he wouldn’t smile too often.

  Then Richard Chance held out his hand to her, and said, “Come.”

  4

  What little color she had, drained from Thea’s face. “What did you say?” she whispered.

  He couldn’t possibly have heard her. He was standing a good thirty yards away; she had barely been able to hear the one word he’d spoken, though somehow the sound had been perfectly clear, as if she had heard it inside herself as well as out. But the expression on his face changed subtly, to something more alert, his eyes more piercing. His outstretched hand suddenly seemed more imperious, though his tone became cajoling. “Thea. Come with me.”

  Shakily she stepped back, intending to close the door. This had to be pure chance, but it was spooky.

  “Don’t run,” he said softly. “There’s no need to. I won’t hurt you.”

  Thea had never considered herself a coward. Her brothers would have described her as being a touch too foolhardy for her own good, stubbornly determined to climb any tree they could climb, or to swing out on a rope as high as they did before dropping into the lake. Despite the eerie similarity between the dream and what he’d just now said, her spine stiffened, and she stared at Richard Chance as he stood under the willow tree, surrounded by a slight mist. Once again, she was letting a weird coincidence spook her, and she was tired of being afraid. She knew instinctively that the best way to conquer any fear was to face it—hence her trip to the lake—so she decided to take a good, hard look at Mr. Chance to catalog the similarities between him and her dream lover. She looked, and almost wished she hadn’t.

  The resemblance wasn’t just in his eyes and the color of his hair. She could see it now in the powerful lines of his body, so tall and rugged. He was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a short-sleeved chambray shirt that revealed the muscularity of his arms. She noticed the thickness of his wrists, the wrists of a man who regularly did hard physical work … the wrists of a swordsman.

  She gasped, shaken by the