Gen ran.
She stood in the bathroom for a very long time staring in the mirror.
“He’s not there,” she insisted to the wild-eyed redhead in the mirror. “You’ll walk back out into the living room and he’ll be gone. Something you ate... or drank. Anything.”
The redhead obviously didn’t believe it. Her moss green eyes were wide with terror, her skin almost as pale as her patient’s.
“You’ve been having a rough time of it lately,” Gen assured herself out loud, as if her voice would add credence to her thoughts. “The plane crash and the memorial service and Annie. All that mess with the bank. The insurance on Tom and the plane. You have a right to be a little... upset.”
Upset.What a nice, calm word forpsychotic.Just howdidshe explain what was lying out on her floor? How did she make anybody understand that she’d evidently conjured this man right out of her nightmares, just to prove to herself that she wasn’t stable enough to be alone?
Gen squeezed her eyes shut and took a long breath. She thought of trying another glass of wine and decided against it, if for no other reason than the fact that if her patient out there was real, she was going to have to keep a cool head around him.
She’d get him stable and call for help. After the squall passed, the Coast Guard could land somebody out here to take him to a hospital.
That was it. Action. A plan. Gen took another breath, but she still couldn’t quell the disorientation, the terrible fear that her sanity had just slipped a very big cog.
“Don’t die,” the man in her living room had pleaded. The same words she’d uttered in her dream. It simply couldn’t be.
In the end, she made it back out there with bandages and blankets and hot broth. Gen looked down at the chiseled features of the man on her floor, at the curl of hair that was visible above the line of the blanket across his chest, at the wide shoulders and callused hands that had seen real work.
Farming, if she remembered.
She didn’t. She swore she didn’t.
But when she bent down to take care of that slash along his temple, her hands were shaking.
“It’s time to wake up,” she informed him briskly as she knelt alongside him, pouring hydrogen peroxide onto a rag. “You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. After all, this is private property—kind of. Not someplace I’d expect a stranger during a storm.”
Her hands couldn’t seem to stay away from his skin, from the delicious silk of that blue-black hair that tumbled over his forehead and curled at the back of his neck. Gen wanted to trace the hollows of his cheeks and reassure herself with the bulk of his arms. Instead, she dabbed at the wound and murmured when he flinched from the pain.
“Please wake up,” she pleaded, lifting his head to towel his hair dry before trying to bandage the wound. “I think there’s a lot you and I have to talk about.”
He muttered something, frowning. He shifted uneasily, but there was nothing that helped Gen. Gen was tall, about five-ten. She figured he must be well over six feet, well muscled and trim.
She wanted him to open his eyes so he could prove to her that he didn’t have the most sinful smile God ever put on a man. She wanted to believe that she wouldn’t know the sweet, melting joy of recognition when he finally opened his eyes to her.
She didn’t want the dream to mean anything.
When she sat to lift his head into her lap, Gen had to take a minute to squeeze back sudden tears. It had seemed so real, after all. And now she was holding him again, just like before. And it felt the same.
No, it felt better, because she’d felt him die, and he was back.
She wrapped quickly, talking to him the whole time, and then picked up the soup to warm him. He was still so cold, shivering from exposure. Muttering again. Restless. Even so, he swallowed when the broth slid down his throat. He seemed instinctively to nestle closer, which Gen tried desperately to put down to a search for warmth. He moaned again, but the sound was much more of relief than distress.
Gen yanked the phone over to where she sat. She lifted the receiver, anxious to deliver her problem into other hands. She heard the throb of silence where a dial tone should have been and moaned herself.
It was going to have to be the old backup radio, and that was in the den. When her patient woke up. After he explained just how he’d ended up on her beach without any clothes.
Probably shot by a jealous husband. On a boat. In the sound. At midnight on a Tuesday.
Gen bit back more tears of frustration and bent back to her task.
“Come on,” she urged as he swallowed. “You don’t know how important it is to talk to me. Please. Come on, Rafe, wake up.”
She didn’t even notice her slip this time, or the fact that it produced the biggest response yet. She saw his eyelids flutter and then open, and found herself falling right back into that sweet sky blue she’d thought she’d only imagined.
Then he smiled, and her world tilted into impossibility.
“Oh, thank God, Gen.” He sighed in relief. “It is you.”
And he closed his eyes again.
