Hidden Depths(26)

The dog gave him a baleful stare and then lay down in front of the sliding-glass door, looking out.

“Okay now. No more of that.”

He climbed back into bed and had barely closed his eyes when a sharp bark and a thud brought him bolt upright in bed again and a flash of lightning from the storm illuminated the sliding-glass door and showed Evan what the dog was barking at.

A ghost.

He scrambled out of bed toward the figure standing in the pouring rain, white-faced and ethereal, with two palms pressed to the glass, as if she could drift through it if she pushed a little harder. With the dog yapping and the sudden black in the absence of the lightning strike, Evan felt unusually clumsy, tripping over a stool he knew was there and banging his knee against the corner of the dresser on the way to the door. By the time he got there and fumbled it open with a curse, the figure had vanished. Not quite into thin air, since the air was thick with the driving rain, but she was gone. Though Evan had only seen the face for a few seconds, he knew it was a woman. More specifically, he knew what woman. Andrea Prentiss.

Shit. He must be going nuts.

Evan clutched the collar of the dog panting at his side to keep him from lunging out into the rain. All he needed to make this night worse would be a muddy wet dog. At the dog’s insistent whimper, Evan looked down at him, about to close the door again until he realized it wasn’t the dog whimpering.

He turned sharply toward the sound and saw her.

Crumpled up against the side of the house, she was clutching herself against the force of the rain, her long dark hair wild around her, wet and thick.

Evan shot out into the darkness and he didn’t know what he felt first, or strongest—whether it was the rain so cold and hard that it might have morphed into hail, or whether it was the painful panic he felt when he recognized that something was wrong, very wrong.

“Jesus, Andrea. What the fuck?”

Something was wrong, and wrong way worse than the sheer impossibility of the phantom woman of his dreams, or his fantasies anyway, showing up out of nowhere at his door in the middle of the night—especially when his door was on an island in the middle of the ocean. Wrong in the way of wrong with her. She was whimpering, not the dog, and when he crouched down to her level she didn’t even look up, her arms tightly clasped around her knees.

“Andrea,” he shouted again over the sound of the rain and, not waiting for an answer, picked her up, cradling her, as he covered the few steps back into the house. She felt impossibly light and fragile and her arms hung from her body. He pulled her tighter to him for a moment before he lay her down on his bed and went back to close the sliding-glass door, blocking out the cacophonous fury of the storm at least a little bit. The dog had apparently followed him out into the rain, although Evan had not noticed, and once back into the warm dry house, he shook himself furiously to dry off as best he could, pelting Evan with it as he did so.

But Evan couldn’t care less. He was focused only on the body on the bed. Shit, not a body. She wasn’t dead, thank God, but she was breathing heavily, her head slack, her eyes still closed. Not bothering to dry off as the dog had or with a towel, he sat next to her, leaning down.

“Andrea,” he whispered and she stirred, but again with that whimper, this time her arms coming up to clutch her stomach.

She was in jeans and a light jacket, thoroughly drenched, and the good sturdy boots she wore looked as if they had climbed too many cliffs. He reached down and slipped them off, along with two pair of very wet socks, baring her icy feet beneath.

“Andrea,” he tried again. His fingers went to the snaps on her jacket, brushing her arms and her whimper turned to a groan. He stilled. “What is it? Are you ill?”

She didn’t answer, but in the light he suddenly thought to switch on, she didn’t need to. She was desperately ill, or injured. One look at the pallor of her white face, lined with what he could see now was pain, told him as clearly as her voice could have. She was delirious with it.

He needed to get her out of these wet clothes and warm and dry. He no more than had the clinical thought than his spirit leaped at the mere thought of undressing Andrea Prentiss, whatever the reason. God, he was a sick fuck. He ignored both the spark of excitement and the immediate self-loathing that followed in favor of getting down to it before the poor girl froze to death.

But when he went to take her jacket off in earnest, she roused herself to try to push him away, going back to shielding her chest when he automatically retreated.

“We need to get you dry, Andrea,” he soothed, accompanying his words with quick action so the jacket was off her in seconds. Unfortunately, it was at the cost of a sharp howl of anguish from her. From the way she was trying to protect her chest, he guessed cracked ribs perhaps. The sea was brutal in a storm like this and God knew how she had gotten here anyway. Perhaps she had been dashed against the rocky cliffs that lined a good portion of the circumference of this island.