words sent a shiver coursing down her spine. She couldn’t help but wonder who he was.
The query, innocently whispered through the foggy haze in her brain, seemed to pry open a floodgate through which other questions tumbled and churned, one on top of the other.
Where was she? What was happening? What had brought her to this place? Why was every muscle in her body throbbing like an abscessed tooth? And why didn’t someone turn off that glaring light?
“Jenny? Come on, now, wake up.”
A different voice, her mind deciphered. Male, also. But softer than the first. Less angry. However, this one, too, was tinged with emotion. The edginess pervading the second man’s words nearly made her skin crawl, and for the first time since awakening, she felt fear.
It was purely her survival instinct that had her forcing her eyes open once again. If danger was coming, she wanted to see its approach.
What a strange idea to enter her head, she thought, lifting her hand to shield her gaze from the bright light. The dark sensation that she was somehow in jeopardy dissolved, like valley mist burned off by the rising sun, as she focused all her energy on making out the gray shapes moving beyond the light.
“Can’t you see she’s being blinded?”
She knew it was the first man, the angry one, who batted the overhead light fixture aside so it no longer shone directly into her face. Her senses were momentarily overloaded as she tried to take in everything at once.
White. Everything was white. The walls, the bed linens, the uniformed-clad nurses...
A hospital. She was in the—
“Hospital.”
The murmured word, rusty and trembling, came from her lips, but the sound of it was so strange. As if she was hearing it for the very first time. This was bizarre. Why wouldn’t she recognize the sound of her own voice?
Seeds of panic and confusion sprouted in her chest, her heart pounding against her ribs in unison with the pain pounding in her head. She pressed her fingertips to her lips. In an effort to curb the rush of anxiety flooding through her, she forced her eyes to focus on the first object on which they landed.
A face.
The man stood at the foot of the bed, directly in front of her. He was dark, tawny, a man who most assuredly worked outside in the sun. He was handsome, in spite of the tension tightening his hawklike features. The artificial light glistened on his raven hair, and his coal-black eyes were etched with intensity—an intensity that told her, in no uncertain terms, that this was the owner of the first voice she’d heard upon awakening.
“There was an accident,” he told her. “You took a tumble.”
“Ha! Luke, only you would describe what happened to Jenny as a tumble.”
She allowed her gaze to leave the dark, angry man’s face, but not before noting his name.
The man who addressed Luke was standing at her bedside. His was the voice that had induced in her that odd feeling of peril only moments ago, but as she looked at him, she couldn’t help but wonder why she would have had that reaction. He certainly didn’t seem like a person who would invoke fear in anyone.
His sandy hair looked tousled, and a cheery smile lit his brown eyes as he turned his gaze on her. “You slid about two hundred feet down the mountainside, Jenny,” he said. “We didn’t find you for hours. You had us all scared to death.”
There it was again, she noted. That nervous, jittery quality in his voice. Why should that frighten her so?
Without warning, a renewed panic blossomed inside her, shooting forth like a wild, fast-growing vine. The trepidation curling in her belly was hot and terrifying. Her eyes widened with this seemingly irrational dread, and for some odd reason, her gaze fled to the face of the dark, angry man—Luke, she remembered—for some sort of comfort, or protection, or something, even though it made no sense to her why she would feel afraid or why she would seek help from this complete stranger.
Evidently, the man named Luke noticed her emotional state because he tossed an irritated glare at the sandy-haired man.
“Shut up, Chad,” he said.
But Chad didn’t shut up. In fact, his nervousness seemed to increase until it no longer showed just in his voice, but in his eyes, too.
“You’ll be fine, now,” Chad went on. “You’ll come home, and everything will be just fine. Won’t it, Jenny?”
She opened her mouth to speak, to ask one of the dozens of questions buzzing like so many bees in her throbbing head, but before she could, Chad snatched up a cup that had been sitting on the bedside table.
“Would you like a drink of water, Jenny?” He offered her the cup.
The confusion swimming in her brain was more than she could bear. Pressing her palms to her temples, she ignored the painful protest of her aching body as she inched away from both men to the far corner of the bed.
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
The question burst from her in a fit of near hysteria, making her head thud all the more. She was vaguely aware that the one nurse who had been in the examination room had slipped silently out the door.
“Calling you what?” Chad said, seeming totally surprised by her outburst. “Jenny? Why, it’s your name, of course. What’s wrong with you, silly?” He then tossed her a knowing look, as though he were on to her. “All right now, this is no time for pranks.”
His thin, jittery chuckle seemed to smack her across the face. Didn’t he see the turmoil she was experiencing? Couldn’t he understand that her whole world had turned upside down?
“Would you shut up, Chad!”
Luke’s sharp order made the younger man go silent, but it only succeeded in frightening her more than ever. She felt like a small, helpless animal, cornered, with nowhere to run.
“Now, listen to me...”
Her attention was drawn by Luke’s calm, commanding tone. Through the drumming agony in her head, she noticed that the anger in his black eyes had been replaced with what looked like deep concern as he gently coaxed her with his soft words.
“The nurse has gone for the doctor.”
He placed his hand on her shin. The thin cotton blanket between her skin and his was inadequate protection against his burning touch. She was unable to keep the panic from her eyes, her gaze darting to his fingertips, and it took every ounce of her control to hold back the whimper threatening to escape from her throat. He immediately removed his hand from her leg.
“I’m Luke,” he continued smoothly, quietly. “Luke Prentice. Your husband. And this is my brother, Chad.”
Her husband? Had he really said that? Why didn’t she know him? She didn’t remember being part of a wedding. She didn’t remember having a honeymoon. She would never forget the happiness of a wedding day! This was some sort of cruel joke. Her eyes welled with tears of confusion and her hands trembled violently.
“This
