But he’d been drawn to her by a power stronger than his intelligence, stronger than his will. He’d gone that first night and watched her small, strained face float above candle flames through the darkened rooms of her house.
And he’d returned the next night.
The night after that.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Banging his fists against his face, he swore, the stream of curses no relief to the grinding agony inside him.
He should have been able to resist.
But he hadn’t.
No, he should never have gone to Josie Conrad’s house.
Not that first time when he’d watched her from the woods and seen her pacing hour after hour in the candlelit rooms of her house. And especially not today.
It was growing worse.
Something had happened while she stood in the doorway. She’d seen something. She believed she’d seen a child.
He groaned, a raw, animal sound of pain.
He was losing control.
Rising in one jerky motion, Ryder stood and turned around, facing the direction she’d taken. Through one of the louvers in the small window next to the door, he watched her slender figure as she vanished down the path. Her moss green eyes had been unbearably sad. Lost. Underneath her reckless courage, she’d been lost.
As he watched, a long braid of shiny black hair swung like a metronome against the pink of her blouse. The end curl of the braid hung like a comma past the waistband of her baggy shorts. A strip of smooth, tanned skin showed above the waistband and pink blouse edge.
He wanted to run the back of his finger along that small strip of satin skin, wanted to touch his tongue to the tiny dimple at the back of her knee and see if it truly tasted of honey and flowers. He wanted—God in heaven, he wanted—
The wooden louver cracked between his fingers, the sound like a gunshot.
A bead of blood appeared along the side of his palm as he stared down the empty driveway. Ryder leaned his forehead against the shattered strip, pressing hard, reminding himself.
He had to stay away from Josie Conrad. He would make himself leave her alone.
If he could.
Like an echo to the tattoo beat of his heart came that whispering thread of sound.
Birdsong. Birdsong.
CHAPTER TWO
Josie never knew how she returned home. She knew only that she was there, the desperate green line of her garden an oasis in the brown of dead and dying grass. She couldn’t remember walking back down the path at all.
But she remembered very, very clearly the sound of the bolt slamming shut against her. Remembered, too, the suffering in Ryder Hayes’s face, the sense of power that came from him and pulled her beyond resistance. Step by step, she tried to analyze what had happened and couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She struggled to make sense from an incident that made no sense. She’d been frightened. Oh, yes, Ryder Hayes had definitely frightened her.
But not until that darkness had come from him, a cold, chilling shadow that swept over her like huge, enveloping wings.
And in those moments she’d heard a child’s cry. She’d glimpsed, vaguely, indistinctly, a hazy shape drifting away from her down the long hallway.
Or had she?
Putting her hoe back on the porch, she frowned. She must have been in shock over the incident with the dogs. Or dizzy with hunger. Low blood sugar could account for that enveloping darkness that had claimed her.
Odd, but it had seemed like a claiming. A moment utterly beyond her experience.
Remembering the texture of Ryder Hayes’s arm against her hand, she shivered. The hard muscle of his forearm had flexed, tightened at her touch.
But his skin had been so cold.
She’d had the most surprising urge to rub her hand over his arm, to warm him.
In the closet she’d turned into a bathroom, Josie splashed tepid faucet water against her face as she tried to recall if she’d eaten that day and couldn’t remember eating anything since the bowl of cereal the evening before.
The water spotted the white sink, sending iridescent reflections against the white, the shimmering drops like the flash of colors in the black feathers of the grackles.
Josie stared at her startled eyes in the spotted mirror above the sink and then passed her wet hand over the image in the mirror. Water splintered across her reflection. For a second she’d seen Mellie there, Mellie who lifted herself up to the mirror to see if she was “bootiful” today.
Memories. The unending heat.
Sighing, Josie pressed her palms to her burning eyes. Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe she wasn’t coping as well as she thought she was. She’d been in the sun all morning and then stormed along the path in the heat of high noon. Heat could make a person do strange things. Imagine things.
Her fingers rested against her closed eyes.
She hadn’t seen the colony of birds on her return. It was as if the curious massing of birds had been a dream.
They had been real, though.
The slow pursuit of the birds had been as real as the feral dogs. But like her conviction that the dogs were watching her with an evil intelligence, her panicked flight from the birds made no sense to her, either.
She wasn’t a woman given to wild imaginings. She’d coped with the reality of blood and bones in the operating room and dealt with prima donna orthopedic surgeons. She was faced with reality every moment of her life. She liked reality.
Or she had until the reality of Mellie’s disappearance and what it meant.
Had she heard a child’s voice, though? Really? Had she actually seen a small form in that chilled, silent hallway?
Yes?
No?
But something had happened.
Cooling her feverish skin, Josie slicked water down her arms. She couldn’t begin doubting her own perceptions. She was a trained observer in the operating room, competent in emergencies. Grounded. As she’d told Hayes, she wasn’t a woman given to hysterical imaginings.
Before he’d strolled out of her life and Mellie’s with a charmingly regretful smile on his face, Bart had always mockingly teased her about her sense of responsibility, but she’d sensed the knife-edge of truth in his teasing, the stab of hostility behind the charm.
“No imagination, no sense of fun, Josie,” he’d said, shrugging. “How can I be tied down to a woman who lives by schedules and lists all the
