Eden, you’re thinking with your emotions, not your head.”
“Wouldn’t you if you were me and this brought him here?” Her hand went out to the table beside her and snatched up the business card she had found in the jacket of his pocket. Her business card. “And this.” Her other hand closed around the photograph that had accompanied the business card. She could feel the painful longing deep inside her as she gazed down at it. “Nathanial, Tia. He was carrying a picture of Nathanial.”
Tia’s face softened at the mention of Nathanial. “Honey,” she pleaded gently, “be reasonable. Having red-gold hair and a pair of lavender-blue eyes, distinctive as they are, doesn’t make him Nathanial. He was what when he was taken? Less than two years old, right? It’s been almost three years now, and kids change a lot. The boy in that photo could be anyone.”
“It’s Nathanial,” Eden insisted fiercely. “I know it is!”
Because you want it to be. That was what the expression on Tia’s face told her. She knew what her friend was thinking, what all the sympathizers had thought and refrained from saying since Nathanial’s disappearance. That too much time had passed, that she would never recover him, that Nathanial was probably dead.
Let them think it. She knew better. Nathanial was still alive. She had never stopped believing it in all the agonizing weeks after his disappearance, in the months and years that had followed. She had never dared permit herself to believe otherwise, haunted as she was by his loss, frustrated as she was that none of the efforts of the professionals, including her own, had produced any results. But now… Oh, yes, now.
“He’s a link to Nathanial, Tia. Whoever he is and whatever brought him to my door, he’s a link to Nathanial. And however rash you think I’m being, I’m not letting him leave until he tells me what I want to know.”
“You’re vulnerable as long as he’s here. You realize that, don’t you?”
“I’m a mother, Tia,” Eden reminded her. “I’ll do anything to find my son. Anything.”
Tia sighed softly. “Yeah, I guess I can understand that kind of desperation. I just hope you know what you’re doing.” Medical bag in hand, she moved toward the door to the piazza and the outside stairway to her apartment. “The painkiller should have taken full effect by now. My guess is he’ll sleep the night through, but if he should wake up and you need me—”
“I won’t hesitate to call you,” Eden promised, following her friend to the door to see her out.
“I’ll come down tomorrow to check on him. Oh, damn, I just remembered. Quinn is picking me up first thing in the morning. We promised to spend the day with his parents down on Seabrook Island, and if I cancel—”
“Don’t cancel. Go, and stop looking at me like that. It’s not as if I’m entirely on my own. The Davises are just across the garden.”
Tia went, though reluctantly and with last-minute instructions about the patient, which she followed with a promise to phone Eden in the morning before she left with her boyfriend.
Eden was relieved when she was finally able to close and lock the door behind her upstairs neighbor. She shouldn’t have been relieved. She was all alone now with a man she knew nothing about, a stranger who had arrived out of nowhere in the middle of a wild night. There was everything about him to make her apprehensive, but her only fear was that he wouldn’t be able to tell her what she would give her soul to know.
She stood there for a moment in the stillness of the apartment, listening to the sounds of the wind and the rain outside. Then she crossed the parlor and went into the guest room to look in on her patient.
The light from the door she left open was sufficient to reveal the man who lay there, undisturbed by her entrance. She stood beside the bed, gazing down at him, remembering the body concealed now by the quilt that covered his length. It was a tall body, and though it had suffered, it was solidly built, with powerful shoulders, lean hips and long legs. A body that had been conditioned for—
What? She had no way of knowing. That was as much a mystery as the rest of him, including his square-jawed face. “Hard to tell,” Tia had observed when she’d been working on that face, “but there could be something worth looking at under all this battering.”
Restless, he stirred briefly, muttering something in his sleep before he became quiet again. Whatever it was, Eden was unable to understand it. Nothing he had murmured since collapsing on the piazza had been intelligible. Except for those first three words. “Am I home?”
She didn’t know what, if anything, he had meant by them or why at the time she had been so moved at hearing them. Am I home?
Eden mentally embraced those words now, clung to them, because only this way, remembering their poignancy, could she go on convincing herself that she was not making a terrible mistake by keeping this man in her home.
Chapter Two
Eden loved her adopted city. Charleston had so many things to offer, the climate being one of them. Even in midwinter like this, the weather was generally mild. Having grown up in Chicago, she appreciated that.
Last night’s frigid temperature had been an exception. But this morning, early though it still was, the thermometer had climbed to a balmy level that had prompted her to open the door to the garden where the sun was already drying the soaked and sagging vegetation.
Eden could hear the tolling of the bells from Charleston’s historic churches summoning worshipers to Sunday services. It was another thing she enjoyed about the city. Not this morning, however. She was too anxious to be soothed by their restful sounds drifting through the open doorway as she waited for the coffeemaker to finish brewing.
The phone on the kitchen wall rang. She picked it up, knowing it would be Tia, knowing, too, what her friend would immediately ask. She wasn’t wrong.
“Is he awake yet?”
Eden was careful to keep her concern out of her voice. “He’s still sleeping, but after what he must have gone through that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. You check his vital signs like I showed you?”
“Yes. They’re normal.”
“You want me to come down?”
Eden heard an impatient sound in the background and realized that Tia’s boyfriend was there and not happy about an offer that would delay them. “That’s not necessary. I’ll give him another hour, and if he isn’t conscious by then, I’ll wake him myself.”
“And if you can’t revive him—”
“I’ll call an ambulance. Look, don’t worry. I can handle it. Just go and enjoy your day.”
Eden’s certainty evaporated when she hung up. She was back to wondering again, asking herself the same question that had troubled her since she had last looked in on her patient. Could he have a serious head injury, and was she denying him the treatment he needed by keeping him here?
It was the thought of Nathanial that kept her from reaching for the phone again. Smothering the threat of guilt, she glanced at the coffeemaker, saw that the brew was ready and poured herself a steaming mug. The first few sips steadied her.
Mug
