strained the fabric of his suitcoat. He wore a vest with a gold watch chain dangling from one pocket, and his odd, stiff collar was open.
For some confounding reason, Elisabeth found herself wanting to touch him—tenderly at first, and then with the sweet, dizzying fury of passion.
She gave herself an inward shake. “This is really authentic,” Elisabeth said. “I hope I’ll be able to remember it all.”
The stranger approached and took the endangered pitcher from Elisabeth’s hands, setting it aside on the table. His eyes raked her figure, taking in every fiber of the long football jersey that served as her favorite nightgown, leaving gentle fire in their wake.
“I asked you a question,” he snapped. “Who the devil are you?”
Elisabeth gave an hysterical little burst of laughter. The guy was a spirit—or more likely a delusion—and she felt a staggering attraction to him. She must be ‘round the bend. “Who I am isn’t the question at all,” she answered intractably. “The question is, are you a ghost or am I a ghost?” She paused and spread her hands, reasoning that there was no sense in fighting the dream. “I mean, who ya gonna call?”
The man standing before her—Elisabeth could only assume he was the “Papa” Trista had been screaming for—puckered his brow in consternation. Then he felt her forehead with the backs of four cool fingers.
His touch heated Elisabeth’s skin and sent a new shock splintering through her, and Elisabeth fairly leapt backward. Hoping it would carry her home to the waking world, like some talisman, she brought the pendant from beneath her shirt and traced its outline with her fingers.
“What is your name?” the man repeated patiently, as though speaking to an imbecile.
Elisabeth resisted an impulse to make a suitable noise with a finger and her lower lip and smiled instead. She had a drunken feeling, but she assured herself that she was bound to wake up any minute now. “Elisabeth McCartney. What’s yours?”
“Dr. Jonathan Fortner,” was the pensive answer. His steely eyes dropped to the pendant she was fiddling with and went wide. In the next instant, before Elisabeth had had a chance even to brace herself, he’d gripped the necklace and ripped it from her throat. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, his voice a terrifying rasp.
Elisabeth stepped back again. Dream or no dream, she’d felt the pull of the chain against her nape, and she was afraid of the suppressed violence she sensed in this man. “It—it belonged to my aunt—and now it belongs to my cousin and me.” She gathered every shred of courage she possessed just to keep from cowering before this man. “If you’ll just give it back, please….”
“You’re a liar,” Dr. Fortner spat out, dropping the necklace into the pocket of his coat. “This pendant was my wife’s—it’s been in her family for generations.”
Elisabeth wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. This whole experience, whatever it was, was getting totally out of hand. “Perhaps it belonged to your—your wife at one time,” she managed nervously, “but it’s mine now. Mine and my cousin’s.” She held out one palm. “I want it back.”
He looked at her hand as though he might spit in it, then pressed her into a chair. Her knees were like jelly, and she couldn’t be sure whether this was caused by her situation or the primitive, elemental tug she felt toward this man.
“Papa?” Trista called from upstairs.
Dr. Fortner’s lethal glance followed the sound. He stood stock still for a long moment, then shrugged out of his coat and hung it from a peg beside the door. “Everything is all right,” he called back. “Go to sleep.”
Elisabeth swallowed the growing lump in her throat and started to rise from the chair. At one quelling glance from Dr. Fortner, however, she thought better of it and sank back to her seat. She watched with rounded eyes as her reluctant host sat down across from her.
“Who are you?” he asked sternly.
He was a remarkable man, ruggedly handsome and yet polished, in a Victorian sort of way. The sort Elisabeth had fantasized about since puberty.
She tried to keep her voice even and her manner calm. “I told you. I’m Elisabeth McCartney.”
“All right, Elisabeth McCartney—what are you doing here, dressed in that crazy getup, and why were you wearing my wife’s necklace?”
“I was—well, I don’t know what I’m doing here, actually. Maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’m a hologram or an astral projection….”
His dark eyebrows drew together for a moment. “A what?”
She sighed. “Either I’m dreaming or you are. Or maybe both of us. In any case, I think I need Aunt Verity’s necklace to get back where I belong.”
“Then it looks like you won’t be going anywhere for a while. And I, for one, am not dreaming.”
Elisabeth gazed into his hard, autocratic face. Doubtless, the pop-psychology gurus would have something disturbing to say about the irrefutable appeal this man held for her. “You’re probably right. I don’t see how you could possibly have the sensitivity to dream. Alan Alda, you definitely aren’t. It must be me.”
“Papa, is Elisabeth still here?”
The doctor’s eyes scoured Elisabeth, then softened slightly. “Yes, Punkin, she’s still here.”
“She was going to bring me some warm milk,” Trista persisted.
Jonathan glowered at Elisabeth for a moment, then gestured toward the pitcher. She stumbled out of her chair and proceeded to the wall of cupboards where, with some effort, she located a store of mugs and a small pan.
She poured milk into the kettle, shaking so hard, it was a wonder she didn’t spill the stuff all over the floor, and set it on the stove to heat. She glanced toward the doctor’s coat, hanging nearby on a peg, and gauged her chances of getting the necklace without his noticing.
They didn’t seem good.
“If you want that milk to heat, you’ll have to stoke up the fire,” he said.
Elisabeth stiffened. The stove had all kinds of lids and doors, but she had no idea how to reach in and “stoke” the flames to life. And she really didn’t want to bend over in her nightshirt. “Maybe you could do that,” she said.
He took a chunk of wood from a crude box beside the stove, opened a little door in the front and shoved it inside. Then he reached for a poker that rested against the wall and jabbed at the embers and the wood until a snapping blaze flared up.
Elisabeth, feeling as stirred and warm as the coals at the base of the rejuvenated fire, lifted her chin to let him know she wasn’t impressed and waited for the milk to heat.
Dr. Fortner regarded Elisabeth steadily. “I’m sure you’re some kind of lunatic,” he said reasonably, “though I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you ended up in Pine River. In any case, you’ll have to spend the night. I’ll turn you over to the marshal in the morning.”
Elisabeth was past wondering when this nightmare was going to end. “You’d actually keep
