Lightning flickered among the trees as they drove down the two-lane highway toward town. Pines and oaks crowded the shoulders of the road, dark shadows in the headlights. It was a relief, Honor thought, to be away from that house.

A half-hour later they reached the edge of town and Ian pulled into the parking lot of a brightly lit all-night hamburger place. Air Force uniforms were visible at a number of tables. A couple of guys in Ranger uniforms nodded to Ian as he guided Honor to a table in an out-of-the-way corner.

People. Normal, ordinary people. How wonderful they looked after a day like today.

“Coffee?” Ian asked. “I’ll get it.”

“Please. Black.”

There was something so wonderfully normal about this place, the bright lights, the gleaming floors, the buzz of quiet conversation, that the past couple of days seemed like a movie nightmare. Almost.

When he returned with the coffee, Ian slid into the booth across from her.

“How are you going to manage to stay awake all night?” he asked her, surprising her. “You’ve had one long day.”

“I’ll be okay. Adrenaline usually does the trick.”

“I’ll come to get you in the morning. Seven-thirty?”

Honor nodded. “I might be a few minutes late, though.”

Ian shrugged. “No big deal.”

A few more minutes passed while they sipped coffee in silence. Finally, looking about as happy as a man facing a firing squad, Ian came to the point.

“I don’t want you being alone in that house anymore.”

The first thing to hit her was a tidal wave of overwhelming relief. Then reality intruded.

“I can’t afford to move out,” she said flatly.

“I realize that. What we need to do is see if we can’t get rid of this…whatever it is. There’s got to be some way to fight it. Exterminate it.”

She thought of the movies and spoke the word with difficulty, rebelling at the whole idea. “Exorcism?”

A strange thing happened then. It almost seemed to her that Ian’s gaze slid away, as if he were uneasy with the subject. As if the word had struck him personally somehow. And that brought the rumors about him being a satanist racing to the forefront of her mind.

“No.” He said it sharply, flatly, in a low voice, a commanding voice. “No. Don’t even think that.”

“What? Think what?”

“That I’m afraid of an exorcism.”

“I wasn’t—” She broke off, realizing that she had been on the verge of thinking exactly that, that a satanist would be terrified of such a thing. “What the hell do you do? Read minds?”

His mouth compressed into a tight line. “I’m not afraid of it,” he said, ignoring her question. “I’ve been through it.”

Through it? He’d been through it? She sank back against the vinyl-padded bench and just stared at him. In all honesty, she wouldn’t have guessed that anyone in this part of the world could even perform such a ceremony. And certainly not that someone she knew might actually have been through it.

“Why?” she said finally. “When?”

“When I was a kid,” he said. The words came roughly, as if they were extremely difficult to force out, but his face never changed. “I was just six. Mrs. Gilhooley—the woman who lived in your house—had a goat. Damn animal was as old as Methuselah. Anyhow, I told her the goat was going to die. I don’t even remember why I said it. Probably because it was so old. And damned if the goat didn’t drop dead on the spot.”

“Oh, my,” Honor breathed, finding it not at all difficult to envision the progression of events. Just imagining it made her ache for the boy he must once have been.

“Mrs. Gilhooley accused me of witchcraft or being possessed or something,” Ian continued. “I don’t remember much of it very clearly. The preacher performed an exorcism on me. I mainly remember being locked up for days while people prayed and sang over me. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink, and sometimes they’d slap me silly, trying to drive the demon out.”

He shrugged again, as if it no longer mattered, but Honor wasn’t quite buying that. “How awful,” she said softly. “Why would she ever accuse you of something like that? You were just a child!”

A child who saw things he shouldn’t. Who heard the thoughts of others. Ian looked at her, but he didn’t answer, because if he told her why Mrs. Gilhooley had hated him so much, she would be scared to death of him. And that wouldn’t help at all right now. Instead, he lied by omission. “I don’t remember much about the whole thing…except you’ll never persuade me that exorcism is worth a whole lot.”

She guessed she could understand that. For a moment she simply sat and looked at him, thinking that they both had childhood scars. It made her feel closer to him. “Did they think they had cured you?”

“For a while, at any rate.” He picked up his cup and sipped. “Something like that sticks with you. Like the smell of skunk. When folks think you were possessed once, they’re always on the lookout for it to happen again.”

Honor nodded. “That must have given you a rough time for years.” Even as she spoke, she realized that for him it had never been over. Just today the electrician had brought the subject up again, even though more than thirty years had passed. “Why did you come back here, Ian? Some of these people…” She hesitated. “Well, some of them evidently haven’t forgotten.”

His eyes bored into her. “It’s my home,” he said.

Honor shook her head slightly. “Being an army brat, I’ve never felt that way about any place. And I don’t think I’ll ever get to feel that way about this place. I like what you said about getting rid of this—this whatever-it-is—but how can we possibly do that?”

“I don’t know yet, but I intend to find out. I’m going to check out the base library this morning. If they don’t have anything, there’s an occult bookstore downtown.” One corner of his mouth lifted a little, just a faint suggestion of humor. “Maybe all we need is a garlic necklace.”

A rusty laugh escaped Honor, and it struck her that she hadn’t laughed in two days now…and ordinarily she was quick to laugh. “Nothing in my life has ever been that easy.”

“Or mine.”

He went to get them some more coffee, and Honor watched him, noting how easily he moved, like a man in complete command of his body. He was used to being in command, that much was obvious. Faced with a ghost—or whatever awful thing was in that house—he considered himself quite capable of dealing with it. All he had to do was discover what needed doing. She liked his attitude and wished she could be so confident. All of her self-confidence was limited to nursing.

Turning her head, she stared past the reflections in the window glass and saw that the night was still storm-tossed, though it hadn’t yet begun to rain. Odd weather, she thought.

She had very nearly forgotten being locked in the closet as a child. Her father had meant it to toughen her and to stop her from seeing things in the dark. It might have toughened her, but now she was seeing things in the dark again. And in broad daylight, for that matter.

Looking back at those endless nights of terror, when she had cried and shrieked and begged for hours to be let out of that small, dark closet, she wondered if they hadn’t contributed to her mother’s decision to divorce her father.

What struck her most now, though, was that this was not the first time in her life she had had a brush with…with the occult, for lack of a better word. Time had rendered her memory hazy, but she vaguely remembered lying awake in her bed, hearing sounds in the night. Footsteps, when no one was there. Voices, sounding distant and garbled, when no one was talking. Sights…

She caught her breath and stiffened. Oh, Lord, she had seen something as a child. A figure. Something. It had terrified her, and when her father had locked her in the closet, it had been there, too. There had been no escape.

“Honor?”

Ian slid into the booth beside her and wrapped a powerful arm around her shoulders. “Shh…” he said softly. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Accepting without question that he somehow knew she was feeling scared and frightened, she turned toward him and buried her face in his strong shoulder. The terror was a memory, she reminded herself, an old memory. She was reacting to something that no longer threatened her.

But oh, how good it felt to be held. He even smelled good, like laundry soap and man, and the cotton of his olive T-shirt was soft against her skin. But she couldn’t afford to notice things like that, she reminded herself. And this was certainly not the time or the place, anyway.

“I was remembering,” she said. “I’d nearly forgotten….”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Who, me?”

A weak chuckle escaped her then, and she eased back from his shoulder. He released her at once, and she wished he hadn’t let go. Looking up almost shyly into his hard face, she found he was smiling faintly. Something about that smile made it possible to confide in him.

“When I was a kid, I saw and heard things in our house. My dad thought it was my imagination and locked me in the closet to break me of it.”

Ian frowned. “He’d be arrested for that nowadays.”

“Maybe. I don’t think he meant to be cruel. He wasn’t a cruel man. Just a hard one. What’s important, though, is that…well, I’ve been through something like this before. If it’s not my imagination—”

“It’s not,” he said, interrupting her. “I feel it, too. You’re sensitive, that’s all. I suspect some people wouldn’t feel a thing in that house.” He gave her another, very faint smile. “Some very dense people might not feel anything,” he amended. “Whatever it is, it’s strong.”

“And getting stronger,” Honor whispered, battling a sudden urge to look over her shoulder. The idea appalled her.

“Maybe not. I mean, if your father locked you in the closet to get you to suppress your sensitivity, it might just have taken a while for your awareness of this…thing to penetrate your barriers. It may have been this strong all along.” He shrugged. “We’re just speculating now, in any case. I suggest we wait until we find some useful information to base our theories on. In the meantime…”

Honor waited as he frowned thoughtfully, looking down at his coffee.

Here she was, sitting around talking of ghosts and other things that went bump in the night, and wishing that Ian McLaren would kiss her again, so that she could find out if the feelings she remembered from last night were real. Stupid. Incredible. But adrenaline had funny effects like that, she reminded herself. So maybe it wasn’t stupid that she was thinking about sex when she ought to be thinking about how she was going to save her house from whatever was occupying it. Of course, maybe she was just overloaded. Maybe she just needed a break, and thinking about her attraction to Ian was a great break from other things.

It might be a dangerous attraction, she found herself thinking. What did she really know about him…except that as a child people had thought he was possessed? Well, with those eyes…

Suddenly those eyes were fixed on her. “We’ve got a little time yet. Want to take a walk?”

 

Walking at night was something she had nearly given up doing, because it just wasn’t safe for a woman alone, and she’d seen too much in the emergency room to remain ignorant of the hazards. Walking with Ian, all six-foot-five and two-hundred-plus pounds of him, made her feel completely safe. She was able to throw back her head, enjoy the stiff breeze and the smell of the sea. The storm had moved far enough away that she didn’t think lightning was a real danger…though it still flickered off to the northwest.

They walked away from the bright lights and onto the athletic field of a nearby school. There they could see the silver-lined storm clouds when the moon occasionally peeked through.

“Some night,” Ian remarked, “we’ll have to take a walk on the beach. When the moon is full.”

“I’d love that.” Amazed that he was planning such things for them, she turned and peered up at him. He looked even more mysterious than usual in the uncertain light. Lightning flashed to the east, causing the shadow on his face to shift strangely. Even in this poor light, his eyes seemed to glow.

Surely, said a faint little voice in her head, she ought to be afraid of this huge man she hardly knew? But she wasn’t. Not at all. Not at this moment. What she felt—all she felt—was an urgent desire to be kissed by him.

He read minds. She became almost convinced of it when his strong arms suddenly closed around her and drew her against him. Suddenly aware of the nerve-exciting textures of man, muscle and denim, she felt her knees turn soft.

“Me too,” he said huskily. “Me too.”

She wondered what he meant, but then she didn’t care, because he lifted her right off her feet and brought her eager mouth to his. Strong. He was so strong. He made her feel small, delicate, fragile…and for once she didn’t mind.

Caution was swept away on a riptide of long-buried passion. All the things she had denied herself, all the things she had thought she would never know, were suddenly within her grasp. Her arms wrapped around broad shoulders, and she reveled in the powerful flexing of his muscles as he held her effortlessly above the ground. Such a large, strong man. Every cell in her body responded to his potency.

And every wounded cell in her heart responded to the unmistakable evidence that he desired her.

He held her with one arm around her waist, as if she weighed nothing, and allowed his other hand to roam. Downward it swept, slowly, along the slender line of her back, the soft curve of her hip, to the silky skin of the back of her thigh. She gasped against his mouth at the exquisite sensation of his callused palm on her sensitive skin and tightened her arms unconsciously, trying to get closer still.

With steady, gentle pressure, he brought her leg up to his waist, and suddenly she was pressed with breath-stealing intimacy against his arousal, while his tongue pillaged her mouth in a blatant imitation of mating.

She had never…not in her wildest dreams… Her fingers dug into the corded muscles of his shoulders, and she tore her mouth from his, throwing her head back in surrender as she abandoned herself to sensations beyond imagining. An extraordinary tension filled her, a wild expectancy that made everything else seem insignificant in comparison.

She wanted. Blindly, heedlessly, instinctively, she wanted this man.

How did he do this to her?

The thought flashed in her brain like a warning beacon. This was too fast, too hot, too wild. Unnatural. Abomination.

A groan erupted from the chest of the man who held her, the man who had mesmerized her, bewitched her and turned her into flame. Suddenly she was on her feet, free of him, except for the hands that steadied her gently. Then, when he had made sure she wouldn’t stumble, he turned his back to her.

Stunned by what had just passed between them, and by the abrupt change, Honor simply stood and stared at his back. She could feel it, she thought crazily. She could feel the control he exerted now as he stood with his hands on his hips and his head thrown back and waited for his own needs to subside. She could feel it as surely as she could feel her own body shriek its disappointment and its hunger.

She hurt. He hurt.

What had happened?

Abomination. The word twisted coldly through her mind, as repulsive and disturbing as a clammy touch. Alien. Not hers.

Troubled, frightened, she wrapped her arms around herself, feeling cold despite the muggy heat of the Florida night. Thunder rumbled distantly, an edgy reminder of a storm that had not yet broken.

“Ian?”

She said his name softly, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, but he heard her and turned to face her.

“I…need to get to work.”

After a moment, he nodded. “Let’s go.”

 

He dropped Honor off at the emergency room entrance and watched her cross the twenty feet of concrete, her cute rump an incitement in those white shorts she was wearing. His palm remembered in exquisite detail just how the smooth skin of her thigh had felt, and the rest of him remembered with excruciating accuracy just how she had wrapped herself around him.

He was spending too much time with her. Getting drawn in too far. He’d slipped badly tonight. Very badly. She’d almost caught him out twice.

He had felt her yearning for him as strongly as he had felt his own for her. He wanted her. She wanted him. It should have been enough—except that he was…an abomination. She had sensed it, too, tonight. He had felt her alarm. Felt her recognition that something was unnatural. She just hadn’t realized that it was him.

He couldn’t afford to get close to her like that. Couldn’t afford to slip. Didn’t think he could stand to see the revulsion and fear on her face if she discovered his secret.

He had plenty of experience in keeping a safe distance, and the few relationships with women he’d allowed himself over the years had been chosen because they would preserve that distance. And always, always, if he felt that distance begin to erode to even a small degree, he’d left before the woman could discover what he really was.

It would be a damn sight more difficult to recover lost distance with his next-door neighbor. If he had half a brain, he would leave her to deal with her ghost by herself, let her get driven out of the place like all the other tenants.

Evidently he didn’t have half a brain. When she was safely inside, he turned his Jeep out of the lot and headed back down the highway toward home. He was going to check out that damn house. Tonight. While she wasn’t there to add to the psychic confusion in the place.

The wind was picking up again by the time he pulled into his driveway. A new storm was moving in, this one more restless than the last. Lightning flickered in sheets, and thunder growled hollowly.

When he had put the deadbolts on Honor’s doors, he had kept a key for himself—another in the long list of his transgressions in life. The problem with security, he had realized years ago, was that if you made it nearly impossible for someone to get in, you might pay a price for being unreachable. People burned to death in homes with barred windows. Medical help couldn’t reach you quickly if no one could break in.

So he had kept a key. And now with it, he let himself into her house. He didn’t bring a flashlight, because there was nothing he wanted to see. He stood inside her front door and closed his eyes.

And waited.

 

It was nearly dawn before he felt it. At first it was like a soft stirring of the psychic breeze, just a whisper of shifting shadows in the living room. Instinctively he turned toward it, though he would never see it with his eyes.

It strengthened slowly, as if waking from a long sleep. From a shifting in the shadows, from a whisper of movement, it grew. Dark. Roiling. Hateful. Evil.

Ah, God, so cold! It seemed to soak the last heat from the room, leaving a cold so intense it froze the soul. Oppressive. Suffocating. Like cold, oily smoke.

Aware. It was aware of him. It was gathering itself, gathering its strength and its hatred, and it knew him. Reaching out with icy tendrils of hate, it touched the edges of his mind and caused him to recoil helplessly.

Hunkering down and wrapping his arms around his knees for protection against a blast of cold that threatened frostbite, he waited it out. He needed knowledge of his enemy, and there was only one way to get it. Cautiously, he reached out with his mind.

And nearly died.

In an instant he was back in the pit that haunted his worst nightmares. Tied ankle and wrist with wire that cut to the bone. Helpless to protect himself. Helpless against the demon who tortured him. Naked to the eyes of his enemy. Knowing his every stifled scream of agony gave pleasure, because he could feel it with his abominable talent, could feel the pleasure of the men who tortured him. Wanting to die with a passion that beggared description, because it was his only way out.

No!

The word exploded in his head like a thunderclap as he grabbed for his self-control and refused to allow the vision power over him. Heedless of the cold that flayed his skin, he rose in the dark and faced his invisible tormentor.

No. By sheer effort of will, he forced his mind into the present, forced it to bury again what had happened in the past. He had been there. He refused to allow a mere memory to wield that kind of power over him.

He was shivering violently now, from the cold that had swallowed all the heat, and he still hadn’t found what he needed. Hate. It was full of hate. Rage. Bitterness. But nothing he could use against it.

Then, suddenly, something shifted. Something changed, a new scent on the wind. The cold withdrew a little; the direction of the hate turned a little.

A change of focus.

Seizing the opportunity, Ian reached out, seeking a clue, a weakness…anything.

What he found was another presence. Outside the house. Drawing closer. Bent on murder.

Turning, he dismissed the evil inside the house to concentrate on the threat outside. Cold breath brushed his neck, making his scalp prickle, but he ignored it, concentrating on the new threat, instead.

Fractured images filled his head, battlefield nightmares, the worst of the things he had ever seen in his life, as the hateful thing in the house assaulted his mind. Dismembered bodies, screaming friends, dead buddies. With a monumental effort of will, he ignored the visions that always haunted him, refusing to give a toehold to the thing that would use them against him.

He was still cold, but sweat broke out all over him, soaking him, as he wrestled for supremacy over his own mind. And the thing outside drew closer. It had been summoned.

Grabbing the doorknob, he twisted it and pulled the door open. The real threat was outside, and he had to face it.

But suddenly he froze, as the cold touched the edges of his mind again. And buried deep in that cold and hate and rage, he thought he felt the touch of something…not exactly familiar, but something he had touched once before.

Before he could latch on to it, though, it vanished. Thunder cracked deafeningly, and the wind moaned around the corner of the house, reminding him where he was. When he was. The darkness in the living room shrank a little, pulling away from him.

And the thing outside was almost here. Swinging the door open the rest of the way, he stepped out into the wild darkness. The storm was right overhead now, and the old live oaks groaned before the buffeting of the wind.

A fork of lightning zigzagged downward, striking a tree farther up the road. The concussion made his eardrums hurt, almost distracting him from the awareness that something was watching. From out there. From across the road.

Keeping low, Ian hurried down off the porch and around to the side, so that he could circle around and come up behind whoever—or whatever—was over there.

Across the road, though a few scrubby pines grew tall, for some reason the vegetation was nearly tropical. Palmettos and ferns that had never been disturbed by man grew thickly. Running on silent feet, crouching to keep a low profile, Ian hurried fifty or sixty yards up the road and then crossed over. Behind him, he felt the presence in the house fade a little, weakening. As if it had used all the energy it could. Or as if its attention had turned elsewhere.

And then he discovered why he’d considered this threat worse than the one in the house.

Thunder cracked loudly, and lightning flared, illuminating the night. Then there was another sharp crack, an unnatural one.

Pain seared his side, and he went down. He’d been shot.

 

Thunder growled like a hungry beast at bay. Lightning slashed jaggedly toward the horizon from heavy clouds that hid the early-dawn light. On a clear day, the sky would be brightening by this time. Today it was a dark, leaden gray.

Ian didn’t show up at 7:30. By eight, Honor was feeling impatient and irritated. This was why she hated to depend on someone else for transport.

By 8:30 she was beginning to worry about him. He didn’t seem like an undependable sort of person, whatever else he might be. She called his house and received no answer.

By nine she was wondering if she could call the police. Something was wrong. She felt it in her bones.

Just as she was turning from the door to go back to the pay phone, she saw his Jeep pull into the hospital parking lot. Grabbing her purse, she trotted out to meet him.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said as she climbed in beside him. “I was unavoidably detained.”

There was sarcasm in the statement, along with something else she couldn’t quite define. She turned to look at him, really look at him, and gasped. “What happened to you?”

He looked pale under his tan, and his eyes appeared sunken. Running a professional eye over him, she realized for the first time that his olive-drab T-shirt had given way to a green hospital shirt. “Ian?”

“I thought we’d grab a quick breakfast and then hit the base library. That okay?”

She knew that tone of voice. Her father had often used it to indicate that a subject wasn’t open for discussion. Instead of arguing, which was what she wanted to, she decided to bide her time. Things had a way of coming out if you were patient. “Okay,” she said, and fixed her attention out the window.

He needed a shave, she thought as she stared out at the scenery. He looked like hell, he needed a shave, and something was very, very wrong. Once or twice she heard him mutter an oath as he took a corner.

They grabbed biscuits and sausage at a fast-food place, and large cups of hot, fresh coffee. They ate outdoors at a stone table, away from the other patrons, who were wisely avoiding the humid morning heat.

“Is it going to clear today at all?” Honor asked as she looked up at the leaden sky.

“I haven’t heard the weather.”

“I came down here for sunshine,” she remarked. “I feel cheated when I don’t get it.”

It was a stupid, inane conversation, but it kept her from asking why he was moving so strangely. So stiffly. And why his mouth tightened at times, as if he were in pain. Not that she needed him to explain that he’d gotten hurt somehow. She did wonder, though, how he’d been hurt. And how bad it was. Instead, she talked of something else. Anything else.

“Do you really think we’ll find anything useful at the library?”

He looked up from his third biscuit. “We’re hardly the first people in the world to be faced with this problem.”

“Well, no.” Not likely. Not when she remembered an earlier encounter just in her own life. Tens of thousands of other people must have experienced such things.

One corner of his mouth lifted in that faint smile she was beginning to find familiar. “The way things are, if two people have experienced something, one of them will have written a book about it.”

She almost laughed then. He was right, of course.

“Even if we don’t find something useful in terms of getting rid of the thing,” he continued, “every bit of knowledge we can gather is potentially useful. And in the meantime, I want you to stay at my house.”

She blinked, startled by both the suggestion and her own response, a swift upsurge of mingled relief and yearning. “I don’t think—”

“Look,” he said, “don’t get all coy and prissy on me. You know damn well you’re not comfortable in that house. Do you really think you’ll be able to close your eyes and go to sleep there after what you tell me you felt yesterday? Are you just calmly going to ignore it and get into your shower again?”

Ice slid slowly down her spine. Inwardly she admitted he was right. She wasn’t going to be able to ignore the presence in the house. No amount of arguing with herself would change the fact that she would always be on edge, listening, waiting.

“But it can’t hurt me,” she said, making one last protest.

His answer was uncompromising. “Oh, yes, it can,” he said grimly. “It sure as hell can.”

It was early afternoon by the time they returned home, bringing more than a dozen books with them. After the library, they’d gone to the occult bookstore, as well, and found a couple of additional volumes.

When Ian climbed out of the Jeep, he stood in his driveway and stared across at Honor’s house. Silent, unblinking, motionless, he reminded her of a cat with its eye on a bird, its nose lifted to scent the breeze. He was a hunter.

“Let’s get your stuff now,” he said abruptly.

Honor was feeling as tired as she had ever felt, and her only desire at the moment was to curl up somewhere and sleep. Anywhere. Even in that damn house she had bought.

“Look,” she said. “Why don’t I just go home and catch some sleep? I can bring my stuff over later.”

“No.”

No? He’d spoken that single syllable in that uncompromising way of his, and it suddenly occurred to Honor that of all the things she disliked about this man, this was the one she disliked most.

“Damn it, McLaren, will you quit trying to run my life?”

Turning to face her, he yanked up the loose green surgical shirt and showed her ten inches of taped stiches in his side. “See that?” he said harshly. “It damn well can hurt you, and I’ll be doubled damned if I’m going to let your stubbornness make you an easy target. We’re getting your stuff. Now.”

He started to tug the shirt down, but Honor stopped him by touching the skin below the wound with gentle fingertips. At her touch, a tremor passed through him. “Oh, Ian,” she said shakily. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “For now, let’s just get whatever you need for a couple of days. Now. While it’s…sleeping.”

“Sleeping?” A chill touched the back of her neck, and goose bumps rose on her arms, despite the day’s heavy, suffocating heat. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “I meant while it’s quiet. It’s quiet now.” God, he was slipping, slipping badly. He could see it in her eyes. It was almost as if some evil genius were driving him to betray himself.

“How do you know that?”

He looked down into her soft young face, into her concerned, frightened blue eyes, and wondered why he couldn’t have been just a normal man. Wondered why he had been so savagely cursed all his days.

“Later,” he said. “We’re beat. We need to sleep. We can talk about everything later. Let’s just get your things.”

Something had flickered in his cat-green eyes, something that her heart recognized as anguish. Compassion rose in her and washed away her irritation. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. But I don’t want you carrying anything, not with those stitches.”

He looked down at her, and then, for the first time in years, he laughed. It was a rusty sound, almost unrecognizable, but it lightened the shadows in his eyes. “Lady, you’re a born dragon.”

She would have bristled, except that she nearly lost her breath at a sudden glimpse of this man as he might have been, given a happier road in life. “I’m a nurse,” she managed to say. “And from the look of it, they should have kept you in the hospital overnight.”

He shook his head and turned toward her house. “The nice thing about being retired is that the base hospital can’t call my commander anymore. They couldn’t make me stay.”

She could well believe that, Honor thought, following him. She could well believe that.