The trees were bigger than she remembered, but she couldn’t stop to think about that. She had to get to the river. Her heart hammered against her ribs, and her legs felt weak and shaky. She’d been lucky, unbelievably lucky, that he hadn’t wakened when she’d dropped her hairbrush. But with Blake, she couldn’t count on that luck to continue.
She walked faster and faster, afraid at any minute that he’d catch her, that she’d never reach the river. It seemed to take forever to get there. Please God, she hadn’t taken a wrong turn in the darkness.
She broke into a run, tripped, stumbled over a fallen limb, and strong arms from behind grabbed her.
She screamed. He’d caught her! Within sight and feel of freedom, he’d caught her.
At the scream, he let her loose immediately, and she whirled to face him, already cringing away from what she knew he’d do to her.
But it wasn’t Blake.
She laughed in delirious, ecstatic relief and flung herself into his arms. “Thank God it’s you.” She stretched up, offering her lips, herself.
Chapter Eleven
For an instant he looked surprised, didn’t respond, and she almost pulled away, almost realized...but then his mouth came down to meet hers, the hunger matching her own. Her soul leapt with happiness as her body strained to his. The fear vanished. She was with Shawn. She was safe now.
She reveled in the familiar taste of his kiss, the softness of his lips, the special way they moved against hers. Reveled in the secure strength of his arms about her, the passion that surged in her at his touch. Until he’d come into her life, she’d had no idea a woman could feel such passion.
His hands stroked along her waist, cupped her buttocks and pulled her against him. She felt his desire for her and shivered with delighted anticipation, as though it were the first time he’d touched her this way...or as though he hadn’t done so in a long time.
Now there’d be no more long times between them.
They’d hold each other every night, all night, eat breakfast together in the mornings, love each other through wrinkles and gray hair and grandchildren.
As she clung to him, the fresh scents of the spring around them filled her, and she rejoiced at the rebirth of the earth, of her life. She tangled her fingers in his wiry hair and pressed herself against him.
They should stop, she knew. They couldn’t make love now. Their escape wasn’t complete. They still had to get on the boat, get to New Orleans. But as always when she was with him, she couldn’t seem to stop, didn’t want to stop...not ever.
Finally it was he who pulled away, and reluctantly she let him go. Savoring the warm feel of his breath on her face, she opened her eyes and looked into his, thrilling to the way their bright blue color always darkened with desire. But something wasn’t right. They were too dark, almost black...
The sound that escaped his lips was somewhere between a groan and a word. “Analise.”
Analise. She sucked in her breath, looking into his face, into Dylan’s face. She wasn’t Elizabeth, and this man wasn’t Shawn. Frantically she tried to clear the fog from her brain. Her mind knew who he was, who she was, but her heart didn’t. She wanted to fall back into his arms, kiss him again, savor the love she’d been so long without.
This was the completion of the kiss they’d only started in the attic, and now she understood. She knew with a certainty that transcended logic that she had lived as Elizabeth and Dylan as Shawn. She’d loved him desperately and completely in another lifetime. She’d left her husband to meet him down by the river, to run away with him...and she’d died.
She stepped backward, away from him, away from the whirlwind that raced through her mind.
He dropped his arms. His eyes slowly cleared. As if on command, the unreadable mask he normally wore enveloped his face, hiding the blatant desire. He muttered an expletive, jammed his hands into his pockets and looked into the distance.
“Dylan,” she whispered, “you have to tell me the truth. I’ve got to know if we were lovers before my accident.”
He shook his head. “No. We have never been lovers.”
He lied. Maybe they hadn’t been lovers in this lifetime, but they had loved before, and the attraction between them still ran rampant. In spite of his firm assertion, she sensed that he knew he was lying. Maybe he didn’t know what the truth was, but he knew he hadn’t spoken it.
“You kissed me like a lover,” she accused. “I know you remember. You knew it when you read Shawn’s story in the attic. It was Shawn kissing Elizabeth then. And the first time I mentioned Blake, that night we were standing on my porch, you almost went into a trance. You remember when you were Shawn and I was Elizabeth, don’t you?”
As he faced Analise in the middle of the field, Dylan’s heart was still pounding, his blood still racing from that kiss...maybe still racing from their first kiss in the attic. He could almost believe her insane assertion that they were reincarnated lovers, so strong was his attraction to her in spite of everything. She felt so right in his arms, the passion and desire so deep, that they might have kissed a thousand times during a thousand lifetimes.
But of course they hadn’t. “Stop it, Analise! You’re being irrational.”
“How did you feel when you read about Shawn? Why did you call Blake a bastard?” She looked and sounded more sane, more in control than she had since her accident, maybe even before. Yet her words were insane.
“I’ll admit that sometimes I get emotionally involved in the past,” he said, unable to deny that he’d had the feelings she accused him of. “But that doesn’t mean I lived there. I’m not Shawn, and you’re not Elizabeth.”
“Are you so sure?” she asked quietly, then turned and started picking her way slowly over the same ground she’d run recklessly across minutes before.
He couldn’t answer her. After that mind-boggling kiss, how could he be completely sure of anything?
He followed wordlessly behind her.
She’d really lost her memory, really thought she was someone else. She hadn’t been able to deal with the realities of her life and had left them behind. She’d seemed to be doing better, recovering, but now he wondered if she’d gone so far away she might never return.
Yet in spite of her doubtful sanity, in spite of her possible knowledge of, if not involvement in, Tom’s death, in spite of what he knew he had to do, he wanted to fold her in his arms, hold her slim, vulnerable, determined body against his, kiss her until neither of them knew or cared if they were Shawn and Elizabeth or Dylan and Analise. Until the world shifted to a place where it was okay for him to kiss her.
Analise listened to the whisper of Dylan’s footsteps behind her. She shouldn’t have blurted out her realization about his identity. Now he really thought she was crazy...and with good reason. A few days ago she’d have thought the same thing if someone had told her she had lived before.
Anyway, it didn’t matter, was probably for the best. She was drawn to him in this lifetime as she’d been in the last. If he returned her ardor, she might suffer the same fate as before. She’d loved Shawn, had rejected her husband for that love. And she’d died.
The memories came rapidly, tumbling over each other.
Elizabeth hadn’t stopped seeing Shawn as Blake had ordered. She’d believed in his cause, had wanted to help ease the agony of the people her husband oppressed. With Rachel’s help, she’d continued to meet with Shawn in secret. But not just because she wanted to assist in his work.
The friendship he offered had rapidly become addictive, rapidly become more than friendship. She’d been too naive to identify the feelings at first, had only known she wanted to be with this man who was so strong and determined one minute, yet so kind and gentle the next.
Then, when he awakened in her the passion she hadn’t even suspected she possessed, Elizabeth knew she had to be with Shawn, no matter the cost. Divorce, particularly from a man who owned the town, wasn’t a viable option. But when Shawn asked her to run away with him,
she agreed, immediately and ecstatically.
They’d planned to catch a riverboat on the Missouri, go to St. Louis, then down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Shawn had been there before and told her wonderful stories of the carefree, colorful life in that city. As soon as they were settled, he promised, they’d send for Mama. They could all get lost in the crowd in New Orleans, and Blake would never find them.
But, Analise reflected, Elizabeth hadn’t made it to New Orleans. She’d never left Holbert. Something had gone wrong. She’d drowned, gone down into the cold, wet suffocation of the Missouri River.
Had it been an accident as the newspaper reported? Lottie’s words came back to her. Rachel blamed herself for her best friend’s death.
Rachel had helped her rendezvous with Shawn, had encouraged their romance. She’d delivered messages between them and come by Elizabeth’s house to pick her up so Blake wouldn’t be suspicious.
If Rachel blamed herself for Elizabeth’s death, she must have known it had something to do with Shawn. She must have felt that her part in helping the lovers meet had contributed to Elizabeth’s death.
Analise’s mind rebelled at the idea that Shawn could have harmed her. He’d loved her. But she’d been so inexperienced then. Had she really been able to gauge the sincerity of a man’s affections?
Something had happened after she met him at the river. She shivered as she recalled the terrifying feeling of hands on her shoulders, pushing. Hands on her shoulders, the same as in the dream of being pushed downstairs. Had those shoulders belonged to Analise or to Elizabeth? Or to both? How many times had she felt those hands on her shoulders?
Dylan’s car loomed suddenly in her field of vision, and she realized they’d arrived back at the street, back in the reality of the present. But were the present and the past truly separate?
The spring air carried a chill that invaded her body, but the chill in her soul came from elsewhere.
*~*~*
Dylan parked in front of his house and came around to open Analise’s door. Instead of letting her out, however, he stood there, blocking her way, one hand on the door, the other on the roof. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Rest, take a nap. I promised Phillip I’d go to dinner with him tonight.” She’d almost forgotten that and now wished she’d never agreed. “I need to know what he can tell me about Analise. About my life.”
Dylan’s nostrils flared, his eyes darkened, losing all trace of the blue she glimpsed more and more often. “Don’t go.”
Was he jealous? She felt herself blush at the pleasure that idea gave her.
He didn’t appear to notice. His knuckles on the door were white, his other arm stiff as he leaned on the roof. “Why don’t you take a few days off? Go stay with your parents. Get away from here for a while.” His expression and tone were ominous, making his suggestions sound more threatening than concerned.
A part of her yearned to do just what he said, to stop trying so hard to find answers, let them come when and if they would. But another part whispered that might be too late.
She shook her head. “I can’t do that right now. Maybe later.”
“You need to go now.”
“Tell me what you know that makes you say that, and I’ll consider it,” she offered boldly.
He said nothing, simply stepped aside and let her escape.
As she walked toward her house, she paused and turned back. He was still standing there, watching her. She stared back at him, but he didn’t flinch.
She ought to resent his blatant spying. She probably ought to fear him. And sometimes she did. But mostly she wanted to give him whatever it took to erase that sorrow and rage from his heart.
But what if that meant losing her life the way Elizabeth had lost hers when she went with Shawn?
She broke the stare and went inside, closing and locking the door behind her. The day’s events had left her exhausted. She needed a hot shower and a nap before she had to face Phillip.
But as she passed the door to her office, she hesitated.
As much as she wanted to rest, even more she wanted to find the mysterious papers that kept nagging at the fringes of her memory, the papers her memory seemed to shy away from as if they were too awful to confront.
Standing in the doorway, she scanned the crowded room.
The massive, old-fashioned desk held her computer and printer. A four-drawer file cabinet stood in one corner, a two-drawer one beside her desk. A telephone sat on a utility table. A wide assortment of books filled the shelves of a small bookcase. File boxes on every surface held loose papers.
Nothing reached out to her, offered its secrets.
She began a systematic search. Pulling out the wide, shallow middle drawer of her desk, she poked through the various items—pens, pencils, paper clips, staple remover, rubber bands, cellophane tape.
The tape.
She’d tried to secure something to the underside of the drawer.
Pulling the drawer out, she turned it over. Only a couple of pieces of torn tape remained stuck to the wood, but she could visualize the large brown envelope that had been there.
She stared at the evidence, despair washing over her. After she tried so hard to hide it, someone had found it anyway. The night he’d pushed her downstairs?
No, she thought with a surge of relief, of hope. She’d removed the envelope herself, fearful that he’d find it.
She sat straight up in the desk chair as the realization of what she’d just remembered hit her.
She’d feared that he might find the envelope, had felt it necessary to hide it better.
When she’d heard a noise in the night, she’d immediately taken a lamp from her bedside to defend herself. Yet she didn’t think she’d known her life was in danger—at least, not from him. But there were others.
She shoved the drawer hastily back into the desk, splayed a hand across her chest and tried to calm her breathing.
Who was he? And who were the others? How did Dylan fit in? Was he the man she’d hidden the papers from? Was he one of the others? Had someone sent him to spy on her, to hurt her?
Could this have something to do with her divorce? But Phillip wouldn’t hurt her. He loved her, wanted her back. He was trying to make right whatever had gone wrong.
Her mind whirled like a Kansas tornado, spinning thoughts round and round, mixing them chaotically. Dylan, Phillip, Shawn, Blake, the others.
Damn it! Why wouldn’t her memory release the answers, let her know the truth, so she could protect herself?
On the other hand, maybe she had a good reason for keeping the knowledge from herself. Maybe she didn’t want to know. How could she stand it if she knew for certain that Dylan wanted to harm her?
She remembered the pain, the way her heart had shrunk inside her when she’d seen him coming up her staircase in the dark, looking for her. The bond was already strong between them, and she knew he felt it too, no matter how hard he tried not to. If he was guilty, he could kill her soul as well as her body.
She rose from the chair and, like a wild woman, dove into her search, desperate to find the documents that would tell her what was going on, who wanted to harm her. Yet at the same time a part of her wanted to hold back, dreaded what she might find.
She snatched the books from the case, flipped through the pages, then turned the case upside down.
Yanking open one of the file drawers, she stared in dismay at her carefully labeled folders. What should she look under? H for He? M for Murderer? The only one that seemed even a possibility was Miscellaneous, but a careful search revealed nothing enlightening.
In the small closet, she found summer clothes hanging from the rack and a large stuffed dog on the shelf.
Terence.
She reached for the animal, took it down and stroked its dusty fur. The white around the black spots had become dingy. She squeezed one floppy ear and found that it still squeaked.
Phillip had won it for he
r at the Missouri State Fair the year before they got married. She remembered how thrilled she’d been, how impressed with his prowess. After they’d married, Terence had occupied a chair at the table and had, according to Phillip, frequently eaten his first helping of dessert so he’d had to have another.
She and Phillip had once shared a life together. How sad that things—that people—could change so drastically. As she thought of Phillip, she suddenly remembered her dinner date with him. She checked her watch, surprised to find how much time had passed.
Replacing the stuffed dog on the closet shelf with a dejected sigh, she surveyed the mess in her office. She’d clean it up later. Right now she needed to change and get ready to keep her promise...to meet with one more piece in the puzzle of her life and try to determine where he fit.
She closed her office door behind her with a sense of regret that curiosity was the only emotion she could find for the man she’d once loved enough to marry.
*~*~*
Analise sat across from Phillip in her favorite restaurant. Located in the Italian section of Kansas City, the place had originally been an old house and had many nooks and crannies. She and Phillip occupied a table on a second floor loft overlooking the first floor.
“You look beautiful.” Phillip raised his wineglass to her. “That’s always been one of my favorite dresses.”
“Thank you.” Had she known that when she selected the royal blue silk with its soft neckline and swirling skirt? Had she unconsciously been trying to please Phillip, as he was so obviously trying to please her?
Much as she’d like to think that, she somehow doubted it.
The waiter set a large salad with artichoke hearts, olives, Parmesan cheese and other tempting ingredients in front of her, and her attention turned to it. She hadn’t eaten all day, had been so tense she really hadn’t had an appetite. But now her body’s demands overrode her emotions. She was starving.
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