A quarter of a mile from her home the sky unloaded. Thunder boomed threateningly as rain fell in torrents, pounding on her car. As she turned into her apartment’s parking lot, she noticed Montand’s distant headlights turn and disappear abruptly. He’d whipped the car around in a tight U-turn and accelerated in the other direction without a pause. She just made out the dark red rearview lights before he was swallowed by the rain and dark gray gloom.

A bitter flash of disappointment went through her, making her grit her teeth in self-disgust.

She opted for the rear entrance so that she could remove her now-soaking shoes on the tile floor of the utility room instead of the wood floor of the entryway. Afterward, she padded barefoot into the kitchen and picked up a dish towel, wiping off her wet arms. Exhaustion struck her all at once, the adrenaline high of the evening—of her unexpected encounter with Montand—running thin in her blood. In the distance, she heard the crashing of swords and the grunts of video game characters doing battle.

“Hi,” she said wearily, rounding the corner into the dim living room. She came to an abrupt halt. Amanda and Colin sat on the couch, side by side. Two video controllers lay on the floor before their feet, forgotten. Amanda’s body jerked at the sound of Emma’s voice, but Colin continued kissing her, his hand running hungrily along the side of Amanda’s tank top–clad torso and brushing a breast. Amanda made a wild, muffled sound and pushed at Colin. Emma caught a glimpse of her sister’s frightened face around Colin’s shoulder. The vision made a hot knife of sensation stab through her belly, forcing reality into her shocked haze.

Colin finally got a clue and turned. They both stared at Emma, pale faced and openmouthed.

The silence was horrible. Strangling. Emma couldn’t think of anything to say. Her tongue had gone numb.

“Emma . . .” Amanda muttered, shock ringing in her tone. She flung herself off the couch and stood. She wore shorts, her long, lustrous dark blond hair falling down her back like a cloak. The skin of her bare legs and arms gleamed in the flashing light from the television, the only source of illumination in the cozy scenario except for occasional flashes of lightning from the storm.

You’re the stupidest woman on the face of the earth. What kind of female left her boyfriend alone night after night with a stunning woman like Amanda? It’d never even occurred to Emma to be jealous.

Colin stood slowly.

“I thought you wanted to get to bed early tonight,” Emma said to him, distantly surprised by how calm she sounded.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Colin said hollowly. He glanced uneasily from Emma to Amanda, and then back to Emma again. “We . . . I didn’t hear you come in.”

Emma nodded. “Yeah. Obviously. I came in the back door. The rain must have muffled the sound.” She started toward the hallway, moving like a robot set on automatic. “Well personally, all I can think about is sleep. Good night.”

“Emma,” Colin called sharply at the same time Amanda cried out, “Emma, wait!” Her sister’s voice rang with a mixture of anxiety, anguish, and disbelief. Emma didn’t turn around or stop walking.

“Forget it,” Colin said sharply when Amanda started to call out again, sounding panicked. “She’s not going to listen to us. Not now. Let’s go.”

That made Emma whip around. She flew across the floor toward them so fast, Colin’s eyes widened in alarm. He took a step back.

“You go,” she grated out, her teeth clenched. “This is my sister’s home. It’s mine. She doesn’t have to leave right now. You do.”

Colin’s mouth fell open in shock. She glared at him fiercely.

“You’re right. I’ll go. We can talk about this tomorrow,” he said after a moment, glancing worriedly at both of them. Amanda just stood there, looking shattered.

Emma turned to resume her exit when Colin started for the front door.

“Emma, stop. We have to talk,” Amanda entreated.

“I don’t want to talk to you. You’re the last person on earth I want to look at right now.”

She didn’t know what she was feeling aside from blindsided. Her brain and body vibrated with shock. Maybe she shouldn’t have acted so holier-than-thou just now. Hadn’t she just been lusting after another man? Hadn’t she been having intensely erotic dreams, dreams she’d never associate with Colin and their sex life in a million years?

In her room, she locked the door and mechanically stripped, changed into some shorts and a tank top, turned out the light, and plunged into bed. When the knock came at the door a few seconds later, along with Amanda’s pleas for her to open up and let her in, Emma reached for her headphones. She curled on her side and let the harsh, loud music crash into her, blocking everything out. Even though she clenched her eyelids shut, Emma knew for a fact she’d never sleep that night.

It’d been her secure relationship with Amanda she lost tonight, she realized numbly. The loss of a lackluster romance with Colin Atwater was nothing in comparison to that wound.

Death rarely followed a smooth downward decline. Emma was reminded of that the next day at work when Cristina joked with her tiredly when she woke up at around six in the evening, telling Emma she looked like something the cat had dragged in.

“Out partying last night with that boyfriend of yours, were you?” Cristina asked as Emma poured out her pain medication.

“No. I just couldn’t sleep,” Emma replied honestly. How could she rest with all the disturbing images she had swirling around her head? Colin’s hand moving along the side of her sister’s body, skimming her breast; the message in Montand’s stare as he’d stood in the headlights of her car; the silent, somehow miserable climax of that man—Vanni.

Yes. Her voyeuristic incident was still bothering her deeply, and she was doing everything in her power to repress it. It felt like her whole world had been toppled over.

“I understand from Margie that you had a good appetite today,” she said, changing the subject.

“A yogurt and half a supplement shake. Good if you’re an anorexic or a dying woman, maybe,” Cristina replied dryly. Neither of them spoke as Emma administered the medication and held up a glass with a straw while her patient laboriously drank a few mouthfuls of water.

“That was some storm last night,” Cristina gasped as she resettled on her pillows. “Maybe that’s what kept you awake?”

“Maybe it was the storm,” Emma said dubiously, setting the water glass on the table. What did she know about what she was feeling, after all? She’d briefly told an equally bewildered, tearful Amanda that this morning when her sister finally confronted her in the kitchen.

“It only happened that one time, Emma. I want you to know that.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better, that it happened once?”

“No! God, what you must be thinking and feeling—”

“I don’t know what I’m feeling, to be honest,” Emma said honestly.

“What do you mean you don’t know how you feel?” Amanda asked wildly. “You must be furious at me. At Colin, too.”

“I don’t care about Colin, Amanda,” she seethed.

She’d only been telling the truth about her bewilderment, though. Nothing and no one felt certain to Emma anymore. Even she herself had become a mystery in this past week. One thing of which she was certain: she felt no flaming jealousy when she thought of Amanda and Colin together, which seemed pitiful more than anything. Mostly, she felt a scoring sense of loss. She didn’t want to feel betrayed by her sister, given the fact that she now realized it’d been a mistake to stay with Colin.

But she did.

And she felt lonely, she realized. She’d never felt so alone in her life, even after her mother had died. It suddenly seemed that everyone was capable of entering a world of forbidden passion, while she herself was left behind, an outsider, too afraid to enter that complicated, bewildering place.

She’d been honest with Amanda about the lack of jealousy. It was Amanda she worried she’d lost, more than her safe relationship with Colin. Exactly what had gone through her sister’s head when she came to the conclusion that being with Colin was more important than her relationship with Emma?

Things were still rattling around precariously in Emma’s world later that evening as she spoke to Cristina.

“Would you like me to turn on the television?” she asked Cristina. She could use a little mindless distraction. Between lack of sleep and the most disturbing dreams when she finally had gone under for a meager few hours, she was feeling less than her sharp, feisty self.

“No. There’s been something I’ve been meaning to speak with you about,” Cristina said. “Remember when I asked you if you were going to preach to me about God and repentance and fire and brimstone?”

Emma grinned as she sat in the upholstered chair next to Cristina’s bed.

“Well, I don’t remember it precisely that way, but yeah . . . in general.”

“And you said you never preached to people because you don’t like to be preached to,” Cristina recalled. Emma nodded. “You sidestepped the issue.”

“What issue?”

“Of whether or not you believe in God. Are you religious?” Cristina inquired. Her thicker than usual accent informed Emma she was growing tired.

“I don’t think so, not in the classic sense. I’m very spiritual, though.”

“Why?” Cristina demanded.

“I’ve seen things. Experienced them.”

“You’ve experienced a lot of death,” Cristina filled in for her. “Because your mother was a nurse in that old folks’ home and you used to spend a lot of time with all those—what’s that charming word you Americans use—geezers,” Cristina recalled what Emma had told her when they conversed a few days ago.

“They weren’t just old people. Many were my friends.”

Cristina shook her head on the pillow. “It wasn’t right, for such a young girl to be exposed to so much disease and death. There’s something twisted about it. It was wrong of your mother to allow it to happen.”

“You say it was twisted because you’re afraid,” Emma said quietly.

Cristina glanced at her incredulously. “How can you sit there, a girl of twenty some odd years, fresh and dewy as a bud still on the rosebush, and say something like that to me?” she demanded hoarsely.

“I can say it because I know. There’s nothing to fear, Cristina.”

For a few seconds Cristina just stared at her in openmouthed awe. Emma saw the doubt slink back into her expression.

“Look at me,” Cristina demanded bitterly, glancing at her frail body beneath the sheets. “I’m skin and bones and seeping sores. My insides are being eaten away by cancer. How can you say death isn’t twisted and awful?”

“It is awful at times. Painful. Scary. But one never sees life more clearly than when death approaches. And maybe that’s the biggest gift of death—life’s final gift—if we can accept it.”

A shudder went through Cristina. “You say you’re not religious, but you certainly sound like you want me to repent of my sins before I go.”

Emma smiled. “I don’t know if I’d call them sins, necessarily, but if you have something you want to talk about, I’ll listen.”

“And not judge?” Cristina wondered skeptically.

“And not judge,” Emma repeated calmly. “You brought this up, Cristina. There must be something you want to get off your chest.”

Cristina stared at the closed curtains across the room, a faraway look in her eyes. “There are so many things,” she whispered, sounding uncharacteristically sad. Wistful. After a moment, she focused on Emma again. She looked very tired. “But I still don’t think it’s right.”

“What?” Emma asked, confused.

“For a young girl like you, so full of life, to surround herself with death. Maybe you’re the one who is afraid.”

“What do you mean?” Emma asked.

“Maybe you’re such an expert on death because you’re afraid to live,” Cristina said in a thready whisper. Her eyelids closed. She didn’t speak again for several seconds. Emma thought she slept, and grew lost in reflecting on Cristina’s words.

“You really do believe it, don’t you?” Cristina asked in a quavering voice after a minute. She opened her eyes. “That dying isn’t frightening?”

“No,” Emma said quietly. “I know it.”

Cristina studied her searchingly for several seconds, and then closed her eyes again. Emma watched over her as she sunk into a comfortable sleep.

Was there any truth to what she’d said about her being afraid of life? Her relationship with Colin for the past two years had kept her comfortable. Safe. That seemed glaringly obvious now. She’d clung to the familiarity. She’d needed security after the death of her mother. Maybe Colin was tired of being her security blanket and longed for something more risky. More passionate.

Who could blame him?

“Emma.”

She started from her thoughts and turned in her chair, surprised to be interrupted. Margie was already gone for the day. She and Cristina were usually alone on this floor of the house at night, and her patient was fast asleep. Mrs. Shaw stood just inside the threshold to the bedroom, perhaps rightfully aware she wouldn’t be welcome by Cristina.

“I’ve come with a message,” Mrs. Shaw said. “Mr. Montand says you forgot to leave your keys in your car, and so he can’t service it. He asked if I could collect them from you now.”

Emma stared, heat rushing into her cheeks. The decision of whether or not to leave her keys in her car this afternoon had taken on gargantuan significance in her head. She’d been a coward not to leave them. Wasn’t she a coward, period? Now it felt as if her vulnerability and confusion had been put on display for Mrs. Shaw, a very undesirable audience.

“I’ll get them,” Emma said breathlessly, hurrying to her purse. She handed her keys to the housekeeper a moment later. “Thank you for doing this.”

“He asked me to give you the entry code to the garage.” Mrs. Shaw said the five numbers like she was uttering a malediction at Emma, before she turned and glided out of the suite.

It’s not a big deal, Emma reminded herself later that night as she looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Debbie was there for her shift and had been briefed. Emma was free to go. She was just going to the garage to pick up her car. There was absolutely no reason to be nervous.

If you’re just going to claim your car and it’s not a big deal, how come you put on perfume and eyeliner? she asked herself snidely. She’d tried to put on some powder, too, to conceal the hated, light sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose, but eventually washed it off. Amanda could make them disappear when she applied Emma’s makeup, but Emma herself always botched it.

Thinking of the familiar little makeup ritual with her sister made hurt and anger slice through her. She stifled it with effort.

Her brown eyes looked especially huge, whether from anxiety or the eyeliner or the contrast of her pale face and blond hair, she wasn’t sure.

You look like a deer in headlights.

That’s what she felt like, too.

Annoyed by her uncalled-for nervousness, she left the bathroom and said good night to Debbie. Cristina was still sleeping.

Unlike last night, she could see thousands of stars in the sky when she walked out the rear entrance. Her memory served her correctly. She easily found the hidden garage door behind the grove of trees and shrubs and used the passcode. Her footsteps sounded abnormally loud on the concrete floor of the mudroom. When she entered the huge space, she saw her car parked first in line on the row of vehicles on the right, along with a pair of long, coverall-covered legs and brown work boots sticking out from beneath it. Rock music was playing. Emma looked around for the source of the music but saw no radio. There must be built-in speakers somewhere.

“Hello?” she called out uncertainly.

Montand rolled out from beneath her car on a creeper, catching himself with practiced ease on the bumper with a gloved hand. Emma held her breath as she watched him sit up. He gripped a wrench in one hand. Unlike last night, he was clean-shaven. The goatee had disappeared, but he looked no less piratical. His hair was a mess of finger-combed, rich brown waves. There was a streak of oil on his jaw. His aquamarine-colored eyes lowered over her slowly.

“Hi,” she repeated stupidly. She’d been wrong again.

He was clearly a very big deal.

He sprung up from the creeper and set down the wrench on a trolley filled with tools.

“She’s all ready for you,” he said, walking toward her. Emma unfastened her gaze from the vision of him removing the work gloves from large, well-shaped, very . . . capable-looking hands.

“How bad was it?” she asked.

“Not bad at all. Just needed someone to give it a little attention.”

She grimaced. “That hasn’t been me, unfortunately. So many things have been breaking down recently. I haven’t had the energy to deal with something that wasn’t broken. Yet,” she added sheepishly.

“What else is broken?” he asked, studying her from beneath a lowered brow.

“What isn’t?” she asked with a laugh. “I’ve put in about a hundred requests with my apartment owner for maintenance to come fix my backed-up kitchen sink, the hot-water heater, the icemaker . . . the list goes on, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of consequences for a landlord who just ignores a tenant’s requests.” She noticed his slanted brows and slight scowl and realized how whiny she probably sounded. “It’s not a big deal. I have a friend who has a dad that’s a cop in Cedar Bluff. He used to work for the Chicago Police Department. He said he’ll walk me through how to file a formal complaint with the housing commission against our apartment owner. Apparently, the owner isn’t the most upstanding citizen. Anyway, I can’t thank you enough for fixing the one thing I really couldn’t afford to have broken,” she said, waving at her car. “A hospice nurse spends a lot of time driving.”

“It’s a nice little car.”

Emma laughed. “Seriously? You were working way below your normal standards,” she said, nodding toward the other superexpensive, rare, and luxurious vehicles lined up in the garage. “Like having to eat cornflakes when you’re used to caviar.”

“I hate caviar.”

“Me, too.” She realized she was grinning at him idiotically and looked away. “Even though I only had it once.”

“You’re not missing much,” he said, flicking his gloves against the palm of his hand. Was he impatient to be gone?

“Well I can’t thank you enough, both for this and last night.” There didn’t seem to be a good place anywhere to rest her gaze.

“Do you want to see some of my cars?”

“Okay,” she said. Had he realized she was uncomfortable and tried to distract her from her embarrassment? That was nice, but somehow even more embarrassing. She fell into step beside him as he began to walk between the two rows of cars.

“You look pale,” he said bluntly. “Is everything okay?” He sounded stiff asking. With a flash of insight, she realized he wasn’t cold. Not really. He just wasn’t used to being solicitous.

He’d slowed down next to a gorgeous, shining ivory-colored vintage car.

“I . . . kind of had a rough night, that’s all,” she said shrugging, stopping because he’d stopped.

His blue-green eyes raked over her face. “Fight with your boyfriend?”

She exhaled in disgusted disbelief. She was either the most transparent person in the world, or those eyes of his really were X rays. “As it turns out, I don’t have a boyfriend anymore.”

“What?”

To her horror, she felt emotion tighten her throat. Had it lain in wait this whole time, ready to spring up on her at the moment she least wanted to feel it? She laughed to hide her sudden discomposure and looked away from his intent expression.

“I walked in on my boyfriend with . . . someone else last night.” She hadn’t breathed a word of the truth to anyone, why Michael Montand, of all people? “We’ve been together for two years,” she added lamely.

He muttered a muted, yet blistering curse.

“It’s okay,” she said, avoiding his stare. She feared she’d see pity on his bold features—or worse, impatience or bemusement at her personal admission to a near stranger. “I probably should have called things off between us a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you?” Montand asked.

“Because he was a safety net? Because I’m a coward?” she asked, a bark of hysterical laughter popping out of her throat.

She couldn’t stop herself from meeting his stare.

“You are not a coward,” he said quietly. As in many things he said, it was a proclamation. He stepped toward her, and her heart leapt.

“Come here,” he murmured.

Her feet moved as if of their own volition. His arms surrounded her. Her cheek pressed against the thick fabric of the cotton coveralls and his hard chest beneath them. The thought struck her that the sensation of the cloth against her cheek was familiar—his scent was—but then the dreaded emotion rose higher in her throat, and she turned all her resources into tamping it down.

She made a strangled sound and shuddered in humiliation. His arms tightened around her, the sensation divine and awful at once. She contained her misery, but just barely. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t told him about what was really bothering her—about who she’d found her boyfriend with—that she managed to not break down. Or maybe it was that he felt so amazing next to her that was distracting her so much. He opened his hand at her back and made a soothing motion against her spine, his fingers curving around her waist. His body felt so solid . . . so good. She’d never been pressed against someone so hard. He seemed like the most solid of things in a world spinning off its axis. His hand cupped her hip. Her thoughts fractured and shot off in a million directions when she felt his body stir. Hers replied in kind.

“Emma?” he asked tensely.

She leaned her head back and met his stare. His hand rose to cup her face, his thumb feathering her jaw. He felt it, too. It was right there in his eyes. The shared knowledge of their mutual need seemed to throb in the air between them like some kind of naked, shared heart.

“Yes,” she whispered her answer, parting her lips.

And his mouth was covering hers.