Morgan, are you all right?” The words floated toward her from across the bayou. Floated on time and space.
She longed to stay where she was. In his arms, wrapped in the pleasant but pungent aroma that clung to his skin. His scent. For the rest of her life, she would know him by that familiar scent.
Then his hand closed over her shoulder, his fingers burning into her flesh as he gently shook her.
Her eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring up at a face that was the same as her lover, yet not the same.
Chapter Three
Morgan gripped the edge of the car seat, trying to anchor herself, trying to remember who she was—and where she was.
Her name floated into her mind.
She was Linette Sonnier.
Linette.
For a moment, it felt right. Good. Comforting. She liked being the woman in the dream. Then her sense of rightness was shattered as her consciousness swept her back into the terror of the flood waters.
In her mind, the current caught her—carried her away. And she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
God, no. She was going to die.
She fought the force of the flood. Fought the terror.
“Morgan! Morgan!”
Her eyes flew open. She wasn’t in the water. She was safe
in the car. She was Morgan Kirkland, wearing a borrowed robe. She wasn’t someone named Linette.
Relief flooded through her as she clutched the importance of that fact to her breast.
She was Morgan Kirkland. She hadn’t drowned. She was safe. And as she absorbed that blessed fact, others followed. She worked for Decorah Security, and for some mysterious reason Frank Decorah had wanted her to take this assignment for Andre Gascon.
And he was standing beside her. He was the one who had pulled her out of the water.
She looked up at him and blinked.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and again she was thrown into confusion as images blended and reformed.
He was Andre. Not the man in her vision. The man who had hired Decorah Security. But she must remember there was another man named Andre. Long ago. And she loved him.
No! She loved her husband—Trevor Kirkland. She tried to hold on to his image. But it was like trying to hold on to a picture printed in water.
Deliberately, as she had so many times over the past two years, she brought back the last glorious weekend they had spent together down at the shore.
They had taken a few quiet walks on the beach. But mostly they had spent hours holed up in an expensive motel room, making love, ordering Chinese food and pizza and champagne.
He had said he would come back to her. And she had believed him. Then she’d heard about an uprising at a prison compound in Afghanistan, and she’d prayed that Trevor wasn’t there—that he was all right. But when two men in business suits had come to her house, her whole body had gone cold. She’d known what they were going to tell her—that her husband was dead. Nothing had mattered after that. Not her friends. Not her job. Not her own life.
Now suddenly, everything had changed, and she didn’t like it.
“Morgan, are you all right?”
A man was speaking. His name was Andre. The owner of Belle Vista.
Pushing herself up straighter, she cleared her throat and gave the only answer she could, the only answer she wanted to give. “I’m fine.”
“You looked . . . spacey.”
“I’m fine!” she repeated, this time snapping out the words. She had always known exactly who she was and what she believed.
And she would not allow herself to be confused.
Yet she recognized that something had happened inside her mind—something beyond her control.
It had to do with the robe she was wearing. She had put it on, and her consciousness had slipped away from the here and now.
She couldn’t explain it. And cold fingers of fear clawed at her insides. Grimly, she shoved them away, as she had shoved so many emotions away.
A man stood over her, his face anxious. She had dreamed of him a little while ago. Well, not him. Someone who looked a lot like him. A guy with the same name, but dressed in an old-timey shirt, pants and boots. Like somebody out of a big-bucks historical movie. Maybe he was playing a country gentleman from the late nineteenth century.
She gave a small mental shrug. Why try to fix the episode in time? It was just a dream she’d made up because she was having a bad time—here and now in the