strength, that they made her feel like she had hope. How often had she clung to that image in her mind, summoning it to survive one more day? She hadn't seen his face or heard his voice. She'd just seen his eyes.
She'd thought she'd imagined him. She'd thought he was a figment of her imagination, created as a self-preservation tool to survive. But here he stood before her, a thousand times more powerful than he'd been in her mind. "You're real." She couldn't keep the awe out of her voice, and she couldn't stop herself from brushing her finger over his jaw. His skin was rough from the whiskers, but it was the warm, living flesh of a real man standing before her.
"Yeah." He didn't flinch, a statue allowing her to touch him however she wanted. But raw emotion pulsed in his eyes. Desire. Lust. And a male possessiveness so unyielding that her belly clenched in response. "You really don't remember me?"
She laid her palm on his chest, and he sucked in his breath. He slammed his hand over hers, pinning it against him.
"Bits and pieces are coming back," she admitted, her heart starting to race at the way he was invading her space. Heat flamed on her cheeks as a memory of him pinning her up against a wall flashed in her mind. The coldness of the plaster wall against her shoulders and back, the dark lighting of the rear hall of Deliverance, the bar she used to work at, the pulsing heat of his lean hips between her bare thighs...
Sudden heat pulsed through her belly, and she swallowed, embarrassed by the images flashing through her mind. The hot dampness of his mouth on her breasts. The raw strength of his body as he'd driven into her again, and again. The ache in her soul as he'd stripped aside her defenses...
Oh...wow...she hoped that hadn't really happened. For so many reasons. On so many levels. She was always half-insane when she came back to life, and it was always hard to figure out what she'd imagined and what was real. The images of the passionate love-fest between her and Ian had to be her imagination. It had to be...but as she felt the thud of his heart beneath her palm, all she could think of was that she also wanted it to have been real. Crap! This was not good. Quickly, she cleared her throat and tried to pull her hand away.
He didn't let her. Instead, his fingers curled around hers, gripping her more tightly, making her pulse jump. "No," he said, his voice raw. "Don't withdraw. Not yet." A sudden chill rippled through Alice as droplets of water beaded down his temples. His pupils were dilated, and his skin was deadly cold. "Tell me you remember me," he whispered urgently. "Even if it's a lie."
Alice swallowed, her heart beginning to pound. Something was wrong with him. So terribly wrong. His skin was too cold. His eyes too tormented. What was wrong? She wanted to help him, even though she didn't understand why.
But she couldn't lie to him. She wasn't capable of it. Not even to help the man who had just saved her life. Not even if he was dying right in front of her. Oh, no. What if he was dying? Sudden terror coursed through her and she yanked her hand back, stumbling away from him. "Are you dying? Please, don't tell me you're dying." She couldn't go through that again. Not again. Not with someone who had just saved her life.
Ian fisted his hands and stared at her. His eyes were hooded with agony. "I'm not going to die," he said roughly, "but it would be incredibly helpful of you to at least pretend that my lovemaking was so earth-shattering that you haven't been able to think of anything else since."
"I have moments where I have flashes of it," she admitted, still backing away from him, needing to put distance between them. "But I'm not sure what really happened and what didn't."
"Moments? Flashes?" He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if he were summoning intense inner strength to fight off a demon she couldn't see. "That's it? That's all you've got?"
His words were light, a quip, but Alice felt the depth of torment beneath the surface. Something was terribly wrong. Why did he need her to remember? Quickly, she tried to explain. "When I die, I lose many of my short-term memories, or they