days she’d been forced to spend at the damn place.
But there had been nothing shadowlike about those nights he’d sat beside her bed and fought off the dragons that attacked from the darkness. There had been moments when she had hated how strong and dominant he had been during that period when she had been so weak. But there had been other times that he had seemed her only path to survival…
* * *
Nairobi Hospital
She screamed.
Darkness.
Pain.
She couldn’t move!
She was smothering!
She sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, her hands tearing off the sheet.
“No.” Novak was suddenly sitting on the bed beside her. “You’re fine. Only another dream, Jill.” He was holding her, rocking her back and forth. “I’m here with you. Nothing can hurt you.”
She was clutching at him. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could hardly breathe. “I hate this.” But she couldn’t let him go yet. Another minute…Then she would be strong again.
No, she couldn’t allow herself that time. It was another sign of weakness. She drew a deep breath and pushed him away from her. “Thank you. I’m okay now. I don’t need you any longer.” Need. How she detested that word. “In fact, I don’t know why you’re here anyway. As you said, it was only a nightmare. I’m not a child who can’t deal with bogeymen.” She leaned back against the pillows and said impatiently, “For that matter, I shouldn’t even be in this hospital. It’s been three days, Novak. I thought I’d be in and out of here in a matter of hours. Why won’t they release me?”
“You know that besides severe bruising you had a cracked rib and a few other less obvious problems. I told them not to let you go until they could promise me that they’d done all they could for you.” He got off her bed and settled back in his chair. “I guarantee they didn’t want to break that promise. I tend to get a little testy. Now go back to sleep.” He paused. “Same nightmare?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She was glad of the darkness. His stare was always laser sharp, and she didn’t want to face it right now. When he came to her at night, he was always only a deep, soothing voice, a strong hand that wove a barrier to keep out the weakness and the terror. “Tell them to let me leave here, Novak. I would never have come if I’d known you’d make me a prisoner. You even have a shrink coming in to talk to me every day. I don’t need all this. I’m not one of your agents. Give me a week or two on my own, and I’ll work it out for myself.”
“No harm in getting a little therapy. The doctor says what you’re going through is PTSD. I think talking to the psychiatrist is doing you good. I’ve noticed that you’re not as tense as you were that first day.” He added, “And only one nightmare so far tonight.”
“I can work it out for myself,” she repeated. “That’s the way it has to be. It’s my story, and I have to tell it.”
“What?”
She hadn’t meant to say that, it had just tumbled out. What did it matter? He had learned more intimate things about her during these last days. “When I was a kid, I had trouble understanding everything that was happening to me. But I loved books and reading, and the stories always made sense to me. There seemed to be a reason for everything, and I thought the writers had a kind of magic that could always make it that way if they tried hard enough.” She added, “And it still makes sense to me to think of myself as writing my own story, incomplete, a work in progress, but totally in control of who I am.” She shrugged. “Weird, huh?”
“Interesting. And totally logical for a premier storyteller.”
“And you’re probably being polite and think that I’m nuts. That’s okay, it works for me.”
“And that’s all that’s important.”
“See? You’re being polite. Look, you’re a busy man, you don’t need to be wasting your time on me. I’m going to leave here tomorrow and go back to Maldara.”
“We’ll see.” He leaned forward and took her hand. “Maybe if you don’t have another nightmare tonight. So concentrate on keeping them all at bay.”
“I’m going to leave tomorrow.” But she found her hand instinctively tightening in his grasp. He had been her anchor in the storm,