“Brie.” Reeve started to reach out for her, then thought better of it. “Tell me what else you remember.”

She looked at him then and her face was as it had been in the hospital. Colorless and strained. “Nothing. I only remember struggling and the smells. I can’t be sure if I killed him. There’s nothing after the struggle, nothing before.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked beyond him. “If the man raped me, I don’t remember it.”

He wanted to swear again, and barely controlled the impulse. Everything she said made his little power play of a few moments before seem hard and crude. “You weren’t sexually assaulted,” he told her in brisk, practical tones. “The doctors were very thorough.”

Relief threatened to come in tears. She held them back. “But they can’t tell me if I killed a man or not.”

“No. Only you can—when you’re ready.”

She merely nodded, then forced herself to look at him again. “You’ve killed before.”

He took another cigarette and lit it with a barely restrained violence. “Yeah.”

“You—in your work. It was necessary for defense, protection?”

“That’s right.”

“When it’s necessary, it doesn’t leave any scars, does it?”

He could lie, make it easy for her. He was tempted to. When he looked at her, her eyes were so troubled. Inadvertently he’d forced a memory out of her. A dark, horrible memory. Did that make him responsible? Hadn’t he already chosen to be responsible?

He could lie, but when she learned the truth, it would be that much worse. Yes, he’d chosen to be responsible. “It leaves scars,” he said briefly, and rose, taking her hand as he did. “You can live with scars, Brie.”

She’d known it. Even before she’d asked, before he’d answered, she’d known it. “Do you have many?”

“Enough. I decided I couldn’t live with any more.”

“So you bought a farm.”

“Yeah.” He tossed down the cigarette. “I bought a farm. Maybe next year I’ll even plant something.”

“I’d like to see it.” She saw his quick, half-amused look, and felt foolish. “Sometime, perhaps.”

He wanted her to, and felt foolish. “Sure, sometime.”

Brie let her hand stay in his as they walked through the gardens, back toward the white, white walls of the palace.

Chapter 6

Barefoot, wrapped only in a thin silk robe, Brie sat dutifully on the bed while Dr. Franco took her blood pressure. His hands were deft, his manner kind, almost fatherly. Still, she wasn’t entirely accepting of the weekly examinations by her family’s doctor. Nor was she resigned to the biweekly sessions with his associate, Dr. Kijinsky, the eminent and scholarly psychiatrist. She wasn’t an invalid, and she wasn’t ill.

True, she tired more easily than she might have liked, but her strength was coming back. And her sessions with the renowned analyst, Dr. Kijinsky, were no more than conversations. Conversations, she mused, that were really no more than a waste of time. And it was time, after all, that she was so determined to recover.