She forced the feelings away as she stared up at the lofty ceiling. She was living in Fairbanks, Alaska now, not a shack near the equator. She was safe, dammit. On someone’s uncomfortable couch with a woolen blanket thrown over her to ward off the chill.

The drapes were pulled closed revealing only a sliver of dull light. The sun wasn’t up yet, but this far north, in January, that didn’t mean much.

The headache retreated a little. She shivered beneath the blanket as she lay on the lumpy, musty-smelling couch. The walls had fake wood panels, and Christmas baubles hung off a rack of antlers that were mounted over the fireplace. A man’s jacket lay draped over the nearby chair, next to her own green, goose-down parka.

This was Martin Carstairs’s living room, she realized. He’d held a potluck in December and pretty much everyone in the grad student program at the Geophysical Institute and the Department of Geophysics, University of Alaska Fairbanks, had attended, in addition to many of the professors and technical staff.

Slowly, she turned her head and blinked at the gray ashes in the lifeless grate, trying to remember how she’d come to be here as she huddled deeper under the scratchy covering. She’d gone to a Burns Supper last night with other grad students. She remembered dancing with Martin and a bunch of other friends. Ceilidh dancing. The steps had been intricate and unfamiliar but the atmosphere exhilarating. Unlike the rest of her existence, she’d started to find a rhythm in the rambunctious reels.

It had been fun, and fun was something she didn’t do very often. Even before what had happened last summer, she’d always put her studies first. She’d needed scholarships and grants to stay in school and that reality had always been enough to keep her focused on work. Fun came in a poor second place.

Except…except that being abducted and raped had plunged her into the realization that life really might be too short. Too short to ignore the total absence of pleasure in her existence.

Between Haley Cramer, her friends here at the university, her support group, her therapists, and a couple of beloved FBI negotiators, she’d been figuring out how to get back to being the person she was before her abduction. It wasn’t easy, but she was making progress.

The dance had been very entertaining. Even the haggis had tasted better than she’d anticipated, like the homemade sausage her mother used to make when Darby had been a child. Her glance moved to the table and rested on two glasses, each with a small amount of amber liquid in them. Behind them stood a half empty bottle of twelve-year-old single malt. That explained the weird taste in her mouth and the throb of her temples. The whisky had definitely been less to her liking than the haggis. She wasn’t much of a drinker. Her father had never allowed alcohol in the house, probably because he’d have drowned himself in it years ago given half the chance.