“Yes, darlin’. You must’ve fallen asleep out here. The rest of the house is asleep.”

“Not you.” She backed away from him.

“No, not me. I don’t sleep well. You know that.”

Yes, she knew that. Even in sleep he had always seemed to wrestle some imaginary force of life.

She released an involuntary whisper. “Hmm.” It was a sound easily heard in bed, asleep, half-asleep.

He pulled her back toward him. “God, Amy, I’ve missed you. I never thought I would see you again, but I’ve never stopped missing you—not once. Shit, you still make me lose my breath.”

“Nick, don’t.”

“I wanted to hate you when you didn’t come.”

His voice came low, raspy, and the whirling darkness that she was afraid would encompass her now rolled over her.

Her voice came from the other side of the lake. “Didn’t come where?”

“For me.”

A star fell—a flash between the clouds.

“What?”

“When you didn’t answer the telegram, I understood. I did. I was not the man you thought . . .”

Her body fell into him. She’d placed her desire for him in a honeycombed labyrinth, so deep below her life that she shook with its rising force. Below her breast, inside the V-shaped convex of her ribs grew a widening shakiness, a quiver that expanded, without possible escape. With the growing feeling also came a serrated pain that had grown and changed while hidden in the dark; it now appeared as anger.

The anger and desire braided together, fighting each other, leaving her without strength to push him away. Nick slid his hand where the cotton of her T-shirt billowed away, forming an air pocket between the vertebrae of her spine—warmth spread as evenly and firmly through her body as her mind. The small groan came from the bodily memory of him.

His body pressed against hers. She closed her eyes to overlapping images behind her lids: his wide hand splayed across a white pillow, his sandals on a hardwood floor, granules of sand encrusted in the sole of a shoe lying on its side, the smooth white porcelain of a tub, his hand reaching above it, pulling her down.

His lips found hers in the dark; she responded with visceral memory as a shock of anger broke from the woven pattern. She pushed him away.

“No.” She made an unconvincing strangled sound. A telegram, he’d said something about a telegram. “What telegram?”

“The one I sent.”

“I never . . . got a telegram.”

He released her, sank to a lounge chair and groaned. “Oh, God, no.”

In the silence between them, something undefined began to move toward her, growing exponentially. She shivered, backed away from him. His bent body punched the dark like an old bruise. Panic rose from a well within her pelvis. Whatever he had to say—she couldn’t hear it. Now sure of the dock and where to step, she ran.