Strangers in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

she poured one final cup of coffee and carried it with her out onto the porch, carefully keeping her gaze cast downward so she wouldn’t spill the hot liquid. Yeah, she thought wryly, that was a great excuse to keep from seeing the lake first thing when she opened the door.
    She kept her eyes downcast as she opened the front door and felt the cool morning air wash overher bare feet. She had simply pulled on her nightgown again after leaving the shower, and the thin material was no match for the chill that the sun hadn’t quite dispelled.
    All right. Time to do it. Firmly gripping the cup like a lifeline, she slowly raised her eyes so that her gaze slid first across the floor of the porch, then onto the overgrown grass, and then down the slight slope toward the lake. She deliberately concentrated on only a narrow field of vision, so that everything else was blurred. There was the willow tree off to the left, and—
    He was standing beneath the spreading limbs, just as he had in her dream.
    Thea’s heart almost stopped. Dear God, now her dreams had started manifesting themselves during her waking hours, in the form of hallucinations. She tried to blink, tried to banish the vision, but all she could do was stare in frozen horror at the man standing as motionless as a statue, his aquamarine eyes shining across the distance.
    Then he moved, and she jerked in reaction as she simultaneously realized two things, each as disturbing in a different way as the other.
    One, the “vision” was Richard Chance. The figureunder the tree was a real human being, not a figment of her imagination.
    Two, she hadn’t realized it before, but last night she had been able to see her dream lover’s face for the first time, and it had been Richard Chance’s face.
    She calmed her racing heartbeat. Of course her subconscious had chosen his features for those of the dream lover; after all, she had been startled that very day by the similarity of their eyes. This quirk of her dreams, at least, was logical.
    They faced each other across the dewy grass, and a slow smile touched the hard line of his mouth, almost causing her heartbeat to start galloping again. For the sake of her circuits, she hoped he wouldn’t smile too often.
    Then Richard Chance held out his hand to her, and said, “Come.”

4

    W hat little color she had, drained from Thea’s face. “What did you say?” she whispered.
    He couldn’t possibly have heard her. He was standing a good thirty yards away; she had barely been able to hear the one word he’d spoken, though somehow the sound had been perfectly clear, as if she had heard it inside herself as well as out. But the expression on his face changed subtly, to something more alert, his eyes more piercing. His outstretched hand suddenly seemed more imperious, though his tone became cajoling. “Thea. Come with me.”
    Shakily she stepped back, intending to closethe door. This had to be pure chance, but it was spooky.
    â€œDon’t run,” he said softly. “There’s no need to. I won’t hurt you.”
    Thea had never considered herself a coward. Her brothers would have described her as being a touch too foolhardy for her own good, stubbornly determined to climb any tree they could climb, or to swing out on a rope as high as they did before dropping into the lake. Despite the eerie similarity between the dream and what he’d just now said, her spine stiffened, and she stared at Richard Chance as he stood under the willow tree, surrounded by a slight mist. Once again, she was letting a weird coincidence spook her, and she was tired of being afraid. She knew instinctively that the best way to conquer any fear was to face it—hence her trip to the lake—so she decided to take a good, hard look at Mr. Chance to catalog the similarities between him and her dream lover. She looked, and almost wished she hadn’t.
    The resemblance wasn’t