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rim.
    Her passport. Her passport, her driver’s license, her company IDs. He’d taken her briefcase and her purse—he’d taken all her identification documents.
    “Oh hell,” was the best she could do as she rubbed her hands over her face. That just made it all perfect.
    She yanked the old-fashioned chain plug out of the drain of the claw-foot tub. She was steaming now, and the burst of angry energy had her getting to her feet, reaching for a towel, before her wrenched knee buckled under her. Biting back a yelp, she braced a hand against the wall and sat on the lip of the tub, the towel dropping in to slop in the water.
    The tears wanted to come, from frustration, from the pain, from the sudden sharp fear that came stabbing back. She sat naked and shivering, her breath trembling out on little hitching gasps until she’d controlled them.
    Tears wouldn’t help her get back her papers, or soothe her bruises or get her to Florence. She sniffled them back and wrung out the towel. Carefully now, she used her hands to lift her legs out of the tub, one at a time. She gained her feet as clammy sweat popped out on her skin, causing the tears to swim close again. But she stood, clutching the sink for support, and took stock of herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.
    There were bruises on her arms. She didn’t remember him grabbing her there, but the marks were dark gray, so logically he had. Her hip was black-and-blue and stunningly painful. That, she remembered, was a result of being rammed back against the car.

    Her knees were scraped and raw, the left one unattractively red and swollen. She must have taken the worst of the fall on it, twisted it. The heels of her hands burned from their rude meeting with the gravel of the drive.
    But it was the long, shallow slice on her throat that had her head going light, her stomach rolling with fresh nausea. Fascinated and appalled, she lifted her fingers to it. Just a breath from the jugular, she thought. Just a breath from death.
    If he’d wanted her to die, she would have died.
    And that was worse than the bruising, the sick throbbing aches. A stranger had held her life in his hands.
    “Never again.” She turned away from the mirror, hobbled over to take her robe from the brass hook by the door. “I’m never going to let it happen again.”
    She was freezing, and wrapped herself as quickly as she could in the robe. As she was struggling to belt it, a movement outside the window had her head jerking up, her heart thundering.
    He’d come back.
    She wanted to run, to hide, to scream for Andrew, to curl herself into a ball behind a locked door. And with her teeth gritted, she eased closer to the window, looked out.
    It was Andrew, she saw with a dizzying wave of relief. He was wearing the plaid lumberman’s jacket he used when he split wood or hiked on the cliffs. He’d turned the floodlights on, and she could see something glinting in his hand, something he swung as he strode along over the yard.
    Puzzled, she pressed her face against the window.
    A golf club? What in the world was he doing outside marching across the snowy lawn with a golf club?
    Then she knew, and love flooded into her, soothing her more than any painkiller.
    He was guarding her. The tears came back. One spilled over. Then she saw him stop, pull something from his pocket, lift it.
    And she watched him take a long swig from a bottle.
    Oh, Andrew, she thought, as her eyes closed and her heart sank. What a mess we are.

    • • •
    It was the pain that woke her, bright pops of it that banged out of her knee. Miranda fumbled on the light, shook out pills from the bottle she’d put on her bedside table. Even as she swallowed them she realized she should have taken Andrew’s advice and gone to the hospital, where some sympathetic doctor would have written her a prescription for some good, potent drugs.
    She glanced at the luminous dial of her clock, saw it was after three. At least the