Chapter 1

      Why wasn’t he dead?

      Nick stared up at the featureless white ceiling of his hospital room as the beeping of a heart monitor punctuated the panic flowing through his veins. Why hadn’t they killed him? Why five years of captivity instead—in a shipping container, on a cargo ship, floating around in international waters?

      And why couldn’t he remember what came just before his kidnapping? The doctors told him he’d sustained a serious head injury at some point during his incarceration. Whether a captor had hit him during an interrogation or he’d fallen during one of the massive open-sea storms that had tossed him like a cork inside his steel prison, he had no recollection.

      He coughed thickly. Supposedly, his pneumonia was mostly under control now. It had been touch and go there for a while. But the worry lurking in his nurses’ eyes had eased in the past day or so. He gathered he was out of the woods, which was good news.

      They were still working on clearing his body of various other infections and trying to restore normal function to his digestive tract. The only way he was putting on weight was via the massive calorie infusions running through his IV.

      They’d cut his dark hair and shaved off his matted beard, revealing the unnatural paleness of his usually olive complexion. The psychiatrists said he might never remember the lost time, a memory gap spanning approximately two years prior to his capture and the first three years or so of his imprisonment. Funny how the shrinks were trying so hard to retrieve those memories and he was trying equally hard not to retrieve them. Absolute certainty vibrated ominously in his gut, warning him that whatever lurked in that black hole of lost time was best left there.

      Was whatever he’d forgotten the reason he was still alive? Had his captors been waiting for him to remember something? Or was there some other, more sinister reason that someone had been hell-bent on imprisoning him?

      Maybe he was just being paranoid. Although it wasn’t paranoia if someone was really after him. Even now, he expected his keepers to burst into his hospital room and haul him back to his box. The idea actually made a certain sick sense. If his captors had orders to keep him alive and he’d gotten too sick to treat on the ship, they could’ve cooked up this whole rescue ruse to fatten him up and get him healthy enough to toss back in Hell.

      Laura Delaney—the woman who’d rescued him from his metal prison and one of the only faces he remembered from the lost years—claimed the two of them had been lovers before he’d disappeared. She’d introduced him to a little boy who looked so much like him it was hard to discount her story that he was the child’s father. He desperately hoped it was true.

      She was an extremely attractive woman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine dating someone like her. But was she for real? Or was she part of his captors’ evil head games? Was she here to trick him into revealing whatever secrets his subconscious was guarding so fiercely?

      If only there was someone he could trust, really trust, to tell him what was real and what was not.

      And then there was the troubling fact that he knew for certain his name wasn’t Nick Cass. Nor had he grown up entirely in Rhode Island. But Laura apparently believed both to be true. He must’ve told the lies himself. But why? If he and Laura were lovers like she claimed, why hadn’t he told her his real name or the most basic facts about his past? Why the deception?

      Everywhere he turned, there were only questions and more questions. Frustration sang through his blood as sharply as his secret hope that his freedom, at least, was real. But he dared not share that hope with anyone. Not until he knew if anyone at all was telling him the truth.

      Laura paused outside the hospital room, steeling herself not to react to Nick’s emaciated state. It wasn’t his fault he looked fresh out of a Nazi concentration camp, and he didn’t deserve to see her cringe at the sight of his skeletal frame, hollow face or his shadowed blue eyes. God, his eyes. The haunted look in them was terrifying. Would he carry it with him forever?

      The shrinks doubted he would recover the years stripped from his memory. But they felt he should recover enough to be a functional member of society once more with time and counseling. He should recover. Not he would.

      At this point, she didn’t care if his memory ever came back. She just wanted him back. The man who’d swept her off her feet in a whirlwind romance in Paris. The man who’d captured her heart and taught her what true love could be. If even part of that amazing man came back to her, it would be better than the hollow shell of a man on the other side of the door. She vowed to be grateful for whatever piece of him survived his ordeal. It was surely better than having no part of him at all. The past five years of waiting and wondering had been pure hell.

      She knew he wasn’t convinced yet that his rescue was real in spite of that first night of freedom they’d shared. They’d gone to her estate, where he’d bathed and eaten. Then she’d made love to him with all the pent-up passion and relief in her soul.

      They’d both cried that night. She’d interpreted his tears as a cathartic release, but she’d been wrong. The shrinks told her he believed that night to have been some sort of elaborate torture by his captors to taunt him with what freedom would be like. Apparently, he’d been crying because the idea of going back into his box after what the two of them had shared had finally broken him. She’d broken him.

      The man hadn’t even known who she was, and she’d been so caught up in her euphoria at finding him that she’d never slowed down enough to realize how lost he’d been. Guilt at her thoughtlessness rolled through her. She’d always been a take-charge, full-speed-ahead kind of person. But that tendency had hurt the man she loved. Part of his paranoid state now was her fault. When would she learn to rein herself in? Had her impulsiveness cost her his trust forever?

      She took a deep breath and pushed open the door. “Hey, handsome. How are you feeling today?”

      “You’re back.” The abject relief in his voice broke her heart a little. What he clearly meant was, “So I get to live another day in this beautiful illusion? Thank God.”

      “The doctors say you can go home soon. You’ll still need around-the-clock medical care, but I can hire nurses to look after you.”

      Terror flashed in his eyes at the mention of leaving the hospital.

      She pretended not to see it and asked lightly, “Do you think when you actually come home to live with me and Adam you’ll believe all of this is real? That you’re free and you have a family?”

      He answered slowly, “I don’t know. I hope so.”

      Hey, progress! He’d spoken of his feelings. Maybe he’d finally accepted that he was not living in a dream or a terrible trick. She picked up his bony hand and cradled it in hers. It had been so strong once, so capable of giving her pleasure, so confident in its gestures. She murmured, “I love you, Nick. If you believe nothing else, please believe that.”

      “Even if you’re lying, the notion makes me happy.”

      She smiled down at him. “Give it some time. Give