Julia shivered, half from desire and half because the temperature had dropped precipitously.
Frank noticed, but she had the feeling he noticed everything about her. âGo upstairs to the master suite where Iâm staying. There should be a sweater in the closet. Iâll bring these blankets downstairs.â
Back to her fantasy room. She ducked in and grabbed a yellow fleece pullover that made her look like a hazard sign.
Returning downstairs, she noticed Frank had set the blankets on the big leather couch in front of the fireplace and was eyeing the iron firewood rack. âWe donât have much wood inside. Iâll go to the shed in back to bring more in.â
âDo you need me to help?â
He laughed. âYouâre asking a Portuguese man if he wants a woman to help him with heavy lifting? Remember where you are.â
âHmmph.â As if she could forget the near castle they were in. âWould you like me to cook or clean something while you do all the manly work around here?â
He gave her a long look up and down her body. âYou make me wish I could do even more manly work for you.â With a wink, he disappeared out the kitchen door.
MARIE DONOVAN is a Chicago-area native who got her fill of tragedies and unhappy endings by majoring in opera/vocal performance and Spanish literature. As an antidote to all that gloom, she read romance novels voraciously throughout college and graduate school.
Donovan worked for a large suburban public library for ten years as both a cataloguer and a bilingual Spanish story-time presenter. She graduated magna cum laude with two bachelorâs degrees from a Midwestern liberal arts university and speaks six languages. She enjoys reading, gardening and yoga.
Please visit the authorâs website at www.mariedonovan.com.
JULIA COOPER SQUEEZED her eyes shut and blinked hard a few times as she sat at a small café table. She couldnât have seen what sheâd thought at first. Ever since her concussion, she didnât quite trust how her optic nerve was shooting messages back to her cerebral cortex. Misbe-having brain. Had to be playing tricks on her.
Even so, her heart still pounded as the man walked down the cobblestone street. He chatted with an older man, hands moving animatedly. Darned if he didnât look like Frank, at least from the back, black hair curling over his collar as if heâd forgotten to get a haircut. The man disappeared around a corner before she saw his face. Of course, all the men on this Azorean island of São Miguel, St. Michaelâs island, were dark, their sunny Portuguese heritage transplanted to a cool and misty string of rocks in the middle of the North Atlan- tic. Although the chain of islands stretched almost four hundred miles from end to end, São Miguel, the largest, was less than three hundred square miles in area according to her father, a huge geography buff.
Did the Azorean men ever have some ancestral longing for the hot, dry mainland, she wondered idly. A remnant of mitochondrial DNA passed from their mothers that made them crave the juice of blood oranges running down their chins as the Mediterranean sun beat on their heads?
She shook her headâcautiously, though. Fanciful thoughts for a decidedly unfanciful woman. Perhaps she was experiencing one of those moments that the poets described, where magic and reality entwined, the hazy time between waking and sleeping when you dreamed strange thingsâor were they dreams?
And what was reality? Was it that past life of hers in Boston, that world of white fluorescent, green scrubs and red blood? Blood and oranges. Blood oranges. She had a sudden craving for citrus, a craving for sun.
Or was it a Vitamin C deficiency? Ah, there was her normal nature asserting itself. She laughed softly, not wishing to appear as flaky on the outside as she sometimes felt on the inside.
It was normal, they had assured her. Normal, she scoffed. As if anything that had happened to her could be called normal.
But she was here, not just in the Azores, but here here, alive and breathing. Still on this earth. And that was something. What, she couldnât exactly say.
Frank, the recesses of her mind whispered to her. Francisco, they insisted. And that was what she had feared, coming back hereâthe insistence of her thoughts. Not just her thoughts, her emotions.
Enough. Julia set her coffee cup down with a resolute clink and stood. Good, no more dizziness today. But she was a bit tired. Fatigue is your body reminding you to rest. She had learned that in nursing school and grad school, but mostly ignored it. Her reserves were much lower now than back then.
Home again, home again. She picked her way along the uneven street, stopping to peer into store windows. Around her, friends greeted each other with affectionate cheek kisses, talking animatedly in the local Azorean dialect. She remembered a couple of words from when she was a child but not enough to understand their conversation.