Obsession by Karen Robards

was frowning, she saw, and he wore glasses with narrow wire frames. The penlight, turned off now, was in his hand.
    Even though his features were still slightly indistinct—that was the fault of her vision, she decided, as much as the absence of adequate lighting—she felt an immediate strong sense of familiarity.
    Along with a little frisson of—something. Tension of some sort. Not a good kind of tension.
    “Hi there,” he said as their eyes met and held. There was definitely some kind of connection between them, but the harder she tried to latch on to it, the more elusive the memory became. Then, after the briefest of pauses in which he almost seemed to be waiting for something, he turned on the small lamp near the bed. Blinking in its sudden low-wattage glow, she realized that she was in a hospital room. It was all there, the heavily curtained windows limned with grayish light that managed to creep in around the edges, the dark TV affixed to the wall at the end of the bed, the banks of medical equipment, none of which, fortunately, seemed to be attached to her. Oh, wait, there was one narrow tube snaking out from the inside of her right elbow. Following it from where it emerged from beneath a strip of white tape up to the plastic bag half-full of clear liquid that hung from a shiny metal pole beside the bed, she realized that she was hooked up to an IV. Not good. Before she had time to think any more about the ramifications of that, he added, “Remember me?”
    “Yes,” she said instantly, because she did, absolutely, positively, no doubt about it at all. Then she got stuck again. Try as she might to pull his identity out of her subconscious, it wouldn’t quite come.
    But that little frisson of something was still there. Was it . . . hostility?
    Blinking in consternation, she concentrated as his features came into sharper focus. What she registered first was an overall impression that here was a good-looking guy. His eyes, which narrowed as he watched her, were medium blue beneath the thin, rectangular lenses that didn’t distort them in any appreciable way. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which came partly from the sun but mostly, she thought, from the intentness with which he was regarding her. They were nice eyes, mild, intelligent, maybe a little reserved, set off by short, stubby, fair lashes and unruly slashes of ash-brown brows that formed thick, straight lines across his forehead. He had high cheekbones, a long, masculine, slightly off-center nose, a thin-lipped mouth, and an angular jaw with a stubborn-looking chin. He was tall, maybe six-one, although it was difficult to judge when she was lying on her back looking up at him, broad of shoulder, lean of build, probably in his late thirties. There was the faintest hint of stubble on his chin, more three-o’clock than five-o’clock shadow. He wore a limp blue oxford-cloth shirt with a slightly frayed button-down collar, no tie, open at the throat, with a white doctor ’s coat pulled on over it.
    It was the coat that gave her memory the nudge it needed.
    “Dan . . . Howard.” The name popped into her mind on a wave of relief. “Dr. Daniel Howard.”
    Once she had the name, everything else fell into place. Of course, he was her next-door neighbor, the physician. He had lived in the adjoining town house since—when? Maybe the beginning of the summer. Not that she had seen a whole lot of him. She couldn’t quite remember specific occasions, but probably they had introduced themselves once, then said hi whenever they happened to cross paths dragging trash cans to the curb and such. Had they had words at one time? Maybe his trash cans had blocked her garage, or her cat had walked on his car, or something? A minor dispute of that nature would account for the tiny flicker of antagonism, if that was indeed what it was, that had flared up inside her when she had first set eyes on him. Whatever, it couldn’t have been too serious, because it