Obsession by Karen Robards Page B

getting out of here soon, maybe even as soon as later today.”
    “Today?” To her dismay, she drew a blank there, too. What day was it, anyway? Anxiously, she realized she couldn’t recall. Here was something she definitely should know—the date—but she didn’t. The thought that she didn’t know things she should was starting to really worry her. “Which is . . . ?”
    “Saturday, July twenty-ninth.” He glanced at his watch. “Six-forty-seven a.m.”
    The specter of a clock reading one-fourteen in glowing red numbers on a black background flashed into her mind, and she shuddered reflexively. She had the uneasy feeling that she was moving closer to some of that hidden knowledge, and that maybe she didn’t want to go there after all. Whatever this thing was, she pictured it as something dark and immense and ugly hovering just out of the reach of her consciousness, like a middle-of-the-night monster a little kid just knew without looking was under his bed.
    “Cold?” Dan asked, and picked up her wrist to check her pulse. It was only as she felt the warmth of his fingers against her skin that she realized that she was, indeed, cold. Freezing, in fact.
    “A little,” she said.
    He released her wrist without comment and pulled another tan blanket, which had apparently been folded at the foot of the bed, over her, stretching it all the way up to her neck and tucking it in so that her arms and shoulders were covered.
    "Better?” he asked.
    “Yes.” The blanket was scratchy against the bare skin of her arms and neck, where it was pulled past the sheet, but the extra layer was welcome. “Thank you.”
    He gave a nod of acknowledgment.
    There was no avoiding it any longer. For the sake of her own sanity, she had to know what was waiting for her there in the dark.
    Her stomach tightened. She took a steadying breath. Her eyes met his. “So what happened? Last night? Why am I in the hospital?”
    His expression changed ever so subtly. There was, she thought, a kind of wariness in the way he looked at her. The caution was subtle, but there. Great. She knew already that she wasn’t going to like what she was getting ready to hear, and his expression just made her doubly sure. Her pulse accelerated with dread.
    “You don’t remember?” he asked.
    She thought. And shook her head.
    “Nothing?”
    She frowned.
    “Take your time,” he said, watching her. “Relax. It’ll come to you when you’re ready.”
    She thought some more. Just as he promised, after a moment the fog began to clear and the images slowly began to crystallize in her brain. Terrible images. Frightening images. Even as they remained tantalizingly shadowy, her pulse began to race.
    “There was a robbery—at my house. Some men broke in.” Her mouth was dry from breathing through it, and she had to swallow before she could continue. “Two men, in black ski masks. They had guns.”
    “That’s right.” He nodded. His eyes never left her face. “What else do you remember?”
    She had to concentrate hard to recover more details. It wasn’t easy with her head throbbing and breathing an effort and the fog just waiting to descend again.
    “They were after . . . some jewelry, which I didn’t even have. I was asleep, and then I woke up, and there was a man in my bedroom . . .” Her heart lurched, her stomach clenched, and her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God! Lisa!”
    Her gaze locked with his, silently asking him the question she couldn’t bear to put into words. Before he even opened his mouth to reply, she knew from his expression that the news was bad.
    “Is that your friend who was visiting?” He was stalling, she could tell, trying to gauge the impact of the truth on her.
    She nodded as the terrible coldness that was raising goose bumps on her skin started to creep through her insides, too. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
    His eyes darkened, and she thought she saw a flicker of some emotion—sympathy for her?—there.
    “Yeah,