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Portland, he’d put two couples together: Aethelstan and his wife Nora, and Aethelstan’s former fiancée, Emma Lost, and her husband, Michael Found.
    Darius stirred his spaghetti sauce. The sauce required a lot of attention, particularly since he hadn’t cooked it at this house in perhaps fifty years.
    No electrical power wires ran to the house. There weren’t power poles this deep in the wilderness. Most of the electricity ran on two large generators that he kept fueled in the garage. Some of the rest of the power came from the solar units he had added to the house in the 1980s.
    And sometimes, when he ran out of fuel for the generator or when he simply had to watch a video or go out of his mind, he conjured up some electrical power all on his own.
    Right now, though, he was cooking on the Franklin stove that he had installed in the house in the ‘teens. He considered that quite a sacrifice, because he had to build a fire in the stove to make the burners work, and the stove heated the kitchen unbearably. But this particular sauce had been his specialty since the mid-nineteenth century, and he had to make it.
    He wanted his guest to experience the best of everything while she was here.
    He wasn’t sure where that impulse came from—perhaps he was lonelier than he thought—or maybe he felt sorry for her. But he doubted it. He was attracted to her courage. He had never seen someone think so quickly or act with such competence. She was amazing. She was clearly an athlete, and a very smart person.
    Darius sighed. He hadn’t been attracted to a woman like this in centuries—maybe ever. Especially a woman he hadn’t spoken to. He couldn’t ever remember being attracted before a conversation started.
    It was still too early in the evening to open any windows to catch the cool mountain breezes. He had taken off his shirt in preparation, but it didn’t feel like enough. The kitchen was hot and stuffy, although the smell of garlic and oregano and the tomato-based sauce was divine.
    Then the music thudded. Darius frowned. Vivaldi never thudded, not even when played by a particularly bad orchestra—and the recording he had was certainly thud-proof. He turned, wondering if the sound had come from the guest room.
    He shut off the Vivaldi and listened for a moment but didn’t hear anything else. Finally he turned the Vivaldi back on and continued to stir the sauce.
    Then he heard the thud again. It was followed by another, and another. He shut off the Vivaldi and listened to the thudding. It was irregular, and it definitely hadn’t come from outside.
    Which meant his visitor was awake. Although he had no clue what was causing her to thud.
    He hurried down the hallway. The door to the guest room was open, and the covers were thrown back on the bed. He peered inside the room but didn’t see her.
    Instead, he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. She sat on his bathtub, her left leg extended, her shirt unbuttoned.
    She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were perfectly shaped ski jumps. Stunning, except for the long red scrapes running down the front.
    She hadn’t seen him.
    He looked away, silently cursing himself for not thinking that she’d be scraped under her clothing. If he’d thought of that, he would have had to repair the scrapes, or at least bandage them, which would require cleaning out the wounds, which would allow him to run a cloth along that upturned skin, down to the nipple …
    A trickle of sweat ran down his forehead. He was hotter than he’d thought he was. Damn that stove. Its effects even reached back here.
    He backed away, considering himself fortunate that she hadn’t seen him. He moved silently, going back into the living room. He grabbed his shirt, wiped off his hot face, and slipped on the shirt. Then he started whistling the Vivaldi as he made his way down the hall.
    Something clanged against the porcelain tub, followed by a soft female curse. He walked more slowly, giving her time to