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leaving his signature in its wake. He repeated the action two more times, on two more copies of the contract. Then he tossed the pen onto his desk and turned to shake Edward’s hand.
    “No going back now,” the other man said with a laugh.
    “No way I’d want to,” Nathaniel assured him. “It’s a done deal.”
    As those last words left his mouth, Nathaniel felt a strange twinge in his chest, right in the area of his heart. Nothing scary, nothing that made him think he needed to head to the nearest ER, just . . . weird. Something weird. He felt as if something in his chest, something surrounding his heart, fluttered a little franticly and then just . . . evaporated. He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. As if a part of him suddenly panicked, then disappeared. And then, suddenly, he was overcome by cold. Cold so strong, it actually made him shiver.
    Unconsciously, he lifted a hand to his chest and pushed against his breastbone, where he’d felt the emptying sensation, as if that might allay the uneasiness that was rushing into him almost as quickly as the cold.
    “You okay, Nathaniel?” Edward asked. “You look a little pale.”
    Nathaniel nodded, even though he didn’t feel okay at all. “I’m fine,” he lied to the other man. “It’s nothing. Probably just something I ate.”
    Yeah, that was it. He’d eaten something that disagreed with him, that was all. Because in spite of what Audrey Magill had tried to tell him, it couldn’t be something he lost.

Four
    THE SECOND TIME AUDREY SAW CAPTAIN SUMMERFIELD, it wasn’t in her dreams in the middle of the night. No, the second time she saw him, it was just past noon, when she entered her kitchen pantry to retrieve a can of tuna to make her lunch. She tugged on the string dangling from the bare bulb overhead, spilled some frail white light into the tiny confined space, and saw him standing right in front of her, framed by a bag of Oreos and a can of artichoke hearts on one side, a jar of Kalamata olives and a box of Cheerios on the other.
    She uttered a startled little cry at his sudden appearance, leaping backward a step and nearly dropping the butter knife she’d been holding absently . . . but now suddenly clutched with great intent. Before she recognized the intruder as the man in the painting upstairs, a million thoughts dashed through her mind in a second’s time. That someone had broken into her house again, that this time the intruder was going to try to do more than fling about hats and portraits, that the only thing standing between her and the great beyond might very well be her faded Levi’s and University of Louisville tank top and the blunt blade of her Oneida flatware.
    Then, when she recognized the man in her pantry as Silas Summerfield, her thoughts went zinging off into a new direction. That she was seeing things that weren’t there, doubtless because she was still carrying around some anxiety about the break-in to her house the day before. Or maybe the hallucination was due to a lack of sleep, since it wasn’t easy to catch Zs when one was lying wide awake in one’s bed, jumping at every creak and groan one’s house made because one was still carrying around some anxiety about the break-in to her house that morning.
    Even worse, when Audrey had finally managed to go to sleep, her dreams had been filled this time with images of Captain Summerfield’s great-great-however-many-greats grandson, and that had been even more bizarre than the dreams about Silas. It had been bad enough confronting Nathaniel Summerfield in person. Though, truth be told, that wasn’t entirely because he’d behaved like such an infuriating ass. It was because her reaction to him—even with the infuriating ass part—had been wholly unexpected and in no way welcome.
    Simply put, the moment Audrey had laid eyes on the man, she’d responded to him in a way that she hadn’t responded to a man for a very long time. Not since she’d laid eyes on