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color over what he had just plainly insinuated.
    She had been holding the sword so that it rested against the mattress. It was purely an instinctive reaction for her to lift it up in front of her. His reaction was demoralizing.
    He laughed, his head thrown back, the sound one of genuine amusement.
    And when that amusement wound down, he was still grinning at her. He did have dimples, she noted irrelevantly. And he didn’t mind telling her what he found so funny.
    “My sword cannot draw my blood. Only the gods can do that now—and Wolfstan the Mad, if he ever finds me.”
    Roseleen heard nothing beyond the words “my sword,” and every bit of the possessiveness that she had developed for the weapon in question came rushing to the fore. “Your sword? Your sword! You’ve got two seconds to get out of my house, or I’m calling the police!”
    “No bedding then?”
    “Get out!”
    He shrugged. He grinned again. And then he disappeared before her eyes—and again, thunder cracked in the distance with a flash of lightning on its tail.
    For five minutes, she continued to stare at the space where he had stood. Her heart was pounding. Her thoughts were frozen. Her skin was covered in gooseflesh.
    When her mind began to function again, she carefully put the sword away and tucked the box beneath her bed. She put her nightgown on, yanking the towel out from under itonly after it fell to her knees, something she’d never done before—or felt she had to do.
    Her eyes kept returning to that empty spot in the corner that remained empty. Even after she crawled into bed, she still sat there and stared at it for a long while. She didn’t even consider turning off the lights that night.
    When she did finally lie back against her pillows, it was with a weary sigh. In the morning, she’d have a logical explanation for what had just occurred. In the morning, she wouldn’t be too tired to figure it out. Just now, all she could think was that she really was losing her mind.

6
    A dream. Roseleen had her explanation for what had occurred last night—or rather, what she’d thought had occurred. Somehow her subconscious mind had combined her curiosity about the sword with Barry’s joke to give her some answers, but as dreams go, she hadn’t gotten around to asking any questions.
    A dream. It was the simplest explanation, and the most logical. It was a shame, though, that the one time she got a handsome man into one of her dreams, she had to go and get all huffy and send him away. Curiosity about the sword wasn’t the only curiosity he could have appeased, and he’d been willing to appease that other curiosity. He’d even mentioned it: bedding her. All she would have had to do was say, “Yes, that would be nice,” and…
    She smiled to herself, thinking about it. You couldn’t find much safer sex than sex in a dream. Morals, guilt, regret, even your ownpersonality, all could be set aside while you enjoyed doing something that you wouldn’t consider doing outside a dream. But she, of course, had to remain true to form and bring her morals, her indignation, and her testy temper along in what had to be one of her most unusual and interesting dreams ever. Truly a shame.
    Roseleen was satisfied with her explanation—but only after she’d spent an hour thoroughly searching the bedroom for wires and hidden cameras that might have been capable of projecting a lifelike image into her room. She found nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn’t really thought she would.
    Getting that complicated was beyond Barry Horton’s imagination, after all, not to mention that he was too tightfisted to cover the expenses for the kind of sophisticated equipment it would take to pull off such a hoax. His idea of an extravagant gift during their courtship was to bring her whatever flowers happened to be in bloom on his route to campus. Heaven forbid he should ever enter a florist’s shop. The less it cost, the better, was his motto.
    Obviously, his joke