The Stranger and Tessa Jones. Christine Rimmer

      Sudden dizziness assailed the man, accompanied by another bout of powerful nausea. He braced himself against the nearest tree. Blinking to clear his head, gulping to keep from hurling whatever he had in his stomach onto the pure, white snow, he focused on the woman.

      She was tall. A big woman, not fat, but…sturdy. Probably in her twenties. She wore a purple quilted jacket and a striped knit hat with a pom-pom on top. Tendrils of blond hair escaped from under the hat, clinging to her red cheeks and bunching at her collar. Beside her, the card-board box held plenty more dishes where the ones she’d thrown had come from. They were all different colors, those dishes. A rainbow of dinnerware waiting at her feet.

      As he gulped down his nausea and blinked to try and clear the dizziness, she bent and grabbed up a plate the color of a sunflower. “You jerk!” She growled the words low in her throat. For a moment, he was sure she must be talking to him. But no. She stared into the middle distance, totally unaware of him. Crash. He winced as the plate hit the target and yellow shards went flying. She bent for another. “You promised. Promised.” She tossed a purple soup bowl. It found its mark and exploded. She grabbed two plates—turquoise and light green—one in each hand. “You said you’d be here for the wedding, Bill. I told everyone—everyone—that you were coming.”

      She fired one plate and then the other, so fast that the second hit the first. Bits of pottery flew in all directions.

      “But no,” she growled. “Oh, no. You couldn’t just come to North Magdalene the way you always promised you would. Uh-uh. Instead, you took a little trip to Vegas to try your luck. Vegas…” A dark blue cup and a shamrock-green saucer met their end. “You fell in love with a showgirl. And she fell in love with you. A showgirl? You?” Another plate flew and shattered.

      The man in the trees knew he shouldn’t be hearing all this. He should show himself or go. But he did neither. He held on to a tree trunk to keep from passing out, as the big blonde in the clearing continued to rail at a guy who wasn’t there.

      “Tell me, Bill. How does a skinny tour bus driver with a space between his teeth, a guy too shy to string more than two sentences together in the presence of a woman, end up married to a showgirl? You tell me, Bill Toomey. How does that happen?” She fired three bread plates—white, black and orange—in swift succession.

      As soon as the last one hit, she went on, “Especially when last September you swore, Bill, you swore with all your heart that you loved me.” She threw a pink serving bowl. “Me, Bill.” The snow swirled around her and the pom-pom on her hat bounced in sympathetic fury. The hair that curled along her cheeks blew across her eyes. She swiped it away and bent to grab more ammunition. “You swore you loved me and wanted to spend your life only at my side…” A cardinal-red dish met a crashing fate.

      The man in the trees was frowning. He muttered, “Another damn drama queen,” and wondered a second later why he’d said that.

      And then he stepped forward, although some remnant of a survival instinct within him cautioned that it was unwise to approach a furious woman with a box full of dinnerware and an excellent throwing arm. She might choose him as her next target.

      He walked toward her anyway, slowly at first and then faster, as the snow came down harder and the wind whistled in the branches of the tall, green trees. In seconds, as dishes continued to shatter and the big blonde with the bobbing pom-pom went on telling off some guy named Bill, he emerged from the shelter of the pines.

      She’d just tossed a serving platter when she spotted him. A yelp of surprise escaped her. “What the…?” She reached into the box and came out with a second big platter. She waved it, a threat. “Stop. Don’t come one step closer.”

      He kept coming. The platter was big and heavy-looking. If she hit him with it, it would probably make his headache a whole lot worse. But somehow, he couldn’t stop moving toward her. “I need…I…Please…”

      She raised the platter higher. “Final warning. Stop right there.”

      He croaked, “Don’t…” as in his head a thousand bells began to ring. “Don’t…” He put his hands over his ears, a move he knew to be pointless. There was no protecting his ears from the ringing. It was coming from inside his head. And the ice pick was stabbing in there again. He groaned as he felt himself slowly dropping to the ground.

      It took forever to get there. It seemed to him that as the ice pick stabbed and stabbed again and the thousand bells kept pealing, he drifted downward—floating, like a leaf or maybe a feather.

      Then, after forever, he found himself on his back in a thick drift of snow. He stared up at the gray sky, or tried to. But the snow was falling so hard by then, it was difficult to see more than a few feet above his face. The cold white flakes caught on his eyelashes. He blinked them away. The bells had gone silent. The ice pick had stopped its stabbing. A sigh of sweet relief escaped him.

      Someone was beside him in the snow. The blonde. She was on her knees, looking down at him, bending closer. Her nose was as red as her cheeks with the cold. She smelled good. Fresh. Clean. Her breath, across his face, was warm and sweet.

      As if it had happened long ago, he recalled her fury and the shattering dishes, the way she’d told off that tour bus driver named Bill. Now she wasn’t angry, though. Now she just looked worried.

      Worried and…kind. He thought, She’s good. A good woman. I could use a good woman in my life.

      Whatever his life was…

      A hell of a mess he was in here, on his back in a blizzard, without a name, without any idea of who he was or where he’d come from, dressed for a much warmer place than the Sierras in a snowstorm.

      She touched him, laying her mittened hand on the side of his face. He felt the warmth of her through the wool. “I’m sorry…”

      He frowned at her. “Sorry?”

      “For threatening you with that platter.”

      “Oh, that. ‘S nothing.”

      “I should have seen you were hurt. But you came out of nowhere…”

      “Didn’t mean…scare you…” His lips felt strange and thick. They didn’t want to talk.

      “I’ll call and get help.” She started to rise.

      He grabbed her arm to hold her with him. “No. Stay.”

      “You need a doctor.”

      “Stay.”

      She sighed and touched his face again. “Oh, you poor thing.”

      “I look…bad, huh?”

      Her soft eyes, gold-flecked green, grew softer still. She asked in a gentle whisper, “What’s happened to you?”

      “I wish I knew,” he heard himself mutter, with effort. “Tell me. Your…name?” His tongue wasn’t working any better than his lips. Each word took form with tremendous difficulty.

      “Tessa. Tessa Jones.”

      He repeated, “Tessa. Nice. Like it…”

      The woman said something else. But he didn’t hear her. He shut his eyes and let the strange white world and the big, kind-eyed clean-smelling woman drift away from him.

       Chapter Two

      The stranger’s strong grip on Tessa’s arm loosened and then dropped away.

      A low cry of distress escaped her. Oh dear Lord, was he dead?

      She ripped off a mitten and touched the side of his throat. The skin was cool beneath her fingers. His face had a grayish cast. But there was a pulse. She felt it beating, steady and true, against the pads of her first and middle fingers. And when she bent her head so her cheek was near his mouth, she felt his breath. Slow. Warm.