But now, Daddy has to punish you.He took a shambling step toward her.You've been a bad girl. And another.A very bad girl.

Her own screams woke her.

She was drenched in sweat, shuddering with cold. She fought for breath, wildly struggled to tear away the ropes of sheets that had wrapped around her as she'd thrashed through the nightmare.

Sometimes he'd tied her up. Remembering that, she made small, animal sounds in her throat as she tore at the sheets.

Freed, she rolled off the bed, crouched beside it in the dark like a woman prepared to flee or fight.

"Lights! On full. God, oh God."

They flashed on, chasing even a hint of shadow out of the huge, beautiful room. Still, she scanned it, every corner, looking for ghosts as the nasty edge of the dream jabbed through her gut.

She forced back the tears. They were useless, and they were weak. Just as it was useless, it was weak, to let herself be frightened by dreams. By ghosts.

But she continued to shake as she crawled up to sit on the edge of the big bed.

An empty bed because Roarke was in Ireland and her experiment of trying to sleep in it without him, without dreams, had been a crashing failure.

Did that make her pitiful? she wondered. Stupid? Or just married?

When the fat cat, Galahad, bumped his big head against her arm, she gathered him up. She sat, Lieutenant Eve Dallas, eleven years a cop, and comforted herself with the cat as a child might a teddy bear.

Nausea coated her stomach, and she continued to rock, to pray she wouldn't be sick and add one more misery to the night.

"Time display," she ordered, and the dial of the bedside clock blinked on.One-fifteen, she noted. Perfect. She'd barely made it an hour before she'd screamed herself awake.

She set the cat aside, got to her feet. As carefully as an old woman she stepped down from the platform, crossed the room, and walked into the bathroom.