Every now and then, she would pause beside the bed and lay a hand across his brow.

It remained icy cold.

Deathly cold.

Despite all they’d done, it was entirely possible he would never wake, much less recover.

Why, in this instance, a stranger’s life mattered so much she couldn’t fathom, but she wanted him to live. Actively and continually willedhim to live.

To have a fallen angel fall into her life only to die before she even learned the color of his eyes was simply unacceptable. Fallen angels did not fall from the sky-or get washed up in her cove-every day; she’d never laid eyes on a man like him, awake or comatose, in all her twenty-six years, and she wanted, yearned, to learn more.

A dangerous want, perhaps, but when had she ever shied away from danger?

The afternoon waned, but brought no change in her patient. As evening closed in, she sighed. The children came up with another set of warmed bricks. She helped them switch the hot bricks for the cool, then, with the children clattering down the stairs, eager for their dinner, she drew the curtains over the window, checked the man one more time, and headed for the door.

Her gaze fell on the objects she’d left on the tallboy by the door. She paused, glanced back at the figure so still in her bed, then picked up the three items-the only things other than his clothes he’d been carrying.

The dirk-a fine piece, far finer than one would expect a sailor to own.

The saber-definitely a cavalryman’s sword, well used and lovingly honed.

She’d get the boys to polish both blades. The saber’s scabbard might yet be salvageable.

The third object, the wooden cylinder, was the most curious. As Will had guessed, the man had been carrying it wrapped in oilskins in a leather sling; with him unable to shrug the sling off, they’d had to cut the shoulder straps to remove it. The wood was foreign; she thought it was rosewood. The brass fittings that held the wooden strips together, and locked one end closed, smacked of somewhere far away, some alien shore.