"Where did you come from? And why did you have to pick my beach?"

She idly brushed his tangled hair back from his face. His eyelids fluttered and then opened. He stared up at her, his pale blue eyes empty, uncomprehending, as if he were looking right through her.

She leaned forward. "Can you hear me?" Meredith asked. "Who are you? What happened?"

He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but all he could manage was a raspy croak. As if the effort was too much, his eyes closed again and his harsh breathing settled back into a shallow, even rhythm.

"I don't even know what to call you," she murmured. "You must have a name." Meredith crawled to the end of the couch and tugged at his knee-high boots. "Maybe I'll call you Ned. Ned, the pirate. You know, Blackbeard's nickname was Ned, for Edward." She glanced over at him and shook her head. "I guess you're not in any condition to complain about my choice, are you Ned?"

After a long struggle, the wet boot suddenly slipped free of his foot. Meredith landed on her backside, the boot in her lap. She stared down at it, stiff leather around the calf and a flared top that formed a cup around the knee. She turned the boot over in her hand and looked at the sole.

"This is a handmade boot," she murmured. Meredith tugged the other boot off and examined it closely, searching for a brand name or a label. "Jackboots. These boots haven't been made since the early eighteenth century. Where did you ever find a cobbler to…"

Her voice trailed off as her eyes moved up from his rough woolen stockings to his breeches. Like the boots, they were handmade, fitted at the leg and baggy at the waist. Glancing nervously at his face, she plucked at the fly with her fingers, causing a flood of heat to rush to her cheeks. "Hmm, no zipper, just buttons. Very authentic." Her confusion was deepened even further by his tattered linen shirt, full at the sleeves and ruffled at the wrist. There was no tag in the neckline, only very fine hand stitching on the band collar..

The shirt lay open nearly to his waist. She stared down at his deeply tanned chest, mesmerized by the play of candlelight on the rippled muscle. With a small pang of uneasiness, she pushed the damp linen together, her hand brushing against the light dusting of hair that ran from his collarbone to his belly.

All of his clothes were wet, but Meredith wasn't about to remove them. Not that she wasn't curious as to what he looked like beneath the odd garments. It wasn't every day she had a man lying helpless on her couch. But there were limits to her nursing skills and to her temerity.

Instead, she pulled a throw from the back of the rocking chair and tucked it around his body. Then she dragged a quilt from the guest bedroom and arranged that on top of him. By the time she'd finished building a fire, his breathing seemed less labored and the color had begun to return to his lips.

She drew a steadying breath. "All right, Ned, now that you're warm, we'd better take care of your wounds. After that, I'll make some coffee and we'll sober you up."

A quick search of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom turned up alcohol, bandages, shaving cream, a straight-edged razor and a small pair of scissors. After bandaging the scrape on his forehead, Meredith tucked a towel around Ned's neck and began to snip away at his salt encrusted beard. She staunched the bleeding from the cuts with the towel before she gently covered his face with shaving cream.

With great care for his wounds, she drew the razor along his cheek. Stroke by stroke, she carefully stripped away the remains of his dirty beard, intent on her task. When she was finished, Meredith drew back. She blinked in shock, clutching the razor in her fist as her gaze fell on the planes and angles of a startlingly handsome face. Until this instant, she'd had nothing more than a nagging fear of this stranger, of having this man alone in her house with help so far away.

As she stared down at his perfect features, Meredith found herself hypnotized. She had seen him before, just hours ago as she focused on the illustration of the pirate in the old book. Pinching her eyes shut, she tried to steady her spinning thoughts. If she had believed in the powers of fate, she might have also believed that she'd somehow summoned him here to answer her girlish fantasies.

But she knew better. He was merely one of Tank Muldoon's boys, she repeated to herself, out to tear up the town right alongside Hurricane Horace. And yet, even though that explanation seemed perfectly logical, it didn't make sense. This was a grown man, not a college boy. No one developed a body like his waiting tables-he worked hard for a living, probably outdoors. And no one took Tank Muldoon seriously enough to wear an authentic costume.

Meredith leaned over to wipe a trace of shaving cream from his cheek. Suddenly, his hand snaked up and clamped onto her wrist in a punishing grip. She cried out and tried to pull away, but he held her fast. Her gaze met his. His pale blue eyes were now lucid and hard as ice. They watched each other for a very long time in the dim light, Meredith's pulse thudding in her throat, his breathing harsh and even.

"Where am I?" he demanded, his voice ragged.

Meredith tried to pull out of his grasp again, but he only tightened his fingers.

"Tell me, lad. Who are you?"

"Lad?" Meredith asked.

He easily twisted her wrist and brought the razor she was holding flat against her throat; "Who brought me to this place?" he asked, enunciating each word, a slight brogue to his proper British accent. "Have a care, for I will know if you speak falsely."

"I-I brought you here," Meredith whispered. "You were washed up on the beach during the storm."

"The purse, where is it?"

"You want my purse?"

"The purse," he said, his grip weakening. "I… I must deliver… proof… upon my soul… I must… avenge… father…" His eyes rolled back in his head and his hand flopped down on his chest, suddenly lifeless, boneless.

"Have a care!" Ben squawked from the shadows.

Meredith quickly retreated from the couch, watching the man from a spot near the fireplace. If she wasn't frightened of Ned before, she certainly was now. He was a madman, muttering about purses and revenge in some hokey British accent. She could still feel the cold blade of the razor against her throat. Her fingers flexed and the straight-edge clattered to the wooden floor. Without thinking, she wrapped her grip around the fireplace poker instead.

She turned and raced to the closet for her slicker. She couldn't stay here. She'd have to summon the sheriff before her pirate woke again. But when she pulled open the front door, the reality of the situation slapped her in the face.

The wind ripped the door from her hand, slamming it back against the wall with stunning force. Debris whipped through the air and the rain stung her skin like a hail of tiny bullets. It took all her strength to push the door shut-and all her courage to admit that she stood a better chance inside with the pirate than outside with the hurricane.

In a panic, she searched the house for something to use against him, something to provide protection in case he tried to attack her. Lord, he'd called her "lad." He wasn't just drunk, he was hallucinating, too. She nearly missed finding the coil of rope on the closet floor, until she tripped on it.

"That's it!" she cried. "I'll tie him up! So tight he won't be able to move. And once the storm dies down, I'll get the sheriff."

"Tie him up," Ben echoed. "Tie him up!"

By the time she finished, he looked like Gulliver after the Lilliputians were done with him. A riot of ropes circled his wrists and ankles, then wrapped around both his body and the couch. It would take superhuman strength to break the bonds and if she believed anything about this pirate, he would be too hung over to be sailing the high seas for some time.

Once he awoke, she'd question him, and if she decided it was safe to let him go, she would. If not, the sheriff could have him. As an added measure of protection, she retrieved a butcher knife from the kitchen before she curled into an overstuffed chair near the fireplace and watched him warily, exhausted.

Meredith closed her eyes and tipped her head back, trying to calm her racing heart. Suddenly, the raging weather outside didn't frighten her at all. This man had become her "Delia" now, the name she had given to all her fears since she'd been a child.

Meredith had been only eight years old when Hurricane Delia had roared along the Atlantic shore of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She and her widowed father, a shrimp fisherman, had lived in a tiny weather-beaten cottage on the creek side of Ocracoke Village.

Though she had been only a child, her memories of that day had completely supplanted all the shining Christmas mornings and blurry birthday celebrations she'd come to experience in the following years. The day, September 11, 1976, had dawned calm and humid. But somewhere south of the island, Delia had lurked, turning the ocean into a terrifying force of nature. As darkness began to fall and the wind began to rise, her father had left her alone in their cottage, promising to return once he had checked the lines on his boat for a final time.

As he pulled on his rain suit and knee-high rubber boots, she had begged him to stay. He'd bent down from his towering height and told her she would be safe, tucked inside the house until he returned. But he hadn't returned. She'd crawled inside a dark closet and cried for her father, and then for her mother, even though Caroline Abbott was just a vague memory to her. She'd been left to face a hurricane alone and from that night on, Delia came back to haunt her dreams.