Forget Me Not

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Alana adjusted the wick on the kitchen light until it burned with a clear, steady glow. Rafe hung his slicker on a hook by the back door.

  “Hope the dudes don’t mind kerosene lamps,” said Alana.

  “So long as they can see the cards, they’ll do just fine. Besides, it will nudge them into bed at a decent hour. Trout rise early. If you want to catch them, you’d better rise early, too.”

  Eyes the color of whiskey measured the signs of fatigue on Alana’s face.

  “You should think about going to bed,” Rafe said.

  “It’s hardly even dark,” she protested, despite the tiredness welling up in her.

  She didn’t want to be alone. Not yet. Not with lightning and thunder loose among the peaks.

  “It won’t be completely dark until nearly ten,” Rafe said reasonably. “That’s too late for you, if you’re going to get up at five to cook breakfast. Tell you what, I’ll do breakfast tomorrow. You sleep in.”

  “No,” said Alana quickly. “You look like you haven’t been sleeping too well, either. Besides, I came here to cook and that’s what I’m going to do. If I get too tired, I’ll take a nap tomorrow afternoon.”

  Rafe looked as though he was going to protest. Then he let out a long breath.

  “Will the light bother you if I work down here for a while?” he asked.

  Alana looked at the loft bedroom that was simply a partial second story. One “wall” of the room was a polished railing that prevented anyone from wandering out of bed and taking a fall to the living room floor. Curtains could be drawn across the opening of the loft, but that cut off the welcome currents of warmth rising from the hearth. Even though it was only the first week of September, the nights at sixty-three hundred feet crackled with the promise of winter.

  “You won’t bother me,” said Alana. “I always sleep with the light on now.”

  Again, Rafe paused. Again, he said nothing, merely looked at Alana with eyes that saw everything, accepted everything, even her fear. Knowing that he didn’t withdraw from or judge her gave Alana a small measure of acceptance of her own irrational feelings.

  “Go to sleep, Alana. If you need anything, I’ll be in the downstairs bedroom. So will Bob, unless he plays cards all night like a young fool.” As Rafe turned toward the dining room, he added, “There’s plenty of hot water for a bath.”

  The thought of a tub full of steaming water made Alana close her eyes and all but groan with pleasure.

  “A hot bath. Damn. That’s my idea of roughing it,” she said emphatically.

  Smiling, Rafe turned back to Alana. He leaned against the door between the living room and dining room.

  “From what Dad told me, Mother and Grandmother felt the same way,” Rafe said.

  “How about you?”

  “I’m not all that upset at having hot water,” Rafe drawled. “Only thing that bothers me is that damn noisy generator. As for the rest, this is home for me. It took me a lot of years and pain to realize it, but it was worth it.”

  Slowly Rafe looked around the lodge, enjoying the vivid Indian blankets and brass camp lamps, the suede furniture and a fireplace big enough to stand in. Luxury and simplicity combined. The generator provided electricity for the refrigerator, the water pump, and the lights. The kitchen stove, which also heated water for the cabin, burned wood.

  All that was lacking was telephone service. His father had taken care of that by adding a shortwave radio and a repeater on the nearby ridge. By tradition, though, the radio was reserved for emergencies.

  Alana watched Rafe quietly, sensing his pleasure in his surroundings, a pleasure she shared. She had loved the Lazy W’s lodge and cabins from the first time she saw them, when she and Rafe had raced a storm and lost. They had been drenched and laughing when they arrived.

  They would have been cold, too, but the bright currents of passion that raced through them made a mockery of cold. He had started a fire in the hearth to dry their clothes. Then he had led her up to the loft and taught her about other kinds of fire, and the beauty that a man and a woman in love can bring to each other.

  Alana blinked, coming back to the present, bringing with her part of the past’s shimmering warmth. She saw Rafe watching her with hungry whiskey eyes, as though he knew what she had been thinking.

  Or perhaps it was simply that Rafe, too, was remembering a storm and a loft and the woman he loved burning in his arms.

  “I laid out your things in the bathroom,” Rafe said.

  “Thank you,” Alana said, her voice almost husky.

  Rafe nodded and turned away, leaving her alone.

  The bath relaxed Alana, taking the soreness from her body and the tightness from her mind. When she pulled on the long, soft cotton nightgown and went up to the loft bedroom, Rafe was nowhere in sight.

  The hearth fire was blazing hotly, ensuring that she wouldn’t be chilled by the trip from the bathroom to bed. The bed itself had also been warmed. The metal warmer was still hot to the touch, the coals from the fireplace still glowing when she opened the lid. The covers had been turned down, inviting her to slide in and sleep deeply.

  “Rafael,” Alana said softly, though she knew he couldn’t hear. “Oh, Rafe, why does it have to be too late for us?”

  There was no answer, unless the bed itself was an answer, a bridge between past and present, a promise of warmth and safety.

  With a sigh, Alana discarded her robe and slid underneath the covers, pulling them up to her chin as she snuggled into the haven Rafe had so carefully prepared for her. Sleep came quickly.

  So did dreams.

  As the storm outside the cabin strengthened, dreams twisted into nightmares called by thunder and wind screaming from the ridge lines. A lake condensed around Alana . . . a landscape subtly blurred, like water pushed by the wind. A glacier-polished boulder stood crookedly, laughing.

  Jack was laughing and the sound was colder than the wind.

  Rain swirled, laughing, showing clear ice teeth, stirring water and rocks and trees until another lake condensed. Small, perfect, utterly real but for the shadows of terror flowing out of the trees.

  Jack’s arms reaching for her, his words telling her of desire and his eyes telling her of death. Jack holding her despite her struggles and then pain came, pain and terror and her screams tearing apart her world.

  Alana woke with her heart pounding and her skin clammy. She was breathing in short, shallow bursts. She had recognized the third lake in her nightmare, but not the other lake, the beautiful lake surrounded by horror.

  Jack, too, was new, unrecognizable, desire and death inextricably mixed. A raw nightmare, a horrible compound of today’s memories and . . . what?

  Truth? Imagination? Both? Neither? Alana asked herself frantically. Jack wanted me, yes, but only as the other half of Jack ‘n’ Jilly. He didn’t want me as a woman.

  And if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t want him. I never wanted any man but the one I loved and couldn’t have. Rafael Winter. Jack didn’t like it, but he finally accepted it—after I told him I would leave him if he ever touched me again.

  Is that what we argued about on Broken Mountain?

  Shivering, Alana wrapped her arms around her body and let reality condense around her once more. It was so long ago, all of it, on the far side of a six-day gap in her mind that might as well be eternity.

  So far away and so futile. Jack was dead and she was not, not quite. She couldn’t sing, she couldn’t be touched, she couldn’t love. But she was alive.

  And so was Rafael Winter.

  Lightning burst silently into the room, bleaching everything into shades of gray and a white so pure her eyes winced from it. Thunder came, but only slowly, telling of a storm retreating down the mountainside.

  Taking a deep breath, Alana lay back once more, trying to sleep. Even, as her head touched the pillow, she knew that it would be futile. Her body was too loaded with adrenaline and the aftermath of nightmare to go back to sleep right away.<
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  She got up, barely feeling the chill. Her deep green nightgown settled around her ankles. The soft T-shirt material clung and flared as she walked to the edge of the loft. The tiny silver buttons that went from her collarbones to her thighs sparkled like raindrops in the muted light from the living room.

  Below Alana, engrossed in the multicolored materials spread before him on a table, Rafe worked quietly. His back was to her, so she couldn’t see precisely what he was doing.

  Alana hesitated long enough to be startled by another burst of lightning. Then she went quickly down the stairs. The battery-powered clock over the mantel told her it was just after eleven.

  Though Alana would have sworn that she’d made no noise, Rafe knew she was there.

  “Take the chair that’s closest to the fire,” Rafe said without looking up from the small vise in front of him.

  Alana pulled out a chair and sat, careful not to come between Rafe and the light radiating from the kerosene lantern. He was focused on a tiny hook held in a small vise. Silently, delicately, he tied an iridescent bit of feather to the hook’s shank using gossamer thread.

  In the warm light Rafe’s eyes were almost gold, his lashes and hair nearly black. Horn-rimmed half glasses sat partway down his nose, magnifying the work in front of him. Deft, tapered fingers handled special tweezers and dots of glue no bigger than the tip of a needle. He wound the thread once more around the shank of the hook, made a half hitch, tugged gently, and cut the thread.

  “There are two schools of thought about fly-fishing,” said Rafe as he picked up a delicate shaft of iridescent black feather. “One school is that you attract a trout by presenting it with something it’s never seen before, something flashy but not frightening. Like this.”

  Rafe opened a small metal box. Inside were neat rows of flies, their sharp hooks buried in the wool fleece that lined the box. The fly that Rafe selected was nearly as long as his thumb. The colors were bright, a whimsical combination of blue, yellow, and rose that culminated in graceful silver streamers reminiscent of lacy wings.

  “Now, Bob swears by this Lively Lady,” Rafe said, neatly replacing the fly in its box. “And I admit to using it a time or two when the fishing was so bad I’d tried everything but a DuPont spinner.”

  “What’s a DuPont spinner?”

  “Dynamite,” Rafe said dryly. “The Lively Lady is outrageous, but it’s more sporting than shock waves.”

  “Does it work?” asked Alana, watching the play of light over the hair on the back of Rafe’s hand.

  “Only for Bob.” Rafe smiled crookedly. “The times I used it, you could hear the fish snickering all up and down the canyon.”

  Alana smiled and almost forgot to jump when lightning flicked again, washing the room with shards of white light. Rafe’s deep, calm voice smoothed off the jagged edges of the night for her.

  “What’s the other kind of fly-fishing?” she asked.

  “The kind that imitates natural conditions so exactly that the trout can’t tell the difference,” said Rafe.

  His voice was casual yet reassuring, as though he sensed the fear that had driven Alana out of bed and downstairs to the table where he worked. He set aside the fly he had just tied and picked up a hook that already had been wound with mink-brown thread.

  “Usually at this time of year, all you have left are larger, darker flying insects,” Rafe said. “Most of the smaller bugs have all been killed off in the same frost that turned the aspens pure gold. I’m a little short on autumn flies, so I decided to do a few tonight.”

  As Rafe talked, his fingers searched delicately among the boxes. There were feathers and tiny, shimmering drifts of fur, as well as nylon and tinsel and Mylar threads of various thicknesses. It was as though he searched with his touch as well as his eyes, savoring the subtle differences in texture with skilled, sensitive fingertips.

  There was no sense of hurry or frustration in Rafe’s actions. If the thread he chose was stubborn or slippery, refusing to wrap neatly around the hook’s shank, he didn’t show any impatience. He simply smoothed everything into place and began again, his fingers sure, his expression calm, his mouth relaxed.

  With eyes darker than the night, Alana watched Rafe’s every movement. He had rolled up the sleeves of his navy-blue flannel shirt past his elbows. Dark hair shimmered and burned with gold highlights as his arms moved. Muscles tightened and relaxed, making light slide over his skin with each supple movement of his body. Beneath the skin, veins showed like dark velvet, inviting her fingers to trace the branching network of life.

  “It’s important to match environments precisely if you hope to lure a trout out of the depths of a lake or a river,” said Rafe, tying a tiny bit of deep red feather to the body of the hook.

  “Why?” Alana asked softly.

  “It’s so quiet down where they hide, safe and deepest blue. But being safe isn’t enough for living things. They need more. They need to touch the sun. At least,” Rafe added, smiling, “the special ones do.”

  Alana watched Rafe’s face, her eyes wide and intent, feeling his words slide past the fear in her, sinking down into her core, promising her something for which she had no words, only a song that couldn’t be sung.

  “So my job is to tempt a special trout out of those safe, sterile depths,” said Rafe. “To do that, I have to know what’s happening around the fish. If dun-colored mayflies are flying, then a black gnat will be ignored by my special trout, no matter how beautifully the fly is tied or presented.”

  Deftly he added a radiant filament of black to the shank of the hook.

  “You see,” Rafe added softly, “my special trout is neither stupid nor foolish. It’s unique and strong and wary. Yet it’s hungry for the sun.”

  Tiny shafts of color shimmered as Rafe worked, feathers as fragile as they were beautiful. He handled them so gently that not a single filament was crushed or broken.

  When he had taken whatever tiny contribution he needed for the fly he was making, his fingers smoothed the remaining feather, making each iridescent shaft into a graceful arch once more. Tufts of color curled and clung to his fingertips as though thanking him for understanding their delicacy and beauty.

  Alana closed her eyes and let memories rise, welcoming them the way a flower welcomes sunlight. Rafe had touched her like that the first time, his strength balanced with his understanding of her innocence.

  And she had responded, sighing and curling around him, clinging to his fingertips while his lips feathered across her breasts until she sang a love song that was his name. He had called to her in return, the exquisite beauty of his hands caressing her until she knew nothing but him, felt nothing but ecstasy shivering through her as she sang his name.

  Then he had come to her like gentle lightning, moving deeply until she learned what it was to die and be reborn in the arms of the man she loved.

  To be touched like that again, exquisitely . . .

  Alana shivered deep inside herself, a tiny ripple that was reflected in the subtle color high in her cheeks.

  Glancing up, Rafe saw the faint flush and rapid pulse beating just above the soft emerald neckline of Alana’s nightgown. For an instant his fingers tightened and the color of his eyes became a smoky amber fire.

  Then he forced himself to concentrate again on his work, knowing it wasn’t time yet. He must be patient or he would frighten her back into the bleak safety of withdrawal from memory, from life.

  From him.

  Alana’s brief, ragged breath sounded like fire flickering inside the glass cage of the kerosene lamp. She opened her eyes and watched Rafe, wanting to touch him, to savor the textures of his hair and skin as delicately as he was savoring the materials with which he tied flies.

  Yet if she did, he would touch her in return and she would be afraid. Then she would despise herself for her fears.

  “Dad never used flies,” said Alana, her voice husky as she searched for a safe topic. “Worms or metal lures only. Spinning rods. That�
�s what I was raised with.”

  “A lot of people prefer them,” Rafe said.

  His voice was calm, neutral, demanding nothing of her.

  “But you don’t?”

  Rafe smiled slightly as he tied another tiny piece of feather onto the mink-brown body of the fly.

  “I prefer the special fish, the shy and elusive one hiding deep in the secret places known only to trout,” he said. “To tempt that trout out of the depths and into the sunlight will require all my skill and patience and respect.”

  He turned a feather, letting light wash over it from various angles, admiring the play of color.

  “But wouldn’t it be easier to fish down deep rather than to try and lure the trout to the surface?” asked Alana, watching Rafe intently.

  “Easier, yes. But easy things have so little value.”

  Rafe looked up at Alana over the dark rims of his glasses. His eyes were gold, as hot as the flame burning in the lantern.

  “The trout should want the fisherman,” he said. “Otherwise it’s a simple exercise in meat hunting. I want to create a lure so perfect that only a very special trout will rise to it.”

  “And die,” Alana said, her voice almost harsh.

  “No,” Rafe said very softly. “My hooks have no barbs.”

  Alana’s eyes widened. She looked at the hooks set out on the table, flies finished and half finished and barely begun. Each hook was a clean, uncluttered curve, not a single barb to tear at the flesh. She looked back up into Rafe’s amber eyes and felt the breath stop in her throat.

  “Would you like to learn how to fly-fish?” he asked.

  While he waited for an answer, he turned a golden pheasant feather in the lamplight, making color run in iridescent waves over the shaft.

  “I’d be all thumbs,” said Alana.

  Rafe laughed softly and shook his head. “Not you.”

  She held out her hands as though to convince him of her awkwardness. Slowly he ran the feather from her wrists to her palms to her fingertips, stroking her with the delicacy of a sigh, seeing her response in the slight tremor of her fingertips.