Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

“Maybe some more roses?” Eslin suggested in a hopeful whisper.

  “No.” Doc smiled with a slight shake of his head and patted her shoulder. “Take care of yourself. Call me if you think about it.”

  “Of course I’ll think about it. I’ll call you tonight.” Impulsively, she kissed his whiskered face, then walked away from the car.

  Carrying her two large tan suitcases, Ramón was already weaving toward the house. Ethan was hurrying toward her. She jerked away from him when he reached for her arm, and turned to smile and wave gaily at Doc as he drove away. Then she whirled toward him.

  “Your mother’s a ninny, Ethan,” she snapped ungraciously, and bolted after Ramón into the atrium.

  He was halfway up the stairs, straining and puffing, and though Eslin ran up the steps behind him, she didn’t catch him until he paused on the gallery to catch his breath.

  “I’ll carry one,” she volunteered, as she reached for the grip in his right hand.

  “No,” Ramón refused with a curt shake of his head.

  At first Eslin thought the look he gave her was insolent; then she realized it was indignant. She’d offended him, insulted his budding manhood. The male ego was a fragile thing. She felt a pang in her chest remembering Doc’s sad smile as Ramón jerked away from her and started up the second flight of stairs. Behind her, Eslin heard hurried footsteps, and turned with a sheepish smile as Ethan climbed the steps to the gallery.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean that crack about Rachel. How rude of me.”

  “No, how right of you.” He smiled as he met her on the gallery and they started up the stairs side by side. “And you have my permission to call her a ninny to her face—if you can get her out of her room long enough.”

  Ethan gave Eslin a rueful sideways glance as they reached the corridor and trailed a struggling Ramón toward the left and the guest room she’d occupied on Saturday. “Frankly, I’ve had it with Mother—and Gage. She stays in her room brooding, and he stays in Ganymede’s barn. They’re both sulking even as we speak.”

  “Did you tell them about—well, about Monterrey?”

  “I told Gage,” he said, as they followed Ramón through the doorway. “He didn’t say much, as usual, just looked inscrutable and went down to the barn. Mother’s in bed with her umpteenth headache this week.”

  All but staggering, Ramón managed to make it as far as the foot of the bed before he dropped the cases with a loud clatter on the tiles. “Thank you, Ramón,” Ethan said gently. “You may go.”

  Anger and something else, shame or sorrow, Eslin thought, flamed in the boy’s face as he fled past her.

  “Poor kid,” Ethan said as he watched him go. “I wish he’d stop flogging himself for Ganylad. I’ve told him it wasn’t his fault, that no one blames him, but he doesn’t believe me—or doesn’t want to. He hasn’t gone near the Stables since Saturday night, and he told Josefina he’s never going to ride again. When he isn’t moping, he’s breaking things and dropping things, waiting for—hoping for, I think—somebody to lower the boom on him. Punishing himself isn’t enough—he wants us to punish him too.”

  For just a second or two Eslin felt the same bleak darkness, the same hollowness, in Ethan that she’d sensed in Gage. It was and it wasn’t as intense, it was the same and yet different, and as deeply buried inside him as it was in his brother.

  “That’s very perceptive of you,” she said, dropping into the sandalwood chair, “and very compassionate.”

  “And not in a million years would you have believed I could be compassionate.” He smiled at her wryly. “It always surprises people when they find out that I am, by God, a human being after all.”

  “I am surprised,” Eslin admitted, “but pleasantly.”

  “So am I. I’m surprised you’re here—I’m surprised you didn’t decide to hell with us and Ganymede.”

  “In for a penny, Ethan, in for a pound. Have you heard anything from Byrne?”

  “Nothing, but I’m not panicking yet. He’s only two hours, twenty-seven minutes and”—Ethan looked at his watch— “twelve seconds over his forty-eight-hour deadline.” He tried to smile at Eslin but didn’t quite make it. “I’m so awfully sorry you were hurt, but so awfully glad you’re here. How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad, all things considered.”

  “Can I send Josefina or one of the maids to help you unpack?”

  “No, thank you. I think I’ll crawl into bed for a while. My headache’s coming back.”

  That was and wasn’t the truth. The dull, pulsing thud above her eyes was still there and would continue for about a week, Doc had told her. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle with a couple of aspirin, but Ethan didn’t know that. The thing she couldn’t handle was his almost palpable gratitude.

  “If you need anything, ring. There’s a bell rope, believe it or not, beside the bed. Dinner’s at six-thirty, or Josefina will bring you a tray if you don’t feel like coming down.”

  “I’ll be fine, Ethan.” Eslin got to her feet to prod him along. “Thanks again.”

  He stepped out into the hallway, drew the door half shut, then leaned around it.

  “We’ve arranged a little surprise for you,” he said. “It isn’t much, but the words thank you seem so inadequate. If you feel like it once you’re rested, I’ll be in the study.”

  She nodded, and smiled and he finally closed the door. She sighed, and without removing her coat or wondering about the surprise, she walked toward her luggage.

  Two hours twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds over the forty-eight hour deadline. It might not be deliberate, but Eslin had a feeling it was. She wasn’t worried, though. She knew they’d hear from Marco Byrne. She didn’t know what they’d hear, but she knew they weren’t going to like it.

  She stopped between her suitcases and frowned at them. Might as well get this over with, she thought. When she picked up the case on her right, she felt a sharp pull in her lower abdomen. No wonder Ramón staggered, she thought, using her knee to lever the case onto the bed.

  It was then that Eslin saw the tarot card propped against the lamp on the bedside table. It was the bent and battered Lovers card, whose bottom half was obscured by a square gray velum card.

  Welcome back, read the tight script scrawled across it. I knew you’d come. Gage.

  “Oh, no,” she moaned softly, and dropped limply onto the side of the bed, feeling stunned.

  For no more than half a minute Eslin sat there in a daze staring at it, then anger swelled inside her and adrenaline pumped into her limbs. The dull thud in her head began to pound fiercely, but she ignored it and jumped off the bed. Snatching up the Lovers card and the note, she stalked out of the room.

  Rage impelled her down the stairs, through the atrium, the sun-room, the sliding glass door; across the garden, through the gate, and halfway down the road to the Stables before it began to peter out and slow tears welled up behind her lashes. The splitting pain in her head was back, her eyes ached, and so did her chest. Every inch of her body hurt, with fatigue or misery she wasn’t sure, but she held her breath until the sob quivering up her throat dissolved.

  While she trudged down the roadside toward Ganymede’s barn, Eslin wished fervently that Doc had taken her to Acacia, Maui, anywhere but Roundtree—but most of all she wished Gage hadn’t left the tarot card in her room. Why was he doing this to her? Why couldn’t he just leave her alone?

  If he’d left you alone last night, her little voice pointed out, God only knows how long you would’ve lain there or what kind of shape you’d have been in when someone else got around to finding you.

  That thought brought her up short as she rounded the last tree-lined curve in the road and saw Gage’s blue Jeep parked outside Ganymede’s barn. She would have known that he’d be here, even if Ethan hadn’t told her. Her anger was fading, but she raised the card in her hand and reread the note taped to it in order to reinforce her resolve.

  Welcome back�
��I knew you’d come. Those words didn’t sound like they were written by a lover, a man who genuinely cared for her, but by a spoiled, grown-up rich kid who’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted handed to him, who’d never had to lift a finger unless he’d felt like it. The tears and the featureless faces of her grandchildren came back to her with the resurgence of her anger, but Eslin pushed them away as she trotted to the barn’s doors, grabbed the rope handle, and pulled.

  Straw dust hung thick in the sunlight slanting through the barred windows near the eaves, and a good-sized muck pile blocked the corridor outside a stall next to Ganymede’s. Metal tines glinted past the open door of the box and deposited another pitchforkful on the heap. She inhaled deeply to catch her breath, sneezing loudly as she stepped inside the barn and let the door fall shut behind her.

  It was the sneeze that Gage heard first, not the echoing, wooden bang of the barn door, and he knew it couldn’t be Ethan who’d just entered. It might’ve been his mother, but he didn’t think so. It didn’t feel like his mother. His shoulder had been throbbing for the last five minutes, but the pain went away as he stepped out into the corridor. He saw Eslin then, standing just inside the door, the dust motes drifting through the slanted shafts of light between them, blurring her face. He’d known it was her, and his heart almost burst from the sheer joy of knowing.

  “Hi, how are you?” He called and started toward her. “You look a lot better than you did the last time I saw you.”

  He sounds so happy, Eslin thought, as she watched him stride up the corridor, so glad to see me. The sunlight streaming between them stabbed fiercely at her eyes and obscured his face. She was grateful for that, but only for a moment, until he stepped through the light cross-cutting the corridor and she saw the smile on his face. It was the first genuine, joyful smile she’d ever seen there, and tears sprang to her eyes again as she realized she’d just been granted her dream wish.

  Eslin’s heart quailed in her chest, and so did Gage’s once he’d cut through the last dusty sunbolt and blinked his eyes to clear them of the glaring, refracted light. Except for two unnaturally bright spots in her cheeks, her skin was nearly the same color as the gauze square taped to her dark hairline. Stark white and drawn tight across her pretty face. Though the barn was warm, the air rich and heavy with sun and the grassy smell of fresh straw, and he was sweating in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, she stood trembling in jeans, a striped shirt, and a navy pullover under a camel stadium coat. Her eyes were nearly the same color as her sweater, and they’d been, he recalled, nearly that same shade on Saturday, when Ethan had told her she was much, much more than a medical librarian. The memory brought him to a sudden halt no more than three feet away from her.

  As a cloud eclipsed the sun the light failed abruptly, as abruptly as Gage’s smile waned, as abruptly as he stopped and stared at her. This was the face Eslin knew. She could say what she’d come to say to this dark, brooding face.

  So hurry, her little voice urged, before the light comes back.

  “Stop doing this to me,” she said, her voice low and tense as she threw something at his feet.

  Puzzled, Gage looked down at the loam floor, and felt a jolt in his chest when he saw the tarot card and the note he’d left in her room.

  “I left that for a reason,” he said, raising his eyes to her face. “I thought you’d know what it meant.”

  “I know precisely—”

  In midsentence Eslin’s voice failed as her eyes lifted past him. Gage heard the soft nicker behind him, the muffled fall of hooves in the loam, and watched Eslin’s eyes widen and her lips part.

  “Meringue,” she gasped, as she ran past Gage.

  Picking up the tarot card as he turned around, he tucked it in his shin pocket as he straightened and saw Eslin throw her arms around the neck of the palomino Arabian mare who’d swung her head past the stall door. He thought of Ganymede as he watched the mare arch her neck and butt her muzzle against Eslin’s shoulder, heard her laugh shakily, watched her run one hand over Meringue’s withers. The bone-deep ache that had been part of Gage as long as he could remember swelled up inside him again. Oh, God, how he wanted Eslin. How he wanted to hold her, make love to her, lay his head against her breast and feel the ache go away forever. Instead, he turned away and headed for the door.

  “Gage?”

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  “Thank you.” One arm looped beneath the mare’s neck, Eslin smiled at him, her face flushed, her eyes shiny.

  “It wasn’t my idea, it was Ethan’s,” he told her. “Thank him. And Fitzsimmons. He helped us move her out here from Acacia.”

  She didn’t doubt it; still, it was significant, she thought, that Meringue was stabled here in Ganymede’s private quarters, and that Gage, who probably hadn’t mucked a stall in years, had been doing so for her horse when she’d come into the barn. Either it was significant, or Gage simply liked to shovel manure. Eslin somehow doubted that.

  “I don’t just mean Meringue,” she said. “I mean last night too. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, but I didn’t do much, just called the ambulance.”

  And so the lies begin, Eslin thought.

  “Which you couldn’t have done,” she told him quietly, “if you hadn’t happened to find yourself in my neighborhood at three a.m.”

  “Damndest thing, isn’t it?” he replied, nonplused. “Coincidence, I mean.”

  “There is no such thing,” Eslin retorted sharply, and Gage watched her fingers tighten in Meringue’s mane. “The police may buy lame excuses like that, but I don’t. I know why you were there—you heard me scream.”

  His expression changed, not much, but the subtle flicker in his eyes told Eslin she’d hit the nail on the head. The proverbial nail, not the horseshoe nail, which she could just see gleaming dully in the open collar of his shirt.

  “I couldn’t sleep and I went for a drive,” he maintained stubbornly. “I didn’t have any idea where I was going or where I’d end up—”

  “Stop it!” Eslin shrilled at him angrily. “Just stop it!”

  Meringue snorted, tossed her golden head, and backed into the stall. Eslin touched her muzzle, crooned to her as she shut and latched the half-door, then looked at Gage over her shoulder. Her face was pale again and her eyes glittery rather than shiny.

  “You can’t lie to me anymore, Gage,” she said, her voice husky, “not if you want me to love you.”

  “Eslin,” he breathed her name softly, wondrously, and started toward her.

  “I said if,” she repeated, holding up her hand to stop him, “and I can’t even think about it until you tell me the truth—and until we’ve found Ganymede and Marco Byrne.”

  “All right, all right I admit I heard you scream.” Gage said quickly, and moved toward her again. “But Jesus, Eslin—”

  “Please don’t touch me.” She backed away from him, tears glistening in her eyes. “I have enough trouble keeping my mind on Ganymede as it is.”

  “That’s all I want to do,” he told her. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but we can’t—” Her voice cracked and she drew a deep breath. “If you want Ganymede back, then you’ve got to get out and stay out of my head. I keep thinking about you and not about him.”

  Gage couldn’t stop the slow smile that spread across his face. “You do?”

  A dimple Eslin had never noticed before creased the right side of his mouth. The sun came back, the horseshoe nail winked at her, and she thought her heart would break as she looked at Gage.

  “You know I do,” she whispered, her tears bleeding into her voice and spilling down her cheeks.

  “Don’t cry,” he murmured, as he took a step toward her. He curved his right hand around the left side of her face and brushed a tear off her cheek with his thumb.

  Eslin tried to jerk her head away, but he gently cupped his left palm around her right cheek and held her face between his hands. Her eyes were dark and wet and luminous,
her pulse throbbed visibly in the hollow of her throat. Gage felt his own heart pound between his ribs, wanted more than he wanted to draw his next breath to take her in his arms, but because he feared he couldn’t stop there he didn’t dare.

  Gazing up at his face, the smile that wasn’t so much on his lips now as it was in his eyes, Eslin could almost believe that he genuinely cared for her. It had been dirty pool to tempt him into confessing he’d heard her scream, a nasty trick that threatened to backfire on her now as his work-roughened fingertips grazed her cheekbones.

  “I love you, Eslin,” Gage said softly. “I’ve never said that to a woman before.”

  “Please don’t,” she begged in a small, quavering voice. “You haven’t any idea what you’re saying.”

  “Just because I never thought I would,” he told her, “doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “You only think you do,” Eslin corrected him shakily. “You’re confusing an emotional attraction with a psychical one.”

  “I’m what?” His hands all but flew away from her face.

  “It’s not uncommon,” Eslin said, struggling to keep her voice even and her lips from trembling. “It’s like a nail and a magnet—”

  “If you don’t love me,” Gage cut in stiffly, “just say so.”

  Lie to him, her little voice advised, but Eslin couldn’t. She couldn’t bear the hurt and longing she read in his eyes, or the misery she felt swelling her throat.

  “I do love you,” she said tremulously. “You know I do.”

  “Then tell me this is all in my head.” Gage laid his hands on her shoulders and took a step toward her as he drew her against him.

  Through his denim shirt Eslin felt the fever in his skin first, then his erection as he pressed himself against her. A small moan she couldn’t suppress parted her lips as he bent his head and kissed her. Despite the hard glint she saw in his eyes as her lashes fluttered shut, his mouth moved gently against hers, his tongue lightly stroking her lower lip before he broke the kiss and she opened her eyes.

  “If this is all in my head,” he said, the smile back in his eyes, “then it’s in yours too.”