by J. D. Robb
Grace put a hand to her mouth. “In the dead of winter? What a cruel death.”
Wyatt nodded. “Not so cruel. The woman was prepared to pay the price of her infidelity. The people knew that the Great Spirits lived in their kingdom beneath the water. Even now, the woman’s warrior lover was dwelling there with them. Now would she go to him. When the tribal elders tossed her into the icy water, moonlight glinted off the waves, like a beacon. At once her body went numb with cold. Within minutes she could no longer feel her hands or feet. Her body sank below the water and she gave herself up to the fate awaiting her. Suddenly, with a great rush of sound, the lake came alive. Waves rose up taller than the trees that ringed the shore. Fish that had been sleeping in the deep awoke and swam in wild profusion around her. Water that had been laced with ice floes was now as warm as if it had been heated over a fire. A mighty wave lifted the woman on its crest, sweeping her above the waves. Her body began to take on a new form, and the form became that of a beautiful but fierce warrior woman in flowing robes, her hair golden, skin luminous as freshwater pearls. It is said that even now she waits out there in the lake, hoping for a glimpse of the daughter she loved more than her own life. Thus was born the legend of the warrior woman of the lake, for there is no warrior more ferocious than a mother denied the love of her child. Like a she-bear, she will wait and watch and do whatever is necessary to reclaim the love that was lost.”
Grace’s tone grew hushed. “Do you think she was able to make peace with her child?”
He fixed her with a dark, knowing stare. “What do you think, Grace?”
She was silent for a long time. When at last she spoke, her voice was troubled. “I can’t imagine any daughter who would be so hard-hearted that she could ignore her own mother’s anguish and refuse to forgive a solitary mistake.”
“Even if that mistake caused great pain to the girl’s father?”
“I wonder. Was it pain that drove the chief to punish her? Or his wounded pride?”
The old man shrugged. “Perhaps a little of both.”
Josh asked the question that was uppermost in his mind. “You said few had seen her, except for some of the old ones. Why do you think the warrior woman has begun showing herself again after all these years?”
Wyatt Eagle turned to him. “That is indeed a mystery. Perhaps it is she. Or perhaps a kindred spirit who must find some resolution to the pain of this life, before entering the Great Beyond.”
Grace mused aloud, “Why have I never read of this legend in any of my research?”
Wyatt smiled. “Much of my people’s lore has never been recorded, but rather passed from father to son. It is, after all, an ancient tale, and there are none of my people left.” He set aside his empty mug. “I thank you for that fine meal. And for your pleasant company. But now I must leave you.”
As he stood, Barnaby looked up from the fire. At a soft command, the dog trotted over to stand beside the old man and looked up into his eyes as though sharing his innermost thoughts.
Touching a hand to the dog’s head, Wyatt glanced from Grace to Josh. “It would seem that my companion feels at home here.” He turned to Grace. “You remind me of the woman who left Barnaby in my care. She entrusted me with something else and told me I would recognize the one for whom it was meant.” He reached into the pocket of his parka and handed Grace a manila envelope.
She stared at it, then up at him. “I don’t understand.”
“So much of life is a mystery.” He bent forward and brushed a kiss on her cheek. “Good-bye, Grace Marin. I am honored that we met.” He turned to Josh. “Barnaby loves the land. He would make a boon companion to one who enjoys exploring the wilderness.”
Josh chuckled. “I’m sure he would. But I travel alone.”
The old man opened the door and stepped outside, with the dog at his heels.
Grace and Josh stood in the doorway watching as Wyatt and Barnaby started toward the woods. Suddenly the wind picked up, yanking the door from Josh’s hands and slamming it shut.
“Getting colder,” he muttered.
When he’d finally managed to shove open the door again, both man and dog were out of sight. Though Josh and Grace strained to see their figures moving in the woods, there was no sign of them.
“Odd. For an old man, he moves like lightning.” Josh glanced at the envelope in Grace’s hand. “Going to open it?”
“Of course.” But instead of tearing it open, she simply stared at it.
“You’re looking at it as though it’s some kind of magic bottle, and you’re afraid of the genie inside.”
“Maybe I am.”
He started out the door. “You can open that envelope, or just stare at it for the next hour. While you decide, I’m going to the shed and see if I can get that generator started.”
He sauntered away, leaving Grace alone in the cabin, her pulse racing, her throat as dry as dust.
Seven
Josh breezed into the cabin on a rush of cold air. Bracing a hip against the door, he closed and latched it before starting across the room toward the warmth of the fireplace.
He passed Grace, seated on the sofa, surrounded by a stack of letters and photographs.
“Getting cold out there. I didn’t realize just how cold until I stepped out of the shed and decided to wash up in the lake. I must be losing my touch. Even though I cleaned every single part, I couldn’t get that generator to . . .” His words died in midsentence when he caught sight of Grace’s tear-streaked face. “Hey, I’m really sorry.” His voice lowered. “I see you decided to free the genie. Is it something you can talk about?”
Before she could say a word, the tears started fresh.
“Here.” He was beside her in an instant, his arms outstretched. “Let me help.”
Grace stiffened. It simply wasn’t her style to give in to any weakness, especially one involving something so private and painful. But his offer was too tempting. Right now, this minute, she was feeling so alone and so wounded. Where was the harm in allowing someone else to be strong for her, just for a little while? The moment the thought formed in her mind, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to accept the comfort he was offering.
On trembling legs she stood and nearly fell into his arms. “Oh, Josh.”
“Oh, baby, whatever it is, you’ll get through it.” He gathered her close. Against her hair he whispered, “Hold on, Grace.”
The instant his strong arms closed around her, she felt a measure of peace and safety. Comfort. As though, simply by being held, she would, as he’d promised, get through this terrible pain that had shattered her poor heart.
The tears started again, and this time she allowed them to fall until there were none left.
At last she sniffed and lifted her head. “Sorry. I don’t usually blubber like a baby. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I had a good cry. Now I’ve got the front of your shirt all wet again. I seem to do that a lot.”
“I don’t mind.” He lowered his head to smile down into her eyes. “It was wet anyway, after my dip in the lake. Feeling better?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“My pleasure.” Despite his smile, there was a huskiness to his tone that had her heart speeding up. He made no move to release her. “You feel good here.”
She blinked the moisture from her lashes. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Great minds.” His gaze burned over her face before settling on her mouth. “If you’d like, we could try that again, only closer.”
Why wasn’t she drawing away now that her tears had run their course? What power did this man have that he could hold her with nothing more than an inviting look, a charming smile?
Her voice was a whisper. “If you don’t mind, I’d like that.”
“Mind?” On a sigh he drew her close and tipped up her chin. She felt the heat of his kiss even before his lips found hers.
He kept the kiss as light as air. As soft as the brush of butterfly wings against her mo
uth.
When she didn’t draw back, he took the kiss deeper.
With a little hum of pleasure she breathed him in. He tasted so good. So right. As cool as the night. As fresh as the evening breeze. With just a tang of the mysterious.
Grace sighed and gave herself up to the moment. If she could, she would stay here, just this way, being held in these strong arms, kissed by this wonderful, clever mouth, all through the night. In some dark corner of her mind she knew that she was playing with fire, in order to hold back the rush of emotions that had left her bruised and battered.
When Josh lifted his head, he touched a hand to her cheek. Just a touch, but she could feel the genuine warmth of him and was moved by it.
Now that her tears had begun to dry, he sensed her need to take her grief a step further and talk about whatever it was that had caused her so much pain.
Catching her hand he dropped down beside her on the sofa. “Want to share?”
She lifted a handful of letters. “These belonged to my mother.”
“Your mother? She was the woman who gave them to Wyatt Eagle?”
She nodded. “All of them were written to me.”
“Why go to all this trouble and mystery? Why didn’t she just mail them?”
“She did.” Grace pointed to the envelopes. “Apparently they were all returned to her unopened.”
“You never got any of them?”
“I never even knew about them. Or about my mother’s attempts to contact me.” Grace took a deep breath. “There are things about me . . . about my past . . .” She was silent for so long, Josh thought she might be having second thoughts about opening up to him. Suddenly the words just tumbled out. “My mother left when I was three. I don’t even remember her. After she left, I was raised by my father.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “Just me and my dad. We moved a lot. From small town to small town. To say my life was sheltered would be an exaggeration.”
He chuckled. “There’s nothing wrong with small towns or living a sheltered life.”
“I wasn’t just sheltered.” She paused a moment, deep in thought, before going on. “Looking back, I realize that I lived in total isolation. I can’t recall a single childhood friend.”
“What about the kids at school?”
“I was homeschooled. My father was a poet. A very successful one. That made it possible for him to be home with me, seeing to my education without the benefit of tutors. By the time I was ready for college, he took a job teaching creative writing at the local university. At the time, I thought he did it to make the transition easier for me. Now I realize that he had other reasons, as well.”
“What reasons?”
She shrugged and avoided looking at Josh. “Now that I know how desperate my mother was to find me, I suspect he wanted to see to it that she didn’t succeed.”
“And you never searched for her?”
“I had no reason to. My father raised me to believe that she wanted no part of our lives.”
“Now that’s some kind of anger. Did you make friends in college?”
“I guess it was too late to change. By then I’d become so comfortable being alone, I found it hard to reach out to the other students. So I continued to be pretty much alone, except for my father. But when I couldn’t stand being smothered by his need to control me any longer, I chose a career that would take me as far away from him as possible. We had a terrible fight.”
“He’ll get over it. You have a right to your own life.”
“My father passed away while I was photographing the people of a small village in the Sahara. We were still estranged and never got a chance to make peace.” She gave a dry laugh. “I’m not only as obstinate as my father, but as unforgiving.”
Josh closed a hand over hers. “You can’t stay locked in guilt, Grace. What happened in the past doesn’t have to affect your future.”
“But don’t you see? Whether I like it or not, the past has shaped me. Having read these letters, I realize that there was another half of my life. A piece of me had been missing, and I didn’t even know about it.”
He could feel her pain in every word and wished with all his heart that he knew how to ease it. “What do the letters say?”
Grace’s fingers traced the edge of an envelope. “They’re all the same. An outpouring of love from a woman whose heart is broken by the separation from her only child. In every letter my mother asks how I’m doing, and what sort of person I’ve become. And she begs me to forgive her for not being a part of her life.”
“Does she say why she chose to leave?”
Grace shook her head. “She gave little explanation, except to say that she’d met a man who had been her soul mate. When my father learned of it he told her she would never see her daughter again. In one letter she claims to have obtained court-mandated visitation rights, but by then we’d left the state, and for years her efforts to find us were thwarted.”
When she looked over at him, Josh could read in her eyes the shock that was beginning to set in. “It’s going to take some time for you to process all this information, Grace. You shouldn’t try to digest it all in one big gulp.”
She looked down. “I feel as if I’ve been in some horrible train wreck that took the lives of both my parents. And somehow, I was the cause of it.”
“That’s not fair. You didn’t cause this, Grace. You were just a kid. Your parents were two consenting adults. Whatever they did to one another, it was their choice, not yours.”
“I know. But there’s more. I didn’t just spend my life missing my mother. I was all too happy to mirror my father’s hatred of her. I nurtured it. Embraced it. And now that I’ve learned the truth, it’s too late. In her last letter to me, my mother writes of her impending death. Now there’s no way to make things right between us. All because of my father’s bitterness, and my willingness, in fact my eagerness, to share it. That’s what makes this all so crushing. Not just knowing that my mother spent a lifetime trying to reconnect with me, but the fact that I swallowed my father’s story without question.”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Grace. Don’t let this new information make you angry and bitter.”
“I have a right to be bitter.” Her tone was harsh, brittle. “Looking back, it seems I spent my entire childhood trying to be the kind of person I thought my mother incapable of being, in order to placate a father who reveled in his darkness. And he’d been playing with my emotions.” Her voice was a cry of pain. “I’ve been regretting the choices I made that caused our separation, believing that he was the only one capable of loving me. And now I find I’ve been grieving the loss of an unforgiving man who did everything he could to make me into his own image. And for that unforgiving man, I contemplated taking my own life.”
Josh was staring at her with a puzzled look. “What do you mean by that?”
For a moment she fell silent. The only sound in the cabin was the hiss and snap of the logs on the fireplace.
Now that the words had been spoken, there was no way of taking them back.
Grace took a deep breath. “Just before your plane crashed, I was sitting on the end of the dock wondering what it would feel like to just slip into the water and let the lake take me.”
Her words sent shockwaves through him. He treasured life so deeply. Lived his life every day to the fullest. Though many would accuse him of taking foolish, dangerous risks, he harbored no death wish, but only the desire to live in the moment.
He latched on to the only thing he could. “You didn’t follow through on your impulse.”
“I didn’t.” For the longest time she sat quietly, staring at the clutter of letters and photos. “But who knows what I might have done if your plane hadn’t crashed at that very moment?”
“Then I’m grateful for my accident.”
She glanced over. “Do you believe it was an accident?”
He shrugged. “Do you have a better explanation?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about the legend, and the fact that the warrior woman’s story mirrors my mother’s so closely. Is it all a coincidence? Or is there something more here? How did Wyatt know I was here? What was he to my mother?” She sighed and rubbed at her temples. “Oh, Josh. I’m so tired of thinking.”
He reached a hand to her shoulder and could feel the knots of tension. “Here. Let me help.”
Turning her slightly away, he brought both hands to the back of her neck and began kneading. With a sigh of contentment she leaned her head to one side, then the other, while he continued working the tightly-coiled muscles of her neck and shoulders.
She gave a deep sigh of pleasure. “Oh, that feels heavenly.”
“I’ve been told I have very talented hands.”
Beneath the warmth of humor in his tone was something darker, deeper. She experienced a quick rush of heat and decided to throw caution to the wind. She’d been alone too long. And what better way to forget, at least for a little while, the sudden, wrenching pain that had been thrust on her?
Her voice grew sultry. “Maybe you’d like to show me just how talented those hands are.”
For the space of a heartbeat he stilled his movements. She could feel the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck. Could sense the way he was watching her while weighing her words.