Before I Sleep

by Rachel Lee

  “How do you feel?” Carey asked.

  “Letdown. Sad. I don't know. I thought I'd feel on top of the world, but I don't.”

  “It was sort of a Pyrrhic victory. John isn't jubilant either.”

  “I can understand what he feels. It's his brother, after all. But I can't understand what I feel. It's as if I didn't save anyone at all.” Seamus kicked up a shower of sand, expressing his frustration.

  “Maybe that's what's wrong with the death penalty.”

  “Maybe.”

  They walked until they reached the hotel, then turned around and started back.

  He squeezed her hand. “Are you going back to radio?”

  “I don't know. It seems so pointless right now. But I don't have to decide yet.” Bill had given her two weeks off rather than lose her. Time to think, he'd called it. She planned to use every minute of it.

  “Well, if you don't go back, I'm going to miss hearing your voice every night.”

  Her heart squeezed, whether because he apparently felt they weren't going to see each other again, or because she had never guessed he listened to her show, she couldn't say. “You listen to me?”

  “Every night, unless I'm working.” He gave a quiet laugh. “I was like a starving man in need of food. I needed to hear your voice. It didn't matter what you said, just that I could hear you.”

  She caught her breath, and some of the sorrow she'd been feeling seemed to be lifting from her shoulders. The night sky suddenly held more stars than she could ever remember seeing, and the water looked as if it were strewn with diamonds. “Really?”

  “Really.” He gave another laugh, this one almost embarrassed. “I told you the other day that I love you.”

  She stopped walking and turned to face him, hardly aware that the warm water lapped over her feet, ruining her shoes. “I remember. Your timing sucked, Rourke.”

  “I know. It usually does.” He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the heavens as if seeking guidance. “The truth is, Carey Stover, in all these years I never stopped loving you. Sometimes I almost hated you for that, but I never once stopped loving you.”

  “Then where the hell have you been?”

  He looked down at her, and in the starlight she could see his almost-rueful expression. “A gentleman hopes that a lady will not respond that way to the declaration of his deepest feelings.”

  “Cut out the malarkey. I'm not Gil. Talk to me, Seamus.”

  “I'm trying. You're not being very helpful.”

  “So try again, and I'll shut up.”

  “That'll work. Okay. So where have I been? I've been hiding from my feelings because I felt so guilty for the way you made me feel. I had some stupid notion that I had no right to be happy.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, you could say I realized just how idiotic I'm being. I mean, when the universe is kind enough to shower you with the best gifts life has to offer, only a jerk would turn them away. Which I did. And I was. A jerk, I mean.”

  Carey nodded.

  “You don't have to agree with me.”

  “I didn't say a word.”

  He felt the stupidest smile stretching his cheeks, as he realized she was enjoying this. She was enjoying watching him squirm. His heart took an upward leap. “Then, the universe gave me a second chance with you. It dragged me kicking and screaming back into your proximity.”

  “I didn't hear any screaming.”

  “That's because you couldn't read my mind the night you called about the death warrant. Trust me, I was screaming. Silently.”

  “You hid it well.”

  “Thank you.” He took a little bow. “Anyway, all of this is leading up to the fact that I've never stopped loving you, and after the last few weeks I love you more than ever. I've put away my demons, for better or worse, and I want to know—do we have a chance?”

  She looked away, pursing her lips, and he felt his hopes plummet. She wouldn't have to think about it if she felt the same way he did.

  “A chance for what?” she asked.

  “A chance for me to strangle you if you keep doing this to me! You know very well what I mean. Can we try to build our relationship again? Can we make another stab at it? You know. The marriage thing. The kid thing. The minivan, picket-fence, diapers thing.”

  She tilted her head back and looked up at him. And there was no more playfulness about her. Her heart seemed to have climbed into her throat. “You want that… with me? After… after what you've been through? Seamus, are you sure?”

  He nodded. “I'm sure. I can't hide forever, Carey. If you want anything in life, you have to take risks. I'm ready to take this one again.”

  Her heart squeezed, and she felt tears tremble on her lashes. He had more guts than she did. “But we made a hash of it last time, Seamus.”

  “I know. Look. I made mistakes. You made mistakes. A lot of it was just bad timing. I was running from grief. You were hiding from shattered illusions. I didn't appreciate you, until you were gone.” He paused for a moment, watching the waves. “I wanted a lifeline, not a partner.”

  “Maybe I did, too. But I remember all the fights, all the anger, all the ways we grated on each other's nerves. I want to love you, Seamus. I do love you. But I don't want to hurt that way again. I don't want to hurt you again that way.”

  “History is not destiny,” he said. “Otis proved that. The world did everything it could to break him, and what did he do? Write poetry. Love his brother. He was stronger than the bad staff that happened to him. And so are you. I think I am, too.”

  He reached over to take her hand. “For all these years, you've been the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we're at the end of the tunnel. Don't take away the light. I love you, Carey.”

  Something inside her felt as if she had tumbled over a precipice, but instead of falling into the pit below, she took wing and soared toward the stars. She reached for him, and felt his arms close around her, the safe haven she had always sought. She blinked away tears. “So this minivan, picket-fence, diapers thing. You're serious about this?”

  “The past is past, Carey. I have to look to the future. And when I look at the future, all I see is you. Will you marry me?”

  “Can I have a big wedding with all the trimmings?”

  He laughed, lifting her off her feet and swinging her in circles. “We can get married on the moon if you want.”

  “Well, in that case, yes. I've always wanted a fancy wedding …” But the teasing tone of her voice faded away, and as he set her on her feet, she gripped his upper arms, looked straight into his eyes, and said, “Forever, Seamus.”

  He nodded. “Forever.”

  She leaned into his embrace and closed her eyes, feeling his warm solidity, hearing the timeless beat of the waves.

  And hearing the timeless words of the Frost poem John Otis had kept on his cell wall.

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  Suddenly, the words didn't sound wearying and sad to her. They were a promise. And she was going to cherish every one of those miles with Seamus.

  Dear Reader,

  I sincerely hope you enjoyed Before I Sleep.

  I never thought to find myself setting so many books in Florida. Florida, after all, didn't spring immediately to my mind as a place full of romance and danger. I was inclined to prefer the American West as a setting, especially since many years of living out that way had given me a fond appreciation for the Western State of Mind.

  But for the last five years, I've lived in Florida, on the Gulf Coast. At first I hated the place. It's crowded, it's tacky, it has no identifiable culture … or so I thought. Whatever beauties had once made this a paradise had been thoroughly paved over. And come tourist season, we become an increasingly irritated sea of humanity that can't even run into the store for a loaf of bread without standing on an endless checkout line.

  But after five years here, I understand why Travis McGee had a housebo
at in Biscayne Bay, and why Carl Hiaasen regularly entertains us with so many wonderful, incredible hijinks.

  Amid the tropical foliage (little of it native), and under the blinding subtropical sun, Florida plays out the salad bowl that is the United States better than almost any other place. The clash of cultures creates a noisy, vibrant garishness that is particularly Florida. We seem to attract almost as many Serial killers as we do blue-haired ladies, and every kind of wackiness that this country gives rise to is visible here. We even have cattle ranches and cowboys.

  Florida is largely a rootless place, full of people who still think of themselves as natives of other states and countries. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play Chicago, the stadium is full of locals—most of them Bears fans from way back. And where else outside Wisconsin can you find a sports club that is unrepentantly dedicated to the Green Bay Packers?

  I've fallen in love with this place and its sheer unexpectedness. And I love the sea. The Gulf of Mexico, with its sparkling waters and white sand beaches, draws me almost mystically.

  Unfortunately, the Gulf disappointed me. When I set out to write my next boo, After I Dream, I planned to set it here in the Tampa Bay area. Several chapters into the book, I went to get a bathymetric chart of the coastal waters. I needed to find a place within state coastal waters that was deep enough for the events in this book.

  Imagine my horror when I discovered that there is no place off the west coast of Florida that's much more than thirty meters deep yet still within the coastal waters.

  It's shallow out there! The Florida escarpment goes out a hundred miles or more before it drops precipitously into deep water.

  This was a major catastrophe. It also turned into a great vacation. Looking at the maps, I realized that the place I needed was in the Florida Keys. I'd been there once on business years ago and hadn't been particularly impressed. This time we packed up and went with a different purpose in mind.

  I will always be grateful that this little kink showed me a side of the keys I had never imagined. I spent a weekend in Old Town an Key West, in a charming cottage in the back yard of two princely gentlemen I plan to uisit often. I wandered the streets an foot, watched the sunset celebration at the dock, soaking up flavor — and same pretty good food. I wandered off onto the other Keys and found exactly the setting I was looking far.

  And I found same of the Floridians who aren't rootless. There aren't rootless. There aren't many of them left down there, but same of those Canchs go back a long way.

  The sun and the heat and the slow pace got to me. I'm a diehard convert to the Conch Republic (as the lower Keys refer to themselves) and hope to visit many ties and write many books set there. It's a place full of possibilities, where the sea and the sun create a world all their own.

  Following is an excerpt from Alter I Dream my first uisit to the Conch Republic. It was a wonderful book to write, full of my dreams. I hope you'll find echoes of your own dreams there, too.

  With best wishes,

  Rachel Lee

  More

  Rachel Lee

  Please turn this page

  for a

  bonus excerpt from

  After I Dream

  coming soon from

  Warner Books

  PROLOGUE

  The day was wrong.

  Tom Akers stood on the deck of the Lady Hope, enjoying a pipe as he waited for the divers to finish their work. As captain of a salvage vessel, he took his moments of peace where he could find them. Most salvage operations he and his crew performed were risky bits of business conducted in bad conditions and under immutable time constraints if they were to save a troubled vessel and its occupants. By comparison, waiting for divers to finish exploring a sunken yacht was a Cakewalk, and Tom was perfectly willing to enjoy the calm.

  Except that it was too calm.

  Tom had spent the majority of his forty years at sea, and the sea spoke to him in a language he understood as well as his native tongue. He needed no radio weather advisories to warn him something was wrong.

  Unease crawled along the cradle of his scalp and it bothered him that he couldn't pin it down. The morning had started out almost painfully dear, with sun glinting off the waves of the Atlantic in splinters of light that hurt the eyes. But since the divers had gone below, the day had gradually changed.

  Becalmed. The word floated up out of his subconscious, some genetic memory from ancestors who had gone to sea in wind-driven vessels. A sailor in these days of powerful engines had no need to fear the absence of wind.

  But Tom found himself fearing it anyway. The Atlantic was never this quiet and still, not even here at the edge of the continental shelf. Stretching away from the Hope, the sea was as smooth as glass. Too smooth. And the sky had grown hazy, an unsettling green-tinged haze unlike anything he could remember seeing this far from land. The sun was still up there somewhere, but the light had become so flat that he had no sense of direction. The Hope might have been cast adrift in some alien world where sea and sky were one.

  He didn't like it.

  Standing there, he reminded himself of his engines, his radio, and his global positioning system, advantages his ancestors hadn't enjoyed. As long as they didn't swamp, he could get his ship home.

  But modern technology and rationalization weren't quite enough to soothe the soul of a sailor. Like most of his kind, he had a superstitious streak, and right now he was trying to remember if they were in the Bermuda Triangle. if asked, he would have said he didn't believe in such tripe, but deep inside he couldn't quite shake a gut feeling no logic could touch.

  His pipe was out, and he tapped it on the railing to shake the dottle into the sea below. The sound echoed in the strange silence, too loud, as if they were caught in a fog bank. But this was no fog, at least no ordinary fog.

  The sea had a life of her own, and Tom respected it. He knew her moods as well or better than he had known the moods of his late wife. In his heart of hearts he felt that the sea tolerated his ship on her surface, and in some part of him he always wondered when that tolerance would end.

  Today? Perhaps it would be today. It was as if she were reaching up over their heads, surrounding them in this grayish green cocoon, and at any moment she would take them down into her eternal embrace.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he muttered, appalled by the turn of his own thoughts. He shook himself and decided this was not a good day to stand by himself at the bow, thinking thoughts that were as mad as any dream he'd ever had.

  A shout from amidships caught his attention. Forgetting his strange meanderings, he headed swiftly toward the two men who were monitoring the divers.

  “What's wrong?” he demanded as he reached them. Other crew members gathered, too.

  “One of the divers is in trouble,” said the man who was monitoring the sound-powered phone the divers were using to talk to the ship.

  “What happened?”

  “I don't know.” The man looked at him, but then his eyes slid away, as if he were somehow a strange part of this strange day.

  Tom felt his unease blossom into vines of ice that wrapped around his spine. “What makes you say something is wrong?” he asked again slowly, trying to make this man understand him.

  “He says there are monsters in the water.”

  The icy vines clamped Tom's spine in a death grip. “Monsters?”

  “Hallucinations,” said the man tending the safety lines. “He must be having hallucinations. It can happen on a deep dive.”

  But not usually to experienced deep divers, Tom thought, his heart squeezing.

  “The other diver can't see anything,” the phone man agreed. “It's got to be nitrogen narcosis.”

  Tom objected. “But their tanks don't have Nitrox. They've got a helium and oxygen mix.”

  The phone man shrugged. “He had some nitrogen in him from breathing regular air when he went over the side.”

  Enough for this? Tom wondered. Fearing trouble, he asked one of his sai
lors to get the medic they'd brought with them, a man experienced in treating diving emergencies.

  Then out of the speaker came the tinny voice of one of the divers. Unidentifiable, because some of his voice was being converted to electrical power for the phone, squawky from the helium in his air mix. Let it be Chase, Tom prayed.

  “I can't … get near him,” the voice said, sounding like a cartoon character. “God … knife … out!”

  “Stay back, stay back,” said the first man into his microphone. “We're going to bring him up.”

  “He's …” The diver's words were broken, many of them distorted past Tom's ability to recognize. “Christ, he … thinks … sees something …”

  The winch was already turning, bringing the troubled diver up a few safe feet. How long? Tom wondered. How deep were they? He hadn't really paid any attention to the details of the dive. It was out of his bailwick. All he was supposed to do was keep his tender here until the work was done. He had no idea how long it would take to safely bring the man to the top.

  “I'm … alongside him,” the driver said. “Bring him up … Oh, Jesus! He's trying … helmet off! Get him up! Get him up! Get him up!”

  The two tenders exchanged glances, then looked at Tom. “The bends …” said the man tending the winches that controlled the safety lines.

  Tom might know little about diving, but he knew about the bends. When a driver descended, the increasing pressure condensed the gas bubbles in his blood, making them smaller, small enough to get into places they wouldn't usually go, into tissues and nerves. If the diver ascended too quickly, those bubbles would expand before they could work their way out of the tissues and would cause serious damage and even death.

  “We've got the decompression chamber,” Tom said. “Preventing the bends won't matter a raindrop in a hurricane if he pulls his helmet off down there!” He was surprised he even needed to say it.