by Cara Colter
It became unusual when it wheeled around and taxied back, directly toward her.
Even though she could not see the pilot for the glare of the morning sun on the windshield of the plane, Lucy knew, suddenly and without a shade of a doubt, that it was him.
Macintyre Hudson had landed. He had arrived in her world.
The conclusion was part logic and part instinct. And with it came another conclusion. That nothing, from here on in, would go as she expected it. The days when choosing a paint color was the scariest thing in her world were over.
Lucy had thought he might show up in a rare sports car. Or maybe on an expensive motorcycle. She had even considered the possibility that he might show up, chauffeured, in the white limo that had picked up Mama Freda last Mother’s Day.
Take that, Dr. Lindstrom.
She watched the plane slide along the lake to the old dock in front of Mama Freda’s. The engines cut and the plane drifted.
And then, for the first time in seven years, she saw him.
Macintyre Hudson slid out the door onto the pontoon, expertly threw a rope over one of the big anchor posts on the dock and pulled the plane in.
The fact he could pilot a plane made it more than evident he had come into himself. He was wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses, a leather jacket and knife-creased khakis. But it was the way he carried himself, a certain sureness of movement on the bobbing water, that radiated confidence and strength.
Something in her chest felt tight. Her heart was beating too fast.
“Not bald,” she murmured as the sun caught on the luscious dark chocolate of his hair. It was a guilty pleasure, watching him from a distance, with him unaware of being watched. He had a powerful efficiency of motion as he dealt with mooring the plane.
He was broader than he had been, despite all the digging of ditches. All the slenderness of his youth was gone, replaced with a kind of mouthwatering solidness, the build of a mature man at the peak of his power.
He looked up suddenly and cast a look around, frowning slightly as if he was aware he was being watched.
Crack.
The sound was so loud in the still crispness of the morning that Lucy started, slopped coffee on her pajamas. Thunder?
No. In horror Lucy watched as the ancient post of Mama Freda’s dock, as thick as a telephone pole, snapped cleanly, as if it was a toothpick. As she looked on helplessly, Mac saw it coming and moved quickly.
He managed to save his head, but the falling post caught him across his shoulder and hurled him into the water. The post fell in after him.
A deathly silence settled over the lake.
Lucy was already up out of her chair when Mac’s head reemerged from the water. His startled, furious curse shattered the quiet that had reasserted itself on the peaceful lakeside morning.
Lucy found his shout reassuring. At least he hadn’t been knocked out by the post, or been overcome by the freezing temperatures of the water.
Blanket clutched to her, Lucy ran on bare feet across the lawns, then through the ancient ponderosa pines that surrounded Mama’s house. She picked her way swiftly across the rotted decking of the dock.
Mac was hefting himself onto the pontoon of the plane. It was not drifting, thankfully, but bobbing cooperatively just a few feet from the dock.
“Mac!” Lucy dropped the blanket. “Throw me the rope!”
He scrambled to standing, found the rope and turned to look at her. Even though he had to be absolutely freezing, there was a long pause as they stood looking at one another.
The sunglasses were gone. Those dark, melted-chocolate eyes showed no surprise, just lingered on her, faintly appraising, as if he was taking inventory.
His gaze stayed on her long enough for her to think, He hates my hair. And Oh, for God’s sake, am I in my Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas?
“Throw the damn rope!” she ordered him.
Then the thick coil of rope was flying toward her. The throw was going to be slightly short. But if she leaned just a bit, and reached with all her might, she knew she could—
“No!” he cried. “Leave it.”
But it was too late. Lucy had leaned out too far. She tried to correct, taking a hasty step backward, but her momentum was already too far forward. Her arms windmilled crazily in an attempt to keep her balance.
She felt her feet leave the dock, the rush of air on her skin, and then she plunged into the lake. And sank, the weight of the soaked flannel pajamas pulling her down. Nothing could have prepared her for the cold as the gray water closed over her head. It seized her; her whole body went taut with shock. The sensation was of burning, not freezing. Her limbs were paralyzed instantly.
In what seemed to be slow motion, her body finally bobbed back to the surface. She was in shock, too numb even to cry out. Somehow she floundered, her limbs heavy and nearly useless, to the dock. It was too early in the year for a ladder to be out, but since Mama no longer fostered kids she didn’t put out a ladder—or maintain the dock—anyway.
Lucy managed to get her hands on the dock’s planks, and tried to pull herself up. But there was a terrifying lack of strength in her arms. Her limbs felt as if they were made of Jell-O, all a-jiggle and not quite set.
“Hang on!”
Even her lips were numb. The effort it took to speak was tremendous.
“No! Don’t.” She forced the words out. They sounded weak. Her mind, in slow motion, rationalized there was no point in them both being in the water. His limbs would react to the cold water just as hers were doing. And he was farther out. In seconds, Mac would be helpless, floundering out beyond the dock.
She heard a mighty splash as Mac jumped back into the water. She tried to hang on, but she couldn’t feel her fingers. She slipped back in, felt the water ooze over her head.
Lucy had been around water her entire life. She had a Bronze Cross. She could have been a lifeguard at the Main Street Beach if her father had not thought it was a demeaning job. She had never been afraid of water.
Now, as she slipped below the surface, she didn’t feel terrified, but oddly resigned. They were both going to die, a tragically romantic ending to their story—after all these years of separation, dying trying to save one another.
And then hands, strong, sure, were around her waist, lifting her. Her head broke water and she sputtered. She was unceremoniously shoved out of the water onto the rough boards of the dock.
Lucy dangled there, her elbows underneath her chest, her legs hanging, without the strength even to lift her head. His hand went to her bottom, and he gave her one more shove—really about as unromantic as it could get—and she lay on the dock, gasping, sobbing, coughing.
Mac’s still in the water.
She squirmed around to look, but he didn’t need her. His hands found the dock and he pulled himself to safety.
They lay side by side, gasping. Slowly she became aware that his nose was inches from her nose.
She could see drops of water beaded on the sooty clumps of his sinfully thick lashes. His eyes were glorious: a brown so dark it melted into black. The line of his nose was perfect, and faint stubble, twinkling with water droplets, highlighted the sweep of his cheekbones, the jut of his jaw.
Her eyes moved to the sensuous curve of his lips, and she felt sleepy and drugged, the desire to touch them with her own pushing past her every defense.
“Why, little Lucy Lindstrom,” he growled. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
All those years ago it had been her capsized canoe that had brought them—just about the most unlikely of loves, the good girl and the bad boy—together.
A week after graduation, having won all kinds of awards and been voted Most Likely to Succeed by her class, she realized the excitement was suddenly over. All her plans were made; it was her last summer of “free
dom,” as everybody kept kiddingly saying.
Lucy had taken the canoe out alone, something she never did. But the truth was, in that gap of activity something yawned within her, empty. She had a sense of her own life getting away from her, as if she was falling in with other people’s plans for her without really ever asking herself what she wanted.
A storm had blown up, and she had not seen the log hiding under the surface of the water until it was too late.
Mac had been over on the wild side, camping, and he had seen her get into trouble. He’d already been in his canoe fighting the rough water to get to her before she hit the log.
He had picked her out of the water, somehow not capsizing his own canoe in the process, and taken her to his campsite to a fire, to wait until the lake calmed down to return her to her world.
But somehow she had never quite returned to her world. Lucy had been ripe for what he offered, an escape from a life that had all been laid out for her in a predictable pattern that there, on the side of the lake with her rescuer, had seemed like a form of death.
In all her life, it seemed everyone—her parents, her friends—only saw in her what they wanted her to be. And that was something that filled a need in them.
And then Mac had come along. And effortlessly he had seen through all that to what was real. Or so it had seemed.
And the truth was, soaking wet, gasping for air on a rotting dock, lying beside Mac, Lucy felt now exactly as she had felt then.
As if her whole world shivered to life.
As if black and white became color.
It had to be near-death experiences that did that: sharpened awareness to a razor’s edge. Because she was so aware of Mac. She could feel the warmth of the breath coming from his mouth in puffs. There was an aura of power around him that was palpable, and in her weakened state, reassuring.
With a groan, he put his hands on either side of his chest and lifted himself to kneeling, and then quickly to standing.
He held out his hand to her, and she reached for it and he pulled her, his strength as easy as it was electrifying, to her feet.
Mac scooped the blanket from the dock where she had dropped it, shook it out, looped it around her shoulders and then his own, and then his arms went around her waist and he pulled her against the freezing length of him.
“Don’t take this personally,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival, plain and simple.”
“Thank you for clarifying,” she said, with all the dignity her chattering teeth would allow. “You needn’t have worried. I had no intention of ravishing you. You are about as sexy as a frozen salmon at the moment.”
“Still getting in the last shot, aren’t you?”
“When I can.”
Cruelly, at that moment she realized a sliver of warmth radiated from him, and she pulled herself even closer to the rock-hard length of his body.
Their bodies, glued together by freezing, wet clothing, shook beneath the blanket. She pressed her cheek hard against his chest, and he loosed a hand and touched her soaking hair.
“You hate it,” she said, her voice quaking.
“It wasn’t my best entrance,” he agreed.
“I meant my hair.”
“I know you did,” he said softly. “Hello, Lucy.”
“Hello, Macintyre.”
Standing here against Mac, so close she could feel the pebbles of cold rising on his chilled skin, she could also feel his innate strength. Warmth was returning to his body and seeping into hers.
The physical sensation of closeness, of sharing spreading heat, was making her vulnerable to other feelings, the very ones she had hoped to steel herself against.
It was not just weak. The weakness could be assigned to the numbing cold that had seeped into every part of her. Even her tongue felt heavy and numb.
It was not just that she never wanted to move again. That could be assigned to the fact that her limbs felt slow and clumsy and paralyzed.
No, it was something worse than being weak.
Something worse than being paralyzed.
In Macintyre Hudson’s arms, soaked, her Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas providing as much protection against him as a wet paper towel, Lucy Lindstrom felt the worst weakness of all, the longing she had kept hidden from herself.
Not to be so alone.
Her trembling deepened, and a soblike sound escaped her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said as she admitted the full truth to herself. It was not the cold making her weak. It was him.
Lucy felt a terrible wave of self-loathing. Was life just one endless loop, playing the same things over and over again?
She was cursed at love. She needed to accept that about herself, and devote her considerable energy and talent to causes that would help others, and, as a bonus, couldn’t hurt her.
She pulled away from him, though it took all her strength, physical and mental. The blanket held her fast, so that mere inches separated them, but at least their bodies were no longer glued together.
History, she told herself sternly, was not repeating itself.
It was good he was here. She could face him, puncture any remaining illusions and get on with her wonderful life of doing good for others.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, putting her away from him, scanning her face.
She already missed the small warmth that had begun to radiate from him. Again, she had to pit what remained of her physical and mental strength to resist the desire to collapse against him.
“I’m fine,” she said tersely.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Well, I’m not hurt. Mortified.”
His expression was one of pure exasperation. “Who nearly drowns and is mortified by it?”
Whew. There was no sense him knowing she was mortified because of her reaction to him. By her sudden onslaught of uncertainty.
They had both been in perilous danger, and she was worried about the impression her hair made? Worried that she looked like a drowned rat? Worried about what pajamas she had on?
It was starting all over again!
This crippling need. He had seen her once, when it seemed no one else could. Hadn’t she longed for that ever since?
Had she pursued getting that message to him so incessantly because of Mama Freda? Or had it been for herself? To feel the way she had felt when his arms closed around her?
Trembling, trying to fight the part of her that wanted nothing more than to scoot back into his warmth, she reminded herself that feeling this way had nearly destroyed her. It had had far-reaching repercussions that had torn her family and her life asunder.
“This is all your fault,” she said. Thankfully, he took her literally.
“I’m not responsible for your bad catch.”
“It was a terrible throw!”
“Yes, it was. All the more reason you shouldn’t have reached for the rope. I could have thrown it again.”
“You shouldn’t have jumped back in the water after me. You could have been overcome by the cold. I’m surprised you weren’t. And then we both would have been in big trouble.”
“You have up to ten minutes in water that cold before you succumb. Plus, I don’t seem to feel cold water like other people. I white-water kayak. I think it has desensitized me. But under no circumstances would I have stood on the pontoon of my plane and watched anyone drown.”
Gee. He wasn’t sensitive, and his rescue of her wasn’t even personal. He would have done it for anyone.
“I wasn’t going to drown,” Lucy lied haughtily, since only moments ago she had been resigned to that very thing. He’d just said she had ten whole minutes. “I’ve lived on this lake my entire life.”
“Oh!” He smacked himself on
the forehead with his fist. “How could I forget that? Not only have you lived on the lake your entire life, but so did three generations of your family before you. Lindstroms don’t drown. They die like they lived. Nice respectable deaths in the same beds that they were born in, in the same town they never took more than two steps away from.”
“I lived in Glen Oak for six years,” she said.
“Oh, Glen Oak. An hour away. Some consider Lindstrom Beach to be Glen Oak’s summer suburb.”
Lucy was aware of being furious with herself for the utter weakness of reacting to him. It felt much safer to transfer that fury to him.
He had walked away. Not just from this town. He had walked away from having to give anything of himself. How could he never have considered all the possibilities? They had played with fire all that summer.
She had gotten burned. And he had walked away.
And he had never even said he loved her. Not even once.
CHAPTER THREE
“YOU KNOW WHAT, Macintyre Hudson? You were a jerk back then, and you’re still a jerk.”
“May I remind you that you begged me to come back here?”
“I did not beg. I appealed to your conscience. And I personally did not care if you came back.”
“You were a snotty, stuck-up brat and you still are. Here’s a novel concept,” Mac said, his voice threaded with annoyance, “why don’t you try thanking me for my heroic rescue? For the second time in your life, by the way.”
Because of what happened the first time, you idiot.
“If I needed a hero,” she said with soft fury, “you are the last person I would pick.”
That hit home. He actually flinched. And she was happy he flinched. Snotty, stuck-up brat?
Then a cool veil dropped over the angry sparks flickering in his eyes, and his mouth turned upward, that mocking smile that was his trademark, that said You can’t hurt me—don’t even try. He folded his arms over the deep strength of his broad chest, and not because he was cold, either.