“I don’t want to wait,” she snapped, turning around. “I’m tired of waiting.” Her arms dropped to her sides. “I want to know now, Joe. Would you leave me there, with people who were strangers to me?”
He leaned back in his chair. “Rain, what are you doing?”
“I’m just curious, that’s all.”
He shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me if this is upsetting to you, that you wished it wasn’t happening,” she insisted, emotion making her breath come in rapid, short bursts. “Or maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it’s convenient for you.”
He frowned, coming forward in his seat. “Convenient? What are you talking about?”
“Let’s face it, Joe, you and I have been going pretty hot and heavy lately,” she explained with a humorless laugh. “And this couldn’t have come at a better time if you’d been having any second thoughts or—”
He wasn’t sure what she said after that. He could see where she was going with this line of reasoning and all he could see was red. He stood with such force, his chair fell backward, landing on the hardwood floor with a horrific crash.
“All right, that’s enough,” he demanded, stalking toward her. His chest was rising and falling with emotion and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to grab her and shake her or drag her into his arms. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do or trying to get me to say, but let’s set the record straight on one thing. If you think this is convenient for me, it’s not. If you think this is easy for me, it’s not.” How was he supposed to make her understand how difficult that was going to be for him? “Rain, if it turns out that you are Rachel Carvy, those people—those strangers—are your family, whether you remember them or not.” He walked to where she was standing, putting a hand on her arm. “What would you want me to do, take you away? Would you really want to leave them again?”
Rain crumpled, her head dropping to her chest. “I don’t know.”
He reached down, slipping a finger under her chin and tilting her head back until she looked up at him. “Yes, you do.”
She nodded, sighing heavily. “Maybe I do.”
“Of course you do, because it’s the right thing.”
She looked up at him, her face sad and unhappy. Her eyes were dry. There would be no more tears. She’d cried all she was going to, resisted all she could. The inevitable was upon them, and now it was time to accept.
“The right thing,” she whispered. “But it doesn’t feel right, Joe. It feels wrong. Leaving you feels wrong.”
He stared down at her, feeling something tighten in his chest. The reality of what was happening couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be pushed aside or swept under the rug. It was right there, staring them both in the face. Tomorrow would change their lives forever. Tomorrow he would return her to another life, another family, another man. She would stop being Rain and become Rachel Carvy—Mrs. Logan Carvy. She would have wealth, society, a husband and a family and no room in her life for a Navajo sheriff from an out-of-the way place like Mesa Ridge. He had less than twenty-four hours to find a way to walk away from her and never look back.
He pulled her close. Tomorrow she would be Rachel, but tonight she was still Rain, and Rain would always belong to him.
“Rain,” he whispered, cupping her face in his hands and brushing his mouth to hers. “How does this feel?”
“Oh, Joe,” she groaned, pressing her lips to his. “I love you, Joe. I love you.”
Even as he crushed her mouth to his, her words vaporized into the air around them, drifting like a thick, intoxicating cloud that seeped into his bloodstream making him feel light-headed and dizzy.
Love. How he wanted to believe her, how he wanted to forget about cautions and controls and doing the right thing and celebrate the fact that she loved him. And he didn’t doubt for a moment that she had meant what she said; he just couldn’t allow himself to believe it. Her world was too new, her realm of experience too limited for her to know about what it was she felt. She relied on him, depended on him, needed him and it was just too easy for her to confuse those things with love.
But he wasn’t confused. His world wasn’t new. It had begun before time, before there was day or night, before First Woman had led the chosen people up from the underworld, before they had felt the warmth of the sun or pondered the glow of the moon. There was a time when he’d been mistaken about love, when what he’d thought was love had turned out to be desire and flattery—and even envy. But from the moment he had seen Rain, his feelings had been crystal clear. It was love; he’d recognized it from the beginning, understood it, and hadn’t confused it with anything else. He was in love with her—in love with Rain.
“Make love to me, Joe,” she moaned against his lips. “Here, now. Please.” She pressed her mouth to his again. “Please.”
Didn’t she know that’s just what he wanted to do? Didn’t she know he wanted her—right here, right now, while she was still in his arms, while she was still Rain and still belonged to him? He wanted to carry her up the stairs, up to his bed and never wanted to let her go. But he couldn’t do that—he wouldn’t.
He had broken a lot of rules since he’d met her—rules about wanting and needing, rules about touching and allowing himself to feel something even though he knew it wasn’t right.
And it wasn’t right. Even though everything in him wanted to argue the point, the truth stood between them and the truth was, she no longer belonged to him—she never had. She was Rachel Carvy and she belonged somewhere else and to someone else. He wanted her, he loved her, but she could never be his.
“Rain,” he groaned against her lips. He almost thought it would have been easier to relieve Atlas of his task of shouldering the weight of the world than it would be to push Rain away, but that was exactly what he had to do. “Rain, no.”
“Joe,” she murmured again, clutching at him.
“Rain, please,” he pleaded, putting his hands on her shoulders and struggling to set her away. “No, Rain, we…we can’t. Rain, stop.”
The word cut through the haze of desire and longing, through the mist of need and hunger. Dropping her hold on him, she stepped back, eyes opening wide.
“You want to stop?”
“We have to stop,” he insisted, his grip on her arms tightening as though sensing a struggle. “We can’t do this. I—I can’t do this.”
She struggled free despite his hold on her arms. “Can’t?” she asked. “Or won’t.”
His arms dropped to his sides. “What does it matter? We can’t do this, you know that. It’s not…not right.”
“The right thing,” she sighed, turning away. “We’re back to that again.”
“Because we’re the kind of people who do the right thing.”
She spun back around. “But couldn’t we just forget this one time?”
He reached out, running the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “That’s not possible and you know it.”
“Do I?” She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. “Joe, we may never be alone like this again. This could be our last night together—our last chance. Couldn’t we just forget about doing the right thing this once?”
“It’s because this could be our last night together that we have to do what’s right,” he explained, the look in her eyes one he knew would haunt his dreams for a long time to come. “Tomorrow I have to turn you over to another man. If we’re together tonight, I’m not sure I’d be able to do that.”
Chapter 13
Joe glanced down at his watch. Logan Carvy was due at FBI headquarters at six o’clock and it was nearly seven now. Where the hell was he?
Looking up, he stared out the window of the high-rise office building at the glow of the city lights below. The pressure at his temples tightened, throbbing painfully. He didn’t want to dislike Logan Carvy, didn’t want to resent the man, but the guy was taking it awfully easy. The man was getting his wife back from the dead, for heaven’s sake. You’d think the least
he could do was be on time.
Joe thought of Rain waiting back at the hotel. She’d been exhausted when they’d gotten off the plane this afternoon. She’d been up most of the night before and he knew she hadn’t gotten any sleep on the plane. He’d waited at the hotel until she’d gotten settled in her room before leaving for this meeting. He hoped she would be able to get some rest, but knowing her the way he did, it seemed unlikely that would happen. She was too wound up, too nervous to settle down.
He looked down at his watch again and swore under his breath. What was it with this guy? Where the hell was he? What could be more important than this? Granted this was just a preliminary meeting and Carvy knew Rain wasn’t going to be there, but did that mean it was okay for him to keep them waiting?
Joe turned away from the window, pacing back and forth and stretching the taut, tense muscles of his neck and shoulders. He felt restless, edgy and couldn’t shake a nagging sense of uneasiness that had been bothering him since they stepped off the plane three hours ago. Maybe he was just looking for trouble, looking for anything to find fault with, but his Navajo blood was telling him that something was amiss, something wasn’t right.
Carvy had been made aware from the beginning of Rain’s amnesia and had agreed to meet with Joe and local FBI agents alone first to formally identify photographs of Rain and to clear up details of the kidnapping and ransom demands. If Carvy did formally identify Rain as his wife, as they all expected him to do, a meeting had been planned for in the morning at the Carvy house where Rain—or, rather, Rachel—could be reunited with her husband and family in the privacy of their own home.
Joe walked back to the window and stared out into the night. So where was Carvy? Why wasn’t he here counting the moments until he could hold her again?
Joe closed his eyes, shutting out the city lights. If she were his wife, he wouldn’t have let anything stop him. He would have been at the damn airport waiting.
He opened his eyes. But Rain wasn’t his wife—she wasn’t even Rain any longer. She was Rachel Carvy and it was his job to return her to her husband—if the guy ever decided to show up.
“I’m going to try to get someone on the line, try to find out what the holdup is.”
Joe turned to Neal Rubin, sitting at the conference table in the middle of the room. The seasoned FBI agent looked as frustrated as he felt.
“That probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he agreed, stepping away from the window. “We probably should find out if there has been some kind of mix-up.”
“There’s been no mix-up.” They both looked at the sound of the door opening. “I’m Logan Carvy.”
The tap on the door was so quiet she barely heard it, but nerves had her reacting as though it had been as loud as an explosion.
She leapt off the bed and ran across the room, squinting to peer through the peephole in the door. Despite the distortion of the glass, Joe’s handsome face looked somber and serious.
“Good, you’re still up,” he said when she opened the door. “Could I come in for a minute?”
“I didn’t think you’d ever get back,” Rain said, stepping to one side to let him pass. “I’ve been going crazy waiting.” She closed the door behind him and followed him into the room. “What took so long? What happened?”
“Well, I met with Logan Carvy,” he announced in a tired voice, walking to the table and chairs near the window.
Logan. Rain shivered. If this was the name of her husband, why did it still send a chill rifling through her, leaving her feeling cold and numb?
“Y-you did?”
He pulled one of the chairs from the table and collapsed into it. Sighing heavily, he nodded.
Logan. This was the man who was supposed to be her husband, the man she loved, the man she shared two children with. So why did his name still fill her with dread? Why did it make her shake? Why had it tortured her dreams and left her feeling frightened and alone?
She wandered to the table and reached for the other chair, sitting across from him. “Wh-what was he like?”
Joe leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and rubbed at his eyes. In all the weeks that she had known him, she’d never seen him look tired, but he looked tired now. In fact, he looked utterly exhausted.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “He’s not very tall, but broad shouldered, dark hair.” He pushed himself away from the table, leaning back in the chair. “He didn’t have horns or a tail or anything like that.”
She leaned back then, too. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to be funny or not, but she could find nothing humorous in any of this.
“So what…what happened? What did you talk about?”
Joe sighed again. “You mostly—where you were found, your injuries. There was talk of the kidnapping, about the demands that had been made, things like that.” He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “That’s pretty much all.”
She drew in a deep breath. It was as if they were talking about someone else, about a character in a movie or a book—but they weren’t. They were talking about her.
“You took pictures…of me. Did you show them to him?”
Joe came forward in his chair again. “Yes, I did.”
“And…?” She held her breath, but the answer really was no mystery to her. She could see it on Joe’s face, in every move that he made.
“And he identified you,” Joe said in a flat, dry voice. “As his wife.”
Rain felt a little like she’d been hit hard in the stomach. Even though she had known what the answer would be, hearing it still brought a reaction. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had been holding her breath, that she had been holding herself rigid, bracing every muscle for the blow.
“You okay?” he asked after a moment.
Actually, she thought she was going to be sick, thought she was going to throw up all over everything, but she didn’t. Instead, she nodded, and rose slowly to her feet, her legs feeling shaky and unsteady beneath her.
“So, I guess that’s it then. No more guessing, right?”
He nodded, turning away. “Looks that way.”
“So, uh, where do we go from here? Am I going to have a chance to meet my husband or are you just going to drop me off at…home?”
He didn’t react to her sarcasm. “We’ve set up a meeting at Carvy’s house in the morning.”
A chill sent a shiver rattling through her, leaving her teeth chattering. For the second time in less than forty-eight hours, she had reason to dread the dawn of a new day.
“I see,” she murmured, wondering how she was ever going to make it through another long night. She took several unsteady steps away from the chair. “Did he…uh, Logan, I mean. Did he say anything? About me, I mean?”
Joe pushed himself away from the table and stood up, too. “I told you, we talked about the abduction—”
“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped, cutting him off. “Did he say anything about…about me, about finding me, about me being here, about…wanting to see me?”
Joe walked up behind her and for a moment she thought he was going to pull her into his arms. That’s what she wanted him to do, that’s what she needed—to feel his strong arms embracing her, to feel his strength, his warmth, his support. But he didn’t reach out, he didn’t make any move to touch her at all, and another icy shiver shuddered through her.
“I think he’s anxious to have his wife back, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good,” she said, forcing the word out of her mouth. She walked to her suitcase, which lay open on the bed. “So I guess it’s probably not a good idea to unpack, since it looks like I will be going…home in the morning.”
“Rain, don’t—”
“Rachel,” she corrected, turning back to him. “Might as well start getting used to it.”
He stood there for a moment, looking at her, his expression taut and stiff. “Whatever you like.”
What she liked? What she liked was the name Rain an
d the way he would say it.
“The children,” she said quietly. “You didn’t say but I assume they weren’t there.”
“No, they weren’t there,” he assured her.
“Did he, Logan, I mean? Did he mention anything about them, about the children? Will they be there in the morning?”
“No, they won’t be there.”
She looked up, surprised. “No?”
Joe shook his head. “He said he thought it would be better if the two of you had…” He paused for a moment, swallowing hard. “If the two of you had some time alone together first.”
“I guess that makes sense,” she conceded, trying to imagine what that first meeting would be like. How was she supposed to greet the husband she didn’t know? Did she shake his hand, run into his arms? “And it’s probably the best thing for the children, too.” She reached down and flipped closed her suitcase. “Did he say anything about them? How they were, if they knew about me?”
“We really didn’t talk that much about them,” he said, turning around and walking back to the table and chairs. “He said he hadn’t wanted them to get their hopes up until he knew for sure.”
“I see.”
He shrugged. “I guess it’s only natural he’d be protective of them. He did mention their names, too, and I’m sorry I can’t remember—”
“Christian and Robyn.”
He stopped and slowly turned around. “What?”
It was only then that she realized what she’d said, that she realized what had just happened.
“They are Christian and Robyn,” she said, as the world swayed and tilted around her. “Christian is nine and Robyn eight.”
“Rain, what are you saying?”
She staggered forward a step. She couldn’t explain what had just happened. She’d had no warning, no notice. She’d just opened her mouth and the names had been there—names and faces. In the space of a breath, everything had changed. What she hadn’t known a moment earlier, she knew with certainty now. And just as the door to her memory had opened, so did the door to her heart. Love swelled in her chest.
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