Lord of Lightning

by Suzanne Forster

  He sat down on the bed next to her, and with a dampened cloth, began to clean the cut on her forehead. She stirred, but didn’t wake. When she did, he knew he would have to find a way to quickly reassure her that she was safe. He didn’t want her panicking again. She’d already done herself enough damage.

  He cleaned the cuts on her arm, and then attempted to roll her to her back so that he could clean the arm she was lying on. She moaned softly as he lifted and repositioned her. That was when he saw the rip in her dress and the gash that began at her rib cage and ran alongside her breast to her armpit. Though she was no longer bleeding, there were some violent looking bruises. It was possible she’d broken some ribs.

  He rose slowly, staring at her, his heart thudding.

  He was going to have to undress her to get to the wound.

  The brutal irony of it hit him immediately. Undressing a beautiful woman would have been a fantasy come true for most men—but Stephen Gage wasn’t most men. And he had no intention of subjecting himself to that kind of cruel and unusual punishment. It would be ludicrous to think that he could treat her wounds with any kind of clinical detachment. She was injured, but that wasn’t nearly as significant to him as the fact that she was an injured woman.

  It had been a long time since he’d touched a woman in any condition. Until recently, it had been years since he’d seen a woman, and he wasn’t willing to put himself to the test of seeing one naked—or of undressing her himself. Not yet. And not her, he thought. She was too desirable, a mantrap lying in wait, an ambush rigged with irresistible female secrets. And she was helpless to defend herself against a man dangerously low on self-control.

  His moral dilemma quickly became irrelevant. He couldn’t call an ambulance. It would draw attention to the quarry lights, and to himself—a risk he wasn’t willing to take. He also couldn’t let her lay there and bleed. If her ribs were broken, they would have to be wrapped. He considered waking her, and decided it would be easier for both of them if she remained out cold. He wouldn’t have to deal with her resistance and/or embarrassment. She wouldn’t have to watch him sweat it out, trying to appear indifferent.

  Her lightweight cotton dress buttoned down the front, and Stephen could see immediately that he had two choices. Remove the dress totally, or take half-measures. He could draw the top down and let it bunch around her waist.

  The dress had to go, he decided. The bunched material would hamper him. He sat next to her, aware that there was only one place to begin, the buttons at her neckline. His eyes were drawn to the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the peach-colored fabric. They looked full and softly rounded, almost too large for her slender frame. Just his luck, he thought, exhaling tightly, the first woman he’d come near in over three years, and she had to be built.

  Humor did nothing to alleviate his tension. He worked open the first button, and his mouth went dry as his fingers accidentally slipped inside the placket of her dress. He hesitated as his skin brushed hers. Velvet doesn’t even come close, he thought. He’d never felt anything so soft.

  He had four more buttons free when he noticed the sprinkling of freckles beneath his fingers. They dusted the valley between her breasts and disappeared into the shadows of her cleavage. Freckles and cleavage, he thought, his heart beginning to thud again. It was a dangerous combination.

  He worked open the next few buttons, slowly, awkwardly, until he had the dress undone to her waist. She stirred a little, her breath escaping in a soft sigh as he grazed her skin, and the sound of it made his stomach tighten. It was a whisper as seductive as the hollow sensation inside him. It tugged at him irresistibly.

  He stood then, staring down at her, his mind beginning to play tricks on him. It was telling him that perhaps she knew what he was doing, that perhaps she even liked it. A fantasy took shape in his imagination ... a supine woman, drugged with passion, languidly allowing a man to undress her, waiting for him to take her sweetly, aching for the hardening organ between his legs. Take me, she whispered, reaching out for him, opening her legs in lush invitation ...

  A film of sweat dampened Stephen’s neck as he broke free of the gripping scenario. He strode to the cabin window and stared out. He was in worse shape than he’d thought. The muscles in his groin ached like fire. He wasn’t going to be able to do this, he realized. Even if he could keep his actions under control, he couldn’t control his mind. Or his body. He was responding involuntarily, muscles hardening even as he stood across the room, ten feet from her.

  It had been too long. He no longer understood the drives and inhibitions of a normal man. He had come from a world where women didn’t exist. Where life itself barely existed. He had lost touch with the human race.

  A moment later he came face-to-face with the reality of his predicament. He had no choice. He couldn’t let anyone else come to the cabin to take care of her. Paramedics roaring around with their vans and flashing lights would be too risky to the vital things he had to accomplish.

  He turned back and glanced at her, disgusted at himself. A woman was hurt and he was acting like an adolescent kid with his first girlie magazine. “Get it together. Gage,” he muttered.

  He got the dress off her fairly quickly once he made up his mind to do it. It wasn’t as tortuous as he’d expected, but her soft sighs every time he touched her didn’t make the task any easier. He could have sworn she was responding to him, or if not that, then dreaming about something she shouldn’t have been. Either way, it was playing hell with his good intentions.

  His jaw muscles clenched as he let his eyes brush over her. She wore nothing under the dress but a pair of soft cotton panties and a cotton bra. No slip, no nylons. No lace. Interesting, he thought grimly, the no-frills model. She apparently harbored no secret fantasies if her sensible underwear was any indication.

  Unfortunately he had fantasies enough for both of them. He averted his eyes, swearing violently as it flashed through his head again, the wildly sexy scenario ... only this time she was the languid woman, reaching out to him, opening her legs, aching to be taken. ...

  His stomach fisted painfully. Get it over with. Gage!

  He lifted her, forcing himself to be gentle—and to ignore her murmurous sighs as he ran his hand along the crevice between her shoulder blades. He was feeling for the back closure of her bra, but all he found was warm skin and elastic fabric. Puzzled, he laid her back down and scanned the front of the bra.

  There was a small plastic oval at the bottom center of the bra where the cups came together. He tested it gingerly, then slipped his forefinger underneath it and felt the two interlocking sections give way. Ingenious, he thought, applying pressure, a front opening. The bra clicked open, and he smiled, pleased with himself. Mission accomplished.

  It didn’t hit him for a moment what he’d done. He’d become so engrossed in the mechanics of the brassiere that he hadn’t thought about the fact that he was baring her breasts. A nerve twitched in his jaw as he surveyed the results of his handiwork. Lush was the word that came to mind. Lord, yes. Her breasts were fuller than he’d imagined, almost voluptuously heavy.

  There was only one problem. The long S-shaped gash had caught the underside of her right breast. In order to clean away the encrusted blood, he would have to cup her, lift her— An angry sound hissed through his clenched teeth. Feeling a woman up. Wasn’t that what they called it?

  A moment later he was gingerly cleaning the long gash, and praying to heaven that she wouldn’t shift or sigh or do anything else that would push him over the edge. As he worked his way down from her armpit, he cupped her breast with one hand and dabbed at the injury with the other. It was a nasty cut, and he didn’t want to hurt her, but that concern did nothing to alleviate the massive fisting in his groin.

  Stephen Gage was in pain.

  The silky weight of her in his palm was devastating. She was soft beyond belief, and her nipples were slightly budded. From the cold, he hoped. To a man in his extreme state of deprivation, she represented
more than a sexual release. At that moment she was everything he’d ever dreamed of in those lost years of ice and eternal darkness.

  By the time he’d finished with her, he was sheened in sweat and his breathing was shallow. He actually felt a wave of dizziness wash over him as he covered her with a blanket.

  As he rose and stood back he caught his reflection in the mirror across the room. He was a frightening sight, his eyes wild and lonely, his features gaunt. He stared at himself, struck by the raw pain he saw....

  The image unlocked a memory. Another time. Another woman. Another world. It ripped through his mind, uncoiling like a demon storm, shrieking of tragedy, of darkness and death. It reminded him of what he’d done—of who he was. It warned him that he was an exiled man, forever marked.

  “No,” he breathed, fisting his hands, driving the memory away with a massive force of will. In its aftermath he could feel the pain coming, but he was powerless to stop it. His strength was gone. It began as it always did, with a blinding flash of white light, and then several crimson flares burned into his focus like laser beams, searing his brain. He caught the web of his hand between his thumb and forefinger, gripping himself brutally, applying enough pressure to snap bones. The man in the mirror was disintegrating before his eyes, dissolving in a pale, fiery light.

  In his total concentration he didn’t see that Lise’s eyes had fluttered open, and she was watching him.

  Three

  LISE’S FIRST SEMICONSCIOUS thought was that she must still be dreaming. Through the misty veil of her half-closed eyes, she saw what appeared to be a great golden lion hovering over her.

  She might have screamed if she hadn’t felt so drugged and stuporous. Lethargy dragged at her as she tried to move, and a dull pain throbbed near her right breast. The question floating vaguely in her mind was. Where am I? The only sound she heard in the utter stillness was the soft rasp of her own breathing.

  Her eyes were heavy-lidded and burning with exhaustion. Fighting to stay conscious, she let them droop shut. For several seconds she sank back into dreamy oblivion, drifting in darkness, telling herself she mustn’t let go completely. When she forced her eyes open again, the form above her had transformed from a lion to a man. A man she knew ...

  The Viking god of her mother’s stories.

  Stephen Gage towered above her, his eyes tranced as he gazed at something in the distance. The room’s thin light poured silver over his burnished gold hair, and his face was sheened, as though he’d walked through a drenching mist.

  Lise rolled her head slightly and saw that he was staring at his own reflection in the mirror. The image was oddly distorted, almost surreal from her angle, and as she tried to bring it into focus, she began to remember what had happened ... the turquoise inferno, the black apparition.

  “Did you see it?” she asked, her words a barely intelligible whisper.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She turned from the mirror to look at him. “What was it?”

  He shook his head, still staring at the glass, lost in some shadowed dream. Gradually he seemed to realize that she was watching him, and he bowed his head, wiping the dampness from his brow, raking his shaggy hair back on his head and holding it there, as though the gesture brought him some kind of comfort.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He looked at her then, the haunted expression gradually becoming recognition. “How are you feeling?” he asked. The silvery distance in his eyes receded swiftly to the blue she remembered, and within seconds he seemed almost normal again.

  “Woozy ... I fell.”

  “A bad fall. You may have cracked some ribs.”

  Again Lise became aware of the throbbing pulse just below her breast. She glanced at herself there, and realized several things ... she was lying on a bed, covered with a soft cotton blanket. The room was small, dimly lit, and by the look of it, a bedroom in the Cooper cabin. Stephen must have found her by the quarry and brought her here. She had to tell him what had happened. The police should be notified—

  Somehow in all that flurry of information, there was one puzzling concern that overrode everything else. Something felt wrong with her body. She brought her hand to her ribs and gingerly touched a bandage. And then she came into contact with something warm and soft. Her own breast.

  It took her another moment to register exactly what was missing. Her clothes? Her bra? She was naked! She looked up at him, a soft gasp in her throat. “What have you done?”

  “I had to ... clean the injury. It was a bad cut.”

  Lise couldn’t summon a response. She was trying to cope with the explosion of sensory signals flooding her groggy brain. She ran her hand down her side and felt the cotton panties. No, not totally naked, she thought, only slightly relieved at the discovery. But he’d undressed her? Dear Lord. A flurry of emotions hit her—disbelief, anger, acute embarrassment. She felt exposed and violated. She felt as wretchedly self-conscious as a twelve-year-old. He’d seen her breasts? She wanted to crawl under the blanket and die!

  For another woman it might have been an overreaction. For Lise, it was the perfectly natural response of a woman who had never been seen naked by a man in her entire adult life, while unconscious or otherwise. What was more, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, she was still uninitiated in the ways of physical love. Probably one of the oldest living virgins on the planet, she often thought privately.

  “You took my clothes off? My br—” She couldn’t say the word. As he nodded, the mortification hit her again. And then another emotion crept in. Fear. What kind of man was he? What else might he have done?

  She tried to sit up, but the pain that stabbed at her was too intense. It ripped the breath from her lungs, and she sank back down, exhausted. Cracked ribs? Was that what he’d said? Her head swam dizzily as she imagined him doing whatever he’d done, touching her ...

  “Lise—” He covered her shoulder with his large hand, gently holding her down as he knelt beside her. “There wasn’t any choice. You might have been seriously hurt. I had to find out. The cuts and bruises were bad.”

  Her eyes must have told him what she was thinking.

  “Nothing happened,” he said, his voice slightly huskier. “I don’t take advantage of unconscious women.”

  Lise stared at him, her heart tripping. There was something so mesmerizingly intimate in his eyes, it left her speechless. He hadn’t taken advantage of the situation. Somehow she knew that. But something had happened. She knew that too.

  “Then what did you do?” she asked.

  “I cleaned the wounds, applied an antiseptic spray, bandaged you—”

  “Nothing else?” She stared at him, pressing into the pillow as she waited for his answer.

  Stephen felt the movement of her shoulder beneath his hand, and it stirred an involuntary response inside him. I didn’t touch you the way you’re thinking, angel eyes. But I wanted to. Like heaven and hell on a collision course, I wanted to.

  She averted her eyes at his silence, and a flush washed over her skin. The warmth of it penetrated his palm. A pulse beat frantically near the web of his thumb. He couldn’t tell if it was hers, or his own.

  “Nothing else,” he said.

  She grew quiet, the only outward sign of her agitation being the rapid rise and fall of her breathing. Her breasts moved beneath the blanket, a delicate quivering, and the awareness of it reminded him vividly that he should release her. Soon. Before his body took him on another comet ride.

  As he did he saw the imprint of his palm on her skin. He could feel the constriction in his groin even as he watched the impression fade from view. The mark of a man’s hand on a woman’s body, he thought. His mark, on her. As her skin tone returned to normal a golden dappling of freckles appeared on her shoulder, like nutmeg sprinkled on custard cream.

  He met her eyes, wondering if she’d noticed it too.

  Lise hadn’t seen the imprint, but she had felt its penetrating heat. And his. Something was happen
ing between them, and she didn’t have to be a sexual sophisticate to recognize the signs. It was happening because she was naked on his bed—because he was the one who’d undressed her. And it was happening much too fast.

  “I can’t stay here,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’ve got much choice.”

  “But shouldn’t I see a doctor?” Lise rejected that idea almost before he’d shaken his head. She knew the Shady Tree paramedics unit. Some of their children went to Abraham Lincoln, and she certainly didn’t want to be rescued from the Cooper cabin in this condition. It would be all over town by the time the morning paper was delivered! No, she’d rest a little longer, just until she could leave under her own steam.

  Suddenly her thoughts went off on a tangent, darting back to an unanswered question. “The rock quarry ... those lights? What were they?”

  He laughed softly, a self-deprecating sound. “Damned if I know. The electromagnetic properties are similar to atmospheric auroras, the northern lights, for example. But at this low altitude, auroral effects are usually caused by energy trapped in the ground.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was sent here to study them.”

  “By who? Whom?” she corrected.

  He rose from the bed and walked to the window, staring out into the darkness a moment. “The government. I’m a scientist.”

  “Really?” Lise was surprised. Beyond that she couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved. Of course, she hadn’t ever believed Julie’s wild imaginings, but she’d rather liked the illusion. And there was something otherworldly about him.

  “The quarry lights aren’t unique,” he said, still staring into the darkness. “Similar phenomenon have been observed around the world—most recently in Norway. The theory is that they’re caused by heavy deposits of ore that have been agitated by seismic activity.”