Unzipping her sea green dress, she let it fall to the floor, sorry that she was the one doing the unzipping. She wasn't sure how she'd expected the evening to end, but in her most pessimistic moments she hadn't imagined it would end with Detective Bailey back on the case, Michael in a rage, her mother and brother alienated from her for the first time, and Tracey alienated from her still.
The one—the only one—with whom she felt a sympathetic connection right now was Dan. It seemed more than ironic; it seemed inevitable.
Destiny. Had he been right about that, after all?
She undid her bra and tossed it on the dress, then walked over to the closet for the nightgown hanging on the hook inside the door. There it was: cool, demure, and white. Just like her. Her hand hovered over the gown and then came down again.
No. Not the nightgown.
Impulsively, Maddie reached past it for a hanger and pulled a sweatshirt from it, bending the hanger in her hurry. A pair of old jeans was looped on a hook inside the closet; she took those too. In seconds she was dressed and had a plan: sneak out of the house and slip over to the lighthouse and—unlike Tracey—do it without getting caught. Her cheeks burned from the sheer adolescent idiocy of it, but she felt on fire with excitement.
The problem was her mother, tossing and turning in the bedroom on the first floor. That was really, really dumb, installing her on the first floor. Shit. Maddie went back to the window and slid the screen up, then looked down at the ground. Too high. Oh, for the apple tree that had split in half under the weight of wet snow last winter.
It was going to have to be the stairs. Maddie slipped into the hall, grateful to see that her daughter's room had the keep-out sign on it and that her brother's door was closed as well. Grabbing her Keds, she tiptoed down the hall and then down the stairs, skipping two of the treads because they squeaked. She hadn't expected there to be a light on in the kitchen, and she was right. She wasn't as sure about her mother's bedroom, recently the study her father had loved so well. The room had the only wall-to-wall carpeting in the house, and light didn't show under the door.
With infinite care, Maddie tiptoed barefoot past her mother's room. To be caught in the hall carrying her sneakers would be the ultimate humiliation.
Obviously the thing to do was to walk boldly out the front door. She ought to be above this adolescent nonsense. She ought to act her age. And yet something about sneaking around had a wicked appeal.
Déjà vu all over again, she thought, exhilarated despite her jitters. She was definitely punchy.
She was lined up exactly opposite the door to her mother's room when she heard a single sharp click. A lamp? Yes. The big keyhole in the door became filled with light.
Shit!
Maddie didn't move, and after a normal eternity, more or less, she heard and saw the light go off. Safe! It was an easy tiptoe sprint to the Dutch door in the kitchen. She slid first the lower bolt, then the upper, then turned the doorknob carefully and let herself out.
She paused on the other side of the door and gazed up at the stars. The night was less black than before; dawn was on the way. If she were going to be insane, then she'd better do it in a hurry.
Chapter 17
Under fading stars, Dan Hawke stood in front of the lighthouse, holding the last pack of cigarettes he would ever possess in his life.
He'd discovered the cigarettes by accident when he was rummaging through a box of books earlier in the day: a pack of Marlboroughs, the cellophane wrapper still intact. It must've fallen out of his shirt pocket when he was closing up his apartment in Atlanta.
He fingered the wrapper, taking comfort in the fact that it was still unbroken. The cigarettes would still be fresh.
All the more satisfying to throw 'em in the sea, he thought, walking toward the water. There weren't too many things in his life that he had control over at the moment, but this was one of them.
The walk was short; there wasn't much beach between the lighthouse and the ocean, despite the outgoing tide. He pulled away the little cellophane strip—the last time he would ever do it—to allow seawater to soak the pack and take it down to a watery grave. Then he hauled back with his pitching arm and hurled the pack as far as he could over the water.
End of story, he told himself, shrugging off the addiction without a regret. He was too exhilarated to care. Here it was, past four in the morning, and he was as wide awake as a kid at camp. And not jumpy awake, either. He felt too alert, too on top of things, to call himself jumpy.
He would see her at nine. At nine he would see her, hear her voice again, definitely kiss her again. He struck out on a walk along the beach. No point in going to sleep now; he wanted to relive the night. He could still taste her mouth, smell her perfume, hear the ache in her voice as she said his name.
There was still hope! The Afghani crone had been right: all he'd had to do was go back to where he'd made a wrong turn and start over. What if he hadn't listened to the old woman? What if he'd written her off as a crazy lady, drugging him with narcotic tea and muttering gibberish to distract him from his pain?
The Afghani crone! He wished he knew her name. He'd send her a year's wages for the miracle she'd wrought. Wonderful lady! He could picture her so clearly, black eyes and all, a black shawl around her shoulders to ward off the cold and damp of her hovel. Those eyes! Beady, glazed with cataracts, unfathomable. Without seeing, they were able to look straight through his soul.
He owed her his undying gratitude, that crone. For the maggoty rye bread, for the straw pallet, for the way she jabbered the soldiers into passing on by.
Two years' wages! And worth every cent.
Old crone—thank you! he thought, pumping his fists in the air. He made a vow on the spot to find her and build her a new house as soon as Maddie agreed to be his.
Maddie would agree to be his. She had to. A woman didn't kiss a man like that from a sense of nostalgia. And she sure as hell wasn't the type to try him on like a new hat. Maddie, Maddie Regan.
Regan! Wrong name, wrong name. Damn! Maddie Hawke. Right name. His name. Their name. Maddie Maddie Maddie Hawke. God, he was floating on air just thinking about her. He loved her through and through. She was as fresh as the sea: bracing and intoxicating and clear. He hadn't felt this good since Lowell College.
No. That wasn't true. He'd never felt this euphoric before. She'd had him riding high in Lowell College, but even there—hell, he was twenty-four. What did he know about love, back in Lowell College?
No, not true. He was being too hard on himself. He knew enough back then to know the real thing when he saw it. And for the next twenty years he'd wandered through a desert of war and rebellion (maybe trying to get himself killed?) without finding the oasis that was Maddie. It took an old crone to point the way back.
Yes! God, he was happy. It didn't seem possible to love someone this much and not explode. Nine o'clock, nine o'clock. He'd blow apart before then!
A long flat wave nudged an empty beer can in his path. A symbol? Of temptation? To do what? Waste this high in a stupor? No way! He kicked the can ebulliently away from him.
And when he looked up, he saw her.
Or thought he did. He had to be hallucinating. She was walking toward him in jeans and sweats, the same as she had two decades ago. Maddie Timmons back then, twenty years old, an idealist, a virgin, for crissake. He'd never known one before.
And the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. Beautiful then, beautiful still. Straight-through beauty, not the skin-deep kind.
He humored the vision walking toward him, smiling and charmed by it, and then he stopped dead in his tracks and blinked. The vision had a voice.
"Dan!"
She broke into a run for him and he was so stunned by the reality of her that he just stood there like an ass, like a besotted, enchanted ass.
Still, he had the sense to open his arms as she drew near. And then he was holding her, holding the vision, and she felt and sounded and smelled like Maddie and was Madd
ie, and his heart, at last, was at peace with his soul. For the first time in his forty-four years of life, he was at peace with himself.
"Maddie, Maddie ... I love you," he said between joyful kisses, because he wanted that out in the open before anything else. "I've always loved you, I'll never not love you, Maddie, I love you."
"I know ... I know ... I feel the same, I've always felt the same," she said, interrupting him with urgent, passionate assurances that left him dizzy with ecstasy. "We never, never should have parted, it was my fault—"
"You had no choice," he said, kissing her throat, inhaling her deep into his soul. "It's why you were you, why I loved you ... I love you, love you ...."
It was a dream, it didn't seem possible, it was a dream, and he became suddenly afraid it would end. "Maddie, let me love you here, now, let me love you." He said it in a low moan, tugging her down to the sand. It was cool and damp from the receding tide, and somehow the right place to be, to make love.
"Oh, yes," she said on a sigh, and she fell to her knees.
He did, too, and they lost themselves in one another's arms for a long, rapturous kiss before she lay back, as if on command, and let him remove her jeans. He rolled up her sweatshirt, exposing her breasts, and he caught his breath in agony that he had lived so long without her. He bent over and suckled her breast as if he were a starved thing, and he heard her moan in abject arousal. Her hands were wrapped in his hair, pulling it hard, pulling his mouth hard against her breast. It left him drunk with satisfaction, wild with desire.
"In me, in me," she said in a low, hoarse cry.
"Oh, gladly," he said, closing his eyes to savor the sound of her hunger. In his wildest dreams, his deepest fantasies, he would not have imagined them here, at the edge of the sea. He thought, in a garden, with roses ... honeysuckle .... But this! And yet it was right.
He rolled over on his back and pulled away his khakis and boxers, then sat up and began to haul his T-shirt over his chest. He stopped and pulled the shirt back down, then said to her, "I don't want you to hurt ... to get sand in you—"
"I'll sit on you," she said, just as she had all those years ago, and it sent a newer, even stronger surge of desire through him. He rolled over on his back again and she took him in her mouth, whipping him to absolute rigidity in a few short strokes, and then she mounted him. The weight of her leg swinging over his torso catapulted him back in time and forward to their future and wrapped him up in a knot of sheer bliss.
In utter silence she fitted herself around him and then went still. She was on him, he was in her, and only the ocean knew—the sad, sighing, mournful ocean, sliding in and then out over the beach. He lifted himself to go deeper still, searching for that last fraction of her, coming home, after all those years.
She let him find her, and then she braced her hands on his chest and drew herself slowly up, then came down ... up ... down, the ebb and flow of the sea, the rhythm of their love for one another. He wanted to savor the moment, but the moment had other ideas.
He cupped his hands under her buttocks, and began to move, and she didn't stop, and suddenly they were slamming into one another, him up, her down, in a fury of pent-up passion, making up for lost time, for lost years, a whole generation of them. He heard her moan in agony and in joy, and he winced from the passion of it and felt tears sting his eyes. He wanted more than anything to have her forever, but he knew more than anything that he could only be sure of now.
He came before he meant to, before she had a chance to. Part of him felt satisfied, but his soul felt bereft; he wanted her with him on the same plane of ecstasy.
"Stay," he whispered, and pinned her buttocks to his groin. "Wait."
She let out a low, throaty laugh of frustration and he knew that she had been waiting, just as he had, all those years. For an exquisitely long moment they stayed locked in their eroticism, listening to the rhythmic approach and retreat of the sea. He knew that he would remember the moment forever: the warmth of her weight on him; the slippery pool of his seed puddling between them; the cool wet lick of a wave as it slid around his ankles and then withdrew as furtively as it had approached.
He would remember it forever.
Suddenly Maddie sighed and seemed to catch her breath, and then she leaned over to give him a scorching kiss. He might as well have been touched by fire. He let out a sharp, animal sound and instinctively rolled over, pinning her under him in the act. He repositioned himself in her, then searched for and found her mouth, thrusting his tongue in it, filling her every hollow with himself, offering himself to her and claiming her for his own.
The hot, quick slide of his flesh back and forth against hers brought him to a new and deeper level of passion. This time, he wanted nothing but to see Maddie satisfied. He made a crazy vow never again to come before she did, because he was crazy in love with her.
He felt her breath grow short and ragged, heard her moan become a series of whimpers, tasted her tears on his lips. He felt her body shudder beneath his. He felt himself go over the edge, and then he felt... stillness, a dreamy, tender stillness between them. After all those years... stillness. At last.
****
After a long, long while, Maddie sighed and rubbed her cheek against his hair, wiping away the last cool trail of her tears.
Crying ... she'd been crying. The thought of tears at a time like this astonished her, until she remembered that she almost never cried when she was unhappy. She mostly cried from joy.
She sighed again, content in her love for him. Dan heard the sigh. Nuzzling her on her neck, he said, "I'm heavier than I was twenty years ago."
"Not much," she said, but he rolled onto his side anyway.
She let out a moan of protest and kept her arms around him, afraid to let him leave her embrace. She'd flung him away once, and had paid dearly for the mistake.
"I love you," she whispered. "I love you."
He stroked her hair away from her face and said simply, "You are my life."
Overhead a gull screeched out a warning: dawn, dummies! Dawn!
"It's getting light out," Maddie said, acknowledging the obvious at last.
Dan's voice was wistful: "I guess we can't just stay here?"
She laughed and said, "Not without bottoms on." She sighed, wistful herself, and began the process of brushing sand from her skin.
"Wait," he said, laying his hand on her wrist. "I have a better idea. We can rinse off in the sea."
Maddie smiled and shook her head. "Only in the movies, I'm afraid. In real life someone's bound to come along walking a dog."
"Okay, here's a concession: we keep our sweatshirts on. No one will suspect a thing. And anyway, who'd be out at this hour of the morning?"
A man and a dog, a woman and two dogs, a man running, another man running, and—amazingly—a woman on horseback, that's who. The beach had turned into Grand Central Station. Every time Maddie and Dan began wading back out of the water, Maddie would spy another body on the horizon. By the time the coast had cleared enough for them to make a run for their clothes, they had goosebumps on their goosebumps.
"Geez, doesn't anyone sleep in anymore?" Dan asked while they dressed in record time.
"Can you believe it? I'm so cold," Maddie confessed, "and suddenly exhausted."
Dan wrapped her in a warming hug and murmured in her ear, "Come back to the lighthouse with me, then. We'll huddle there together. Maybe take a nap. Eventually."
Maddie closed her eyes and imagined the two of them holed up in the lighthouse, making love, sleeping, making love again. It sounded like paradise, a dream come true.
But a dream, nonetheless. Maybe Dan could live the life he'd lived twenty years earlier, but that luxury was no longer an option for Maddie. She had a family. She had commitments. For all she knew, her mother was on the phone with the police at that very moment, reporting an abduction.
"It sounds like heaven," she said, holding him tightly around his waist. "But I can't just run away from home. It does
n't work that way."
Dan sighed and said, "Go, then, though I hate to have you leave my sight. Shower and we'll go somewhere for a meal. I'll pick you up—when?"
"Maybe the best thing is to take separate cars," Maddie murmured, unable to look him in the eye as she said it.
He understood. "Your mother's on to me," he said without a smile.
"Well, what do you expect? She never did like that Harley," Maddie said, trying to keep it light.
He surprised her by staying serious. "What did she say?"
"Oh, you know mothers: they don't say anything; they just give you that look."
"What did she say, Maddie?"
"Well ... she seemed ... surprised ... that you would want to take up with me again."
He smiled wryly. "She thinks I'm a cur."
"Something like that."
"Damn."
"Oh, don't be shocked, Dan, please don't be shocked," Maddie said, taking his hands in hers and bringing them up to her breast. "My mother is still in agony over my father. She's doing exactly what I did; she's taking out his murder on you. She's frustrated ... angry ... grieving. She wants to put the blame on someone. She wants closure, and you're a convenient scapegoat. Trust me on this: I know exactly how her mind is working. Her mind is being led around by her heart, and her heart is bitter right now."
Maddie blinked. She'd formed the theory on the spot, but now that she'd said it, it made a sad kind of sense. She added softly, "Every murderer is really a serial killer, isn't he? When he takes a life, he destroys a whole string of other lives. I'd give anything to know who killed my father."
Dan wrapped his arms around her and whispered, "I know, Maddie." He became quiet after that, lost in his own thoughts.
"I'm sorry," she said in a voice muffled by his shoulder.
"I didn't mean for it to finish up like this. We had such an incredible, wonderful experience ... that's what I want to take back with me. That's what I want in my heart right now. You."
"Maddie ... love of my life. If you had any idea ..." He kissed her again, a profoundly tender kiss that left her in awe. All those years. He'd remained committed to her all those years.
A Charmed Place Page 17