He’d never seen Jenny coming, that was for sure. Since Brazil, he’d made a point of living one day at time, looking no farther than the birds he could track through the lens of his camera. Seemed like the best prescription for what he was ailing from. But under this unexpected contentment, he was still the man he was before she loomed up out of the darkness to knock him senseless, even if the impact still scrambled his mind. He’d only known her for days. This thing between them was supposed to be limited to great sex. He had no right to hold the hand of this woman, to make any deeper promise.
The breeze had kicked up into burst of rain-heavy gusts by the time he drove into the driveway, his mind till turning in circles. He turned the engine off. Next to him, Jenny flexed like a sleep-roused cat.
“I don’t know about you,” she murmured in a silky voice, “but I could sleep for twelve straight hours.”
“Yeah,” he said, just before he hopped out of the truck to avoid the heavy-lidded look in her eye. They’d be sharing a bed tonight, that didn’t have to be said, yet already he was feeling a creeping uneasiness. What kind of message would he be wordlessly telegraphing when he pulled her against him in the darkness, not for another bout of mind-blowing sex, but just so her head would tuck under his chin, so he could fall asleep with the scent of strawberries in his head?
“Hey Logan, I left my sunglasses and shirt on the lounge chair out back this morning,” she said over her shoulder as she headed around the side of the house. “I’m going to fetch them before the wind carries them off.”
He nodded a reply, fiddled for the keys, and entered the cabin. Tossing the keys on a counter, he sauntered down the hall to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and splashed his face cold. With water dripping off his jaw, he stared at the unshaven man in the mirror, wondering how long he could stretch the little time he had with Jenny and pretend this was just about ground-shaking sex. With this trouble knotting tighter in his mind, he brushed his teeth, stripped to his boxers, changed the tangled sheets on the bed, and wondered what was taking his girl so long.
His girl.
Pulling on a T-shirt, he strode into the kitchen, shading his eyes against the glass to peer into the darkness through a back window. He didn’t see Jenny, but he saw light pouring out from his shed, flickering with the movement of her shadow. He jerked away from the window. A dark hand closed over his heart. She didn’t belong in there. She hadn’t been invited.
He gripped the doorknob and hesitated, the brass heating in his hands, vacillating between confronting her or just turning back to the bedroom and ignoring the intrusion. He didn’t want to explain himself. He’d told exactly three people the truth, and he never wanted to speak of it again. But his stomach knotted as he stood there, debating. There was no way to dodge the questions she would have on her lips, or in her eyes.
Gusts of wind tugged at his tee-shirt as he padded barefoot through the grass under a sky eclipsed of stars. Rain was coming, and soon. Stepping into the doorway, he found her seated on a stool inside, cradling one of his finished pieces in her hands. She looked up as he entered.
“I…I didn’t mean to pry,” she stuttered, lifting her cupped hands. “I’m sorry.”
Logan’s throat tightened. She held a carving of a Western Meadowlark. One of his earlier pieces, simpler than the bird carvings he was working on now, still lying about in raw wood upon the table, unpainted, awaiting his attention.
“The chairs were overturned on the grass,” she said, lowering her cupped hands to her lap. “The wind is kicking up, so I figured I’d put them away. So I dragged them in here and….”
He glimpsed a folded lounge chair leaning against the inside wall, and the plastic table upon which he’d set her burger earlier in the day. An accident, this intrusion. She hadn’t meant to pry. He should have padlocked the door if he wanted to keep secrets
“It’s late.” He banked his anger, knowing it was unreasonable. He hadn’t marked out this shed as off-limits, or forbidden her to enter, or said a word about what he was doing back here while she worked in the lab. Only twenty-four hours ago they were roommates trying to keep out of each other’s way. “I’ll close up,” he said, stepping away from the door to give her space to walk through. “You go ahead inside.”
“Did you really make this, Logan?”
His ribs tightened, dug deep. She didn’t budge from the chair. But he didn’t want to talk about this, especially not about the meadowlark in her hand. That had been among the first of his efforts. Polishing it had brought him hours of peaceful insensibility. His mentor, Curcio, would say that his focus and labors had imbued the wood with spirit, the kind that drew the attention of the attuned.
“Did you do all of these?” She gestured to the dozens of birds perched on the ledges that lined the shed. Bright yellow larks, tanagers perched for flight; a hawk stretched forward as if it eyed a mouse scurrying across the floor.
He crossed his arms. “Most.”
“They’re so full of life.” She ran a hand over the back of the meadowlark, petting the painted feathers. “This one looks like it might stand up in my hand and fly away.”
His palm itched to seize the carving and return it to its proper perch but he didn’t dare move. He felt more stripped bare than he had been all day.
“So this is why you take photos of birds.” She gestured to the prints hanging from a rope stretched across the back of the shed. “You catch them perched or in flight and then carve their likeness.”
“Sometimes.”
“You are a man of many talents, Logan.”
“It’s a hobby.”
He was being terse, but it was past time Jenny got the hint. She didn’t deserve his ire, but neither did he want to tell her why he spent hours carving feather-grooves in knots of wood, or sanding away the rough edges, or working with three-strand brushes to paint the feathers right. They were sex-buddies, right? They were supposed to spend every waking hour of the next week in a cycle of desire, sexual engagement, post-coital bliss, and sleep. Best to keep conversations light, and discover nothing deeper about one another than what physically roused them. Yet he knew his stubborn silence was speaking louder than words.
He picked his words like he was tweezing stitches out of a wound. “It’s an interest I picked up on my travels.”
“South America.”
“Brazil, specifically.”
She nodded. “For me it’s Sudoku. Crossword puzzles.”
“That’s for the mind. This—” he jerked his chin toward the shelves “—keeps my hands busy during down time.”
“More than that, I think.”
Don’t think, Jenny. But she was thinking. He saw it in the way a little fan of lines deepened beside her left eye as she tilted her head. He’d seen that look before, caught it when he’d come down to her lab to find her contemplating the secrets of the universe, her gaze fixed on air. Her gaze wasn’t now fixed on air, or him, but he felt like the singular subject of her thinking anyway.
“As a kid,” she murmured, running a fingertip across the unpainted wing of a red-tailed hawk, “I took piano lessons for a while. I played music to—how did you put it?—to ‘keep my hands busy during down time.’ I was in boarding school at the time, and the work of my hands, and my mind, distracted me from other troubles. Like missing my grandmother. Or finding friends when my French was less than adequate.”
He shifted his stance, uneasy with the parallels.
“At the time, I was determined to be at least half as good as my father—he’d planned to be a concert pianist. But then I was born, so he turned to medicine.”
“Heck of a family you’ve got there.”
She dropped her head. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have my father’s talent.”
“You wouldn’t admit it, even if you did.”
“Probably not,” she conceded. “I could manage passable Tchaikovsky, but Beethoven became the bane of my young existence.” She gripped the edge of the stool between her legs
, hunching her shoulders. “It was my first and most devastating failure.”
He frowned. He couldn’t imagine this woman failing at anything she put that brilliant mind to. “I’d love to hear you play anyway.”
A strange little smile flittered across her face before she found interest in the dirty floor. Yeah, he shouldn’t have suggested that. Because there was no piano in the cabin. Because to hear her play—to want to hear her play—meant extending this relationship beyond the boundary of this cabin, far beyond the next week.
“So,” she said, breezing past that awkwardness, “this isn’t the kind of work you spontaneously pick up. Who taught you?”
She had a hell of a left hook.
“A colleague,” he said, measuring his words. “A doctor from Ecuador.”
“And you met this man where…?”
“In a clinic set up by Doctors Without Borders.” A gust rattled the shed door on his hinges, and brought in the first spray of rain. “He ran the unit in a remote area in the Amazon River Basin. I was one of his assigned doctors.”
She nodded, waiting for more. He frowned, resisting the pull of her interest, and the vacuum of the growing silence between them. He’d felt the same urge last October at the college reunion with Dylan and Garrick, when they’d all met in the darkness of a cool evening. But he’d known Dylan and Garrick for years. Jenny was still a stranger in all but the Biblical sense. It didn’t make sense to crack open his chest and reveal everything. She’d be unnerved, maybe even repulsed.
He looked away from her, running his gaze everywhere but where she waited in patient expectation. He could limit his confession to the carvings, describe to her the long afternoons he’d spent with the doctor who’d suffered his first attempts. Curcio didn’t mind when Logan joined him on walks through the rainforest to seek out seasoned wood. The practice of long walks and carving proved to be a meditative distraction from the work he’d volunteered to take on. It took his mind off the darkness of human nature.
He pushed away from the doorjamb where he’d been leaning. He couldn’t tell her any of this.
“Let’s close this shed up,” he said, swiping moisture off his arm, “and get back to the house before the skies open.”
“You don’t have to close up, Logan.”
He gestured to the unfinished carvings. “Rain will ruin the wood.”
“I’m not talking about the shed.”
He crossed his arms.
“Anyone can see there’s a terrible secret eating away at your heart.” She shook her head. “No matter how many birds you carve, the trouble isn’t going to fly away.”
Pressure built behind his sternum. Why hadn’t he been more careful? He should have packed away everything when he wasn’t here, taped the boxes closed. Now Jenny’s words threaten to pry everything open, every terrible moment—and with a new gust of wind and splatter of rain, suddenly he was inside the tent in the Amazon again, working between cots where sixty-odd people lay groaning. Mud gave beneath his feet, soaked by rain and blood. He and three other doctors worked to save the people hurt in an attack that wouldn’t make any international newspaper except as a short blurb next to an advertisement for Gucci. He remembered stepping out of the tent into the rain to plunder the overturned supply boxes for gauze, bandages, clean strips of cotton—thinking that he’d been awake for twenty-six hours—when the young woman had emerged from the murky darkness. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Her eyes swam in tears, as the rain battered a limp child in her arms.
“What happened, Logan?”
What happened? What else could happen. He’d seized the child, another victim, he’d assumed. He’d carried the six- or seven-year-old into the tent while the mother trailed behind him, speaking in the local tribal language Logan had just begun to learn. No signs of obvious bleeding, no traumatic wound, no broken bones, no head trauma. He saw the runny nose, noted the lethargy, felt a fever. He shouted for a nurse, gave her standard instructions, doses of medicine and intervals, and then strode back out of the tent to fetch whatever he’d been looking for—a tourniquet, bandages, sutures—he could hardly remember now. He’d conformed to triage protocol. He would check on the child later.
He glanced up at Jenny’s stricken face, the memory washing through him, gripped by a self-loathing shudder as he dug his fingernails into his arms.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The man was traumatized.
Jenny watched the war inside Logan manifest in the cold light of the shed’s single bulb. His jaw was set, his hands digging deep into his balled biceps, but his eyes looked like bruises. He swallowed spasmodically. She wanted to launch herself off this stool, cross the room, wrap her arms around him, but she held herself firm on the seat. She wasn’t sure that kind of comfort might not be welcome, for he gave off waves of warning.
She dug her fingers into the ripped, padded seat of the swivel stool, feeling out of her depth. She worked with scientists and academicians all day, focused her attention on experiments she could control down to the last variable parameter. A wizard with test tubes, she always felt at sea with new acquaintances, with fresh friendships, and always with lovers, few as she’d had. Socializing and intimacy involved so many unpredictable, uncontrollable factors. Strong feelings unsettled her, she’d come from a family that considered hard work and stoicism a virtue. Now standing here before Logan, she sensed that one wrong move, or one wrong word, and this complicated and intriguing man might turn on one foot and walk into the darkness and probably out of her life, and she would never understand why.
A creeping dread made her stomach roll, but she set her mind on suppressing the prickling unease at the thought of abandonment—that was an old reflex, one she had learned to disarm. Logan was the one in distress right now. She would focus on how to draw him out—or whether to draw him. She could only fathom a guess as to what he’d experienced to put him in such a state, to require the time and energy and distraction of this kind of work. She knew a little about the organization, having interviewed a few doctors who’d worked in remote areas about the local botanical medicine. She knew these doctors were often sent into areas of battle and conflict. Should she change the subject, divert him from his agony by choosing to keep their bond shallow? Should she ask him again what happened? She cycled through the choices, knowing that whatever she did, it risked destroying the easy connection they’d enjoyed these past days by pushing him away…or drawing him even dangerously closer.
“I think I told you,” she ventured into the thick silence, “that my father was a surgeon.”
He usually came home humming Mozart or Vivaldi, his terrible voice cracking, but the enthusiasm clear. When she was home for holidays, she’d greet him at the door and hum along. But sometimes, he came home silent. She would meet him at the door and see a different face, a different man.
“I always knew when he lost someone on the operating table.” She slid off the stool, the boards hard beneath her feet. “His expression looked a lot like yours right now, Logan.”
She took a step toward him, sliding her hand along the edge of the work table, trying to act casual as she approached, watching his face as she did so. He planted his hands on his hips and turned away, to stare through the doorway into the darkness of the night.
“My mother,” she added, “never seemed to let tragedy bother her, or, at least, I didn’t see it. She would tell me what had happened that day, then pause a moment or two if the news was bad. Then she would take a deep breath and ask me what happened in school.” Her mother coped differently, that’s how Jenny saw it, but now she wondered if that was her mother’s way of hiding from the pain. “It sounds odd, and I guess it was. I understood my father’s silence better—”
“Stop Jenny,” he interrupted, speaking into the night. “Please. You didn’t sign up for this.”
“I’m just talking, Logan.”
“Talking can bring complications.”
“I can handle complications.”
He laughed, acidly. “Well, this ex-doctor can’t.”
He paced in the doorway, a man uncomfortable in his own skin. Memory ran through him like a spark-spitting current. She imagined a misdiagnosis, an attempt at last-minute treatment, a botched resuscitation, and an inevitable ending, a lost patient on the table with monitors flat lining. As an emergency-room doctor, he’d seen lots of death, but this one he blamed upon himself.
She said, “That’s why you left the profession.”
“She had Brazilian purpuric fever.” His voice darkened. “It’s rare without antecedent conjunctivitis, but I should have seen it.”
There he was, a glimpse of the man inside, angry at himself.
“A doctor isn’t effective when he’s second-guessing himself. That’s why I left the profession. Let’s stop talking about this.”
“Do you want to stop talking? Or do you just think that’s what I want?”
“I don’t need any more company in my own private hell.”
She glanced at the birds, looking all the more lifelike in the swinging of the bare bulb, and understood that he was carving beauty to fill the hollow left by the tragedy. How long had Logan been carrying this guilt? She remembered him saying something about having left the profession six months ago. It was no wonder he’d set himself apart from the world. No wonder been so furious at John for double-booking this cabin. She understood the need to hide away when life hurt.
She’d been the ass.
“I said I was sorry before. For snooping.” She approached him. “But I’m not. I’m glad you shared this with me.”
She looked up into his drawn, stony face, the bruised eyes. Beyond the shed, a wind whipped the boughs, swirling them around, splattering raindrops through the door.
Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Page 11