“Sure I can’t help?” Travis asked in the drawl that sounded so lazy and concealed so much intensity.
“You’ve carried me enough for one day.”
“But I like carrying you.”
Cat glanced up, saw the crooked grin that was as familiar to her as her own hands, and felt both warmed and chilled. Right now she didn’t need any more complications in her life.
Yet it felt so good to laugh, to glance up and see his blue-green eyes approving of her every movement, to watch his hands and remember their gentleness on her skin.
She knew she shouldn’t pursue the fire she sensed within Travis.
And she knew she was going to.
Even in the short time she had spent with him, he had filled spaces in her that she hadn’t even known were empty. It was as though he knew her better than she knew herself.
Cat smiled and shook her head. “Travis, you’re . . .”
“Impossible?” he suggested hopefully.
“Incredible,” she said, her voice revealing too much. “Really incredible,” she added briskly.
With casual skill she went back to work. White slices of mushroom piled neatly to one side of the large, honed knife. With a deft motion she gathered slices onto the blade and dropped them in a bowl. The mushrooms fell on top of thinly sliced scallions, nearly transparent rounds of radishes, and circles of carrot as thin as gold coins.
Without pausing, Cat squeezed a lemon over the vegetables, added a generous tablespoon of her homemade garlic-basil olive oil, and set the bowl in the refrigerator to marinate.
“You look like you’ve done that once or twice,” Travis said.
“I cooked my way from the Virgin Islands to Dana Point.”
Though Cat’s voice was neutral, something in her manner made Travis look at her sharply.
“Do you do it often?” he asked.
“Cook?”
“Go from the Virgin Islands to Southern California.”
“Just once.”
“You sound like you didn’t enjoy it. Seasick?”
“No.”
Cat pulled the core out of the leafy lettuce, turned on the tap, and held the lettuce underneath.
Travis waited, knowing there was more to the story.
She turned off the water and shook the lettuce so that excess water could drain off. Methodically she began taking leaves and patting them dry on clean cotton towels.
Part of Cat wanted to tell Travis why she hadn’t enjoyed the trip. The rest of her wanted to forget the past.
“I loved the ocean,” she said finally. “It just wasn’t the best time of my life.”
Travis waited until he was certain she wasn’t going to volunteer any more.
“I’m glad you don’t get seasick,” he said. “I’m going to take you sailing.”
“Does a boat come with your cousin’s house?” Cat asked, wrapping up the lettuce in a damp dish towel and putting it in the refrigerator.
“No. I come with the boat.”
She stood on tiptoe and peered out the kitchen window to check the progress of the coals in the small grill on the deck. They would be ready by the time she got the biscuits made.
Silently Cat began cutting butter and flour together in a bowl, making biscuit dough. Travis watched her while she kneaded the dough, rolled it out, cut it into circles, and tucked the biscuits into the oven.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of boat I own?” he asked.
“Sure. What kind of boat do you own?”
“A sailboat.”
“That’s nice. The coals are ready. I’ll just dab some herb butter on the swordfish and we’ll be eating in no time.”
Travis shook his head at Cat’s lack of interest in the possibilities of sailing with him.
“Are you sure you like sailing?” he asked.
“I love the ocean,” Cat said as she spread a sheen of butter over the swordfish. “I don’t know beans about rag sailing. So if you’re one of those avid sailors who expects me to care about sloops and catamarans and jibs and the six thousand boring shapes of canvas you can hang from masts, you’re going to be one disappointed puppy.”
Travis smiled ruefully. “I learned a long time ago that my love of wind, sail, and water isn’t something most people give a damn about.”
“Like me and photography. I could go on for hours about light and texture, shape and weight and shadow and—Get the door for me, would you?”
He opened the door and followed Cat out to the back deck. Her hands were full of fresh swordfish. His eyes approved her unconscious grace as she bent over the grill.
“But I’m more than willing to listen to you talk about wind and all,” she said without looking up. “I’ll even make soothing noises, as long as there isn’t a pop quiz at the end.”
He laughed out loud. “Some other night, maybe. I won’t ask that much of a sacrifice on our first date.”
Cat went back inside and began setting the small table. Travis took the silverware and plates from her.
“I can do this,” he said.
“Thanks. The napkins are on that roll by the sink.”
He looked at the paper towels and grinned. “I thought I was the only one who did that.”
“My mother did her best to civilize me,” Cat said with a shrug. “It worked until I figured out that life isn’t civilized.”
While she tore up lettuce for the salad, Travis wandered over to the bay window and picked up a handful of shells from the pile by the sill. Slowly he let the shells pour from his hand. They made a whispering, strangely musical sound as they fell. He repeated the motion slowly, thinking about the curves of shells and sails and Cat’s sleek body.
He looked back at her. As though hypnotized, she was watching his hand and the liquid fall of shells. Her gray eyes were soft, luminous. Wisps of hair burned around her face in the lamplight.
When the last shell had fallen, Cat glanced up to Travis’s face, to his eyes, and felt as though she had stepped off her solid world. She was floating on a tourmaline sea the color of his eyes.
It was an effort to look away. The silence shimmered with possibilities, a sensuality as deep as his eyes.
“Jason likes those shells too,” Cat said.
“Jason?” Travis’s drawl vanished, leaving his voice as smooth and cool as a wave-polished shell. “Who’s he?”
“My neighbor on the other side. Most of those shells are his. Or were. He refuses to take them back.”
Travis looked at the pile of unimpressive shells. Privately he didn’t blame Jason for unloading the whole lot. What he didn’t understand was why Cat had kept them.
“What made him think you wanted them?” Travis asked.
“He found me photographing a shell one day. The next thing I knew he had given me his whole collection.”
“Generous of him.”
She laughed softly. “It’s just an excuse to visit me. He’s a smart one, all gorgeous blue eyes and earnest conversation. It would go to my head, but I know I’m just a stand-in for his mother.”
The clear, deep affection in Cat’s voice sent a wave of unease through Travis. Somehow he hadn’t thought there was a boyfriend in the wings, especially not one who could make her mouth soften and her eyes radiate happy memories.
“I thought you didn’t like boys,” he said.
“I make exceptions for the seven-year-old variety,” she said dryly. “Especially when he finds himself the not-so-proud older brother of newborn twins who take up every second of his mother’s time. We have a breakfast date whenever he can sneak out.”
“Seven, huh?” Travis dug into the shells with renewed pleasure.
“A very grown-up seven.”
From the corner of his eyes Travis watched Cat combine all the ingredients of the salad, toss it, and put it on the small table. She turned the fish on the grill, took out the biscuits, and put them on the table next to the salad.
“Time for the fish?” he asked hopefully.
“Hungry?”
“Like I said, eating is one of the things I do well.”
Travis proved it when Cat brought in the fish. He ate as she did, without hurrying, but a lot of food disappeared in a very short time. When they were both finished, he sighed, picked up a final crumb of biscuit, popped it into his mouth, and smiled at her.
“You were right,” he said. “You can cook. It’s a wonder you don’t weigh as much as I do.”
“Eating alone isn’t much fun.”
“What about the kid next door?”
“Jason is only allowed to show up for breakfast. Not my rules. His mother’s. Sharon threatened to put a collar and leash on him if he doesn’t stop ‘bothering’ me. But he’s just lonely.”
Cat pushed back her chair and began carrying dishes to the sink. Travis took them from her hands, gestured for her to sit down again, and cleared the table. It didn’t take long. He spotted the dishwasher, opened it, and looked dismayed.
“No room,” he said.
“Sure there is.”
She slipped past him and took over, finding places for everything but the salad bowl in the already full dishwasher.
“So you don’t mind having the neighbor kid underfoot?” Travis asked, wiping off the table with a sponge he had found. “I thought you were busy.”
“I am. Jason is an excuse for me to relax.”
“You need an excuse for that?”
The sharp question made Cat glance up. She shut the dishwasher and reached for a towel to dry her hands.
“I must have pushed the button marked preconceptions,” she said. “What are you really asking?”
“Are you so busy chasing money that you need an excuse to be human?”
Saying nothing, she wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and leaned against the dishwasher. The tiredness that came from too little sleep and too much work rushed back at her like a great gray wave.
Four months to go.
January.
Wearily Cat reminded herself that she could do anything for a hundred-plus days without breaking down. All she had to do was take them as they came. One at a time.
She drew a deep breath. “I suppose you could say I’m too busy chasing money. There’s enough truth in it for most purposes.”
Cat didn’t have to look at Travis to sense his disappointment. He washed the salad bowl with abrupt motions of his hands. She took it and began drying the wood with unnecessary care. She was glad to have something to do that concealed the fine tremor in her hands, a tremor caused by fatigue and emotion.
“Why does that bother you?” she asked neutrally.
“Money is such a shallow thing to spend your time on.”
“No exceptions?” she asked, setting the dry bowl on the counter.
“Not one.” The words were implacable, the tone utterly certain.
Absurdly, Cat felt her throat tighten around tears. She hadn’t cried in seven years. That, more than the burning ache in her back and arms and legs, told her how very tired she was.
Anger came finally, giving her the temporary strength of adrenaline. With deceptive calm she tucked the dish towel over the corner of a cupboard to dry.
Then she turned and faced Travis.
“Are you finished?” she asked.
“With the dishes?”
“No. With passing judgment on me.”
“Cat—”
“It’s my turn,” she interrupted tightly. “I don’t know what paragon of womanhood you’re measuring me against. I do know that I’m damn tired of coming up short. Two choices, Travis. Take me as I am or take a hike.”
He propped his hip against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at her. “What if I told you I was rich? Would you still want me to leave?”
“Why is it that boys seem to feel money excuses all manner of shortcomings?”
“Because girls tell them so as soon as they’re old enough to know the difference between nickels and dimes,” Travis retorted.
“Your choices have just narrowed. Take a hike.”
“But what if I’m very rich?”
Yet there was no real question in Travis’s voice. He already knew the answer. Rich made everything right. Rich also made a man feel as interchangeable and anonymous as a hundred-dollar bill. One was pretty much like another, as long as the zeros added up.
“If you’re very rich,” Cat said, “that would explain everything except my stupidity. I thought I was a fast learner, but I guess some things just have to be gone through twice.”
“You lost me.”
“That’s the way it goes,” she said, turning away from Travis. “Win some, lose some, some never had a chance. If you’re rich, we fall into the third category.”
“You’re not making sense.”
There was impatience and something more in Travis’s voice. Something urgent. Something uncertain. She couldn’t be turning away from him.
But she was.
“What’s so hard to understand about good-bye?” Cat asked.
“You don’t believe I’m rich,” he said flatly. Women didn’t turn their backs on a really wealthy man. He had found that out the hard way.
“Travie-boy, you could spit diamonds and still not impress me.”
“I doubt it. Women like you don’t—”
“You don’t know anything about a woman like me,” Cat interrupted bitterly.
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t.”
Cat wanted to stop there, to say no more, but anger and an irrational sense of betrayal forced words past her stiff lips.
“I once swam two miles at midnight through the open sea just to get away from more money than you’ll ever count. Rich,” she snarled. “Sweet God above, preserve me from rich boys!”
For a moment there was only silence and the echo of Cat’s rage quivering in the room. Travis looked at the rigid line of her back and knew he had made a mistake. She was telling the exact truth about herself and rich men.
She despised them.
Thinking hard, Travis crossed the kitchen to the window where the pile of shells lay gleaming in the overhead light. Slowly he began running his fingers through the shells.
“Who is he?” Travis asked finally.
Cat stared out the kitchen window where coals still burned hotly inside a cast-iron trough.
“Cat?”
She looked back toward him. Her eyes were the color of winter. She said nothing.
Travis left the shells and walked over to Cat with the coordination of a man accustomed to balancing on the uncertain deck of a ship.
As she watched him approach, she wondered if that was why he seemed so familiar to her, because he walked like a man who had been to sea, like her dead father, like the man she had thought her husband was.
Billy, the worst mistake she had ever made in her life.
“Who is he?” Travis asked again, his voice gentle, coaxing. “Did he seduce you and abandon you? Is that why you hate rich men?”
Cat looked through Travis to seven years ago. Memories poured over her despite her desire to forget it all, especially that last night when she and Billy had been anchored in the Virgin Islands with a group of his friends. As usual, Billy was sullen. As usual, he was mostly drunk.
The smell of rum and pineapple turned her stomach. He was yelling at her and waving a lab report that said his sperm count was low, but adequate for conception.
It’s your fault I don’t have sons. You’re not good for a fucking thing, and that includes fucking most of all.
It’s all your fault. Your fault! You’re no good as a wife, no good in bed, and you’re sterile. What the hell good are you, kitten? Huh? How are you going to earn your keep? You can’t run home to Mummy because she’s broke now, and you never went to school.
All you were good for was having babies, and it turns out you can’t even do that. You’re sterile, you useless bitch! You can’t earn your keep. It’d serve you right if I kicked you
overboard to drown.
“Cat?” Travis said softly, calling her attention back to him.
When she didn’t answer, his hands kneaded her shoulders and rigid neck. He looked at her gray eyes, filled with memories and pain.
Slowly Cat focused on Travis. For a moment she gave in to the silent promise of his touch, letting his warmth seep into her. Then she realized what she was doing and pulled away.
“Cat? What is it?”
She couldn’t find the words to tell Travis of the need welling up in her, consuming her.
And Travis was that need.
Wearily she wondered if she would be this vulnerable to him in January, when she would no longer feel like a woman being pulled to pieces by too many demands, all of them utterly necessary. In January she wouldn’t be impossibly drawn to Travis. Travis, who looked so strong, so competent, so capable of love.
But that was always how the masculine trap was baited.
Billy had looked strong and competent too. Capable of love? No, not even before he knew she couldn’t be the source of his dynasty. Boys loved only themselves.
Cat closed her eyes. How many times will I have to be hurt before I learn that simple lesson?
And why am I so weak that I want to believe Travis is different?
A man, not a boy.
“Cat, say something.”
“Why are you still here?” she asked with false calm.
But she couldn’t mask the tremor that began beneath the warmth of his hands on her shoulders and radiated through her body.
Slowly Travis lowered his head. She felt the heat of his breath on her cheek, the rough silk of his mustache on her mouth, then his lips moved over hers.
The kiss was gentle, sweet, safe. He demanded nothing, gave everything, warmth and the taste of him slowly filling her senses until she sighed his name. She had never been kissed like that, had never even dreamed such gentleness and caring was possible from a man.
When Travis lifted his head, tears stood like crystal at the ends of Cat’s eyelashes. He caught each drop on the tip of his tongue, then bent and kissed her again, sharing the taste of tears.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she whispered, trembling between his hands. “I’m not strong enough to lose again. Not now.”
To the Ends of the Earth Page 6