Whispers In The Dark

by BJ James

  A weekend sailor, she concluded. One who had lost his way.

  An uncommon occurrence in her little crook of the estuary, but never the bay. Curiously, she welcomed the temporary intrusion. Anything and anyone would be welcome. Any diversion that meant, for a measure of time, she needn’t think.

  The boat moved slowly through the rigors of the small and tricky channel with an adroit and careful hand at the wheel. Another turn, as skillfully accomplished brought it nearer. Sleek, crisp lines of a master designer were apparent. The name at the bow became legible, and with it the familiar logo.

  The craft was splendid, the logo startling, but it was the man at the helm that held her spellbound. She gaped, unnerved and wondering, long after he made the final turn toward her dock.

  The skill that negotiated the narrow crooks in the river was as evident when the boat skimmed the side of the dock. Tilting back the billed cap that shielded him from the sun, the helmsman smiled at her. “Hello, Irish.”

  His voice was soft and deep and drawling, exactly as she remembered. The voice of her dreams.

  A finger at the brim moved the hat another notch. “Permission to come ashore?”

  “Rafe. Rafe Courtenay!”

  The sloop rocked, a sail rippled. The logo of McCallum International shone in the late-afternoon light. Ducking under the swinging sail, he approached the coaming. “You were expecting someone else?”

  A hasty shake of her head and a hairpin half-dislodged by her dervish twirling, spiraled to the dock. The mass of her hair tumbled about her shoulders in a wreath of burnished darkness. Brushing it impatiently from her face, she muttered as much to herself as Rafe, “I wasn’t expecting anyone. One doesn’t in this part of the bay.”

  “Ahh, then, since I’m not intruding, and not interrupting...” Taking a massive rope from its coil, he let it dangle from his fists. “Permission to come ashore?”

  “Why are you here?” As she sidestepped his request, her hands were clasped before her to still their shaking. In her exile, she’d only just begun to deal with the rescue of Courtney McCallum, its consequences and its impact. She wasn’t ready for his attitude and his questions. Nor for Rafe Courtenay, himself. “How did you find me? Why?”

  “I’ll answer all your questions.” His smile changed from genial to patient. “But it would be easier over a drink, or a cup of coffee.”

  “I don’t think so.” Refusal spilled from her more emphatically than she intended. The training of a lifetime prompted an oblique and rambling apology. “What I mean is I don’t think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t be very pleasant company, or a proper hostess. It would be best for both of us if you turn about and go back to wherever you came from.”

  “You wouldn’t be pleasant company? A proper hostess?” A shrug lifted his shoulders, straining the knit fabric of his shirt “Fine, you needn’t be either. This isn’t a social engagement, I didn’t come to be entertained.”

  “Then you’re lost, this is a chance meeting, purely coincidental, and you’ll be leaving right away.” The acerbic drawl and her hurry to have done with him didn’t keep her from noticing the sea had darkened his skin even more. That in his bronzed face, the flash of the smile that had been scarce in the desert was swift and brilliant, touching eyes as vivid as jade.

  As she watched, the smile faded, his jeweled gaze regarded her. Softly, so softly she barely heard over the splash of the rippling tide, he asked, “What are you frightened of, O’Hara?”

  Valentina bristled and reddened, and was grateful for her own excuse of blushing color from a day in the sun. “Frightened? I’m not. Why would I be? Why should I?”

  “Do I frighten you?” An aberrant swell lifted the prow of the craft and set it rocking. He stood surefooted and as unmindful as if he stood on solid rock. “After you slept in my arms for most of two nights, are you suddenly afraid that I would harm you?”

  Shaking her head and catching the sweep of her hair back all in a move, she stuttered a denial. “I never. I wouldn’t.”

  “You dreamed, O’Hara.” Rafe gripped the rope, wishing he could touch her and comfort her as before. “Disturbing dreams. And I held you until you slept at peace.”

  “Ahh, you’re clairvoyant now.” She wanted to back away, wanted to have done with this, but found herself rooted to the dock and imprisoned by the power of his gaze. Rejecting what he said, what he made her feel, she retaliated with scorn. “You claim to know the quality, if not the content of my dreams like some Gypsy fortune teller, and I’m to believe you? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Truth is seldom ridiculous. And the truth is that in the desert your nights were pain and torment. Because it seemed to help, I held you until it passed.”

  “You lie.” Once the nightmares had been frequent, but not in a long while. When they had begun again after her time with Rafe in the desert, she thought it was only here at the lodge. A backlash caused by the death of Edmund Brown. Resurgence of guilt she must face alone.

  “You he,” she cried once more, desperate to disprove what she feared must be true.

  Rafe looked steadily at her. As impervious to the insult as the roughening tide, but not her distress. His tone was low, his voice subdued. “You dreamed of David, O’Hara.”

  All the world receded. The dock did not rock beneath her feet. The breeze was still, the leaves quiet. No loons cried from the marsh in the darkening gray of the sun. “David.”

  His name was agony as fresh as the moment. A raw reminder that came too quickly on the heels of this day. She wasn’t ready, her defenses weren’t repaired. The key turned a second time in floodgates kept tightly closed. Except in her dreams. Except today.

  Grotesquely familiar images resurfaced with the blinding power of a migraine. If the first had been a dagger to the heart, this was the battering ram she hadn’t the strength to withstand. Hardly aware of her actions, she turned from Rafe quickly. But not before he’d seen that she’d paled. That her lips were stark and blue rimmed. That her eyes shone emptily above the purpling, ever more evident stains of lost sleep.

  When she would have walked away, seeking escape from memory and from him, she found her way blocked. Rafe had leapt to the dock, permission to come ashore taken. His fingertips beneath her chin were callused but kind as they lifted her face. “Is that why you’ve come here? To grieve? To lock yourself away from the world while you sink into a quagmire of guilt for what can’t be changed?”

  “Don’t!” Valentina closed both hands over his wrist, moving his fingers from her face. “You have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t understand. You can’t.”

  “That’s right, I don’t know. At least not enough. And perhaps I don’t understand, but I can.” As he spoke she had looked away, her expression closed and brooding. A touch of their joined hands at her cheek returned her gaze to his. “I will before we’re through.”

  “No.” Her fingers curled, holding his hand against her flesh ever so briefly before she released him. “No,” she repeated emphatically, even while she conceded his were the eyes that trespassed and confounded a waking nightmare. And his voice the gift of peaceful sleep.

  Rebuffing the irrational need to step into his arms, to let Rafe Courtenay bear the brunt of her guilt and grief, she took a step back. Spine straight, shoulders square, her chin lifted by habit to a brave angle. “My problems are mine, and mine to confront alone.”

  “Alone. You use that word a great deal.” At her look of askance, he continued grimly. “Is that why you look so worn? Because you let no one near you? Because there’s no one to hold you through the night?”

  “Stop! I don’t want to hear this. I won’t hear it.” She took another step away, her stance regal. Only the ravages of the ordeal she’d chosen to suffer singularly betrayed her. “I’d like you to leave. If it satisfies your ego, pretend you came here by mistake. You were truly lost and wandered into my little part of the bay in one of the peculiar coincidences that prove life is stranger than fiction.”
>
  “Perhaps I have been lost,” Rafe mused. “Perhaps I am. And if I am, how should I find my way back?”

  He was teasing her, the subtle twist of his words did not escape her. She had no idea why he’d come. But for whatever reason, she was certain he wouldn’t concede defeat so easily. An ache still coiled deeply within her, but she had regained her composure enough to play his game. “Finding your way back shouldn’t be a problem. The simplest method would be to backtrack, taking the same route out that brought you in.”

  Rafe glanced at the sky. “It’s getting dark, and landmarks never look the same from the opposite direction.”

  “Surely you have compasses and—”

  “No.” Rebuttal came quickly. “The Summer Girl was in the process of being stripped down for refurbishing and outfitting when I borrowed her for a while.”

  “Surely there are charts.”

  A smile that was almost angelic flickered over his face. A dismissive shrug accompanied it. “Forgot’em.”

  Valentina studied him, her glare narrowed and skeptical. “Are you sure you didn’t run out of gas, too? Maybe you lost a sail, or the breeze.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We both know you aren’t that big a fool, Rafe Courtenay,” she snapped, her temper slipping away. “If you were, you’d be a hazard to everyone on the bay.”

  “I needn’t be.” A look over his shoulder directed her attention toward land. “If you have charts, that is.”

  “There are some,” she admitted. “They’re quite old.” Relenting, only because she judged it the easiest way to rid her self of him, she sighed. “I suppose even an old chart is better than none in an emergency.”

  “I wouldn’t refuse the offer of a cup of coffee while I check them. The tide’s coming in, and the breeze has turned wet and frigid.” As if on cue leaves rattled, sails snapped, the boat rocked and scraped against the dock. “See.”

  “I see.”

  “I missed lunch.

  “You’ll miss dinner, too. I don’t cook.”

  “Except range fare.”

  “Right.”

  “A peanut butter sandwich would suffice.”

  “Don’t push it, Courtenay.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Irish.”

  “Wise choice.”

  Her words were inhospitable But as they strolled together from the dock, Rafe sensed a momentary subsiding of anguish.

  Seven

  Her home was not the typical cottage by the bay, and, even with a glimpse of its chimney tops, not what Rafe had envisioned. Though he couldn’t say exactly what he’d expected, it wasn’t this affair of stone and brick, with a roof of slate overhanging mullioned doors and windows. If the house was of country French design with connected carriage house and covered verandas, the grounds and gardens were purely English. A wonderful, disordered hodgepodge of sunny glen and graveled paths leading from shore. Then, in a perfect blend of cultures, in perfect complement, giving way to functional, simplistic formality nearest the house.

  But not merely a house, Rafe realized as he veered through a hedge of clipped boxwood. A lodge, he deemed it as she led the way, her sneaker clad step making no sound on a winding avenue of brick-bordered stone. A hunting lodge from another era, another century, and authentic he would wager. And when he stepped onto an oval of lush, shorn grass circling the brick and stone ledge of a pool, he was hard-pressed not to stop and stare.

  His astonishment was not for aged grandeur. Rafe was accustomed and comfortably familiar with both as a native Louisianan; and more and greater in the castles and keeps of Patrick’s Scotland. It was not its haunting beauty, nor that such quiet majesty lay hidden in the wilds of the Chesapeake and the shores of Virginia, that intrigued him. It was that this, with all its grandeur and all its beauty, was the chosen refuge of Valentina O’Hara.

  Another dimension. And, within its walls, perhaps, the key to the mystery that hovered like a cloak about her. Tearing his gaze from the structure, seeking some difference, an answer, Rafe looked to Valentina and found nothing.

  Without pausing, immersed too deeply in her own response to the man and his physical presence to be conscious of his perception of her home, she took him quickly from garden to terrace to veranda. Massively cased doors swung on heavy hinges as she stepped inside a vaulted room.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Avoiding his gaze, she gestured to a cluster of seats gathered before a fireplace laden with wood and lacking only a match. “I’ll start the coffee.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “No bother,” she called over her shoulder, as eager to put as little distance between them as to have something to occupy her time and her thoughts. “Or would you prefer tea?”

  “Tea would be even better.”

  “Tea it is. I won’t be a minute.” Passing through an archway, she disappeared. Her voice floated back to him, a little strained, a little husky. “Then we’ll see to the charts and set your course for home.”

  “Home,” Rafe mused, and questioned which of a half dozen places he could truly call home. Did it matter? he wondered as he began to wander, unabashed, through this part of hers.

  The great room, with its private alcoves and nooks, was plainly a work in progress. The main area and an adjoining loggia were an orderly study in polished wood, shining glass, and antiqued ceilings. Its half-hidden niches and crannies revealed a clutter of canvas sheets and ladders, carpentry tools, cans of paint and stain. Because it was Valentina’s, an orderly clutter.

  It was no surprise to him that the interior was only partially restored. Nor did it take great insight to know whose hands had patiently and painstakingly performed each chore. Even hidden away in this remote part of the estuary, she would not, could not fall into idleness. He had seen her in the desert, then a mountainside, and learned the demands she made of herself. He had watched her he for hours, moving no more than to draw a breath or blink an eye. But for a purpose, with costly effort. For life, for death. For Courtney.

  Grimly, he put the recollection aside. As she had, or had striven to do, with this and other times through her labors.

  Restless, intrigued, he moved deeper into the room, reflecting on her thoroughness and yet another area of expertise. What he saw was more than busy work to quiet a troubled mind. Restoration of the venerable lodge was as much labor of love given by an intelligent and resolute woman, as panacea for the tribulations of conscience.

  “Whatever works.” Rafe heard the indifference in what would seem an uncaring verbal shrug, and recognized it for an oblique lie to himself. One without success. He wouldn’t be here if the indifference were true. He wasn’t quite sure why he cared, or how much. At this point, in a singular reversal for the icy-tempered Creole, he had no clear notion of his feelings for the woman he called O’Hara.

  He’d begun by telling himself that he’d seen a need, one he felt obliged to answer in payment of a debt. But as he’d searched for her, exhausting every avenue, he admitted it went beyond obligation. When he came to Simon, challenging him, threatening a long-standing friendship, he knew obligation was the smallest part.

  As he’d conceded to Simon, it was all too complicated.

  In all his years, in all his relationships, he’d never felt this ambivalent about a woman. He either liked them, or he didn’t. They were friends or casual lovers, or they weren’t. Only one woman before had not fit the mold. But Valentina wasn’t Jordana.

  Valentina wasn’t any woman. How did he deal with that? Must he, when he was only here to repay a debt?

  “Is that all that brought you here, Courtenay?” His rasping question was a hollow knell, a false note even to his ears. Too much the realist to deceive himself, not ready to put a name to his unrest, he forced his attention back to the lodge and labors of remorse and love.

  Remorse and love! Standing where she had stood, with the evidence surrounding him, he saw more clearly. This was the anguish he saw in her. What he heard in the nightmare she rode in sleep
. It was here in the lodge, in the measure of her labor.

  There would be years, yet, before the repair and refurbishing were complete. Years that would take her mind from the tragedies of her life.

  But when the work is done? He turned in a broad sweep, his eyes closed. Yet even then he saw the exceptional workmanship, the precise attention to detail, the faithful preservation of its antiquity. His heavy lids lifted, his attention focused, seeing what his mind’s eye had seen better. “When it’s done?” his lips formed the question without sound. “What then, Valentina?”

  Raking a hand across his face, he turned his thoughts to the conclusion he would wish for her. God willing, and by her own strength, in that tune there would be some sort of closure. Some resolution for the guilt that drove her. And, God willing, by then she wouldn’t be a part of Simon’s grisly task force.

  As much as peace, she needed gentleness in her life. But how did he make her see that when she lived by and with instruments of death?

  But did she? Rafe turned again in a slow circle, only then becoming aware there were no gun cabinets, no gun racks in sight. No weapons of any sort. No records of death.

  If there had been the expected trophies mounted on the walls, declaring a hunter’s prowess, they had been removed and any vestige of their existence erased. In their stead were walls of shelves filled with books and wildlife carvings. Another rife with paintings and memorabilia of the sea. Turning, his gaze ranging from ceiling to floor, he imagined the room as it might have been, and discovered he liked better what it had become.

  None of its masculinity had been lost. With leather and wood, it remained very much a man’s room, yet one enriched by the comforting presence of a woman.

  Was there comfort for Valentina among the memories she brought here? Frowning, Rafe wondered if there could ever be.

  The rustle of cloth, the tap of a step, the whisper of a drawn breath had him spinning, discovering that she watched him from the cathedral arch of the doorway. Her face was still, her eyes somber. With her head tilted, and one tattered shoe braced over the other, she looked more a watchful child than a wary woman.