The Drifter

by Susan Wiggs

  “I suppose I could row the dinghy there if I wanted.”

  She laughed. “It’s not quite that close. Even if you survive the Strait of Juan de Fuca, you could encounter pirates.”

  “Sure, Doc.”

  “Well, you could. Some of the bolder crews have been known to raid towns.”

  He shaded his eyes and gazed into the distance. “Canada.” He shook his head. “Some things look simpler than they are.”

  She allowed herself a small, rueful smile. “The same could be said of doctoring.”

  “You’re a strange bird, Leah Mundy.”

  She relaxed enough to take a risk. “Come this way. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  He gave her his special half grin, a subtle lifting of one side of his mouth that made her stomach jump and her pulse quicken. She led the way across the clearing and into a grove of alder trees. Over her shoulder, she said, “I found this spot while I was out gathering medicinal herbs with Sophie.”

  They walked on, deeper and deeper into the woods until the grove of alders gave way to older stands of towering fir and cedar and spruce. In the middle lay another clearing, a tiny one, and in the middle of that was something extraordinary.

  Jackson didn’t disappoint her. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured, striding across the clearing.

  You probably already are that, Leah thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.

  She watched him walk around the small structure. Ages ago—Sophie thought at least fifty years—some settler had built a cabin raised up on stumps to keep it out of the damp. But the forest had reclaimed the dwelling, trees snaking up and around the walls and over the roof, moss and ferns sprouting from the eaves. The house resembled a perfect nest in the midst of green trees. The roof had fallen in here and there and the door hung askew, but a strange, otherworldly, almost fairy-tale charm pervaded the place.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Leah commented.

  “Yeah,” he said, half to himself.

  She joined him on his slow walk circling the little house. A special enchantment haunted this spot in the woods. She’d sensed it the first time she’d come here, and the feeling persisted with each visit. Now it was stronger than ever. The tallest of the trees made arches of their branches, and the sun filtered through them in hazy-bright bars, angling down to the fine grass and moss that covered the forest floor. The light shone through the leaves, creating a cool emerald mist.

  Jackson squinted up at the filtered green light. “Look, I’m sorry for what I said back there. It’s none of my damned business how you live your life. I got no call to be telling people how to live.”

  He set one booted foot on the bottom step leading up to the nest house, testing the wood for strength. It crumbled a little at the edges, but held. He entered the house, then turned, holding out his hand for Leah.

  She followed him into the house. The cabin was small and crude, almost ghostly in the way it stood untouched, as if time itself had passed it by. Huge spiderwebs draped the corners. Where the rain came in, the floor had rotted through.

  But the fieldstone hearth and chimney had sturdily endured; the iron tools hung in place and even an ancient heap of split wood lay ready, waiting to warm the place. The kitchen area was equipped with battered tin implements. A sagging bed frame stood in the corner.

  “Looks like whoever used to live here just up and left,” Jackson observed. “Wonder why.”

  “People have their reasons.” She regarded him pointedly. She knew she shouldn’t mention Carrie again, but she had to. She wanted to understand the woman’s hold over Jackson. “Carrie was your reason,” she said at last.

  His posture changed the slightest bit—stiffened, sharpened. She’d seen patients do this, anticipating pain.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said—”

  “Probably not,” he agreed. “But from the time I left St. I’s in Chicago until the day Carrie took off with that Armstrong fellow, finding and protecting her was the thing that gave me a purpose.”

  Leah felt a stirring in her chest, the beginnings of an emotion that scared her. “And now?” she asked.

  He leaned back against the mantel, watching her. “Now I don’t know. Now I have to ask myself some hard questions and see if I can live with the answers.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “Like can I live life as a workingman rather than a gambler?”

  “Why not? You’re a man of...varied skills.”

  “I can play cards and shoot straight,” he said.

  “Then you’d be a fine sheriff or marshal,” she suggested.

  “A lawman?” He snorted. “You think folks would feel safe with me?”

  “I feel safe with you,” she said quietly.

  He stood silent for a long time, then took a deep breath. “There’s something inside me, Leah, something dark and cold. It sits like a rock in my gut and it’s always there. I keep thinking that if I finally get my life on the straight and narrow, the darkness will go away.”

  She gaped at him, stunned by his remarkable honesty. She, too, had a darkness inside her. She had made a straight and narrow life for herself, but the shadows still hung there, cool and immutable. “Then why do you run? Why not stay where you are? Or stay somewhere you can call home?”

  “I never knew the meaning of the word ‘home.’ I never cared. Until now.”

  “Until now?”

  “Until you.”

  His admission made her dizzy. She felt a jolt of emotion, something big and new, completely strange to her, yet achingly familiar. Unexpected. Exhilarating. Terrifying. “Mr. Underhill—”

  “Jackson.”

  “Mr. Underhill, you shouldn’t speak of such things.”

  “Why not?” He gestured around the tree house. “We’re alone. There’s no one to see, no one to hear.”

  She felt as if she had plunged into black water without knowing its depth, its treacherous shoals. She experienced the breathlessness, the heavy limbs of a drowning person. “It...it makes no sense.”

  “What makes no sense?”

  “We make no sense. Forming a—an attachment. A tendre. Nothing but heartbreak can come of it. You have to go. And I have to stay.”

  He pushed away from the mantel and crossed the room. Instinct told her to move away, to flee, but his beautiful eyes and the sensual promise she saw there held her captive. A strange heat sparked within her, curling through her like a wisp of smoke.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “How do I know what?”

  “That nothing can come of this.”

  “Because we have no future.”

  “We have right now.”

  “But...”

  “What if ‘right now’ is the only thing we’ll ever have?”

  She stood waiting, for what she wasn’t certain, but his question made a mad sort of sense. Don’t touch me, she thought. Don’t touch me now, or I’ll shatter. The feeling was seductive, evocative, and when he reached out with both hands, she went willingly to him.

  Though his arms were gentle, settling around her and drawing her against him, his lips claimed hers with a barely restrained violence that should have offended, but instead excited her. She felt the heat of desire fill her more and more completely until she was brimming over with it. She wanted the taste of him, the press of his body against hers, and just for this moment, she wanted to damn the consequences.

  Her emotions were in a turmoil. She knew that, but she didn’t care. He was getting too close to her heart. She should resist fiercely, but she didn’t. She felt herself arching up and toward him, hungering for more, wanting to touch him everywhere, wanting him to touch her.

  Passion for Jackson Underhill took her by surprise. Accustomed
to a life of rigid control, she had finally found something she could not govern. All she could feel was the sensation of him kissing her, the firmness of his lips and the pressure of his arms holding her.

  His kisses left her both exhilarated and frightened. She knew she was coming closer and closer to loving Jackson, and she knew there was a terrible danger in that, but for now she didn’t care.

  “Leah,” he murmured against her mouth. “Leah, I want you. I want to make love to you.”

  She said nothing, only lifted herself on tiptoe and wound her arms tighter around his neck.

  “Talk to me,” he said with a rumbling in his chest. “Tell me you want this.”

  She couldn’t. If she said too much, thought too much, she’d lose her nerve. “I don’t want to decide.”

  She knew she had conceded total surrender to a man who was bigger, stronger, infinitely more powerful than her. It was a thing she’d never believed herself capable of, this unabashed giving of oneself, this leap of faith. But Jackson had brought her to the precipice. His willing victim, she teetered on the edge.

  His hands slipped down, freeing the buttons of her shirtwaist. “You don’t wear a corset,” he whispered. “It was one of the first things I liked about you.” He cupped her aching breasts. The heat flared in her, and she caught her breath with the sudden fire that roared through her at his intimate caress. She let her head drop back, baring her throat, and while all this was happening, she couldn’t believe it was she, Leah Mundy, in the arms of this man, surrendering everything to him.

  Due to her training and her practice, she had thought she understood the human sex act. Indeed, she’d read and studied all the literature she could find. She’d been certain she understood.

  She’d been wrong. She had not even begun to understand it. She wondered what else life was hiding from her.

  His mouth skimmed over the taut arch of her neck, and she brought her fingers up and into his hair. She had yearned to touch it for so long. The loosened hair felt so silky, the ends cool and curling around her knuckles.

  Then he moved his mouth lower, and she felt nothing but that, nothing but the soft slide of his lips down between her breasts. His hand slipped beneath her skirts, brushing the fabric of her pantalettes. Touch me, she thought, knowing she could never say the words aloud. Please, there.

  “Say it, Leah,” he urged in a hoarse whisper. “Say you want this. Say you want me.”

  “I...” The words froze on a rush of icy fear. What in God’s name was she doing, playing the whore to this desperado? She had spent years trying to build up her reputation. Yet in just a few moments it would all turn to dust and rubble around her feet.

  So what if no one knew? She would be compromised. She might get pregnant.

  Her hands gripped him. Take the decision away from me, she silently urged him. I want this to be your fault.

  He seemed to read her thoughts. He broke the embrace with a low oath. “I won’t do this unless you say you want it. All of it. A hundred percent.”

  And I, she thought bleakly, I can’t do this unless it’s forever. “But I...won’t you just keep on with...what you were doing?”

  His brow creased. “Honey, I’d like nothing better than to keep going. But if you can’t bring yourself to admit you want me, that you want to lie down with me and make love, then I’ll make myself stop.” The words sounded strained, torn with reluctance from his throat. The hand he slowly withdrew from beneath her skirts trembled slightly, then fell still against his taut thigh. His other hand, which he’d held behind her, dropped to his other side.

  Leah didn’t just miss his touch, she ached for it.

  He smiled ruefully, no doubt recognizing the tortured expression on her face for what it was. “All you have to do is ask.”

  She knotted her fingers and looked down. “You don’t understand how hard it is for me.”

  A blur of regret tinged his smile. “I can’t offer you much, Leah. Maybe just the chance to slow down for a minute, to taste the sweetness of life.”

  She felt her cheeks turn hot. “I just don’t see the point.”

  He stared at her long and hard, seeing more of her, she knew, than anyone ever had before. “God, Leah, what the hell did your father teach you? That every damned thing has to have a point?”

  Ah, anger. She almost welcomed it, a familiar old friend. “At least I had a father.”

  The barb hooked into him; she could see the change in him. One moment, he was looking at her with yearning and even compassion. But after she spoke, he turned cold and cynical and contemptuous.

  She should have felt triumphant. Instead, she felt small and petty and ashamed. But she didn’t know how to tell him so. Didn’t know how to take back the words.

  “Thanks for reminding me, Doc.” He rammed his hands into his pockets and turned to leave the nestlike little cottage.

  As he strode away through the woods, she said, “Jackson,” but the word came out as a broken whisper.

  Ten

  Jackson stalked down to the beach without looking back to see if she followed. Leah had taught him an important lesson today, something he should have figured out a long time ago.

  His scars ran too deep to risk letting another person into his life. The wounds inflicted by his mother’s leaving him, by his never knowing a man to call father, would always exist. If he was fool enough to find a woman like Leah who knew just what sharp instrument to use to inflict the most damage, then he deserved to feel the hurt.

  And he did feel it, all over again with brutal clarity. He had been about five years old when his mother had abandoned him. Before sunrise one morning, she had roused him from his sleep atop a smelly, bare mattress. She’d taken him to the steps of the St. Ignatius Orphan Asylum in Chicago and told him to sit there and wait for the light.

  She refused to wait with him; now he knew it was because she didn’t want to risk being questioned, possibly arrested and detained.

  He remembered sitting there in the cold gray dawn, hearing her footsteps click on the wet brick pavement as she rushed toward the train station, never looking back. He watched and watched, shivering with cold and fear, uncomprehending. He’d never understood much that she did. At a very young age, he learned to be silent and disappear while she went about her business.

  That business was always something to do with entertaining men in bed. She would giggle and whisper, and after a while, strange moans would come from behind the curtain that shrouded the bed. Once, he’d tried to look, thinking his mother was in trouble, but all he’d gotten was a cuff on the ear.

  On that dark pre-morning so long ago, he sat and watched her go, watched the stringy plume that sagged from the brim of her hat, watched her feet wobble ever so slightly in their ill-fitting shoes. Though he feared a whipping if he called to her, he did it anyway. Mama. Mama, come back. Mama, take me home.

  Her step faltered, but she didn’t turn. He supposed some part of himself understood that it was the last he would see of her, but he had a child’s ability to block out the truth.

  Denying the truth had probably saved him from shattering more than once. But Leah wouldn’t hold with denying anything. She wanted it all laid out neatly like surgical instruments on a tray. Instruments made of honed metal, designed to cut and dissect.

  If you cut me open, Leah Mundy, would you see my black heart?

  He was so wound up with his dark thoughts that at first the spectacle on the beach didn’t register. Then he realized what had happened.

  “Aw, shit,” he said, planting himself at the top of the bluff above the spot where they’d moored the boat.

  “What’s the matter?” Leah came up behind him. Her voice sounded strained, as if she found it hard to speak to him. Her gaze followed his down the bluff. “Oh dear.”

  “The tide came
in.”

  “It has a habit of doing that.”

  In spite of himself, he smiled ruefully. “Where do you suppose the dinghy wound up?”

  She looked thoughtful as she scanned the area. She had no idea that she was pretty, that her eyes were a velvety shade of brown and that her well-kissed lips were bowed and shining in a way that haunted his dreams. She wore her attractiveness like a useless old dress. He’d been inches from showing her just how powerful her attraction was, but he’d backed off.

  Jackson had never walked away from seducing a woman in his life. Christ, what had he been thinking?

  “It’s there, see?” She pointed.

  He squinted at the shoreline. Sure enough, there was the dinghy, bobbing close to a wall of jagged rocks. The bowline had snagged on something.

  “How will we get to it?” Leah asked.

  “Can you swim?”

  “Of course. But the water’s freezing. I see a better way.”

  “Then do it your way. I’m going after the dinghy.” He peeled off his shirt, then removed his boots. When his hand went to the top button of his jeans, she gave a huffy little noise and flounced off.

  If it hadn’t been for that noise, he might have followed her. Instead, he scrambled down to a shallow outcropping of rock choked by gorse and yellow blossoms of Scotch broom. Damn. It was a lot longer dive than he’d thought.

  He sneaked a glance over his shoulder. Leah was still stomping away toward the rocky bluff. Damn fool, stubborn woman. If he killed himself and she didn’t see him do it, then it was her loss.

  Without pausing to examine his own logic, he took a deep breath and dived. The shock of the water numbed him. His hands brushed the rocky bottom; then he arced upward and broke the surface. The first thing he did was look for Leah. She kept marching doggedly along the bluff. Sharp-tongued, bullheaded woman wouldn’t even check to see if he’d died. With long, angry strokes he swam through the churning cold water toward the dinghy. Treacherous currents pulled and sucked him toward the rocks, but the strength of his anger sustained him. He ought to make her walk home. That would serve her right.