The Drifter
Page 34
A slim calf. No, skinny. Skinny and dotted with freckles, stark against the lifeless ivory skin.
Jesse was swearing through gritted teeth. Fluent phrases spat past a clenched jaw. He used to talk to God. Now he swore to no one in particular.
Each passing second stood apart in time, crystallized by the knowledge he had been fleeing for years. He had come to the very ends of the earth to escape the past.
He could not escape it. Couldn’t help thinking of it. Of what the sea had stolen from him.
And of what the sea had brought him today. A woman, of course. That put the final twist of cruel irony on it.
He quickly moved upward, uncovered the face. And almost wished he hadn’t, for when he saw her, he knew why he had felt so compelled to run.
An angel had died on his beach this morning. Never mind that her halo was fashioned of kelp and endless tangled strands of dark red hair. Never mind the constellation of freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose.
This face, this pale face with its lavender bow of lips, was the one sculpted by every artist who had ever tried to turn marble to poetry. The face envisioned by hopeful dreamers who believed in miracles.
But she was dead, back in the realm of angels where she belonged, where she never should have left in the first place.
Jesse didn’t want to touch her, but his hands did. His idiot bridegroom’s hands. They took her by the shoulder and tugged gently, at the same time rolling the mast to which she was still tied. He saw her fully now, head to toe.
She was pregnant.
Rage charged like a thunderbolt through him. It was not enough that a beautiful young woman had been taken. But the sweet, round swell of her stomach, that dark mystery, that whispered promise, had been claimed, too. Two lives had been snuffed out by the merciless breath of the wind, by the wall-size waves, by the uncaring sea.
This was the start, Jesse thought as he unbound the ropes and gathered her in his arms, of a journey he had no desire to undertake.
The corpse flopped forward like a rag doll. A cold hand clutched at Jesse’s arm. He reared back, leaving her on the seeping brown sand.
She moaned and coughed out seawater.
Jesse Morgan, who rarely smiled, suddenly grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll be damned,” he said, ripping off his mackintosh. “You’re alive.”
He settled the plaid wool coat around her shoulders and picked her up in his arms.
“I’m...alive,” she echoed in the faintest of whispers. “I suppose,” she added, her head drooping forward, “that’s something.”
She spoke no more, but began to shiver violently, uncontrollably. She felt like a large fish in its death throes, and it was all Jesse could do to keep from dropping her.
Yet even as he bore his burden up the impossibly steep slope, running faster than he’d ever run in his life, he knew with stone-cold dread that this day had brought something new, something extraordinary, something endlessly fascinating and frightening, into his world.
Copyright © 1998 by Susan Wiggs
ISBN-13: 9781460319437
THE DRIFTER
Copyright © 1998 by Susan Wiggs
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