“Sorry,” he muttered, releasing them, and dared to look at her. “Why don’t we get the hell out of here?”
She nodded and went to the ladies’ room while he took care of the bill. “Was the meal not to your satisfaction, sir?” the waiter asked, worried.
“It was fine,” he said, leaving a generous tip. “We just weren’t as hungry as we thought.”
He waited outside for her. It was that time of day between sunset and dark. The air was filled with the smell of growing things, flowers and grass and new leaves on the trees. They’d already rolled up the sidewalks in town, and the only sound in the still air was the quiet burble of the river running beside the mill.
Did his daughter lie in some spot as peaceful? Were there flowers growing on her grave, or did it lie neglected and choked with weeds—as choked as he suddenly found himself, so painfully that he could hardly breathe?
He was leaning on the parapet of the little humpbacked bridge, watching the waterwheel’s slow turning, when she came out of the restaurant.
“Why don’t we walk a bit?” he asked, when she joined him. “There’s a path beside the river, and it’s still early. Or do you have to get back home?”
“No, Joe,” she said mockingly. “I can come and go as I please. And I’d like to walk.”
He took her arm and steered her down a rickety flight of brick-lined steps to where low-wattage lamps strung on an overhead wire marked the path. “You mentioned being in Thailand,” he said. “What was it about the country that had such an effect on you?”
“I worked in an orphanage near the Laotian border. There were so many children, some so sick they were just waiting to die. It broke my heart to see them, especially the babies. There was one in particular, a little girl four months old, but she was so tiny she might have been a newborn. Maybe that was what made her so special to me. I loved taking care of her, loved the way she’d burrow into my neck when I held her.” One day,
She swallowed, once again fighting tears. “One day, she began to run a fever. By evening, she had trouble breathing. There was an old rattan rocking chair in the nursery. I sat there with her the whole night, watching her sleep and listening to the wheezing of her poor, congested little lungs.”
He heard the break in her voice and took her hand. It didn’t matter that he said not a word. His touch was comfort enough, and gave her the strength to finish what she’d started.
“Some time after midnight, I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was dead in my arms.” She stopped, dazed at the depth of her pain. She had not expected to find it easy to tell him, but neither had she known it would this hard. “You might find it difficult to believe, Joe, but I think that was when I finally faced up to our baby’s death. I mourned that little orphan as if she’d been my own. Even now, it’s her face I see whenever I think about our daughter. Not long after that, I came back to Canada and took up work that had nothing to do with children so I wouldn’t be faced every day with reminders of what I’d lost.”
“Damn your mother!” he said, with sudden vehemence. “And damn everyone in that hospital who conspired with her to shut you out of—”
“It wasn’t their fault,” she said. “They meant well. And I went along with them.”
“And because of them, you still haven’t put your baby to rest, Imogen,” he said, his voice a murmur. “You need to do that.”
Perhaps he was right, but she was afraid of the poignant memories such action might stir up, afraid she might fall back into the dark pit of despair that had been the legacy of her night of love with him. But she didn’t expect him to understand that. He’d never been afraid of anything in his life.
“I don’t know that I can,” she said, bracing herself for another outburst of scorn from him.
Stopping under the canopy of a willow tree, he tugged her so she was facing him and standing so close that his words winnowed over her face. “Yes, you can, princess,” he said, running his hands up her arms and over her shoulders. “Because we’ll go together. This is one thing you won’t have to do alone.”
Then, as he had the night before, he leaned forward and kissed her, a long, slow kiss full of tenderness. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to sink into that kiss, to drown in it. To let her breasts cushion the unyielding plane of his chest, her hips nest against his. And when his mouth grew subtly more assertive, to let her lips open in soft welcome.
Briefly, he raised his head and stared solemnly at her, the question in his eyes unmistakable. Are you sure?
She met his gaze fearlessly. Never more sure of anything! Never mind that this was how things had started for them all those years ago, with a need to comfort and console. This was different. She was no longer an ingenue, stepping blindly on the path of passion without the first idea where it could lead, but a woman who knew full well the limits of her tolerance, just as she knew he was the only man on earth who could heal the aching sense of loss she’d carried for so long.
She tasted of honey and silk, of innocence and allure.
Dazed, he found himself pulling her to him and threading his fingers through her hair to weld her mouth more tightly to his. Unwilling, unable to let her go. Good God, how was it possible that the spell she’d cast on him almost a decade before had lost nothing of its power to enchant him?
The driving hunger took hold of him, goading him beyond anything a man should have to tolerate. The thoughts raced through his mind, insanely greedy, obscenely indiscreet—find a secluded place where they wouldn’t be seen, here, now, bury himself in her sleek flesh, feel the shudders devour her until she convulsed around him and brought him to his own singular swift release.
His fingers slid down her throat, deftly worked apart the buttons of her jacket and found the sweet, warm valley between her breasts. She moaned and sank against him.
Frantically, he searched for a place to take her and found nothing but the forked trunk of the old willow tree. Angling himself against it, he brought her close again, burying his mouth against the thrust of her nipples beneath the silken fabric of her camisole.
He molded her hips with his palms, trailed his hands the length of her legs to the soft hollows behind her knees. At his instigation, the hem of her skirt rode high around her waist until, at last, there was nothing but the tender inner sweep of thigh beneath his hands, the secret crease of flesh.
She was damp and willing, and he was at flash point, ready to explode at a touch, so close to paradise that the exquisite torture nearly killed him.
She was the one to put an end to such madness by pulling back. Not cruelly, as he’d done the previous night, to prove himself unvanquished, but with a quiet honesty that shamed him. “It seems I don’t know myself nearly as well as I thought I did,” she said, her voice a breathless quiver of emotion. “I’m no more able to resist you now than I was at eighteen.”
He hardly recognized the rough croak of his voice. “I doubt that.”
“It’s true.” Unable to look him in the eye, she attempted to restore her clothing to some sort of order.
He swallowed and straightened the lapels of her jacket “It’s been an emotionally draining couple of days for both of us. People tend to overreact in such circumstances. I certainly did, last night and again tonight. And I apologize.”
“Are you saying you’re sorry you kissed me?”
Kissed her? He’d damn near ravished her!
The lamps lining the path threw haunting shadows over her face, emphasizing her mouth, so soft and tender it was all he could do not to lay claim to it again. And her eyes—how could he lie with that clear gaze trained on his face so artlessly?
“Yes,” he said. “It wasn’t a smart move.”
“Why not?”
Jeez, had she always been like this, probing every word to lay bare deceit and uncovering truths she’d be better off not knowing? “Because when it comes to romantic stuff, I’m not in it for the long haul. I can’t give you what you’re looking for, Imogen.”
“I know we’re headed down different roads. We always have been. If the child we made had lived, I’d have been prepared to stand by you. But realistically, the chances of a marriage ever working out between us would have been pretty dim.”
She stared at her laced fingers, then skewered him with another of those unsettling gazes. “Why?”
Aiming to lighten the moment, he said, “Because you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and the closest I ever came to that was the wooden spoon on my rear end when I was about eight and shaved my brother’s head.”
The laughter poured out of her, as pure and free as water gurgling over rocks in a creek. For a moment, she seemed to sparkle all over, and he knew another powerful urge to kiss her. Too soon, though, she sobered, and it was as if a light had gone out. “But we’re not children anymore, Joe. We don’t have to play by other people’s rules. We can make our own.”
That was when he should have put a safe distance between them, thanked her for a pleasant evening and driven her home. Instead, he cupped his hand around her jaw and said, “You don’t know the risk you’d be taking, Imogen. I’ve never been very good at abiding by anyone’s rules, not even my own.”
“It’s a chance I’m willing to take,” she said and, turning her head, brought her mouth to rest against his hand.
Her eyes, heavy-lidded, held him transfixed. Of their own volition, his fingers uncurled and grew slack. He saw her lips part and then, with an audacity he’d never have suspected in her, she brought the tip of her tongue to play in a lazy circle in the middle of his open palm. The gesture rocked him to the soles of his feet and damn near leveled him.
“You don’t know what you’d be letting yourself in for,” he muttered again, with about as much conviction as a dying man.
“Oh, but I do. I knew what I was doing when I let you be the first man to make love to me, Joe Donnelly, so I think you can safely assume I know what I’m proposing now.”
If she had been a different kind of woman—designing, shallow, interested only in a little romantic diversion—he might have accepted her words and driven them both to the nearest motel for the night. But her guilessness saved her. Because even he wasn’t cad enough to take what she seemed so willing to give without thought for what it would cost her.
“No, princess, you don’t know,” he said. “My life isn’t here in this town any more than yours is. A few days from now—a week at the most—we’ll have gone our separate ways again. Are you really prepared to risk everything you’ve struggled to build, just to find out if what we once shared was really as good as memory’s trying to tell you it was?”
“Yes. I’m tired of being cautious. It’s taken meeting you again to make me see that I’ve been living in a vacuum from the day they told me my baby had died, and it strikes me suddenly that if getting pregnant was a sin to begin with, wasting what’s left of my life is an even greater transgression.”
If only he dared believe a brief affair would be enough to satisfy her! But she was no more the brief affair type than he was a blue blood. What she really wanted was permanence, a man to share her life with. A suitable husband. And he was about as unsuitable as pigs were for ballet dancing. Yet because they shared so much history and because he happened to be here, at this moment, with a dangerous mix of chemistry at work, she was prepared to believe he was the answer to all her dreams.
She’d never know how tempted he was to indulge her fantasy, but he had enough on his conscience without adding to its burden. So he steered her briskly along the path toward the bright lights of the parking lot and away from the beckoning, seductive shadows.
“Trying to reconstruct history isn’t the way, Imogen,” he said flatly. “That’s why I intend to find our child’s grave, so I can close the door on the past, once and for all, and move on. If you’re one-tenth as smart as you like to think you are, you’ll do the same.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THEY drove to Rosemont under a canopy of stars and a moon as round and silver as an old-fashioned dollar. The road unwound before them, splashed with the indigo shadows of trees in an otherwise empty and serene landscape. It was a perfect midsummer night, a lover’s kind of night. The car was small, intimate. Without moving an inch in her seat, Imogen could have laid a hand on Joe’s knee or rested her head on his shoulder. Yet the distance separating her from him might as well have stretched the width of an ocean, he emanated such forbidding aloofness.
And then, when she’d decided the entire journey was going to pass in silence, he spoke. Spoke? He exploded, so suddenly and unexpectedly she practically jumped out of her skin.
“You know something, princess? You shouldn’t be let out without a keeper! You’re all set to leap into a relationship with me based on a couple of kisses, but you’d change your mind pretty damned fast if you knew what kind of guy you’d be hooking up with.”
“We go back a lot further than a couple of kisses, Joe,” she retorted, rattled. “We’ve known each other for at least twelve years.”
“Bull, Imogen! Our association can be measured in hours. We barely exchanged two words before the night I got you pregnant.”
“But I knew you. You were part of the landscape. The few times I visited your house, you were there. I saw how protective you were of your mother and Patsy, how you helped your father at the garage. You were the best beach lifeguard for miles around and taught more kids to swim during two months of summer vacation than anyone else managed the rest of the year. I knew you were decent and kind.”
“Oh, Christopher Columbus!” he scoffed. “You’ll be nominating me for sainthood next!”
“No. You were a rogue, no doubt about it. You delighted in embarrassing me every chance you got, and I guess I made an easy target. But there was always that chivalrous side of you. No one ever messed with Patsy, because that meant they’d have to deal with you. I’d have given anything to have had someone looking out for me the way you always looked out for her. And then, one day, it happened. You became my guardian angel, too—a bit tarnished around the edges, maybe, but an angel nonetheless.”
“I was hell on wheels, Imogen, and you know it.”
“I know that the night you made love to me was magical. You were,” she said, glad darkness camouflaged the flush stealing over her face, “a wonderful lover.”
“As if you’d have known the difference!”
Her flush deepened at the way he dismissed her. “If it makes you feel better to trivialize the whole incident, go ahead, Joe. But nothing you say changes the fact that you’re the one who taught me what passion and desire were all about.”
“If I did, princess,” he said, “it’s because I’d had plenty of practice. You probably still believed in the tooth fairy when I got laid for the first time.”
“Resorting to vulgarity won’t change anything, either,” she snapped. “Deny it all you like, but the plain truth is that I felt like a piece of dirt after Philip Maitland got through with me, and it took you to restore my sense of self-worth. You turned a horrible experience around and made me feel beautiful for the first time in my life. And don’t bother telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I do.”
“You don’t know diddly squat, Imogen. You’ve just come down with a bad case of wishful thinking—that, or your memory’s playing tricks on you.”
“I’d have been inclined to agree before I found the diary.”
“What diary?”
“The one I started writing the day I turned fifteen. I came across it in my room. You’d be surprised at how often your name crops up.”
“Do us both a favor and burn the damned thing,” he said.
“It’s too late.”
“Too late for what? Or don’t I want to know?”
“It won’t change what’s happening now. The conne
ction we both thought had been broken when we each left town nine years ago is still there between us, Joe. The other day, you said that you wanted to finish the last chapter of the book where you and I were concerned. Well, the way I see it, it hasn’t been written yet.”
He took a long curve too fast and sent her swinging toward the passenger door. “I don’t like the way your mind’s working,” he said. “You’ll be throwing out the L-word, next.”
“No. It’s too soon for that, and I know it, but it’s a distinct possibility.”
“Not for me, it isn’t. It’ll never happen.”
Her heart fell a little at the certainty in his voice. “Well, I can only speak for myself, of course, but I don’t see what’s so impossible about you and I...”
He expelled a sigh of pure frustration and thumped his fist on the steering wheel. “Would you change your mind if I told you that I spent three years in jail for killing a man?”
“Only three years?” she asked, refusing to let him shock her into retreat. “Then you must have been falsely accused.”
“Nice try, princess, but you’re way off the mark. A man died and I killed him. With my bare hands.”
“Why?”
“What the hell does it matter why? I took a life and was thrown in jail.”
“Where?”
“What is this, twenty questions? On Ojo del Diablo, an island off the coast of Colombia.”
Diablo. Devil. Despite the warm night, gooseflesh prickled her skin. “It sounds rather forbidding.”
“It was a place right out of hell. The name means devil’s eye. A few residents claimed it referred to the lake in the center of the island, but the most popular belief was that the place was damned and the devil’s eye followed you wherever you went”
“How did you wind up there?”
“By accident.”
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