by Cindy Gerard
“Just think,” she said brightly, “tonight we won’t have to be subjected to another meal of dehydrated something-or-other that passes as real food.”
After they’d settled down on a prominent rock ledge overlooking the bay, Adam reluctantly confessed he didn’t have the slightest inkling of what to do.
“What do you expect from a street kid from Detroit?” he grumbled good-naturedly. “Why don’t you do it?”
She waved her bandaged hand. “It’s a two-handed sport, sport. Besides, I think I’m going to enjoy playing the part of teacher for a change.”
The reminder of the kind of tutoring Adam had given her the previous night and then again that morning flooded her cheeks with crimson.
He pulled her up against him and kissed her hard. “Lord, you look pretty in pink.”
“Quit trying to distract me.” She laughed, squirming out of his arms, then patiently instructed him on the proper way to cast the line.
His huge hands, usually artful and articulate, became clumsy and unsure as he battled the intricacies of the rod and reel.
“I’m suddenly seeing the term ‘all thumbs’ in a new light,” she said, teasing him about his botched attempt to cast into deeper water.
“You know,” he drawled, arching a brow in warning, “I could throw you out there with a lot less difficulty than this line. I might enjoy it more, too, so don’t push.”
Taking pity on his frustration, she encouraged him gently. “It just takes practice. It’s all wrist action and finesse.”
“So ask me to finesse a wallet out of some mark’s pocket, or the hubcaps from a car parked under a streetlight. I’ve had plenty of practice at both.”
“I knew you had a shady past.”
He laughed. “The shadiest. But just so your little heart doesn’t go all atwitter, you couldn’t be in safer hands than mine.”
“I’ve always known that too,” she said, then added hesitantly, “but you do have my curiosity piqued. What is it you do in Detroit?”
He sobered as reality crept in. “I’m a cop.”
She looked out over the bay. “A cop,” she repeated, as if everything had just fallen into place.
“You sound surprised.”
“No. Intrigued would be a better word. And it definitely explains a few things.”
“Like?”
“Like that angry scar on your thigh. You were shot, weren’t you? And you’ve got, in your words, ‘time on your hands’ because you’re still healing.” Concern darkened her eyes.
He looked away, knowing she deserved to hear the whole story but unable to find it in himself to relive it. She must have sensed the difficulty he was having, because she quickly steered clear of the subject.
“So you went from picking pockets and stealing hubcaps to one of Detroit’s finest. What kind of a police force has a petty thief on its payroll?”
He gave her a slow, crooked grin. “A desperate one.”
“You haven’t really done those things, have you?”
“Those and a helluva lot worse. What you see before you is a product of a less-than-sterling upbringing. I was hustling for a buck before I was old enough to know that what I was doing was wrong. And I was damn good at it,” he added, smiling ruefully. “I reached the ripe old age of twelve before I ever got caught.”
“And that was the end of it?”
He grunted. “Just the beginning. I wore my little stint with juvenile probation like a medal and went right back out on the streets. By that time I was enjoying what I did, the thrill and all, the bucking of a society that didn’t give a damn about me and my kind. And by then I’d sort of gotten used to eating.”
“Where were your parents?” She asked so hesitantly he suspected she’d already guessed the answer.
His jaw hardened for a moment, then he shrugged. “I never knew who my father was. My mother found herself pregnant at fifteen. She never tired of reminding me she’d given up her youth to raise me. We lived from one welfare check and allotment of commodities to the next. And whatever else I could scare up for rent money. Evidently, it finally got to be too much for her, because I came home one night and she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Split. She’d brought some drifter to the housing project about a week before. He must have promised greener pastures because . . . Hey, what’s this?” Reaching out, he brushed away a single tear that tracked down her cheek. “Ah, Jo . . .”
Drawing her onto his lap, he held her close. No one had ever cried for Adam Dursky. Because of him, maybe, but never for him. Yet this tough little woman who refused to cry for herself was crying for him. “Don’t cry for me. I was one of the lucky ones.”
She nestled closer to his chest. “How so?”
“I found Jack Claypool. Or rather, he found me. Jack was a beat cop the summer I turned eighteen. One steamy July night he caught me trying to hot-wire a car.”
She felt his chuckle against her cheek. “That’s funny?”
“Jack angry is funny. He’s like an old bull seeing red. Anyway, he could have really nailed me, booked me as an adult. But he let me off with some fast talk and some honest caring. The man turned my life around. He got me into the marines, and as the saying goes, ‘it made a man out of me.’ ”
“You were in the Gulf War.” She reached shyly inside his shirt and ran her fingers along the long, shiny scar that hugged his rib cage. “Is that where you got this?” By now she knew the scar intimately, it and the one low on his groin, dangerously close to that part of him that responded to her slightest touch.
He gave her another kind of response now, a subtle tensing of his body. When his answer didn’t immediately come, she pulled back, smiling an “it’s okay” smile. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Adam was stunned by her gesture. Before he could tell her it was all right, that he was ready to talk about it, a whirring sound sliced into the silence.
“Ohmygosh!” She jumped up off his lap and lunged for the fishing pole, barely catching it before it disappeared into the lake. “Adam, you’ve got one!” she cried, shoving the pole into his hand. “Don’t just sit there. Catch it!”
Watching her lose her cool had a calming effect on him. And she was something to watch, shouting heated instructions, her hair flying with frenzied activity around her face. Her excitement was infectious, though, and finally, despite her harried orders and his ineptness, he landed the fish.
It was only by sheer luck that the aged monofilament line didn’t snap against the weight of a nice-sized walleye.
“Oh, Adam,” she cried, bubbling over with delight. “It’s a beauty! And wait until you taste it.”
Trying hard to hide his pride and wondering why a stupid thing like catching her a fish for her supper made him feel so full inside, he swung her, fish and all, into his arms.
“You’d by God better not burn it,” he said as he stalked toward the cabin.
“Me? Oh, no.” She laughed, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You catch ’em. You clean ’em. You cook ’em. It’s the law of the wilderness.”
He grunted and hefted her higher against his chest. “I think you’ve forgotten who the law really is in these parts, Red. Let’s hope you get your attitude adjusted by the time we get back to the cabin.”
Many hours later, with his stomach and his arms full, Adam looked down in utter contentment at the woman lying by his side. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. It’s freezing out here.”
“But look at the sky . . . and wait. The show should start anytime now.”
They were lying in a clearing under the stars, nestled together inside the sleeping bag like two squirming puppies. After they’d eaten their fill of fish, she’d done a little mental calculating and realized this was a night she’d been waiting for since the beginning of the summer. With some gentle coaxing,
she’d convinced him he didn’t want to miss what the night had in store.
Wrapping her tighter against him, he smoothed back the riot of red-gold curls and tucked her head beneath his chin. He felt her smile as she settled against him.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked after a while, looking up at the star-speckled sky. “The black is so black, the starlight so pure.”
Her whispered sigh seemed not an intrusion on the quiet, but an integral part of the peaceful night. Without stopping to measure his thoughts for censure, he stared into the heavens and spoke. “I remember a night a lifetime ago when I lay under a midnight-black sky like this one. We were dug in at the edge of a village waiting for morning and the Republican Guard’s next assault.
“And I remember wondering then, how could anything that beautiful be a part of a war so ugly?”
For a moment he was back there in the foxhole. The fear he’d felt as a nineteen-year-old soldier thousands of miles away from anything that was familiar colored his voice. “Hell, I was a city kid. I’d never seen a night sky without a layer of smog and manufactured light to dim its shine. I’d never seen a night so black. And I’d never been so scared. I was twenty-one days away from going stateside and I hadn’t received so much as a scratch. And deep inside, I knew they’d never let me go home that way. . . .”
He felt her heartbeat accelerate against his chest and drew her closer. “We’d held repeated fronts. Our casualties had been heavy. The constant barrage from snipers and the remoteness of our location had whittled us down to a small, scraggly platoon of scared kids and crazy men. Rations and ammunition were low. Morale was nonexistent.
“Just before morning light, they came. Hundreds of them. Screaming like banshees, swarming like flies.”
In spite of the cool night air, beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. “I’m still not sure why I’m alive. Probably because they thought they’d killed me. I’d emptied my rifle on the first wave and was trying to reload when the magazine jammed. The first Guard over the rim of the foxhole made a wild jab with his bayonet, then clubbed me with the butt of his rifle.
“The next thing I remember, I was on a gurney in an EVAC unit near Tikrit with a hell of a headache and a hole the size of Michigan in my gut. And I was one of the lucky ones. . . .”
He drew a shuddering breath, remembering the sounds and stench of the dying and the dead. He’d never spoken to anyone about his memories of the killing and the atrocities of war. Not even Annie. Reliving them was as painful as bleeding. The hurt would go on for as long as he lived. Yet as he closed his eyes against the horror, he found that with the telling, something had changed. Somehow, the memories were less vivid, a bit more distant. He relaxed and let the images roll through his mind and out of his subconscious like a vintage newsreel.
Jo’s silence was more supportive than words, her presence more potent than drink. And drinking was all he’d wanted to do after he’d come back to the States. He’d done a lot of things he’d been sorry for. Yet as he lay in the arms of this small, giving woman, a peace settled over him, a feeling of freedom from that part of his past. He felt a strong sense of communion with her and, surprisingly, more in touch with himself than he’d been in too many years.
When she wrapped her arms tighter around him, he realized how long he’d been silent. She ran her hand back and forth along the scar on his side, then lower. “Do they still hurt you?” she asked with ingenuousness only someone as pure as Joanna could have.
“No. There’s no pain, but . . .”
“But?” she urged when he hesitated.
“But the general consensus is that the infection did its damage.”
She tipped her face to his. He brushed the hair back from her forehead and answered her questioning frown. “Lord, girl, haven’t you wondered? As many times as we’ve made love, we’ve never used protection.” He heard the hollow emptiness in his tone. “I’ll never father children, Joanna. Did you think I’d risk the possibility of a pregnancy knowing that when I left, you’d be forced to deal with it alone?”
Jo couldn’t say what hurt her more, the fact that he’d voiced the inevitability of his leaving or his unspoken pain over the loss he’d suffered. And no, she hadn’t wondered. She’d just accepted what they’d shared and not once considered the potential consequences.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and dropped her head to his chest again. “You should have been a father. You’d have made a good one.”
A thousand splintering emotions ricocheted through him. He wanted to hold her forever, to absorb the healing balm of her spirit and reconstruct the shambles his life had become. He’d never felt as whole as when he was with this woman. And he’d never felt as bleak as when he faced the prospect of life without her.
“Adam!” Her excited whisper brought him back to the night. “Look. It’s starting.”
A brilliant streak of white light arced across the indigo sky. It was followed by another, then a profusion of rocketing fireballs trailed by diamond-dusted tails. The shooting stars crisscrossed and careened through the heavens like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The meteor shower was as stunning and as brilliant as she had promised.
“Have you ever seen anything as beautiful?” she asked with breathless awe.
His dark gaze lowered to her face. The star glow reflected in her eyes showed the wonder with which she watched the sky. “I hadn’t . . . until I met you.”
He loved her slowly that night, with exquisite awareness of her pleasure, with torturous knowledge that when he left he would cause her pain. Their days together might be numbered, but he intended to do everything in his power to make the most of them.
She evidently had the same idea.
“Come on,” she said playfully as she knelt beside him the next morning, extending a mug of coffee for them to share. “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s explore the island.”
He yawned and braced himself on his elbows to look at her. She was all bright green eyes and challenging smiles as he leaned toward her morning kiss.
Loving this joyful side of her, he followed her lead. “I can save you the trouble, Red,” he said, teasing her with a lazy smile. “To your left is rock, water, and pine. To your right is rock, water, and birch.” He paused for a careful swallow of hot coffee. “And to your immediate front and center is a man who’s too tired to do anything but look at you.”
She considered his sleepy speech, grinning mischievously. “What do you suppose it would take to put a little life into those old bones?” she asked, toying with the top button of her shirt.
“Oh, no.” He sat up laughing when the first button slipped free of the buttonhole. “Any more of that kind of exercise and they’ll be feeding me intravenously for a month.”
Her staged attempt to look put out broadened his smile. The self-effacing, sexually shy girl who’d come to him that first night would never have had the confidence to engage in this kind of love play. This woman had reached fulfillment. He felt a sudden stirring of response to the invitation from his wild, uninhibited lover.
“All right, then,” she countered, trying another tack, “what about the prospect of a little excitement?”
“I repeat,” he said, intentionally misunderstanding, “any more of that kind of exercise—”
Her bubbly laughter cut him off. “I was thinking more along the lines of mystery and intrigue.”
He eyed her suspiciously over the rim of the mug. “On Jug Island?”
“Especially on Jug Island. Surely you’ve wondered how Jug got its name.”
“I’ve wondered how I ended up here, I’ve wondered how you ever survived long enough to get here . . . and I’ve wondered about that little mole on the inside of your left thigh.” He grinned, thoroughly enjoying her blush. “But to tell you the honest truth, Red, I’ve never wondered how Jug got its name. Should I have?”
He was fully awake now and his wicked grin suggested he might be interested—at least in the illicit part. Propping his arm on an updrawn knee, he handed her his coffee mug. “Such as?” he asked, playing with a strand of the red hair he seemed always compelled to touch.
“Such as moonshine and Prohibition booze.”
He arched a brow. “In Minnesota?”
“Of course in Minnesota, and specifically here. Remember, we’re only minutes away from the Canadian border by boat. Kabetogama runs into Lake Namakan and over half of Namakan is in Canada. It was a short dash across the border with the illegal hooch. Jug, and the way the mouth of Blue Fin Bay is practically hidden unless you’re looking for it, made this the perfect place to stash the goods.”
“Stash the goods? Illegal hooch?” He tugged her onto his lap. “You watch a lot of old Bogart movies up here in the winter, Red?”
“Go ahead, make fun of me. But I happen to know that Capone himself once walked Jug’s shores.”
“Looking for his stash, no doubt.” He wiggled his eyebrows Groucho Marx style, then pulled an appropriately serious face to match her scowl. “All right. I’m sorry. Tell me more. What brought Capone to Jug Island?”
“He came to check out the location for a possible drop.”
“Oh.” He nodded sagely. “He was casing the joint, huh?”
Her eyes narrowed and her chin came up a notch. “You have an incredibly smart mouth for a man with a bad leg and a cup of steaming-hot coffee balanced over his lap.”
He laughed. “And you’ve got a hell of a lot of cheek,” he said, hugging her tight. “No . . . no . . . not the coffee. I’ll be good, I promise. Please . . . do continue.”
Over a breakfast of leftover fish, she convinced him with animated gestures, wide-eyed excitement, and suspiciously sincere accounts that Jug had in fact been a drop point for contraband liquor during the Roaring Twenties.
“Somewhere on the island,” she said, “though no one knows for sure where, there is said to be a cave. And in the cave is an undelivered shipment of bootleg booze, still fermenting in its stone jugs.”