by Sandra Field
Those same blue eyes were now filmed with tears. “It does?” Katrin said jaggedly.
“Surely I don’t have to tell you that?”
“It would be really nice if reading your mind was one of my talents,” she said. “But it isn’t.”
Luke didn’t want her reading his mind; he had to keep some parts of himself inviolate. “I didn’t sleep more than five consecutive minutes last night.”
“Neither did I.” Giving him a small smile, Katrin reached for the jeweler’s box. As she lifted the delicate bracelet from the box, her face lit with delight. “It’s beautiful, Luke, thank you. Will you do it up for me?”
He fumbled with the tiny clasp, her scent filling his nostrils. When he kissed the pulse in her wrist, it raced beneath his lips; they were very late eating the marinated tofu. Which did indeed taste rather weird.
Luke went to Dallas on his own, missed Katrin unrelentingly, and flew home late on Friday. He didn’t like missing her, reaching for her in the night, wanting to share a joke with her or a conversation. No matter how earth-shattering it was, sex was just sex. He’d better not forget it.
When he unlocked the front door, it was past eleven. A note was on the kitchen table. “Gone to bed…see you there?”
Luke ran up the stairs two at a time, hoping she wasn’t asleep. He opened the bedroom door, stopped in his tracks and started to laugh, a laugh that came all the way from his belly.
“You don’t laugh often enough.” Katrin said, “Welcome home, Luke.”
She was lying in a seductive pose on black satin sheets, wearing a sheer white nightgown that left nothing to his imagination. Red roses were strewn on the bed, while there were enough candles burning in the room to start a major fire. Marlene Dietrich was singing something sultry on the stereo; strings of tiny white lights glittered like stars all over the ceiling.
Katrin said innocently, “Did I go overboard enough? You’ll notice there are no flamingos.”
“Perhaps you should have included a fire extinguisher.”
“The kind of fire I’m interested in can’t be put out so easily,” she rejoined, tossing her hair back with a gesture worthy of Dietrich.
Her nipples were pushing at the filmy white nylon, which clung to her hips and thighs. Luke said huskily, “I could help you light the fire.”
“I was hoping you’d offer.”
He dropped his clothes on the carpet and, naked, walked over to the bed. “As you see, I won’t take much persuading.”
She blushed in a very un-Dietrichlike way. “None at all, by the looks of you.”
He buried his face in the softness of her breasts, her creamy skin and ardent embrace wondrously familiar. He could have told her he’d missed her; he didn’t. “I hope the roses don’t have thorns,” he murmured; and said nothing else for quite a while.
Early the next morning Katrin and Luke boarded the first leg of a flight to Winnipeg, capital city of Manitoba. So, thought Luke, they were going back to Askja. He had no objections whatsoever; they could swim, sail and hike, and he might even get around to a little fishing.
Four days with Katrin in the village where she grew up would be just fine.
After they’d landed in Winnipeg, Katrin picked up a rental vehicle that turned out to be a four-wheel-drive wagon. She headed toward the perimeter highway that circled the city. Luke was tired; Dallas had been strenuous and he hadn’t slept much the night before. “Would you mind if I have a snooze?” he asked. “I could drive after that.”
“Sure,” she said.
She didn’t look entirely relaxed. Perhaps, he thought wryly, she was going to show him more of her past in Askja, and expected him to reciprocate. He hoped not. He’d much rather make love than war. He settled back in the seat, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
He had no idea how much time had passed when he woke up. Stretching, he glanced at the clock on the dash. “Good grief, did I sleep that long? You must have worn me out last night, Katrin…we should be nearly there.”
He looked around in growing puzzlement. The landscape looked both unfamiliar, yet frighteningly familiar. He said slowly, “This isn’t the way to Askja.”
“We’re not going to Askja.”
“We’re in Ontario.”
“Yes. We crossed the border a little while ago.”
“What’s up, Katrin?” Luke said tightly.
“You’ll see. You agreed not to ask any questions, remember?”
He had. Relax, Luke, he told himself. Katrin doesn’t know about Teal Lake. She’s taking you to a resort on Lake of the Woods, that’s all. He said, “Would you like me to drive?”
“No, I’m fine. If you’re hungry, there are some chocolate bars and sandwiches in my pack.”
He munched on a sandwich, subliminally aware that she was gripping the wheel much too tightly for someone on a perfectly innocent vacation. What was up? Why was she so tense?
He found out ten minutes later when they came to the green and white sign for Teal Lake. At the last minute Katrin slowed, flicked on her left-hand signal and took the turnoff. Luke said sharply, “Where are we going?”
Her knuckles were now white as bone. “Teal Lake,” she said. “Where else?”
“Katrin,” he said in a deadly quiet voice, “turn around.”
“No, Luke.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere near Teal Lake!”
“I’m sure you don’t.”
He could have grabbed the wheel. But if they both ended up in the ditch, that would solve nothing. “For the last time, turn around.”
“You promised me four days of your time, no questions asked.”
“I also said I loathe being manipulated,” he said icily. “How did you find out about Teal Lake?”
“I had lunch with Ramon the day before you left for Dallas. He told me.”
Mixed with rage was now the sharp pain of betrayal. “What did he tell you?”
“Only that the place meant something to you. Nothing more. He can be as closemouthed as you.” She added with a small smile, obviously trying to lighten the atmosphere, “Although it made a change for me to ask him the questions.”
The wagon was bouncing over the ruts in the dirt road. Which would, Luke knew, get worse before they got better. No wonder she’d hired a four-wheel drive. “You had this all planned, didn’t you? Clever little Katrin.”
A muscle twitched in her jaw. “How long will it take us to get there?”
“Oh,” he said, “you’ll find out.” Then he leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes again. He was damned if he was going to count every tree and chunk of granite between here and their destination. Let her deal with the potholes, the culverts and washboard slopes. This was, after all, her idea.
Had he ever been so angry in his whole life?
It’d be a lifetime before he made Katrin—or any other woman—another blind promise like the one he’d made so innocently in the kitchen. He’d trusted Katrin; and she, like Ramon, had betrayed him.
He wasn’t sure which was worse: anger or pain.
Time passed. The wagon lurched and bounced. Neither he nor Katrin said a word until she slowed, then turned again, this time to the right. “We’re here,” she said, parked the vehicle and pulled on the handbrake. Then she got out of the wagon.
Luke sat up and looked around. She’d parked at the beginning of the town. It was deserted now; the mine had closed many years ago, the inhabitants transported to other mining towns along the shield. He had two choices. He could sit here until she tired of wandering among the tumbledown buildings. Or he could join her and have the fight he was spoiling for.
He should join her anyway; this was bear country.
Luke jumped to the ground. It was late afternoon, under a clear sky. Somewhere in the woods a white-throated sparrow sang its pure, single notes, while a thrush was piping from the tall pines. The mosquitoes descended on him almost immediately. He pulled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned his collar. “S
o what’s the plan, Katrin?” he grated. “Because I’m sure you have one.”
“Let’s just walk around,” she said.
Her spine was like a ramrod under her cotton shirt, and she stumbled over a couple of rocks as she passed the first shack. Luke remembered it all too well. Jim Morton had lived there with his wife and half a dozen kids; the eldest boy had made Luke’s life a misery until Luke had grown big enough to turn on him one day and knock him to the ground.
He, Luke, had been small for his age in those days. He’d suddenly shot up when he turned thirteen; a couple of years later, he’d lost all fear of his father.
The roof of the old country store was sagging. Like Katrin’s cake, thought Luke, and heard her say, “How long since the place closed down?”
“You mean you didn’t do your research?” he said nastily.
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“You don’t know me very well if you think you’re going to get a guided tour.”
They passed the little church, the paint peeling from its shingles, and three more houses. The windows were boarded up; desolation and abandonment hung like a miasma over the whole settlement. Gradually and inexorably grasses and shrubs were encroaching on the houses. Swallowing them, thought Luke, and wished he were anywhere else in the world but here.
They were approaching the tar-paper shack where he’d lived with his parents, and then with his father once his mother had left. His nerves had tightened to an unbearable pitch. Trying to distract himself from memories that were mobbing him like a flock of crows, he said flatly, “Why did you bring me here?”
“I thought it might open you up. Make you tell me about yourself, your parents, your past.”
“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
She stopped right in front of his old house. “I didn’t know what else to do! I can’t live with someone who won’t tell me the first thing about himself. You’re like a medieval castle, Luke—walls ten feet thick and no windows.”
“Yeah?” he said in an ugly voice, emotion seething in his chest. As though a dam had burst inside him, the words came pouring out, unstoppable, carrying everything in their path. “While we’re on the subject of windows,” he rasped, “why don’t you take a look at the place right in front of you. That’s where I grew up. You see that broken pane in the kitchen window? My dad put his fist through it one night. He was aiming at my head. But he was dead-drunk and I ducked and so he missed me. He whomped me with his belt for that…is that the kind of thing you want to know?”
Katrin paled. “Where was your mother? Couldn’t she have protected you?”
“My mother took off with the local mechanic the summer I turned five. Her morals were what you might call loose…who knows if my dad really was my dad? Certainly they never bothered to get married. I was glad when she left because it meant no more fights in the middle of the night, no more broken crockery and bruises on my mother’s face. How in hell could she protect me, even if she’d wanted to—she was shorter than you and my dad was a big man.”
“She could have taken you with her.”
“She didn’t want me. To give my dad his due, he did provide me with some kind of home. At least he didn’t run away like my mum. Although we were dirt poor because he drank everything he earned.”
“But he used to beat you,” Katrin whispered.
Her face, a frozen mask of horror, only served to make Luke angrier. “I learned very young to stay out in the woods all night if he’d been into the booze, and I was always quicker on my feet than him. But sometimes he caught me, yeah. So are you getting the picture? Can you see why I’m not rushing you to the altar, or fathering a dozen kids? I never want to have children!”
“That’s why you’ve made so much money…so you’ll never be poor again,” she said in a dazed voice. “Where’s your father now, Luke?”
“When I turned fifteen, he took his belt off once too often. I flattened him against the wall and told him I’d beat the tar out of him if he ever tried that again. The next morning I left. Went north. I lied about my age, worked the mines and started saving money.”
“Did you ever come back here?”
“Never. I got word two years later that he’d died of a heart attack…there was no reason to come back.”
“So you never made peace with him.”
Luke’s throat tightened; to his horror he felt tears sting his eyes. With a tiny sound of compassion, Katrin stepped closer and tried to put her arms around him. He struck her away. “I’ve always regretted that I never came back here, or tried to meet my dad on a more even footing. Not everyone saddled with a rebellious kid who might not even be his own flesh and blood would have hung in like my dad did. But I never told him that. And now it’s too late. Years too late.”
He, Luke, could have ended up in an orphanage; and rough though his upbringing had been, Luke knew in his bones that an orphanage would have stifled him. His fists clenched at his sides, he went on, “There was more to my dad than the booze and his belt. His whole life he worked to get unions into the mines. Every mine I own is unionized, and the safety regulations are strictly adhered to or I close the place down…it’s the least I can do for him.”
“It’s a fine legacy,” Katrin said unsteadily.
“Maybe he loved my mum, despite her infidelities. Maybe that’s why he drank. Or maybe it was because of his own childhood—he came over here from the slums of Glasgow, God knows what his upbringing was like. There’s so much I never asked him. And now I can’t.”
Katrin was gazing at the little house as though it might tell her all its secrets. “Wasn’t there anyone here who loved you? Someone you could run to when you were in trouble?”
“Me? Run for help? Not likely,” Luke said ironically. “You asked me once what my middle name was. How about independence?”
“You have two middle names,” Katrin said with a flare of her normal spirit. “The second one’s pride.”
She’d got that right. “You think I was going to tell the whole village what my life was like? How terrified I was sometimes? How lonely I felt, how unloved?” He gave a derisive laugh. “There are worse things than the occasional night in the woods.”
“You’ve never told anyone any of this.”
“Imagine that.”
“Not everyone’s like your parents!”
“Right,” he said sarcastically, raking his fingers through his hair. “Have you seen enough? Or do we have to walk the whole goddamned street?”
“I’ve seen enough.”
“Good. Then let’s get out of here.”
Katrin dragged her eyes away from the rotting wooden gutters, where flaps of tar paper hung from the roof. In a low voice she said, “I brought you here for another reason.”
“I think you’ve done enough damage for one day.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you! I needed to know more about you, to try and understand you. To get behind all those barriers you hide behind.”
“Why do you need to do that?” he exploded. “What business is it of yours?”
She drew in a ragged breath. “Haven’t you guessed?” she said. “I’m in love with you, Luke.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INTO the silence came the whitethroat’s clear lament, piercingly sweet. Luke said with careful restraint, “Would you mind repeating that?”
“You heard,” Katrin said with a touch of desperation. “I love you. I’ve been in love with you for weeks, that’s why I was so devastated when you left in the middle of the night after we first made love. That’s why I want more of you than you’re giving me. Don’t get me wrong, I love how we are in bed together, it’s truly wonderful. But it’s not enough. I can’t build a relationship on sex, Luke. There has to be more than that.”
His heart felt like a chunk of ice. The lake used to freeze solid every winter, he remembered absently, that’s when he’d learned how to skate. He said flatly, “You’ve ruined everything.”
; “Don’t say that!”
“I don’t know how to love. And I don’t want to learn. Not with you. Not with anyone. It’s too late.”
She said with passionate conviction, “It’s never too late to learn how to love someone. Never.”
“Then sooner or later you’ll learn to love someone else, won’t you?” he blazed. “Because I’m not available. Will you get that through your head?”
“I don’t want someone else. I want you.”
“Then you’re a fool,” Luke grated, too angry to care what he said. “I’ve had enough of this. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve forfeited your other three days—I want to go straight back to the airport. You can come back to San Francisco with me or not, as you please. If you do, I’ll be faithful to you and I’ll put you through law school. But I won’t fall in love with you and I won’t marry you.”
“And you won’t take me on business trips, don’t forget that,” she flared. “Let’s go—we can’t get to the airport soon enough for me.”
She marched ahead of him down the dirt road, her hips swinging in her cotton trousers, one hand slapping at a mosquito on the back of her neck. Luke took off after her, swung her around, planted a furious kiss on her parted lips, and snarled, “I’m doing the driving. I’ve had enough surprises for one day.”
“You can do what you damn well please!”
Her eyes were as turbulent as an ocean storm; she looked so beautiful that he had to bite back the one question he refused to ask. Whether she was coming back to San Francisco with him or not.
If she was in love with him, it would be better if she didn’t. He said furiously, “I’ll tell you one thing—you don’t look like you’re in love with me. You look like you hate my guts.”
“How would you know what love looks like?”
How indeed? “Give me the keys to the wagon,” he ordered. She hauled them out of her pocket, dropped them on his palm without touching him, and kept on walking.
He didn’t want to look at the houses, or the pale beauty of the evening sky. He certainly didn’t want to look at Katrin. Never so glad in his life to get behind the wheel of a vehicle, Luke snapped his seat belt and took off in a spurt of gravel.