by Lee, Rachel
“Loyalty is all well and good, Chase. But don’t let it blind you.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Those divers weren’t looking for the diamonds. There’s no link to your brother at all.”
She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. All of a sudden, it was hard to breathe. He was washing his hands of the whole thing, she thought. The only reason he’d been trying to help her find out what happened on the Island Dream was because he thought it was tied to what had happened to him. Now that he was dismissing the link, he wouldn’t help her anymore.
Like every other man in her life, he was abandoning her. Well, what had she expected? Men were never around when you needed them. Never.
“I’m going home,” she said tightly. “Do you want Jeff to stay?”
He whirled around. “You’re not going anywhere alone. You don’t know who might be out in those woods.”
“Just some damn demons from your nightmares,” she said acidly. “What could they want with me? I don’t have anything to do with your problems.”
“Goddammit, Callie. If this is all tied together the way you just said, you damn well do have something to do with my problems.”
“You just said none of it’s linked.” She turned and started to walk away, but he reached out and caught her arm. Her anger grew to white heat. “Don’t you dare manhandle me.”
“Then quit acting like a jerk. You don’t know who’s out in those woods, and you don’t know what they’re after. There’s no guarantee they only want to bug me.”
“You think I’m afraid of a little seaweed and some crazy red lights?”
“Anybody with half a brain is afraid of a threat when they don’t know what it is.”
“I know what it is. But you won’t listen to me.”
“Jesus.” He glared at her.
He was still gripping her arm, and the look on his face frightened her. Instinctively, she started to swing at his arm, hoping to make him let her go.
In an abrupt movement that caught her totally by surprise,, he wrapped his arms around her, pinning her hand to her sides so she couldn’t hit him.
“Don’t hit me,” he said in a low voice.
“Then let go of me!” She tipped her head back, meaning to return glare for glare, but in the instant their eyes met the world careened wildly off its axis. All of a sudden, she could think of nothing except the way their bodies were pressed tightly together. The heat of him so close.
Her breath locked in her throat. He no longer looked as if he was furious with her. Instead she saw hunger. Yearning. She felt the same awakening in her, needs so strong that she didn’t recognize what they were because she’d never felt them before.
Then his mouth swooped down and claimed hers in a kiss that was nearly violent with desperation.
At first she was utterly still. Then she felt her body leap in response, dizzying heat running along her veins. The sensation panicked her, and she hammered wildly on his shoulders.
He let her go so swiftly that she stumbled and would have fallen if he hadn’t steadied her.
“Christ,” he said raggedly. “Christ, Callie, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… Jesus.” He turned his back again and gripped the porch railing. Even in the poor light she could see the tension in him, and the whiteness of his knuckles. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
She felt weak, trembling from head to foot, but she gathered what dignity she had left and turned away. Not caring what might be out in the woods, she descended the porch stairs and headed along the path home.
He was no better than Mel, she thought numbly. Hot tears began to run down her cheeks, but she hardly felt them. No better.
What was it with men anyway? she wondered. Why did they all feel so entitled to do what they wanted any way they wanted? Even Jeff, and God knew she had tried to raise him to be better. But he thought nothing of ignoring her wishes and running off in his damn boat anytime he felt like it. Thought nothing of depending on her to take care of him when he hit a rough spot because he couldn’t take care of himself.
And her father, thinking nothing of going back to sea and leaving his fourteen-year-old daughter to mother his six-year-old son for weeks on end with scarcely any help. Maybe it was different in his generation, maybe girls were expected to do that—but that didn’t make it right. He could have found a job on land. He could have been around more. Could have been there to help her, to ease the burden, to ease the fear.
Because what she had given up to become Jeff’s caretaker was small potatoes beside the fear she had felt all those weeks when her dad was out at sea and Jeff was her sole responsibility. God she had been terrified. What if she did something wrong? What if Jeff got hurt? What if she was doing a lousy job of raising him?
At the age of fourteen she had been standing beside a little boy’s bed while he slept, overwhelmed with guilt and grief because she wasn’t doing enough, she wasn’t loving enough, she wasn’t patient enough, because she had shouted at him over nothing, or because she just hadn’t known how to do it right.
No fourteen-year-old should have to go through that, especially when the child wasn’t hers.
But she had. Those terrors still haunted her. Every time Jeff did something crazy or heedless, she wondered where she had failed. She lay awake nights, wondering where she had gone wrong, and feeling so horribly guilty for all the things she had failed to do.
If she had done things right, Jeff wouldn’t be in this trouble. He’d be in college. He never would have been charged with that first assault.
She had failed, and her failures might cost her baby brother his future—or even his life.
She started walking again, feeling more hopeless than she had felt in a long time. Chase had at least given a direction to her search for the truth about what had happened on the Island Dream. What was she going to do? She didn’t know enough about diving, enough about where the boat had been found, to continue to look.
The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that this was all connected, what had happened to Rushman and Westerlake, what had happened to Chase, the crazy things with the seaweed and the red eyes in the woods—they all had to be connected because it was just too damn many strange things happening all at once for them not to be related.
She heard footsteps pounding behind her on the path, and she whirled around, her heart slamming. It had to be Jeff, she assured herself. The person creeping around in these woods after dark wouldn’t approach so noisily. At least she hoped not.
But she stepped off the path anyway, and hid behind a tall, elderly buttonwood.
It was Jeff. She recognized the way his shadow moved as he came around the bend in the path. She stepped out from behind the tree, and he drew to a sharp halt.
“Jesus, Callie! What are you thinking, running out all by yourself like that? And what the hell is Chase thinking, letting you go alone?”
“We had a fight. Besides, there’s nothing out here for me to be afraid of.”
“That’s a pretty big assumption.”
“Big assumptions seem to be the order of the day,” she said acidly, and started striding rapidly down the path again. “Everyone else is making them. Why shouldn’t I?”
He caught up and walked beside her. “What happened?”
“We fought. Basic disagreement.” Through the mangroves, she could see the silvery sparkle of the moon-dappled water. Ordinarily she would have been enchanted. Tonight she hated the whole world.
“What assumptions?” Jeff asked.
“Never mind.”
His footsteps grew sharper, angrier. “I’m not a kid anymore, Callie. Will you quit trying to cut me out of things? You’re upset, and I want to know why.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jeff.” The last thing on earth she was going to do was tell him that Chase had manhandled her. Jeff would probably get furious and go after Chase, and just get himself into more trouble. “It’ll blow over.”
“Was it about him
teaching me to dive?”
“No.” Although now that she thought about it, that was another reason to be angry with Chase. He knew how she felt about Jeff and the sea, yet he was still doing this. “We never even got around to that.”
“You don’t approve, do you.”
“Not really.”
“Damn it, Callie, just butt out of my life.”
She was shocked. She and Jeff had argued before, but he’d never once said that. “Butt out? Jeff, I raised you! That gives me some rights.”
“I know you raised me, and I’m grateful for it, but that doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do for the rest of my life.”
All of a sudden, Callie found it impossible to breathe. Her lungs seemed to have stopped working, frozen in shock. Then her heart slammed and she drew in an agonized breath. “Jeff…”
“I’m not kidding, Callie. You’re always on my case about something. You’re never, ever happy with me. Just stay out of my life. Get a life of your own.”
They reached the end of the path and emerged into their own yard as he spoke. He gave her one last angry glare, then ran up the steps and into the house.
She stood alone in the moonlight, realizing that her entire life was crumbling around her.
And all of it was her own fault.
After Chase sent Jeff to follow Callie, he retreated to the fortress of his house and locked all the doors and windows.
Why not? It was one thing to say he was going to face this thing down, and another actually to do it. And whether a human agency made those eyes in the woods or put the seaweed on his porch, there was still the whispering, rustling pressure of the darkness that rose out of the sea every night to torment him.
He got the Beretta and put it on the table, but he didn’t sit down with it, didn’t pour himself a glass of whiskey. Although he was tempted to reach for the gun.
He couldn’t believe he’d grabbed Callie that way. Never before in his life had he grabbed a woman in anger. He was appalled at himself, and he didn’t blame Callie for being furious.
He wondered if his accident had not only given him nightmares and strange fears, but if it had changed his personality in some essential way. It seemed he couldn’t even trust himself not to do something stupid when he was angry.
Christ.
What in the hell had possessed him?
He passed on the whiskey and got himself a glass of ice water. His hands were trembling, he realized. He was shaking in reaction to his own violence. That had happened to him once before, a long, long time ago in training, when he’d been deliberately provoked by an instructor. But not once since then had he allowed himself to be angered to violence.
Jesus H. Christ, he was coming apart at the seams.
Remembering the look on Callie’s face, he knew he had done more than shock her. He’d wounded her.
The night was battering at the walls of his cottage. He could feel it, but he didn’t give a shit. There were more important things to worry about, like his own disintegration.
Self-pity was waiting in the wings, and moved suddenly to center stage. There wasn’t a hole deep enough to bury himself in, he thought. Nothing he’d tried was making anything better. He might as well just barricade his doors and windows and hole up forever, never seeing another living soul. Just pack it all in and become a hermit until he died, because he was sure as hell never going to be useful to anyone again.
He paused in his pacing to stare at the Beretta. Or, he could just pull the trigger.
But he’d never been a quitter, and he hated self-pity. Listening to his own thoughts made him want to gag. Christ, there had to be a way out of this hole he kept digging deeper for himself. There had to be a way.
Callie’s face swam into the view of his mind’s eye, her appalled, stricken expression after he kissed her, the look of disappointment. He couldn’t let that lie. He had to apologize to her. Get down on his damn knees if necessary.
He strode to the door and touched the knob, suddenly once again aware of the pressure of the night outside. He could wait until morning. She might be more amenable then anyway, after she’d calmed down.
In his heart of hearts, though, he knew an apology alone wasn’t going to do it. But if he walked over there in the dark, that might prove to her how sincerely sorry he was.
And he needed her to understand that. He recognized the selfishness in his need for forgiveness, but he needed it anyway. And she needed to know he was truly sorry, even if it didn’t ease her wound any. He owed her that.
Taking a deep breath, he opened the door. The rustle of the breeze in the trees greeted him, along with the gentle lapping of waves against the seawall.
The sea was not the threat, he realized suddenly. She was trying to tell him something. He just couldn’t understand.
It was an insane thought, but it stayed with him as he took his courage in his hands and set out for Callie’s. And it seemed to him, as he walked, that the gentle lapping of the waves held the night at bay, as if the sea created a cocoon around him, guarding him.
More insanity. He was losing the last of his marbles, and he was past caring.
Callie was sitting on one of the wicker chairs on her porch, curled up as tightly as she could get, her knees drawn to her chin and her arms wrapped around them. Her eyes and throat burned with unshed tears. Not since her father’s death had she felt so alone and lonely.
She honestly didn’t know what to do about Jeff. Maybe he was right that she was being too controlling, but he wasn’t as grown-up as he thought, either. What was she supposed to do? Keep her mouth shut when she saw him doing something that could get him hurt?
The idea of his diving terrified her. She realized she was being ridiculous. People dived all the time without any problems. Most of the people who went diving around there didn’t even go deep enough to need to decompress on their way back up. She’d heard that somewhere, years ago. The depths simply weren’t great enough until you got well out past the reefs into the ocean. How much trouble could Jeff get into in thirty feet of water? If he suddenly ran out of air, he’d still be able to reach the surface. There were moray eels, of course, and sharks, but they weren’t a major concern.
So he was right. On this, at least, she ought to butt out. As long as he followed the rules of diving and used common sense, he should be perfectly all right.
But then she remembered Chase. He’d done everything right. He’d been diving for years, and look what had happened to him. It was small comfort to remember that he’d been five times deeper than Jeff would ever be likely to go.
She was losing Jeff, she realized. One way or another, he was going to leave her. He was going to carve out his own life, make his own decisions, and… he wouldn’t need her anymore. God, how that hurt.
She swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in her throat. She was almost strangling on grief, and no matter how much she told herself that this was the normal course of events, that every mother eventually had to let go, she didn’t know how she was going to stand it.
These feelings couldn’t be normal, she thought. They were too strong. All mothers felt trepidation and loss, but they let their children go. She was clinging so hard to Jeff that it was unnatural. Apparently she needed him even more than she thought he needed her.
But if she didn’t stop this, she was going to destroy their relationship. God, she had to learn to let go.
She bit her lip, trying to hold in a welling tide of grief. Shouldn’t she be feeling proud? Jeff was ready to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to. That was far better than him wanting to stay with her forever.
All of a sudden she wondered if he was still living with her only because he was aware that she needed him. Her heart skipped a beat at the thought, and she found herself staring blindly out over the water. Was he in his own way trying to take care of her?
She hadn’t thought of that before, and the notion made her feel even more pathetic. God, had he known all along wh
at she was just discovering, that she was leaning on him? Probably. Hadn’t he just told her to get a life?
Cruel words, but they went straight to her heart because they were true. She had no life aside from Jeff and work.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, “what am I doing?”
It was all too much. The murder charges, watching Jeff start to break loose, discovering what a spineless wimp she was. It was just too much. One scalding tear ran down her cheek.
She heard Chase’s approach before she saw him. It never entered her head it was anyone else. Already she recognized the rhythm of his limping walk. She waited uneasily, wondering what could be momentous enough to make him journey through the night alone, not really wanting to see him after what had happened between them.
His shadow emerged into the yard from the path, and he came to the foot of the stairs, looking up at her. After a moment of silence, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You came all the way here to say that?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Callie. I can’t believe I did that. I just can’t believe it.”
He had walked through the night that terrified him to apologize. Her heart skipped again, differently this time. “Are you okay?”
“To hell with me,” he said. “I’m worried about you. What I did… God, I’m sorry.”
Something inside her, something she hadn’t been aware had frozen, thawed just a little. “I made you mad,” she said tentatively. And it was true.
“That’s no excuse. That’s never an excuse. What I did was plain wrong. I should never have laid a hand on you, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have kissed you in anger. That was disgusting and reprehensible.”
She didn’t know quite what to say. It had been disgusting and reprehensible. She also knew that anybody was capable of doing things he or she shouldn’t in the heat of anger. Something else concerned her more. “Are you… inclined to do things like that?”
“No. Never. I never did anything like that before in my life. Not even when I was married, and God knows that if I was looking for excuses to act like a Neanderthal, my wife gave me plenty of them.”