Light of Day

by Barbara Samuel

  Samuel smiled, accepting her help. “He might have at that. I certainly did.”

  From the woods behind Lila came a pack of malamutes running wildly through the trees, a series of moans and yelps erupting from their throats. Before Samuel had a chance to react, they had surrounded Arrow, tumbling him over in joyous greeting.

  As the dogs wrestled and jumped, a man came out of the trees, nodding once toward Lila and Samuel before whistling softly at the pack. They responded instantly, all but Arrow, who whined pitifully before turning back to sit down next to Lila.

  Samuel felt a strange prick in his chest at the sight. Lila, with her curls wild over the shoulders of her worn bomber jacket, generous mouth tilted in a smile of comfort for the dog that leaned against her leg. The sound of the dogs faded away, leaving the silence of the forest to envelop them again. The sense of arousal he’d experienced a moment before returned, and he wanted to cross the small space between them, to finish the kiss that had been interrupted.

  Instead, he simply admired her in the cloudy day, recorded in memory the deep gloss of her hair against her pale skin, the lovely plumpness of her lips, the size of her hand against Arrow’s fur. For soon the day would come when he would no longer enjoy the luxury of her soothing presence. The knowledge sent a crushing weight of sorrow through his chest. Ah, Lila, why did fate send you now?

  At that moment she looked up at him, as if she had heard his thought, and a wistful expression crossed her pale eyes. Then she smiled the smallest bit. “Are you ready to head back?”

  He nodded and turned to follow her back up the hill. As they reached the summit of the hill, she said, “I’m not sure what it is about this quiet and the forest, but sometimes it really makes me miss my dancing.” She paused. “I think because it’s so beautiful that you can’t describe or express it except through something like music or dancing.”

  “You studied a long time.” There was no question in his words. In her movements the night he’d found her dancing, there had been the expertise born of long years of study.

  She nodded. “Nine years. Do you know that I had interviews set up with dance companies in three cities for one summer? And my parents were willing to let me go wherever I had to in order to find out if I had what it took.” She smiled at him. “Maybe in some ways it’s better that I never found out.”

  Samuel took her hand, unable to resist. “You are a dancer, Lila, even now.”

  “Am I?”

  “You are,” he said, smiling. “And any way, by now you would be retiring, yes? Your knees would ache, and your feet would be horrid and all that lovely excitement that shines in your eye would have been erased.”

  She stopped. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed a sheen of tears brightened her eyes. “I would never have met you, either.”

  And then, very softly, she kissed him. Samuel returned it, putting his arms around her to hug her. It was so simple a gesture, he thought as her hair tickled his nose and her arms embraced his waist, but it made him dizzy. His words to Lila echoed through his mind as he drifted in the simple pleasure of holding her. A passion of the soul.

  He released her wordlessly and they began to walk again.

  Chapter 9

  Three days later Samuel stared moodily out of the upstairs window. Heavy clouds promised rain before dark.

  Lila had gone outside again, after starting a thick soup for the supper they would share in a few hours, and he could see her on the beach with Arrow. She was collecting things from the shoreline, her hair tossing in the strong breeze coming west with the rain. She was too far away for him to see details, only her energy was communicated. Her blasted energy.

  Since they had returned from their trip to town a few days before, she had never stopped moving. She baked and cooked, cleaned and rearranged, walked vigorously in the woods and along the beach. In the evenings she played solitaire and knitted and read her thick history book by the light of the fire, twirling a curl around a finger, occasionally stopping to share some incredible fact she’d just stumbled over.

  And Samuel had prowled, unable to escape his increasingly bad temper even with the long runs he forced himself to take to rebuild the strength he had lost. His wound was healing more quickly than he could have imagined, although there was stiffness and some lingering pain in the joint. He needed his right arm if he were to undertake his next assignment.

  As he watched Lila prance about on the beach, he restlessly moved in his hands the strange little gadget she had picked up at the bookstore. It was a magic trick. The point was to take the single metal ring from a pair of horseshoes joined with a chain. Lila, with a flick of her wrists, had shown him the trick one time, then with her mischievous grin had handed it to him.

  In odd moments he found himself picking it up, turning it over, trying to find its secret. He approached it mathematically, knowing the immutable laws of nature would not be broken. But he could not seem to solve the puzzle.

  Now he wrestled with it again, putting the two pieces together, trying to understand how the ring came off. It was good therapy, and he was grateful to Lila for understanding him well enough to offer him such a distraction. It kept his darker thoughts at bay, kept him from despairing.

  He’d found himself thinking often of Mustapha as the uncertain and seeking boy he had been. A painfully awkward child, with hands and feet too large for thin arms and legs, his nose growing three times as fast as the rest of his face, he had been a target for the taunts of other children, who found him an easily wounded mark. Together with his insecurities over his parentage, the combination had been devastating.

  Samuel wished now that Mustapha had grown up before he’d understood the power of their father’s money, for he had finally grown into his looks. In adulthood he had grown into a tall, imposing figure with severe, autocratic features and the soft, wide eyes of their mother. Had the transformation occurred before Mustapha had learned the power of property and cash, a woman might have healed his early scars.

  Instead, Mustapha had fallen into the habit of using money to influence people. And some elements, like the Freedom League, were not averse to manipulating the man for his money.

  It gave Samuel no joy to contemplate opening the wounds of his brother’s heart. But no one else would undertake this assignment with the commitment Samuel would bring to the task. And Mustapha, for all his flaws, was Samuel’s blood. He wanted to see him live, to perhaps heal his life.

  Samuel’s dreams at night had been filled with visions of his brother, dead and bleeding. Other times it was Lila who was murdered instead. He awoke from these nightmares with a pounding heart and dry throat.

  He had to protect both of them. It seemed a particularly unkind twist of fate that saving one meant leaving the other. And if he stayed here, warm with Lila, all of them would die.

  The ring between his fingers suddenly slipped between the bars and came off. Samuel swore, for in his absorption, he’d not seen how it had come off, and that left him no closer to solving the puzzle than before.

  * * *

  On the beach Lila sifted through the sand at the edge of the lapping waves, intent on completing her makeshift chess set. In a bag were sixteen smooth shells, all pale tan with streaks of pink, together with four straight bits of rock for bishops, four knotty pieces of driftwood for knights and pinecones for the royalty of the court. All she lacked was something to use as castles. A length of red-and-white gingham would do for the board.

  Rooks had been her favorite playing piece as a child. She liked the way they moved in straight, unwavering lines. There was no ambiguity about rooks, not like queens or the strapped and helpless kings, or knights with their dancing L’s.

  A long shell caught her eye. It would do. As her fingers closed around it, the first drop of rain splashed against her cheek. Looking up in surprise, she saw the heavy clouds that had hidden the sky, saw the storm moving across the water in fuzzy gray fury. “Damn,” she said, and jumped up.

  The movement
caused a twinge in her lower back, a warning that had been sounding now for two days. She was doing too much, and when she rested, it wasn’t the kind of deep relaxation her back required. Instead, she awakened with tired arms and legs and neck, as if she had run hard in her sleep.

  She ignored the twinge and rounded a pile of rocks, kicking sand around with her toe, heedless of the sprinklings of rain on her hair. A second, similar shell lay at the edge of the waves, and she grabbed it, dropping it into the bag victoriously.

  Arrow trotted over, sniffling at a bulbous tangle of seaweed, then, finding nothing edible, picked up a finger of driftwood and dropped it at her feet. “Sorry, baby,” she said without looking at him. “I don’t have time.”

  Unconcerned, he snuffled away, rewarded a few feet down the shore by something tasty in a hollow of sand. Lila spared him a single, amused glance. Too bad humans were not as easily distracted as dogs, she thought ruefully.

  Rain began to fall more quickly, making a pattering noise on the rocks, and Lila redoubled her efforts. A third, suitable shell tumbled from a stack of pebbles, and she snatched it up, blinking rain from her eyes. Her hair was more than a little damp by now, and the curls dripped around her face and shoulders. “Damn,” she said again, tossing the offending locks out of her eyes.

  One more shell. One more. She jumped up and started digging with her toes through a promising stack of flotsam washed ashore. Right near the top was the last shell, and Lila grabbed it, whistling for Arrow as she dropped it into her bag. “Come on, boy,” she called. “Let’s get home!”

  Earlier the day had been unseasonably warm, and Lila had needed only her flannel shirt over the sleeveless T-shirt she wore as underwear in this isolated place. Now there wasn’t a square inch of her body that wasn’t soaked through, even her feet in the high-top tennis shoes squished with every step. She shivered. Her back would not repay this kindly, she thought grimly, topping the rise by the cabin.

  Emerging from the front door was Samuel, who had thrown a coat over his head. “Are you mad?” he called. “It’s pouring!”

  A gust of wind slammed into her wet body, and her teeth started chattering. Annoyed more with herself than with Samuel, she snapped, “I know.”

  She ignored him, bracing herself against the outer wall of the cabin to shake as much water from her hair as possible. She tried to stay away from Arrow, who performed the same task with much more efficiency. Both of them dashed into the sheltering warmth of the cabin.

  “Ach,” Samuel said, and slammed the door behind her.

  A fire roared in the potbellied stove. Lila dropped her bag of chess pieces on the table and headed for towels.

  “Here. I’ve got them out already,” Samuel said behind her. “I saw that you weren’t coming when the rain started. Dry your head. You’ll catch a cold.”

  She accepted the towel, moving closer to the fire. “Thank you.” With trembling fingers she struggled with the buttons of her flannel shirt, intent on shedding her soaked clothes as quickly as possible. If she warmed up quickly, she might prevent a debilitating episode with her back. Kicking off her shoes, she said, “Samuel, get me that quilt, will you?”

  He moved to pull it off the bed. Lila stripped her shirt and tossed it to the bench, then rubbed her arms dry with the rough towel. Even next to the stove, she was agonizingly cold.

  It wasn’t until Samuel turned back, the heavy patchwork quilt in hand, that she realized how she must look, how little of her was really covered. Her jeans were stuck like glue to her body, and the sleeveless tanks she favored were made of thin, white cotton. She didn’t dare glance down, suddenly feeling the warmth of the fire on her nearly naked breasts. She flushed and lowered her eyes, knowing she might as well not be wearing a shirt at all.

  Samuel paused only an instant, and nothing showed in his face except for a tiny white line around his flared nostrils. He tossed the blanket around her shoulders, covering her, then pulled it tight, his fists under her chin. “Why did you stay out there so long?”

  “Just a minute.” He let her go. She unbuttoned her jeans under the quilt. When it was obvious they wouldn’t come off without a struggle, she said, “Samuel, turn around for a minute, would you?”

  He complied.

  The small twinges she’d felt in her back on the beach were no longer simple warnings. As she bent to struggle out of the heavy wet cotton, pain seized the lower muscles with crushing force. She gasped and reached out instinctively for something to hold on to before she fell, stopping just in time from putting her hand on the hot stove. “Samuel,” she cried, “help.”

  He caught her in a strong grip. For a long moment she leaned against him, holding her breath against the clutch of muscles in her back. The quilt had fallen away, but Lila couldn’t find it in herself to care. His warm hands on her arms were steady and impersonal, his chest a secure and unmoving wall. After a moment the clutch in her back eased enough that she was able to shed her jeans, holding on to Samuel for support. When she had finished, he kindly retrieved the quilt and wrapped her up again.

  “All right now?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes.” The word was nearly a whisper. Her cheeks burned. It must have seemed a ploy—her staying out in the rain only to return to undress in front of him. What must he think of her? Especially, she thought a little wildly, since he had been completely unmoved by her spectacle. Mortified beyond any previous experience and unable to escape, she turned away to sit on the bench near the fire.

  Samuel watched the rosy blush climb from her shoulders to her cheeks until she was one raging flush. Her eyes were lowered modestly, her freckles lost in the heated color staining her skin. She was more excruciatingly embarrassed than anyone he had seen in years. For a moment he didn’t really understand the reason. When he realized it stemmed from the accidental exposure of her carefully hidden body, he smiled gently and sat down next to her on the bench.

  Slipping an arm around her shoulders, he said, “I have never seen such a blush, ma chérie. Come here.” He pulled her, quilt and all, into his arms. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. We are alone in a small place, with bad weather, yes? It was bound to happen that I would see you or you would see me.”

  She nodded, eyes downcast. The furious color in her cheeks began to recede.

  Continuing in the same light vein, he teased, “And the world thinks America is full of decadent women.”

  She laughed, lifting her head to shyly pull away.

  He released her. “I have water boiling for tea. That will warm you.” He stood up, moving away from her, away from the stirring temptation of her richly feminine form. With his back turned, he carefully took a long, slow breath.

  It was good she had taken such pains to cover herself, he thought, rattling a spoon in a cup, giving his body time to overcome the aching and instant arousal the sight of her had given him. Her breasts swung full and high above a waist as willowy as that of a girl, and her thighs were creamy and white, long for so small a woman. With a mental curse, he poured the water. His resolve was slipping with each moment he spent in her company. It would be so easy to love Lila, to explore and give pleasure to the lush figure that fulfilled the promise of her lips.

  And yet the very tenderness that had arisen at her distress warned him that he could not simply feast with her and then move on, sated but unmoved. He feared he could not leave her, even now.

  Resolutely he made the tea, stirring in the generous helping of sugar she liked. Carrying it to her, he said, “Now, what was so important out there that you had to risk pneumonia to get it?”

  Moving stiffly, she smiled and reached for her bag. She upended it, spilling out a collection of shells, driftwood and rocks, along with a spray of sand. “Chess.”

  Samuel reached for the motley collection, fingering them curiously. He picked up a shell. “Pawns?”

  She nodded, sipping her tea gingerly. “If you’ll look in that drawer over there, there should be a piece of red-and-white gingham. I’
ll set it up.”

  “Are you ever still, Lila?” he asked.

  Her eyes dropped, then rose to meet his. “Sometimes I am. Under the circumstances, however, it seems better to stay busy.”

  Fixed in the serenity of her pale green eyes, Samuel felt again a tide of unnamable emotion filling his chest and throat. Abruptly he stood, going to the drawer to find her gingham.

  Watching his jerky movements, Lila frowned. Nothing she said seemed to be right. “Never mind, Samuel. It isn’t that important.”

  “Yes, it is.” He yanked the fabric from the drawer and shook it out.

  “Maybe,” she said, trying to curb a smile of amusement, “we should make bread. Kneading dough is great therapy.”

  He looked at her with narrowed eyes, and she thought he was about to explode in anger. Suddenly the tension in his body broke, and he took a long breath, the ghost of a smile easing the heavy lines in his face. “I’m acting like a child,” he said. “Forgive me.”

  “It’s just cabin fever.”

  He shook his head, then sighed. “Let’s play chess. You’ve gone through such trouble to collect the pieces, it would be my pleasure to put my intuition to work.”

  There were limitations to the makeshift game, they found. The pieces were the same colors, making it impossible to keep the players straight. Lila tried smearing carbon from the fire on one set, but it quickly rubbed off during play, and none of the other ideas she had helped much either. With a half smile she said, “This is typical. I have these great ideas, and then overlook some critical detail.”

  “It is not an insurmountable detail,” he replied. “Given a day or two, we could find a way to stain these other pieces.”

  “I know.” It was an oblique reference to the fact that they had very little time left in this quiet hideaway. “I just wanted it today.”

  “Well, I’m hungry, anyway. Your soup has been tempting me for hours.”