by Nancy Morse
Rennie’s breathing slowly leveled as passion turned to contentment. She had often wondered what it was that was missing from her life. Now she knew. This was it, the missing link. He made her feel like a woman, not a woman to manipulate and possess, but a woman who knew how to receive and to give in return. A woman who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was the warm security she felt now, nestled in his arms.
In spite of the taut emotions she heard in John’s voice whenever he spoke—which she did not understand—day by day a fragile trust began to form for the enigmatic man. In his arms she felt safe and protected, shielded from the pain of betrayal and the uncertainty of the future. For the first time she felt unafraid.
“Did you ever ask yourself what brings you to a place?”
John’s eyes fluttered open at the sound of Rennie’s voice. He’d been thinking about the woman in his arms. How complicated she was, and yet, how wonderfully simple and straightforward she could be when it came to expressing what she wanted from him. “I thought the grant brought you here.”
“It wasn’t the grant. It was something else.”
He tightened his arm around her in an unconscious gesture. “Do you want to tell me about it?” His voice was low and deep and comforting in the darkness that enveloped them.
She whispered against the night, “Yes.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“You’ve been so good to me, John, and I feel like I’ve been holding out on you. I want to tell you. I have to tell you. Maybe it’s because I don’t know you. Maybe it’s because I feel as if I’ve known you all my life.” Her voice shook. It was time, she told herself. Time to tell him the truth. She moistened her lips and swallowed, grateful not only for the darkness, but for her blindness, which prevented her from seeing his face as she began to speak.
“I had planned on coming to the Everglades to do research as part of the grant, I just hadn’t planned on coming so soon. If I’d been thinking clearly, I never would have taken off in the storm, but when you’re desperate and afraid, you do things you never thought you’d do.”
“A common affliction,” he muttered.
“Yes, but how do you explain the mistakes you make when you’re not desperate and afraid, when you think you’re happy and realize when it’s almost too late that you’re not?”
“We all make mistakes, Rennie,” he said tautly, thinking of his own fatal error that had led him to this place in his life. “All we can do is learn from them, and if not, then try to live with them as best we can. Besides, you still haven’t told me what this big mistake was. Maybe it’s not so bad.” Whatever her failures were, he knew with cold certainty that they could not be as bad as his own.
“His name is Craig Wolfson.” There, it was out. There was no turning back now. “He was my fiancé. We were going to be married in June.”
Married. The word ricocheted off his mind like a bullet fired at close range, hitting him harder than he expected. Stop it, he ordered himself. Stop feeling wounded. Very deliberately he shifted his weight slightly away from her. “Were?”
“I called it off.” She stirred nervously as the uncomfortable memories flooded back.
He wasn’t pleased hearing about another man in her life, or facing up to the very real possibility that she had loved someone else. Why should it matter, he demanded of himself. Thickly he asked, “What happened?”
“I discovered that the only reason he wanted to marry me was for the piece of real estate my stepfather was going to give him as a wedding gift.”
John snorted derisively. “That must be some piece of real estate.”
“Prime coastal real estate overlooking the intracoastal.”
He whistled softly. “Wow. Who’s your stepfather that he can give something like that away?”
Rennie took a deep breath. “Senator Trevor Hollander.” She knew from his silence that he was staring at her through the darkness. “Craig was going to make a hefty donation to the senator’s reelection campaign in exchange for the land. All he had to do was marry me.”
She turned to him then, and even though she couldn’t see him, she studied the sound of his silence, the cadence of his breathing, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking.
Deep inside of him he struggled to remain calm. “Did you…love him?”
Rennie laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound, only the sting of regret. “I told myself I did. I ignored all the signs of possession, the manipulative nature of the man, the lack of emotion inside of myself, because I thought that marrying Craig was what I was supposed to do. Don’t you see, all my life I’ve been told what I’m supposed to do.”
In the darkness he could see the pale cloud of hair that fanned over his arm and the angle of her cheekbone in the moonlight. A man would be a fool to try to possess her. She was like a delicate butterfly caught in one’s hands. If you held tight, you would kill it. But if you opened your hands and showed it the freedom that was there for the taking, it would stay, fluttering its wings in your palm and taking your breath away with its flawless beauty.
“And who told you that you’re supposed to be lying here with me?”
“Nobody. It just…happened.”
“Getting hit by a truck just happens,” he said dryly.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you’re here with me like this right now because you’re doing what you want to do. You made the decision. Nobody else.”
Rennie considered for a moment what he said, then nodded. “That’s true.”
“Why did you do it? To teach him a lesson?”
She jolted away from him and sat up. “Are you suggesting I made love with you to get back at Craig? I never wanted this to happen. I didn’t start it.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said roughly. “That was my weakness. But I didn’t want it, either. So I guess that makes us both guilty.”
“Guilty?” she echoed. “Maybe you feel guilty, but I don’t.”
“All right, sorry, then.”
“Not sorry, either.” She began to rise, but he sat up beside her and caught her arm in his grip.
“What do you feel?” he demanded.
“Free. In control. I don’t know. I’ve never felt it before except in my work, certainly never in my personal life.”
His hand dropped away. What had he expected her to say? Love? The unexpected intrusion of that word in his consciousness stunned him. He got up and walked to the window, where the starlight played across his naked body while he stared out at nothing in particular. “This isn’t smart,” he muttered.
Rennie climbed out of bed and found him in the darkness. “I don’t want to be smart. Not tonight. Not when you make me feel like I matter. Not my money, not a piece of real estate, but me.”
He should have turned back before it was too late for both of them. But she was standing behind him, so close that he could feel the peaks of her breasts brushing his back, the soft fan of her breath against his heated flesh, and he knew in his heart that it was already too late.
He turned from the window and draped his arm around her shoulders. Together they walked back to the bed. Lying down beside her, he pulled her into his embrace and held her.
“That night you ran from the cabin, was it that guy you were afraid of?”
Rennie shivered against him. “You don’t know him. He’s manipulative and controlling and rich. And he gets what he wants.”
“And what he wants is you.” It was a statement, not a question, and even as he said it he felt a stab of jealousy. “Don’t worry. He can’t hurt you.”
He wanted to tell her that he would protect her from the man she feared, but what gave him the right, when the mere act of holding her in his arms put her in a danger she couldn’t even imagine? Touched by her honesty, there raged within him a battle over whether to share his secret with her. She had a right to know, didn’t she, that in her search for a legend, they were both searching for the same thing…
the panther.
“You’ve been so good to me,” she said softly. “All the things you’ve bought for me, I want you to know, I’ll pay you back.”
Something inside of him rose with anticipation. “And how do you propose to do that?” he said with a gentle laugh.
“When my eyesight returns…or even if it doesn’t…I’ll have to go back and face my mistakes. And when I do, I’ll pay you back every penny.”
It wasn’t what he expected. The prospect of her leaving hit him squarely in the solar plexus, taking his breath away and spiraling him back to the reality of his life. Not the life that existed in the darkness with her, but that which called to him from the swamp, the one which no amount of heated caresses could make him forget. He said nothing, while inside of him the fury that abated for a brief while began to stir again.
Rennie laid her head against his shoulder and breathed in the sweet fragrance of him. She didn’t want to think about going back. For now she felt safe and secure and grateful, and carried the warm feeling with her into sleep. When she awoke some time later and stretched her hand out for him, he was gone.
Chapter 9
The morning broke quiet and calm.
John sat with his back pressed against the trunk of a giant cypress tree, oblivious to the cobweb of moss that hung from an overhead branch, and brushed his face in the breeze as he watched the soft buttery light crest the trees and infiltrate the swamp. He hadn’t slept a wink all night, but neither had he gone in pursuit of that devil beast. Instead, he just sat there hour after lonely hour, reliving last night over and over again in his mind.
He’d left the cabin in the dead of night after he swore to himself that he wouldn’t. He had wanted to stay there with her, God how he’d wanted to. But the sound of her breathing as she slept, the smell of her, the very thought of her was too much to bear, and if he stayed, he would only have made love to her again. Racked with guilt over the danger he had put her in, he had dressed quickly and left.
He had walked aimlessly all night, driven by a host of emotions. He was angry at the weakness in him that had put her in such danger. Now, more than ever, he had to find that beast and kill it, before it took from him a woman who had somehow come to mean too much to him.
But it was more than anger that tore at him. The startling truth was that he was jealous of her relationship with another man. The thought of someone else touching her, kissing her, possessing her the way he had done last night drove him crazy. He didn’t need another obsession in his life, not when he already had one that threatened to destroy them both.
He looked around him. A curve of grass suddenly became a great blue heron. The bark of a dead cypress limb trembled and became a whippoorwill. A shred of white cloud tore off and turned into an ibis. But the magic was lost on him. For the first time in his life he did not see the swamp as a place of beauty and enchantment. On this warm summer morning, all it was to him was a place of heartache and loneliness.
The ground was squishy from last night’s rain. His shirt and jeans were still wet from the drops that had pelted him. The air was humid. And everywhere the mosquitoes buzzed maddeningly. He should have been used to them, but he wasn’t. Just like he would never get used to the loneliness.
He thought he had it all under control. He told himself that if it ever got too lonely, he could always go to the reservation anytime he wanted to see his mother. And old Willie Cypress came by to visit him every now and then, which helped break up the monotony of his self-imposed exile. But it wasn’t until Rennie fell into his life that he realized how all-pervasive that loneliness really was. How it invaded every corner of the cabin, every inch of the swamp, every fiber of his being.
The familiar shhh of the saw grass called John away from his dismal thoughts. He drew a breath of warm, humid air deep into his lungs and let it out slowly as his gaze swept the horizon. The Everglades were mysterious to anyone who did not understand their fundamental nature. But to him, born and raised in the vast wetland, there was no mystery here, only life at its purest and most complicated. Even the inexplicability of the panther’s vengeance was something he did not question. It simply was.
It was at times like this, when he felt an acute longing deep in his soul, that he saw his beloved Everglades as they really were, a place that was slowly dying, as he was inside. Too little or too much water reached the marsh at the wrong times because of a latticework system of canals that delivered water to homes and front yards and farms, with the Everglades always at the end of the line. When it arrived, it was often polluted. Sugarcane. Suburban sprawl. Asphalt. They were the reality. There was no mystery there. For John the only mystery was when and if he would ever find the beast that had caused him so much sorrow.
It had always been impossible for him to look upon this place and not see a bit of himself reflected in it. A few years ago Hurricane Andrew had plowed through the fragile, primordial marshland, thinning the trees, bending fifty-year-old mahoganies and gumbo-limbos at right angles, stripping the bark off the palms. But nature was an awesome healer. Today there was no sign of the devastation caused by Andrew’s supersonic winds. Yet as he looked out over the panorama that stretched before him, he felt no part of it. Nature was kinder to the Everglades than it was to him. Her restorative power could not heal the wound inside of him that only grew deeper with Rennie’s intrusion into his life.
In the distance, behind a hammock, etched against the blue sky, great white clouds formed. Rennie couldn’t see them, but she knew by the scent that wafted in through the open window that it was going to rain. John had taught her that, and so much more.
Through his words and descriptions she had learned to discern the sound of an alligator sliding on its belly into the water from the bank. She knew by the feel of the air when they were out of the wetlands, full of grasses and water and alligators, and canoeing through the pinelands or the mangroves or the slough, each with its own unique atmosphere.
The hammocks were green, fragrant, shady places where he sometimes tugged the canoe ashore and they would sit for a while, she listening to the sounds of nature, he explaining them. She recalled one morning in particular when they had stopped in just such a place. She had lain back on the grass, her arms under her head, thinking wistfully aloud how she could stay there forever, until John told her about the eastern diamondbacks and the black bears that lurked about, and she let out a little yelp of fright, causing his laughter to reverberate through the stillness and her cheeks to redden. But the lighthearted moment was gone as soon as she had asked him about the presence of panthers. In cold, irrefutable silence he had pulled her up by the hand and shoved the canoe back into the water. They had paddled for home without speaking, leaving her to wonder what she had said or done to bring about such an abrupt change in him.
Sometimes she questioned if she would ever understand him. Last night, for instance, he had fairly begged her to make him stay, and even after she did, he left. How could a man who was so unselfish and open in his lovemaking be so closed off to her emotionally? She had thought that by revealing her own private torment, it might clear the way for him to be forthcoming about whatever it was that was making him so miserable. It came down, she supposed, to trust.
In reality, she trusted a man she couldn’t even see to a degree that she trusted no one else, not even herself. Her own instincts had let her down, but he didn’t. He had helped heal her body and her spirit with his gentle, caring nature, making no demands on her until she was ready to acquiesce. And when she was, she found that giving in to him was the easiest thing in the world to do.
Making love to a man whose face she couldn’t see was like a deliverance. It was his energy that thrilled her, his essence that drove her, his giving that made her want to give in return. It had nothing to do with how he looked, only who he was and how he felt inside of her.
But when he grew silent and unreachable, the way he was that day in the hammock, or when he left her alone and wanting as he did last nigh
t, she questioned whether making love to a man was ever enough to really know him. And whether he would ever trust her enough to share his secrets.
Footsteps on the cypress planks of the steps outside brought Rennie’s head up from her thoughts. Her heart skipped a beat when the door swung open. But it wasn’t John’s familiar scent that rushed into the room. Her hand fumbled for the dark glasses she no longer wore in the cabin but which she always kept close by, as if for the support she seemed to need less and less of these days.
“Who’s there?” she said as she slipped them onto her face.
“Just me, miss.”
She recognized the voice of Willie Cypress, the old frog hunter who had found her after the plane crash and brought her to John. Willie sometimes stopped by during the day when John was there. He was a cheerful man, if not a little too talkative for her liking. She usually went outside to sit by herself while the two of them conversed in their own language. She didn’t feel offended by it. After all, she was the outsider.
“John’s not here this morning, Willie,” she told him. “Can I offer you something to drink? It feels like it’s going to be a hot one today.”
“You got a beer?”
John wasn’t much of a drinker, but Rennie knew he kept beer in the cabin for Willie’s sporadic visits. “Sure. Have a seat.”
She found her way easily to the kitchen where she pulled a cold bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. The bottle opener was in the drawer where she knew it would be. Fitting it over the bottle top, she popped the cap off, grateful for John’s neatness that had everything in place and made small tasks such as this so much easier.
“It smells like you’ve been fishing,” she said, when she handed Willie the bottle.
He took a swallow, then ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “Gar, mud fish, snappers, turtles. The usual haul.”