A moment later, Samuel had been lowered to the center of the raging torrent. The girl’s hair was matted with murky mud, her dark eyes wide with terror. She’d pleaded for help, begged for her life. Samuel remembered her small hand reaching out, shaking with cold. He remembered the feel of her icy fingers brushing his palm.
And he remembered the sickness in his gut when she’d been swept into the raging torrent.
Ellie’s fingers dug into his arm. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered. “There wasn’t anything you could do.”
“There was one thing.” His voice sounded dead as he related what happened next, how he’d done the one thing on earth that he’d been trained to avoid at any cost. He’d released his harness and plunged into the swollen river to grab the child.
The angry water had pummeled them, pulled them under. Samuel had clung tenaciously to the child, refusing to relinquish his precious cargo. He would save her or he would die with her, but he would never let her go.
“The current dragged us down. I held on to her, even under water. I was so afraid to let her go....” Breathing heavily, Samuel unclenched his fists, stared at the loft floor until the planks blurred into the turbulent brown mass in his mind. The swirling current, the putrid mud stench, the battering debris. The taste of death in his throat.
He remembered it all, relived it all.
One of the rescue squad’s snag lines had caught them, held them firmly against an inundated tree trunk. Still clutching the limp girl, Samuel recalled grappling with the line. He’d heard shouts from the bank, the voices of his friends. The cable had arched against the wind as a uniformed figure rappeled out to retrieve the child and carry her to safety.
Barely conscious by then, Samuel had felt an immense surge of relief when the child had been safely transported to shore. But his strength had been waning and he hadn’t been able to maintain his tenuous grasp on the snag line.
It had slipped from his grasp; the river had fought to claim him.
A voice from the past circled his mind.
“Uh-uh, buddy.” A safety latch had clicked onto his harness. “You aren’t getting away from me that easy.” Samuel could still remember Drake Jackson’s smiling face. “Hang on, my man. We’re outta here.”
Drake had never seen the massive raft of debris hurtling straight toward them. Before Samuel could croak a warning, Drake had sensed danger, heaved forward to block Samuel’s helpless body with his own.
And with that single heroic act, two lives had changed forever.
Ellie placed two mugs of herbal tea on the coffee table, then slid another log into the firebox before joining Samuel on the sofa. Her heart ached at the sadness in his face, at the taut set of his jaw and deep lines bracketing a face already roughened by pain.
Emboldened by darkness split only with light from the dancing wood fire, she laid a hand on his thigh. He flinched slightly, glanced away.
“You saved that child, Samuel, and you did it willingly without thought of your own safety. So did Drake. You both knew the risks. You both took them.”
He wouldn’t look at her. “I’m still whole. Drake isn’t.”
A sick heaviness settled into her stomach. The debilitating guilt in Samuel’s eyes broke her heart. He’d told her about his friend’s severe injuries, the crushed pelvis, the spinal damage that could bind him to a wheelchair for life. Even if Drake Jackson did walk again, which medical opinion considered unlikely, the poor man’s firefighting career was over.
“What happened was tragic,” Ellie said. “It’s heartbreaking. I don’t know your friend Drake but from what you’ve told me I can’t believe he holds you responsible.”
Samuel shrugged, rubbed his eyelids. “I hold myself responsible.”
“Why?”
“Because I broke the rules. Drake was injured because I disregarded orders, and put my team members in jeopardy. If I’d followed departmental procedures Drake would never have been hurt.”
“But a child would be dead,” Ellie added softly. “Do you think Drake would have preferred that?” When Samuel remained silent, she continued. “Saving others is what firefighters do, Samuel. It’s the reason you chose the profession in the first place. It’s the reason Drake chose it. Both of you understood the risk involved, and it was a risk you willingly took.”
Samuel set his jaw. “It’s not the same.”
“Of course it’s the same. You risked your life to save a drowning child. Drake risked his life to save a drowning friend.” For a moment, Ellie thought she might have gotten through to him.
Until he spoke. “We all understood that dealing with tragedy was part of the job,” he said. “Every day we faced it, fought it, beat it and lost to it. Afterward, we never spoke about the bad calls, the ones we couldn’t win. It was our way of keeping death a stranger.” Samuel’s chest shuddered. He stared into space as if reliving the terror all over again. “But on that day, in the eyes of that terrified little girl and the face of my very best friend, death wasn’t a stranger anymore. I could touch it. I could smell it. It had a face. It was real.” Samuel closed his eyes, opened them with exquisite sadness. “That’s when I recognized the consequence of my failure. I couldn’t let it happen again.”
“Oh, Samuel.” Tucking one foot under her, Ellie turned sideways on the sofa to cradle Samuel’s face in her hands. She wanted to offer comfort, but knew that her words would be useless against the crushing weight a terrible guilt that only Drake Jackson could absolve. “You can’t go on like this.”
He reached for the mug, sipped the cooling tea.
“You’ll never be able to go forward until you go back, Samuel. Drake needs you now, and you need him.”
Samuel balanced the tea mug on his knee, regarded Ellie thoughtfully. “So you believe I should return to face the consequence of my sordid past?”
Unable to meet his intense gaze, Ellie flushed and turned away. She, too, had consequences to face.
A knowing smile revealed that Samuel also recognized the parallel of their lives. Each of them had avoided dealing with failure and confrontation, and in doing so had relinquished all hope of vanquishing their private demons.
They were so much alike, as two flawed halves of a perfect whole. Both were hiding from a painful past; Ellie trying to escape fear, Samuel trying to escape failure.
They’d escaped nothing. But they’d found each other.
And Ellie had found so much more.
A surge of moisture blurred her vision, brought a lump to her throat. She pressed her hand against his cheek, thrilled when he turned to kiss it. His lips stroked her palm so tenderly that goose bumps rose along her arm.
He took her hand between his, held it away as if studying universal secrets revealed in her palm. A subtle tremor vibrated through his touch. A spark of longing touched his eyes.
Ellie shivered, stood. “I think we should go to bed. Daniel will be awake soon. And by the way, I don’t think you should sleep in the loft anymore. It’s too cold up there for a man who prefers to sleep without, ah, constriction.”
Clearly startled, Samuel also stood, watched her cross to the double bed in which she’d slept alone since her arrival. She nervously straightened her torn sleep top, wiped her moist palms on the matching fleece pants and slipped into bed.
Samuel still hadn’t moved.
“Well?” She took a deep breath, patted the mattress beside her. “Are you coming?”
He shifted awkwardly, looked like a youngster being offered his first hot fudge sundae. “This isn’t a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I get into that bed with you, I’ll want to make love with you.”
“I’m counting on that,” Ellie whispered. Then she drew down the covers invitingly, and held her breath.
Chapter Nine
A come-hither smile just wasn’t doing it. Ellie batted her eyes, tugged at the torn sweat top and dipped a shoulder to expose a provocative hint of bare skin. “Well?”
Across the room, Samuel stood motionless, staring at her as if she’d completely lost her mind. “Well what?”
Her smoldering smile faltered. “Do I have to draw a squeeze-cheese picture on the pillow?”
An amber glow from the woodstove reflected his subtle smile. “If you’re into innovative use of cheese products, I have a couple ideas that might interest you.”
“Ooh, now that sounds intriguing.” Breathless. She sounded absolutely breathless and a tad desperate. Of course she’d never seduced a man before—never needed to, never wanted to—but at the moment things were not going at all well.
She stroked the vacant place beside her, issued a throaty purr designed to pique Samuel’s interest. Samuel didn’t move; Baloo did. The animal reared up, lumbered over to foist forepaws onto the mattress and gaze at Ellie with big, worried eyes.
A chuckle from across the room didn’t help matters. “Looks like ’Loo thinks you swallowed a cat.”
That was swell. Closing her eyes, Ellie hugged her knees, dropped her head and issued a frustrated moan that had the alarmed hound whining and pawing the bed. “I don’t know,” she murmured against her kneecaps. “I try to be a good person, really I do. I bathe daily, I’m nice to small animals and I never park in handicap spaces. What on earth am I doing wrong?”
A hesitant shuffle was followed by footsteps. “Go lie down, ’Loo.” The animal whined a protest, but doggy toenails clicked a mournful rhythm across the room. Ellie felt rather than saw Samuel kneel beside the bed. “You’re not doing anything wrong, honey.”
Recognizing a slight advantage, she heaved a sigh, opened one eye far enough to angle a guarded glance. “There must be something. You think I’m a shameless hussy and your dog thinks I eat cats.”
“I don’t think you’re a hussy. Shameless, maybe, but definitely not a hussy.”
“So what about the cat thing?”
Samuel directed a look toward the contrite canine. “Consider the source.”
“Good point.” Ellie stroked Samuel’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “I’m crazy about you.”
The revelation clearly shook him. He grasped her hand between his own palms, held it away. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you my life.” A fleeting sadness veiled his eyes, puckered his brow. “But that’s not what this is about,” she added quickly. “I’m not good at expressing myself. I know that. I always crack jokes to break tension and end up saying something completely inappropriate, so I’m probably going about this the wrong way.” She held up her free hand, silencing his protest. “I want to be close to you, Samuel. If you don’t feel the same, that’s okay.” A lump clogged her throat at the thought. She coughed it away. “Well, maybe it’s not okay, but I can accept it if you just look me straight in the eye and say you don’t want me.”
“It’s not a simple question of wanting or not wanting.”
“Yes, it’s exactly that simple.”
He shook his head, looked miserably away. “I can’t commit to you, Ellie. You know that.”
“Actually, I don’t know any such thing.” If the wild cadence of her heart would only slow down maybe her chest would stop aching. Maybe the tears poised on the edge of her lashes would evaporate before he saw them and realized how very close she was to losing control. “It’s irrelevant anyway. I’m not asking for commitment.”
“You should be. It’s what you deserve, Ellie. It’s what Daniel deserves.”
The very thought of commitment shook her to her soles. Whether she deserved it or not, Ellie had never wanted commitment, had always feared it, yet in some secret part of her soul, she suddenly craved it. That frightened her.
Clamping her lips together, she combed his thick hair with her fingers, smoothed a ruffled tangle at the crown into an appealing sexy tousle. “You need a haircut. I’m pretty handy with a pair of scissors. Maybe tomorrow—”
He stopped her with a kiss.
Warm lips cherished her mouth softly, tenderly, trembling with leashed passion quivering below the surface like a rumbling volcano. The kiss ended as quickly as it had begun, and when Samuel drew away, his eyes glowed hot in the firelight.
Ellie touched her swollen lips, then used the same fingertip to trace the sculpted contour of his mouth. A hiss of breath warmed her skin a moment before he grasped her wrist, pressed his cheek to her palm. “This is a magical place,” she whispered. “I never want to leave.”
“I know.” Samuel shuddered, stroked her wrist with his lips. “But none is this is real, Ellie. It’s an illusion, a fantasy.”
“It’s real to me. I think it’s real to you, too.”
He sighed. “We can’t hide from the world forever.”
“Why not? What has the world ever done for us?” Desperate, foolish, completely irrational. She knew it. She didn’t care. “There’s nothing out there for either of us except grief. We can build our own world here, Samuel. We can build a life for ourselves and for Daniel.”
“You won’t feel that way when spring comes.” He silenced her protest with another kiss, sweet and fleeting, then shifted from his crouched position and sat on edge of the bed. Gathering her in his arms, Samuel pressed her head to his shoulder and gently stroked her hair. “The only thing between us and the outside world is six miles of unplowed road. After the snow melts, it won’t be safe for you here.”
Ellie was well aware that. She just didn’t want to hear about it. Yesterday had been the first of March. Snow flurries now dropped inches rather than feet, thawed faster than it fell. Jasper the snowman had melted into a skinny shadow of his former self. “Maybe Stanton has stopped looking for us.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Her stomach tightened. No, she didn’t believe that, not for one minute. There was nothing on earth Stanton Mackenzie wouldn’t do to find his son. Nothing. Unless...
“I don’t want to think about him.”
“Honey—”
“I don’t want to think about Stanton Mackenzie, or spring, or even tomorrow.” Her voice cracked, clogged with emotion. She clung to him, tangled her fingers in loose fabric of his unbuttoned shirt. “All I want is tonight. I want to feel good again, I want to feel safe. I want to take away your nightmares, and I want you to take away mine. For now, please, just for now, I want to pretend this beautiful world we’ve created will never end. I want to love you, Samuel, and just for a little while, I want you to love me.”
A sob humiliated her, and she buried her face against his throat. His pulse raced against her cheek. She felt it as surely as she felt his resistance melt in the heat of a fierce embrace. His breath warmed her face, whispered like mist in the chilly cabin air.
Words circled like soft butterflies, flapped frantically without form or substance. Desperate murmurs, prelude to love making. Ellie cherished the sounds, throaty, unintelligible rasps more thrilling than a sensual sonnet, more poignant than erotic poems of a bawdy bard. Sweet whispers touched her soul, stroked her starving spirit.
Samuel’s hands were everywhere, a frenetic blur of movement and sensation. His mouth cherished her lips, her throat, the delicate flesh beneath her earlobes, the pale, pulsing curve at her shoulders. He tasted, he sipped, he drank greedily, drawing strength from her moans of pleasure, her startled sighs of delight and surprise.
The scent of him dazzled her. Erotic, fresh, musky arousal mingled with forest spice, a dizzying mixture of all that was natural, all that was male. She wanted him. Desperately, defiantly, beyond all whim or reason and with a passion beyond her experience. There was no time to rationalize, to sort out the jumble of sensation, the secret whispers in her mind. She knew that only this man and this man only had the power to heal her, to make her whole.
“Ellie... honey... are you sure?”
“Yes.” It was a moan. “Oh, yes.” She returned his kisses with frantic vengeance while her seeking hands roamed the slickened planes of his chest. She fisted the lose fabric of the shirt she’d ins
isted he don against the cold night air. Now she regretted that request, pushed at the offending garment until he shrugged it off and tossed it aside.
A satisfied sigh slid from her lips. She studied the beauty of his bare torso, sculpted and vibrant, glistening in the firelight.
“You’re beautiful,” she murmured. “So perfect.”
He mumbled something against her throat, but made no attempt to quell her searching fingers. His skin was hot to the touch, stretched over taut muscles that vibrated beneath her fingertips like the oiled engine of a perfectly tuned machine. The power of his body, the strength of pulsing muscle, of steel-hard bone was incredibly exciting.
Ellie wanted to feel that strength, all of it. Around her. Inside her. Now.
As if reading her mind, Samuel withdrew slightly, and tugged the hem of her tattered fleece top. She raised her arms, allowed him to remove it, then squirmed to kick off her sweatpants. They, too, were brushed aside.
The chill air raised gooseflesh, along with a sudden surge of modesty. She crossed her arms to cover her swollen breasts, and the sturdy cotton bra concealing them. “I, ah, I’m not as thin as I used to be.”
Samuel’s eyes reflected only wonder. “You’re beautiful.”
She flinched at the blatant admiration in his gaze, recalling the last time he’d viewed her so intimately, when he’d delivered her son. “In comparison, I suppose there’s been some improvement.”
A startled blink, an amused chuckle. “You were beautiful then, too, but considering the circumstance, I thought it inappropriate to comment.” Leaning forward, he brushed a gentle kiss at the curve of her throat, slipped a furtive hand behind to tickle between her shoulder blades.
The bra sagged free, fell away. “Beautiful,” he murmured, reaching out with a trembling fingertip to trace pale blue veins of motherhood. “Sometimes I watch while you’re feeding Daniel, and I envy that closeness. Before the two of you came into my life, I never thought much about the bond between mother and child, never considered its poignancy, its breathtaking beauty.” Ellie shivered as he slipped his palms beneath her breasts to test their soft weight. “It’s a miracle, a gift of unconditional love. I never understood that before.”
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