Читать книгу Dark Tides - Celia Ashley - Страница 10

Meg raced up the back stairs to the second floor in her unfastened rubber boots, stumbling at the top. She continued down the hall to her bedroom, and once inside, switched on the light.

The sash of the window where she thought she’d seen Caleb was raised several inches, the curtain fluttering slightly in a draft of air. Right. She’d forgotten she’d opened it. She really didn’t believe Caleb would have wandered into her room, anyway, although if he had still been awake, he could have spotted the glow of the flames from the hallway and come to investigate.

Stepping back into the corridor, Meg listened. After a moment, she slipped out of the clumsy boots and strode toward the guest room. She paused outside the closed door. After turning the knob, Meg eased the door open and peered inside. Revealed in shadow and light, Caleb lay on his back, one arm flung above his head, jaw slack, mouth open with the growl of steady respiration passing in and out of his lungs.

Leaving the door slightly ajar, Meg returned to her room, the jolt of alarm fading, and in its place was a certain bemusement as she thought of Caleb asleep in his bed. It hadn’t taken him long to slip back into slumber. Not surprising, considering his ordeal. She pictured the blankets twisted about his hips, his naked chest rising and falling with each breath. A beautifully made man, Caleb Hunter. She needed to forget that and sleep, too. The therapeutic effect of burning the drawer’s contents should help. Yet, she didn’t think it would.

Meg climbed into her bed and pulled the blankets to her chin as she stretched out on the sheet. Lying on her back, she watched the pattern of reflected starlight move across the ceiling for one hour, then into the next, listening to the sound of Caleb breathing across the hall where he slept soundly, cramped in the narrow iron bed. She told herself she had left his door ajar in order to hear him if he became restless or distressed. She told herself that as if it were true. Foolish, foolish, foolish, on so many levels.

What inhabited the night to change one’s perspective? What was it about the closing of the day, the shadowed places, and the hushed quality of sound that made a difference? What, in the small hours of the morning, made loneliness more prevalent, made desire seem reasonable, made memory less bearable than the alternative…well, despite the pain memory brought. She wouldn’t want to be in Caleb’s position, without a past to recall.

Loneliness had become her companion, but not a pleasant one. Familiar, yes, comfortable, yes, but never comforting. Rolling onto her side, Meg punched the pillow with her fist several times before lowering her head back onto the cool surface.

The anniversary of Matt’s death and she yearned for a stranger. A stranger she had dreamed about, but a stranger nonetheless. She had as little idea of whom and what he was as he did. Only a matter of a few hours old, the connection between them had no basis on anything practical or proven.

Sitting across from him at dinner, her eyes had strayed to his left hand. Usually, if a man wore a wedding band, some indication of its existence would show even if the ring of gold had gone, like an absence of tan line, a thinning of the flesh, a certain type of callous, something. But she detected none of those giveaways. The lack didn’t preclude marriage, naturally, as he could have been one of those men who didn’t wear a ring due to the hazards of his particular occupation. His hands certainly had the appearance of immoderate use.

What did he do for a living? At this point, who might be looking for him to return to his desk, his tractor, his ship? Could a child or children exist somewhere, a wife wondering what she had done to make him leave her, waiting in vain for him to walk in the door?

Meg closed her eyes, blotting out that picture. She knew he had no wife. Or she had at least become adept at convincing herself he had no wife, as the dark magic of the night constructed its web. With a snort of derision, she rolled to her other side, chiding herself for her weakness, her desperate loneliness on the anniversary of Matt’s demise. She wanted comfort and physical closeness, and something about Caleb Hunter made her want him to fill that void. Maybe her good buddy, loneliness, had pushed her off the deep end.

But she knew better.

Damn it.

Settling herself, she listened to the sounds of the house. Wind rattled the glass and ruffled the chimes on the porch into musical annotation. Wood creaked, not from the pressure of a body’s weight advancing across the planked floor—even though her mind had leaped to that conclusion in a heated rush—but from the contracting of cooling timbers in the weathered Victorian frame. In the front hall below, the grandfather clock ticked its metronomic rhythm. Hot water clicked through expanding pipes. Far from silent, yet the palpable emptiness of the house settled like a weight on her chest.

But it wasn’t empty. It had never been. She was someone. And now there was another someone within its walls as well.

Someone with no memory of the specifics of his own life, but what did that matter? His injuries were not life threatening, no continued swelling, no headache, nausea, blurred vision, or slurred speech. He wanted somewhere safe for a time until he remembered things besides his name and that a person or persons had tried to kill him. He could be wrong about an attempt on his life, of course, given his battered recall. But if he wasn’t wrong, then they might still be looking for him.

She should have considered that sooner.

Immobile beneath the quilt, she listened with renewed interest to the sounds she had identified only a few minutes earlier. Had she locked the doors? She rarely did. It would probably be a good idea to do so now.

Flipping back the covers, she stood up beside the bed, but she didn’t turn on the light. Instead, she went to the window and parted the lightly blowing curtain. A chill draft fingered its way through the worn-thin fabric of her sweatpants. The isolated highway curving black in the night remained empty but for the glint of a car window beneath the stand of scrub pine up the road. A quick stop for teenagers bent on whatever teenagers did in the dark in their cars these days. Not much different from her youth, certainly. She moved to peer through one of the ocean-facing windows and pulled back the curtain. The garden below lay shadowed and whispering in the breeze. The beach showed no sign of habitation.

Biting her lip, Meg headed out into the hall and down the stairs, striding through the darkness to check the locks on the three doors and lower windows. In the room where she painted, she turned on the light, gazing at the illustration on the board, still unfinished. To the right, under the old sheet covering, rested the painting of the sea on its easel. She moved to stand in front of the easel and lifted the edge of color-smeared cloth to peer at a dark ocean that seemed to breathe with movement. Usually her own worst critic, she recognized the quality of the work. Even so, from her sudden detached perspective, she recognized the oppressive and deeply disturbing qualities of this particular painting.

It needed something to give it a little light. She had no idea of the time and didn’t care as she squeezed paint from several tubes onto her pallet. With a few strokes, she painted an object into the foreground, well off-center so that it would not be the focus but an item of interest, and then proceeded to add detail, working quickly, filling in with color the object floating in the water, making the water wash over the bit of debris, the flotsam nearly concealed. Thrown up there, one might think, in the course of nature. She executed the object, following a stream of subconscious impulse. When she finished, she cleaned the brushes and returned to the painting. Looking at it, a chill coursed her spine.

She hadn’t added just any bit of debris floating beneath the surface of the dark tide. Bobbing on the current, a broken board bore the name, nearly illegible, of her husband’s ship: Bonafide Venture.

Stepping back, she pressed her hand to her mouth. “Oh, God,” she whispered against the icy flesh of her palm.

What had made her do that? The addition had not elevated the subject matter but plunged the painting deeper into the darkness that had spawned it.

Backing away from the easel, Meg felt blindly for the light switch. Moving with speed through the shadowed house, she stumbled over a kitchen chair on her way to the stairwell. Shoving the chair back under the table, she limped up the steps to the guest room.

“Caleb.”

He made a noise in his sleep but did not waken. Meg crossed the floor and lowered herself into the chair beside the bed, taking care the wood did not creak. She folded her hands between her knees. Turning her head, she stared through the window at the night sky.

The bedsprings groaned as Caleb rolled beneath the light cover. “What’s wrong, Meg?”

He showed no surprise at finding her there, his tone sleepy, concerned. He sounded kind. Was he kind? She didn’t even know that for certain.

“I’m afraid, Caleb,” she said.

He didn’t ask of what but reached out to take her hand in silence, closing his eyes and falling back asleep without letting go.

* * * *

Lying motionless on top of the blanket, Meg listened to the gentle, growling breaths Caleb made above her head, careful not to move, not to disturb him. She didn’t want him to wake up and find she had crawled into the bed beside him. In subliminal recognition, he had known her there anyway, indicated by the fleeting, involuntary erection that rose and then receded against the curve of her posterior. Eventually his arm had come up as well, flopping across her waist. After, he had not moved, settling back into a deep slumber with his body pressed up against hers.

She found comfort in the closeness, even if stolen and premature and risky. She knew she took advantage of him, seeking solace and warmth where she had no right to expect any. But the contour of that single arm around her waist, the weight if nothing else, protected her. She, who prided herself on her independence and fortitude, recognized in the small hours of the night, lying beside a stranger, that it had been an outward show. Almost a defiance, as if somehow word would get to Matt she had survived his leaving her, continued in her career, made a life without him. Well, she had done all of those things and none of them, and now it didn’t matter anyway.

Just let it go, she told herself. Just let it all go.

She had been telling herself that for three years, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Suddenly Caleb’s arm tightened around her. Meg’s complacent acceptance of her own bold action—lying down beside a stranger—vanished with a thrust of concern. Caleb’s hand moved under the hem of her shirt and settled around her breast, cupping the weight of it in an unconscious caress, perhaps in vague memory of another woman in his bed beside him. She didn’t want to think on what that relationship might have been, might still be, once the details of his life returned to him. She didn’t want to think at all, startled but aroused by a stranger’s hand on her flesh. Holding her breath, she waited for his fingers to relax so she could pull them away without disturbing him.

They didn’t relax. As she lay there, his thumb began to move across her stiffened nipple in slow strokes. She bit her lip to silence a verbal reaction to the sensation, of heat flooding her limbs, her loins, coursing through her blood. Her toes curled, her hips moved, and then she forced herself to lie still. He would stop. He would drift more deeply into slumber and stop. She would get out of his bed and return to her own. Hope he would have no recollection of what he had done to her in his sleep, so she would be able to face him in the morning.

But he didn’t stop and she didn’t get up. He took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and began a gentle and erotic tug and release. Her heart thudded in her chest. The flesh between her legs grew slick. In a fiery instant of realization, she knew he no longer slept. He turned her onto her back as he rose up from the mattress beside her. Both hands pushed her oversized T-shirt up and over her head. She found herself exposed to the chill air, to the draft seeping in from the raised sash of the window, to the exploration of his hands over the stippled flesh of her breasts. His fingers moved across her stomach, then pushed the ragged sweats down over her hips. His fingers slipped between her legs, which parted willingly to his exploration as his teeth clamped lightly down on her nipple. She thrust her breasts eagerly toward him with a whispered word. Please. One hand in his hair and the other arm laced through the iron railing of the headboard, she arched her back further. Fired by her eagerness, Caleb greedily consumed her flesh with his mouth, seeking out and finding every nerve ending to increase her arousal, his fingers doing exquisite things to the flesh between her legs, stroking her clitoris until she was ready to explode. As his hands firmly grasped her thighs and his mouth closed over her, she arched up from the bed with a cry of release that echoed in her ears long after it had ended.

“Oh hell,” she murmured, breathing hard, the word followed by one of his, not nearly as innocuous. He sat up, settling back over his heels. Her gaze darted to a discovery he slept in the nude. His erection stood firm against the line of dark hair trailing up his belly to the silky, curling mass on his chest.

The accusation in his eyes made her scramble up against the headboard, struggling into her shirt to hide her nakedness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, ashamed, swinging her legs over the side of the bed as she reached for her discarded sweatpants.

He closed his hand around her wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t leave.”

“I have to,” she said.

“Please. Stay. Stay and talk to me.”

At his tone, she wanted to weep. Instead, she shoved her legs into her pants and stood, yanking them up to her waist. Peripherally, she saw him watching as he moved to sit with his back against the headboard and pulled the blanket up to cover his hips. He remained hard, unfulfilled, but he seemed okay with that. He patted the mattress beside him.

“Sit,” he said. “Talk.”

Biting her lip, Meg slid back onto the mattress, tucking her bare feet under the sheet. Not so much for warmth but because she didn’t want anything of nakedness between them. Of course, there was no getting around the fact he sat fully unclothed beside her. The only thing hiding his erection was the tented, lightweight blanket. The blood engorging his penis didn’t look to be going anywhere else anytime soon. Meg turned her head away, drawing her knees up to her chest.

“I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that, Caleb, climbing into your bed, looking for comfort, for…well, I wasn’t exactly looking for what happened.”

“I could have stopped,” he said. “We both could have stopped.”

“I know.”

“It was nice. It was more than nice. You were…quick,” he added delicately.

“Yes, well, three years alone will do that to you.” If he wondered why she had been alone for three years when her husband had only been dead for one, he made no mention, perhaps too distracted to do the math.

“You didn’t have any trouble recalling what you needed to do to make that happen,” she said.

“I guess some things don’t require conscious memory. Some things you don’t forget.”

“Like riding a bike,” she murmured. He gave her a quizzical look from beneath his lashes but didn’t ask. Meg let out a long breath. She listened as the wind picked up, causing a sudden, musical clamor on the porch.

“What is that?”

“Wind chimes,” she explained. “Metal tubes of varying lengths are hung around a circular plate with fishing line, and when they strike each other in the wind, they make that noise. There are eight tubes, so they probably correlate to every note of a tonal octave. I don’t know for certain. I’ll show them to you tomorrow.”

Beside her, he nodded, reaching over to take her hand. “What’s this on your finger?” he asked, rubbing his nail along a bit of dried paint.

“I still couldn’t sleep, so I was painting. I think I could sleep now, though,” she admitted with a small laugh.

Without answering, he slid his hips down, pulling her close so her head lay on his chest. The folds of the blanket revealed his ebbing erection. She badly wanted to touch him, to stroke him back to eager hardness, but she kept her hand balled into a fist against the curling hairs of his chest.

“Go to sleep, then, Meg,” he whispered above her head. “But tell me one thing first.”

“What’s that?”

“What were you afraid of?”

She opened her fingers into the soft, black curls on his chest. Beneath the drifting current of her steady respiration, his nipple stood erect. She knew what would happen if she touched him there, knew it as surely as if she’d already done so, as if she’d already explored the places that made him moan. Closing her eyes, she burrowed closer beneath the curve of his arm, breathing in his musky male scent.

“It might be easier if I told you what I wasn’t afraid of,” she said.

“All right,” he agreed affably.

“You,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you.”

The rumble of a chuckle vibrated beneath her ear.

“And what we just did?”

“Not afraid of that either,” she answered. His fingers moved through her hair, stroking the slightly damp locks back from her crown before they settled on her shoulder.

“I don’t think there’s much that frightens you, Meg Donovan, but there is something that does, and it seems to be undermining a great deal of your life. I’m glad it’s not me. I’d like to do this again sometime.”

She snorted in a distinctly unfeminine manner as she wrapped her arm around his waist. “Whatever you say,” she murmured, leaving him to wonder to which of his three statements she’d responded. She closed her eyes again. Outside, the wind chimes continued their music, and she knew she would never hear them again without thinking of this night—this quirky, scary, perfect night. That was one of her problems. She attached meaning, significance, to everything, when sometimes none existed. Sometimes things happened. Period.

And sometimes, like with Caleb, the trail of significance in the wake of an occurrence stretched farther than she could hope to comprehend.