A Charmed Place (24 page)

Unzipping her sea green dress, she let it fall to the floor, sorry that she was the one doing the unzipping. She wasn't sure how she'd expected the evening to end, but in her most pessimistic moments she hadn't imagined it would end with Detective Bailey back on the case, Michael in a rage, her mother and brother alienated from her for the first time, and Tracey alienated from her still.

The one—the only one—with whom she felt a sympathetic connection right now was Dan. It seemed more than ironic; it seemed inevitable.

Destiny. Had he been right about that, after all?

She undid her bra and tossed it on the dress, then walked over to the closet for the nightgown hanging on the hook inside the door. There it was: cool, demure, and white. Just like her. Her hand hovered over the gown and then came down again.

No. Not the nightgown.

Impulsively, Maddie reached past it for a hanger and pulled a sweatshirt from it, bending the hanger in her hurry. A pair of old jeans was looped on a hook inside the closet; she took those too. In seconds she was dressed and had a plan: sneak out of the house and slip over to the lighthouse and—unlike Tracey—do it without getting caught. Her cheeks burned from the sheer adolescent idiocy of it, but she felt on fire with excitement.

The problem was her mother, tossing and turning in the bedroom on the first floor. That was really, really dumb, installing her on the first floor. Shit. Maddie went back to the window and slid the screen up, then looked down at the ground. Too high. Oh, for the apple tree that had split in half under the weight of wet snow last winter.

It was going to have to be the stairs. Maddie slipped into the hall, grateful to see that her daughter's room had th
e keep-
out sign on it and that her brother's door was closed as well. Grabbing her Keds, she tiptoed down the hall and then down the stairs, skipping two of the treads because they squeaked. She hadn't expected there to be a light on in the kitchen, and she was right. She wasn't as sure about her mother's bedroom, recently the study her father had loved so well. The room had the only wall-to-wall carpeting in the house, and light didn't show under the door.

With infinite care, Maddie tiptoed barefoot past her mother's room. To be caught in the hall carrying her sneakers would be the ultimate humiliation.

Obviously the thing to do was to walk boldly out the front door. She ought to be above this adolescent nonsense. She ought to act her age. And yet something about sneaking around had a wicked appeal.

Déjà vu
all over again, she thought, exhilarated despite her jitters. She was definitely punchy.

She was lined up exactly opposite the door to her mother's room when she heard a single sharp click. A lamp? Yes. The big keyhole in the door became filled with light.

Shit!

Maddie didn't move, and after a normal eternity, more or less, she heard and saw the light go off. Safe! It was an easy tiptoe sprint to the Dutch door in the kitchen. She slid first the lower bolt, then the upper, then turned the doorknob carefully and let herself out.

She paused on the other side of the door and gazed up at the stars. The night was less black than before; dawn was on the way. If she were going to be insane, then she'd better do it in a hurry.

Under fading stars, Dan Hawke stood in front of the lighthouse, holding the last pack of cigarettes he would ever possess in his life.

He'd discovered the cigarettes by accident when he was rummaging through a box of books earlier in the day: a pack of Marlboroughs, the cellophane wrapper still intact. It must've fallen out of his shirt pocket when he was closing up his apartment in
Atlanta
.

He fingered the wrapper, taking comfort in the fact that it was still unbroken. The cigarettes would still be fresh.

All the more satisfying to throw 'em in the sea, he thought, walking toward the water. There weren't too many things in his life that he had control over at the moment, but this was one of them.

The walk was short; there wasn't much beach between the lighthouse and the ocean, despite the outgoing tide. He pulled away the little cellophane strip—the last time he would ever do it—to allow seawater to soak the pack and take it down to a watery grave. Then he hauled back with his pitching arm and hurled the pack as far as he could over the water.

End of story, he told himself, shrugging off the addiction without a regret. He was too exhilarated to care. Here it was, past four in the morning, and he was as wide awake as a kid at camp. And not jumpy awake, either. He felt too alert, too on top of things, to call himself jumpy.

He would see her at nine. At nine he would see her, hear her voice again, definitely kiss her again. He struck out on a walk along the beach. No point in going to sleep now; he wanted to relive the night. He could still taste her mouth, smell her perfume, hear the ache in her voice as she said his name.

There was still hope! The
Afghani
crone had been right: all he'd had to do was go back to where he'd made a wrong turn and start over. What if he hadn't listened to the old woman? What if he'd written her off as a crazy lady, drugging him with narcotic tea and muttering gibberish to distract him from his pain?

The
Afghani
crone! He wished he knew her name. He'd send her a year's wages for the miracle she'd wrought. Wonderful lady! He could picture her so clearly,
black eyes
and all, a black shawl around her shoulders to ward off the cold and damp of her hovel. Those eyes! Beady, glazed with cataracts, unfathomable. Without seeing, they were able to look straight through his soul.

He owed her his undying gratitude, that crone. For the maggoty rye bread, for the straw pallet, for the way she jabbered the soldiers into passing on by.

Two
years
'
wages! And worth every cent.

Old crone—thank you!
he thought, pumping his fists in the air. He made a vow on the spot to find her and build her a new house as soon as Maddie agreed to be his.

Maddie would agree to be his. She had to. A woman didn't kiss a man like that from a sense of nostalgia. And she sure as hell wasn't the type to try him on like a new hat. Maddie, Maddie Regan.

Regan! Wrong name, wrong name. Damn! Maddie Hawke. Right name. His name. Their name. Maddie Maddie Maddie Hawke. God, he was floating on air just thinking about her. He loved her through and through. She was as fresh as the sea: bracing and intoxicating and clear. He hadn't felt this good since
Lowell
College
.

No. That wasn't true. He'd never felt this euphoric before. She'd had him riding high in
Lowell
College
, but even there—hell, he was twenty-four. What did he know about love, back in
Lowell
College
?

No, not true. He was being too hard on himself. He knew enough back then to know the real thing when he saw it. And for the next twenty years he'd wandered through a desert of war and rebellion (maybe trying to get himself killed?) without finding the oasis that was Maddie. It took an old crone to point the way back.

Yes! God, he was happy. It didn't seem possible to love someone this much and not explode. Nine o'clock, nine o'clock. He'd blow apart before then!

A long flat wave nudged an empty beer can in his path. A symbol? Of temptation? To do what? Waste this high in a stupor? No way! He kicked the can ebulliently away from him.

And when he looked up, he saw her.

Or thought he did. He had to be hallucinating. She was walking toward him in jeans and sweats, the same as she had two decades ago. Maddie Timmons back then, twenty years old, an idealist, a
virgin,
for c
rissake. He'd never known one before.

And the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. Beautiful then, beautiful still. Straight-through beauty, not the skin-deep kind.

He humored the vision walking toward him, smiling and charmed by it, and then he stopped dead in his tracks and blinked. The vision had a voice.

"Dan!"

She broke into a run for him and he was so stunned by the reality of her that he just stood there like an ass, like a besotted, enchanted ass.

Still, he had the sense to open his arms as she drew near. And then he was holding her, holding the vision, and she felt and sounded and smelled like Maddie and
was
Maddie, and his heart, at last, was at peace with his soul. For the first time in his forty-four years of life, he was at peace with himself.

"Maddie, Maddie
... I love you," he said between joyful kisses, because he wanted that out in the open before anything else. "I've always loved you, I'll never not love you, Maddie, I love you."

"I know
... I know
... I feel the same, I've always felt the same," she said, interrupting him with urgent, passionate assurances that left him dizzy with ecstasy. "We never, never should have parted, it was my fault—"

"You had no choice," he said, kissing her throat, inhaling her deep into his soul. "It's why you were you, why I loved you
... I love you, love you
.
..."

It was a dream, it didn't seem possible, it was a dream, and he became suddenly afraid it would end. "Maddie, let me love you here, now, let me love you." He said it in a low moan, tugging her down to the sand. It was cool and damp from the receding tide, and somehow the right place to be, to make love.

"Oh, yes," she said on a sigh, and she fell to her knees.

He did, too, and they lost themselves in one another's arms for a long, rapturous kiss before she lay back, as if on command, and let him remove her jeans. He rolled up her sweatshirt, exposing her breasts, and he caught his breath in agony that he had lived so long without her. He bent over and suckled her breast as if he were a starved thing, and he heard her moan in abject arousal. Her hands were wrapped in his hair, pulling it hard, pulling his mouth hard against her
breast
. It left him drunk with satisfaction, wild with desire.

"In me, in me," she said in a low, hoarse cry.

"
Oh
, gladly," he said, closing his eyes to savor the sound of her hunger. In his wildest dreams, his deepest fantasies, he would not have imagined them here, at the edge of the sea. He thought, in a garden, with roses
... honeysuckle
...
.
B
ut this
!
And yet it was right.

He rolled over on his back and pulled away his khakis and boxers, then sat up and began to haul his T-shirt over his chest. He stopped and pulled the shirt back down, then said to her, "I don't want you to hurt
... to get sand in you—"

"I'll sit on you," she said, just as she had all those years ago, and it sent a newer, even stronger surge of desire through him. He rolled over on his back again and she took him in her mouth, whipping him to absolute rigidity in a few short strokes, and then she mounted him. The weight of her leg swinging over his torso catapulted him back in time and forward to their future and wrapped him up in a knot of sheer bliss.

In utter silence she fitted herself around him and then went still. She was on him, he was in her, and only the ocean knew—the sad, sighing, mournful ocean, sliding in and then out over the beach. He lifted himself to go deeper still, searching for that last fraction of her, coming home, after all those years.

She let him find her, and then she braced her hands on his chest and drew herself slowly up, then came down
... up
... down, the ebb and flow of the sea, the rhythm of their love for one another. He wanted to savor the moment, but the moment had other ideas.

He cupped his hands under her buttocks, and began to move, and she didn't stop, and suddenly they were slamming into one another, him up, her down, in a fury of pent-up passion, making up for lost time, for lost years, a whole generation of them. He heard her moan in agony and in joy, and he winced from the passion of it and felt tears sting his eyes. He wanted more than anything to have her forever, but he knew more than anything that he could only be sure of now.

He came before he meant to, before she had a chance to. Part of him felt satisfied, but his soul felt bereft; he wanted her with him on the same plane of ecstasy.

"Stay," he whispered, and pinned her buttocks to his groin. "Wait."

She let out a low, throaty laugh of frustration and he knew that she
had
been waiting, just as he had, all those years. For an exquisitely long moment they stayed locked in their eroticism, listening to the rhythmic approach and retreat of the sea. He knew that he would remember the moment forever: the warmth of her weight on him; the slippery pool of his seed puddling between them; the cool wet lick of a wave as it slid around his ankles and then withdrew as furtively as it had approached.

He would remember it forever.

Suddenly Maddie sighed and seemed to catch her breath, and then she leaned over to give him a scorching kiss. He might as well have been touched by fire. He let out a sharp, animal sound and instinctively rolled over, pinning her under him in the act. He repositioned himself in her, then searched for and found her mouth, thrusting his tongue in it, filling her every hollow with himself, offering himself to her and claiming her for his own.