Forbidden Dreams (10 page)

“Yes. Of course, Shell. I’ll just go—”

Lil reached out and caught a handful of his blanket, holding him fast. “Shirl, darling, don’t be like that. Jase is your friend, isn’t he?”

She twitched the blanket and sent a twinkling smile flitting between the two of them. “It appears to me that he’s a very good friend, so of course we must include him in our little luncheon party. Right, Jase?”

Jase gently tugged the blanket from her fingers and scooped up the bag Ned had brought in. “Right, Lil,” he said. “And thank you. I’d be delighted.”

Shell glared at him. “How far do you think you’ll get without shoes, O’Keefe? You ended up here barefoot.”

He flapped a hand at her. “I never let minor details like that worry me when a beautiful woman has asked me to lunch. We’ll be there, Lil. With bells on.” He paused for effect. “If not shoes.” No way was he going to tell Shell that he had another pair in his bag.

Lil’s rich, full-throated laugh was his reward.

“W
HY DIDN’T YOU WANT
me to go to your mother’s house?” Jase asked as they walked home that night. They followed a path between the two houses, lit by the flashlight Shell carried.

Dammit, she thought, he saw altogether too much. She considered denying his allegation but shrugged. Why resort to a phony denial that he wouldn’t believe anyway? She hadn’t wanted to take him there. That it had turned out as well as it had was no thanks to her abilities to protect her mother. To her eternal relief, Kathleen, her mother’s dear friend and longtime companion, had seen them coming up the ramp and had the presence of mind to whisk the gold statuettes away. Jase had not seen them, had asked no questions that couldn’t be answered easily, and had spent most of the ensuing hours entertaining them, rather than the other way around.

“Lil isn’t well,” she said. “Surely, you could see that.” Then, almost grudgingly, she added, “Though I must say she enjoyed your company and your stories. All that laughter seemed to add to rather than deplete her strength. She hasn’t managed to stay up so late in ages.”

“There now. See how trustworthy I am?” Jase asked, laughing. “My mission in life is to keep ladies from wanting to go to bed. What better recommendation could you ask? Or,” he added, “could Ned ask? I felt like Jack the Ripper when he came in to find me there with you. Are all your neighbors so protective of you?”

Shell bit her lip, thinking of the outraged expression on Ned’s face when he had arrived for lunch and seen Jase ensconced in an overstuffed armchair, his injured leg on a footstool and an attentive audience of three women avidly listening to a hilarious story of one of his college escapades.

None had been more fascinated, more enchanted, than Lil, Shell thought, frowning. Somehow, they were going to have to find ways to protect Lil from herself as long as Jase was stranded on Piney Point. Even after Shell had managed to let her mother know that she and Jase were not lovers, that he had blown in with the storm and would be gone again almost as quickly, Lil continued to treat him as if he were Shell’s beloved. No, more than that. As if he were Shell’s intended.

And that was scary!

“Ned and Nola are ‘all our neighbors,’ ” she said in response to his question. “Piney Point contains just our three houses, all of which belong jointly to my mother and Kathleen, and yes, he’s very protective.” He was paid handsomely to be that way, she did not say.

“I got the impression he hated to leave me alone with the three of you after lunch. And he certainly wasn’t delighted to find me still there at dinnertime. He’s more than protective. He’s out to protect you from me personally.”

“That’s silly,” she said. “Of course he’s not.” That was only half-true. Ned was protective; he just wasn’t protecting Shell. And he seemed to think it was through some negligence on her part that Jase was there. As if she’d had any choice in the matter!

She rolled her eyes; remembering her mother’s comments, too, when she’d gone to Lil’s bedroom to say good night.

“What a honey your Jase is,” she’d whispered to Shell as they hugged. “I can’t remember when I’ve met a nicer man, one who suited you more, and I can see that you like him a lot.”

Before Shell could protest, Lil had added, “He likes you, too, baby doll, so see that you don’t chase him away by being unnecessarily cautious.” She’d pulled a scornful face. “That Ned. Really, the man takes things, and himself, far too seriously. See to it that you don’t start acting like him, all right?”

Shell hadn’t argued. Her mother was so tired, she’d told herself, she didn’t know what she was saying. Unnecessarily cautious? Taking things too seriously? There was no such thing when it came to protecting Lil’s privacy. That caution had been bred into her and had become so ingrained, she couldn’t exist outside of its strictures. She wondered if her mother’s disease had resumed its inexorable progress and was affecting her thought processes. It was completely unlike Lil to be as careless with a stranger as she had been with Jase.

No wonder Ned had been having fits.

From the time she was ten years old, Shell had been taught never to tell anybody much about herself, her parents, or her upbringing, particularly about how she had lived before coming to the Sunshine Coast and Piney Point. Yet all day Lil had been less than discreet in her choice of subjects for discussion. Ned and Shell and Kathleen had shared more than one alarmed glance at some of her disclosures.

“Ned’s … very old-fashioned,” she said now in response to Jase’s comment. “I don’t suppose his finding you in my house this morning dressed only in a blanket did much to endear you to him. Don’t take his actions personally. He’d have been that way no matter who you were.”

Jase laughed. “Not true, Shell. He simply doesn’t like me. Or trust me. And it all seems centered on my coming from California. It was my license plates far more than my state of undress that originally got his back up. Why, Shell? Is it because you and your mother lived there for a time? Did something happen there that makes Ned distrust Californians on her behalf and yours?”

Shell stumbled. That was too near the mark for comfort!

Jase steadied her, then caught her hand, holding on to it.

“No,” she said quickly. “What could have happened? It’s just that Ned has a—a strange attitude about tourists. To him, everyone who crosses the forty-ninth parallel is automatically suspect. Californians, of course, being the worst of a bad bunch.” She lowered her tone, sounding deeply condemning. “Useless parasites every one, brains either fried by too much sun or numbed by smog. Drug dealers, addicts, or AIDS carriers, if not all three.”

She and Jase shared a laugh. She thought about twisting her hand free, but it felt nice—no, more than nice—to walk shoulder to shoulder with him, their fingers linked together. “I don’t know how he deals with me,” she continued. “I was born there, after all, lived there for the most of the first ten years of my life.”

“Ah, but your dual citizenship must have made all the difference.”

“I suppose.” She glanced up at him. How in hell did he know about her dual citizenship? The answer came on the heels of the unvoiced question: The Internet. Of course. “Don’t let Ned get to you, Jase, please. He’s like that with all strangers.”

“He doesn’t bother me in the least. And he’s not alone in his attitude. I’ve found it all over the U.S. Californians are weird.”

“But you aren’t really one, are you? Didn’t you say you’d lived in every state except Nebraska and Ohio?” It had been a throwaway comment over lunch, and when she’d tried to go back to it earlier, Jase had steered the conversation down another alley.

“That’s right,” he said, his tone nonchalant. “But I’m all Californian now, so there must be something wrong with me. I mean, who in his right mind would live on a geological fault and shrug off the idea that the entire western edge of the state could end up in the Pacific Ocean in the blink of an eye?”

“Makes a person wonder, doesn’t it? And don’t forget, we live with that same danger right here. Every year there’s a measurable difference in the height of two slabs of bedrock on Vancouver Island—right over there.” She gestured at the lights of Nanaimo, the city across the Strait of Georgia. “If the Island falls into two big pieces, there’s going to be one unholy big splash and the resulting tsunami is going to wipe us right out. But do we care? Nah. Living here’s worth it.”

Slipping her hand out of his, she asked, “Why are you so reluctant to talk about your childhood, Jase? I mean, especially to me. After all, I shared a few months of it.” And why, she wondered, was she pressing him to do what she couldn’t do in return?

Because, she had to acknowledge, she wanted to know him better, wanted to understand what made Jase O’Keefe tick.

It was more important than she liked.

He shrugged and came to a halt on the side of the path where rough-cut logs formed five steps down to the beach.

“It wasn’t such a great childhood,” he answered at last. “What’s to talk about?”

He said nothing more, and they stood silent, listening to the slow, lazy swells curl and wash up over the gravel, then recede, rolling pebbles out with them in a gentle, rattling sound. Overhead, a three-quarter moon on the wane shone down between straggling, wind-streaked clouds. Shell turned off the flashlight, and as her eyes adjusted, she could see the waves on the beach, black with shining edges, gleaming under the moon. The marker on White Islet, half a mile offshore, blinked monotonously, warning ships away.

To get a little, she thought, you have to give a little.

“As you might have gathered from the conversation today,” she said, “my childhood wasn’t exactly modeled on a TV sitcom family, either. At least your parents were married to each other. I didn’t even know I had a father, let alone who he was, until I was ten and we moved up here.”

He took her hand again and, still holding it, slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Mine weren’t married very long. They divorced when I was five, Jenny four, and Marcus about two. After that, they traded us back and forth as if none of us mattered much more than the family camping gear, which also traveled from household to household when it was needed.”

She squeezed his fingers. “Jase … I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I came to terms with it long ago. My dad called it ‘getting along,’ my mother, ‘dealing with reality.’ ” He laughed, to show he really didn’t care, though Shell knew he did. “Joint custody,” he added. “What a crock. The courts that order it never ask the kids if they want to be human Ping-Pong balls. The only normalcy in my life was the times I spent with my grandmother.”

“Such as that summer we played together? Your brother and sister weren’t there. Why?”

“Because Jenny was with Dad, and Marcus was with Mom. I rebelled, so they sent me to Gran to get ‘straightened out.’ ”

“Did it work?”

He chuckled. “Not appreciably. How about you? How did you and your mother come to be in Rhode Island that summer? Lil said she worked in the Los Angeles area.”

“Why, uh, I guess we were … on vacation,” she said lamely. She couldn’t very well say “in hiding,” which was closer to the truth.

Even now, thinking about it, she felt sick to her stomach, hearing again the shrill demanding voices, “Lilianne, was it alcohol or drugs?”

“Were you drinking because Max Elkford left you for Marcy LeFave?”

And the pictures of her mother on her hands and knees, hair awry, beautiful face streaked with tears, agony painted on every feature as she struggled to rise, flashed across Shell’s memory.

She shuddered and forced the images away. “Can’t people from the West Coast want a change of scene now and then?”

“I suppose.” He paused, as if waiting for her to go on.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m sure your pampered California bones must be frozen about now, to say nothing of your leg.”

“They’re not,” he said, but followed her along the path.

Skeena bounded up to them as they neared the cabin. Shell turned the flashlight on the dog and bent to brush a litter of twigs off her black fur. When she’d had enough grooming, Skeena turned and loped up the ramp to the house, nearly knocking Shell to the ground. She would have fallen, had not Jase’s arm swept around her and held her pinned to his chest.

“Steady.” His voice was gruff.

“I’m all right.” Hers was breathless.

He touched her hair, brushing it back from her face. “Are you?” She felt a tremor in his fingers, felt his heart hammering hard and fast under her palm as she pressed it to his chest, half to hold herself apart from him, half because she couldn’t pull it away.

“Yes …” she said, but it came out as a soft, aching whisper as she gazed into the fathomless darkness of his eyes.

“That’s funny,” Jase said. “I’m not.” He drew her closer, stroking her hair with one rough hand as he pressed her head to his chest. No, he wasn’t all right. What he was doing was insane. The way he reacted to this woman was wrong and had to stop. He should set her away from him, force himself to go inside the house and out of this tempting darkness, to where walls and light, and commonplace surroundings would put his mind back on track and make his body behave. So, why wasn’t he doing any of that?

Because she wasn’t moving! She was standing there, not quite leaning on him, but he was totally aware of her shape, her heat, the outline of her breasts through the thickness of her sweater and jacket. His jacket was open, and her hand rested on his chest, separated from his skin by nothing more than his shirt. Was she still there because she, like him, simply couldn’t move?

“Shell … ?” His voice sounded rough, rasping.

“What?” Hers sounded bemused, and he groaned, grabbing a fistful of her hair and tilting up her face.

Shell sucked in a deep breath, seeking the strength to push herself away from him. As if he sensed her intention, he tightened his hand in her hair, then released it. To her horror, Shell found herself melting against him, soaking up the warmth of his body, breathing deeply of his scent. “You do something to me, you know,” he said. Her blood thrummed loudly in her ears, almost blocking the sound of his ragged breathing. His arm slid farther around her, and his hand caressed her shoulder, moving over her collar until his fist rested just under her chin. Its faint pressure urged her to obey the dictates of her own desires, to reach up and take the kiss she knew he’d give her if she showed him she wanted it.