Forbidden Dreams (2 page)

It was simply that with the approach of the anniversary, she was on edge. Of course. It was surely just that. Except …

Except she had seen that face before. She was certain. Only where? When? The answer wouldn’t come. Quickly, she picked up his wet jeans and, feeling like a thief, searched the pockets for a wallet. She found nothing more than a handful of coins, most of them American, two crushed Canadian fives, and a crumpled credit card receipt from a gas station. It was so badly waterlogged, little was legible beyond the station’s name and its Blaine, Washington, address. Another search of the jacket pockets, both inside and out, turned up only a hotel room access card, which did nothing to provide identification of its bearer.

Frowning, she dragged a low footstool close to the bed. With the basin of water on the floor by her feet, she began daubing with a soft cloth at the area surrounding the deep cut on his thigh. He didn’t stir, even when she gently spread the lips of the wound and used a wet cotton swab to flick out several pieces of grit that were embedded in the livid flesh. Only his short, shallow breaths told her he was still alive.

She shot another glance at his face. Dammit, who was he? Her initial distrust of him had been as instinctive as it was illogical, but this was something more. Like an itch in the back of her mind, the belief that she knew his face persisted, along with the association of it with a camera.

A stronger shiver of unease slithered through her. Could he possibly be one of those curiosity seekers who annually sought answers to the questions about Lilianne? If so, this was the closest anyone had come so far. She cast another uneasy glance at his still, pale face and tried to reject the thoughts, the fears.

He was too young to be someone from her past—at least the past that had involved Lilianne. He wasn’t much older than she.

Forcing the worry away, she concentrated on taking care of his injuries. Finally satisfied that the wound was as clean as she could get it, she dried the skin around it, then drew its edges shut with butterfly strips. As hard as she tried to control it, though, her mind insisted on humming along frantically, trying to sort this all out.

She kept coming up against the same blank wall, however. The man was not old enough to have been one of the horde of photographers and reporters who had poked and prodded and questioned her during her early childhood to the point where she actually became nauseated. Yet her linking his face with a camera seemed to suggest he had been behind some of those exploding flashbulbs she’d so hated.

She bathed his feet and saw that all the scratches, except for one, were superficial. She was being irrational, she told herself. Of course she’d never seen him before. He was a total stranger and no danger to anyone, and he hadn’t said her name. That had been a figment of her imagination. More likely, he’d slurred the words “What the hell” or something similar.

It wasn’t until she drizzled disinfectant onto the jagged scrape on his right foot that he showed any sign of distress, and then he gasped only once in pain. She bit her lip and glanced at him. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her with a disconcerting intensity. She murmured an apology but continued cleaning the cut until he lifted a hand and touched her hair, shoving it back from her face.

“You … hard lady … track down,” he said, then managed a ghost of a smile. “Shirley Elizabeth Landry, all growed up.”

Shell leaped to her feet. A loud, crashing roar filled her ears as her world tilted the wrong way on its axis, then shuddered and fell.

When Jase fully regained his senses, he realized first that he was warm. He was lying on a bed, and the scent of wood smoke hung in the air. Something else, familiar and poignant, teased his nostrils as the sensation of fingers, warm and gentle on the skin of his inner thigh, teased his body with a delicate stimulation he wished he could ignore. He could not; it pumped through him, heated his blood, and had an inevitable effect on his sex.

Even the pain in his ribs, in his leg, and the headache—the awful blinding headache that dogged him wherever he went, pouncing in a sneak attack when he could least afford to accommodate it—couldn’t override his body’s response to that distinctly feminine touch.

But whose touch? Where was he? He wanted to open his eyes, but the pain in his head made his lids heavy. He sought the inner peace that would allow him to control the pain, and presently it began to ebb. The metallic taste that always accompanied it faded, too, and he breathed a bit easier. A vague memory crossed his mind of a female voice talking about pills and milk, telling him to drink.

Yeah. Right. He’d told her about his medication. He hated taking it. Took it only when forced to. Like on the ferry ride … how long ago? Not long enough, probably, but if this was an overdose, he kind of liked it. He drifted, enjoying the easing of the pain, the fluttery fingers on his skin, the warmth and comfort of the room.

As the sharpness of the varying pains in his body eased, fuzzy, confused thoughts flitted around his mind. He tried to focus them. He had to remember, to bring himself up-to-date, but all he recalled was that ferry, the noise, people talking, kids running and playing; the pain, taking pills washed down with execrable coffee; then driving off, knowing he shouldn’t drive with that drug in his system. There’d been an endless dark highway, and he’d peered through heavy rain to glimpse road signs while impatient traffic rode his tailpipe. Then, his turnoff, a dirt road. The bouncing beams of his headlights had ricocheted off trees, more trees than he’d seen in one place for years, and then the sudden gleam of white frothing water immediately before his front wheels. He’d jammed on the brakes, then … Then what?

Then suffocation, feeling trapped. His leg had been caught, his foot pinned. He’d struggled to get free, to breathe, feeling pain and confusion, then blessed air. Cold, so cold and wet, he’d walked, fallen, got up and walked again. Trees crashed and branches slammed to the ground all around him, as the wind howled and water smashed into rocks, threatening to reach out and snatch him. He saw a dim light that he sometimes thought was his imagination but followed it anyway, not knowing where it would lead but knowing it was his only hope. Then, finally, warmth, a voice, comfort, and those hands on his naked body.

His naked body? He clenched his fists and teeth and opened his eyes.

A woman bent over him, a woman with sleek, shining pale hair that clung to her head, flowed past her shoulders, effectively screening her face from him. He lay on a bed, head and shoulders elevated against thick, soft pillows, in a room all dark except for the intimate glow of an oil lamp standing on a chair next to the woman. He was half-covered by a quilt, and not fully naked after all. He still wore his blue briefs. Intent on her job of bathing his thigh, the woman didn’t look at him. That gash …

Yes. He had it now. His Jeep and the washout on the road, the road to … He frowned, wishing he could think. Ah, yes. The road to Shell Landry’s house. Of course.

He was in her house. He’d knocked on the door. Pounded. He remembered a woman snatching it open. Remembered a laughing face turned up to his as she said something. Remembered that laughter dying as she’d stared at him blankly, seeing a stranger.

Then there was nothing. Until now.

His gaze wandered around through the pool of yellow light. His pill bottle. He squinted. Yes. She’d given him his medication. That was why the pain was fading, why he was adrift within his head. He tried to focus on his surroundings.

Just within the outer edge of the lamp’s glow sat a black Labrador with a broad forehead and intelligent eyes, eyes that watched him with wary intensity. Beyond, through a doorway, he saw the source of the poignant aroma—a Christmas tree standing in one corner of a room. An old-fashioned rocking chair sat near it, complete with patchwork cushions that reminded him of his grandmother, and on a table was another lamp like the one that lit this room. It was as if he’d stepped through a time warp, he thought, into a much further past than the one that included the child Shell Landry.

It was the adult Shell who bent over him now. Of that he was certain. As she turned to rummage in the first-aid kit at the foot of the bed, her long hair draped itself across his ankle, producing a tremor of pleasure that approached pain.

She was oblivious to his response, giving her total concentration to taking care of his wound. She deftly strapped tapes across it to pull it closed, her fingers soft on his skin. She was treating him, for the love of Mike, not caressing him! What the hell was wrong with him, letting his libido get the upper hand like that? Dammit, where was his control?

She moved again, and the glow of the oil lamp sent golden flames dancing across her impossibly sleek hair. It was so pale, draping down around her face and shoulders in a thick curtain. And straight, dead straight. He remembered it as being golden, yes, but curly—tight, bouncy curls that had circled her laughing, elfin face.

Had he ever touched her hair then? He thought not. Now, though, he wanted very badly to touch it, to see if it felt as silky as it looked. He wanted to speak to her, to see if the slightly tilted light green eyes he recalled would turn to him with eagerness, as they once had. He wanted to discover if the mercurial sprite he remembered from childhood remained within the depths of the woman Shell had become.

He lay still and floated in and out of the past and while she worked on his leg, taping the thick dressing in place.

Summertime, and a little girl named Shirley, who’d called herself Shell. He’d played on a beach with a Shell, and the two of them had giggled about it. Fun. Fairy tales. She had seemed like a character out of a fairy tale to him then, soft and golden, with little freckles all over her like a dusting of sunlight, so different from him with his dark hair and sun-dark skin.

As she continued her ministrations, working on his feet now, dabbing, cleaning, bandaging, he worried about his scars, wishing she didn’t have to see them. But there was nothing he could do about it while this drug filled his head with fluff, slowed his thoughts, sent his memories skipping like flat stones on still water.

Big girls hated his scars.

She poured some kind of liquid over a laceration on his foot, and he stiffened, gritting his teeth so as not to make a sound. But his breath drew in sharply despite his good intentions, and she lifted her head, looking directly at him. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

Her eyes were still green, still almond-shaped, but instead of laughter, they held contrition. She didn’t like hurting him.

Absurdly, he wanted to comfort her. With great effort and concentration he raised a hand and tucked her hair behind her ear, draping it over her shoulder. It felt as silky as he’d fantasized, but much heavier, richer.

He smiled. “You’re a hard lady track down,” he said, fighting to enunciate clearly. “Shirley Elizabeth Landry, all growed up.”

As he spoke, a loud crash sounded elsewhere in the house; everything in the structure shuddered and trembled. Dishes rattled, a large pink spiral shell on the window sill danced, then dropped to the top of a dressing table. In the shock-frozen seconds following, she gaped at him as if he were somehow responsible, her hand clapping to her moth to muffle a cry. Then, spinning around, she fled, running toward the source of the noise, the dog scrabbling after her.

Jase tried to heave himself upright, the instinct to protect screaming inside him like a siren. The effort was too much as an unseen horse kicked him in the ribs, and he flopped back down, blinding pain stabbing through his chest as darkness flooded into his head.

His last sensation was one of impotent fury at his own weakness before he swirled away into the loud roar of the December storm.

S
HELL’S FIRST, CONFUSED THOUGHT
was who’d plastered all those wet, shiny green leaves against the living-room window? In the next instant she realized that her favorite arbutus tree had fallen, no doubt wiping out her sun deck. Another foot or two to the right, and it would have taken out the bay window. She supposed she should feel fortunate. She didn’t. She felt devastated, as shattered as the trunk of the big, twisted old tree must be.

Her swing! Where would she hang her swing, with the tree gone? It would take a hundred years or more to grow another one that size, and she didn’t have a hundred years. She had … She had an incipient case of hysteria on her hands, she decided. She also had an unexpected visitor who knew her full name, who remembered her from the past—the past before her tenth year—and whom she couldn’t fully place.

What more could go wrong?

She soon found out. The wind whipped up and over the roof. Its pattern changed drastically by the absence of the big old tree, it blew smoke down the chimney, forcing it out around the door of the wood stove and filling the room with an acrid, eye-stinging cloud that set off the smoke detector.

Skeena cowered and put her front legs over her ears, her howls adding to the din. Shell stood on a chair and waved a book catalog at the screaming meemie on her ceiling, clearing the air around it long enough to stop its frantic shrieking.

For a moment she considered pulling out the battery of the device, but good sense prevailed. On a night like this anything, it seemed, could happen, and probably would.

She tiptoed back to the guest room. The man was asleep, apparently undisturbed by all the noise. She quickly bandaged the cut on his foot, covered him completely with the quilt, cleaned up her first-aid supplies, then went to bed.

Once in bed, though, sleep eluded her. She was too aware of the man’s presence in her home. What did he want? Why had he blown in with the storm? She’d thought she’d got over distrusting strangers simply because they were strangers. Paranoia, her father often called it. Justifiable reticence, her grandmother insisted, given the kind of childhood she’d suffered. Lil said she’d been painfully shy as a child too.

A sound from the guest room brought her erect, listening, and a moan whipped her out of bed. Still sleeping, the man tossed restlessly, and she wondered if she should waken him and give him more of his medication. The bottle simply said, “Take with food or milk as directed, for pain.” What kind of pain was he being treated for? Since he carried pills, it must be something chronic. Had it to do with the scars she’d seen on his legs and torso, deep, puckered purplish and white lines that bespoke terrible wounds? The scars appeared to be of different ages. What kind of man lived the sort of life where such damage could happen repeatedly to his body?