From Glowing Embers (16 page)

“Laugh, will you!” Dillon shook the hand he had just battered with a hammer. “There, see? On top of everything else, I knocked the head off the nail.”

Gray handed him another one. “Two more, and that should do it for this window.”

“I’d sooner live underground for the rest of my life than live in a glass house in a cyclone.” Dillon pounded the nail into the sheet of plywood that almost, but not quite, fit over the large window on the west side of Paige’s house.

“We’re lucky there was wood to cover most of these.”

“Now why don’t I feel lucky?” Dillon turned around to send Gray a grin to offset his words.

The two men hadn’t even changed out of their wet clothes. After transferring suitcases to the appropriate rooms, they had taken one look at their situation and gone back outside to see what could be done to improve it. Paige’s house was an architect’s dream and a meteorologist’s nightmare. The structure was sturdy enough, but in an attempt to blend the outdoors with the indoors, the house had been designed with a multitude of windows and sliding-glass doors. Inside, there were few walls or doors to cordon off living space. Outside, there were three porches—or lanais, as Julianna had told him they were called in Hawaii—and a terraced path leading down to a large shed.

Gray’s fear was that Eve would inextricably blend the outdoors with the indoors by the fury of her winds. Fortunately the last tenant had made a small woodworking studio out of the shed, and when he had moved back to the mainland, he hadn’t taken his leftover lumber with him. There was enough to partially protect all the larger windows and all but a few of the smaller ones.

“Well, that’ll do it.” Dillon drove in his last nail and stood back to admire his work.

“There’s enough wood for the little window in the kitchen. Then we’ll have to tape the rest.”

“What good will that do?” Dillon asked as they repositioned themselves.

Gray had been a young teen when Hurricane Camille had savaged the Mississippi Gulf coast. He still remembered the way shards of glass had glistened on the beach at Granger Inlet after Camille’s fury died. Every window in the beach house had exploded with the storm’s force.

“It will keep the glass from shattering into a thousand splinters,” he said, hoping it was true.

The two men had enjoyed an unlikely camaraderie as they had prepared the house, both ignoring the fact that they were soaked to the bone. Now Gray’s reminder sobered them.

“We get cyclones up in the north of Australia,” Dillon said, “but I’ve never been through one myself.”

“I don’t want to go through another one.” Gray held his hand over his eyes and turned his face to the sky. “But it looks like I’m going to.”

“The women are afraid.”

Gray thought about the women’s reactions. He hadn’t been surprised the storm would terrify Julianna. And Jody’s reaction was exactly what he would have expected from a child her age, excitement one minute, panic the next. Strangely enough, it was Paige who had surprised him the most.

Gray had often suspected that Paige had a deep well of emotion inside her, a well that was largely untapped because of the close watch she kept on it. He had never been sure he had touched her emotions himself, although he suspected he had come closer than any man before him. Today, however, when she had run to him through the storm, she had been vulnerable and eager for his reassurance.

And Julianna had been there to see it.

Gray had been torn by conflicting feelings as he’d held Paige in the rain. He had been glad to be there for her, and he had been sorry their reunion was going to be spoiled by the storm. But, most confusing of all, he had felt that holding her was a betrayal of the woman standing on the porch watching them.

“I shouldn’t like to be in your shoes about now.”

Gray knew Dillon was talking about his whole life, not his rain-soaked sneakers. Oddly enough, Gray suspected the opal miner was just offering him a helpful ear. They had progressed a long way from nearly throwing punches at each other. Eve encouraged strange alliances.

“I’ll bet you wish you’d been assigned a different seat on Flight One,” Gray answered.

“I was delighted with my seat. It’s not often a seatmate looks like Julianna.”

“It’s not often an ex-husband starts a fight in the middle of the aisle, either.”

“If you were really an ex-husband, I might not have minded so much.” Dillon hammered a nail in for emphasis.

“We’re going to get a divorce.”

“Are you granting me permission to court the lady?” Dillon turned to get the full impact of Gray’s answer.

Gray wasn’t sure what emotion Dillon had read on his face, but the Australian faced his work again and hammered another nail. “I didn’t think so.”

“What you and Julianna do is none of my business.”

“I reckon I’d be tempted to take you at your word if she weren’t as confused as you are. But she is, and she doesn’t need an opal gouger complicating her life.” Dillon backed away to admire his handiwork, blinking rapidly to discourage the raindrops dripping from the sadly drooping brim of his hat.

Gray scooped up tools and leftover pieces of wood to take back to the shed, and Dillon did the same. Once inside they threw the wood scraps on a pile in the back room. Gray paused to wring the water out of his shirt until he realized what a useless gesture it was. They still had to run through the rain back to the house.

“Do you think there’s food enough for us all?”

Gray was glad to talk about something more neutral than Julianna. He was still trying to name the feeling he’d experienced at the thought of Julianna with Dillon. “Paige says there’s plenty. She changed her flight when she heard a storm was building, so she got in yesterday morning. She shopped before coming up.”

“It’s no wonder she was glad to see you. I doubt she wanted to be here by herself if the storm hit.”

“If I hadn’t come, she was going to go to the nearest shelter.”

“Maybe that’s where we should all be.”

Gray shook his head. “I think we’re better off here now that we’ve got most of the windows covered. We’re too high to worry about flooding. I think we’ll be safe.”

Both men stripped off their shirts, shoes and socks as soon as they got inside. Paige immediately brought them towels, and they dried off as they stood beside the door so they wouldn’t soak the floor on the way to their room. Dillon finished first and went ahead of Gray, who lingered to have a moment alone with Paige.

“I think we’ve got the worst taken care of.” He smiled, trying to encourage the same from her. “You don’t have to worry.”

“This is an extraordinary situation, Granger.”

Gray knew she was referring to Julianna, not the hurricane. He felt as much as saw her dark eyes probing for reassurance. “I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel I had any other choice.”

“She knows you want a divorce?”

Gray nodded.

“And she knows I’m part of the reason?”

He nodded again.

“Well, you always told me she was a woman of great courage.”

“And you’ve always told me you were a woman of great tolerance.”

“We’ll see. I’ve already tolerated a lot from you. But there is that saying about the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Gray understood that Julianna was more than a straw. He was asking too much, and he knew it. He reached out and stroked the silky fall of hair that perpetually caressed one cheek. It was a flawless frame for her exotic face. “Will you hang on a little longer?”

“What’s a day or two?” She brought his palm to her mouth and kissed it, then turned and disappeared down the hallway toward the kitchen, where the clang of pots and pans was evident.

Paige
had
been tolerant. In the years after Ellie’s death and Julianna’s disappearance, she had been there for him when he’d needed her, demanding nothing, expecting nothing, hearing nothing except his darkest, most tormented thoughts. They had developed a friendship that had brought Gray through his worst depression and Paige through several dead-end relationships, including a short-lived marriage to a man who had wanted to share her fortune but not her life.

The deepening of their friendship had occurred so gradually that neither of them had been sure it was really happening. If what they felt lacked the wild, impulsive joy of young love, what they had was built on sharing and caring and mutual respect. Both of them were tired of living alone. Turning to each other had seemed only natural.

Now Gray wondered if he had seriously jeopardized his relationship with Paige by bringing Julianna to her house. Paige knew him well. She would not fail to sense his internal battles. And no matter how tolerant she was, she was also a woman with a future to protect.

And who was he? A man so shaken that sometimes he wasn’t sure whether he was twenty-one or thirty-one? A man so confused that he had to fight himself not to reach out and hold the woman who hated him? A man so racked with guilt that he had brought his wife to his fiancée’s home to put an end to his torture?

He was all those men, and one other besides. He was Gray Sheridan, a man who knew that a new life can’t begin until an old one ends. He, Paige and Julianna were going to have to get through the next days, no matter how painful they were, because only then would any of them be able to walk away from the past and begin again.

JULIANNA GOT THROUGH
the rest of the day as well as she could. Between comforting Jody and organizing and preparing meals—a job Paige admitted that she hated—she kept herself out of the mainstream of conversation. While the others taped windows and barricaded furniture against two of the three glass doors, Julianna cooked whatever she could find that would keep for a day or two without refrigeration. So far they had experienced no problems with power outages, but everyone knew it could happen anytime, and she wanted to be prepared.

More than prepared, she wanted to be busy and as far away from Gray as possible. Buried feelings were pushing to the surface. She didn’t want to feel anything, not jealousy, not sadness, not the irrational fear that the howling winds and driving rain induced in her. She wanted to be in bed, asleep, without so much as dreams to remind her she was alive. But when it came time to go to bed, sleep came with difficulty.

In the hours just before dawn, the rain stopped. Sometime during the long night she had made a fragile peace with the wind’s roar and the unrelenting staccato rhythm of the rain, but now their absence woke her immediately.

She lay in bed listening to the soft sounds of Jody’s breathing. If the storm had ended, she wanted proof. Quietly she slipped on a muumuu. Without bothering to put on shoes, she tiptoed out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The house was dark and still, and she felt her way to a window to open the curtains. Only Dillon and Gray’s handiwork greeted her. She had forgotten that most of the windows had been covered with plywood.

A large glass door leading to a backyard lanai had been impossible to protect with anything more substantial than masking tape. Julianna found her way there and slid the door open, stepping out and closing the door behind her. When she turned back to gaze out into the darkness, she found she wasn’t alone.

“Did the silence wake you, too?” Gray leaned against the railing, his arms crossed against his chest.

Julianna had spent most of yesterday avoiding Gray. Now, she had forced this encounter.

“I wanted to be sure I wasn’t imagining the storm was over,” she answered, moving to the opposite end of the lanai. “I didn’t know anyone else was up.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.” His words were traced with bitterness.

“Do you know whether this is just a respite, or has the storm moved away?”

“Eve’s an unpredictable, disorganized lady. Maybe she’s going off on a little Pacific cruise.”

“Bon voyage.” Julianna put both hands on the railing and leaned against it, shutting her eyes. She wanted to go back inside, but she knew Gray would see it as a retreat. Instead she drew a deep breath. “Smell that air. The rain pours down hard enough to crush life from the flowers, but all it does is release their perfume.”

“Too bad there isn’t a parallel for humans.”

Julie Ann might have told him that there was, but Julianna couldn’t. She had found there were some things that even the most courageous couldn’t rise above.

“When I first came here, I lived in a one room apartment above an old warehouse. I’d lived in some pretty awful places, but that was one of the worst. No matter how bad the apartment was, though, I could walk outside any time of the day or night, and there would be something beautiful to experience.” She stopped, realizing she had almost forgotten it was Gray she was speaking to.

“And that healed you?” Gray’s voice was cynical.

“Would you believe me if I said yes?”

Silence was his answer.

“No, it didn’t heal me,” she went on. “But it helped.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Why not?”

“You don’t have anything to hide anymore, Julianna. You don’t have to keep your past a secret. Indulge my curiosity.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re married?”

She faced him, crossing her arms as he had. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Don’t you think so? Then you have a funny idea of what marriage is.” He moved closer, and she felt suddenly vulnerable. “I married you for better or worse—”

“And it was worse than you could ever have imagined, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes, much worse.” He stopped inches away. “And you know what was worst of all? Watching you learn to hate me.”

She tried to avert her eyes, but he grasped her arms. “You learned to hate me long before Ellie died. That’s why we went to the beach house that day. I wanted to get everything out in the open so we’d have a chance to make our marriage work. It was hanging by a thread.”

“By then we had no marriage.”

“Because you’d given up on it.”

Her voice soared, despite her desire to remain calm. “I didn’t give up, Gray. There was nothing I could have given up on, even if I’d wanted to. You didn’t want me. You didn’t want our child. And lucky you. You got rid of both of us!”