Hours to Cherish

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

A Biography of Heather Graham

I
N THE HEAT OF
the night he was running, running.

A low-lying ground fog shielded him, putting him on another plane of reality, as if he were racing on a treadmill through endless clouds. The sound of his breathing was heavy, an agonized rasping that ripped from his body in heaving gasps. It was all that he heard except for the ceaseless fall of his own feet, rhythmic slaps that were each a spiked rod of pain creeping upward through abused muscles that refused to grow numb. A new sound permeated his mind. Although distant, the raucous clamor was unmistakable—the frenzied barks and yelps and bays of the hounds.

Suddenly, blessed numbness seemed to come. He was lifted into the clouds of the mist, the world became silent. He was still running, but his movement was effortless. … And ahead of him, he saw her.

She too seemed to be clothed in the mist, an ethereal figure; the long sable hair that had long haunted his dreams fluttered around her like rich sea waves, a luxurious enticement. And as he had often dreamed, she beckoned to him … she knew him, she smiled in sweet, seductive greeting. …

He ran faster toward her, remembering the liquid beguilement and the spirited rages that could glimmer in her sea-emerald eyes. When he reached her, he would be home. …

He lifted his arms in the mist; he was close, so close. But suddenly he was moving in slow motion in the dead silence of the mist. He reached, and reached, but she was slipping away. …

Sound returned to his world with the chaotic shrieking, shouting, and fevered baying of the dogs, pierced by maddening growls. And just as sound returned, so did pain. He could run no more; his legs buckled to the spiked agony that assailed his every footfall.

The dogs were upon him. He could feel the bloodlust in the hot, fetid breath that was an inferno against his skin. He waited for the tear of their jagged teeth. But it was Lopez who had found him tonight. Even as he clenched his eyes, braced himself against the onslaught, the shouts continued; the dogs were called off. He stiffened against the inevitable as he was dragged to his feet, closed off his mind to the furious spate of reproach and abuse. He could do nothing else but tolerate with a numb silence the brutality that followed. … Thank God Lopez was half human.

But it still meant a return to the pit. A four-by-four space of eternal darkness. Pitch darkness, and sizzling, incredible heat. When the noonday sun rose, sweat would race in rivulets down his entire body, his blood seeming to boil. Even the strongest man could be broken after a few days of such torture. And the break would come all at once. He would open his mouth and scream and scream and scream. …

He awoke in a cold sweat, and it took him several seconds to assimilate his actual surroundings.

And then he realized that although his body was drenched, he hadn’t screamed. Not this time. The nightmare, which he hadn’t had in some time now, was ebbing, slowly, slowly, releasing its tenacious hold.

He rose from the bed and left his cabin, seeking a cleansing from the sea air. On deck he stepped past the tools and rewards of his trade: scuba gear, air blowers, ropes, chains, and sealed cases. They had finished up out here today, he thought, perhaps that was why the dream had come.

The night was black velvet on the choppy open sea. A brisk wind had picked up from the west, but he barely noticed. He breathed deeply as his hair was furiously whipped across his forehead and savored the feeling of the cooling wind on his heated flesh.

Quit fooling yourself, he thought wryly. He knew why the dream had come. They had been talking about her today; Luke had been reporting everything he knew about the situation at the cay.

He had waited and watched for so long, a tentative phantom in the shadows, almost a child who trembled with indecision. He could wait no longer. Not with things moving the way they were; not when she continued to haunt his dreams, his sleeping moments … his waking moments. He could merely close his eyes and see her … working, standing, sitting, breathing … that mystical cloak of sleek dark hair, those eyes that were the enigma of the sea, so often raised to his in glimmering challenge, yet never failing to beguile.

Rather than return to his sweat-drenched sheets, he lay down upon the deck, lacing his hands behind his head as he stared up at the few stars dotting the eternity of black-velvet dark. He felt the night wind with every pore, just as he felt the sea move beneath him. The cool rolling action was soothing.

It was time to go home. Very soon it would be summer. He smiled for a moment, his memories dry with a sad and strange amusement. They had been so young, and although many human factors didn’t change, their follies had been those follies of youth.

Summer.

It was only fitting.

It was the season of the sea witch.

T
HE ISLANDERS CALLED HER CAT
.

A tall woman, she was lithe and beautiful in a way that endeared her to those who knew her. Laughing as she stood upon the dock, her deeply bronzed legs sturdy and shapely—sailor’s legs—and sneaker-clad feet set firmly apart, she was the epitome of radiant health. Her hair, long and deep sable and touched by the gold of the sun, was swept into a simple ponytail that reached almost to her waist. She wore no makeup, for she would be facing the salt spray of the ocean and the whipping wind of the breeze at full sail. Although she wasn’t consciously aware of it, she was one of the rare women who needed no complement to her natural coloring. Her cheeks wore the rose blush of perfect health and tone. Her eyes were a brilliant emerald green, fringed by thick lashes as dark and lustrous as her hair.

Her name was Catherine Miller—
Mrs.
Catherine Miller, although the islanders had little memory of Mr. Miller. Cat had always been part of the island. She had been born there and raised there, and although she had gone away to school in the States, she had always returned, loving the simple, carefree ways of the islands, loving the quiet life of easy dignity she lived with her father—a historian and scholar. Her father was long dead now, and Mr. Miller—a handsome youth who had swept in one summer and disappeared soon after—was also an entity of the past. The wedding had been a beautiful affair, the young bride a picture of loveliness in white, the groom all that could be admired in a man. Tall, much taller than his Cat, broad of shoulder, trim of waist, still young but well on the way to maturity. His face held promise of a jaw turning firmer with age, a physique that would develop into powerful muscles rather than flab.

Two such beautiful people …

Yet the summer was filled with strife. They were both headstrong, determined. He had the flair of a reckless devil to him; women eyed him and it was in his nature to return their stares boldly. His wife was a beauty, built to equal the classic forms of the sculptures of ancient Greece, but he was, perhaps, a man not ready for a wife. Not that he was cruel, or that his bold stares at other women were anything other than speculative—he was simply preoccupied with his salvage-diving business. He was, in a way, a modern-day pirate, seeking the lost treasures of the sea.

Cat had been in love—madly, obsessively in love. She had trusted the handsome young man with the aloof and dominating manner, and she had given her all. It was unfortunate that happenstance taught her a sad lesson—Clay Miller had wooed and married her upon her father’s request. Nobel-prize-winning historian Jason Windemere knew his health was weak. To Clay, with the promise of vast strength as well as daring in his dark eyes, Dr. Windemere meant to entrust not only his daughter but his vast charts of the Bahamian waters and limitless knowledge of ancient wrecks. Jason held only one chart back, that of a dream he would cherish in fantasy until his dying breath. The resolution of that dream he would leave to chance and to Catherine’s wits. Perhaps in the back of his mind he had always thought of it as a safeguard for his daughter, who would surely be the one to go through his personal possessions.

Jason Windemere had, however, made the severe mistake of underestimating his daughter as a woman. Cat was not a woman to be manipulated. She adored her husband, but she turned from him, and he was not a man who tolerated rejection. Despite the fact that his head was filled with his business and he considered his wife little more than an obligation to be cared for considerately, she was his wife. And although he hadn’t been aware of it, he discovered, with a fair amount of surprise, that he was a very possessive man. He was also determined to rule his own roost.

She was equally determined not to be ruled and the beautiful marriage became a battleground.

And so matters stood until the end of summer. And at that time, already establishing a name for himself in salvage circles, Clayton Miller sailed away. He was after the wreck of the
Princess Leana
, a clipper of the Dutch West India Company said to have sunk a hundred miles southeast of Bermuda in a fearful storm in 1646.

And then, while scouting the waters alone before bringing in his crew, Clayton Miller disappeared. His high-powered cruiser, the
Lady Luck
, seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

Clayton Miller was proclaimed by the superstitious to be a victim of the infamous Devil’s Triangle. Whatever the truth, he was assumed dead.

Cat, upon hearing the news, retired to her room and, despite the best efforts of her father, had refused to see anyone, speak to anyone, or open the door for three days. Long into the night, Jason Windemere had heard her sobs.

For a year she waited. She appeared serene; it was apparent that she believed Clayton Miller would come back to her. But at the end of that year Jason Windemere’s failing heart gave way. Cat again cried, for her father. In time her grieving ended—all her grieving. She had given up her father, she had given up her memories. Clayton Miller was as dead and gone as Jason Windemere.