Deep Waters (38 page)

“I won't argue with that conclusion. But it doesn't tell you much.”

“We'll see.” Charity removed a tissue from her pocket and carefully wrapped the nail fragment in it. “The only thing I can tell for certain is that it's not Phyllis's special color, Dartmoor Mauve. I'll talk to Radiance in the morning. She should be able to identify it.”

“Fine. Talk to Radiance. In the meantime, would you mind answering my question?”

She looked up innocently. “What was it?”

He was beginning to get irritated. “I want to know why you're doing this.”

“Isn't it obvious? I'm doing it because you're my friend.”

“You're sure that's the only reason?”

“What other reason could there be?” she asked.

“Who the hell knows?” he muttered, exasperated. “I just thought that there might be a more personal reason for your great interest in my welfare.”

“What could be more personal than our friendship?” she asked politely as she brushed past him in the hall.

Without any warning, his frustrated anger briefly swamped his self-control and common sense. He whirled around and trained the flashlight on her.

“Has it occurred to you that the reason you're so damned worried about me is because you're wildly, madly, passionately in love with me?” he asked with a fierceness that startled him.

“That, too,” she agreed.

17
 
 

Water never disappears forever. It flows back into the sea, becomes rain, forms a river, fills a pond, or cascades down a mountain. In one way or another, it always returns.

—“On the Way of Water,” from the journal of Hayden Stone

Big mistake, Charity thought. She had not meant to say the words aloud. Not after last night's debacle. They had just sort of slipped out. An accident waiting to happen. Now here she was standing at the scene of the train wreck.

“Elias?”

He did not respond. He loomed in the deep shadow behind the glare of his flashlight, his face unreadable. But she did not need to see his expression. She could feel the impact her words had made. Elias was stunned. Shaken to the core, no doubt.

She felt a little sorry for him. His fancy philosophy was good at developing inner strength and self-control, but it did not handle deep emotions well. Charity
knew of no philosophical framework that did. Human emotions were too mushy for such rigid constructs.

She should have kept her mouth shut, she thought. She knew he was not ready to deal with this. She aimed the beam of her own flashlight squarely in his face. He did not flinch or blink. He was frozen.

“Well, don't just stand there like a deer caught in the headlights.” She knew her voice was laced with a distinctly waspish note, but there was nothing she could do about it. “It's your own fault. You had to go and get sarcastic about the whole thing. You know how that irritates me. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm under a lot of stress at the moment. I sometimes act impulsively when I get under stress. I've explained that to you.”

He did not move or speak. With a sigh, Charity lowered her flashlight. The beam pooled on the floor at her feet while she studied Elias's dark silhouette. The silence that gripped the old cabin was eerie. She could feel her pulse.

After a moment or two she began to get really worried.

“Are you okay, Elias? We can't stand here staring into the dark all night. We've hung around long enough. We should be on our way.”

He finally moved. A single step toward her. “You can't just leave it like that.” The words sounded strained and awkward, as if he had trouble stringing them together in a logical sentence.

“Why not?”

“Damn it, you know why not.” He took another step forward, moving with a stiff, jerky motion that was completely unlike his normal, gliding stride. “This is important. A lot more important than what we came out here to do.”

“I disagree,” she said crisply. “If you get arrested,
we're going to have a bigger problem on our hands than sorting out the interpersonal dynamics of our relationship.”

“Don't,” he said, “make a joke of it.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure that I'm sorry?”

“No.” He came to a halt directly in front of her. His hand was clenched around the flashlight. The light poured down on the floorboards, flowing into the white pool created by her flashlight. “Are you sure about what you said a minute ago?”

“About being wildly, madly, passionately in love with you?” There did not seem to be much point in denying it. Charity resigned herself to the inevitable.

They had managed to sidestep the issue last night thanks to the timely distraction created by the discovery of Rick Swinton's body. But she could hardly count on another, equally diverting event this evening. Not that she wanted one. Two murdered bodies were enough for one summer. She was certainly pushing the limits of her stress threshold.

“Yes.” Elias's voice sounded disembodied, as though he spoke from a great distance. “Are you sure about being in love with me?”

“Very sure.” She raised her chin. She was vaguely surprised to realize that she did not feel even a tremor of anxiety now. It was certainty, not panic, that welled up inside her. “I'm sorry if that upsets your delicate philosophical balance, but you'll just have to deal with it, Winters.”

“Last night.” He broke off, apparently searching for words. “Last night you said you wouldn't move in with me because there was no love between us.”

“No, I didn't say that. You weren't listening, were you? I meant that I wanted us to be in love before
we took that step. I once made the mistake of almost marrying a man for reasons based on friendship and business and feelings of family responsibility. I do not intend to repeat the error. I don't think my medical insurance will cover another round of therapy.”

“Our relationship isn't like that.”

“Technically speaking, you may be right. You've asked me to move in with you, not marry you. And I'll admit that moving in with a man for reasons based on friendship with good sex is a distinct improvement over my relationship with Brett. The good sex was lacking last time. But it's still not enough.”

“I want more than friendship, too.”

She stilled. “How much more?”

“I want you,” he whispered.

The aching hunger in his voice was getting to her. She knew she was weakening. She had to be careful, she warned herself. There was so much at risk.

“What are you prepared to give in return?” she asked softly.

“Whatever I can. Take whatever you want. Please.”

The stark
please
was her undoing. She could not refuse him a second time. She loved him, and he said that he was prepared to give her as much of himself as he could. Coming from Elias, that meant a lot. She wondered if he understood that he was as good as promising her that he would try to learn to open himself to love.

She smiled. “I guess I can work with that. All right, Elias. If you really want me to move in with you, I will. But I warn you, my furniture is coming with me. I'm not going to spend every evening sitting on the floor when I can kick back in my own Italian easy chair.”

“You've got a deal.” He reached for her.

“Uh, maybe we should get out of here before—”

Elias pulled her into his arms with such force that she dropped her flashlight in surprise. It rolled across the floorboards and fetched up against a wall.

She was crushed against his chest. She could hardly breath. Elias's mouth was ravenous. His body was hard with his surging arousal. It was as if all of the intense emotions that he could not show in any other way were channeled into this one singular form of human communication.

“Elias, wait.” Charity managed to free her mouth from his, but she could not get his attention.

Denied her lips, he quested in another direction. She made a soft, half-strangled sound when she felt his teeth come together around her earlobe. A blazing excitement shot through her. Then his mouth moved lower to the curve of her throat. The handle of the flashlight pressed into her back. Elias's free hand pushed through her hair, freeing it from the ponytail clip.

“No, hold on.” She caught his face between her palms. Gave him a small, determined shake to make him focus. “Stop.”

“What's wrong?”

“I absolutely refuse to have a significant sexual encounter here in this sleazy cabin that appears to have been used by everyone in town who wanted to conduct a clandestine affair.”

For a few seconds he did not seem to comprehend. Then she felt him relax very slightly. There was just enough light bouncing off the wall from the fallen flashlight to reveal the slow, sexy grin that transformed his face.

“But someone left a perfectly good set of handcuffs in the bedroom,” he said. “Why waste them?”

“Get a grip, Winters.” She scooped up the fallen flashlight. “We're outa here. Right now.”

“And here I'd started to think of you as a thrill-seeker.” He picked her up and whisked her outside.

He stuffed her into the Jeep, got behind the wheel, and drove back to the cottage with a complete lack of regard for the local speed limits.

Charity did not say a word as he pulled into the drive and switched off the engine. There was just enough light to see her sexy smile.

He groaned and reached for her, intending only to kiss her once more before they got out of the Jeep. But passion exploded on contact.

“Elias. Oh, my God.”

He fumbled with the Jeep's door with his left hand. He got the door open, but he could not get out of the vehicle. Charity was kissing him with a sweet, frantic desire that sent need swirling through his veins.

“Here,” he whispered. “Now.”

“Now?”

“Right now. I won't last until we get into the house.”

He struggled with her jeans. She did not argue. Instead, she kissed his throat. Her hands fluttered around his waist. He groaned when she carefully lowered his zipper. He was rigid. He knew he was thrusting through the opening in his briefs, through the opening in his pants.

He started to struggle with her jeans.

“No, wait,” she whispered.

“Now, what? Don't worry, this isn't like the old Rossiter place. I swear, no one has ever had sex in this Jeep.”

She did not answer. Instead, she cradled him in one soft palm.

And then she lowered her head and very delicately, a little awkwardly, as if she had never attempted anything quite like it before but was determined to experiment,
she gently stroked the length of him with her wet, warm tongue.

Elias closed his eyes. He could have sworn that he saw the spaceships finally land in Whispering Waters Cove.

“It's called Tal Kek Chara. The same name as the exercises and the philosophy.” Elias sat cross-legged on the mat that he had placed next to the small garden pool. He looked at his new student, who was seated on a similar mat across from him. The leather weapon lay stretched out on a towel between them. “Literally translated, it means, the tool that carves a new channel through which water may flow.”

Newlin picked up Tal Kek Chara and twisted it tentatively around his wrist, the way Elias had demonstrated a few minutes earlier. “I thought it was a belt or something.”

“The best weapon is that which does not appear to be a weapon,” Elias said. Newlin's deep curiosity about the strip of leather reminded him of his own first youthful encounter with it.

In fact, he thought with an odd sense of deja vu, this whole session brought back his own early lessons with Hayden Stone. Newlin asked the same questions he had once asked, and the intrigued expression on his face reflected the feelings Elias knew that he had had back at the beginning.

Water never disappears forever. It may return in some new form, but it always returns.

“What language is Tal Kek Chara?” Newlin shifted a little on the mat.

Elias realized that his new pupil was probably getting stiff. Newlin had been sitting in the unfamiliar position for nearly thirty minutes, and it was chilly out
here in the garden. The morning sun had not managed to burn through the fog yet.

Last night he had dug out Hayden's journal and for the first time read a few passages. He had been looking for inspiration for his first session as an instructor of Tal Kek Chara. As if fate had guided his hand, he had stumbled across something Hayden had written early on in the journal.

A good teacher must sense the natural rhythms of learning in his students and respond accordingly. The act of teaching is discipline for the teacher as well as the student.

He must end this first session soon, Elias thought, even though Newlin seemed quite willing to continue.

“The language no longer exists,” Elias said. “The people that once spoke it were assimilated into a dozen different cultures over the centuries. The last place where the pure language and the knowledge that accompanied it were kept alive was in an ancient island monastery. It was a place that was cut off from the world for a thousand years. Now that monastery is empty.”