Forbidden Dreams (6 page)

How strange that he was the first person to come out of her childhood like this. How protected she—they—had been the past twenty years, how secure they’d become, thinking they had only to guard against the obvious dangers. And now, because one man remembered a summertime friend from long ago, was all the fine security they’d built in danger of coming apart?

“Imagine,” she said, “your remembering me and my crabs all these years.”

“Imagine my remembering your saying you’d marry me.” His dark eyes danced. “Of course, that was the first time a woman ever proposed marriage to me. I guess that’s not something a guy forgets.”

“How many women have proposed marriage to you since?”

He shrugged. “No so very many.”

“I’m sure a few have wanted to.”
Oh! How gauche!
Shell would have given a lot to be able to recall those words.

He looked away, and the name Sharba suddenly hung between them like a piece of soiled laundry, ruining the mood of camaraderie they’d been building with their memories. Had Sharba proposed marriage to him? Shell wondered. Had he proposed marriage to her? Why had Sharba left, and if she ever came back, would Jason O’Keefe reach out to her as he had the night before, clinging to her as if he’d hold her forever? And, dammit, what did it matter?

“You know,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence, “it’s funny, but when you first arrived last night, I thought there was something familiar about you. It drove me crazy, especially once I knew your name and still couldn’t make the link between a vaguely familiar face and the reality of a man named Jason O’Keefe. How could we have been such good friends and known so little about each other—such as last names?”

“I knew yours, but maybe you never needed to know mine because we were kids, and children are very accepting of one another. They don’t require details. For instance, I had no idea that summer that I was playing with a little heiress.”

Though his face became slyly thoughtful, his eyes laughed secretly as he said, “Hmm, now that I think of it, maybe I should demand my rights as your affianced husband. After all, if you refuse, it could be considered breach of promise. Might be worth a great deal.”

Her jaw tensed. “I’d say that no court in the land would expect me to uphold a promise I’d made before I was old enough to cross the street alone.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Worse luck.” He waggled his brows. “Damn. I’ve never tried blackmail as a means of courting a lady.”

She relaxed. He might think of her as an heiress, but she sensed he wasn’t after money. “No? Why, you poor, deprived man.” As if poking a sore tooth, she added, “We’ll have to find you one with something to hide.”

Her words elicited not a glimmer of secret knowledge on his face, or guilt, or even a spark of suspicion that maybe she could have something to hide. Either he was a superb actor or he truly did suspect nothing about her mother’s identity.

Shell breathed much easier. It really was all right, she told herself. Leaning forward, she folded her arms on the table. “So, tell me where you’ve been since we were children. What kinds of exciting things have you done? You wanted to be an explorer, if I remember correctly. Tell me about your life.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been lots of places, done lots of things, though I was more what you’d call an adventurer than an explorer. Still, it’s been an … interesting life, so far.”

“Earning scars,” she said quietly, not asking but letting him know she’d like to understand why and how he had them, if he wanted to share that information.

He met her gaze steadily. “That too,” he said, declining to go into detail about them. “But no more. Now I spend my life—”

He broke off as the dog leaped to her feet with a ferocious “Woof!” toenails scrabbling as she flung herself toward the door even before it was swept open and a red-faced man burst through. He was dripping from the brim of his grubby canvas hat to the toes of his equally grubby boots. As Jase watched, his hackles suddenly up and stiff, Shell, clearly unmindful of his condition, jumped to her feet with the same alacrity as the dog and flung herself into the man’s bear hug.

“Shell!” the man exclaimed. “Wasn’t that a terrible night? I’m sorry I couldn’t get back. Are you all right?”

J
ASE SAT RIGID, STRUGGLING
not to leap up and pop the man a good one right between the eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He had no right to object. Still, he didn’t mind a bit when Shell wriggled out of that embrace.

“Ned, I’m all right,” she said. “What do you mean, you couldn’t get back? Were you away?”

“Yes,” he said, jamming a hand through his hair and dislodging a confetti storm of sawdust. “Nola and I went into Sechelt last night to have dinner with her sister. We couldn’t get back because of all the trees across the
road
.”

“Across the road?” Shell laughed. “Have you seen my front deck?”

“I saw. And the crick’s washed out too. Took the bridge with it. There’s a Jeep with California plates”—Ned’s tone became scathing— “ass-end up right in the middle of it, and …” As Shell stepped aside, Ned appeared to have noticed Jase for the first time. “Oh. Yours, huh?”

Holding the blanket around himself, Jase stood and limped to Shell’s side. He put a hand on her shoulder in a foolishly proprietary gesture. It pleased him to note that he was nearly a head taller than the other man. “Mine,” he said, not even trying to put any friendliness into his voice. He caught the look of startled surprise Shell bounced between him and the man she’d called Ned.

Shell bit her lip, not knowing whether to laugh, cry, or get mad. What the hell was going on here? On Ned’s part, of course, he was responding to those California license plates, but what could account for Jase’s prickly behavior? That icy stare should have frozen Ned’s wet clothes right to his frame.

“Jase,” she said, “this is Ned Mason, my next door neighbor. Ned, meet Jason O’Keefe, an old friend from long ago.”

Ned glared. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jase said, and Shell almost expected him to add,
Wanna make somethin’ of it?
Quickly, she said, “Ned, you’re soaked from head to toe! What happened to you?”

“Told you. Crick’s flooded and the bridge is gone. I discovered that on my way home this morning. With that wind last night, I figured it’d be bad, so as soon as it was daylight, I headed out. Lucky I had a chain saw in the back of the truck. I had to cut my way through. There were nineteen trees down in the mile and a half between the highway and the crick, and when I got to the bridge, that is where it used to be, I had to find a way across—most of it wading. That’s why it took me so long to get here.”

He scowled from her to Jase and back. “Did you think I’d abandoned you?”

“Oh, Ned, of course not. Nineteen trees? You must be worn out as well as soaked. Go on home and change, then come back and have some coffee and something to eat. Your house will be cold.”

“Uh-uh.” Ned shook his head. “Nola and Grace made sure I got fed before I left the village this morning, and I’ve still got too much to do outside. The arbutus isn’t the only tree we lost out here by the beach. There’s a couple down between here and your—” He cast a suspicious glance at Jase, who had gone back to his chair and had his foot propped up again. “Between here and Ms. Harris’s place,” he went on, “and I want to get them out first thing, keep that path clear.”

Shell glanced at her watch. “Mom won’t even be up yet,” she said, and grinned. “Don’t go using a chain saw over by their house, or you’ll have Kathleen outside throwing rocks at you. Their house is okay.” She gestured out a side window that gave a view around the shore of the semi-circular bay and another, larger house, with wisps of smoke coming from its chimney. “See? Fully intact. I checked that first thing. I haven’t had a minute to get out and see how yours fared, though. I just got up.”

Ned shrugged and looked at his own watch. “Yeah. I guess you’re right about wakin’ up your mom. I’ve been out of bed so long, it feels like noon already. My house will be fine. Farther back from the water and in a bigger clearing.”

He cast another look at Jase and his blanket, his sleep-tousled hair. “I managed to hook a bag and another case out of the back of that Jeep. Want ’em?”

Jase’s face lit up. “They’re here?”

Ned opened the door and tossed inside a soggy looking, battered leather tote; then, with more respect, handed Shell what looked like a laptop computer case. Behind her, Jase breathed out a long sigh of relief. He took the computer from her and set it on the table, wiping its case dry with one corner of his blanket.

“I called Nola from up on the highway where there’s cell service and told her to call what’s-er-name,” Ned informed Shell, “that assistant of yours, and let her know you were stranded out here. I guess she can run the store okay for you.”

“Of course she can. Ned, thanks.” Again wet as he was, Shell hugged him.

“Not very friendly, is he?” Jase asked after Ned had left. “At least toward other men. He seemed pretty pally with you.”

Shell heard the hard tension in his voice and stared at him in disbelief. “I’ve known Ned Mason since I was ten years old. He and his wife work for my mother and her friend, Kathleen. He’s a handyman, a gardener, a general fixer-upper, and is invaluable besides being a damned good friend. Nola, his wife, is my mother and Kathleen’s housekeeper. He looks upon himself as sort of an honorary uncle to me, I think.”

Jase felt chastened. “Oh. Well, okay.”

“Okay?” Shell planted her fists on her hips. “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Are you giving me
permission
to hug Ned?”

He bit his lip, feeling more than just mildly uncomfortable under her furious glare.
Hell, yes,
he realized,
that was exactly what I was doing, and with absolutely no right or reason. And it was crazy, as crazy as my reaction to seeing her in another man’s arms had been.
His sister Jenny called what had just inexplicably happened to him a “testosterone fit.” He’d heard her use the term with an affectionate, derisive laugh, poking her husband in his slight paunch when she said it. His brother-in-law was the jealous type.

Jase, absolutely, was not. It was simply that Shell’s eagerness to greet the other man had startled him, especially in light of the way she’d responded to his kiss only minutes before. He had not been jealous.

“No, of course I’m not giving you permission,” he said. “Sorry about that. Must have been some kind of atavistic instinct brought on by this time warp we’re in. A weird kind of need to protect an old girlfriend.”

Shell’s nostrils flared. “Time warp?”

Damn, he’d offended her again. “That’s what I thought in the night. You in that long gown with lace around the throat, the oil lamps, the rocking chair with its patchwork cushions. It was as if I’d traveled back a hundred years.” He smiled. “It was kind of a nice feeling.”

As he said it, he knew it was true. He, who had sworn, after too many tours of duty in too many primitive places, never to live again without the amenities, had felt a strange affinity for Shell Landry’s particular time warp. “But obviously,” he went on, “it made me act as if I were living a hundred years in the past.”

Shell’s anger abated with his apology, and she refilled their coffee mugs before sitting down. “Maybe you better stay out of time warps, then, if that’s what they do to you.”

Laughter lit up his eyes. “How else can I find old girlfriends if I don’t employ time travel?”

“You do a lot of it?” She grinned. “Isn’t it sort of dangerous, looking them up? Is that where you got all those scars?”

The question was a definite challenge, but Jase refused to answer it. He’d rather not discuss his scars. And oddly enough, he realized that as long as he remained trapped in her time warp, he’d rather not have her know what he did now, either. Too many people, men and women alike, wanted to be friends with someone they saw as having a little bit of fame. It would be nice, he thought, if Shell could be his friend again simply because she liked him.

But … it was dumb to go looking for friendship in a place where he had no intention of lingering, wasn’t it? He glanced out the window beside him. It revealed a sweep of grass littered with broken evergreen boughs and twigs, a wall of tangled brush, and a sliver of bright blue ocean with frothy whitecaps on it.

It was the first time in more than five years he had looked out a window and not seen another building, and he wasn’t sure he liked the feeling of isolation it gave him.

Isolation, the loneliness it bred. That was what was really dangerous. It led a man to do foolish, ill-considered things.

Realizing she was still waiting for an answer about his scars, he glanced back at her. “I could have gotten them from old girlfriends. Old girlfriends can be dangerous.”

After a moment she said, “I’m waiting to learn why you looked up this ‘old girlfriend,’ Jase, and why you suddenly remembered me and went to the trouble of seeking me out after more than twenty years.”

He sighed. “Are you going to be offended when I confess that I didn’t really remember you? That for a long time I’d forgotten you and the summer we played together, until I ran across a picture of you? Even then, I probably wouldn’t have made a point of hunting you down if I hadn’t realized, later, that you were exactly the person I needed, the only one who could help me with something I … have to do.”

Again, she tensed. She tried to hide it by sounding nonchalant. “Really? And what is that?” Jase looked at her, then down at the table where he had spilled the sugar what seemed like a long time ago. He pushed it into a small heap with the side of his thumb.

Now, he knew, was the time to trust her instincts—and his own. She undoubtedly loved her grandmother as much as he had loved his. Surely, she’d be willing to help. Especially if it meant saving her grandmother from a harm greater than betrayal. Better, he thought, for Evelyn Landry to feel simply betrayed, than betrayed and bereft of a large portion of capital.

But, and this was the cruncher, would Shell insist on running immediately to her father with what he had to tell her?