Seeing Red (9 page)

How was he going to handle this?

Immediately after Ellis squealed and threw her arms around Nate’s neck, she realized she was behaving like a twelve-year-old.

She was thankful Nate’s response to seeing her seemed equally unchecked; she felt just a little less foolish when he set her back down on her own two feet.

Looking into those stormy eyes, her senses began to register that this was no longer the boy she’d known but a man grown in height and breadth, mature ruggedness replacing boyish good looks.

He had a crescent-shaped scar near the corner of his left eye that hadn’t been there fifteen years ago. His neck was lean and corded; she could see his pulse in the artery beneath the surface of his skin. He’d always been muscular, but the solidness under her hands had felt completely unfamiliar to her—and undeniably masculine.

However, the look in his eyes didn’t match the exuberance of his initial reaction. She took a tiny step backward.

“I can’t believe you’re here . . . after all this time.” Even as she said the words, she realized she was overstepping. She’d been so unimportant in his life that he’d disappeared without a word, had left and never sent so much as a postcard.

“Jake tells me you’re an elementary teacher.”

“Yes. Fourth grade.” Sending a quick glance Mr. J’s way, she wondered if he’d kept in touch with Nate over the years. She’d never asked after those first weeks when she’d bugged the man day and night, asking if he’d heard from Nate.

Nate’s mother had moved away from Belle Island the year after Nate disappeared. As far as Ellis knew, no one had heard from her either.

“Good.” Nate nodded. “That’s good.” In the lull that followed, he stared at her, looking rather ambivalent. Back in the day, they’d never had an awkward moment, could talk about anything. But the years had robbed them of easy conversation.

She asked the first innocuous question that popped into her mind. “How’s your mother?”

Nate said softly, “She died eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Ellis hadn’t really known Nate’s mother. She did know what the town had said about her: that she was “loose” (which, now that Ellis was grown, she knew could mean anything from prostitution to wearing an indecent neckline), that she was white trash and let Nate run wild. Ellis had ignored the comments. This town had also said a lot of unkind and untrue things about Nate back then.

“Laura’s dead too.” Only after the words were out did Ellis realize that it was an utterly insensitive way to break the news.

No surprise registered in his face. “I know.”

Had he only discovered it when he’d arrived back in Belle Island? Had he maintained contact with someone in town? That idea stung, salt in a wound she thought had healed long ago. Ellis had shared his grief, had stood by him when others had not. And he’d cut her cleanly from his life.

She wanted to know everything: Why had he left so abruptly, so mysteriously? Why had he abandoned Laura before all hope was gone? And there was that small, needy voice deep inside that asked,
Why did you leave me? I needed you even more than Laura did.

But she only asked, “When did you find out?”

He held her gaze. “The day she died.”

“How?”
Tell me you were closer to someone else, someone you trusted more than you did me.

Nate hadn’t had a lot of friends. He’d started working at the stables when he was eleven years old. The few friends he did have had distanced themselves after Laura’s attack. All except Ellis.

He didn’t look her in the eye when he said, “I kept in touch.”

“With Mr. J?” If so, why didn’t Mr. J ever let her know Nate was alive and safe?

“Yeah.” The look on his face said there was more he wasn’t saying.

“Why didn’t you come back for her funeral?” Didn’t he know what people said about him when he’d disappeared right after Alexander’s guilty verdict?

“Would it have made a difference?” The cynical tone in his voice was accompanied by an aggressive thrust of his chin.

“To me.” She felt a flutter of panic, of raw vulnerability, as if she’d stepped onto a busy street buck naked. She wasn’t an unschooled teen any longer. She couldn’t just blurt out her innermost feelings to him as she’d once done.

He looked into her eyes, and her feeling of overexposure intensified. Her skin blazed with the heat of embarrassment, and she momentarily forgot to breathe. Even so, she found herself leaning closer to him, toward his solid strength, toward the memory of his protection.

Finally, he said, “For that, I’m sorry.” His eyes said he meant it.

Ellis swallowed, her gaze welded to his. There were so many more questions she wanted to ask. But her voice had stopped working.

“Them horses ain’t gonna let themselves out to pasture,” Mr. J said, breaking the mesmerizing force field that bound Ellis to Nate. She blinked and finally drew a clear breath as she watched Mr. J walk around them and through the open door. “Some of us got work to do.” He started down the broad front steps, mumbling about “sleeping dogs” and “pecks of trouble.”

Ellis looked back at Nate. “He called you ‘boss’?”

With a half-smile, Nate said, “Jake’s idea of humor.”

She nodded, even though she’d never detected a humorous bone in the old guy’s body.

“When did you arrive?” she asked. It was a nice, uncomplicated question, one that she would ask any acquaintance, she assured herself. One that didn’t require dredging up the past.

“Late yesterday,” he said.

She waited for him to elaborate.

He didn’t.

“So,” she said in a tone she hoped sounded casual, “what brings you to Belle Island?”

Nate stepped out onto the porch. His gaze moved from the marshy river to pastures and the woodlands that flanked the house. His eyes shone with that contagious passion she remembered from her first days at the stables.

He gave an offhanded lift of a shoulder, dismissing the past fifteen silent years the same way she had. “Had some time off. Wanted to see Jake again.” He drew a deep breath. “This place . . . it holds good memories.” He shifted his gaze to her; she could feel it probing. There seemed to be the slightest edge of challenge when he said, “Glad to see you still come here. You loved it almost as much as I did.”

It was true. And she’d cut this place out of her life, just as Nate had cut her from his. Up until yesterday, when she’d seen Paco again, she hadn’t realized what a gaping hole it had left in her soul. But she wasn’t going to admit that she’d been scared away by the very memories that had drawn him back.

It was different for Nate. This had been the one place where he’d been respected, where he’d been more than a penniless kid from the trailer park.

“How long are you staying?” she asked, wondering only briefly if she was telling a lie by not correcting Nate’s misconception that she still came here regularly.

“I’m really not sure.” He didn’t offer more. In fact, he was retreating again.

He turned his back on her, bending down to gather up the tools lying on the porch floor.

She started toward the steps. “Well, I guess I’ll be going. It was good to see you.”

He lifted his chin in acknowledgment, but to her disappointment, he didn’t engage her in further conversation. It was as if he really was the stranger the change in his physical appearance said he was. That fact made Ellis strangely sad, as if he’d deserted her all over again.

She walked down the steps, loneliness gnawing at the edges of her soul. The wind gently rustled in the treetops. Why did she suddenly feel so alone?

“Ellis,” Nate called.

Her falling spirit fluttered upward. She turned and looked up at him. “Yes?”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone I’m here.”

He didn’t wait for her agreement. He turned and entered the house, closing the newly hung door behind him.

She lingered there on the steps for a moment, listening to the sound of his footsteps through the open windows.

Nate sat on the broad staircase inside the plantation house and fisted his hands in his hair. He pulled until it felt his entire scalp would lift, but his scalp and the thoughts running under it remained vividly intact.

He hadn’t expected this rush of—he couldn’t quite name what seeing Ellis up close had done to him. She’d always been an amazing person. But now her body had caught up—and surpassed—that beautiful personality. He’d known she’d changed, had seen it two years ago when he’d watched her teach her class in the park. Still, he hadn’t been prepared for the dynamic impact of facing—and touching—the whole package of the grown woman.

When she’d thrown her arms around him, it had felt as if he’d never left. He’d never measured his words with her as he did with everyone else. Of all the people he’d known, only Ellis had seen Nate’s unguarded side. It had been a risk he’d taken only once. And his friendship had been detrimental to her in the end.

Ellis had been pure. After Laura had been attacked, there was no way he could remain close to Ellis and not taint her with this town’s perception of him; a perception that lingered long after Hollis Alexander had been arrested for the crime. Nate supposed it had been there all along. But the quiet whispers he’d always been able to shut out became deafening shouts of accusation after Laura had been found, bloody and broken, on the beach.

It had been better for Ellis that he’d left. She would have stood by him, he knew. And she would have suffered for it.

He sat on the stairs for a long moment, eyes closed.

Who was he kidding? He dropped his head back and stared at the ornate plastered ceiling. His leaving Belle Island hadn’t been that simple . . . or that noble.

He’d been a coward. A fact that was all too easy to forget when he’d seen the unabashed joy in Ellis’s eyes the instant she recognized him. Which she’d done surprisingly quickly. He’d left here a boy and returned a man who’d seen too much, learned never to trust anyone, and knew things that made a peaceful night’s sleep impossible. The changes in him had to be every bit as visible as those he saw in her.

Although she’d been fourteen when he’d left, she was now several inches taller—having grown into those coltish legs—and had developed curves that had felt unfamiliar when he hugged her against him. The beauty he’d seen masked by youth had emerged; she was a woman who would draw sidelong looks from every man she passed.

But the most startling change had been her eyes, even in that initial moment of delighted recognition. They were no longer the eyes of an optimistic young girl. The mossy depths were cautious, guarded. The Ellis who had thrown her full heart into everything she did, the girl who’d been led by her passions, was gone. It was evident to him, because he’d held her spirit in his memory for all these years, constant, never changing. He supposed someone who’d been by her side day after day might not even notice the change.

It made him sad to see it. Her exuberance had been the fire that lit her soul.

Even throughout those horrible months—even when she’d shunned the stables and had trouble sleeping—even then, she’d still been Ellis; sparky, vibrant Ellis. Willing to defy her parents and meet secretly with him.

How would he have survived those months without her?

Nate scrubbed his hands roughly over his face. He’d thought he could come here and approach this as he would any other operation. This onslaught of feelings was not in the plan. Feeling led to mistakes. Mistakes to disaster.

He’d risked a lot by coming to the plantation, especially now. He’d be a weak son of a bitch to let his emotions risk the outcome.

He was here for one reason only. And he’d better remember it.

The sound of Ellis’s car starting came through the open windows. He kept himself planted until the crunching of her tires on the sandy lane faded completely from his hearing. Then he gathered up his tools and headed out to the main stable.

He was hanging up the hammer when he sensed Jake behind him. Nate kept about his business, ignoring the old man, wiping the hinge grease from the tools and putting each item back in its proper place. That was one of the things he liked about being here; he could always count on finding things where they should be, no last-minute scrambles, no surprises.

“You tell her?” Jake asked.

Nate drew a deep breath. Trying to ignore Jake was like a buried ham bone trying to ignore a starving hound.

“No.”

Jake harrumphed.

Nate didn’t turn around.

“It’d make things easier, you know.”

With a glare over his shoulder, Nate said, “I know what I’m doing. No one is to know I’m here.”

“Don’t know if you noticed or not, but you wasn’t invisible. Ellis knows you’re here.”

“She won’t tell anyone.”

“How’d you reckon that?”

“I asked her not to.”

“
Pssst,
” Jake scoffed. “You don’t know women a’tall, then.”

“I know her.”

Jake walked out, mumbling about unnecessary carryingson.

Nate called after him, “Gas up the boat. I’ll need it tonight.”