Spirit Lake (12 page)

She closed her eyes against her own confusion. She should be angry. Here he was again making promises. Her heart wanted to burst from the ache, and yet her emotions sizzled like never before—even hotter than she remembered with him. This wanting him was wrong, dead wrong and dangerous, but she saw a man fighting for his very breath. For life. For a chance at redemption.

When his lips caught the shell of her ear, her breathing grew ragged along with her common sense. He needed more than a shoulder to cry on. She wondered if it was possible to make up for lost years during a single moment in a musty attic. She tilted her head, pressed her lips against his neck and drank of his heat.

“I hated the loneliness, too. I hate it now when I forget to be strong and it steals over me. Cole, it will get better. I promise. The black-and-white world evolves into rainbows eventually. Trust me."

A large hand tucked her even closer to him. Heat and ice coming together, resistence melting.

She listened to his heartbeat and to her own voice of reason. He was a lost man driven to find surcease from the ache. She should run to find her hiding places, but her legs would not respond.

His mouth found hers and she became as lost as he, transcending time with him. His breathing spilled onto her face in jagged rhythms, but she remembered the breeze on a hot summer's day. Her hand caught his long hair, fingers recalling the soft strands of timothy grass cushioning their ardor back then.

He was a rock to lean into, his chest and shoulders massive, warm and drenched with an inviting earthy, woodland smell. Her soul felt in need of rest against such a rock. Her back arched to close the gap between their bodies.

A growing thunder of heartbeats echoed within the attic.

His tongue darted into her mouth, exploring, rendering her to a delicate state, making her want to taste of him more, as if she'd been thirsty all her life and he was a clear, cool stream.

She attempted to shut the window in her heart she'd opened for him. Dangerous as a storm blowing through, he could turn her heart inside out again, then leave destruction behind for her to clean up.

She teetered on an abyss.

He kept pulling her back.

The heat grew stronger as he deepened the kiss. Her heartbeat raced way beyond normal and into a red zone, and way beyond what she'd ever experienced even with the Cole who lay with her in a meadow. This Cole was different. Strong yet vulnerable. Aching. Wanting her because of that admission. The new awareness of him bowled through her and begged her to take another look.

His lips skated in a dance across her skin. Feathering a cheekbone. Suckling an earlobe.

The years washed away and down her arms. Like opening the box of crayons, she could see rainbows again.

He lowered her with him to the floor, shedding his shirt and managing to push hers only down her shoulders before reaching their destination. When his thumb flicked apart the front hook of her lacy undergarment, heat crashed through her, tainted with the fear of the unknown. Had they ever made love?

It didn't seem possible.

This felt like the first time. Delicate. Intense.

His eyes were like the hawk, his arms like its wings, wide as the horizon and ready to swoop down and lift her into the skies. Laurel quaked inside, an itch taking up residence in her center. She could answer it by running away. Or by staying to explore.

Cole lowered himself, the hawk riding down on the drafts of jagged breathing to its prey. He nuzzled aside the curtains of hair tickling her shoulders, then the clothing to expose her.

With doubts and fear trembling below her surface, she hesitated to run, her arms pinned yet in her own clothing. Had he planned it that way?

“Cole?"

The hawk trapped his prey by tangling it in the tall, meadow grass. He held it between his talons until it succumbed.

He whispered, “All these years, I've missed this. I've remembered this."

Then he lowered himself to suckle a nipple in exquisite torture. The hawk lingered, and when a moan escaped her involuntarily, he flicked his tongue repeatedly across her ever-tightening bud with the power of rapid wings beating at air currents.

Her heartbeat pounded out of control, her breathing growing so deep that it drew his attention to her heaving breasts. His eyes held a fire in the center of their darkness and yet he waited above her.

He was offering her the choice. Leap away from the fire and run into the darkness, or give in to the hawk.

Her soul reminded her how tiring it could be to struggle against the tall meadow grass, how undignified it was to deny the natural order of things. Her heart reminded her of how lonely and empty that house was inside her.

Did she dare feel this wild again?

Why, with him now, did she think about believing in a future?

She drew in air filled with his spice and the memory of clover and sundrenched earth beneath her. She knew the itch threading through her veins now would never go away of its own accord. So like a small bird, Laurel arched her back, and closed her eyes in repose to welcome what her hawk must do. What she wanted.

In a frenzied capture, they satisfied great hungers. They explored, skin against skin, one heart in syncopation with the other. They borrowed time, not knowing if they could ever be together long enough to pay back this happiness.

Atop the soft flannel of her blouse and his shirt, in their own nest, Laurel forgot that loving could be dangerous.

Chapter 7

THEIR LOVEMAKING was like a brushfire sweeping to the edge of the lake. What started in tender fury found it had no place to go.

Both Laurel and Cole disengaged from the last kiss without a word, though Laurel could not quell her ragged heartbeat or stop her eyes from watching him or measuring his every graceful move.

He tugged on his shirt too quickly, she thought. Her lips could still taste the salt of his skin, the bubbling warmth of the flesh over his pounding heart.

She struggled to breathe when he reached over to slip the top button on the front of her blouse back into place. His obvious hurry to obliterate any evidence of what they'd done sparked confusion inside Laurel.

Why had she succumbed? Why did she already wonder if there would be a next time to succumb?

He'd allowed himself a full range of emotions with her, from sorrow to rage to tender love and tears. When he let down his guard, he was a complicated man. Something she'd never before experienced with him. Certainly not long ago. She was outright attracted to this man. Her body wept to be in his arms. Her mind gloried in the memory of his gutteral whispers, the shared thoughts of needing each other.

His sigh stirred the air. “I'm sorry. I'll leave right away, get to D.C. and work from there."

Panic ripped her. He wanted to forget their slip from grace, their taste of each other.

Her mind raced, confused. What about his brother? The evidence?

Raking his hair back into place, he averted his gaze from her, then twisting around, took stock of the attic.

She sensed he hadn't found what he'd come for.

He reminded her of a lone bear in spring, hungry, thrashing about in the woodland on a search for sustenance, but disoriented with no clear direction. Laurel could not run from that plea for help, even if it was dangerous.

She had to be honest with him, no matter how much it made her stomach ball into a knot just now. “I took what I needed, too. If you're even thinking about being embarrassed—"

His soft smile robbed her of breath. She shoved her blouse back into her jeans.

Adjusting his stance to relieve his bad leg, he said, “There was a time I had no worries. I'd give anything to feel that again."

The attic smelled musty again, old. It made her tired. Looking into his eyes beseeching her in the soft light, she allowed, “All I am, all I do for my job, is worry. Constant worry is a lonely thing. Find a way out of it."

The eyes softened, the lines around them relaxed, and his smile rose like the sun. “I'm glad I have you to talk with. Laurel, you're a fine person."

His tall frame loomed over her, wrapping her tight against him until she could feel nothing but the oneness of their warmth flowing back and forth.

Her heart fluttered. She breathed in the earthy tang about him. “We'd all like to be young again for a few moments now and then. To be free, with the sun on our face, and nothing planned beyond that feeling of sublime warmth."

She hugged him, and he hugged her back.

She committed the elegant simplicity of it to memory.

When she sat down on a chair to put her hiking boots back on, he knelt down and began lacing the hooks for her. “It's more than recapturing youth,” he said. “My dad would say it's a marketing thing. It's about us wanting to be heroes, but losing our audience. What does a hero do when he has no audience? Without one, he has nobody to play to, like an actor on a stage without anyone to please."

“Heroes sure don't have it easy."

“No, Laurel, they don't."

Laurel fought the urge to dig her hands into his hair and to bring his lips back up to hers. This was the old Cole, the solicitous one, the kind and charming man and she could fall for him fast. If it weren't for something bothering her.

“You always liked the easy life,” she ventured, “but when we grow up, nobody respects people who get things too easily."

His confused look threw bedlam into her heart.

Stiffening, he stopped lacing her boot. “I'm sorry,” he said for the second time, “but what's that supposed to mean? I made love to you because, ah, hell, forget it."

Lumbering up, he shot an expletive into the air and steadied himself on a chair.

She bit at her lower lip, not wanting to talk about what they'd just shared, and yet, it was there. Still, they had to disengage, to give each other permission to move on. “I'm making a mess of this. You're trying to be nice, trying to help us over the embarrassment of making love like hot teenagers again—"

“And all I'm doing is bringing back bad memories."

“No,” she said, surprising herself. “There were good things you did, but that was then. It's ... nostalgia. And that's how we should keep things between us."

A flicker sparked in his eyes. “What was good back then for you?"

She thought a moment. “The way you listened to me talk with your quirky smile on your face. You seemed so absorbed in me, as if I were ... special, though I know now you were only plotting new crazy trouble to get into."

He chuckled. “You were smart. I was enthralled, jealous. I knew nothing about fishing and you knew the difference between a plug and a fly. Though I admit you were the cutest thing in the county and that may have been influenced my attention factor."

Heat prickled up her neck to her cheekbones. She should be wary of this silly talk, and yet, it brought sweetness to the air they breathed.

He crouched down again before her and continued lacing up her boots. She let him.

She felt as if they'd walked part way across the bridge from the past and could now see the other side for the first time.

His smile was almost quirky. “Remember those boat rides?"

“You were careless and stupid,” she said, but the memory brought a sigh. “We went so fast it sucked the air out of my mouth."

“And you got bugs in your teeth."

“Did not."

“Did too,” he said and she almost giggled. He plunged on. “The best was that time in the boat when we sprayed that couple of tourists all decked out in those beer can hats and matching plaid outfits. They'd shoplifted the rubber worms."

Laughter whipped her insides fresh as sheets on a line in the breeze. “We hid behind the counter while they stood there sopping wet in the bait shop threatening to sue my father. He handed them the bill for the worms."

Cole laughed harder. A brilliant twinkle danced in his eyes. “And because they'd never gotten a good look at you, you hired out to them as a fishing guide that evening. They gave you a ten dollar tip."

“Which we promptly spent on more gas for the boat so we could drench our next victims,” she said, catching her breath, “though that time my dad didn't much like it. Wasn't the guy a mayor?"

Cole nodded. “You were quite the devil in those days."

“I was, wasn't I?"

Impulsively she reached out to comb through his dark hair with her fingers. It seemed thicker than she remembered. She let her hand slide down along his jawline, so firm and ruggedly stubbled with whiskers he proudly shaved in those days. To touch him now was to emerge from a dark cave into sunlight.

She pulled back her hand and got up. The late afternoon air held a chill in its shadows. “I need to tend my animals."

“Don't go yet. I want your opinion about this.” He ran his palms over the maps laid out on the table. Her mind recalled the hot feel of them roving over her body only moments before.

Again she could not resist his entreaty. She convinced herself a look at the map was harmless. “Railroad lines?"

“Yes. Mike and I had marked my railroad adventure out with big Xs on the western states and up through Wisconsin. Up until last night, I thought the last X was here in Dresden, at the house."

“But I don't see any other Xs."

“After finding the crayons, I began going over this again.” He tapped a place near Milwaukee and then Chicago. “See those tiny dots?"

She leaned closer. “Yeah. They're made in pencil."

“Mike's sharp accounting pencil. The dots go on. I almost need a magnifying glass to see them, but they go all the way to D.C."

“He wanted you to see someone there? Who? This is a break!"

“Laurel, he made these marks only days before he died. I worked on the map before that and they weren't there."

An awakening trundled ice down her spine. “This is big?"

“More than a chat with our Congress rep, I'm sure.” Then his eyes lit up. “Come with me, Laurel Lee. I have to show you something."

He grabbed her hand. They fairly tumbled down the staircases to the bottom floor. When he spotted the cooler in his way at the front door he scooped it up and gave it back to her outside.