Under the Boardwalk: A Dazzling Collection of All New Summertime Love Stories (59 page)

"Are you feeling better?" he asked.

"A little. My back and shoulders aren't quite as tight."

"Good." Jeremy dribbled a bit down the back of her leg to the calf, and she shivered under it. With sure hands, he rubbed the colorless remedy into the skin, marveling at the strength and shape of the legs right there under his nose.

Purgatory
, he thought.
This must be what purgatory is like
.

"Okay. Flip side." He tried to force a lightness he did not feel into his voice. How to touch her and not want to make love to her again?

"I think I can take it from here." Jody rolled over and sat up. "Thank you, Jeremy. I'm beginning to feel less like a burnt offering and more like a human being."

He didn't bother to protest.

"I'll just do your shoulders and your face," he told her, "and you can do… well, you can do the rest of you."

He watched silently as she eased the liquid onto her arms, onto her chest, onto her abdomen. She had just reached her hips when he decided he couldn't watch anymore.

"I'm going to run back to my room to get a few things," he told her. "And I'm going to stop in the restaurant and pick up some cool drinks, some ice, and some hot water and tea bags, then I'll be back."

"What's the tea for?"

"Are you aware that your eyes are half closed? If we don't do something tonight, they might be swollen shut by tomorrow morning. We may be able to avoid that if we pack tea bags on your eyes now. And I'm going to stop back at the drugstore. One bottle of aloe is not going to be enough."

He paused, looking down at her, then added, "I'm not sure that we shouldn't make a trip to the nearest emergency room."

"For a little sunburn? No, I'll be fine tomorrow. But Jeremy, you don't have to stay here tonight," she told him, although she wished that he would. "I'm afraid I'm not much company."

"I promise to let you make it up to me." He kissed the top of her head, about the only spot on her body that wasn't glistening with aloe.

"You're very good to me, Jeremy." She watched, through swollen eyelids, as he unlocked the door.

"You have no idea of how good I intend to be to you. But first, let's see what we can do about this sunburn."

The note on the pillow read,
Gone for coffee. Be back in 5
.

Jody sat on the edge of the king-sized bed and wondered how she could avoid letting him back in.

Despite the fact that her face had been lathered with aloe all through the night, her mouth was still swollen, her chin was still blistered, and her eyelids, while not swollen shut, were puffed. She'd shrieked when she'd caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. How could she face Jeremy with her face so distorted?

The doorknob rattled and she ducked under the pillow. There was no way he was going to see just how ugly she was.

"Jody?" he asked softly.

"Go away," she grumbled miserably into the mattress.

"Jody, what's wrong?"

"I look like a ghoul. I'm not leaving this room. Ever. Go away."

"Sooner or later, you're going to get pretty hungry, you know."

"Promise me that, if I starve to death, you'll make them cover my face before they bring the body out."

"Jody, it's not as bad as all that."

"Yes, it is. I thought you said that the aloe would fix it."

"I said the aloe would help it heal. If your skin was already badly burned, it can't reverse that. What it can do is help it to heal quickly. Open the door," he said patiently.

"No. I can't let you see me like this, Jeremy."

"I already did."

"You didn't!"

"Sorry, but you were right there, next to me in the bed when I woke up this morning."

Jody got out of bed and padded on bare feet to the door to let him in.

Jeremy placed the bag down on the dresser and began to unload its contents. "Coffee, orange juice, an English muffin, and some cantaloupe."

"Jeremy, this is very sweet of you," she said, trying to keep her head down.

Was it possible to eat with your head at such an angle? How did one drink coffee without raising one's head?

With the fingers of one hand he tilted her face up to his. When she tried to turn away, he stopped her, saying, "We might as well get this over with now." He peered closely. "My, my, those blisters are really impressive. And I didn't expect that the swelling would be quite so bad this morning; too bad we didn't get the aloe on earlier."

She pulled away and averted her eyes.

"The blisters will heal, Jody, and with any luck, the swelling will be down by the end of the day," he told her gently, hoping he was right.

"I look hideous."

"If you say so." He turned his back and opened one of the bags. Handing her a cup of coffee, he asked, "Would you rather have breakfast out by the pool? There are a few tables in the shade, so you won't have to worry about getting more sun."

She put the cup down, wanting to protest. She'd never felt uglier in her life. But here was Jeremy, holding out his hand to her.

"I can't believe you'd want to be seen in public with me."

He shook his head. She was, in his eyes, beautiful, the blisters and puffy eyes inconsequential. How did you make a woman understand a thing like that?

"And I hurt. I really hurt." Tears welled in her eyes. "I never knew that sunburn could hurt so much."

"Jody, if you are still in that much pain, I think you should go to the nearest hospital."

"Jeremy, this is sunburn. I'd feel like an idiot going to the hospital for sunburn."

"You'll feel like a bigger idiot if you get really sick, Jody. And people do get really sick from sunburn. You could have sun poisoning."

She sat up and looked at him through slightly swollen eyelids.

"I really think you should let me take you."

Reluctantly, and with the greatest of care, Jody swung her legs over the side of the bed. She gathered elastic-waist shorts and an old, oversized tee-shirt from her suitcase, and walked to the bathroom.

As she closed the door, she said over one shoulder, "Just give me five minutes to get dressed."

The day was overcast, the fog thick as they went from her room to his car, and Jody was thankful for the fact that she needn't fight the sun's rays that morning. She slid cautiously into Jeremy's car, wincing as her sensitive thighs met the leather seat.

They followed the signs for Island Memorial Hospital, just four blocks away. As the sedan rounded the corner to the emergency room entrance, shrill sirens split the morning calm, and Jeremy stopped to allow an ambulance to precede him into the parking lot. He pulled into the nearest parking spot just as the first ambulance was followed by a second, then a third.

"What do you suppose that's all about?" Jody shifted in her seat to watch the last of the ambulances pull into the line that had formed at the doorway to the emergency room.

"Stay here," Jeremy told her, "and I'll find out."

He was back in minutes, his face white.

"There's been a really bad accident out on the Garden State Parkway. A tractor trailer jackknifed, and there was a six-car pileup because of the fog. Apparently there were a lot of severe injuries. You can't get near the emergency room right now. I think there's another hospital farther up the coast, though. We can try that one."

"I'll bet they're jammed, too. There are only three ambulances here, Jeremy. There must be others on their way to every hospital within miles." She nodded her head in the direction of the ambulances that were lined up, and the flurry of activity that had erupted. "Compared to
that
, a little sunburn seems pretty insignificant."

"Jody, what you have is more than just a little sunburn."

"There's no way that I would expect anyone to tend to me in the midst of what those people must be going through. Let's just go back to the motel, Jeremy, and try a little more aloe." Jody shifted uncomfortably in her seat and tried to smile.

One possibility nagged Jeremy all the way back to her motel room.

It nagged him as he watched Jody walk across the room on swollen feet and smile at him ruefully as she eased onto the side of the bed.

It nagged him as he watched Jody try to sip coffee between swollen lips, and his insides twisted, knowing that she was in pain.

It nagged him as he bit his bottom lip pensively, knowing he had a choice to make, right here and now. Jeremy had hoped that the visit to the hospital would have provided relief for her discomfort, but now, with the hospital personnel concentrating on patients with more immediate, more critical concerns, Jeremy had to face the fact that he had one option left.

Help was less than an hour away, if he was man enough to take that one giant step backwards into his past.

His heart turned over in his chest, and he knew that there was, after all, really no choice to be made. She was hurting, and there was only one person that he knew for certain could help her.

Miz Tuesday, the older-than-the-hills healer from deep in the Pines, could heal wounds in a fashion that never left scars. In his youth, Jeremy had seen Miz Tuesday set bones and cure everything from pneumonia to snake bites with concoctions that had been passed down through generations of healers.

Surely, Miz Tuesday could treat Jody's sunburn, could take away her pain.

Assuming, of course, that Miz Tuesday was still alive.

And if his own wounds were opened, well, he would just have to deal with it, as he always had.

The drive was not a long one, but Jeremy was numbly aware of every mile, every turn in the highway. It wasn't until he pulled off the main road onto the first of the more narrow country lanes that his senses began to come alive. Sights and sounds, smells, some long forgotten, all but overwhelmed him. Forced to slow down once he hit the dirt roads, he found himself surrounded by a half-dozen varieties of pine and as many of oak. Here and there he stopped momentarily to look around, but never spoke. Jody sat quietly, watching his eyes, knowing that wherever he was taking her, he was paying a toll that she had yet to understand. She suspected that before the day had ended, she would learn.

We're going into the Pines," she said finally as the forest deepened around them.

"Yes." He nodded.

"There aren't as many trees as I would have thought."

Jody said. "I always imagined the Pines to be thick with trees and densely overgrown."

"Fires are very common here," he said, sounding detached. "Plants that can't adapt, don't survive. That's why there is so little diversity of plant life here. Some are structurally better insulated from heat than others. Some are better adapted genetically to the conditions. Some seeds germinate more quickly when heated or when they raff onto the bare soil left behind after a fire. Some produce root sprouts that grow more quickly after being exposed to intense heat. Several of the pines that thrive here—the pitch pine, for example—have thick bark and can send up new shoots from the base if the top of the tree is killed."

His voice had taken on the flat monotone of a tour guide who had recited his lines a time or two too many, but she let him continue, since talking seemed to be distracting him from whatever it was that he was trying to avoid winking about.