Storm Surge (14 page)

And then, there was the whole ghost story. Paige didn’t believe in apparitions, but skepticism did not preclude having an encounter, whether a person accepted it or not. If he’d known where she was going, he might have warned her. He’d filled half a book on the tales of the stone circle, although he hadn’t experienced anything for himself when he’d gone out there to take photographs and gain a feeling for the overall ambience. Stories of hauntings had been told for years, even before Dr. Columbus had located the stones shrouded in forest growth.

Liam knew the occurrence had frightened her worse than the break-in to her cottage and the later appearance on the street of the man in possession of her bookmark. A
bookmark
. To steal such an intimate item with no monetary value had nothing to do with greed and everything to do with a personal campaign. But Paige had not recognized the man. Liam had asked Stauffer if there was a possibility he might view the photo he’d shown Paige. As far-fetched as the notion might be to some, Liam’s association with Paige might have made her a target. He needed Stauffer to recognize that fact. Liam had made arrangements to stop by the station the next day.

When he came around to what was, essentially, the front door to the cottage, despite its position facing the ocean rather than the road, Liam set the box and the beer down on the stone step. At the tide line, Paige stood gazing out to sea. Liam observed her for a minute, wondering at her stillness. Paige Waters was nothing if not a ball of energy. He rarely saw her sit still for longer than it took one thought to move on to another.

Honestly, though, how well did he know her? Sometimes he forgot they’d only met a few days ago. He didn’t know if forgetting was a good or a bad thing.

“Paige!”

She didn’t hear him. Not surprising. The tide’s roar at close range could easily drown out any noise. He trotted down the stairs to the rocky beach and crossed over to her. “Paige,” he said again when he got closer. She remained unaware of his presence. Not wanting to startle her, he walked in a wide semi-circle toward the water so he’d fall into her peripheral vision first. She turned to him slowly.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” he said. Stepping in, he leaned forward and kissed her on the side of her head. The gesture felt significant, as if they’d crossed a boundary. He was in deep shit. “Everything okay? God, Paige, your hair.” He ran his fingers through the locks behind her temple, careful not to tug on any tangles.

She brought both hands up to grip the curly mass. “What about my hair?”

“It’s adorable.” Had he actually said that? What had happened to “Keep an eye on her, Liam, and keep your fucking distance”?

She rolled her eyes. “If you say so.”

His stomach churned with the knowledge of how much he meant it, and that transported him right to something resembling panic. “I brought you a beer.” Voice sounded normal. Good.

She glanced down at his hand.

“It’s up by the door.”

“Oh.”

“I brought you something else, too.”

“What?” Her gaze lost its distance and lit up with curiosity.

“Something I found in the attic.”

She didn’t wait to hear any more, but began a brisk walk up the beach. He watched her with an idiotic smile on his face. About thirty feet away, she pivoted to look back at him. A burst of wind blew her curly chestnut mop into a shape like a dandelion seed puff around her head. Lifting her arm, she held out her hand.

“You coming?” Her fingers curled in, beckoning. He closed the distance and slipped his hand around hers, her slim digits fitting between his like the pieces of a puzzle. He didn’t want to let go.

“God help me,” he whispered. Fortunately she didn’t hear.

Paige had locked the deadbolt when she went down to the beach and handed him the key to open it while she gathered the items he’d left on the doorstep. Liam noted that the cottage had been rearranged yet again in a way he found charming. The bed was back against the wall, but angled. She’d placed the low chest on the rug over the trapdoor and set the chair beside it, like a sitting area.

“I can drive a few nails into that trapdoor if it will make you feel better,” he said.

She picked up a hammer from the kitchen counter and wagged the tool at him. “Already done. I stopped in town to grab a few things once my heart stopped racing. I have dinner if you’d like it.”

“We’ll see. First, you want to tell me again what happened today?”

She twisted the cap off the bottle and took a tentative sip of the contents. Her right eye scrunched in a lopsided squint as she took the beer’s measure. “Better,” she said with a distinct lack of conviction.

“Not everybody likes beer.”

“In general, I don’t really like alcohol.” She shrugged. “I just thought I’d give it a try. People rave about how wonderful a beer is in the summer heat.”

He shook his head. “It’s not all that hot today.”

“No.”

“Did you think it might calm you down?”

“I guess.”

He reached out, took the beer from her, and swallowed several mouthfuls before setting the nearly full bottle in the sink. “Don’t like it myself,” he said.

“Did you buy that for me?”

“I did.”

“Liam…”

“Tell me again what happened at the standing stones.”

Her demeanor altered with his request. She dragged her fingers through the mop of her hair and began to pace. “You’ve talked about these things in such a matter-of-fact manner, as if they were true. As if you’d known them to be true. Before today, Liam, I didn’t believe you at all.”

He took a seat in the single chair and crossed his arms over his chest, following her movements with his eyes.

“When you said this town had been referred to as Haunted Alcina Cove, I had all I could to do to keep from laughing.” She paused, facing him with an earnest expression. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“Go on.”

“But what I saw today… There was no human present besides me. I was alone. But I wasn’t alone. I had no doubt of that. That’s never happened to me before.”

On her third pass, he grabbed her hand and pulled her down onto his knee. She didn’t seem to notice where she’d landed. He could see her remembering the event, eyes darting from side to side, not quite focused, pupils dilating.

“Don’t be afraid, Paige.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“I’ve never seen you afraid, not even facing me in the dark when we first met.”

“Well,” she said, leaning her forehead against his, “you’re a man.”

“And as a man,” he answered, “I could have done a lot more damage than a ghost ever could.” He hadn’t realized he’d put his arms around her, but he felt her ribcage beneath his hands, her torso expanding and retreating in slow respiration. Her face pivoted until her mouth was a bare inch from his own, the warmth of her breath passing from her lips over his. He tasted the sweet-bitter flavor of hops in the moist passage of air.

“Paige.”

“I know.” She rose, moved away. “This can’t happen. Like I said this morning, I get it. And I do.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant at all, but he let it go. What he wanted to tell her was how much he craved her, every inch of her, what he wouldn’t give to lose all memory of himself deep inside her for as many minutes, hours, days as she would grant him. Sighing, he lifted his chin toward the box he’d carried over.

“That was in the attic. I think it was…well, I think it was your father’s.”

She jerked around with a small jump, staring at the box as if she thought the lid might pop open and pull her in like an element of some deep, dark magic. “What’s in it?”

“I have no idea. I only know it’s not mine. But I did see there are photographs in there.”

Her brow puckered. Still, she wouldn’t touch it. Liam rose to stand beside her, eyeing the wooden container.

“Pick it up. You need to lift the lid to find out what’s inside. That’s how it works.”

“Maybe…maybe I don’t want to know what’s in there.”

“You told me you were looking for answers from your past. I can stick the box back in the attic if you’d like.” He made to reach for it, hoping to motivate her to action. She took the bait, snatching the box from the edge of the bed where she’d set it down.

“You’re right, of course.” Climbing up onto the mattress, she kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged, contemplating the box settled against her calves for several minutes more. Liam lowered himself onto the other end of the bed, waiting. The ancient box didn’t possess any quality and might fall apart once opened. He’d delivered it, and that was all he could do. The rest was up to Paige. He didn’t enjoy lying to her. In fact, he would have preferred all the honesty she deserved. But certain falsehoods were created to protect her. He’d been forced to recognize that fact from his very first conversation with her.

Teeth set in her lip, Paige pulled her hair away from her face, circling the length of it up into a self-contained knot behind her head. She placed her hands to either end of the lid, palms flat, fingers stiff, and slowly drew it open. For what seemed a very long time, she gazed into the box without touching anything. Lashes lowered, her hooded eyes remained unreadable to him.

“Paige?”

She shook her head. With shaking fingers, she grabbed one, then another, then a whole packet of photographs, spreading them like cards on the bed.

“They’re me.”

“Yes.”

She shot him a look.

“I saw some of them, like I said. I didn’t mean to, but I did open the box. I had no idea where it had come from or whom it belonged to.” He had a sudden vision of his sister when they were children, dancing around him, chanting, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ He closed his eyes.

“They’re all photos of me. And not only from when I lived here. There are some more recent. And this—this is me at my high school prom with that dork, Ashford. Who names their son Ashford?”

He knew she was crying without looking up. He kept his gaze on the floor below his knees. A moment like this shouldn’t take place in front of someone who was little more than a stranger. He should have acknowledged that, walked out the door the moment she took the box into her hands.

“I don’t understand. I don’t
understand
. Why would my father have these? Why? Where did he get them?”

She didn’t appear to expect an answer, and he had none to give.

“I don’t understand,” she said again, quieter this time. With a flurry of motion she snatched up the photos from the bed and threw them back into the box. She shoved the container toward him. Without a word, he moved it to the floor.

Rolling, she landed on her side on the mattress and buried her face into the pillow. Liam scooted closer, curving his fingers over her upper arm. “I can go. I’ll take the key with me and lock you in.”

“No.”

“But—”

“Stay.”

The timbre of the single syllable dug like a swift, sharp knife into his abdomen. “I can’t make this go away for you, Paige.” But hadn’t he been thinking that very thing? Losing himself and all he wanted to forget in the fierce, heated act of sex with a woman he’d begun to realize meant more to him than he had any right to expect.

“You can.”

“Not—”

“For a few hours.”

A few hours. Fire rushed, molten, to his groin. He lay down, curving his body to fit around hers and pulled her close. “Paige…”

“Take off my clothes, Liam. Let’s pretend for a while that we’re real lovers.”

He stilled beside her. “For the love of God, Paige, if we do this thing together, what is it you’ll think we’ll be?”

She shrugged. He thought she might be crying again, but he couldn’t see her face. When she spoke, her voice was hushed, distant, as if she’d slipped away. “I don’t know.”

He stroked her unruly hair back from her face in an effort to see her better. “You don’t know?”

“Lovers are—people who hold each other’s hearts. Otherwise, it’s just sex.”

His lips curved. He understood now, or was starting to. It was a matter of trust. Leaning over her, he kissed her ear.

“I’m broken, Liam. That’s what I tried to say the other night. I came back to try to fix me, who I am.”

Grabbing her shoulder, he pulled her around until she lay on her back. He positioned himself over her, one arm to either side, looking her in the eye. “Sweetheart, you can’t fix the past. You can make amends, but you can’t repair what’s gone. It’s not tangible. The past is not a physical object. You can, however, reshape what it’s done to you. You can take what you have in here”—he lightly touched a finger to her breast in the vicinity of her heart—“and here”—and then moved his fingers into her hair, cupping the shape of her skull in his palm, feeling the warmth of her scalp—“and remake it.”

Tears glittered on her lashes in the steep angle of the sun through the window. He pressed his mouth to one eye, then the other, and pulled away, tasting salt on his lips. “And you can rebuild trust. I promise you.”

Even as he said those words, he experienced a sickening, guilty wrench in his abdomen, and yet he believed them with his whole heart. To stop the pain that had begun to flood his veins, he kissed her again, on the mouth this time. Hers opened beneath the pressure with a tiny moan that rushed against the tide, pushing culpability and anguish back into that dark cubbyhole he’d created inside him for its keeping.

“So,” she whispered against his scar. He doubted she even noticed it. “It’s not just sex?”

He closed his eyes and shuddered at the touch of her tongue along his jaw, his throat. “It’s not just sex, Paige,” he said, struggling to manage coherent thought for words. “We might be undefined right now, but just sex it is not.”

“All right, Liam. I’m going to do my best to trust you.” She breathed warm and oddly effervescent air against the hollow below his ear. Guilt flared once more in a brief conflagration and vanished as she did something to him that made him cry out and forget everything but the moment.

He had remarkably sensitive earlobes. Every man possessed some point of contact from which he could not return. Paige heard his cry and let it rush over her skin like water. She tugged his T-shirt out of his jeans and closed her thumb and forefinger on the rigid nub of his nipple as she continued her prior ministrations. The sound he made then proved more delightful than the one before. He seized her hands in a sudden flurry and jerked away, gazing down at her with eyes as dark as midnight.