Upon a Mystic Tide (18 page)

Feeling better at having come to a decision on
this
worry, Bess stopped pacing at the turret room windows. The strong wind now had the filmy curtains billowing nearly straight out. Not just rain coming. A storm.

Figured. Positively, absolutely figured.

She stomped her foot. It felt pretty good, so she stomped it again. Then she returned to pacing, putting her heart into it. When it failed to rid her of steam, she added deep-breathing exercises. The moon clung on the horizon, beneath the swirl of angry, gray clouds and their eerie, misty tentacles. A brilliant flash of lightning split the night sky. A horrendous clash of thunder followed. The windows rattled and the lights flickered, then flickered again.

Bess stopped dead in her tracks. Not just a storm. A wicked thunderstorm. The lights dimmed, then went out.

A thin, silvery streak of moonlight slanted across the floorboards and the braided rug. Odd. With the storm there should be no moonlight, and yet there was. How could that be?

Please, not this, too. Not a storm, too. Not now.
A blink from tears, she moved toward the bed, determined to plop herself into it, jerk the covers up over her head, and not come out until the world again got civilized. She’d had all she could stand of her starring role in “The Perils of Pauline.”

Her foot tangled in the edge of the rug. She stumbled, fell face first down to the hardwood floor, breaking her fall with her elbows. Pain shafted up her arms and she bit back a wail.

Well, if this just wasn’t the last straw. Stinging tears flooded her eyes then spilled down her cheeks. She should stop them, now, before she lost complete control. But a good cry could be therapeutic, could clear some of the frustration from her system. Hadn’t she often prescribed a marathon crying jag on occasion for just that purpose?

Someone touched her arm.

She gasped.

“It’s me.” John sat down on the floor beside her. “Are you hurt? I heard you fall.”

“Only my dignity.” Her voice caught, ragged. He hadn’t heard her fall. The rug had muffled it. He’d remembered how much she hated the dark and storms. And now he knew she was crying. Lord, was there no end to the humiliation?

“Come here.” He pulled her into his arms.

Yet another act of unselfish kindness. Cecelia would like that. Bess shouldn’t like it but, damn it, she needed holding, and she was so tired of fighting everything—including him—alone. Swearing she wouldn’t, she snuggled closer. When he closed his arms around her, she shivered. Feeling safe and secure, and unafraid. She should be terrified. If she had half an ounce of sense, she’d be scared witless.

He cupped her bottom and pulled her into the wedge between his bent knees, his feet flat on the floor, his shirt soft against her skin, his jeans rough against her side.

“Aren’t you going to ask me a bunch of stupid questions?” She curled her hands to her chest to keep from winding them around him. He smelled so good, like John, and he still wore the same cologne.
Obsession.
How he’d laugh at her if he knew she’d bought a bottle and sprayed her spare pillow to help her get through stormy and lonely nights.

“No. No questions.” His heart raced, thudding hard against the side of her face. He brushed at her wet cheek with a gentle stroke of his thumb. “These tell me plenty. You’ve talked with Francine.”

“Why are you doing this?” She looked up but the darkness shadowed his face and she couldn’t see his expression. Grateful for that, for knowing he couldn’t see hers either, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you hate me that much?”

He lifted her chin with an upward nudge then smoothed her hair back from her face. “I don’t hate you, Bess.”

The moonlight slanted over his face and, though the look in his eyes contrasted with his words and an unspeakable sadness tainted his tone, relief fluttered through her. She was rationalizing but weak right now, she needed the crutch. Being held in the warmth of his arms couldn’t be good for either of them. They were both vulnerable. And with them, vulnerability equated to danger. The magnetism between them always had been too strong. Yet she didn’t move away. “Why, then? Why Silk? Jonathan, I’ll look like a fool and so will you.”

“Let’s talk about it later. Right now, just let me hold you. You’re shivering.”

And she would be as long as she was in his arms. She hated it that he could still do this to her—but not enough to want him to stop. The storm was nearing; she smelled the rain, and wished she’d closed the window. “I think we’ve got a classic case of—”

“Please don’t start spouting jargon, Bess.”

He pleaded for far more than that; though for what exactly, she didn’t know. “A classic case of all or nothing,” she amended, using laymen’s terms. “You don’t want me, but you don’t want to let me go for fear someone else will want me. You want to just hold on to me.” His arms gripped her tighter. “Am I right about this?”

“At the moment, Doc, I am holding you.” He clearly meant to sound flip, and he would have, to anyone but Bess. She heard that telltale tremor in his voice, the husky one that betrayed him. John was not calm, but highly emotional—and hungry.

John? Hungry for her? Hot desire rippled through her body. Memories of other times, of other storms, flooded her, swamping her with vivid recollections of times of tenderness and lovers’ secrets shared: situations and feelings best forgotten.

She tried to pull away.

He held her tighter. Let his hand drop to her bare back, graze her cool skin in the gap between the band of her bra and her panties. “You used to sleep naked.” His voice went huskier, sexier.

“I’ve changed.” She had, but not in that respect. “Are you going to tell me why you’re doing this with Silk? You don’t really want visitation rights with her, John.”

He skimmed Bess’s side, hip to thigh. “Maybe I resent you leaving me by phone. Maybe I think I deserved for you to tell me you were leaving me face to face.”

She looked up at him, into the underside of his chin. The sliver of moonlight splayed over it and it looked as hard as the granite cliffs beyond the turret room window. She drew back then rested her hands on his rock-hard thighs. “Maybe I resent you staying gone three days without a word. You didn’t call—not once, not even on Christmas.” Chilled, missing his warm, sure hold and, stupidly, the comfort of it, too, she snuggled back to him. “When you finally did call, all you said was, ‘Sorry, darling. I forgot.’” She slapped at his thigh. “That was a bastardly thing to do to me.”

He rested his chin on her crown. “You knew I was following a lead.”

“Kidnapers,” she snuggled closer still and curled her knees until they rested against the underside of his firm thighs. “You were following kidnapers who might have murdered Dixie and I thought, maybe you.” After putting Bess through that, holding her seemed the least he could do. God, but she’d been terrified.

He guffawed. “You never believed she’d been kidnaped, Bess. You sided with the FBI, remember? Convinced she’d eloped.”

“I’m not sure I believe she was kidnaped now. But I didn’t know it for a fact, Jonathan. And when you don’t know for fact, you worry your beliefs are wrong. I worried myself sick over you. Do you know how long three days can be when you’re worried someone you—?” Nearly saying someone you love, she stopped cold. A slip of the tongue. A momentary lapse of memory that things were different now. “I was worried sick.”

He cupped her face in his big hands. They were strong, good hands, and not quite steady. “I believed she’d been kidnaped. Why couldn’t you believe me?”

“Because the evidence was shaky at best. It wasn’t anything personal, John.”

“Nothing personal? For a wife to not have faith in her husband?”

Genuinely surprised, she grunted. “This didn’t have anything to do with faith in you. That’s absurd.”

“It did from where I stood.”

She’d hurt him? She didn’t want to answer him. Didn’t know how to answer him. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters to me.” His fingertips stroked her jaw, the sides of her nose, her lips. “Why, Bess?”

“I was afraid you were dead.” Her voice cracked and a tear slid down her cheek and onto his fingertip. “I was afraid I’d lost you forever, and—.” A sob swelled in her throat. She couldn’t go on.

“So you left me.” He tilted her face into the silvery moonlight.

Praying it wasn’t a mistake, she let him see the anguish he’d put in her eyes. “I loved you then, Jonathan.”

He swallowed hard. “I loved you then too, Doc.”

He was shaking. So was she. Their gazes locked and he leaned toward her. The truth, sadness, and regret tortured his eyes, and that urge to nurture, to heal, struck her hard. It would be so easy. So easy to move those scant inches, to lean to him and to kiss him. To let her body tell and show him all the turmoil she was feeling inside. But she couldn’t do it. They were divorcing. They weren’t the same people now they’d been then.

And they couldn’t go back.

“But that was then, wasn’t it?” she asked. “It isn’t now. We don’t love each other now.”

He let his hands slide down her neck, round her shoulders, the sides of her bra-clad breasts, then down her ribs to her waist. “Come here, Bess.” The gentle pressure of his urging hands, the smell of the sea and him, so familiar and so long missed, conspired and proved far stronger than her will. “I want to kiss you.”

Her heart skipped a pounding beat then nearly careened out of her chest. “That’s not a good idea. In
fact, it’s a lousy idea.”

“I know. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

Knowing the magic was still there between them physically, she’d be a fool to do it. She’d be forty kinds of fool. All that pain. That emptiness. That desolation of losing what they’d had. The disillusionment on again realizing they’d had nothing more than a mirage. “Please, don’t.”

“Tell me you don’t want to know what it’d be like, Bess.
Tell me that after all this time, you haven’t once thought of it or wondered, or dreamed about us being together again.”

She couldn’t. Her body throbbed, remembering too well exactly how it’d been between them. But that was physical. It wasn’t love or any basis for a strong, enduring marriage. It was lust with a kick. No less, but no more. “No.”

He bent low and whispered close to the shell of her ear. “Liar.”

“Okay, I’ve wondered, I’ve dreamed, I’ve even fantasized,” she confessed. “But I don’t want to know enough to find out.” The costs were too high.

He laughed, low and husky, his broad chest rumbling. “You never could lie.”

She couldn’t, not to him. And it only made her look more foolish to try now. Though in the shadowy darkness he likely wouldn’t see it, she gave him a solid frown. “You should have gotten slouchy, Jonathan. If you had a single compassionate bone in your body, you’d have become a real pig.”

He slid her a wicked smile and clipped his chin, descending closer to her mouth. “Sorry, darling. My wife has a strong aversion to sloppy men.”

“Sorry, indeed.” The man was too charming for his own good—and definitely for hers. But the temptation, hearing him again refer to her as his wife; she couldn’t resist him any more now than when they’d first met. Even less now because she
knew
what she was missing: the magic.

He touched their lips, his voice a throaty whisper that had her quivering. “I have to feel you again, Bess. Just
 . . .
once.”

He looked so good; felt and smelled and sounded so good. “Just once,” she swore, unsure if it was a promise to him or to herself. Not caring at the moment which it proved to be, only wanting to again feel all she’d once felt when in his embrace. Safe. Secure. Loved
 . . .

He rubbed his lips to hers, gently, teasingly, with little pressure, and yet the impact was potent, powerful, stunning. She stiffened, certain she had trodden too far into a place that could bring her pleasure but even more pain. Once his mouth left hers, once his arms no longer cradled her and she could no longer feel his warmth, she’d ache for him. She didn’t want to acutely remember those early months of their separation, to have those memories sharpened by rediscovery. She didn’t want . . .