THE STORM THAT had been predicted hit as he ate his breakfast. No tornadoes forecast, but six inches of rain and some strong wind with a warm woman. He had the perfect candidate, but her car was already gone from her driveway. The rain and wind were projected to continue all day and into the night. At least the poachers would be home. Nobody would enjoy hunting in this. Even the animals hunkered down.
His mother called on his cell to remind him to check on her cabin by the lake. “It shouldn’t flood, high up as it sits,” she said. “But I’d appreciate if you’d make sure nothing’s leaking and there aren’t any trees down.”
“Not supposed to be that much wind,” he said. “I’ll check and let you know.” He pulled on his rain gear on his way out the door. As he climbed into his SUV, he took a hard look at the kennel. The skunks should be safe, if miserable.
But six inches of rain was a lot of rain. He walked across the street, found the playpen on Emma’s back porch, opened it, then set up food and water inside. He made three trips to carry the skunks under the porch roof and out of the rain. Bedraggled as they were, they seemed grateful. He zipped up the top of the playpen so they couldn’t climb out and, satisfied that they’d be safe, left for his mother’s cabin.
He drove past Barbara’s clinic on his way to the lake. This must be one of Emma’s days. Her car sat at the side of the lot to give the clients as much room as possible. Rain or no rain, the lot was already half-filled. He should call to tell her he’d moved the skunks, but he had plenty of time to do that before she got home.
The cabin was several miles past the clinic off the same road. At several points along the road, he could peer through the woods to glimpse the little lake the cabin sat beside. It didn’t look happy either.
Sarah drowned in another small lake only a bit larger than this one.
Because it was small and shallow, it could kick up whitecaps fast. He turned his head so that he wasn’t continually aware of it. Too many memories. He hadn’t set foot in a swimming pool again until he’d been forced to swim laps in college as part of his athletic classes.
He found the cabin clean and dry. Lights worked, refrigerator was stocked with beer, wine and soft drinks. No mildew smell even in the bedroom. The sheets smelled fresh. He locked up, estimated that the waves were lapping well below the little bluff the cabin sat on and drove away.
That was what he and Emma needed. A private place where no one could find them. Now he just had to figure out how to manage it.
At noon he pulled up in front of the clinic. As he started to climb out of the SUV, the front door opened. Barbara and Emma walked out together. They must be driving into town for lunch.
He leaned across, opened the driver’s side door and called out, “Barbara, you mind if I borrow Emma for a while?”
“Not at all.”
“Now wait a minute,” Emma said. “Barbara and I are going to lunch. Then we’re shutting down the clinic for the rest of the day until the storm blows over.”
“I’d rather stay here, open a can of soup and do paperwork. Go on. Enjoy,” Barbara said.
“But…”
“Emma, please get in.” He leaned across from the driver’s side and shoved the passenger door wide. Emma braced herself against the door as the wind threatened to slam it.
“If we’re going to lunch, why can’t Barbara come?”
“Emma, for once in your life, would you please do as I ask?”
* * *
HE WAS STARING out the windshield, not even looking at her. Something bad had happened. Had to be. She slipped into the passenger seat, shut the door and fastened her seat belt. Outside, the first blast of rain hit the SUV so hard it rocked.
He turned right out of the parking lot—away from home, away from Williamston.
“Is somebody hurt? Your mother? Your father? Oh, Seth…” If not his family, then hers. She closed her eyes against whatever disaster was to come.
“Nobody’s hurt.”
“Thank God. Wait—my babies. I have to go take care of them! They could drown outside in all this rain.”
“They’re fine. I brought them up on the back porch out of the rain and put them back in the playpen with plenty of food and water.”
“They’ll climb out the top.”
“No, they won’t. I zipped it up. Emma, I promise you, they’ll be dry and happy.”
“Thank you for looking after them. But something’s wrong. Why are you upset?”
He slowed down long enough to glance over at her. “I’m not upset at you. I’m mad at me, and it’s about time I did something about it. Walking in on your lunch with that Nathan showed me that.”
“You don’t have to kidnap me. All you have to do is ask me to go with you.”
“It was either kidnap you or go crazy. I’m crazy enough already.”
“What is all this about? Talk to me.”
He slowed down again. The steady whack of the windshield wipers on their highest setting wasn’t as fast as her heartbeat. Even when she’d almost blown up the oak tree, he hadn’t been angry. He hadn’t laughed either. He accepted her fears and simply stepped in to help. He took her seriously, so this was serious. That was one of the things she loved about him.
Where did that come from? Neither one of them had ever mentioned love. Nobody fell in love in a week. And at this rate they weren’t likely to. Suddenly, he wasn’t the only angry one. “If there isn’t any disaster, you have no right to snap like a bear with a sore toe. You say you’re not mad at me, but I’m the only other person in this car, Seth. Talk to me, or I’ll unkidnap myself and walk home in the rain.”
“Assuming you could get out of a moving car without breaking your beautiful neck, you’d fall in a ditch and I’d have to drag you out. I promise I’ll explain, once I figure out how to do it. I hope you’ll forgive me, or at least cut me some slack in the meantime.”
He kept his eyes forward and concentrated on his driving. He was right about walking home and drowning on the way. So far they hadn’t run into any truly flooded stretches on the road, but he’d slowed down to avoid hydroplaning.
They drove for twenty more minutes in silence. She didn’t take her eyes off him, but his jaw seemed to relax the farther they drove from the clinic. Was that it? Something bad about the clinic?
Then he turned left, crossed a one-lane bridge and drove down a gravel road into a thick stand of loblolly pines. Ahead, the normally placid lake roiled with whitecaps. On a bluff a dozen feet above the lake stood an A-frame cabin all by itself among the trees that swayed, whipped in the wind and threatened to come crashing down on it.
Seth stopped the SUV but left the keys in the ignition where she could reach them if she chose.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” he said. He rested his forearms on the steering wheel. “I don’t know where my head was. I’m sorry. I’ll take you back home right now.”
“In this storm?” Emma asked. “Just tell me where we are and why you’re doing this. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out. My father always tells me I can’t screw anything up so badly that we can’t unscrew it. We’ll unscrew it together.”
He gave a short bark of laughter. “Little does your father know. Okay, if you’re still game, come on.”
He climbed out of the SUV, ran down the flagstone path, up three steps to the front door, unlocked it and held it open for her. “Sorry,” he called, “I don’t carry an umbrella.”
“Now you tell me.” She ran after him, followed him inside and leaned back against the door after he’d closed it. “We’re wet,” she said.
“You think?” For the first time he smiled. It was tentative. He was apparently still not certain of his reception. “I’ll light the fire.”
“In May? We won’t melt if we dry off naturally. Got any towels handy?”
He disappeared through what was obviously a bedroom door and emerged with a big armload of towels. She grabbed one and went to work on her hair.
When it was semidry, she looked around, taking in her surroundings. The main area was an open room furnished with comfortably shabby furniture, the kind of furniture that had outlived its first life, but could endure sand and damp and not complain too much.
The entire back wall, the one facing the storm and the lake, was entirely made of windows. A river-stone chimney and fireplace covered most of the wall that backed up to the pinewoods. An unlit log fire was already laid.
“This is charming,” she said. “What is this place? Who does it belong to?”
“My mother. Actually, it belongs to me, too, but I never use it. She spends almost every weekend here with her friends playing bridge and swimming when the weather’s too hot to breathe in town.”
“I hope she’s not driving out here alone in this storm.”
He shook his head and toweled off his head and arms. “Nobody else is coming.” He tossed the damp towel over the counter that divided the great room from a small galley kitchen.
“This is laid out a lot like The Hovel,” Emma said.
“It should be. Martha borrowed the layout when she redid her living room. There’s a master bedroom and bath in there.” He pointed behind Emma. “And a loft upstairs that sleeps six. My mother had it built after she moved from the house I grew up in to her condo. She said she had to have someplace away from town where she could be alone. Sounded like a good idea, so we did it. I lived here after Clare and I separated, but it’s really too far from town for easy commuting, so I moved into the house across the street from you.”
“I love this place.” She turned and walked over to him. “But why all the subterfuge? Why not just tell me you wanted to drive out here?”
He ran his index finger gently down her cheek. “I wanted someplace different, perfect. With nobody else around.”
She caught her breath, felt her heart speed up. “We don’t seem to do perfect too well, do we?”
“At least I got the nobody-else-around part right.” He slid his arms down to encircle her waist. “Whatever happens, out here we won’t get phone calls we don’t make, visitors we didn’t invite, emergencies we have to drop everything for…”
“But aren’t you on call?”
“I am officially off duty. Only Earl knows how to get me.”
“Can you do that?”
“More often than I do. Mostly I don’t mind when I get called out. The others have families. Not so easy for them to go out at four in the morning to chase some idiot jacklighting deer. Usually I don’t have anything better to do. Tonight Earl can handle problems.” He held her away from him. “The other day when I found you having lunch with your old boss, I had a sudden desire to toss him out of the café and boot him and his fancy car back to Memphis.”
“You were jealous of Nathan? That’s silly. He’s my boss—was my boss—not even truly a friend. If he was a friend, he wouldn’t have fired me the way he did.”
“He’s important to you. He’s everything you’re used to. Everything I can’t touch in your life. I worried all night. Finally I decided I had to get us away.” He brushed his hand across her forehead. “You are so beautiful.”
“I look like a drowned rat.”
“Wet or dry doesn’t matter. When you banged on my door that first night, you looked worse than a drowned rat and sounded meaner than a junkyard dog, but I knew I was a goner right that minute. Makes no difference how hard I try to deny the way I feel, I’m stuck with it, and it keeps getting worse. I thought if I got us away somewhere without people and animals and responsibilities, I could tell you…”
“What took you so long?” she whispered.
She melted into his arms. Didn’t matter that they were wet to the skin—everywhere their bodies touched, they generated their own heat. He lifted her up, kicked the bedroom door open, carried her inside and set her back on her feet.
“This is going to happen, isn’t it?” she whispered. Their eyes met and held.
“Only if you want it to. Do you?”
In answer, she peeled off her wet sweater and dropped it on the floor, then began to unbutton his wet shirt. After the first two buttons, he yanked it over his head and flung it beside Emma’s sweater.
She unfastened her bra and added it to the collection of wet clothes. “I’m cold. Maybe you should’ve lit that fire,” she whispered.
He slid his lips down her throat to her breast. She shivered at the touch of his tongue on her nipple.
“Too late now,” he whispered. “We’ll have to create our own.”
The rest of their clothes came off in a tangle until at last they lay naked, side by side.
The storm seemed to grow with their passion, their hunger to explore with tongues and fingers. When he moved away from her, she whimpered, until she saw him take a condom from the drawer of the bedside table. When he came back to her, driving her farther to that precipice, she clung to him as he slid into her.
Their bodies seemed to know without learning how to fit together, to pleasure, to savor. She matched him thrust for thrust, and when at last they came, they came together.
Emma felt as though she’d never breathe again. Seth moved beside her and gathered her into his arms, where her head fit into the hollow of his shoulder. She could feel his heartbeat slow as his muscles relaxed. She drew her hand down his chest to his stomach and below, simply to enjoy touching him, holding him.
“Oh, my,” she whispered against his throat. “I don’t think I can stand up.”
“Then don’t. Stay here. I’d offer to carry you, but I’m not sure I have the strength. I’d drop you.”
“I’m not exactly a virgin. I thought I knew about sex,” Emma said, “But what we just did is a whole other thing entirely—at least for me.” She rose up on one elbow. “I want to do it again soon.”
“Not without a couple of rare sirloins first,” he said. “And maybe a couple fingers of Scotch.”
“I hope you brought the steaks, because no way am I getting out of this bed to go to the grocery.”
He curled a strand of her still-damp hair around his finger. “You’re in luck. I brought a cooler in the back of the SUV with steaks and fixins, and Mom stocks a full bar for her bridge club.” He reached down to the foot of the bed and pulled a thick down comforter over them.
“Ooh, lovely,” said Emma. She cuddled against his side with her arm across his chest.
He felt rather than heard her laugh, and propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at her. “What’s funny?”
“I can’t believe you actually kidnapped me,” Emma said.
“Let’s say I invited you.”
“Forcefully, without telling me where we were going.”
“If you’d hesitated, I’d have taken you home. I figured I could talk you out of having me arrested if everything worked out.”
“And if I’d said no?”
“Then, like I said, I would’ve taken you home. I thought this was what we both wanted, but every time we got close, either someone would show up at your front door or the skunks would need you or I’d get called out to arrest somebody.”
“Or I’d wind up in the azaleas.”
“That, too. When that Nathan guy showed up at lunch with you at the café, it was all I could do to be civil to him.”
“He’s a nice man.”
“He’s a part of your life I can’t share.”
“Not can’t. Don’t. Just as I don’t share how you chase poachers. Most people share only bits and pieces of their lives with each other. My stepmother and father are close, but there’s plenty she doesn’t know about his legal cases, and plenty he doesn’t know about her volunteer work at the children’s hospital. They love each other dearly, but they’re very different.” She paused. “I don’t want anyone to try to absorb me, either.”
He chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “Good luck to anyone who tries. One thing you learn working with wild animals—a fox may seem tame, but he’s still a fox, just as your skunks are still skunks. Push their buttons hard enough, and they’ll skunk you.”
“Now I’m a skunk?”
“Parts of you are pure skunk, lady.”
She slipped out of his arms, piled up the pillows that had landed on the floor behind her and leaned against them. “I never thought of it that way, but that’s what Trip tried to do—make me into what he wanted, never mind what I wanted.”
“You should’ve skunked him.”
“Not a bad idea. You know,” she said, “you and I had Sunday evening alone after we found Bobby Joe. Nobody interrupted us then. I still ended up going to bed alone.”
“I would gladly have made love to you while we were both covered in chigger bites and anti-itch lotion—well, maybe not gladly—but somehow the romance was missing.”
She hit him with a pillow. A moment later they were rolling around on the bed laughing. Until the laughter stopped. “Kiss me,” Emma whispered.
He smiled down at her. “The heck with the steaks.”