Accompanying Alice (18 page)

Blindly he pushed the brambles aside, but memory could not be coerced so easily. Twenty years ago, give or take a millennium, he was back in
Southeast Asia
by
his
choice, a medic who didn’t believe in
causes or
killing, but who arrogantly thought he could make a contribution and save a few lives. A patrol unit had brought a pair of wounded
guerrilla
prisoners into the hospital for treatment. One had taken a young soldier by surprise, grabbing his weapon and shooting another soldier whose rifle had fallen near Gabriel. Gabriel had picked up the gun instinctively, ready to fire it. And hadn’t. Not at the urgings of his head, nor those from the soldiers around him. A nurse had echoed the voice of his conscience with her pleading
“D
on’t.
”

It
was the first time he’d ever picked up a gun; the first time he’d ever doubted the pure pacifism his parents had taught him to believe in. The first time he’d truly understood the impotence and violence of rage.

He picked up a dead branch and swung it against a fallen tree, seeking to jar himself off the path his thoughts had taken. But they refused to be sidetracked, instead leaving him with one more deliberately forgotten vision. Fifteen years ago, academy graduation. His parents had attended the ceremony. They didn’t understand why he’d
had
to become a cop, didn’t understand what he’d meant when he tried to tell them he couldn’t sit by any longer and watch death happen around him
the way
he’d had to at the
refugee
hospital and not try to do something to prevent it. Try to make a difference. And if that meant he had to carry a gun, then he’d carry a gun and learn to use it.

They’d assured him they loved him and were proud of him for doing what he felt he had to—for making a choice and sticking to it. They didn’t agree with his decision, but they’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t made it simply to pacify them.

By the end of his third case, though, their view of him had shifted uneasily. He was changing, they’d said. There was something growing in him, something violent. He was starting to enjoy his role among the criminal element too much, and that made them afraid. Of him.

He stopped and wrapped a hand around a tangle of wild grapevines. He’d stopped going to see his family because he was aware—even though he was unwilling to admit it then—that they were right to be afraid of him. Something hard, inhuman and violent
was
taking root inside him; something intolerant, unforgiving and bitter aimed as much at himself and the bureaucracy he battled almost daily to allow him to make his cases, as at the criminals he risked his life to build cases against.

But he figured he’d made his choices, he’d lived by them. No one got through life without a few skeletons lurking in their memories. Some had more than others; many were worse than his. Some dealt with memory by confronting it, letting it rise and fall in a natural day-to-day progression. He’d dealt with his memories by burying them alive and changing his identity with his cases so that when his ghosts came out to haunt him, they wouldn’t be able to find him. For the most part it had worked. Until Alice.

He ran a hand through his hair trying to come back to the present, get his bearings, remember which persona to put on. Damn, he might have known he’d been enjoying himself too much with her. And her family. He might have known that if he let himself relax even a little he’d start to question who and what he was again.

He stiffened at the sudden cold flick of her shadow on his back, heard her puff in the clutter of branches behind him.
Don’t,
he thought, a warning to himself. Or was it to her?

“Gabriel?” His name was a tentative sound in her throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Who are you, really, Alice Meyers?” His voice was controlled, intense, almost savage. Even now, when it was the last thing on earth he wanted to feel, he had the powerful urge to turn to her, touch her, ask her to hold him. His fists clenched at his sides. He’d never asked anyone to hold him. “What is it about you that lets you twist me in knots one minute and makes me want you under me the next?” He swung about and advanced on her, backing her into a tree. “What makes me want to tell you things I don’t even want to think about?” He ran a finger along her jaw, watched her pupils dilate, her breath quicken, felt desire rise. “Why, when I can’t seem to get far enough away from you, can’t I get close enough to you, either?” He dragged his finger
across her lips, touched the heat and moisture of her mouth. “Why do I know how you’d feel if I—”

“Don’t.”

She could barely breathe, he was so close. Blatantly sexual, his gaze moved lazily across her face, aroused, rousing. His breath brushed the corners of her mouth. His body didn’t quite press hers, but she could feel him, taste him...

“—if I touch you—”

“Don’t!”

“How long has it been, Alice?” He braced his hands on the tree behind her head. “How long since you’ve been touched by someone other than yourself? Treated like a woman deserves to be treated?”

Long enough.
The thought leapt between them, guilty and revealing. Gabriel’s mouth lowered toward hers, and Alice knew he’d read the evidence in her eyes before she could blink it away. Her feet clung to the earth, wanting to run, unable to move.

“Please, Gabriel,” she whispered. Why did she want to justify her reaction to him? Why was she afraid of what he might think? She shouldn’t be ashamed of not sleeping with anyone since Matt—of being cautious with both her body and her emotions. “Whatever you see, whatever I’ve done, I didn’t mean… I don’t want… I don’t
know
you. I
can’t
—”

Gabriel’s mouth sought hers briefly, impatiently, stilling the words. “But I’ve known you forever, Alice,” he said thickly, “and I need…”

He stopped abruptly, stunned by the truth. Oh, God, what was he saying, what was he
doing?
He
did
need her. Fiercely. Passionately. He
did
know her. Every nook and cranny of her soul. Had forever. Where he’d always thought he ended, she began him again. His hands crushed dead bark from the tree as he withdrew them from behind her head. The idea was madness. It was impossible.

But it was also true.

His eyes found Alice’s, read the confusion, the latent desire, the concern. The same mocha-chocolate eyes that had feared for him—been afraid
of
him—yesterday morning. The expressive wanting eyes that had called him to her last night, then stopped him from kissing her all in the beat of a pulse. Damning eyes. Samaritan eyes. Forgiving eyes.

Hungry eyes.

He spun away from her, back onto the trail he’d crushed through the bramble coming in. And stopped. He couldn’t run from her this time.

He turned, but she was already there, hand on his arm, speaking his name. His skin quivered at her touch. “Gabriel…”

“Don’t touch me, Alice, not now.” His voice was strained. “This is something I haven’t planned for, I’ve never felt. If you keep touching me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Gabriel, please.” Again she was pleading with him, but differently now, for understanding. “You… I don’t understand what I feel. You confuse me. One minute we’re so close that the only things I don’t know about you—or care if I ever know—are the details. The next minute you’re
someone else, someone I don’t want to
know—
couldn’t
know. When I remember that it was only yesterday, and how I found you, I’m frightened.
You
frighten me. Everything in my life is changing so all at once, and I don’t know if the way I feel around you is part of that or because of it, and I don’t know if this is just a game of pretend that got carried away and...”

She was dithering, just like Aunt Kate at Cousin Mamie’s wedding. She hated that about herself, hated not being able to put her thoughts into words coherently. She plunged recklessly on, anyway. “And I don’t like feeling like this—like I keep inviting you to do something, then pushing you away. But I’ve never…and I don’t know how…and if I let go of you, somehow that seems like it’ll make it all even worse and—”

Gabriel’s hands cupped her face, were in her hair. His mouth was warm on hers, stilling, demanding, gentle. “Alice,” he murmured. “Be quiet. You’re rattling on.”

Her hands were on his arms, holding tight. “Am I?”

“Yes,” he assured her between kisses. “On and on and on.”

“I’m sorry.” Breathlessly, Alice sought the dangers of his mouth, moth to flame.

Gabriel’s hands slid down her sides, found her waist, dragged her close. “I’m not,” he muttered, and then there was no more room for speech, no breath to spare for anything so mundane. Alice’s arms sought the path along his shoulders, around his neck. Fingers slipped easily into his hair, tightened. His tongue touched hers, claimed it, branded it to the deep-seated tone of Alice’s encouragement. His hands curved over her hips. She stood on tiptoe straining to
get near, called to him by the rumble in his throat, a sound without words, a plea.

And then he lifted his head and let her go, drawing her hands from his hair, pushing her away.

“Gabriel.”

His name was out before she could stop herself from saying it, calling him back. He shut his eyes, jammed his hands deep into his pockets.

“I can’t, Alice. I want you too badly. If I don’t stop now, I won’t be able to stop at all. I’d take you down right here, but I don’t want you to remember me that way. I don’t want you to regret it.”

“What about you?”

Gabriel looked at the sky, at his recent past and indefinite future. What had she called their possibilities last night?
Temporary.
“I don’t matter a damn past Saturday, Alice.”

She was in front of him, insistent. Her eyes were damp.

“What if
I
said you did? You could?”

“You like to be sure of things before you commit to them, Alice, and I am not, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, a sure thing.”

“Because of your job?”

“That, and who I am.”

“But who—”

“I’m never sure, Alice.” He looked at her bleakly. “And I do wish I knew.”

Chapter Seven

A
dithery-looking white-haired woman in a fluttery dress of orange-flowered chiffon stood on Alice’s porch wiggling her fingers excitedly at them as they pulled into the driveway after a silent journey home.

She was flanked by a squat gray grizzled-looking man in his late sixties, three dubious-appearing red-haired boys of varying sizes and ages, a forty-five
year
old whiny-looking female in shorts and a halter top who bore a marked resemblance to the chiffon-clad woman, and a tall stalwart-looking gentleman with orange hair and an expression eternally wishing to be somewhere else. Alice stared at them aghast. After what she’d just been through with Gabriel, the last thing in the world she needed was Aunt Kate, Uncle Delbert, Cousin Mamie, her husband, George, and their children dumped, like so many puppies, on her doorstep. She lifted her eyes skyward with a silent
Why me?—
realizing, as she had in the past, that God undoubtedly appreciated this joke very much, since He apparently had the same sense of humor that Helen had.