If You Loved Me (16 page)

A log rolled over and sparks showered up. As the flare died, a long, inhuman cry sounded on the air and Emma gasped.

"It's a wolf," said Gray. "A long way off."

"How can you tell the distance?" The mournful wail still echoed in her chest.

"I can tell. He won't bother us."

She realized she hadn't the energy to worry about the wolf. "I try not to, but I keep thinking of Chris preparing for this trip. He wanted to come so badly. The wilderness and the dangers frightened me, but I never told him. I kept telling myself I hadn't stopped him from rappelling up rocks or learning to take a kayak in the rapids, kept thinking if I stopped him now, I'd be crippling him, limiting his life with
my
fears."

The wolf cried again, but it seemed farther away now.

"Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should have stopped Chris, told him it was too dangerous."

Gray set his cup aside and she flinched. If he were going to touch her again, she needed to be braced against it.

"When Chris was small, when did you stop walking him to school?"

She smiled. "He was in second grade, and I would stand at the corner until I'd seen him cross safely. Then—well, I couldn't hold his hand or watch him forever. There were crossing guards and he had to grow up."

"You must have known a drunk motorist might kill him in a crosswalk. You couldn't control that, but you couldn't keep walking him to school forever. This is the same, Emma."

She realized she was tired, overwhelmingly tired. She wondered why the wolf had howled on the night air, and why he'd stopped now. Like dogs, she thought, dogs barking at night.

"Earlier, you told me you're engaged to a wonderful man. Does he have a name?"

"A name?"

"This man you're going to many." His voice sounded harsh. "Don't you remember his name, or is he some fiction you created to see if I'd react?"

"Alex." Suddenly, the need to cry grew in her throat and she scrambled to her feet. "Alex," she said again, because her voice felt like her only anchor.

"Tell me about him."

Therapy, she thought. He was trying to hold her here, keep her sane with conversation.

"He's a partner in the clinic where I work, a pediatrician." She tried to form Alex's image in front of her eyes and couldn't make it come clear. "He's wonderful with the children. He has a... sort of magic with kids. I've seen him with a hysterical little boy, calming him with just his voice. He's... he's a nice man."

Gray stood, carrying her eyes up with the motion. He loomed in front of her, his face a mystery in shadow. "You don't love him."

"Of course I love him. You have no right—"

"Why would you marry a man you don't love, Emma?"

"I—Damn it, Gray, why are we talking about Alex when Chris is out there?"

He took her cup and set it somewhere behind him before he took her shoulders. She knew what was coming, knew she must pull away, yet felt powerless.

"Stop handling it, Emma. For tonight, let the control go."

She needed something to scream at, but screaming would shatter her control. "I can't."

He shook her roughly. "Damn you! You'll break if you go on this way."

The movement of her body, the feel of his hands on her split something inside.

"Don't you tell me what to do!" She shook her hair back.

His hands tightened, harder, and suddenly she was fighting him, struggling in his grip and screaming words without meaning. Her hands balled into fists and hammered against his chest.

His lips moved, but she couldn't hear the sounds. Then his hands gentled, sliding up into her hair. His elbows bracketed her rib cage.

"Oh, God," she gasped as the fury drained out of her. "What am I doing?"

"It's okay." His thumbs slid out of her hair, smoothing her lids closed. "Close your eyes. Let it go, Emma."

She came up against his chest with a soft thud, her sweatshirt against his heavy plaid mackinaw. Suddenly her pulse was pounding and she didn't know if it was fear for Chris or panic that she'd disappear in Gray's grasp.

Then Gray's lips covered hers, drew hers in and sent the world spinning. Her hands were trapped between their bodies as his lips brushed roughly over hers, then fastened hard and hungry... and she spun away, lost everything but the hunger that exploded in her veins and dragged a groan from him—or perhaps from her.

From them.

His hands slid up her back, dragging her closer, closer, hungry and hard. She breathed in his touch and pressed into him, felt herself twisting, pulling, fighting closer, his tongue plunging deep, her mouth wild and dark, his need feeding hers.

She twisted her fingers into his hair, felt the ends curling into her palms. Her fingers clenched and his mouth closed deeper on hers as her body convulsed against the hard pressure of him against her belly.

She cried out when he jerked his head back.

He filled her view, the harsh lines beside his mouth, his eyes a dark smoky fire she needed to burn in. She stared into his eyes and felt her world spin.

Sensations. The crackling fire behind her, the hard pressure of his arm on her back, her body crushed intimately against his from hip to breast, pulse beating so hard she wasn't sure whose heart kept the rhythm.

Her fingers tangled tighter in his hair and she tried to draw his mouth closer.

Gray spread one hand over her cheek, forcing her face up to his with his thumb under her jaw.

"Is it like this when you're with Alex?"

His words sent hot awareness flooding over her. Gray's erection, hard and needy, pressed against her belly. Her response clenched deep inside, the pulse beating hard at the fork of her body, a madness in her veins.

Right now, if she pulled his mouth back to hers, pulled the fabric of his shirt aside and pressed her throbbing breasts to his naked flesh...

"Is it, Emma?"

He pulled her harder into him and her eyes closed, her body melting into him, throbbing
yes
against his, her heart losing its own rhythm. Then his hand slid down and grasped the aching mound of her breast and her head fell back.

His voice twisted in her. "How can you want me like this, Emma, if you love him?"

She jerked free—or he released her; she wasn't sure which. Her heart pounded hard like an out-of-balance washing machine, the air suddenly cold and harsh through her sweatshirt, her hands empty.

She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered, couldn't pull her eyes away from him. She needed his hands back on her flesh, needed his body against hers, naked, flesh to flesh.

"Why did you do that to me?"

"Emma..." He stepped back one pace, then two. "You'd better get some sleep," he said harshly.

Somehow she found strength to tear her gaze from his, to turn away. She opened the flaps to the tent and crawled in, onto the sleeping bag on the right side, hands on the cold surface of the bag. She sat and turned to take her shoes off and slip them outside the tent wall. Through the open flap she saw him turn with an abrupt motion and disappear.

She had to sit on
his
bag to get hers unzipped. Two bags, identical to the touch, illuminated in shadows as the flames outside sent subdued light through the tent wall. When Gray's hand had pressed her into him, her body had responded hungrily, starving for him. It would be so easy to remember how his hand would slip through the layers of fabric, searing her breast, making it swell and peak.

Oh, God. All those years ago it had been a hot madness when he touched her, but this was worse. Her body throbbed as if it would die without him.

This was some sort of reaction to Chris's disappearance, not real, no more real than Gray MacKenzie had been to her all these years.

How could hands and lips and a man's hard body combine to set off a nuclear explosion inside a woman? She was tired—overtired, overstressed, short of sleep and short of sanity. And he wasn't real. He was part of the wilderness, and she was anchorless out here, cut off from her own reality.

How much clothing would he take off before he got into his sleeping bag? How much should she strip off?

Which bag did he want?

She hadn't the nerve to call out and ask which side he preferred, a crazy intimate detail she would be wise not to learn. She crawled into the sleeping bag on the left with all her clothes on. When she turned over to face the wall of the tent, the lining of the sleeping bag caught and turned with her.

Where was Chris?

She tried to visualize him sitting comfortably under a tree somewhere along the shore, imagined that when she found him he would look at her in that too-grown-up way and say, "Aw, Mom, you didn't have to start all this search business. You should have known I'd be okay."

Gray would find her son and everything would be fine.

As she rolled onto her stomach, her clothes twisted and pulled uncomfortably. The flames threw monstrous shadows onto the wall of the tent and enough light to illuminate the lumpy shadow of Gray's empty bag.

She'd been curious, that's all it was—curious in flashes all day whenever she looked at him, whenever she saw his body move or caught his eyes on her, remembering his touch all those years ago. Remembering once, just once, his hands caressing her naked flesh to evoke the trembling sensations of awakening womanhood.

She'd wondered what his touch would feel like after all these years. It was natural to wonder, wasn't it? He'd been her first lover. She was curious about what it was like to go skydiving too, but that didn't mean she was about to jump out of a plane in flight.

It would have been better not to know.

Madness. It would be gone with the morning.

* * *

Gray could see moonlight through the nylon of the tent, which meant the storm had cleared enough to let some sky show. By the wind in the trees he could tell the gale was still blowing, but the clearing sky spoke of change.

He figured two kayaks could have ridden out last night's south wind if they were in one of the narrow channels, if their occupants were experienced and smart enough to head for shore during the hours when current and wind fought each other to create huge standing waves in the tide rips.

Chances were the kid was smart, and he did have some experience. Also, he wasn't alone, which upped his survival odds considerably. But hypothermia could steal two lives as easily as one, especially if they'd both taken a soaking in a stormy sea.

It seemed more likely they'd run into some problem with their equipment or a medical problem, and they were stalled on shore. Hopefully it was equipment, which would leave both boys fit. Their Outward Bound training should give them the survival skills to make sensible choices that would maximize their odds.

Best case scenario, it would be just a matter of time until someone found them, healthy and hungry and eager for rescue.

He knew Emma wasn't sleeping. She'd been facing away from him when he came into the tent and switched on his flashlight, her body held rigidly motionless. Pretending to sleep.

"Take your clothes off," he'd told her. "If you sleep that way you'll wake up sweaty and miserable."

She'd given no response except for a tense quality to the stillness.

"Take them off, Emma, or I will."

He'd turned then and gone back outside. Motionless, he'd listened to the rustling that was Emma undressing, trying not to think of exactly which garments she might be removing. He'd been obsessed by a woman all his adult life and had no idea what she wore when she went to bed.

It made no difference what was—or wasn't—between her skin and the sleeping bag so long as she'd shed enough clothes to sleep comfortably. He damned well wouldn't let it make a difference. She had concealed his child from him for seventeen years. Whoever she was, she didn't match the fantasy he'd created of her. Why in God's name would he want to become entangled with a woman who'd never been anything but trouble? She'd promised him the earth and stars with her eyes and her lips, but when it came to the crunch, all she'd given him were lies.

He'd lain awake for hours now, too aware of her, torn between storming out of the tent and turning toward her. He needed to pull that thick sleeping bag away and bury himself in every female curve of her body, to caress her until she turned hot and frantic, until she moaned his name.

Or Paul's name?

Face it, she'd married Paul, had stayed married for years until Paul died. The odds were it was Paul playing the lover in any nighttime fantasies Emma had.

Or perhaps it would be Alex now, the man she was going to marry. Gray hadn't believed in Emma's fiancé when she first mentioned him, but when she talked about his magic with kids, he'd heard tenderness in her voice.

Not love, just tenderness. But how could he know for certain?

Damn! His thoughts and emotions were swinging like a randy teenager's. He closed his eyes and began deliberately to review this section of the coast, to plan tomorrow's search. Eventually, he managed to drift into that state between wakefulness and sleep.

"Gray?"

It was only a whisper on the night, her voice as he remembered it, close and uncertain after their passion was exhausted.

"Gray, are you awake?"

If he turned toward her, he would reach to touch, so he kept his hands clenched at his sides. He wasn't about to let himself be torn apart over Emma Jennings again.

"Yeah," he growled.

"I hear sounds outside."

He stretched his attention and noted the rustle of branches. The wind must be shifting to southwest, which meant the storm was moving past. He heard a groan, probably the friction between a standing tree and the trunk of a windfall tree rubbing against it; some small animal rummaging nearby. There were always sounds in the bush, like an old house at night.

He'd been hanging around the bush behind his father from the first time he could remember. He couldn't remember a time when the wild had seemed strange, but Emma would have no way of recognizing any of these sounds.

Back when they were kids, he'd never taken her inexperience into account. He thought of the day he'd challenged her to prove she loved him by packing a suitcase and running away with him.