If You Loved Me (20 page)

She opened the door to the bathroom. She would just take a minute to wash her face and hands. She wasn't about to take her clothes off in his house. She was not going to get naked and climb into that deep green soaker tub, was not going to turn the switch to activate its Jacuzzi jets.

A glass jar of bath salts beckoned from a mahogany shelf over the toilet.

No.

There's lots of hot water, enough to run a deep tub and soak.

Damn!

It would be stupid to go into town dirty and sore when she could soak the aches and the dirt away in a deep, hot tub; crazy to believe that being naked behind a locked door could make her vulnerable to Gray in any way. By insisting on going into town without taking advantage of hot water and his deep tub, she must be giving him the impression she was
afraid
to be around him.

She pushed the door closed and locked it, sealing herself in. She would have a quick bath, and later she'd make sure she asked him exactly how he managed to have hot water in the middle of nowhere when he'd shut the power generator off before they flew off searching for Chris. With luck, the answer would be very technical, and she'd ask him enough questions to last from here to Prince Rupert.

She turned on the water and watched it thunder into the tub.

Five minutes later she was up to her shoulders in hot water, rolling her shoulder and hip to let the jets pound on her thigh, drifting on the flow of heat, and feeling as if she were lying in a warm cloud after running a hard mile.

The tub was big, built for his long body. Perhaps even built for
two.
Had Gray ever had a woman with him in this tub? Perhaps the woman he'd married?

She wouldn't ask, didn't need to know.

Anyone could have a Jacuzzi tub. Maybe she'd talk to the contractor who had done her renovations about putting in one. It would be great to relax like this after a long day in surgery. Alex would probably enjoy it, too, although she couldn't imagine herself bathing naked with Alex.

That was only because they'd never yet made love. When she got back home...

She tipped her head back and let her hair and her ears sink below the surface, felt a rumbling in the world around her.

Someone was coming!

She sat erect, water streaming off her hair and shoulders. Under the water, the sound had swallowed her, penetrating her whole body. Now, it resolved into footsteps outside the bathroom door. Gray.

She stared at the knob. Even if he tried the door, it wouldn't open. She
had
locked it. Hadn't she? She stood and grabbed a towel from the rack, twisted it into a turban with her hair inside. She took a second towel and wrapped it around herself, tucking the end under between her breasts.

Damn!
She'd forgotten to bring clean clothes into the bathroom, and now she was dripping on the dirty sweatshirt and jeans she'd dropped on the floor.

It would be silly to get back into her dirty clothes. After all, a woman wrapped in a towel was more thoroughly covered than a woman in a bikini.

She heard a door open, then close. He must have gone into his bedroom.

She opened the bathroom door a crack. Yes, his bedroom door was closed. He was inside there, on the other side of a thin wooden door. Hurriedly, she slipped out of the bathroom and into the guest bedroom, then realized she'd left the water in the tub and her dirty clothes on the floor.

She wasn't going back, not until she had clothes on. She'd clean up the bathroom after she dressed.

She closed the door firmly, then threw her suitcase on the bed, opened it, and pulled out panties and bra. She was pulling her panties up over her damp thighs when she heard a door open again. Then she heard water.

Gray was in the bathroom, draining her tub.

She hated the thought of him cleaning the tub behind her, picking up her dirty clothes from the floor. She gritted her teeth and yanked the clinging panties over her damp buttocks. Too late to do anything about it now. Being a man, he'd probably just kick her clothes into a corner if they were in his way.

Getting dressed was the first priority. She fastened her bra, then pulled on a pair of maroon slacks and an off-white silk blouse from her suitcase.

She frowned at herself in the mirror. The turban around her head made it plain she'd just stepped out of the bath. She unwound the towel and finger-combed her damp hair. The mirror showed the silk of her blouse clinging to her breasts as she lifted her arms.

If he saw her like that, he might think she'd dressed to issue an invitation.

She pulled a colorful quilted vest out of the suitcase, Chris's Christmas present to her last year. It was different from the plain blazers and slacks she normally wore, but she liked it, although she thought it made her look a bit bohemian.

It covered her breasts quite effectively.

She hung both towels over the back of a chair, then opened her makeup bag and applied lipstick—no perfume and no other makeup. She wasn't issuing any invitations or doing anything he might interpret as an invitation. That would be stupid after last night.

Her face flared as she remembered the storm that had swept over her in his arms. She'd ached to feel Gray buried deep inside her. Nothing else had mattered, nothing at all. It had been the situation, of course—the wilderness, the wind howling in the trees, Chris somewhere out there in danger, and Gray, the only solid thing in the world to cling to.

So she'd gone a little mad. People did act in bizarre ways in extreme situations. When the emergency was over, they returned to normal, as if the aberration had never happened.

Last night she'd wanted him so badly. At first his touch had felt like home, soothing her anxiety over Chris. Then, suddenly, it had changed, and she'd lost herself in a deep hungry world where nothing mattered but Gray's arms around her, and her body crying to be possessed.

Then she'd realized there could be a child, and the knowledge evoked a powerful image of Gray's child suckling at her breast, Gray's strong arms about them both. For a moment, in madness, she'd welcomed the primitive craving that welled up inside her body to mate and procreate, to feel his seed growing within her.

It was insanity—too much adrenaline in her system, her brain producing endorphins in response to crisis. It was good he'd reacted the way he had when she told him, good he'd turned away and stopped them from going over that edge. She should thank him for that.

Thank you, Gray, for not taking advantage when I tried to climb all over you last night when I was mad enough to think everything would be solved if I could carry your child. Thank you for not making love to me.

Well, that was a speech she'd never make. She'd thank him for finding Chris, for promising to check on her son tonight and keep an eye on the boys' journey to Prince Rupert. As for their passion in the midst of the storm in a wilderness inlet—best to leave that memory to die a natural death.

She combed her hair and then packed everything away in her suitcase. Her medical kit was still in the plane. She'd brought nothing else, so she was ready to go.

She picked up the suitcase and opened the bedroom door.

In the same instant, the bathroom door opened and Gray stepped out, naked—or almost naked.

She swallowed her gasp and stared at his face. His chest was naked. Further down she didn't know, wouldn't look.

She took one step back.

"Emma..."

"I have to go." She focused her gaze on a spot over his shoulder. The doorjamb was painted a dusty rose, contrasting with the deeper shades of the wallpaper. "Can you fly me home now? I mean, to Prince Rupert."

He wore a towel slung over one shoulder. Above the towel, his damp hair curled over his ears. She told herself if he were naked, he'd have the towel wrapped around his hips. She took a careful breath and let her gaze dodge downward to his naked chest and midriff to the jeans below, zipped and fastened at the waist. His feet were bare. She swallowed hard.

"The first time I met you, you were in a hurry to get home. You were afraid of your father then. What's the rush today?"

She stared at the sprinkling of hairs on his chest. Of course she had to go. There were reasons, dozens of reasons. All she needed was one, and a voice.

"Alex."

He lifted the end of the towel and blotted a bead of water that had escaped his hair. "The man you're going to marry."

"Yes," she agreed. "He'll be worried," she added, and realized that it was true. Alex would be worried. She should have phoned him from the cell phone when she was in the air. Gray said her phone would work in the air over Stephens Island, but she'd forgotten to call. She hadn't tried to call Alex even once during the long air search for Chris.

Standing here staring at Gray's naked chest, it seemed unforgivable, though not as bad as the fact she wanted to reach out and touch the man in front of her.

She'd never seen Alex with his shirt off. Maybe—

Lies. Damn it, she was telling herself lies.

When she saw Alex she would have to tell him the truth. If she was going to marry him, it couldn't be with Gray as a ghost between them.

"Chris isn't your child." She didn't know where the words came from, but recognized them as a barrier between Gray's probing eyes and her pounding heart.

"I knew that as soon as I saw him."

"He looks like Paul."

"Yes." Gray shifted his stance, and for a moment she thought he was going to step closer. She braced herself then slowly let her breath go when she realized he'd actually moved away from her.

"Chris is a good kid, Emma. He was determined to finish that trip even after a week trying to carve a paddle out of a tree."

"I wanted him to feel... not trapped by my worrying."

"You did a good job."

She felt off balance. Gray was not quite close enough to touch, yet too close.

"I wouldn't have married Paul if the baby was yours."

His eyes flared. "How could you be sure it wasn't mine? When we had sex—"

Her bitter laugh stopped his words. "Have sex. You always said it like that. Never love."

"You said love and made it into a fairy tale. When you realized you were pregnant, how could you be sure the baby wasn't mine?"

"I was on the pill. I went to the doctor that spring, when we started seeing each other again."

"Why didn't you tell me?" He held a hand up to stop the words on her open lips. "Why did you marry Paul?"

She made a helpless gesture. "Because you didn't love me. I tried to pretend you did. All the time we were going together I pretended eventually you would realize you loved me." She pushed the old dreams away with another restless motion. "When you asked me to come with you, I realized you didn't love me—you couldn't. If you'd loved me, you wouldn't have asked me to forget everything I cared about, to give up my dream of being a doctor and follow you to the ends of the earth."

"You'd have come if I loved you, but if I loved you, I wouldn't ask?"

She smiled sadly. "Exactly."

"And what has any of that to do with marrying Paul?"

She wanted to touch his forehead, to smooth the crease from between his eyes.

"Does it matter now?"

"I don't know."

"I guess I wanted someone to love me. You didn't—you didn't even want me to come with you, not really. You'd no sooner asked me than you were telling me all the reasons I would never make it in your wilderness world."

Gray pulled the towel off his shoulder and Emma gasped, "I have to leave."

"Don't go."

She forced a smile. "I'd have given anything to hear you say that when I was eighteen. It's different now. We're different people."

She found herself pressing against the wall without knowing how she'd gotten there. "You
know
how different we are, Gray. You understood that from the beginning. I think you were right about me. I wanted everything, all the bits of life I'd missed by spending so much time in the hospital and on crutches. We never would have made it together, and now I need to go home. I need my life back."

"I want you, Emma."

His voice rumbled through her whole body, from her shoulders through her breasts, over her belly to her thighs, down into the secret center of her hunger.

"I think you want me, too."

Her lids went heavy. Her lips felt so full she needed to part them. Recklessness surged inside, words came, but she wasn't sure what they were. Her fingers curled in on themselves with the force of her need to reach for him.

"I don't know you, Gray. I don't know who you are. Maybe I've never known." Her words made a kind of sense to her, enough to allow her to turn away from him, to step into her room and pick up the suitcase.

Chapter 9

Her room? What kind of insanity was that? It was only a place she'd slept, a spare room in Gray's house. He'd had a wife, probably other women. Right now he wanted
her,
and she had to get out of here while her life still made sense. Did she want the tears back, the confusion, the yearning for something she could never have?