Lord of Lightning (13 page)

She wanted that beauty, with him.

“Stephen—” She reached out blindly, touching his face, his hair. Her voice broke softly. “I do want this ... I want you.”

There was a shudder in his breath as he gathered her up in his arms. She could feel his heartbeat, and the sudden urgency of his embrace. This wasn’t seduction anymore, she realized. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t even sex. He was shaking.
He needed her.

“No—not this way.” She pulled at the blindfold, trying to free herself. She wanted to look at him and touch him. To make it real. “I have to see you.”

He unknotted the cotton strip, and as it fell away from her eyes she saw a dark form swimming in stars. “Move into the moonlight,” she said urgently. “Let me see you.”

He took her by the hand and brought her around with him. As the light struck his features she saw the chiseled bones take shape and the golden hair flash with silver.

“Do you believe me now?” he said softly.

“Believe you? About what?”

“About this place. About touching the stars.”

He pulled her into his arms and swept a hand out toward the sky. It was true. The heavens were studded with stars that looked close enough to touch. Lise felt as though she were standing among them.

She looked up at him and saw the emotion she’d sensed. It was stored in his beautiful eyes and in the grip of his hand as he held her. “Yes, I believe you,” she said. He wasn’t an alien life-form or a Norse myth. He was a man, and that realization brought her another awareness. There was something he had to know about her. Something crucial she had to tell him.

She laughed softly, embarrassed. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Never done what?”

“I’ve never made love with a man. I’ve never touched the stars.” A wave of wild relief swept through her as she realized how easy it had been to tell him. The waiting and wondering was finally over. Sex would no longer be the ultimate mystery in her life. What pleased her more was that after so many years, she wasn’t afraid.

“Which star shall I touch?” she said, searching the sky with her eyes. Laughter bubbled up inside her. She couldn’t seem to control the delighted sound.

“Lise, this
can’t
be your first time.”

The low astonishment in his voice startled her. She turned to look up at him, and the laughter died in her throat. His features were changing, harshening. The emotion was becoming something else, something frightening. She couldn’t tell if it was disbelief or anger.

“What’s wrong, Stephen?”

His taut silence was answer enough. If there was one area in Lise’s life where she was painfully vulnerable, it was the subject of her virginity. Why didn’t he just say it, she thought. Mature, overripe? How ridiculous for a woman her age to be a virgin?

She was struggling for words when she saw something just beyond him in the sky. A hoary wave of darkness swept the night horizon. The clouds boiling toward them were devouring everything in their path, blotting out the stars, swallowing the moon. It looked like something out of a movie.

“Stephen—look!”

As he turned, a bolt of lightning split the sky in two. Its jagged, icy light scarred the heavens. The answering roar of thunder was deafening. Lise pressed her hands over her ears. The air was choked with the pungent stench of sulfur.

“What’s happening?” she gasped.

“An electrical storm,” he said, grabbing her hand. “They blow in quickly at this elevation. Come on! Let’s get back to the car!”

They began to run, sidestepping rocks and crevices, dodging boulders. Stephen’s eyes were fixed on the punishing terrain ahead when he felt Lise’s hand wrench from his.

“Ahhh!
Stephen—”

He whirled at her cry of pain. She’d dropped to the ground and was clasping her foot. Lord, she was barefoot! He’d forgotten. “I’ll carry you,” he said, scooping her up. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

The path down was treacherously steep and hard to follow in the dark. Lightning spat at Stephen’s back, and thunder roared at every turn, as though the heavens were seeking vengeance. Lise’s fingernails bit into his neck as she clung to him, but her pale, beautiful features registered something closer to stoic determination than fear.

Halfway down he came upon a shortcut, a dried-up creek bed where the rocks gave him better traction. He’d barely made it thirty yards before the rain started. It was a violent downpour that drenched both of them in seconds. He gave her his jacket, but it did little good. They were soaked to the skin by the time they got to his Rover.

The drive down the mountain was equally treacherous. The rain had washed out the shoulder of the road in places, forcing Stephen to stay to the middle. He tried to use the white line as a guide, but rain sheeted the windshield, blinding him for several seconds at a time. The van shimmied and squealed as he took the corners. He was driving too fast.

He was aware that Lise was pressed back against the seat, her fingers gripping the armrest, but he hadn’t realized she was staring at him until they reached the bottom. A streetlight illuminated her silent, drawn features. Her stoicism had given way to apprehension, and in the soggy nightgown, she looked like a frightened, rain-drenched waif.

“What’s gotten into you?” she said, her voice faint. “The way you’re driving, I’d almost think a pack of hellhounds was after us.”

She’s closer than she knows.
“I wanted to get down off that mountain. The roads are death traps in this kind of weather.”

“All the more reason to drive cautiously. Stephen—what’s wrong?”

There was a shake in her indrawn breath, and it tore him up to think that she was frightened because of him. “Nothing—except that I was an idiot for taking you up there.”

Her voice thinned out. “Why? Because of what I told you? That I’d never been with a man before?”

“No.”
Yes,
he thought. Yes, it was that. She had saved herself with that confession. She had said the one thing that could have stopped him at that moment. The lightning storm had done the rest. Lord, he hoped it was
just
a storm.

“I’m not some trembling virgin, Stephen. I’m twenty-seven. I know what I want.”

But do you know what you’d be getting,
he thought. “I’ve got to get back to the cabin,” he told her, slamming the Rover into a lower gear. The back wheels were skidding and he needed traction. “The lightning could damage my equipment, a power surge.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

“Stephen—”

“No.”
He silenced her with a quick, angry glance. “I’ll let you out at your place, and I want you to get the hell inside and stay there, do you understand? These kinds of storms can kill people.”

She went quiet then, but the hand she’d knotted in her sodden nightgown told him more than he wanted to know. He’d hurt her. Drawing in his next breath became an ordeal. He’d known this was going to happen. It was inevitable.
Why the hell hadn’t he stayed away from her?
If he needed a reason not to see her again, he’d just found it. He had hurt her. He would hurt her again. It was inevitable. Pain bred pain.

Rain pelted the windshield, running in streams.

The storm was letting up by the time they reached her place. The lightning had subsided, but the drops were still falling hard. He pulled the van into her driveway, reached across her and opened the door. The chill that came off her damp nightgown made his heartbeat slow and painful. “Can you get inside by yourself, Lise?”

“I can get in.” She shrugged off his jacket, refusing his help.

He made no more attempts to help her as she slid to the ground. He didn’t trust himself to touch her. Barefoot in the rain in her nightgown, he thought, his chest tightening. What would the good people of Shady Tree think if they could see their Miss Anderson now?

He pulled the Rover out and swung it around.

She stood in the grass alongside the driveway, watching him, her eyes puzzled, angry and sad, her hair curling damply around her face. She looked like a water spirit who had wandered too far from her enchanted lily pond.

He waved at her to go into the house.
Why the hell didn’t she?
And then he hit the gas and pulled out. A fiery pain flared through his jaw as he glanced in the rearview mirror. She was still there, standing in the pouring rain, watching him roar out of her life.

With a giant heave, Lise pulled the Dieffenbachia free of its terra-cotta clay pot and set it on the porch.

“Just as I thought,” she said, heaving a shaky sigh.
“Pot-bound.”

Its roots were twined around the root ball in a dense, suffocating mass. The plant was strangling itself. Lise wiped at her dripping nightgown frantically, oblivious to the mud and dirt stains on her hands as she crouched to prune the tangled artery network.

The fibrous tendrils were no match for her flashing stainless steel knife. Lise imagined she could hear screams with every amputation, but she never wavered until the job was done. There was nothing more important to her on this night of abductions and electrical storms than to get the plant where it could live and breathe.

A short time later she stood in her yard in the drizzling rain, staring at the living thing she had just liberated. The Dieffenbachia stood, stunned but proud, near the driveway.

Grow, baby, grow.

She walked back into her house without once looking at the road Stephen Gage had taken moments before. When she reached her bedroom, she yanked the soiled nightgown over her head, dropped it on the floor, and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wet and bedraggled and dirty. She looked like a drowned cat with breasts.

“What does he know.” Her voice hoarsened with pain. “There are men who would kill for this overripe body.”

A feedback signal beeped softly and insistently in the predawn stillness. Stephen awoke with a start. The flashing lights and zigzagging readout displays bewildered him for a minute before he remembered where he was.

He sat forward in the straight back chair he’d fallen asleep in and massaged his aching temples savagely. It was all right, he reminded himself, calming his rising panic. The equipment hadn’t been damaged. Once the worst of the storm had subsided, he’d even managed to make contact. The transmission had been only seconds in duration, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless. Now, the question was, could last night’s communication be repeated? He still had to prove it wasn’t a fluke.

The storage room was stifling as he left its whirring activity and walked to the bedroom window. Dawn was sheening the hills with pink and gold. It was going to be a beautiful day, he realized, but the awareness brought him no joy. He wouldn’t be seeing too many more California sunrises. He would miss the austere beauty of the hills. He would miss her.

Was she still standing alongside the road?

The image was indelible in his mind. The Rain Maiden. Wistful and wounded. She probably thought he hadn’t wanted her, that
she
was inadequate in some way, when nothing could be further from the truth. He was the one flawed.

Pain thrust at him like a dull knife blade, as blunt and tearing as the moment he’d let her out of the car. It had nearly killed him to leave her that way.

Was
she awake now? Was she getting ready for school? Sitting in a shaft of sunshine? Braiding her hair?

He should have told her it was him. He should have told her about the other woman—the one he’d stupidly talked into intimacy before either of them was ready— with tragic results. He owed her an explanation, at least.

Rising light turned the window into a mirror which captured every detail of his haggard expression.
This is no less than you deserve, Gage,
he thought.
Wanting her is your punishment. Letting her go is your atonement.

He turned away from the window.

“Tah
dahhh!
The train of the future!” Julie’s hand cut a flamboyant arc through the air as she presented the class with their masterwork, the model maglev train.

Lise stood at the back of the room, her stomach tied in knots as the class waited breathlessly for Julie to throw the switch. The project was far from done, but this was their first test of the electromagnetic propulsion system and it was crucial. They’d all been working furiously, even giving up their weekend to get it ready. They were using the electric induction motor that Stephen had helped the children assemble the day he’d spent with them, but he hadn’t been around to help them with the magnetized reaction rails.

He hadn’t been around period,
Lise thought. A hot sensation, like a branding iron, touched a nerve in her cheek. She hadn’t seen him since the storm two nights before.

“Conductor, ma’am?”

Lise gave Julie a quick nod. “Hit it, Chief Engineer.”

Julie approached the switching mechanism with great flourish. “A drumroll, please,” she said.

The class obliged, and as their clattering fingers subsided, Julie executed one last Carnack-the-Magnificent bow.

Lise actually felt a stab of panic as Julie put her finger to the switch. There was so much at stake. Beyond winning the scholarship money, even beyond losing the school, there was Lise’s own personal need to have this system work. She couldn’t call on Stephen for help again. She
wouldn’t
call on him for help.

“Julie! Stop kidding around and do it,” Lise pleaded.

Startled, Julie threw the switch.

The silence was deafening. No lights, no choo-choo noises, no nothing. Their masterwork didn’t.

“Aw, shoot,” someone moaned.

“It’s a dud!” came another outburst.

Lise gave way to the panic rising inside her. “Is the transformer plugged in?” she called, rushing up the aisle toward Julie.

Julie ducked behind the table for an instant. “Yup, everything’s plugged but the toilet.”

Lise hushed the class’s burst of laughter and tried the switch herself. Not a hiccup. The system was doornail dead.

“I think we need the Maytag repairman,” Julie said, grimacing. “Where is Flash Gordon, anyway?”

“Yeah, where’s the spaceman?” Danny Baxter asked.