Sweet Salt Air (16 page)

“That’s it,” he finally said, taking a long look at what they’d done before collecting his things and backing down the ladder. As soon as Charlotte was on the ground, he lowered the ladders and carried them away. He returned with two bottled waters, handed her one, and drank the contents of the other in an unbroken series of gulps.

Charlotte was feeling better, like she had accomplished something, had earned her keep in an odd regard. She looked up at the roof. Still lit by the flood, it was dark and even. “That’s good-quality tar paper,” she said.

“What’s the point of making the effort, if you don’t do it right?”

She smiled. “I just read that in a book. The guy is building a boat and wants to use the best materials, which are taking forever to arrive, but he’s adamant about waiting.”

Leo was staring at her.

Puzzled, she stared back. “What?”

“You read that crap?”

“What crap?”

“Salt
.
”

She was amused. “What do you know about
Salt
?”

“It’s all people are talking about.”

“You read?”

He frowned. “Sometimes.”

“But not
Salt.
Because it’s crap. For the record,” Charlotte remarked, feeling proprietary of the book, “I don’t think it’s crap. I think it’s well written and tells a great story.”

Leo stared for another minute, then said, “So does
Moby-Dick.
Lots of copies of that in the prison library.”

“So they let you read there. That’s not so bad.”

He turned up his lip. “I also learned how to pick locks and hot-wire cars.”

“I’ll watch my Jeep. They used to say you stole money from the church box.”

“They never caught me at it,” he countered, not quite answering the question.

She shot a puzzled look at the house. “So how do you pay for repairs?”

“Embezzlement.”

Charlotte didn’t believe it for a minute. “Did you ever force a girl to have sex?”

“I never had to. They were willing.”

“Did you ever make one pregnant?”

“I’m not that dumb,” he muttered and, seeming to have had enough talk, walked back to the house to turn off the floodlight. Then, in long strides, he headed off through the herbs. As he walked, he pulled his shirt over his head.

“Where are you going?” she shouted as the moon glanced off his bare back.

“Swimming. Go home.” He turned into the night woods and dissolved.

Charlotte wasn’t about to go home. She wanted to see where Leo swam. If her calculations were correct, that path would lead to a stretch where the shoreline was rocky and forbidding. She and Nicole had never walked that far down the beach. Like broken pavement on the road, the message was
KEEP OUT
.

Now, though, she could approach it from a different direction. If Leo had cut through the woods, so could she.

She was about to do that when a rustling came from the bushes by the house. As the dog emerged, she held her breath. A black hulk in the moonlight, it looked first at her, then in the direction Leo had gone. She had no idea what its thought process was; she only knew that, after what seemed an inordinately long time, it set off after Leo. It walked slowly, plodding toward the woods. The word
gingerly
came to Charlotte’s mind. As she watched, she didn’t think the dog looked dangerous. She thought it looked old.

It hadn’t gone after the doe or its fawn. It hadn’t lunged at her. She had never seen it do anything but lumber along. Old. She couldn’t rule it out.

Not that she was taking any chances. She waited until it was gone, then silently followed. Something sweet hovered in the garden, but her focus was beyond. There was definitely a path. Forest brush snapped under her sneakers, but the surf grew progressively louder. Then it appeared, reflecting the moon like a light at the end of the tunnel. Large boulders, small rocks, and flat little stones flanked a patch of wet sand. Had the tide been in, that sand wouldn’t have been visible at all. Even now it was hard-packed. Leo’s clothes were there, alongside his boots, kicked off and askew.

Hidden just inside the path, Charlotte searched the water. Moonlight bounced off the waves, which rolled gently in, but it was a minute before she was able to separate out a pair of arms. Pale white in the moonglow, they stroked steadily away from shore. A risky thing to do? She would think so. But he had to know what he was doing—had probably done this hundreds of other nights. He swam easily, rising and falling with the waves, seeming as comfortable in the water as he was on his roof.

Mesmerized by the rhythm of those arms, the turn of his head when he breathed, an occasional kick that broke the surface behind him, she barely breathed herself until something wet touched her leg. Startled, she whirled around. It was the dog, looking up at her with baleful eyes.

“It’s okay,” she whispered shakily. “It’s okay. Good Bear. No harm.”

Baleful? Or simply sad? In the rays of the moon that wove through the trees, she saw furrows on its brow, and patches of brown near its eyes and snout.

Heart pounding, she extended a hand. The dog sniffed it for a minute. It didn’t growl, didn’t bare its teeth or back away—it actually seemed to want something more. She put her fingertips to its head, much as Leo had done that first night. Its fur was short and coarse on the flat stretch between its ears, but those ears looked silky. Curious, she touched them.

The dog sat.

Charlotte’s heart continued to pound, though no longer from fear. Now it was the pull of the moon, and before that the smell of temptation in the garden. She was hot. “I’m going for a swim,” she whispered to the dog. “Okay?”

When Bear didn’t move, Charlotte looked at the sea again. Leo’s arms were distant, but they had reversed direction. He was heading in. If she planned to join him, it had to be now.

“Stay,” she urged softly, and with only the quickest glance back to make sure the dog didn’t follow, she hurried to the beach. The moon was bright, turning the ocean into a play of contrast, midnight and silver, dark and light, good and bad. This was her life. She had no business being here. She was playing with fire.

But that didn’t stop her from stripping down to her underwear and running into the surf. The water was cold, taking her breath for an instant, but she didn’t turn back. When she was thigh-high in it, she dove over an incoming swell and submerged in its wake. Surfacing a body length beyond, she gasped at the cold. Then, pausing only to locate Leo, she started to swim. Her body rose with each swell, working harder on the climb, but the effort warmed her. She stroked steadily until one ill-timed breath met the rolling surf. Just shy of swallowing a mouthful, she spit it out and, straightening, looked for Leo. She didn’t have to look far. He had stopped swimming and was watching her. Dark head, dark eyes, wet face white, he was as much a contrast as the rest of the world.

Treading water, she remembered the warnings about Leo Cole. Just then, though, none seemed to matter. If Leo had done bad things, so had she. And danger? She had once dived off a cliff in Acapulco. It hadn’t been pretty, and she wasn’t about to repeat it, but she had survived and remembered the rush. Being in these waters with Leo couldn’t be worse.

The surf brought him closer. She couldn’t tell whether he helped it with his hands, since they were submerged, as were hers. Her hair had come loose and trailed behind her. Only her head and shoulders broke the surface as she kicked to keep herself afloat.

He stopped an arm’s length away, staring at her with shadowed eyes. After a minute, he blew out a short breath. From the exertion of swimming? Not likely. It might have been a question:
What did I expect?
Or a warning:
You’re pushing me.
Mostly, it felt like a bald statement:
We’re in trouble.

But wasn’t that what she wanted? If there was a price to pay for this, what was one more price? And it wasn’t just her.
We,
his expression said. This wasn’t a one-way thing.

His leg tangled with hers. At the same time, he tethered her by the hair and brought her to his mouth. The loss of breath then was for real. Part moon, part ocean, his kiss was like nothing she’d ever experienced. It was commanding, but not hurtful—thorough in the way she needed. By the time it was done, her arms were around his neck, her legs around his waist. The cold water should have depressed his need, but did not. The next wave brought a taunting undulation.

Breathing hard, he propelled them toward shore. They were barely in the shallows, their legs still washed by the surf, when he set her on the sand and levered up only enough to tug at her panties. She helped, but one leg was all they managed. Holding that leg, he looked at her, giving her one last chance.
Are you in or out?

“In,” she whispered, and he was. Head back, eyes closed, he held himself there for what seemed an eternity, before looking at her again. He seemed surprised. So was she. She hadn’t been conscious of wanting him, hadn’t drooled over his body while they worked or dreamt about it afterward. The way he fit into her now, though, satisfied something deep inside.

Wanting another kiss, she brought his face down, and the hunger was fierce on both sides. In time, she needed air, gasping at the power of what she felt. His thrusts went beyond the rhythm of the surf, creating sensations so strong that she cried out.

He went still. “Hurt?”

She laughed into a moan, moved her head no against the sand, and, crossing her ankles, pulled him deeper. It went on and on and on, both the lovemaking and the spasms at the end. Her body or his? She was too into it to know or care.

When he finally slipped to the side, she lay back, breathless and limp. Eyes closed, she refused to see anything around her. He stayed close, his abdomen to her hip and one leg over hers. She didn’t fall asleep, though the sense of release was so great that she might have. She simply lay there for however long, totally drained.

Then she felt something. It was his hand, moving over her belly in a slow, tentative way that had nothing to do with sex—and in a flash, reality returned. Sitting up fast, she turned away and hugged her knees. When she looked back, he was on an elbow, frowning.

“You have a baby,” he said.

She swallowed, shook her head no.

“Those are stretch marks,” he stated.

She had always been careful to hide them. One-piece bathing suits were good for that. Same with silk camis. But she had never been so taken with sex as she’d been with Leo, and it was night. The dark should have kept her secrets.

Not that she had thought any of this out ahead of time. She had come to Leo’s to be punished. But sex?
Punished?
He hadn’t been a brute of a lover at all. Powerful, yes. But far from cruel, and that was as upsetting as the other. Sex with Leo had been … amazing. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.

Frightened, she looked around for her clothes and quickly pulled them on. Leo was sitting up now, watching her, but he didn’t speak, and as soon as she pushed her wet feet into her sneakers, she made for the path. She didn’t pass the dog, barely heard the crunch of the forest floor or felt the sand matting her wet hair. When she came out into the garden, she hurried through the rows, down the drive, and onto the road. She didn’t look back,
couldn’t
look back. And when she reached Nicole’s house, she closed the door and sank to the ground.

She had run to Leo’s to escape a mess. Now she had created another.

*   *   *

There was only one thing to do. After showering away all signs of the night, she wrapped herself in a fleece blanket on the sofa downstairs and, picking up
Salt,
escaped into a world where love beat the odds.

At least, she thought it did. An hour later, though, she was worried. The lovers were perfect for each other, but they were rooted in such different worlds that only a sea change in one would keep them together. She didn’t see it happening. The author had painted both in fine detail; she knew them well. They had overcome silence and secrets, and had changed in the deepest possible ways—but their differences remained huge. They simply couldn’t change more and stay in character.

Unable to bear the suspense, she flipped through to the last pages, the ones Nicole had sobbed about. Minutes later, she slammed the book shut, buried it under a pillow in the corner of the sofa, and, heartsick, went to bed.

Chapter Ten

T
UESDAY’S MEETING IN
C
HICAGO WAS
tough from the start. Whereas Peter Keppler had an easy way about him, Mark Hammon was an academic. A slender, bespectacled man who wasn’t prone to small talk, he studied Julian’s file at length, turning from one page to the next, frowning, going back, removing his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose, glancing at Julian, replacing the glasses, returning to the file. When he finally spoke, he expressed serious reservations about Julian being a candidate for a stem cell transplant.

What little relief Nicole felt was offset by Julian’s frustration. His face was tight with it.

“You’re thinking that I’ve only been at this for four years,” he argued, “but my reading says that stem cell treatment is the most promising when it’s done in the early stage of a disease. I’m the perfect candidate.”

Hammon didn’t look convinced, though he considered it a while before saying, “You tend to have serious side effects. There are less risky things to try first.”

“What we’ve tried hasn’t worked.” When Hammon named two drugs that Julian hadn’t tried, he only waved a dismissive hand. “The side effects of either one can be worse than the disease, and the promise of payoff isn’t as good as with stem cells.”

“Given your physiology and your history of reaction, an autologous transplant would be better.”

“Using my own cells? With another patient, I might agree. But I’ve been on so many drugs that I doubt my own cells would be any good, and testing for that would only waste time. Time is the issue, Mark. If there’s any chance of salvaging my career, I need to act now. I want to take a step that holds real promise. I know the risks.”