Forget Me Not

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Your hands are just right,” Rafe said. “Graceful and long and very, very sensitive.”

  Alana’s breath came in raggedly as she saw Rafe’s expression. She knew that he was remembering being touched by her, the sensual contrast of her hands against the male contours of his body, the heat and pleasure she had brought to him.

  “You’ll enjoy it,” continued Rafe softly. “I promise you.”

  “I—yes,” Alana said quickly, before she could change her mind and be afraid again. “After breakfast?”

  “After breakfast.”

  Rafe turned his attention to the hook in his vise. He released the hook and carefully buried the sharp tip in the fleece-lined box.

  “Can you sleep now,” he asked, “or would you like me to sit next to your bed for a while?”

  Then he looked up, catching and holding Alana’s glance with his own.

  “I wouldn’t touch you unless you asked me to,” Rafe said. “And I don’t expect you to ask.”

  “I know,” Alana said, her voice low.

  And she did. She trusted him.

  The realization sent a quiver of light through the dark pool that fear and amnesia had made in the depths of her mind.

  “Would you mind staying with me?” she whispered. “For just a few minutes? I know it’s childish—”

  “Then we’re both children,” said Rafe easily, cutting across her words, “because I’d rather sit with you than be alone.”

  Alana brushed his mustache with her fingertips.

  “Thank you,” she breathed.

  The touch was so light, it was almost more imagined than real. Yet she felt it all the way to her knees.

  And so did he. His eyes were tawny, reflecting the dance of flame from the lamp.

  “My pleasure,” Rafe said.

  Then he looked away from Alana, not wanting her to see his hunger.

  “Go upstairs before you get cold,” Rafe said. “I’ll clean up here.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No. It will just take a minute.”

  Alana hesitated, then turned away as Rafe began deftly sorting materials and stacking small boxes onto a tray.

  But as soon as she no longer watched him, Rafe looked up, ignoring the brilliant materials at his fingertips. Motionless, entirely focused on Alana, he watched as she climbed up the narrow stairs to the loft.

  The glossy black of her hair caught and held the lamplight like stars reflected in a wind-ruffled midnight lake. The green of her nightgown clung and shifted, revealing and then concealing the womanly curves beneath. Her bare feet looked small, graceful, oddly vulnerable beneath the swirling folds of cloth.

  Silently, savagely, Rafe cursed Jack Reeves.

  9

  A LANA OPENED THE cast-iron stove door, using a pot holder that had been crocheted by Rafe’s grandmother. Inside the belly of the stove, a neat pattern of wood burned brightly, sending vivid orange flames licking at the thick iron griddle above.

  “So far, so good,” Alana muttered.

  She closed the door, adjusted the vent, dipped her fingers into a saucer of water, and flicked drops on the griddle. Water hissed and danced whitely across the griddle’s searing black surface.

  “Perfect.”

  The kitchen was washed in the golden warmth of a kerosene lamp, for it was at least half an hour until dawn. The smell of bacon and coffee permeated the lodge and spread through the crisp air to the other cabins, prodding everyone out of bed.

  From just outside the kitchen door came the clean, sharp sound of Rafe splitting wood for the stove. It was a strangely peaceful sound, a promise of warmth and a reminder that Rafe wasn’t far away.

  The rhythm of a song began to sift through Alana’s mind, working its way down to her throat. She hummed almost silently, not knowing what she did. It was only the barest thread of sound, more a hope of song than song itself.

  Alana picked up the pitcher of pancake batter and poured creamy circles onto the griddle. When the bubbles burst and batter didn’t run in to fill the hollows, she flipped each pancake neatly. Soon she had several stacks warming at the back of the stove next to the thick slices of bacon she had already cooked and set aside.

  As she poured more batter onto the griddle, she sensed someone walking up behind her.

  “I don’t need any more wood yet, Rafe,” Alana said, setting aside the pitcher as she turned around. “Not until I—oh!”

  It was Stan, not Rafe, who had come up behind Alana. Reflexively she took a step backward, forgetting about the hot stove.

  “Watch out!” said Stan, reaching toward her automatically, trying to prevent her from being burned.

  Alana flinched away, bringing the back of her hand into contact with the cast-iron stove. She made a sound of pain and twisted aside, evading Stan’s touch at the cost of burning herself again. Again, he reached for her, trying to help.

  “Don’t touch her.”

  Rafe’s voice was so cold, so savage, that Alana almost didn’t recognize it.

  Stan did, though. He stepped back instantly. When his blue eyes assessed the fear on Alana’s face, he stepped back even more, giving her all the room she needed.

  “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Rafe.

  His voice was flat and low, promising violence. The stove wood he had carried inside fell into the wood box with a crash that was startling in the charged silence.

  Though Rafe hadn’t made a move toward Stan, the blond man backed up all the way to the door between the dining room and the kitchen before he spoke.

  “Sorry,” muttered Stan. “Bob and I thought Alana might need help with . . . whatever.”

  “Bob and you? Christ,” snarled Rafe. “That’s an idiots’ duet if ever there was one.”

  Stan flushed. “Now look here, Winter.”

  “Go tell Bob that if Alana needs the kind of help that you had in mind, I’ll be the first one to suggest it. Got that?”

  Stan’s mouth flattened, but he nodded his head curtly, accepting Rafe’s command.

  “That was your free one,” Rafe said grimly. “Do you read me?”

  Again, Stan nodded curtly.

  Rafe turned his back on Stan and went to Alana. He held out his hand.

  “Let me see your burn,” Rafe said softly.

  The change in his voice was almost shocking. Warm, gentle, reassuring, it seemed impossible that the words came from the same man who had flayed Stan to the bone with a few razor phrases.

  “It’s all right, wildflower,” murmured Rafe. “I won’t hurt you.”

  With a long, shuddering release of breath, Alana held out her burned hand to Rafe.

  He looked at the two red bars where her skin had touched the stove and felt rage like raw lightning scoring his gut. Turning on his heel, he went to the refrigerator and pulled out a handful of ice. He dampened a kitchen towel, wrapped the ice, and held it out to Alana.

  “Put this over the burns,” he said gently. “It will take away the pain.”

  Numbly Alana did as Rafe said. Within seconds the pain from the seared flesh was gone.

  “Thank you,” ‘she said, sighing. Then, “It seems that I’m always thanking you.”

  He took the spatula from Alana and scraped off the pancakes that had begun to burn.

  “Funny,” Rafe muttered, “it seems that I’m always hurting you.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Stan’s, either. It was my own foolishness,” said Alana.

  “Bullshit,” Rafe said in a clipped voice.

  He scraped charred batter off the griddle with short, vicious strokes.

  “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me,” he said, “and neither would Stan.”

  Alana was too surprised to say anything.

  With a disgusted sound, Rafe threw the spatula onto the counter and turned to Alana. His eyes were nearly black with the violence of his emotions.

  “Forgive me?” he asked simply.

  “There’s noth
ing to forgive.”

  “I wish to Christ that was true.”

  Abruptly Rafe turned back to the stove and began greasing the griddle.

  “I’ll finish cooking breakfast,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Sit down and keep those burns covered. They aren’t bad, but they’ll hurt unless you leave the ice on for a while.”

  Alana sat on the-kitchen stool and watched Rafe covertly. He cooked as he did everything, with clean motions, nothing wasted, everything smooth and sure. The stacks of pancakes grew.

  By the time everyone was seated in the dining room, there were enough pancakes to feed twice as many people as were around the table. At least it seemed like that, until everyone began to eat. The altitude and crisp air combined to double everyone’s appetite.

  Even Alana ate enough to make her groan. At Rafe’s pointed suggestion, Bob did the dishes. Stan insisted on helping, as did Janice. Rafe set out fishing gear while Alana packed lunches.

  There were still a few stars out when Rafe led the two dudes to a stretch of fishing water and gave advice on the most effective lures and techniques to use in the extraordinarily clear water.

  When Bob turned to follow Rafe and Alana back up the trail, Rafe gave him a long look.

  “I promised to teach Alana how to fly-fish,” Rafe said. “For that, she definitely doesn’t need an audience.”

  “I won’t laugh,” said Bob, his lips quirked around a smile. “Much.”

  “You won’t laugh at all,” Rafe said smoothly, “because you’re not going to be around.”

  Bob looked quickly at Alana, but she shook her head. He shrugged and accepted the fact that he wasn’t going fishing with his older sister.

  “Oh, well,” Bob said. “I promised Stan I’d show him how to use the Lively Lady. Bet we catch more than you do.”

  “You’d better,” retorted Alana. “Rafe uses barbless hooks. If we’re going to eat trout, it’s up to you, baby brother.”

  “Barbless?” asked Bob, giving Rafe a swift look. “Since when?”

  “Since I was old enough to shave.”

  “Hell of a way to fish,” Bob said, turning away. “A man could starve.”

  “Fishing is more than a way to feed your rumbling gut,” pointed out Rafe.

  “Depends on how hungry you are, doesn’t it?” retorted Bob over his shoulder as he walked down the trail.

  “Or what you’re hungry for,” added Rafe softly.

  He turned to Alana.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Um . . .”

  “I’ve got a spot picked out by the lake. Lots of room and nothing to tangle your line on the back stroke.”

  “You’re assuming that I’ll get enough line out to tangle,” Alana said, smiling wryly.

  Rafe’s soft laughter mixed perfectly with the sound of the stream flowing along the trail.

  Though the sun hadn’t yet cleared the ridges, predawn light sent a cool radiance over the land, illuminating the path and making boulders look as though they had been wrapped in silver velvet. In the deep pools where water didn’t seethe over rocks, trout rose, leaving behind expanding, luminous rings.

  Silently, letting the serenity of the land and the moment seep into Alana, Rafe led her to a narrow finger of glacier-polished granite that almost divided the lake into two unequal parts. As she stepped out onto the rock shelf, Rafe touched Alana’s shoulder and pointed across the lake.

  A doe and two half-grown fawns moved gracefully to the water. While the fawns drank, the doe stood guard. Beyond them the granite face of Broken Mountain flushed pink beneath the gentle onslaught of dawn. The sky was utterly clear, a magic crystal bell ready to ring with exquisite music at the first touch of sunlight.

  The doe and fawns retreated, breaking the spell. Alana let out her breath in a long sigh.

  Rafe watched her for an instant longer, then began assembling his fishing rod.

  “Have you ever used a fly rod before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Alana watched intently as the long, flexible rod took shape before her eyes.

  “I’ve always wondered how a fly rod works,” she admitted. “With spinning rods, the weight of the lure is used to pull line off the reel. But there’s no weight worth mentioning in a fly.”

  “With fly rods, the weight of the line itself is what counts,” Rafe said. “The leader and the lure barely weigh anything. They can’t. Otherwise they land with a plop and a splash and scare away any fish worth catching.”

  Using a smooth, complicated knot, he tied a nearly weightless fly onto the thin, transparent leader. Then he pulled a length of thick fly line off the reel, showing her the line’s weight.

  “Handled correctly, the fly line will carry the fly and set it down on the water as lightly as if the fly really had wings,” Rafe said. “The point is to mimic reality as perfectly as possible. The leader is transparent and long enough that the fish doesn’t associate the heavy fly line lying on the surface with the tasty insect floating fifteen feet away.”

  Alana looked at the opaque, thick fly line.

  “If you say so,” she said dubiously.

  “See that fish rising at about two o’clock?” asked Rafe.

  She looked beyond Rafe’s hand to an expanding ring. It was at least fifty feet out in the lake.

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “Watch.”

  With his right hand, Rafe held the butt of the fly rod near the point where the reel was clamped on. With his left hand, he stripped line off the reel. As he did so, his right hand began to move the rod forward and back in a smooth, powerful arc.

  Kinetic energy traveled up the rod’s supple length, bending it with easy, whiplike motions, pulling line from the reel up through the guides. With each coordinated movement of Rafe’s arm, line leaped out from the tip of the rod, more line and then more, until it described fluid curves across the luminous sky.

  Silently, smoothly, powerfully, Rafe balanced the forces of line and rod, strength and timing, gravity and flight, until an impossibly long curve of line hung suspended between sky and water. Then he allowed the curve to uncurl in front of him, becoming a straight line with the fly at its tip.

  Gently, gently, the fly settled onto the water precisely in the center of the expanding ring left by the feeding trout. Not so much as a ripple disturbed the surface from the fly’s descent. It was as though the fly had condensed out of air to float on the dawn-tinted mirror of the lake.

  And then there was a silver swirl and water boiling as the trout rose to the fly.

  The rod tip lashed down at the same instant that Rafe began pulling line in through the guides with his left hand. The supple rod danced and shivered as the trout tail-walked across the dawn like a flashing silver exclamation point.

  Line slid through Rafe’s fingers, drawn by the trout’s power. But slowly, gently, the line returned, drawn by his sensitive fingers, until finally the trout swam in short curves just off the granite shelf, tethered to Rafe by an invisibly fine length of leader.

  Just as the first rays of sunlight poured over the lake, the trout leaped again. Colors ran down its sleek side, forming the iridescent rainbow that gave the fish its name.

  In reverent silence, Rafe and Alana admired the beauty swimming at their feet. It would have been a simple matter for Rafe to unhook the net at his belt, guide the fish into the green mesh, and lift it from the water. Instead, Rafe gave an expert flick of his wrist that removed the hook from the cartilage lining the trout’s mouth.

  There was a moment of startled stillness, then water swirled as the trout flashed away.

  “See how easy it is?” murmured Rafe, watching Alana with eyes as luminous as dawn. “It’s your turn now.”

  * * *

  For what seemed like the hundredth time, Alana stripped line from the fat reel, positioned her hand to feed line from reel to rod, lifted her right arm, and began the forward and backward motion, that was supposed to send line shootin
g up through the guides on the rod.

  As she stroked the rod forward and back, line inched up through the guides and started to form the lovely, fluid curve that was the signature of fly-fishing.

  And then the curve collapsed into an ungainly pile of line on the rock shelf behind Alana.

  “I waited too long on the forward stroke, didn’t I?” Alana muttered. “All the energy that was supposed to hold up the line went fffft.”

  “But you got out nearly twice as much line,” pointed out Rafe, his voice and smile encouraging her.

  “And before that, I broke three hooks on the rock, hooked myself on the back stroke, hooked you on the back stroke, lashed the water to a froth on the forward stroke, tied ruinous knots in your beautiful leader, and in general did everything but strangle myself on the fly line.”

  Alana shook her head, torn between frustration and rueful laughter. Rafe had been incredibly patient. No matter how many times the line or the leader snarled hopelessly, he had neither laughed at her nor gotten angry. He had been gentle, reassuring, and encouraging. He had praised her and told funny stories about the monumental tangles he used to make when he was learning how to fly-fish.

  “Alana,” said Rafe softly, capturing her attention. “You’re doing better than I did the first time I had eight feet of limber rod and fifty feet of fly line in my hands.”

  She grimaced. “I don’t believe it. I feel so damn clumsy.”

  “You aren’t. You’re as graceful as that doe.”

  “Outrageous flattery,” she said, smiling, “will get more knots tied in your line.”

  Alana positioned the rod again. “Here goes nothing.”

  Not quite nothing. A rather impressive snarl came next. Rafe untangled it with the same patience he had displayed for the last hour.

  As he turned the rod over to Alana once more, he hesitated.

  “If it wouldn’t bother you,” Rafe said quietly, “I could stand behind you, hold on to your wrist, and let you get the feeling of the timing. And that’s all it is. Timing. There’s no real strength involved. Fly-fishing is a matter of finesse, not biceps.”