Forget Me Not

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Alana touched Rafe’s wrist, felt the life beating beneath his supple skin.

  “Not many people know what it is like to serve an indeterminate sentence in hell,” Rafe said. “Waiting and listening to the screams while the damned are tortured, waiting and listening and knowing that soon you would be screaming, too.”

  Alana made a stifled sound and turned very pale. Yet after a brief hesitation, her hand never stopped touching Rafe, giving him what comfort she could while he relived a nightmare she could barely imagine, but could understand all too well.

  The man she loved had been imprisoned and tortured until he screamed.

  Whatever memories I have hidden in my nightmares, Alana told herself silently, Rafe’s must be worse, memory and nightmare alike. Yet he survived. He is here, strong despite the cruel violence of the past, patient with me despite my weakness, gentle with me despite the brutality that he has known.

  As Rafe continued talking, low-voiced and intense, Alana took his hand and pressed it against her cheek, as though simple touch could take the agony and bitterness from his past. And her own.

  “I went into the jungle alone,” he said, “about three days ahead of the others. They needed someone to get inside the prison for a fast recon so we’d know how many of the men were alive and able to walk on their own. It was too dangerous a job to ask anyone to volunteer for.”

  Rafe stared past Alana, his eyes unfocused, remembering. Yet even then his fingers moved lightly against Alana’s cheek, telling her that her presence helped him as much as anything could.

  “I got into the prison without any problem,” Rafe said. “Wire fences and a few perimeter guards. They were counting on the jungle and the prison’s reputation as a hellhole to keep people away.”

  Rafe’s fingers tensed on Alana’s cheek.

  “It was a hellhole, all right,” he said. “What I saw there made me want to execute every guard, every government officer, everyone I could get my hands on. And then I wanted to burn that prison with a fire so hot it would melt through to the center of the earth.”

  Rafe closed his eyes, afraid that if they were open, Alana would see what he saw. Men chained and tortured, maimed and slowly murdered for no better reason than the entertainment of guards who were too brutal to be called men and too inventive in their savagery to be called animals. Grinning devils ruling over a green hell.

  “I got the information and I got out,” Rafe said. “The next day I led my men back in.”

  His eyes opened. They were clear and hard as topaz, the eyes of a stranger.

  “As soon as we pulled out the men we came for, I went back to that prison. Three of my men came with me, against my orders. They were the three who had seen the wing where prisoners were tortured. The four of us freed every prisoner and then we blew that building straight back to the hell that had spawned it.”

  Alana held Rafe’s hand against her lips, trying to comfort him and herself, rocking slowly.

  “One of the men who came back with me was injured. The other two carried him to the rendezvous while I stayed behind to cover the retreat.

  “Some of the guards survived the blast. I held them off until my gun jammed. They caught me, shot me, and left me for dead in the clearing. The helicopter got away, though. I heard it lift off just after I was shot.”

  Alana made a low sound.

  “I survived. I don’t remember much about it. Some of the peasants hid me, did what they could for my wounds. Then the government soldiers came back. I was too weak to escape.”

  Alana bit her lips against the useless protests aching in her throat.

  Rafe kept talking quietly, relentlessly, getting rid of the savage memories from the past.

  “They took me to another prison just like the one I’d blown to hell. I knew there was no hope of rescue. My men had seen me shot. They would assume I was dead. Besides, you don’t risk twenty men to save one, unless that one is damned important. I wasn’t.”

  Wanting to speak, afraid to stop the flow of Rafe’s words, Alana murmured softly against his palm and tried not to cry aloud. Her hands smoothed his arm and shoulder again and again, as though to convince herself that he really was alive and she was with him, touching him.

  “I spent a long time in that prison,” Rafe said. “I don’t know why I didn’t die. A lot of men did and were happy to.”

  Then Rafe turned and looked at Alana.

  “That’s not quite true,” he said. “I know why I survived. I had something to live for. You. I dreamed of you, of playing the harmonica while you sang, of touching you, making love to you, hearing you laugh, feeling and seeing your love for me in every touch, every smile.”

  “Rafael,” she whispered, and could say no more.

  “The dreams kept me sane. Knowing that you were waiting for me, loving me as much as I loved you, gave me the strength to escape and to live like an animal in the jungle until I crossed into a country where I wouldn’t be shot on sight.”

  Alana bent over to kiss Rafe, no longer caring if he saw her tears.

  “And then,” Rafe said, his voice flat, “I came home to find that the woman I’d loved enough to live for didn’t love me enough to wait for me.”

  “That’s not true!” Alana said, her voice a low cry of pain.

  “I know. Now. I didn’t know then. All I knew was what the papers told me. Jack ‘n’ Jilly. Perfect marriage. Perfect love. No one told me any different.”

  “No one knew,” Alana said raggedly. “Not even my family. Jack and I worked very hard to keep the truth of our marriage a secret.”

  “You succeeded.”

  Rafe looked at Alana for a long moment, seeing his pain and unhappiness reflected in her dark eyes and pale face. He touched her lips with his fingertip, loosening the tight line of her mouth.

  “I left the army as soon as my time was up,” Rafe said. “My father was dead by then. I came back to the ranch as bitter a man as has ever watched the sun rise over Broken Mountain. Until a year ago, I ran the ranch through my lawyers and lived out of the Broken Mountain fishing camp. Alone.”

  Alana closed her eyes against the tears she couldn’t control.

  “If only I had known you were alive . . .” she whispered.

  “But I wasn’t sure that I was alive,” Rafe said. “Not really. Most of my time was still spent in hell. No one on this side of the mountain even knew that I hadn’t died. Except Sam, and he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Sam?” Alana asked, startled.

  “He took some training in Panama. Different outfit. Civilian, not military. We worked together once, just before I left the army. He’s a good man, if a bit hardheaded. And that’s all I have to say on the subject of Sam Burdette.”

  Alana started to object, then realized that it would do no good. Rafe might share his own secrets with her, but her brother’s secrets were not Rafe’s to share. She looked at Rafe with eyes that understood, eyes as dark as midnight, as dark as her nightmares.

  “When did you decide to tell people that you were alive?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. It just happened.”

  Rafe shook his head slowly, remembering his rage and bitterness at life and the woman who had married another man just six weeks after her fiancé had been declared dead.

  “I ran into Bob one day in the high country,” Rafe said. “He was fishing that crazy fly he favors. And he went straight down the mountain to you.”

  Without realizing it, Alana’s fingers tightened on Rafe’s arm as she remembered the moment that Bob had burst into the house talking about Rafe Winter, a man come back from the dead—and looking like it. Hard and bitter, eyes as cold as a February dawn.

  Rafe. Alive.

  And Alana was married to a man she didn’t love.

  “A day later,” Rafe said, watching her, “Bob brought me a letter. I recognized your handwriting on the envelope. I looked at it for a long, long time.”

  “Why didn’t you—” she began.

  �
��I knew I couldn’t open my own Dear John letter,” Rafe interrupted savagely. “I couldn’t force myself to read the words describing your perfect marriage, perfect career, perfect man, perfect lover. I couldn’t read the death of my dream written in your own hand, the dream that had kept me alive when most of me hurt so much that death looked like heaven itself.”

  Alana shook her head. Tears fell from her tightly closed eyes. With a ragged sound, she put her head on Rafe’s chest and held him until her arms ached. She couldn’t bear the thought of Rafe being tortured, dreaming of her, surviving because he loved her.

  And then coming home to find her married.

  “What was in the letter?” Rafe asked.

  His voice was so soft that it barely penetrated the sound of Alana’s tears.

  “The truth,” Alana said hoarsely. “I was going to leave Jack. When I was free, I was going to write to you again, if you wanted me to.”

  “But you didn’t leave Jack.”

  “No.” She drew a ragged breath. “When I lost you a second time, I thought nothing mattered. I went back to Jack.”

  Rafe’s eyelids flinched. It was the only sign he gave of the pain within him at the thought that he had sent her back to Jack Reeves.

  “But when I knew you were alive,” Alana said, “I couldn’t stay with Jack. Not even to save our singing career. So we lived separately, but very discreetly.”

  Slowly she shook her head, remembering the past.

  “Separation wasn’t enough,” she whispered. “You didn’t want me, hadn’t even cared for me enough to tell me you were alive, but I had to be free of the sham marriage. I had lived with lies for too long. When you were dead, the lies hadn’t mattered to me. Nothing had mattered except singing.

  “That’s how I survived, Rafe. I sang to the memory of the man I loved, not to Jack. Never to him.”

  “And then,” Rafe said bitterly, “I wrote your death sentence on an envelope and sent it back to you.”

  “What?”

  Rafe swore savagely.

  Alana trembled, not knowing why he was so angry with himself.

  “What did you mean?” asked Alana, her voice shaking as she looked at Rafe’s narrowed eyes. “Why was that envelope my death sentence?”

  “It sent you back to Jack Reeves.”

  “What—”

  “The answer is in your nightmares,” Rafe said, cutting off Alana’s question.

  Her eyes searched Rafe’s, looking for answers but seeing only herself reflected in the clear amber.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “That, too, is in your nightmares.”

  Rafe’s hands came up to frame Alana’s face.

  “There’s something else in those lost days, wildflower,” he murmured, kissing her lips gently. “There’s the moment you saw me, knew me, turned to me.”

  He kissed her again, more deeply.

  “Rafe—”

  “No,” he said softly. “I’ve told you more than the good doctor wanted me to. But I thought it might help you to know that something other than horror is buried with those six missing days.”

  12

  F OR A LONG time there was only silence and the rushing sound of the distant cascade.

  Rafe’s expression told Alana that questioning him would be futile. He had the same closed look that he had worn when he talked about leading his men into hell.

  But it angered her that Rafe knew something about her six lost days and wouldn’t tell her.

  “Why?” Alana asked finally, her voice harsh. “Why won’t you help me?”

  “You didn’t know Jack was dead. People told you he was. How much help was that?”

  Alana searched Rafe’s topaz eyes.

  “But—” she began.

  “But nothing,” he interrupted in a flat voice. “Did knowing Jack was dead help you remember anything?”

  Alana clenched her hands.

  “No,” she said.

  “Did waking up in that hospital beaten and bloody tell you how you got hurt?”

  Silence. Then, tightly, “No.”

  “Did reading about Jack’s death in every newspaper help?”

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  “In some ways you’re a lot like me,” Rafe said simply.

  “But if you’d tell me what you know, it would help me sort out reality from nightmare.”

  “The doctors don’t think so. They’re afraid I might tell you something you don’t want to know.”

  “What?”

  “I might tell you that your nightmares are pieces of the truth.”

  Rock and ice and wind, something lifting her, throwing her out into the darkness

  falling

  she was falling and rocks waited below, waited to break her, hatred breaking her.

  Alana made a small sound and went pale. She wrapped her arms around herself as she felt the cold of nightmares congeal inside her, fear and truth freezing her. She closed, her eyes as though it would shut out the fragments of nightmare.

  Then she wondered if it was memory that she was shutting out, reality chasing her through her nightmares, truth saying to her, remember me.

  Rafe reached for Alana, wanting to gather her into his arms and comfort her.

  When his hands touched her, she gasped and flinched away.

  Rafe withdrew instantly, but the cost of controlling himself made muscles stand out rigidly along his jaw. He looked at Alana’s pale skin and black lashes, her mouth shaped for smiling but drawn by fear into a thin line, the pulse beating too quickly in her throat.

  With a soundless curse, Rafe closed his eyes. The doctors were right. Telling her wouldn’t help.

  Even worse, it could hurt her.

  At first Rafe had been afraid that Alana would remember too soon, before he had a chance to win her love again. Now he was afraid that she wouldn’t remember soon enough, that she would lose faith in herself and then tear herself apart.

  Yet Rafe couldn’t bring back Alana’s memory for her, no matter how much he wanted to. The bitterness of that knowledge made the brackets around his mouth deeper, harder.

  “If telling you everything I know about those six days would stop you from freezing when I touch you, I’d shout the truth from the top of Broken Mountain,” Rafe said, his voice rough with suppressed emotion.

  Alana said nothing.

  “My God, don’t you know that I’d do anything to have you in my arms again?” Rafe whispered. “I want you so badly. I want to hold you, comfort you, love you . . . and I can’t. All I can do is hurt you again and again.”

  Rafe’s hands became fists. With a quick movement, he rolled over until his back was turned toward Alana.

  “It’s like Central America all over again,” he said harshly, “only it’s worse because this time it’s you I’m leading into hell, knowing with every step that there’s no other way, knowing and hating myself just the same.”

  His laugh was a short, savage sound.

  “Christ,” Rafe said harshly, “I don’t blame you for shrinking away every time I touch you.”

  The raw emotion in Rafe’s voice called Alana out of the depths of the nightmare as nothing else could have. She knew what it was like to feel snarled and helpless, hating yourself, feeling as though everything you did made the tangle worse, not better.

  The thought of Rafe feeling that way because of her made Alana ache with tears she couldn’t shed. In just the past day, Rafe had given so much to her, laughter and protection, patience and companionship, subtle passion, and, above all, acceptance.

  She might rail at herself for being weak, she might be angry and disgusted with herself . . . but Rafe was not.

  When she was close to hating herself, he had told her about strength and weakness and survival, torture and the breaking point every human being has. He had told her about his own time in hell, and in doing so he had coaxed her out of the depths of her own self-disgust.

  Rafe had given her hope when al
l she had was nightmare.

  And for that she flinched when he touched her.

  “Rafael,” murmured Alana, touching his arm.

  He made no response.

  She shifted her position until she was on her knees. She leaned over Rafe, stroking him from the thick silk of his hair down to the corded tension of his neck. She repeated his name again and again, a slow litany that was nearly a song.

  Her hand moved down, trying to loosen the rigid muscles of his shoulders and back. The dark cotton of his T-shirt felt like warm velvet to her. Her fingers kneaded the hard flesh beneath. He felt so good to her, heat and smoothness and strength.

  With a sigh, Alana bent over until she could put her lips just below the dark brown of his hairline. Rafe’s neck was warm and firm, tanned skin stretched tautly over tendons, tempting her tongue to taste and trace each subtle change in texture.

  She kissed him lightly, lingeringly, before she gave in to temptation and touched his skin with the tip of her tongue. He tasted of salt and heat and man, slightly rough where his beard began and amazingly smooth on the back of his neck.

  Delicately Alana’s teeth closed on Rafe’s neck, testing the resilience of the muscle beneath. He moved his head and shoulders slowly, increasing the pressure of her teeth on his flesh, making her hand slide over the muscles of his back.

  Rafe tasted good, felt good. Alana wanted to touch and savor more of him. Her fingers dug into the bunched muscles beneath her hand as her teeth tested the male power of his shoulders.

  Rafe arched against her touch like a hungry cat.

  The honesty of his response made an equal hunger sweep through Alana, a hunger that only Rafe had ever called from her. She wanted to lie down next to him, to fit her body along his, to feel his passion surround her as she surrounded him.

  Yet even as fire licked through her, melting her, Alana knew that if Rafe’s arms closed around her, she would freeze. And in freezing, she would hurt him cruelly. Then she would hate herself all over again.

  “Oh, Rafe,” she said, her voice breaking on his name, “what are we going to do?”