Forget Me Not

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Alana’s fingers went from Rafe’s shoulders to his thighs in a single, shivering caress that almost destroyed his control. For an instant he let her fingertips trace the hard outline of his desire and count the heavy beats of his blood. Then he caught her hands between his own.

  “No,” said Rafe hoarsely.

  “But—”

  “If you touch me again, I’ll lose control. This time, let me touch you. Next time you can tease me until I go crazy, but not this time. This time is too much like my dreams. This time it’s all I can do not to pull you down and take you right here on the cabin floor.”

  Alana closed her eyes, knowing if she looked at Rafe right now she would have to touch him. With a graceful motion she turned away and stretched out on the daybed. Only then did she open her eyes and look at the man standing beside the bed, Rafe with firelight licking over his powerful body, molten gold pooling in his eyes, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. When she spoke, her voice was a soft, husky song.

  “Then come dream with me, Rafael.”

  He came down onto the bed and gathered Alana into his arms in one continuous movement. He held her as though he expected something to wrench her from his embrace, ending the dream, leaving him to awaken hungry and despairing, the past repeating itself endlessly, dream sliding into waking nightmare.

  Alana felt Rafe’s mouth demand hers, felt his arms close powerfully around her, felt the bruising male strength of his body, the hardness and the hunger of him; and she returned the embrace, holding on to him with every bit of her strength.

  After a long time, Rafe drew a deep, shuddering breath and released her.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, kissing Alana gently, repeatedly, tasting her with each word, unable to stay away from her for more than a second at a time.

  “You didn’t hurt me.”

  Rafe touched Alana gently. His hand trembled as it moved from her temple to her lips. Eyes closed, she twisted blindly beneath him, seeking to hold him again, to feel the heat and power of his body against hers, sliding within her, moving with her.

  With a throttled groan, Rafe trapped Alana’s restless hands. He kissed her palms, bit her fingertips and the flesh at the base of her thumb, sucked lightly on her wrist and the inside of her arm. She moved against his loving restraint, wanting more than his inciting, teasing caresses.

  Rafe laughed softly and watched Alana with smoky golden eyes. He stroked her body almost soothingly, and when he spoke his voice was deep, husky with memory and desire.

  “At first,” he said, “after they tortured me, I dreamed only of revenge. Blood and death and the devil’s laughter. But later . . .”

  Rafe’s head bent until he could touch the tip of Alana’s breast with his tongue.

  “Later, hatred wasn’t enough to keep me alive,” he said. “It was for some men, but not for me. That’s when I began to dream of you, deep dreams, dreaming all the way to the bottom of my mind, dreaming with everything in me.”

  Rafe’s teeth closed lightly, tugged, then he took Alana’s nipple into his mouth and cherished her with changing pressures of his tongue until she cried his name and her love again and again.

  “Yes,” he whispered, smoothing his mustache across her taut nipple until she shivered, “I heard you calling for me when I wanted to die, calling for me and crying . . . and so I lived, and I dreamed.”

  The words came to Alana like another kind of caress sinking into her soul, Rafe’s voice dreaming of her while his hands and mouth moved slowly over her, memorizing her as she burned beneath his touch.

  Strong fingers stroked down her stomach, her thighs, sensitizing her skin until her breath came in raggedly. When his cheek slid up from her thigh and ruffled the blackness of her hair, she moaned his name. His hands smoothed the curve of her legs, pressing gently, asking silently. Her legs shifted beneath his touch, giving him another measure of his dream.

  When Rafe felt the waiting heat and need of Alana, his hand shook. She was even softer than his dreams, hotter, more welcoming. His fingers slid over her, cherishing and parting her in the same loving caress.

  Alana tried to say Rafe’s name, but she could only moan while he caressed her deeply, telling her of his dream and her beauty as she moved sinuously, helplessly, clinging to his touch.

  When his mouth brushed over her, tasting and teasing her, she gave up trying to speak, to think. She cried for him with each ragged breath, each melting instant, fire spreading in rhythmic waves through her body.

  Rafe moved over Alana slowly, covering her body with his own, sliding into her, filling her, and she came apart beneath him. Motionless, rigid, he listened to the song of her ecstasy, better than his dreams, wilder, hotter, sweeter.

  And then Rafe could hold back no longer. He moved within Alana’s melting heat, sliding slowly, fiercely, then more quickly. She called his name huskily, tightened around him, holding him with all her strength.

  They moved together, wound tightly around one another, sharing each heartbeat, each rhythmic melting of pleasure, until neither one could bear any more. Rafe cried out and gave himself to Alana even as she gave herself to him and to the incandescent ecstasy they had created.

  Finally they knew the shimmering silence and peace that followed such a complete sharing.

  It was a long time before Alana stirred languidly and looked up at Rafe. He was watching her with smoky amber eyes that remembered every touch, every cry, every moment, everything.

  She smiled and smoothed his mustache with fingers that still trembled.

  “I love you, Rafael Winter.”

  Rafe gathered Alana against his body a little fiercely, like a man hardly able to believe that he wasn’t dreaming.

  “And I love you, Alana. You’re a part of me, all the way to my soul.”

  He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks and the corners of her smiling lips, and he felt the kisses returned as quickly as they were given.

  “As, soon as we get off the mountain,” Rafe said, “we’ll be married. On second thought, the hell with waiting I’ll get on the radio and have Mitch fly in a justice of the peace.”

  Rafe felt the change in Alana, tension replacing the relaxed pressure of her body against his. He lifted his head and looked into her dark, troubled eyes.

  “What is it, wildflower? Your singing career? You can live with me and write songs, can’t you? And if you want to do concert tours, we’ll do concert tours.”

  Alana opened her mouth. Words didn’t come. But tears did, closing her throat.

  “I’d like to have kids, though,” Rafe added, smiling. “Boys as clumsy as me and girls as graceful as you. But there’s no rush. You can do whatever you want, so long as you marry me. I can’t let you go again.”

  “Rafael, my love.” Alana’s voice broke and tears spilled over her long eyelashes. “I can’t marry you yet.”

  “Why?”

  Rafe looked at Alana’s dark eyes. Where passion had recently burned, there were only shadows now.

  “Because Jack has been dead only a month?” Rafe asked bluntly. “The marriage was a mistake. A pretend mourning period would be a farce.”

  “Jack has nothing to do with it.”

  “Then—”

  Alana touched Rafe’s lips with gentle fingertips, silencing him.

  “I want to be the woman who gives you children,” she said softly. “I want to live with you and love you all the way to death and beyond, because I can’t imagine ever being without you again.”

  Rafe took Alana’s hand and kissed her palm with lips that clung and lingered over her skin. He began to gather her gently into his arms, then stopped.

  She was still speaking softly, relentlessly.

  “But I can’t marry you until I can trust myself not to shatter into a thousand pieces with every thunderstorm,” Alana said. “I can’t marry you until the sight of a big, blond stranger doesn’t send me into a panic. I can’t marry you until I can come to you whole, confid
ent of myself, of my sanity.”

  Alana felt Rafe’s retreat in the withdrawal of his hand, saw it in the narrowing of his eyes and the expressionless mask that replaced a face that had been alive with love for her.

  “Until you remember what happened on Broken Mountain?” asked Rafe, his voice neutral.

  “Yes. Before I marry you, I have to be able to trust myself,” she said, pleading with him to understand.

  “Trust yourself—or me?” retorted Rafe.

  The amber eyes that measured Alana were remote, as cool as his voice, showing nothing of the pain that his words cost him.

  “I trust you more than I trust myself,” Alana said.

  Her voice was urgent, almost ragged, and her eyes searched Rafe’s face anxiously.

  “Then trust me to know what’s best for us,” he said. “Marry me.”

  Alana shook her head helplessly, wondering how she could make Rafe understand.

  “So much for trust;” said Rafe, his voice clipped.

  “I trust you!”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He said something savage beneath his breath. “Well, at least I know how long you were standing by the cascade today. Long enough to hear Stan. Long enough to believe him. Long enough to kill a dream.”

  “No!” Alana said quickly. “I don’t believe Stan. You aren’t like that. You couldn’t kill Jack like that!”

  Rafe’s laugh was a harsh, nearly brutal sound that tore at Alana almost as much as it tore at him. With a vicious curse, he rolled off the bed and began pulling on his clothes.

  When Rafe snatched up his shirt, the harmonica fell out of the pocket onto the floor. Firelight ran over the instrument’s polished silver surface, making it shine.

  He scooped up the harmonica, looked at it for a long moment, then tossed it casually onto the bed.

  “Rafe?”

  “Take it. Souvenir of a dream,” Rafe said roughly, kicking into his boots. “I won’t need it anymore. Any of it.”

  Alana picked up the harmonica, not understanding, not knowing what to say, afraid to say anything at all.

  But when Rafe pulled open the cabin door and started to walk into the night, Alana came off the bed in a rush and threw her arms around him, preventing him from leaving.

  “Rafe, I love you,” she said against the coiled muscles of his back, holding on to him with all her strength.

  “Maybe you do. Maybe that’s why you forgot.”

  Rafe started to move away, but Alana’s arms tightened, refusing to let him go.

  The pain that had come with her refusal to marry him raged against Rafe’s control, demanding release. He jerked free of Alana’s arms and spun around to face her, his pain naked in his expression—and his anger. Yet when he spoke, his voice was so controlled, it lacked all inflection.

  “I tried to be what you wanted, wildflower. I tried everything I could think of to lure you out of your isolation. I reassured you in every way I could. And it wasn’t enough.”

  Rafe’s voice roughened with each word, sliding out from his control. To see Alana in front of him right now, so lovely, so unattainable, to lose her all over again . . .

  Rafe made a harsh sound and closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t touch her, hold her, stir desperately among the ashes of impossible dreams.

  “No matter how carefully I constructed my lures, you didn’t want them enough to trust me,” he said. “Finally, I even tried music. I hadn’t played the harmonica since the day I found out you were married. I had played it too often for you, loving you with music the way I never could with words. After you married Jack, even the thought of touching that harmonica made me blind with rage.”

  “Rafael,” Alana began, but he talked over her.

  “Music had always been irresistible to you. So I picked up that beautiful, cruel harmonica and I called to you with it.”

  Tears trembled in Alana’s eyelashes. “Yes.”

  “And you came to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You sang with me.”

  “It was the first—”

  But Rafe was still talking, and his eyes were as haunted by pain as his voice.

  “You made love with me more incredibly than in my dreams,” he said. “But it wasn’t enough to make you trust me. Nothing will be enough for you.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “What’s true is that you may never remember what happened on Broken Mountain. And even if you do—”

  Rafe shrugged and said nothing more.

  Tears and firelight washed gold down Alana’s cheeks. Her hands reached for him.

  “No,” Rafe said gently.

  He stepped away, out of reach of her slender hands.

  “I once said my hooks were barbless, Alana. I meant it. I can’t bear hurting you anymore. You’re free.”

  Frozen in disbelief, Alana watched as Rafe turned and walked away from her, Rafe passing from silver moonlight into dense ebony shadows, Rafe moving as powerfully as the wind, leaving her alone with the echoes of her pain.

  And his.

  “Rafael . . . !”

  Nothing answered, not even an echo riding on the wind.

  17

  F OR A LONG time Alana stood in the cabin doorway, staring into moonlight and darkness, unaware of the cold wind blowing over her naked skin. Finally, the convulsive shivering of her body brought Alana out of her daze.

  She closed the door and stumbled back into the cabin. With shaking hands she pulled on her nightgown, but her fingers were too numb to cope with all the tiny, mocking buttons. She kept remembering Rafe’s long fingers unfastening the buttons one by one as his mouth caressed her body with fire and love.

  With a choked sound, Alana grabbed Rafe’s heavy robe. The harmonica tumbled free of the indigo folds and fell gleaming to the floor. She hesitated, looking at the firelight caressing the harmonica’s chased silver surface.

  Then she bent and picked up the instrument and put it deep in the robe’s soft pocket. She pulled the robe tightly around her and sat at the edge of the broad granite hearth, staring into the hypnotic dance of flames.

  But all her eyes saw was the darkness that came after fire was lost.

  Eventually dawn came. Alana realized she was cold. The rock hearth she sat on was cold. She ached from the chill of unforgiving stone.

  Cold.

  Stone.

  Darkness.

  Heart hammering, Alana tried to move but could not. She was chained by stiffness and memories summoned by the icy touch of granite.

  “Rafe—”

  Alana’s voice was hoarse, as though she had spent the night calling futilely for help that never came.

  But not last night.

  She had called all through the darkness nearly four weeks ago, when she had spent the night on the rock ledge by the lake. She hadn’t called to Jack that night. She remembered now.

  She had called to Rafe, crying his name again and again, cries that had come from deep inside her, from the love for him that was as much a part of her as her own soul.

  Jack had laughed.

  Cold. Helpless. A prisoner tied to stone.

  It was devastating to be so helpless, to know that beyond the tiny, icy circle constricting her, there was a world of heat and sunlight and laughter and love.

  And none of those things could reach her.

  Cold.

  Ice raining down. Darkness and wind lifting her, tearing her from . . .

  “No!” said Alana fiercely, denying her nightmare. “There’s no ice here. I’m in a cabin. I’m not tied by that lake. I’m not waiting helplessly for Jack to come and either free me or maul me. I’m not a tiny, shivering aspen leaf at the mercy of cold winds. I’m Alana. I’m a human being.”

  Her body shivered convulsively, repeatedly.

  “Get up,” Alana whispered hoarsely to herself. “Get up!”

  Slowly, stiffly, she pulled herself to her feet. She moved awkwardly toward the cabin door. When she finally managed to open it, she saw
that a new day was pouring down the stone ramparts in a thick tide of crimson light.

  Alana stared up at Broken Mountain’s ruined peak, rocks shattered and tumbled, cliffs and miniature cirques sculpted by winters without end.

  She climbed down the cabin’s steps to the clearing. Her feet were too cold to feel the impact of sharp stones. She hurried to the main lodge, wanting only to get dressed before Bob got up and saw her and asked questions that she had no way to answer and no desire to hear.

  Stumbling in her haste, Alana went up the lodge’s steps. For an instant she was paralyzed by the thought that Rafe might be inside, that she would run to him and he would turn away from her again, leaving her freezing and alone.

  A nightmare.

  No, worse than that, for in Alana’s nightmares Rafe didn’t turn away from her, he came to her and—

  Alana froze in the act of opening the door.

  Rafe. In her nightmares. Like Jack.

  Shaking, suddenly clammy, dizzy, Alana leaned against the closed door, wondering if it was memory or nightmare or a terrible combination of both that was breaking over her, drenching her in cold sweat.

  Rafe had been on Broken Mountain.

  He had told her as much. He had told her that with the horror she had buried beneath a black pool of amnesia, there was an instant of beauty when she had turned to him.

  Did Rafe tell me that only to help me remember? Alana asked silently. Did he use the promise of beauty like a single, perfect lure drifting down onto the blank surface of my amnesia, luring me beyond its dark, safe depths?

  Alana waited for memory or nightmare to come and answer her questions, freeing her.

  Nothing came but the too-fast beating of her heart, blood rushing in her ears like a waterfall . . .

  Ice and darkness and falling, she was falling to the death that waited below!

  With a hoarse cry, Alana wrenched herself out of nightmare. She opened the lodge door and hurried up the loft’s narrow stairway. She pulled on clothes at random, caring only for warmth.

  The fiery orange of Alana’s sweater heightened the translucent pallor of her face and the darkness below her eyes. She rubbed her cheeks fiercely, trying to bring color to her face.