Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Shh, shh," he begged her. "Sweet, goofy darling ... concentrate."

  "Aye, aye, sir," she whispered, and somehow the phrase made her go suddenly all quiet.

  She sighed and took a deep breath, and when he slid into her, her moan of pure pleasure took his own breath away. Sam's senses were acutely heightened, and he heard everything around him: the siren at the end of the breakwater, the horn at West Chop, the low gurgle of an outboard as some skiff picked its way through the fog. He heard it all, but what he would remember for the rest of his life, what he would carry in his heart around the world, was the soul-satisfying sound of that moan.

  He began a slow move to ecstasy, back and then forward at a controlled pace, straining at the reins of his self-imposed discipline, even as he savored the whimper of her ragged breathing. Her body arched underneath his as she dug her heels into the narrow berth, creating a deeper entry. The sound of his flesh slapping against hers as he stepped up the rhythm made his head spin, impelling him into an ever faster, deeper rush to fulfillment.

  Making love to her on her father's impounded boat was surely the most foolish thing that Sam had ever done, but if they came after him with handcuffs swinging just then, it wouldn't have made any difference: he wanted this woman at this moment in a way he'd never wanted anyone before.

  Not even Eden.

  He increased the pace to a furious pump, slamming the breath out of her in staccato grunts as she kept pace with him thrust for thrust. Everything about her whipped him on as they raced in tandem to the finish. His mind reeled, his ears rang; he began to see bright colors flashing before his closed eyes.

  And then, because he was being so willful, taking Holly on a berth in the Vixen; because he was thinking of her and not, for once, of himself; because he didn't want her to dwell for one split second on the possibility of having to make a wrenching choice if this should be her fertile time—because of all those things, and because he cared for her in ways that he couldn't begin to understand: he pulled out of her, a single heartbeat before he came.

  ****

  "No-o-o," Holly cried, and at the exact moment that Sam withdrew from her with a wrenching groan, she felt herself go over the edge in a climax so dizzying that she blacked out, if only for the briefest of eternities.

  They lay together in exhausted silence for another, longer eternity, until Holly took a deep, deep breath, letting it out in moan of satisfaction. If they were in a hut in Tonga, she couldn't have felt more spent.

  "That was ... unbelievable," she whispered.

  "I'm having a hard time believing it myself," Sam said. He did sound stunned.

  "But ... I wish you hadn't pulled out."

  She felt him nod agreement against her. "I didn't know if you were protected," he said. "We were a little spur of the moment."

  "I'm not on the pill," she admitted. There hadn't been much need; her sex life had been depressingly low-key lately.

  "Holly, I'm—"

  "You're not sorry, are you?" she said quickly. Somehow he sounded as if he was going to be sorry.

  He nuzzled the curve of her neck and dropped a light kiss on her damp skin. "I should be, God knows. But right now ... Holly, right now, the only place on earth I want to be is in your arms."

  And if she had her way, he was going to stay there the rest of their lives.

  They lay there for a dangerously long time, and then Sam said, "Much as I hate to say it, I don't think we should compound our folly by hanging around."

  He smiled at his choice of word. Folly? A folly was a pretty little structure in someone's backyard. What Sam had just indulged in was pure and indulgent madness.

  Holly groped around in the dark and came up with some paper towels, which Sam used to wipe up the puddle he'd left on the berth of the Vixen. Part of him—the old, ironic, cynical part—thought, Is this symbolic or what? But the bigger part, the newly joyful part, stuffed the paper towels in his hip pocket and said to Holly with a grin, "Let's get the hell out of here."

  In absurdly comical silence they tiptoed out of the cabin, slid the dropboards back in place, locked the padlock to which Holly had a key—big oversight on someone's part—and stepped off the boat onto the dock. Joyous or not, Sam breathed a sigh of relief; at least they wouldn't be nabbed en flagrante.

  Holly was ready to make a mad dash, but he pulled her back and caught her in his arms for a long, delicious kiss.

  "Let's go home," he said after he released her.

  "Oh, God, yes," she said, sounding tired and happy. She looked up with a shyly wicked smile. "My diaphragm's there."

  They began retracing their steps down the long, still-deserted dock. Sam looked out to the east and was convinced that he saw dawn nudging its way through the fog; they had been aboard the Vixen for what had seemed like hours. He lit his watch and was amazed to see that it was only three forty-seven.

  Morning light would be a long time coming.

  Chapter 20

  For the first time in many days, Holly slept without dreaming.

  When she woke up, it was in Sam's embrace and to the profoundly satisfying sound of his gentle snoring. She opened her eyes a little, just to be sure. Yes: this was the guy, all right. Straight nose; dark eyebrows and no-nonsense lashes; high-cut cheekbones, shadowed with a day's growth of beard; sandy brown hair, curling under his ears and still damp from their last lovemaking—all part and parcel of Samuel Steadman, the light of her life.

  She touched her lips to his temple. "Sam. Are you up?"

  "Mnuh-hh," he answered, burrowing more deeply into his pillow.

  "Sam? You are up, aren't you?" she asked, shaking him gently by the shoulder.

  "Mnnph."

  "Because if you are—I wish we could make love again."

  He opened one eye. "Izzat true?"

  She smiled and reached for him under the covers. "I am, if you're up for it, which, after last night, you may not b—ahh, no problem," she said with a sly smile. She loved that he wanted her as much as she needed him.

  "You're scaring me, woman," he said, rolling on his back. He pulled her toward him for a wake-up kiss and brought those dark brows down in a comical look of worry. "Is there such a thing as being hooked on fear?"

  "Sure," she said, nibbling his upper lip. "Ask Stephen King." She sighed with pleasure, convinced that Sam Steadman had the most perfect mouth, the most perfect everything, she'd ever kissed.

  But still. "I've never been like this with anyone before," she felt obliged again to explain. "I'm not exactly the island nymphomaniac; ask anyone. Honest. I don't know what's got into me."

  His own laugh was low and still sleepy. "Me, for one thing—after that iffy start."

  "Oh, I know." It was the one pang of regret she'd had about their wonderful night: that during their first time together, they hadn't climaxed together. At the same time, yes—but not together, him in her, the way it should have been.

  She kissed him softly. "I don't want this ever to end, Sam," she confessed.

  He smiled a game smile and said, "Okey-dokey; I'll see what I can do."

  She loved his answer, loved everything about him. Loved him. But she was impatient, and she wanted more.

  Averting her gaze from his, she said, "There's something I should tell you, Sam. It's not the easiest thing for me to say. You may not want to hear it. But I have to get it off my chest; it's killing me not to have you know."

  He murmured a surprised kind of hmp and cleared his throat. "Funny; I have something I need to tell you, too."

  She began tracing an embroidered rose on the hem of his pillowcase. "Let me go first," she said, still not daring to look at him. "Sam, I... I love you. I was going to hedge and say that I was just falling in love with you, but it wouldn't be true. Isn't it obvious?" she asked with a tiny shrug at the roses. "I love you. You know how when some people meet the right one, they know it right off the bat? I'm one of those."

  Her confession was at an end. She exhaled loudly and looked at him to
discover an entirely new expression on his face. She had been expecting to see surprise, maybe wariness, hopefully delight. If God were in His heaven, he would have looked thunderstruck and said, "Oh, my darling, you too? I feel that way exactly."

  The one thing she had not expected to see in Sam's face was agony. Fear, caution, even horror would make some kind of sense. But agony?

  Confused and deeply embarrassed, she began to lift herself up. Suddenly it seemed not that right to be naked in bed with him. "See? Told you you weren't going to like it."

  "Oh, God, Holly, that's not it. How can you think that?"

  He wrapped his arms around her and drew her down across his chest, cradling his hand around the back of her head, kissing her hair softly between whispers of endearments.

  "Understand this," he said. "The last few hours with you have been ... beyond bliss."

  That's all that she wanted to hear. "I thought so," she murmured contentedly.

  "If someone had told me when I arrived on this island that I'd soon be flipping over a fey socialite who was more comfortable with a table saw than I was, and who hung rusty farm tools on her living room walls as art—I would have laughed and asked him what he'd been smoking."

  "But you're an artist, too," she argued, instinctively looking for common ground between them both. "We have careers in common, at least."

  "I'm just a photojournalist," he said, dismissing the comparison. "And anyway, it's more than that. Our backgrounds, our lifestyles, are completely different. But here's the real kicker, Holly: you don't know a thing about me."

  She shook her head. "Not so. I know what's important. I know that you were adopted by two wonderful people who still care about you. I know you love them very much, or you wouldn't have come here in the first place. What more do I need to know than that?"

  "Well—one or two things," he said, sounding much too grave.

  She didn't want to hear him sounding much too grave. That's how fathers sounded who took off with very young women.

  Determined to counter his tone, she said lightly, "Tell me this, Sam: are there any outstanding warrants for your arrest?"

  He smiled and said, "Not any more."

  "Are you a compulsive drinker, gambler, womanizer?"

  "No. No. And you've just ended a pretty long dry spell."

  "Any social diseases I should know about?"

  "None."

  "There you go, then," she said, nervously twisting a couple of hairs on his chest. "I'm giving you a clean bill of health, physically and morally."

  His laugh was soft and low and sad. "It's the latter one that's hanging me up."

  She began untwisting the hairs before they hurt him too much. "Oh? Are you a reprobate?"

  "Define reprobate."

  "Sam. If you have something to tell me, then just ... tell me," she said, reversing herself. It was a measure of how deeply she had fallen for him that she found uncertainty more unbearable than possible bad news.

  Their gazes met. "It's about Eden," he said.

  "Eden? What can Eden have to do with you and me?" she asked, baffled.

  "It's a pretty long story. The telling's overdue."

  Holly never heard the knock on the kitchen door downstairs. It was only when Sam jerked his head toward the bedroom door that she realized she had a visitor pounding.

  Sam scowled and said, "Hell! Can't we just ignore that?"

  "Of course we can, and we will. It's too early for—oh my God! What day is it? Say it's not Friday."

  "Okay. It's not Friday."

  "It is Friday! That's my mother down there!" she said, scrambling for the clothes that were strewn around the room. She grabbed the first thing handy, Sam's tee shirt, and pulled it over her bare breasts. "We're supposed to meet Ivy and the kids at the ferry dock in five minutes. How could I have forgotten about that?"

  "Do you have to be there to meet them?" Sam asked, plainly preferring that she didn't. "We were in the middle—"

  "Of course I do! It's a yearly ritual, our month by the sea together. She's my sister. And this year the month is only two weeks!"

  She thrust one leg through her shorts and began hopping to the bedroom door. "Coming, coming!" she yelled into the hall and down the stairs. After dropping one shoe, she dropped its mate, then picked them both up, knocking her head against the eave in her hurry. She swore, then started down the hall before reversing herself and running back into the bedroom. "Shh—not a word," she said, holding a finger to her lips. "I'll see you tonight. Thank God you're renting the apartment; we have an excuse for your car."

  Sam was standing naked as a jaybird at the foot of the bed. She scooped up his khakis and tossed them his way. He caught them and said, "You're not planning to tell her we've been together?"

  Holly sucked in her breath. "I can't be happy when she's so unhappy. How would that look? Shh! Stay right here. Coming," she shouted down the stairs.

  Raking her fingers through her hair, she ran down the steps and then opened the door to her mother, the essence of summer in a floral shift and a big straw hat.

  "Holly, for pity's sake, we're late already, and look at you. What have you been you doing all morning?"

  "Oh, you know. A little of this. A little of that," Holly said as she glanced around for her bag.

  "You're not wearing those," her mother said, staring at Holly's navy-blue shorts. "Have you been painting? You've got some kind of stain on them," she said, giving the shorts a tentative swipe.

  Holly looked down at the cloudy-white stain there. Sperm! Oh no! She jumped out of mothering range. "I'll change! Start the car!"

  "It's started. Will you hurry up? Cissy and Sally will be crushed if we're not there to greet them."

  "The boat'll be late—fog," Holly yelled over her shoulder as she dashed back up the stairs.

  "Where are your eyes? The fog is nearly burned off."

  "I know that," said Holly, but it could have been raining artichokes; she wouldn't have had a clue.

  "And put a nicer top on!" her mother yelled from the foot of the stairs.

  By now Sam was dressed and leaning against the deep sill of the gabled window that overlooked the drive, waiting dutifully for them to leave.

  Bug-eyed, Holly pointed melodramatically to the stain on her shorts. "Next time—khakis!" she whispered, and burst into nervous laughter that she immediately squelched by slapping her hand over her mouth. Too many jolts; she was becoming unhinged by them.

  Off went the shorts for the third time in twelve hours. Holly grabbed another pair out of the drawer, yanked them over her tanned legs, switched tops, and grabbed a tube of lipstick from a crystal bowl on the dressertop. One last sprint across the room for a quick kiss from a bemused Sam, and she was bouncing down the stairs again, dabbing lipstick blindly as she went.

  In the car, she and her mother talked of preparations for Ivy's arrival, which her mother clearly was dreading. Everyone knew that the absence of Grampa would hit the children hard. Cissy and Sally had been told that their grandfather had an important case in Providence, but that maybe later in the month he'd be able to come to the Vineyard. If there was wishful thinking involved in the lie, it was that the children would be having so much fun that they wouldn't miss him as the days wore on.

  Her mother suddenly asked, "Why was Sam's car parked in front of your house and not at the barn?"

  "Oh, that. He's filling in some of the potholes around the studio, and his car was in the way," Holly said easily. Liar, liar, pants on fire, went through her mind.

  True on both counts.

  "What a nice thing to do," said Holly's mother.

  "He's very good with his hands."

  "But ... do you really think it's a good idea, having him stay in the loft?" her mother ventured. "I mean, I know you have feelings for him—but he's probably too fixated on this Eden business to reciprocate them right now. I just wouldn't want you to get hurt, honey," she added with a worried glance. "You've been—we've all been—so emotional."
>
  "I suppose, but personally, I'm getting past all that," Holly said ambiguously. "It's time to move on." Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  Still true. Both counts.

  "So he seemed wretched?" her mother asked.

  "Yeah, just all of a sudd—oh, you mean Dad. Oh, yes. Dad was flat-out miserable."

  "Well—good. Maybe the fever is running its course."

  Holly had made a tactical error the day before by telling her mother how terrible her father looked from the ordeal. She had done it to make her mother feel better, but she'd omitted one little detail: that Eric Anderson's misery was because he thought Eden might be dead.

  "Look, Mom, we're not too late," she said to distract her. "People are just getting off the boat."

  Charlotte Anderson took one glance at the ferry and her face was immediately transformed. Gone was the weariness, gone was the dread: in their place was a radiant, heartening, grandmother's grin.

  "Oh, they're here, they really are here! I can't believe it; at last—something happy."

  "Quick, let's ditch the car," Holly said, hanging out the passenger window and waving wildly. "I think I see the girls on the upper deck. Yep, that's them; they've spotted the angel whirligig. Look at Cissy, swinging her arms like one; what a little devil she is!"

  They parked the Volvo and ran it to the foot of the gangway in time to open their arms in welcome. Cissy, a seven-year-old with her father's charm and fiery red hair, hurled herself at Holly like an Irish setter, nearly knocking her down. Sally, her pretty blond sister, was far too conscious of her French braids, double-pierced ears and decorated fingernails to indulge in such a gauche display in public.

  "Oh, my goodness, how you two have grown! How old are you now, Sally? I thought you were nine."

  "I am nine, Gram."

  "Going on fourteen," Ivy muttered in Holly's ear as they hugged. "She's driving me crazy. You don't know how much I need this vacation."

  "And look at you, Cissy," said her grandmother. "You're so tall! You're catching up to your sister."

  Cissy lifted her nose in triumph. "I know I am. I already can run faster and even if my bike isn't as big, I can still beat her."