To the Ends of the Earth / The Danvers Touch

by Lowell, Elizabeth

  There was no mistaking the cynical calculation in his sea-colored eyes. She couldn’t have missed it if she had wanted to. The regret she felt surprised her. A corner of her mouth curled in a bitter smile.

  This joke was on her, definitely.

  “Fun’s over, Travis. Put me down.”

  “What do your men call you . . . Cat?”

  She lifted one dark auburn eyebrow and watched him with cool, unblinking eyes, waiting to be released.

  After a long moment he loosened his grip on her legs, letting go of her in such a way that she slid intimately over the length of his body before her feet touched the ground.

  And even when she was standing, his arm stayed around her back, holding her against his body.

  Cat knew that struggling against Travis would be a waste of energy. Even worse, it would increase her awareness of his disturbing male strength. Her skin burned with the tactile memory of his body rubbing over hers.

  Finally, slowly, Travis removed his arm.

  Unconsciously she readjusted the weight of the camera bag and shifted the awkward sling to a more comfortable angle. While she did, she studied Travis as though he was an interesting rock formation she was thinking about photographing.

  He would have been a good subject. Sunset light transformed his hair and beard into fine, radiant wires. His eyes had changed color again, green tourmaline now, so deep they were like a sea without a shore. His wet clothes clung to every line of tendon and sinew, outlining muscular shoulders and thighs.

  Distantly Cat realized that Travis was much bigger than he seemed at first glance. Like a perfectly proportioned tree, she had to stand close to him to appreciate his true size.

  And his confidence. He was watching her, waiting for her to move. Nothing in the blunt lines and angles of his face suggested softness.

  Not a handsome man, she thought. Yet there’s something about him . . .

  She could look at Travis for a long, long time and still find new aspects of him to appeal to her. He was a complex man.

  And she was used to boys.

  “I’m the only one who calls me Cat. I don’t have any men. And,” she added neutrally, “I’m not looking for any.” She turned away. “But thanks twice, Travis.”

  “Twice?” he asked quickly

  There was surprise in his deep voice. Surprise and something else, something uneasy. He rarely was wrong in his estimate of people, yet she kept taking him off guard.

  Cat looked back over her shoulder, caught by the odd inflection in Travis’s voice, as though he was echoing her own regret.

  “Once for the cameras,” she explained, “and once for the laugh.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I? You don’t have many happy thoughts.”

  She pretended she hadn’t heard. Without another word she turned and walked away from the surprising, compelling stranger.

  Travis watched her proud long-legged stride, the faint hesitation caused by her bloody foot, and the ease with which she shouldered the weight of her camera equipment.

  It didn’t take a crystal ball to know that she wasn’t going to look back.

  TWO

  STRUGGLING NOT to limp, Cat crossed the narrow strip of sand that stood between the ocean and the ragged cliff ahead of her. Houses spilled down the steep face of the land, trailing stairways like tentacles down to the beach. The bluff was so heavily eaten by weather and sea that deep ravines separated homes whose outer walls were no more than twenty feet apart.

  To visit neighbors, Cat had to climb up to street level and cross over on the city sidewalk or climb down to the beach and take a private stairway up to the neighbor’s house. The arrangement wasn’t unusual in Southern California cities like Laguna Beach, where waterfront land was so valuable it was sold by the inch.

  A rock concealed beneath the sand made a joke of Cat’s attempts not to limp. She bit her lip against the pain.

  “Cat.”

  She froze. She hadn’t heard Travis come up behind her, yet he was so close to her now that she could feel his warmth radiating against the bare skin of her back.

  “Will you let me help you?” he asked.

  The words were soft, spoken against the braided mass of her hair. His breath was as caressing as sunlight on naked skin.

  When she didn’t answer, he slowly picked her up again, giving her every opportunity to object.

  Cat could have told herself that it was all right not to protest, that her foot hurt too much to walk on, but she had given up that kind of comfortable self-delusion when she dove into a midnight sea seven years ago. She was letting Travis carry her because it felt right, as though he was an old friend helping her rather than a stranger who intrigued and annoyed her by turns.

  “Thank you,” Travis said softly.

  She shook her head in a gesture of disbelief that was directed at herself. Then she sighed and relaxed against his strength. It did feel good not to be walking on her bloody foot.

  “I’m the one who should be saying thanks,” Cat said.

  “Maybe. But you don’t allow many people to help you.”

  Surprise and wariness flickered through her. She didn’t like being so transparent.

  “How did you know that?” she asked coolly.

  “I watched you on the rock. The rest of the world just doesn’t exist for you.”

  “Nothing mysterious in that. Concentration is simply part of being a photographer.”

  Travis smiled down at her, but his eyes were intelligent rather than amused.

  “When that wave sprayed your legs,” he said, “you knew you were in trouble. You didn’t look around for help.”

  “Why would I? I was alone.”

  “You acted like you were on Mars. You didn’t even notice me when I yelled.”

  “The surf was too noisy,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It took you about three seconds to get to the bottom line. No whining, no hand-wringing. You saw your best chance and you took it.”

  “Your point?”

  “That kind of independence is unusual for a man, much less for a woman. It comes from living alone.”

  “Like you?” Cat challenged.

  “Yeah,” he drawled. “Like me.”

  “Well, don’t cut your foot. You’re too big for me to carry.”

  He laughed and his arms tightened in what could have been a hug.

  “Kitten, I—” Travis stopped abruptly, aware of the sudden stiffness of her body. “Don’t like being called kitten?”

  “Right the first time, Travie-boy.”

  “What happened to the last man who called you kitten?”

  “The last boy who called me kitten decided it was a case of mistaken identity.”

  Cat smiled, but her eyes were narrowed against the painful flood of memories. For a time, Billy had called her kitten. Billy, the pretty, petulant, too rich boy she had married before she was old enough to know better.

  “Another unhappy thought,” Travis said.

  “You seem to have the touch.”

  He winced. “Sorry.”

  “Why? You can’t be blamed for my memories.”

  “You made them, and you’ll live with them,” he said. It was a summation, not a question.

  Cat cocked her head and looked at Travis again. She was becoming used to his uncomfortable insights.

  “Have you been reading my mail, or are you a practicing warlock?” she asked.

  One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “It would take a warlock to pet a red-haired cougar, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m told that warlocks have green eyes. Yours are, sometimes.”

  “Not often enough to count on the warlock scale. Actually, I’m a pirate.”

  “A pirate . . .” Cat said slowly, testing the thought.

  She looked at his profile, his beard luminous with the fading light, his teeth a slash of white beneath an arrogant nose. An uncompromising face, utterly male, fully suited for a pirate.

  “I’ll b
uy that,” she agreed. “A southern pirate.”

  “Southern?” Travis asked as he began climbing the stairs at the far right of the beach. “How did you guess?”

  “The name. And the sexy drawl. East Texas?”

  “Guilty.”

  Belatedly Cat realized that she was being carried up the wrong stairs. “I’m the next one over on the left.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You live here?” she asked, surprised.

  “For a while.”

  “House-sitting?”

  “After a fashion.”

  Then Cat remembered the man she had seen for the last eight dawns when he dove into the waves and swam out beyond the cove, his body as sleek and powerful as a dolphin’s.

  “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on,” she said, thinking of the brief black trunks that were all Travis wore at dawn.

  He stopped at a midpoint on the stairs and stared down at her blankly.

  “Your dawn raids,” she explained, smiling.

  Her smile revealed the white shine of teeth against the tip of her pink tongue. Reluctantly Travis glanced from her mouth to the multilevel redwood-and-glass house that was one stairway over. Understanding hit.

  “And I didn’t recognize you with your clothes off,” he said wryly.

  He looked back at her, taking in the thick auburn braid sliding over her shoulder, the wet halter top outlining two very tempting breasts, and the cutoff jeans that only emphasized the feminine curve of her legs draped over his arm. Slowly his glance returned to the halter and her nipples drawn tautly against cloth.

  “The lack of clothes is a definite improvement,” Travis added.

  Cat looked down at herself, wondering if her halter had been ripped on the rocks. The cloth was intact, but for an instant she saw what he had seen—a woman whose breasts were perfectly revealed through the halter’s thin cloth, every curve, every swell, nipples puckered by cold. Everything.

  She had never seen herself through a man’s eyes. The experience was both shocking and . . . intriguing.

  “Do I embarrass you?” Travis asked.

  His voice was gentle rather than teasing. She reacted to the drawl as though she had been caressed.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Honest little cat, aren’t you?”

  “Always,” she said flatly, not bothering to be polite. She looked at his face again, fascinated by an elusive something about this man that appealed to her. “I keep feeling we’ve met before.”

  His sun-bleached eyebrows shot up in surprise or disbelief.

  Hearing her own words, Cat groaned. “You’ve reduced me to clichés.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Slowly Travis bent his head down to her. She didn’t protest when his lips brushed across her forehead. His short, sleek beard smelled of sun and salt and man. She closed her eyes, accepting his caress as easily as he had given it.

  “For the last three days I’ve seen you at dawn,” he said against Cat’s hair, “stealing down your stairs like a shadow. You’re all but hidden by equipment. Are the baggy jeans and sweatshirt a disguise to keep off predatory males?”

  “It’s cold at dawn.”

  “Not if you’re in the right bed.”

  The thick crimson light of sunset concealed his expression, but Cat could feel Travis waiting for an answer to the question he hadn’t asked. Not quite.

  “I’m always in the right bed,” she said. “Mine.”

  She wondered whether that had been the answer he wanted to hear. His expression told her nothing.

  Travis continued walking up the stairs, breathing evenly, carrying her with every appearance of ease. Cat appreciated his strength on more than a simple feminine level. Her own career—and pride—demanded that she keep the flexibility and stamina she had enjoyed as a teenager. At twenty-nine, that wasn’t easy.

  Cat guessed that Travis was at least five years older than she was. She respected anyone who had the discipline to stay fit on the other side of thirty. She knew several men who got breathless just climbing up her steps from the beach. She had worn out more than one eager male simply by walking down to the water, swimming for an hour, and walking back up to her home.

  It was piquant to realize that it would take more than a bit of exercise to wear out the man called Travis.

  “Now, that looks like a good memory. Or at least,” he amended, taking the last step and walking onto a cantilevered wooden deck, “not a bad one.”

  “It’s a new one. Fully worth cutting my foot for. In fact—”

  Cat’s words stopped abruptly as Travis turned, giving her a view of the sun balanced on the edge of a shimmering magenta sea. The whole world had turned burning gold and shade on shade of purple. There were no clouds, no smog, nothing to interrupt the razor clarity of the horizon.

  And then Cat saw a sailing ship sweeping before the wind like a great black bird. Soon it would fly across the incandescent eye of the sun.

  “Put me down,” she said urgently, struggling without realizing it, intent on the image that was forming in her mind.

  Cat didn’t see Travis’s surprised look or the instant of anger that quickly became puzzlement. Once she felt the deck beneath her feet, she forgot her wet clothes, her cut foot, even the disturbingly sensual presence of the man who stood watching her.

  Her hands flew over the camera case. She found an empty camera body with one hand and high-speed color film with the other. She loaded the camera, secured it to the autofocus zoom lens, and zeroed in on the sailboat.

  Less than a minute after Travis put her down, Cat was taking the first picture. She worked rapidly, with a precision that reflected the years she had spent looking through a lens. The long lens was sensitive, well balanced in its rifle-style holder, and easy to use.

  Yet the lens felt very heavy after a solid day of photography. Even as Cat braced her arm, part of her mind cursed her relentless schedule of work in the past twelve months. Her reserves of strength were gone. She was weak when she desperately wanted to be as strong as the beautiful ship skimming over the incandescent sea.

  But most of Cat’s mind ignored regrets and emotions. Pouring herself into the camera, she focused entirely in the moment, forcing her weary body to obey her commands.

  The ship cut the burning wake of the sun. In silhouette the purity of the ship’s lines became breathtaking, more work of art than simple transportation. Curve on curve singing of speed and distance, flight and patience, power and silence, endlessly poised on the edge of creation.

  The last frame of film whirred through the camera. The motor drive fell silent.

  Quickly Cat looked at the sun and the ship. There was neither time to reload nor enough light left for photography. With an expression of yearning, she lowered the camera and watched the elegant ship sail into the condensing night.

  Not until the ship vanished completely did Cat notice that her foot throbbed, her arms were shaking with fatigue, and Travis was bracing her with one hand and holding the heavy zoom lens with the other. She sagged against him but still said nothing. Her eyes searched the darkness beyond the setting sun, looking for a ship. She found nothing but colors draining into night.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  Travis stared at Cat. Her eyes were luminous, intense. Her voice was barely more than a sigh, as melancholy as the descending night.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered, “it must be incredible to sail that ship over the curve of the world and into the soul of beauty.”

  Travis clenched his jaw against the anger uncoiling in his gut. She’s just like the others after all, out for everything she can get from me.

  A seagull cried, breaking the spell the ship had cast over Cat. She looked up at Travis. His expression was distant, his eyes unreadable.

  “Didn’t you see it?” she asked. “It was the most beautiful ship ever created. Someday I’ll take a photo as perfect as that ship. Then I’ll smash my cameras and never take
another picture again.”

  Travis didn’t say anything. His disappointment in finding that Cat was just like the other women he had known was so intense that it was almost pain.

  It infuriated him.

  Fooled again, he told himself bitterly. Just when I was congratulating myself on finding a woman who was interested in me before she ever knew about my bank account.

  I should have known better.

  “Travis?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She looked at him again, wondering why he looked so remote, so grim. Then she replayed her own words in her mind. For the first time in years, a flush climbed up her cheeks. She laughed self-consciously.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “Not everyone feels the way I do about light and shadow and the shape of freedom.”

  Travis didn’t trust himself to speak. Anger and disappointment were too strong, shockingly strong.

  I barely know her. Why the hell do I care that she’s another gold-digging, lying female?

  Cat smiled slightly, trying to understand the expression on his face.

  “I’m not really crazy,” she assured him. “Not all the time. I’ve just never seen anything quite that beautiful before.”

  She waited for Travis to speak. He didn’t. His eyes were a reflection of deep twilight—mystery and darkness and something else, something bleak that she couldn’t name.

  “Travis?” she whispered.

  His fingers tightened on her arm to a point just short of pain.

  “What kind of game do you think you’re playing?” he asked roughly.

  Cat stared at him, not understanding the question. All she knew was that the expression on his face was as cold as the wind lifting off the darkened sea. The lazy, approving masculine warmth was gone as though it had never existed.

  Abruptly she felt so tired she could hardly stand up. The weakness sweeping over her was frightening.

  No, she thought instantly. I can’t be this tired. Not yet. Not for four more months.

  But she was. Exhaustion was stealing through her like twilight, taking all warmth and color. She couldn’t allow it to happen. Her reserves of strength had to last until January.

  In January she would be able to crawl into bed and pull the covers over her eyes and sleep for a year.