by Jane Graves
“Of course.”
She put a hand against his shoulder and gave him a shove. He reached for the post of the dock and missed, and a second later he hit the water in a thunderous splash, holding his breath just in time to avoid getting a noseful of water. A few seconds later he came to the surface, slinging his hair back and swiping the water off his face.
Val was smiling. Of course she was. She was the one still standing on the dock. But he could remedy that in short order.
“Is it any cooler in there?” she asked.
“You’ll know yourself in a minute,” he said, treading water. “And you get to choose. You can get in, or I’m going to chase you down and throw you in.”
She appeared to ponder that for a moment. Finally she shrugged. “Oh, what the hell.”
She leaped off the dock right into Alex’s arms. He swept her around in a circle, swishing the water in an orbit around them. He eased a little closer to the bank where his feet just touched bottom. They floated around for a moment, their arms encircling each other.
“Take off your shirt,” Val said.
“Why?”
“Because I like what’s under it.”
He smiled. “We’ve been naked all day.”
“Why stop now?”
He peeled his shirt off and tossed it onto the dock. “You, too.”
“Can’t. I’m a girl.”
“I noticed. Now, off with it so I can notice some more.”
“We’re in a public place here.”
“It’s almost dark. And I don’t see anyone else around.”
She took off her T-shirt and tossed it onto the dock. He immediately reached down and flicked her bra open. She pulled it off, too, tossed it on top of her shirt, then slid back into his arms. They bobbed a little, chest to chest, the water sloshing between them.
“The lake,” he said. “Good suggestion. Of course, I didn’t expect to end up in it.”
“Are you complaining?” she said, running her hands up and down his back.
“Nope. Not a bit.”
“Oh, they’re right there, aren’t they?” she said, tracing her fingertips over a spot on his back.
“What?”
“The scars from your stitches.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You say you fell out of a tree?”
“Uh-huh. Scraped my back all the way down.”
“Must have been pretty deep. You said it took a lot of stitches.”
“Twenty-seven in all.”
He slid his hands around to her waist, then moved them upward to cradle her breasts in the spaces between his thumbs and forefingers. She blinked slowly, letting out a soft sigh.
“So what made you fall?” she murmured.
“I was climbing higher up in the tree to hide from my father. The last branch I stepped on wasn’t strong enough, and I fell.”
He moved closer and strummed his thumbs over her nipples. Her eyes drifted closed.
“Why were you hiding from your father?”
“Because I was late coming home. I knew he’d be mad.”
“So it was better to continue to hide?”
Alex gave a humorless laugh. “Oh, hell, yes. Especially when he was coming after me. But then I fell right at his feet. Knocked the breath right out of me.”
He ran his hands down to Val’s hips and pulled her buoyant body against his, leaning in and kissing her neck at the same time.
“So was he mad?”
“No,” Alex said between kisses. “Not really.”
“So what did he do to you?”
“Nothing. I guess he was just glad I didn’t kill myself. Or maybe he figured I’d hurt myself enough that any punishment was pretty much gratuitous. All he did was take me to the hospital.”
Alex thought for a moment, wondering why that was. His father had never let any bad deed go unpunished. He remembered when John was nine and had practically drowned playing in the creek behind their house when he wasn’t supposed to. John was still sputtering while his father was hauling out the belt.
Alex remembered being in the hospital. The stitches. The number of stitches. Telling how he’d cut himself on the tree limbs to the doctor, to his mother, to everybody who asked. But when he thought about the span of time between when he hit the ground and went to the emergency room, he realized he didn’t remember a thing.
“You had cuts only on your back?” Val asked.
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?”
“It was just the way I fell.”
Alex felt strange all of a sudden, as if his body temperature had suddenly shot up ten degrees. He leaned away from Val.
“What’s wrong?” Val asked.
“Nothing.”
No. Something. A memory. A hot, hazy memory of that night that he just couldn’t seem to touch. But it was there, and slowly he began to realize that it was something that had hovered around the periphery of his mind for years, but he’d always shoved it aside, thinking he must have dreamed it, or made it up somehow. But there it was again. He swallowed hard, suddenly feeling as if he were being transported back twenty-eight years.
It had been a hot night. Like tonight. One of those hot, humid, deathly still nights that never really burned off the daytime sun because it had soaked into every blade of grass, every shrub, every tree.
He heard his father calling to him. Shouting at him. Threatening him.
Val took his hands in hers. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
He’d climbed farther up the tree. And then he saw his father, standing on the ground below. He took one more step up, and the branch gave way.
He remembered falling. It seemed to take forever, falling through those tree branches, like a parachute plunge from ten thousand feet. And then he hit the ground. The pain was incredible—all the air was smacked right out of his lungs, and for several seconds he couldn’t breathe.
“I remember lying facedown on the ground,” he told Val, his gaze turned away from her. “I heard my father’s voice. He was angry.” His voice came out in a hushed whisper. “So angry.”
“You just said he wasn’t angry.”
Alex turned back. “I—” He stopped again, shaking his head. He’d always thought that he hadn’t been. But that wasn’t true. “I guess I just didn’t remember.”
All at once he realized how hard he was gripping Val’s hands. He released them suddenly and moved away from her, sliding down into the water up to his neck.
“Alex? What’s the matter?”
The sound of his father’s angry shouts filled his mind.
What the hell do you think you’re doing? I told you to be home before dark!
He remembered lying on his stomach, gasping for air. It hurt. Every attempt at taking a breath sent pain shooting all the way down into his lungs.
He heard a cracking noise. Then his father’s footsteps.
Don’t you ever disobey me again!
Pain suddenly shot down his back, a white-hot, searing pain unlike anything he’d ever felt before. It came again. And again. And again, until he nearly passed out. Then his father grasped him by the arm and hauled him to his feet, yanking him around to face him. And that was when he saw the tree branch the man held in his other hand.
“He hit me,” Alex said, his voice so choked he could barely get the words out. “With a tree branch.”
“What?”
Up to this moment, he’d always thought that it had just taken a moment for the pain to strike him. That each searing lash he felt was nothing more than his body waking up to the pain. But he hadn’t had those cuts when he hit the ground.
He remembered crying, and his father’s face had grown wild with rage. Don’t cry, goddamn it! Take it like a man!
“He hit you?” Val said. “That’s where you got the cuts?”
No. It couldn’t have been as bad as he was remembering. His father couldn’t possibly have done something like
that to him.
“It was just discipline, Val,” he said, his voice shaky. “That’s all.”
“Discipline? Twenty-seven stitches? Alex, for God’s sake—what kind of man beats a child to a bloody pulp for staying out after dark?”
Alex swallowed hard, his mind feeling hot and hazy. No. That wasn’t the way it had been. It couldn’t have been.
Then suddenly he remembered what his father had said next, and his stomach twisted with the memory.
You got those cuts when you fell out of the tree. Understand?
And that was the story Alex had told. A lie. He’d told his father’s version so many times that he’d actually come to believe it himself.
But now he knew. He knew the truth about that night, and it struck something buried so far inside him that he almost couldn’t grasp it, something he knew on a subconscious level but had never been able to bring to light.
The ultimate knowledge of what his father really was.
As if a dam had burst, suddenly the memory of it came flowing out. He remembered every stroke of his father’s arm, every scorching lash across his back. He felt every blow as if it were happening right now. Twenty-seven stitches. Christ, his father had ripped his back wide open. And then the man he’d always thought was above reproach in every way, who saw a chasm of difference between right and wrong, told him to lie about it.
“He told me to lie,” Alex said breathlessly. “Told me to tell people I got the cuts when I fell from the tree. How in the hell could he have done that? And why didn’t I remember?”
Val took his hands again, sliding down into the water until she was looking him right in the eye. “Because you were only six years old. You didn’t want to believe that your father would do something like that to you.”
And from that moment forward, Alex had learned to avoid his father’s wrath by becoming just like him. By adhering to the same brand of mental toughness. No compassion. No extenuating circumstances. No bleeding heart. There was right and there was wrong, with absolutely nothing in between. Over time, Alex had learned his lesson well—the quickest way to draw his father’s rage was to let emotion blur the line between the two.
Ruthless.
He’d heard that word so many times before in conjunction with his father, but he’d never believed it. Never.
Until now.
All this time he thought he understood the man as nobody else did, only to realize that he was the one who’d been so horribly misguided.
“My father,” he said. “I’m just like him.”
“What do you mean?”
Suddenly Alex was remembering things, so many things, so many times he’d made the decision his father would have deemed to be the right one, when it wasn’t right at all.
“When I was in patrol,” he told Val, “I remember dragging a guy to jail on Christmas Eve because he had an outstanding warrant for writing hot checks. I took him right out of his house while he was having dinner with his family. He had two kids. Little ones. They were crying as I dragged him away. My sister Sandy found out about it and let me have it. She said that all she could think about was how a couple of kids spent Christmas without their father. My father told Sandy to shut up. That I was right. That it was the guy’s own fault for writing those bad checks in the first place, and that I had an obligation to bring him in. And I remember feeling so damned proud of myself.”
Everything his father had beaten out of him that night in the woods was coming back in a torrent of emotion, so powerful it practically knocked him unconscious. He saw what his father had been. And then he saw what he’d been all these years. Good God—would he be the same if he had children of his own? Expect the impossible, then make them suffer if they didn’t achieve it?
“The guy was hardly a threat,” Alex went on. “I could have waited until the holidays were over. But I didn’t. You’d have thought I’d have had pity for those kids. But I didn’t feel a thing. I never let myself feel anything. It’s one thing to be impersonal as a cop. It’s another thing to be merciless.”
Val shook her head. “No. That’s not what you are.”
“That isn’t the only thing I ever did, Val. There’s more. So much more.” He closed his eyes. “Like what I did to you.”
“No, Alex. If you were like your father, you never would have come to my apartment that night to try to break the news. You wouldn’t have given a damn about me at all.”
“And then I left you in the middle of the night. How cold was that?”
“No. You didn’t leave because you felt nothing for me. You left because you felt too much.”
And instantly he’d shoved those feelings aside because they made him feel weak and powerless and out of control, telling himself instead that what had happened between them was meaningless. An unfortunate mistake on his part. Bad timing. And then he’d systematically put Val out of his mind in a way that would have made his father proud—right up to the moment she showed up in his life again.
He and Val were the same in so many ways. They’d each locked themselves away from other people, Val because she was overflowing with emotion and only her grandfather had allowed her to get close enough to let it out, and Alex because he’d had all the emotion beaten out of him to the point that he didn’t know how to let anyone in.
He glanced up at the sky. The pale orange light at the horizon had disappeared completely, revealing a half-moon and a sprinkling of stars.
He pushed a wet strand of hair away from Val’s cheek with his fingertips, then kissed her. “Let’s go back to the cabin.”
She nodded. They got out of the lake. Val put her shirt on, while Alex merely slung his over his shoulder. Val slipped her hand inside his, and they walked back to the cabin.
They took a shower—a long, hot shower during which neither of them spoke at all, losing themselves in the water and the steam and the soap. Finally they stepped out and dried off.
“I need to dry my hair,” Val said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Alex left the bathroom, knowing it was getting late, knowing it was time he got dressed and broke the news to Val. Instead, he lay down in bed and pulled the sheet up to his waist. He turned onto his side, his arm tucked under the pillow, staring ahead into the darkness of the bedroom. With Val—only with Val—he’d found more inside himself than a mirror image of a man he knew now that he never wanted to emulate. And now there was a possibility that he’d never see her again.
A few minutes later, he heard her come out of the bathroom. But as he was turning over, he felt her hand against his shoulder. She eased him back until he was lying on his stomach. Then, to his surprise, she straddled his sheet-covered hips and began to run her hands over his back and shoulders.
He started to rise, but she leaned into him, pressing with her palms, then moving her thumbs deep into his muscles, coaxing him to relax when he didn’t think there was any way he could ever relax again. After a moment, he slipped his arms beneath the pillow and let his eyes drift closed. He absorbed every sweep of her hands, every nuance of her soothing touch, knowing there might come a time when he’d have only memories of moments like this.
Tell her. Right now. Tell her you’re leaving.
Then he felt her lips on his back. A gentle kiss, right over the area where his scars were. A kiss to take away the old memory and put a new one in its place.
She leaned forward and slid her hands beneath the pillow on top of his. She kissed his neck, then brushed her bare breasts against his back. She was naked. He hadn’t been completely sure of that, but there was no question about it now.
She sat back up and ran her hands down his rib cage, then brought them up to massage his shoulders with deep, satisfying strokes—soothing him and arousing him all at the same time. Then she slowly stretched out over him again, pressing her body against his, running her hands all the way down his arms and circling her fingers around his wrists. She kissed a spot beneath his right ear, then gently nipped his earlobe, sending war
m shivers down his spine.
It’s getting late. You have to tell her.
Finally he turned over, easing her off him, but the moment he was on his back she swept the sheet away and straddled him again. He felt a jolt of desire, which took a quantum leap when she slid herself over the length of his erection, moving back and forth, arousing him with heat and pressure without ever taking him inside. He stroked his hands along her thighs as she moved, amazed at how hot and wet she already was. Then she fell forward, dragging her nipples along his chest, still maintaining the smoothly cadenced motion that was driving him crazy.
Stopping was no longer an option.
He caught her face in his hands and kissed her, twining his tongue with hers in a slow, languid kiss. Still she moved against him, her hips shifting back and forth. Hot. Slick. He pressed his palms to her breasts, gently caressing them, and soon he felt a rising tension deep in his groin. He wanted to be inside her. Needed to be inside her. Now.
He skimmed his hands along her waist to her hips, guiding her, trying to move her in such a way that he could slide himself into her. But every time he was poised at her opening, she moved just enough to keep him at bay.
“Val,” he said breathlessly, “I’m not any better at begging than you are, but here in a minute—”
She shifted her hips just slightly, and on the next stroke he got his wish. He groaned and clutched her hips, pulling her down until he was as deep inside her as he could get.
“Again,” he said.
She rose, then thrust down on him again with a moan of satisfaction. Every muscle in his body contracted, poised to respond to her every move. Her fingertips bit into his shoulders as she repeated the motion, slowly at first, then faster, until she settled into a wild, hot rhythm.
He watched her, her eyes closed, her face flushed, that untamed hair of hers cascading over her shoulders, reaching for pleasure at the same time she gave it to him. He’d never seen a sexier sight in his life. The sounds she was making—tiny, breathless moans in the back of her throat—were almost enough to send him over the edge all by themselves. He tried to put his hands against her hips to slow her down, to keep this from being over before she was ready for it to be, but she persisted.
