What the Waves Bring

by Barbara Delinsky

  His breath was warm and raspy against the damp tendrils of hair on her brow. “Is it always like that?” he asked in a tone deep and husky.

  “It’s never been like that before.” She spoke her own, thudding heart’s declaration, stretching the soft, ivory flesh of her body more comfortably against his manly firmness.

  He tightened his arms about her for an instant. “I’m glad, April …”

  For that brief moment, in the aftermath of mutual desire and shared fulfillment, the haze of passion held her on its secluded shore, safe from the reality that lurked beyond the dunes. April had never, in her life, felt as content, as whole. She was a woman beside this man, had given to him the same delight she’d received; the satisfaction was soul-reaching.

  Then with unexpected and unwelcome intrusion, reality was upon her. With the restoration of electrical power, the lamp by the bed came suddenly aglow, its bright yellow glare illuminating her nakedness and that of her tall and rugged lover. Awareness returned with a vengeful rush.

  It took dismaying moments for her to will movement to her passion-spent limbs. At last she rolled onto her side, away from Heath, moaning in disillusionment at what her mind was beginning to assimilate.

  “That shouldn’t have happened!” she cried in soft self-reproach.

  He argued gently, balanced on his elbow just behind her curled form. “It was inevitable. And very beautiful. You can’t deny that.”

  With a force that startled them both, she whipped around, drawing the sheet over her as cover. Her eyes pierced his dark depths with the intensity of her conscience. “Have I just become an adulteress, Heath? Can you tell me that?”

  “You know I can’t,” he replied calmly. “But in this society isn’t one assumed innocent until proven guilty?”

  Her voice held uncharacteristic bitterness. “Ah, a lawyer, now. Or, better still, the judge. Is that it? Am I getting warmer?”

  Warning lights flashed in the darkness of his eyes. “That’s enough, April.”

  “No,” she persisted, her brown eyes grown suddenly liquid, “it isn’t! I can’t stop, Heath! I can’t stop wondering and questioning and agonizing and fearing—”

  “April …” His voice was a low growl, his features taut.

  For a moment, she held her breath, mesmerized by the casual fall of the swath of vibrant black hair on his forehead, the comb marks of her own fingers above and behind his ears. “God help me.” Her eyes widened with her soulful whisper. “I can’t stop wanting you …” Slowly, the tears escaped their bounds, trickling, one by one, over the now-pale sheen of her cheeks.

  “Damn it, April,” he swore, grabbing her arms and hauling her against his chest, easily overpowering her resistance with arms like long steel bands that formed a temporary prison about her quaking body. “Listen to me! Whatever was done in this bed, was done by both of us. We’re in this together. I won’t have you blaming yourself for something that was genuine and lovely … and undertaken in the spirit of innocence—”

  “There was nothing innocent about it!” She interrupted him sharply. “It was lust. Physical need—”

  “Which,” he continued for her, “was satisfied by two people who had no other knowledge but that they were free to do so. Don’t you understand, April? I have no idea when—or whether—my memory will return. Can I isolate myself from life, from pleasure, indefinitely? Perhaps it is a purely selfish approach—but it’s the only one I see that will help me over the next weeks, months, maybe years.”

  His words had a self-calming effect, his tone gradually growing softer, less gruff. April felt his sense of conviction, conveyed through every fiber of his body as it held hers, and she derived momentary solace from it.

  “How strange,” she hiccoughed, at last, closing her eyes against the warmth of his chest, gaining strength from his manly scent, “that we should wait and wait for the lights to come on, and then find them to be so cruel. I wonder”—a sniffle interrupted her musing—“what would have happened … had the electricity gone on an hour ago.”

  She opened her eyes to see the first light of dawn break beyond the windowpane. It held no miracle answers.

  Heath snickered. “You would have been just as horrified to find yourself in bed with a half-dressed stranger … who would have wanted you regardless.”

  “You,” she announced without a trace of humor, “are probably a notorious playboy.” At her frown, he released her, and she bounded from the bed, throwing her robe across her shoulders as she fled the room to do battle with her conscience.

  By the time she emerged from the bathroom, she was alone in the house. Aimless steps took her from room to room, mug of steaming black coffee in hand, to the front door to examine the world in the aftermath of Ivan the Terrible. How differently things looked to her now, even though they were quite unchanged! Saturated with rain and glittering with brightly mirrored puddles, the moorland started just beyond her yard and undulated its way toward the horizon. The misted morning’s sun wore a thinly clouded veil, lending even greater stillness to the pale yellow and gray tapestry, a miracle in elemental recovery.

  Nothing had changed, yet everything had. She closed the door softly and turned from it. The hurricane had been compassionate toward the landscape; it had wreaked havoc with her peace of mind. Where was Heath now? Driven by intuition, she mounted the steps to her rooftop cupola, scanning the beach until the dark figure came into view. Head down, he walked slowly, deep in thought similar to that which monopolized her own being. Who was he? What was he to her? She felt herself at the starting line of an unfathomable race, its ultimate course a deep, dark mystery. What was she to do?

  With the electrical power restored, the phone service would surely soon follow. Then the search might begin for Heath’s true identity. A shaft of fear coursed through her at the thought of the possibilities. She had imagined him so many different things in the past two days; which would it turn out to be?

  When Heath returned, his hair in casual disarray, his face a healthy brown broken only by the purple bruise high on his cheekbone, April sought refuge in the kitchen, preparing a huge batch of pancakes for which she herself had no appetite. She and Heath sat quietly opposite one another as, for the most part, he did the eating. April kept her eyes to the table, dispassionately pushing wads of syrup-soaked pancake around her plate.

  “Are you all right?” he asked at last, putting down his fork with a clink.

  She shrugged as her eye caught on the leanness of his fingers, long and strong against the wood of the table. Her own hands ached to reach out and trace the manly lines; determinedly, she clutched them in her lap.

  “You can’t continue to castigate yourself, April.”

  Her mind made a defensive feint. “Castigate. That’s a very good word. Do you suppose you might have been a professor of literature? Or an author?”

  “April!” His fist hit the wood with a force that jolted in reverberation through her. “Cut it out!”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away.

  His voice was suddenly quiet. “Would you like me to leave?”

  “No!” Her decision came much too quickly.

  “Why not? If my presence is going to make you uncomfortable—”

  “No!” she exclaimed again, then lowered her voice to a more poignant request. “Please. Stay.” On a whispered note, she begged him. “Don’t leave me.” Her eyes were large, brown orbs, confused yet direct, focusing on his darkness. As he stood and paced to the window, she followed his tall form.

  “You’d like me to stay here without … touching you?” He paused. “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  April stared at his straight-backed stance for long moments. Then a sad smile tremored over her lips, and she looked down. “When I took over this house, the bookshelves contained the same volumes they do now. Some of them go back into the history of Nantucket. It’s fascinating.” Heath turned to face her, his expression one of puzzlement, but her eyes were glued to the h
ands that clenched each other in her lap. “This was the whaling center of the world for nearly one hundred years. The men were often gone for a year, two, even up to four or five years at a stretch on the longest voyages.” She paused for breath, looked shyly up at Heath, then down again.

  “There was a man named Benny Cleveland. In the early 1900s. He used to ‘rent himself out,’ during storms and bad times, to ladies whose husbands were at sea and who were frightened of staying alone. Fifteen cents for one night, twenty-five cents for two. It was all supposedly very innocent, yet Benny Cleveland was the envy of many a man around.” Her grin was directed inward, in renewed appreciation of the tale. When she continued, it was less steadily. “I like having you around, Heath. That hurricane might have been a nightmare had I been alone here!” In sincerity, she raised her eyes to his, stirred involuntarily by their warmth. “Don’t leave … yet.” Left unsaid was the inevitability of his eventual departure; she couldn’t quite voice that fact. Nor could she voice a far deeper need for him than mere companionship.

  “The storm is over, April. That storm. Will you make another one of our relationship?”

  His was a valid question, holding April speechless for long moments. As he had expressed it, there would only be turmoil if she created it herself. Was he right in his inference?

  A loud hammering at the front door saved her from having to answer his question directly. With the rasp of wood against wood, she pushed back her chair and left him, for the moment, alone.

  “Morning, Miss April.” A cheerful voice greeted her as she pulled open the door in response to its thud.

  “Tom! How good to see you! Can I take it that the phone crews are out as well?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the good-looking man, sandy-haired and no more than a year or two older than April, announced with pride. “I see,” he said, looking past her, “that your lights are okay?”

  She nodded. “They came on just after dawn.” How clearly she recalled the moment!

  “Good! Any other damage … to …”—his eye caught on something, drawing April around to see—“ … report?”

  “No, Tom. Everything else is fine.” Hesitating for a hairbreadth, she willed herself to calmness as she introduced the tall man who had approached and now stood just behind her. “Tom, this is Heath. He’s been with me during the storm.”

  The men eyed each other warily before shaking hands. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” The local islander spoke first, his continued scrutiny as intense as Heath’s.

  The dark head dipped. “Same,” he murmured simply, then stood back.

  Sensing a strange tension, April broke the silence. “Was there much damage on the island, Tom?” The municipal worker shook his head. “Any problem at your house?” Again, his gesture was in the negative. “Good.” She smiled, gratified at the news.

  “Well,” he said with a lingering edge of discomfort, “I’ll be moving along. Want to check all the homes on this end of the island before noon. Take care now, Miss April.” His eye flicked past her for a moment’s concentration on Heath before he smiled a final time, turned, and left.

  Only when the door was firmly shut and the faint sound of the Jeep in retreat met their ears did Heath speak. “Who is Tom?” He seemed nearly angry, startling her.

  “He’s an islander. Tom McGraw. He works with the electric company, I believe.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “This is a small island, Heath. We met in town soon after I arrived. The people here are all curious of newcomers.”

  “He remembered your name well enough.”

  April pondered the taut line of his jaw before grinning in sudden understanding. “Tom McGraw has a lovely wife and two young children. It was actually his wife, Sarah, whom I met first. We see each other in town every so often.”

  At the visible relaxation of his features, she felt an odd sense of satisfaction. He had been jealous! That was a new one! Then, with a soft gasp, she caught herself. Jealousy—and her resultant smugness—had no place here. Theirs could not be that kind of a relationship!

  “Yes, I am jealous!” Heath voiced her thoughts with uncanny perception. “And I’ll continue to be jealous of any man who looks at you, April. Evidently that’s the kind of man I am. Now perhaps you should reconsider. Do you still want me to stay here?”

  There was no reconsidering to be done. Much as she knew the danger of his presence, his sudden removal from her life would be worse! “Yes,” she murmured softly, holding his gaze with her last remnants of composure.

  Though he made no move to erase the distance between them, the sensuality of him reached out to her, caressing her anew, sending a tremor deep into her. In that instant, she doubted the wisdom of her decision. In the next, she had cause to doubt it even more.

  “I can’t make any promises, April. When I want to touch you, I intend to. If I want to kiss you, I will.”

  “Then I’ll have to be a conscience for us both!” she declared on impulse, clutching at the only solution she saw to the dilemma. She wanted to be with him, yet she did not. Until the mystery of his identity was resolved, she had no choice but to try to effect this compromise.

  The look he threw her was a wry one, in analysis of her chances of success; mercifully, he said nothing. Even more mercifully, he made no move toward her. Had he put her resolve to the test, she might have crumbled on the spot. For as he stood before her, she knew that same craving deep within; it took, to her chagrin, nothing more than his nearness to trigger this innermost physical response.

  With a deep breath of determination, she turned toward the spot in the living room that held her computer. For many of its uses it was fully operational now, given the return of the electrical power. For purposes of transmission, however, it still lacked the telephone connection.

  “What does it do?” Heath asked, eyeing the machine nearly as cautiously as he had eyed Tom McGraw moments earlier.

  “It’s a marvelous machine,” she began in loyal description. “It’s a word processor, a telecommunicator, an educational tool, a home entertainment center …”

  “Do you use it for all those things?”

  She laughed at his quick analysis. “No. I use it as a word processor and a communicator. I have all the manuals and materials for the other functions”—she pointed to a bottom shelf of the bookcase nearest the machine—“but I stick to the two I need for my work. For you …” She paused, growing instantly more sober. “I’ll go to the ‘Source.’”

  “The Source?”

  Her long brown lashes flickered up at him, then down again. “I can scan the Associated Press and UPI reports for the past few days, right from here,” she said, pointing to the small screen atop the keyboard unit, “and see if there is any report of a man lost at sea.”

  “Very interesting.” His comment carried the same unnamed weight that she felt in the pit of her stomach. “How long does this take?”

  “Seconds.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I guess that’s all there is to it,” he concluded deeply. He stared at her for long moments, his gaze dark and probing. When finally he spoke, his voice was very low. “April?” Her eyebrows cocked up in response. “When that fellow—Tom—came to the door, you did not mention that I’d been shipwrecked. Or that I didn’t remember a thing.” Another hesitation gave her the time to consider her lapse. “Why not? I would have thought that it would be a matter of high priority.”

  Until he’d mentioned it, April hadn’t realized what she’d done—or, more accurately, failed to do. As a trained psychologist, she knew that there were subconscious reasons behind the omission. Yet she wasn’t ready to examine these before Heath.

  “I-I really don’t know,” she stammered softly, avoiding his gaze. “Maybe I felt that he wouldn’t be of much help. What we need is the police chief—or someone who can start an investigation.”

  “Is that what we should do, then? Call the police once the
phones are back in order?”

  “Yes,” she answered quickly, then changed her mind in an instant. “Ah … no! No.” With a hand at her forehead, she struggled to separate emotion from reality, but it was a futile task. “Why don’t we see what the computer comes up with first?” There was timidity in her suggestion, knowing with her good sense that, given the possibility of a family off somewhere, she should call into action every possible resource—as soon as possible. Unsure now, she left the final say to Heath.

  It was as though he read her from head to toe, understanding her hesitation, feeling her fears himself. “We’ll do that, April. If the computer comes up with nothing, then we’ll look further.”

  Nodding her chestnut-maned head, April felt dire need of escape from the vibrations that wore constantly at her resistance. They were currents of life from Heath, reaching out to the softness of her. It was sheer torture to deny them, but deny them she must. “I-I think I’ll do some cleaning up,” she mumbled beneath her breath, disappearing quickly into the bedroom.

  It was a prolonged silence, broken only by some very suspicious and familiar-sounding blips, that finally brought her out of seclusion—not that the time to herself had accomplished anything, anyway! Besieged by guilt and tormented by an emotion she could neither contain nor define, she felt herself floundering. It was a welcome relief to have some source of diversion.

  The sight that confronted her in the living room brought her to an abrupt halt. “What are you doing?” She aimed her question at the broad back facing her. Seated at her desk chair, Heath was deeply engrossed in communion with her Apple.

  “Do you play chess?” he asked absently, sparing but a minute’s worth of his attention on her.