by Raye Morgan
“I’m not going to risk losing you, now that I’ve found you,” he said, and there was a steely glint in his eye as though he were warning her he didn’t like all this kidding around. “Where is this friend of yours? In one of these cars?”
Kim looked out through the parking lot and her pulse raced. There was no sign of Jake. Where was he?
“Uh, I don’t see her,” she said, stalling for time and wondering a bit desperately how she was going to get Hiram to go back into the inn.
The door flew open again, and there were the other two men, each calling out to Hiram and Kim. Hiram turned back to yell a response at them and in that moment, they seemed to come together, each yelling something, like a scrum of young men pretending to be unruly puppies.
And at that moment, Jake came shooting out from behind a car and stopped the bike right where Kim was standing. He had Dede strapped to his chest and his hood down and there was no way anyone was going to recognize him. She jumped aboard, grabbing on to him, and off they went. Looking back, she could see that the men were just beginning to understand that she’d left them and seemed too befuddled to know what to do next. She held on to Jake more tightly and began to laugh.
But Jake wasn’t laughing. “That was a little too close for comfort,” he grumped.
Kim laughed again, exhilarated.
“It was a good thing they were stumbling all over each other or they might have noticed me waiting for you,” he said. “As it is, I don’t think they have a clue.”
“You’re right. I’m sure they thought my ‘friend’ was a surprisingly large, burly sort of girl piloting a motorcycle.”
He looked back. “At least they don’t seem to be following us. Probably couldn’t find their car keys. We’re lucky.”
“You don’t think we could have beat them on this trusty stead?”
“Not if any of them had anything that ran.”
She laughed again, face into the cold wind. “That was fun. Let’s find another inn and do it again.”
Jake hunched over the handlebars and shuddered.
They drove on for another hour. The snow was letting up, but darkness was falling. Suddenly, Jake pulled off the road behind a small stand of trees and got off the bike, walking back toward the road and staring ahead.
“What is it?” Kim asked.
“I can’t tell for sure, but it looks to me like that might be a roadblock up ahead.” He pointed toward an area where there seemed to be a group of cars circling a set of floodlights.
“Why would there be a roadblock?” she asked, frowning.
He shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes local militias get frisky and decide to take the law into their own hands. You never know.” He turned and looked into the gathering gloom. “I think we’ll head out into the open country for a while. You game?”
He looked at her. She looked up at him.
She had Dede again as they’d stopped and changed partners a while ago. But something about this trip was pulling the two of them closer together and forming a bond between them that she never would have expected.
“Sure,” she said, feeling a little breathless from what she thought she saw in his eyes. “I’m ready for anything.”
He smiled at her and reached out to touch her cheek. But only for a second, and then he was swinging back onto the bike, dousing the light, and they were off, leaving the road behind. But the tingle where he’d touched her was harder to lose.
“Hold on tight,” he called back as they hit a rutted meadow.
The bike began to bounce like a bronco. She held on tight. Now, not only was it miserably cold and the going rough, her bottom was being punished like it had never been before. She felt as though a giant had taken her up and shaken her, then thrown her down in a way that made her bounce. For just a few minutes, she had some doubts about the survival of certain body parts.
But it didn’t last much longer. He found a smoother path near a river, and then, finally, they were back on the road.
Jake stopped and looked back up the way they would have come. The lights of the blockade were just barely visible. They started off again, but he waited another couple of miles before he turned on his lights and it was a little spooky dashing through the darkness.
The wind had died down, and the snow was just light-as-a-feather flakes now, but it covered the countryside and coated every tree.
“Hey, remember what you said about it not snowing down at the lower levels?” he called back to her.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. You ready to revise that opinion?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, just checking.”
She sighed. “I’ve never seen it like this before. Isn’t it beautiful?”
It was like a fairyland and eerily silent. The only sound was the bike as it putted along. A magic night, a magic journey. She sighed, wondering how she could so easily go from fearing him to being annoyed with him to being grateful—and now this. What was this exactly? She didn’t know and she didn’t want to think about it too hard. It was what it was, and it was obviously temporary. So it hardly mattered, did it? Whatever.
And then, finally, they reached the cliffs that Dorcher Cliffs was named for. The whole town spread out below them in lights, like a diamond necklace thrown carelessly upon an open beach. Many houses had lights strung, and some of the boats in the harbor were strung with lights, too. The entire town seemed to be aching to celebrate something.
Kim felt happy just looking down at her little town. She was home. They began to make their way down the winding road toward the cottage and she leaned forward and said, “You know what’s coming up? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
“No kidding. I haven’t been paying attention, I’m afraid.”
“I know. You’ve been a little busy trying not to get killed lately.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t think you’ll be in danger in Dorcher Cliffs,” she said serenely. “So you can relax and enjoy the holiday.”
She began to hum “White Christmas” against his neck.
He shook his head as she started to laugh. Suddenly she realized she’d been laughing a lot in the last few hours. She didn’t laugh much these days. In fact, she thought she’d probably laughed more today with Jake than she had in all the months since the war began put together. It really seemed to be true that attitude was everything.
When they had started out from the city, she’d thought there was no way she could do this. But just being with Jake and listening to his silly jokes and feeling his concern and seeing how he looked at life as an adventure had changed everything. She had to remember that.
The cottage was small, just two bedrooms and a living room/kitchen combination, but there was a nice little yard with a covered patio that gave it a garden quality. The atmosphere was cozy. If you stopped and listened for a moment, you could hear the waves on the rocks, not far away.
This was where Kim had spent her early childhood, before her mother had been lured back to working and living in the castle despite the fact that it was under the Granvilli regime. Kim had gone with her and received early training in castle work, besides being accepted as the personal companion to Pellea.
Her mother had died before she turned eighteen, leaving her the cottage that they had used mainly for holidays in those last few years. Despite the fact that she didn’t know many of her neighbors very well, she thought of Dorcher Cliffs as home and always had. Her mother’s sister, Grace Day, had a small house down by the shore, but she’d lived in Paris for years and seldom visited.
Even after she’d been banished from the castle shortly after the war had begun and had fled here to have her baby, she’d kept to herself. Leonardo had never tried to find her here. She was pretty sure he’d gone on to oth
er concerns. The good citizens of Dorcher Cliffs seemed to respect her need for privacy. They might leave a basket of freshly baked buns or a sack of homegrown fruit occasionally, but a smile and a few words of thanks seemed to suffice. They kept their distance but she never had a sense of animosity from them. All in all, it was a comfortable place to live.
As they drove in, she was surprised to see her aunt’s house, with its old-fashioned Captain’s walk around the roof peak, lit up as though someone was living there. Maybe her aunt was home for a visit. She would have to check that out.
The cottage smelled a little musty, as though no one had been in it since she’d left. She pointed out the fireplace to Jake and he quickly began to build a fire in the grate.
“That should take the chill out of the night,” he said as he rocked back on his heels in satisfaction, looking at the results of his handiwork.
Kim smiled. It was so nice to have someone else there to help with things that had to be done. She realized, suddenly, how tired she was of being responsible for everything. She changed poor Dede who’d been in the same diaper for hours, giving her a quick bath in warm water in the sink. She loved the water, babbling and cooing and splashing with her fat little hands, laughing as the bubbles rose. And then her little face registered a twinge of stabbing pain.
Kim could hardly stand it. She’d gone off to the city for six weeks to find relief for Dede and now she was back and not one step closer to finding help. As a mother, she was a class-A failure. She had to do something and do it now.
“What’s it going to be, girl?” she asked herself softly. “What’s it going to be?”
She picked her baby up and held her close, singing an old song that came readily to mind, and trying to use her love to heal her baby, even if only for the moment. That wasn’t enough, but it was all she had tonight.
Carrying Dede out into the living room, she was still humming as Jake looked up and gave her a crooked smile.
“You know what, go take a shower,” he said, reaching out for Dede. “That’ll make you feel better. I’ll take care of this little girl.”
“Really?”
“Of course.” The way he held her showed he knew what he was doing. “I’ve got a little bit of experience with this sort of thing, you know.”
She remembered he’d had a baby of his own once. She smiled and did as he suggested. The shower restored her spirits. It was always a boost to feel clean and fresh.
She came out into the living room and found Jake in a rocking chair again, only this time it was a slender, rickety model her mother had used. Dede seemed to be sound asleep and Jake’s head was back, but his eyes were open, if barely, and he gave her a slight smile as she got closer, though he didn’t say a word.
She went on into the kitchen, opened the freezer and pulled out two sacks of frozen soup, popping them into the microwave. It was late and there was no time to fix a complete dinner, but a good soup was always welcome on a cold, snowy night. She hesitated, wondering if Jake would like some toasted bread with his soup, and was just about to go out and ask him, when she stopped herself.
No, doing that would be getting a little too friendly and accommodating. He would start to think she was trying to butter him up—either that, or falling for him. She had to keep her dignity and her distance. The trip through the snow had been one thing, but now that they had made it to their destination, better not to get too close.
Interestingly enough, Jake’s thoughts were running along the same lines. He’d been sitting in the rocking chair holding this extremely loveable baby, enveloped in a cloud of baby happiness, and feeling nothing but peace and goodwill toward everyone—and it had to stop. This was not what he’d come here for. What did this have to do with the healing powers of vengeance?
It was Kim’s fault. Something about her appealed to his senses—all of them—like no other woman he’d ever known. When he looked at her, he wanted her, wanted her in a deep, primal way that would make him take steps he knew he shouldn’t take. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he wanted her for more dangerous things as well. He liked talking to her. He liked the way her eyes lit up when she thought of something new. He wanted to touch her hair, her face. He liked looking at her, at the way laughter seemed to bubble up from inside her. Just catching sight of her made him feel warmer when it was cold. And when he looked at her, the urge to do something to make her happier began to fill the empty void he’d carried inside him for so long now. And that wasn’t good. She wasn’t the one to fill it.
But the worst thing was, he was feeling all these traitorous emotions and urges around the woman who had been with Leonardo and had his baby—the last person on earth he could ever let himself love.
Love? Where had that word come from? His subconscious was dredging up old terms just because they seemed to fit his situation. But his subconscious was wrong. Love was not a word that would be relevant to him—never again.
No, this was just simple lust and hunger for human contact. That was all. And even that was too much. He held the baby as though she were the most precious thing in the world, and he knew, at this moment, she was. She couldn’t help who her father was, so it had no bearing.
But Kim could help it. And he couldn’t forget that.
“I like your cottage,” he told her as she served up the soup at the dining room table. “It feels like a place one could call home.”
“And I do.” She took Dede from him and put her sleeping baby down in her little crib, then stood looking down at her.
Jake came up beside her, looking down as well. He was so close, his arm touched her shoulder. Why did that make her heart jump? She bit her lip, willing it to stop, but he’d turned his face toward her and she could feel his breath ruffling her hair. If she didn’t watch out, her knees were going to buckle.
She looked up at him and he looked down at her and she felt like swooning. If he kissed her again, it would be different this time, and he had that look in his eyes. And no matter what she was telling herself, she knew she wanted it even more than he did.
She had to think fast—think of something that would stop this in its tracks.
“Jake,” she began, her voice shaky, “tell me about your baby.”
She felt his body stiffen. This was not a good question. But looking at his face, she decided she needed to know. It was time for him to talk about it, time for her to know the truth. And maybe it was time he let out some of his feelings. Who knew? She didn’t get the sense that he had a lot of people he could talk to. If he needed someone, for now, let her be the one.
He was looking down at Dede again and it was soon apparent the sensual mood that had been developing between them had been blown to smithereens by her question.
“Not now,” he said dismissively, though without turning away. He was too tired, suddenly, to argue, and yet too wound up to sleep.
And she seemed to feel the same way. But staying here, standing too close, letting emotions build, was out of the question.
“I’m going take my soup and sit on the couch and watch the fire until it burns out,” she said. “It’s that kind of night.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said, but the tone of his voice warned her he might have more in mind than sipping soup.
Still, neither one of them spoke while they enjoyed their meal, letting the warm, nutritious comfort food do its work along with the fire. And even then, they sat for a few minutes and just soaked it in.
“Hey,” Kim said at last, looking at him sideways. “I need to thank you. You saved Dede today, and you got us home, even though it took quite an effort. I owe you one.”
He shook his head, staring into the fire. “Babies are the most vulnerable ones in wartime. They can get caught in the crossfire so easily.”
“Yes.”
He turned and looked at her
. “I’ve got to know, Kim. You’ve got to explain something to me.”
A shiver went down her spine.
“What do you want to know?”
He turned back and stared into the fire for another minute. “I want to know why you think you belong with the Granvillis,” he said softly. “I want to know why you have such animosity toward the royals.”
Well, there it was. How was she going to explain this to him?
“Hey, there was just a war in this country, remember that? People had to make choices, pick sides.”
His dark blue eyes looked haunted. “And what made you pick the side you went with, Kim?”
How could she explain her emotions at the time? She still didn’t completely understand them herself. When Pellea had fallen for Monte, she’d helped her all she could. She hadn’t thought twice. But later…
“A lot of people, even some in the castle, decided to back the invasion by the old DeAngelis royal family. I guess they had nostalgia for the old days or something. Or they wanted to return to the monarchy.”
“But not you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I grew up with the Granvillis, lived in the castle when the Granvillis were in charge, worked for them most of my adult life, and I stayed loyal.” She said the words with fierce conviction, as though the harder she made her defense, the more valid it was. But glancing into his eyes, she had a feeling he wasn’t buying it.
“Is that what you call it?” He said it softly, but his bitter streak was showing.
She gave him a resentful look, but she didn’t say anything.
“Bad choice,” he added.
That certainly put her back up. “You dare say that sitting right here in the heart of Granvilli territory?” She leaned back, watching at him with a sense of distance, as though she was trying to find a way to keep him at arm’s length. “You shouldn’t say things like that. You might be overheard, you know. Someone might turn you in.”
