Her Miracle Man

by Karen Sandler

  “Mia.”

  She rose with a start, dropping the newspaper to the sofa with a guilty flush. “I was finishing your crossword puzzle.”

  “I need to stretch my legs. I’m going out for a walk.”

  “Can I come with you?” She was wary of letting herself get too close to him, but the lure of spending time out of the house proved too much temptation.

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “I’ll find you a jacket.”

  She expected him to pull out something of his wife’s, but when he returned from the coat closet, he brought her what had to be one of his own jackets. The sleeves of the rain shell hung a few inches past her fingertips. When she zipped it, she could have fit a twin of herself inside with her. But the warm fleece lining made the jacket snug and warm.

  As she fumbled with the cuffs of the sleeves, Jack stepped in. “I’ll do it.”

  He rolled the cuffs with efficient precision, the few scudding brushes of his fingertips across her skin brief and impersonal. Once he’d finished the task, the sleeves dropped neatly to her wrist bones. He started for the front door, obviously expecting her to follow.

  Although the sky still glowered down at them, it had stopped raining. Excess moisture dripped from the pines and firs surrounding the house. Mist curled between the trees, hung like shawls around the tall, straight trunks.

  “There’s a path this way,” Jack said, his voice vivid in the quiet.

  The tree litter crunched under their feet as they followed the twisting trail. The wet bark of the conifers stood in stark black contrast with the bright green of the redwood needles and scalelike cedar leaves. When she tipped back her head, the water-laden branches released their moisture onto her cheeks.

  As she followed behind him between the trees, her brain automatically processed her surroundings, Latin names streaming into her conscious mind. “Oh,” she said softly.

  Still moving, Jack turned back to her. “What?”

  “Yesterday, before you found me…” She brushed her fingertips against the rough bark of a redwood. “As I walked through the forest, I knew the names of the trees—the scientific names.”

  Jack slowed, stopped. “Do you remember now?”

  She gestured toward an incense cedar. “Calocedrus decurrens.” She turned to point out a ponderosa pine. “Pinus ponderosa. The Douglas fir up ahead is Preudotsuga menziesii.”

  “Are you a botanist?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But…that’s not it. I just can’t picture myself as a scientist.”

  He frowned. “But can you picture yourself anywhere?”

  Under the pressure of his sharp gaze, she shook her head. He shrugged again and resumed walking.”

  The blankness of her mind taunted her, pricked her with anxiety. Despite Jack’s reluctance to share much about himself, she needed a diversion from her failure to remember. “Have you lived here a long time?”

  His shoulders stiffened and his pace increased. She would have had to run to keep up if not for the tree that had fallen across the path. Nearly three feet in diameter, the dead cedar brought their progress to a halt.

  He levered himself over the obstruction, throwing his legs over in one graceful move. Mia half wondered if he’d continue on, leaving her and her questions behind. But he put out his hand, taking hers, placing the other hand under her elbow to pull her on top of the log.

  During the moments she sat on the rough bark of the cedar, she felt the dampness through her jeans, but she was barely aware of the chill. She could focus only on the feel of his hand pressed against hers. The way his dark gaze met hers, briefly traced the lines of her face.

  Then he gave a tug, and she lifted her legs over with much less elegance than he’d shown. She brushed the backs of her jeans, glad his jacket had kept her from a complete soaking.

  When he finally answered her question, it took her a moment to remember what she’d asked. “Three and a half years,” he said as he held back a branch to allow her passage.

  “You weren’t living here when she died, then.”

  Tension stiffened his broad shoulders. He shook his head.

  “She died in Berkeley.”

  “I would have thought—” Mia paused to catch her breath as they scaled a steep climb “—you’d want to stay where you’d lived before. To preserve your memories of her.”

  He stopped so short Mia stumbled back trying to avoid colliding with him. She smacked her hand on the stub of a tree branch, regaining her balance.

  Jack turned, his expression savage. “Why the hell would I want to remember?”

  “You saved so many of her things. Her clothes, her books.” Mia faltered under the fierceness of Jack’s gaze. She went on in a near whisper. “To have kept so much…you must have loved her a great deal.”

  Jaw working, he swallowed. She didn’t know if it was grief or anger that drew those sharp lines in his face. Maybe a little of both.

  “I loved her more than you can imagine.”

  Swinging around, he started back up the hill, setting a pace so rapid that Mia fell behind. As the trees thinned into a clearing, she could keep him in view, saw him stop beside a granite boulder, lean against it.

  When she reached the massive boulder, Jack moved over a bit to give her space alongside him. She kept a few inches between them when she took her place. Although she couldn’t feel the heat of his body through her jacket and sweater, she could all too clearly imagine it.

  His arms crossed over his chest, Jack stared across down at the trees below. A few blackened redwood trunks dotted the clearing; other smaller trees had toppled across the hillside. The ragged tops of the snags still standing gave witness to a trial by fire. Whitethorn, deerbrush and green leaf manzanita filled the space between the dead trees, grudgingly ceding space to white and red fir seedlings just beginning to show above the level of the brush.

  “How long ago since it burned?” Mia looked around her, judging the height of the firs. “Ten, fifteen years?”

  Jack raised a brow. “Twelve and a half years ago. We were in escrow. Nearly fifty acres burned, three of them on my property. How on earth could you have known that?”

  “From the amount and type of growth.” She swept an arm across the landscape. “The brush comes back almost immediately. Although the wind blows in tree seeds, the whitethorn and deerbrush shades them and slows their growth. The only reason the red and white fir have done as well as they have is that they’re shade tolerant.”

  Jack gave her a bemused smile. “You’re a walking textbook.”

  “At least I’m remembering something.” She pointed out the twisted red branches of a manzanita. “That variety both sprouts from its burl—its root—and grows from seed. In fact, the fire has to scarify the seed for it to grow.”

  Somehow they’d edged toward each other, his shoulder pressing against hers. She would have thought he’d move away again, break the contact, but instead he dropped his arms so that the back of his hand brushed against her. Now she didn’t have to imagine the body heat radiating from him. Unlike before when he rolled up her sleeves, he moved his hand toward her with intention. His fingers wrapped around hers, the pressure of them slight but definite.

  He made no other move toward her. He still looked away, off across the regenerated landscape. She could only see his jaw, the high cheekbone. She wanted those dark eyes turned toward her. As opaque as they so often were, she might be able to see something in them that would help her understand what was going on.

  Heat curled up her arm, hot as flame. Was this what the forest felt as wildfire rushed through it? Like the manzanita, whose seeds needed to be seared for rebirth, would she be reborn through Jack’s fire? If she couldn’t be herself again, could she be someone new?

  “This is what I miss the most,” he said, his voice low in Mia’s ear. “Holding her hand. Her palm against mine.”

  Now empathy tangled with the sensuality he’d stirred within her. She tried to muster a response, to s
ay something that would soothe him. But the touch of his fingers laced with hers drove coherence from her mind.

  “We’d sit together, on the sofa or in bed at night. We’d be reading or watching television. She’d reach across, take my hand.” His fingers gripped Mia’s convulsively, as if he groped for his dead wife. “Sometimes I think if I could just hold her hand one more time…”

  He pushed away from the boulder, shoving his hands into his pockets. “I need to get back. Still have a few things to finish before dinner.”

  He waited until she fell in behind him, then started back down the trail. The going was easier downhill, although in the oversize shoes the slick mud made the footing treacherous. She slipped twice, biting back a gasp each time, regaining her balance on her own by reaching for a redwood trunk. Jack moved on ahead of her, apparently unaware of her predicament.

  Then her heel caught on a protruding rock as she slid, inertia all but launching her forward. Her flailing hands found nothing within reach to grab, and she couldn’t hold back a cry of fear.

  She landed, not on the rock-studded hillside but in Jack’s arms. He took a step back to absorb the energy of her fall, then held her tight until she could get her feet under her. Once she’d centered herself again, he let go.

  “Thank you.” She smiled, still shaky from the near disaster. “That was a lucky catch.”

  “I was watching you,” he said, his expression serious. “I wouldn’t have let you fall.”

  Of course he wouldn’t. She knew so little about him, but she felt secure in that knowledge. No matter what, Jack would keep her safe.

  Chapter Six

  He’d been shut up in his office for two hours since he and Mia returned from their walk and had accomplished nearly nothing in that time. The engineering report he should have completed by this afternoon was still unfinished. The spreadsheet he’d promised to e-mail to Dawson so he’d have it when he returned from Boston mocked Jack on his computer screen, a third of the data unentered, the final calculations still undone.

  His gaze strayed to the closed door. He should have left it open, kept an eye on Mia while he worked. Although her memory loss seemed to be the only lasting effect of her ordeal in the creek, he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t lose consciousness again.

  But he’d felt too vulnerable, too stripped bare by her. He knew it had nothing to do with Mia, that his emotions were always harder to control as the calendar marched closer to the anniversary date. Even still, her presence had brought all the loneliness and grief out in sharp relief.

  Why else would he have taken her hand like that up on the hillside? Spilled his guts to her? No doubt he’d embarrassed her. He felt like a complete ass.

  Restlessness drove him to his feet. He would have to finish the spreadsheet and report this evening. It would give him something to do besides obsess over Mia.

  Swinging the door open, he scanned the great room for her. The back of the sofa blocked his view; he couldn’t see if she lay there reading or napping. The pellet stove still burned on low, and the evening chill curled toward him through the large space.

  He remembered the wave of coolness when he’d opened the door of his and Elizabeth’s Berkeley apartment that night. They would leave the thermostat down low when they weren’t there. The first one home would raise the temperature so the furnace would cycle on. The chill when he’d entered that December day had given him his first inkling that something was amiss. That and the silence when he called Elizabeth’s name.

  In those first few moments before he’d found her bloody and broken, he’d tried to fool himself into thinking everything was okay. She’d just stepped out briefly and had forgotten to lock the door behind her. If he just shut his eyes and waited, she’d return.

  Then he’d stepped into the kitchen and found the body of his murdered wife. His world had ended the instant he saw her, still and lifeless on the floor. Even as he held her, shouted her name, he’d known it was over.

  When they arrested him three weeks later, he could hardly bring himself to care, despite his innocence. Elizabeth was dead. What did it matter where he finished his days—in San Quentin or in the prison of his own unending loss?

  The fragrance of sautéed onions brought him back to the present, telling him Mia must be in the kitchen starting dinner. Competing forces warred within him—the urge to see her, the reluctance to let himself be stripped bare by this intriguing woman. Elizabeth, as a professor of abnormal psychology, could have offered up some complex phobia or psychological condition to explain what he was feeling.

  They’d had an agreement during their marriage: he wouldn’t bore her with the technical specs of flood catch-basin construction and she wouldn’t psychoanalyze him. Right now, though, he felt as if he needed his head examined.

  To delay the inevitable, he took a side trip to the garage for more stove pellets. Hefting the forty pounder back inside, he cut a corner from the plastic bag and poured pellets into the near-empty hopper. As he shook the last of them into the stove, he glanced into the kitchen where Mia stood at the cooktop.

  Adjusting the pellet stove to a higher heat, he crumpled the empty bag and headed into the kitchen. Mia looked back over her shoulder at him as he stuffed the bag into the trash. Her brief smile stopped him in his tracks, literally froze him there with his hand still on the trash-can lid. When she turned back to the stove, he shook himself and, freed of her spell, he went to wash his hands.

  As the water rinsed away the soap, another flashback intruded—him sobbing as he cleaned Elizabeth’s blood from his hands. He slammed shut the water and the memory, angry that he’d let the ugliness into his mind with Mia there. Yes, it was December, the time of year when his exertion of even the most powerful will couldn’t keep the images at bay. But he’d made a point over the years of only allowing himself to lose control when he was alone.

  And then it hit him hard—he wouldn’t be alone for the anniversary this year. Mia would be here, would see every moment his self-control chipped away, would see what he became. If he’d felt exposed earlier today, it would be nothing to the nakedness he would reveal.

  Except he wouldn’t let her see. He damn well wouldn’t. He wrapped his fingers around the edge of the sink, the corner of the granite countertop digging into his hand. It was time he stopped indulging himself, anyway. Five years was long enough.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Jack jumped, unaware that she’d moved up behind him. He turned toward her, forcing a smile on his face that must have looked like a grimace. “I could eat.” His stomach knotted at the thought.

  She studied his face, her gray eyes so soft, the curve of her mouth so sweet, his heart ached. He wanted desperately to pull her into his arms, to feel her slender body against his. To feel the warmth of her.

  He edged away. “I’ll set the table.”

  He laid out plates and flatware in the dining room, then carried in from the kitchen a basket of fragrant biscuits. Mia brought out a bowl of canned peaches, then a covered dish that she set on a trivet.

  “I hope you don’t mind me taking over your kitchen,” she said as he pulled out her chair for her.

  “No problem.” Except it was. It brought back too many memories of returning home to a warm apartment, to Elizabeth putting out dinner for them.

  A tantalizing aroma rose when she opened the covered dish. “Sausage and onions in a honey-mustard sauce. I found the recipe in one of your cookbooks.”

  He served them each a portion. In spite of himself, his mouth watered at the delectable smell. “You haven’t forgotten how to cook.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it? What I remember and what I don’t.” She took a biscuit from the basket, then offered him one. “I didn’t need a recipe for these. My hands just seemed to know what to do.”

  He glanced down at those small, clever hands and let himself imagine what else they could do. If he thought about her body, her mouth, how her skin would feel under his fingertips, how it would
taste, then he could push aside his more dangerous emotions. He didn’t have to act on his sexual fantasies, but he could use them as a buttress to hold himself together.

  It wasn’t hard to think of Mia that way. To imagine pulling her into his lap even now, to push up that sweater, feel the narrowness of her waist, the shape of her back as he moved his hand higher. He could taste that curve of her throat, see if it was as sweet as the honey she was licking from her fingers.

  She lifted her gaze to his, one finger still in her mouth. Sensation shot low in his body, and he grew hard just watching the color rise in her cheeks. Even when she lowered her hand to her lap, dropped her gaze to her plate, heat surged through him, goading him. The handle of the fork in his hand bit into his skin, his grip so tight on it he was probably bending the metal.

  But despite the way his body screamed in frustration, this physical response to her was better than the grief, the rage. He had enough willpower to keep his hands off Mia. He didn’t have the strength to fight the black emotions that threatened to ambush his soul, wash him away the way the creek nearly had Mia.

  He shifted in his seat, his erection pushing on the placket of his jeans. The table kept Mia from seeing, although he couldn’t quite guard his face. Her sidelong glances told him she saw desire there, must have known that he wanted her. He edged away, keeping his focus on his dinner. He didn’t want her to be afraid of him.

  She sure knew her way around a kitchen. The biscuits melted in his mouth, the sweet-savory sausage and onion had him leaning back in his chair, eyes closed to appreciate the layers of flavor. Elizabeth had been a hazard around pots and pans, her culinary disasters far outnumbering her successes. She laughingly would tell him she had two favorite dishes—takeout and anything he cooked for her.