by BJ James
“You mean debate, don’t you?”
“Debate, defense.” Rafe gestured, a brief open-handed motion. “Often one and the same.”
“I’ve had many teachers in the art of debate and defense. The best of both was Kim. An oriental without speech, who taught the daughters and sons of Keegan O’Hara to protect themselves, mentally as well as physically.”
Rafe didn’t question how one who couldn’t speak could teach debate. He suspected there were other unique occurrences in her life, waiting to be discovered, awaiting an explanation. “Did Kim, who had no speech, teach you to turn the tables so adroitly?”
“He taught me to analyze, to find my best advantage, in all things.”
“An intelligent, insightful man, whose teachings seem to have taken root.”
“In all of us,” Valentina agreed. “But of us all, only Tynan was the perfect student.”
“The family philosopher.”
“Among other things.”
Rafe grinned and leaned an arm over the back of the sofa. A position that emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, the leanness of his body. “Given what I’ve heard and what I’ve learned, no one in his right mind would ever argue that an O‘Hara—any O’Hara—was ever one dimensional.”
“You feel you know us well enough to make that judgment?”
“All of you but one.”
“Is that why you’ve come? To resolve your questions and render judgment?”
“Judge is your word, not mine.” Rafe’s reply was quick and easy, proving, as he had when they met, that he was as adept at verbal fencing as she.
An answer given too quickly, too easily. One Valentina could not let pass. Rising, she walked to the window, standing in nearly the same place Rafe had stood.
The wind had died as suddenly as it had risen, bringing with it change. Wisps of smoky mist borne on warming air drifted through the channel from the bay. Touching, clinging, one layer building upon another, lying in a thick, impenetrable blanket over the estuary. The sun disappeared, the little that remained of the day was dark and murky. The lamp at her back shone in mullioned panes, mirroring the tilt of his head, the cast of his shoulders. He was a shape, a shadowy figure, no more. But she knew he watched her, as surely as if she could feel the sweep of his gaze.
The gathering mist crept from river to shore and billowed over the lawn. Window panes ran with rivulets of moisture before she turned to him with no trace of acrimony. Speaking fact, not accusation. “You judged me before.”
“I was a fool, I won’t be again.”
“Is that why you’ve come here? To rectify a mistake?” Her arms were crossed beneath her breasts, as if by moving beyond the circle of the fire, she had grown cold. “I don’t need your apologies, nor your regrets. I’ve been judged before, and more unfairly.”
Rafe left the sofa, crossing swiftly to her. Taking her by the shoulders, he drew her nearer. With only the heat of their bodies touching, mingling, tension sang again in a higher octave. “I didn’t come to rectify an error. I didn’t come to apologize. And I didn’t come out of regret. I came because I had to.”
“That makes no sense.” His hands were heavy on her shoulders. A hunger she hadn’t felt in a long, long while stirred in her. Shaking free, in quiet panic, she backed away, From new-old feelings. From the man who haunted her nights and her days. Dreaming or awake. “I don’t understand.”
His hands hovered in the air after she’d left them. For the space of a heartbeat he was tempted to reach out again, to draw her back to him. But if he did, if she came willingly to his embrace, there would be no denying desire. No going back.
It was too soon. There was too much to be resolved. Too much to understand. Curling his fingers into his palms, he let his fisted hands fall to his sides. He wouldn’t touch her again. Not until she came to him unfettered by the past.
Fog tapped at the windows. Sound perceived not heard. Coming on the little cat feet of Sandberg’s poetic eloquence, it sat on silent haunches. When the sleeping wind woke, it would move on. But not yet. For now it was his ally, sealing them away from the world. “I think you do, Valentina,” he murmured softly. “I think you understand better than you wish. I think you know what you want. What we both want.”
She backed away another step. “You have no idea what I... No! You’re wrong. No! No! No!”
Rafe advanced a step and was pleased when she stood her ground. “Yes.” Breaking his brand new rule, and because there was no help for it, he traced the line of her cheek from temple to the corner of her mouth. “When I make love to you, it will be because we both want it.”
Catching his wrist in a firm grasp, she stared up at him. “I’m not into one-night stands.”
“Nor am I. What’s between us could never be resolved in a night.”
“You sound so certain.” She felt his fingertips leave her face as he took his wrist from her circling clasp. But the memory of his touch, the throb of his pulse, lingered on.
“I’ve been certain from the moment I held you and comforted you, wishing I could dream your dreams for you.”
“You would dream my dreams?”
“If I could.”
“Even when they’re of another man?”
“Especially then.”
Bewildered, deeply touched, she spun away from the intensity of his gaze. A new understanding began to evolve in her mind. “There are compasses aboard The Summer Girl, aren’t there?”
“There are compasses.”
“And sextants?”
“And sextants.”
“Charts?”
“More than I would ever need.”
Valentina crossed her arms again, her fingers clutching at her sides. “You never intended to leave.”
“Not so soon. Not without you.”
She had no idea what he meant, but she dared not ask. In any case, he couldn’t go now. In this fog it would be suicide, even for the most experienced seafarer. “You seem to have this all worked out. Did you order the weather, as well?”
Rafe chuckled, diffusing the tension only a portion. “That I left to God and Mother Nature.”
“How kind of you.” She spun to face him again, mockery dripping from her drawling words.
“How kind of them to spare me another battle,” he countered.
“I’ve only one renovated bedroom. Mine.”
“And how kind of you to offer to share—”
“You’re out of your mind, Rafe Courtney.”
“—but the sofa will suffice.” Closing the little distance between them, he bent to kiss her, quickly, gently. Daring only a taste of her. While her mouth still trembled, he stroked her hair, murmured something too softly to be comprehended and returned to the table and the repast she’d made him.
The tepid tea had been drunk, his sandwich gathered up and devoured, before Valentina gathered her scattered wits.
Eight
The beach was a narrow, primordial strip of sandy soil separating earth from this briny passage to the sea. One small part of thousands of miles of curling, meandering merges of land and water marking the beginning and the end of the Chesapeake.
At the edge of a salt marsh, a great blue heron splashed and fluttered as it speared a breakfast catch. Without turning or slowing his pace, Rafe identified the sound. One that had grown commonplace in the time he’d spent walking the shores of Valentina’s retreat. He wondered, apropos of nothing but a ranging, questioning mind, if there was a season of the year, or a country in the world in which this skinny-legged Ichabod did not stand watch over dawn.
He wondered, as well, if it were an unwritten dictum of man and life that a stroll on the beach, any beach, should offer succor for body and spirit. And as he wondered he understood, as he had each of the three mornings he’d walked this walk, why Valentina came back to it time and again after each call from Simon. Returning to recover, to recoup. If never truly healed.
On this, the day he meant to be the last on her small is
land, he found her where he knew he would always find her in this hour encompassing dawn and day. The curving easternmost point, the end of her mile long expanse of shore, drew her as inevitably, as surely, as if it were her lodestar. While the river churned and swirled on its way to empty into the broad expanse of the Greater Chesapeake, she stood at its edge, her slender figure delineated in perfect detail by dancing reflection, her face raised to the sun just lifting from the rimline of the horizon.
Loath to disturb her reverie and the thoughts that took her so far from him, he approached slowly, his footsteps soundless. Choosing his customary seat, he settled on a half-petrified log of driftwood washed on shore only God knew when, or from where. As light burst fully upon them, bright and white with hues of sunrise giving way to a clear cerulean sky, he waited.
Affronted by the intrusion, a red-jointed fiddler crab scuttled away. Its trail a telltale line of crumbling, shifting sand dotted with bits of white quartzite and black and cream-colored chert. From a neighboring mix of trees, in a great flapping of wings, a bald eagle lifted from an aerie sprawled among the towering, uppermost limbs of a dying conifer. A magnificent treasure, a beautiful spectacle, strafing silver-crested ripples.
While the eagle soared, tiny beach creatures and sand dwellers tied to the earth scurried and hurried in their fashion. Fish leapt, sparkling rainbows in the light. Shells washed from deeper water tumbled on shore. There were bird calls and bird-song raised in morning symphony. But none were the red-throated loon, rarest of the rare on the bay. Valentina’s favorite.
As he waited and watched, the lap of the tide and the distant sea kept the rhythm of the day. A muted whisper, like the hum captured by a shell clutched to the ear of a child.
Time passed slowly, yet seemed not long. Warm air, borne in the night on wind and fog of the first evening, wafted in stalled currents around him. And with every increment of the climb of the sun, grew warmer still. One more day of temporary reprieve from the promise of premature autumn. A reprieve mildly refuted by the clarion cries of a chevron of tundra swans winging across the horizon in early arrival from the Arctic.
“Once the estuary was as clear as the sky, and even the rarest bird was plentiful.”
Drawn from his pensive drifting, Rafe abandoned his idle watch of morning by the bay. Valentina had deserted the point of her meditation to cross the sand to stand by him.
“In the days when the lodge was built the bay was different,” she explained. “I’m told one could stand chest high in water and see the shells and sea creatures and recognize which fishes were nibbling at toes or heels.”
“Until the world and modern ways discovered its riches.” Responding, looking, listening, Rafe made his own discovery. One he made anew each day. She was lovely in the morning light, with her hair still tossed by sleep and her mouth easy of stress. Barely restraining himself, barely keeping his mouth from exploring the dewy softness of hers, as he hungered for more than the taste of his single kiss, he clung to the thread of conversation. “Progress. If pillage of land and sea can be counted progress.”
Intent on Rafe, Valentina only shrugged, abandoning an old thorn in the modern conscience for a more immediate interest. “You slept well?” An expression surprisingly like a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Three nights on the sofa and you haven’t taken to hobbling hunchbacked or scuttling sideways like a crab.”
For three days he’d been her uninvited guest. Because he’d stayed too long helping her with renovations to the ceiling, because they’d sailed too long on The Summer Girl, or fished too long in the marshy ponds. Because the tide had turned, leaving the river too shallow for the sloop to traverse, or night had fallen, making passage too uncertain. Because this task or that, once begun had not been completed.
Each reason, each pretext, however flimsy or flawed, had been accepted with more grace than it merited.
For three nights he’d lain on the sofa a stone’s throw from her room, listening for dreams that never came. For three days he’d risen with her, given her these few minutes of solitude, then walked with her and talked with her. As she went about her days, he’d worked and played by her side, as if it were natural that he be there. As if he would never leave.
“I slept well.” He spoke neither lie nor truth, but an evaluation of three hours or, sometimes, four. Enough.
Returning her smile, he found the brightness of the pristine morning turned her tumbled hair to a gleaming cloud. And resolutely he tamped back the familiar longing to bury his hands in it and feel its silken glide through his palms. Instead of addressing one need, he answered another by linking his fingers through hers to draw her down to sit by him.
Her shoulder touched his. The length of a thigh, left half-naked beyond the frayed fringe of her cutoffs, brushed the corded seam of khakis he’d retrieved from an ever-prepared duffel kept on board the boat. As his own body tensed in response, the rise of her breasts seemed to stop in a broken breath. Her fingers trembled against his. Just for the moment, she seemed suspended. Mesmerized, beguiled. Yet when he looked at her, his probing gaze drawn inevitably to hers, her eyes were clear and calm.
And he knew he had only imagined. Perhaps wished. “And you?” he asked in a tone that was solicitous, revealing little of his disquiet. “Have you slept well?”
“Quite well.” Turning her face away, she regarded her bare toes with great interest.
In another circumstance, with another woman, Rafe would have thought this the advance and retreat of a coquette’s seductive ploy. But not here. Not with Valentina. In all his life, he’d never met a woman like her. Never so complex nor so innocent. Never so many intriguing qualities, so many talents. So many psyches in one.
Which was she today and every day as she walked the shore? Perhaps a barefoot and distracted beachcomber who never collected a shell? No, he decided quickly, certainly. More simply, a beach walker, seeking solace, collecting melancholy thoughts instead.
“What do you think of when you come here, Valentina?” He wondered aloud, gathering her hand closer into his grasp when she would have pulled away. “What are you thinking now?” In a voice so low it was nearly lost in the sounds of the morning, he asked, “What makes you so solemn and quiet?”
“This and that.” A toss of her head, meant to belittle the significance of her thoughts, was unconvincing. “Sense and nonsense. Nothing earthshaking.”
“Do you think of David?”
Valentina recoiled, a slight move, a token distancing. She’d known from the first that questions of David were inevitable. Yet she hadn’t expected it here, or now. Nor that his interest would be as unstructured, so unspecific. Specific would be easier. The who, the what, the when, where and why of it. Direct questions, allowing decisive answers, with little need to expound, and less to hurt.
“I think of him.” Her feet shifted, scuffing deeper into sand. “Of course I do. I always will.”
For all her reserve, something in her tone caught at Rafe, a desperate resolve that nagged at him. He hadn’t intended to probe, or delve into more than she would volunteer, but now he knew he must. “Tell me what you were thinking just now. Was it of David? Only David?”
“Yes! Always.” Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she shivered at her own half truth. The innate O’Hara honesty had her adding and qualifying when she never intended it. “But lately, mostly...today...”
“Today...?” he prompted, encouraging the faltering revelation.
Now that she’d begun, there was no turning back. “I was thinking of dreams I haven’t dreamed.” And eyes that weren’t David’s. A consoling voice not David’s. A comforting touch not David’s.
“As you did in the desert?”
Valentina gave no answer. Not even the O’Hara honor could compel her to speak the inexplicable.
“But you have dreamed here, as well?” In the desert, or a stone lodge by the bay, Rafe would name them nightmares, the subconscious agony of a soul. Never dreams.
&
nbsp; “This time.”
“This time,” he mused, letting the full import of the terse comment sink in. “This time, but not before?”
She was silent for so long he’d begun to think she wouldn’t respond. When she did there was evasion, a hesitant quality in her manner, as if they’d trod on forbidden ground. “Not in a long, long while.”
“Then you’ve come full circle.”
“In a way.”
Her terse acknowledgment told him nothing. A subconscious stepping back into the past to deal with something left unresolved would be healing. Sinking into the bog of yesterday to avoid tomorrow would be worse than disastrous. For Valentina. For him.
“The dreams came in the desert.” Hazarding a guess, he added, “As they have in other places, before other assignments.”
“Some. Yes.” She would offer no more than minimal candor.
“And then here for the first time, as you said, in a long, long while.”
“Circumstance.” Falling silent, she left him to make what he would of the single word.
They were still again, and quiet. Sand, stirred by a lazy dust devil darting over the shore like a ground-hugging land shark, sifted sand over their feet and ankles. The fiddler peeped from a burrow. Lulled into courage by their silence, he whisked to another. A heron stalked the waterline, scaly legs like toothpicks, moving, bending, graceful in fastidious slow motion.
The great bird had moved from sight, and Valentina had been given a moment of respite before Rafe ventured the most telling question. “You dreamed here again, and then they stopped. Will you tell me when?”
She had been staring out over the water, now she turned to face him. The clear calm in her eyes had become dark and thoughtful. “I don’t have to tell you. You know.”
“Then you haven’t lain awake fighting sleep to ward them off while I’ve been here?”
