by Sandra Field
Jake turned off the motor. “They must have repaired the jetty.”
“A couple of years ago,” she replied, taking the hamper from him. As he joined her on the jetty, she said forth-rightly, “I’ve never been back here, Jake. Not once.”
“Then I’m glad you’ve come back with me,” he said, and watched her lashes flutter to hide her eyes. “I brought a couple of pails, thought we might find some late bake-apples. Or crowberries.”
There was, briefly but unmistakably, relief on her face. He said roughly, “Shaine, I didn’t bring you out here to seduce you. I just thought we needed a day away from everyone. Away from the village and our son and your brothers.”
“Two friends picking berries.”
It wasn’t quite that simple. “Yeah,” said Jake.
In companionable silence, they picked the small orange fruit for nearly two hours. Then Shaine straightened, stretching her back. “I’m hungry.”
“Then let’s eat.”
The motel restaurant had packed the hamper. “Chicken sandwiches,” Shaine said contentedly, helping herself. “They always were your favorite. And I love any food I don’t make myself.”
He poured her a glass of chilled white wine, and passed carrot and celery sticks. It was an unsophisticated meal that many of his clients would have decried; but to Jake, seated on a rock surrounded by ocean and with Shaine just two feet away, it was ambrosia.
She said abruptly, “Your dad drowned off this island.”
“Near the reef by the lighthouse.”
“Someone told me your mother had remarried.”
“Several years ago.” Briefly he described his stepfather. “She’s happy again. After Dad died, she couldn’t bear looking out her window every day and seeing the ocean that had killed him. So she left, and broke all her ties with the village. One more reason I didn’t know about Daniel.”
“You never even wrote me one letter,” Shaine said quietly, making no attempt to hide that old sense of betrayal.
He wasn’t quite ready to go there yet. “I should never have stayed away those thirteen years. Walking through the woods the other night, being out on the ocean today…they’re part of me, a part I’d lost. When I left here after we’d made love, I drove myself unmercifully. Worked on freighters and salvage rigs, salted away my money, then started playing the stock market. I always was a mathematical whiz. I took some appalling chances, and enough of them paid off that I made a lot of money rather too fast. The more I had, the harder I played. I found my first two or three private clients, the only stipulation being that they had to be comfortable with a high level of risk for high returns. My name got around by word of mouth, and some big names came on board. I haven’t looked back since.”
She said naively, “Are you very rich?”
“Very,” he said. “I own two places in New York, a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps and a flat in Paris, within walking distance of the Louvre. You’d like it there.” As longing rippled over her face, he added, “But even before I came back here a couple of weeks ago, I was starting to see that along the way I’ve lost something. My soul? That’s a hell of a big word.”
Shaine passed him another sandwich, her eyes on his face. He said ruefully, “I’d forgotten what a good listener you are—I didn’t mean to bore you.”
“You’re not.”
“There’s a gap in my life,” he burst out. “A hollow place, which no amount of money can fill.” Gazing down at the food in his hand as though he’d never seen a chicken sandwich before, he added, “Then I find out about Daniel. And I see you again.”
“I’m not the same person I was thirteen years ago.”
“I’ve asked you this before—did you mean what you said that last day? That you didn’t love me enough to go away with me? It wasn’t like you, Shaine—you never were someone to do things by half measures, and you’d told me often enough you loved me.”
She said, with a faint, reminiscent smile, “We were planning to share your apartment in Manhattan, weren’t we? I was going to take art courses and find a studio. My parents would have preferred something more conservative—they wanted me to enroll in university—but they were willing for me to go because they trusted you.”
“But you didn’t go.”
“There was a reason I couldn’t go with you,” Shaine said carefully. “A very real reason. But I couldn’t tell you about it at the time, I’d promised I wouldn’t. Not that it would have made any difference in the long run.”
He put all the force of his personality into his words. “I want you to tell me now.”
“Do you remember being here that day?”
“I’ve never forgotten the smallest detail.”
She flinched. “You kept on and on at me, begging, pleading, trying so hard to make me change my mind…the truth was, I was as desperate for wider horizons as you were.”
With the tenacity of a bulldog, Jake brought her back to the point. “What was the reason?”
“Doc McGillivray,” she said. “I don’t imagine you’ve forgotten how every year, on the anniversary of his wife’s death, Doc goes on a bender. Drinks himself silly one day, suffers through the hangover the next, goes back to work on the following day. All the villagers know that 362 days a year he’s the best doctor the length of the coast…and if anything happens on the other three, they go into Corner Brook. It’s the way it’s always been.”
“He looked guilty when he saw me the other night,” Jake said slowly.
“You see too much.” She gave a heavy sigh. “I always visit him on the anniversary, I feel sorry for him because his wife was a lovely woman and he still misses her dreadfully. When I went that year—it was the day before you and I came out here—he let it drop that my mother had cancer. He’d just gotten the reports from Corner Brook; my mother didn’t know yet. She’d need surgery, he said, and radiation. Maybe even chemo. He thought the prognosis was good, but it could be months before we’d know for certain whether she’d pull through. Then he suddenly realized he’d said something that should have been kept strictly confidential, so he made me swear not to breathe a word to anyone until after my mother’s appointment with him later that week.”
She shrugged. “That’s it. I couldn’t possibly leave the cove knowing that my mother would be going through such an ordeal within a matter of weeks. But I couldn’t tell you the truth.”
Jake sat very still. Of all the many reasons he’d conjured in his mind over the years, this had never been one of them. Then he realized Shaine was still speaking. “Technically, I could have told you once my mother knew, there’d have been no need for secrecy then.”
“For the sake of two or three days, we lost thirteen years?” Jake said, appalled.
“But it wasn’t just a question of those two or three days,” Shaine said passionately. “You’re a decent man, Jake, you’d have stayed behind in the cove if you’d found out about my mother. That would have been so wrong for you. Your destiny wasn’t in Cranberry Cove, I knew that better than anyone—you’d have gone crazy hanging around here. Worse, you’d have ended up hating me.”
“I ended up hating you anyway.”
Her lashes flickered. “So I decided before we left in the boat that day to keep my mother’s illness a secret as long as I could, and to tell you I didn’t love you enough to go away with you. That way, you’d leave for New York without me.”
Of all the emotions churning in his chest, relief was uppermost. Jake clasped her by the elbows, his smile irradiating his face. “So you did love me,” he said. “You were lying to me just to make me leave.”
She pulled away from him, chewing on her lip. “We were so young,” she said in a rush. “And I, at least, so naive. So inexperienced. What did we know about love? Country and western songs, the love poems we had to study in high school—what did they have to do with two kids who’d grown up misfits in an out-of-the-way fishing village? We were in love with love, Jake.”
“Speak for yourself,
” Jake said harshly. “I loved you with all my heart. I was young, yes, and not nearly as experienced as you might think. But I knew you were the woman for me.”
With huge bitterness she said, “Oh sure. If I meant so much to you, why didn’t you write to me or phone me and keep in touch?”
He leaned forward. “Don’t you understand? That’s precisely why I didn’t keep in touch! I couldn’t bear to. You didn’t love me, that’s what you said. So I ran away and hid and spent a very long time licking my wounds. Hell, Shaine, I can see now that I shouldn’t have reacted that way. But I was only twenty-two, and here on this island I’d given you my heart.”
“You didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I couldn’t,” he said tautly. “I went home, packed my gear and left.”
Her hands were twisting in her lap, her head downbent; he had no idea what she was thinking. Raking his fingers through his hair, he added, “I’m not trying to justify it. I’m just telling you the way it was.”
“When I told you I wouldn’t go away with you, I never thought you’d vanish from my life. We were friends! Didn’t that mean anything to you?”
“How could I separate love from friendship? From my perspective you’d rejected me—all of me, my love, my friendship, the works. I was supposed to write you letters talking about the weather? I don’t think so.”
Her chin set stubbornly, she said, “It doesn’t really matter now, does it? My mother had the surgery and radiation, came through in fine style, and then she and Da were killed in a stupid accident. So if I’d gone with you to New York, I would have had to come home to look after my three brothers.” She lifted burning eyes. “Would you have come back with me?”
He owed her an honest answer. “I would have, yes. Because I loved you.”
“You see? I was right to send you away.”
“You made a decision for both of us—you don’t think you overstepped your limits?”
“No,” she said, her chin high. “I did what was best.”
“For you, maybe. But what about Daniel? And me? I appear out of the blue after thirteen years and my own son can’t stand the sight of me.”
“He’ll accept you, given time,” she insisted, hoping with all her heart that she was right. “Patience never was your strong suit.”
“Nor yours. And don’t argue.”
“Whatever we do,” she said urgently, “we mustn’t argue over Daniel.”
“We won’t,” he said shortly. She was so passionately intense; yet in the last few minutes she’d reiterated that she’d never really loved him. Would he ever understand her?
“You were the only real friend I had while I was growing up,” Shaine said. “I’d like us to be friends again.”
“Friends who want to go to bed with each other? That’s what we did wrong the first time.”
“You fell in love with me—that was the real mistake.”
She was glaring at him as though he was the enemy. His gut clenched as another thought struck him. “Is that why you made love to me—because you were upset about your mother?”
“I made love to you because I’d wanted to tear the clothes off your back ever since you came home for your father’s funeral.”
“So you lusted after me. Even if you didn’t love me,” he said bitterly, and in the distance heard a gull scream from the cliffs.
“Why do you have to analyze everything?” she cried.
Unable to stand how beautiful she looked, her back to the sea, sunlight dancing in her hair and bathing her cheek with golden light, he said, “I’m a mathematician—analytical and cold-blooded.”
Her nostrils flared. “Would you try and steal Daniel from me by using your money and your power?”
“I’ve already told you that’s not on the cards.”
“Then you’re not cold-blooded,” Shaine said. “I’ve watched you with Daniel, it hurts you when he’s so aloof.” She tossed her head. “And you’re not remotely cold-blooded when you kiss me.”
He told the literal truth. “Making love with you on this island—nothing in my life has ever matched that, Shaine.”
She’d seen the glossy photos in the magazines: the elegant, couturier-clad women with their diamonds and their sheen of assurance. Yet Jake was saying that she, Shaine O’Sullivan of Cranberry Cove, more than equaled them.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Jake said curtly.
“I don’t know what I believe!”
As though history was replaying itself, he felt the old hurt lance his ribs. Was he in danger of having his heart broken twice by the same woman? That would be a damn fool thing to do. “Let’s go down by the rocks,” he said tersely. “Crowberries used to grow down there.”
But as Jake reached for an empty bucket, she bent to pick up the same one. Their hands touched, her nails brushing the dark hair on his wrist. With a muffled groan he pushed her down on the grass, fell on top of her and kissed her.
Her tongue slid enticingly along his lips, her breasts were pressed into his ribs, her hips pinned to the ground by his weight. Fire streaked through Jake’s veins, and it would have been all too easy to have lost his control in a glorious explosion of desire. But at some deep level, he didn’t want to do that. He reared up on one elbow, his eyes running over her flushed face as if he were seeing it for the first time. With one finger he very slowly traced the arc of her brow, the rise and hollow of cheekbone, the sensual curve of her lower lip. “Each time I see you,” he said, “your beauty confounds me.”
A sudden sheen of tears made Shaine’s irises gleam like emeralds. “When you look at me like that, I can scarcely breathe,” she said helplessly. She cupped his face in her palms, pulling it down until her lips touched his in a kiss as tentative and exploratory as a young girl’s.
Wondering if she could hear the heavy thud of his heart, Jake teased her mouth open, tasting the sweetness that was Shaine, his fingers buried in her molten curls. Then, of its own volition, one of his hands wandered the slim length of her throat, paused to feel the race of her pulse, and pushed aside the collar of her shirt to trace the slender bridge of her collarbone and the delicate hollow beneath it. Her skin was silken-smooth, warm from the sun; she smelled of grass and the ocean. And she was willing: achingly, deliciously willing.
Very deliberately, she undid the first button on her blouse. Then she slid one hand beneath his T-shirt, tangling her fingers in his body hair, where the rippled muscles of his belly clenched to her touch. Fighting for restraint, Jake undid the second button, then the third, brushing her nipples until they were hard as unripe berries. She arched toward him, moaning his name, her eyes darkening. Finding the clasp of her bra between her breasts, Jake undid it and swooped to suckle her. She cried out with pleasure, a cry as wild as a falcon’s.
As he thrust between her thighs with his erection, she hauled at his shirt. He tugged it over his head and opened the rest of her blouse, dipping to taste the ivory concavity of her belly. With fierce hunger he reached for her zipper, pushed aside her lacy underwear, and cupped her. She was warm, moist and writhing to his touch in a way that inflamed him. His gaze trained on the gathering storm in her face, he teased her flesh open and with hypnotic certainty took her to the very center of the storm.
Panting, throbbing and his. His, he thought. Only his.
She reached for the waistband of his shorts. “I want you inside me,” she gasped. “Now, Jake, now…”
He was aching to be clasped by her in that most primitive of ways. With all his strength he flung himself sideways. “We can’t,” he gasped. “I don’t have anything to protect you against pregnancy. And I bet you don’t, either.”
Her face was a study of conflicting emotions. “No, I don’t.”
“We can’t risk a repeat. That’s one risk I won’t take.”
Appalled, she muttered, “I never even thought about protection—I must be out of my mind. What is it about you? I’m normally sensible when it comes to things like that.”
Her laugh was strangled. “Haven’t you noticed them—lined up from the back door all the way to Port aux Basques? Have a heart, Jake.”
His fingers clamped around her wrist. “Have you really been celibate for years?”
“Yes.”
“Why? And don’t do the all-men-are-jerks routine.”
“I’m too frustrated to come up with any kind of routine,” she said furiously. “My sex life—or lack of it—is my business.”
So she was still keeping secrets from him. Striving to control his breathing, Jake said, “I purposely didn’t bring any protection with me. It’s too soon for you and me to fall into bed. Sure, one kiss and we go off like a couple of firecrackers—so what?”
“I’m flattered,” she snapped.
“Dammit, Shaine, this time I’m trying to do the right thing.”
With fingers that were trembling, she clasped her bra and did up her blouse. Then she tossed him his T-shirt. “Put it on,” she ordered, “because—total idiot that I am—I still want to jump your bones.”
“My turn to be flattered?” he mocked; and knew he was doing his level best to bring himself back from the brink of something momentous. He’d been the one calling the shots in the affairs he’d had over the years. But Shaine just had to look at him and he was lost. Putty in her hands. Dead in the water. And how was that for mixed metaphors?
“Crowberries,” she said with determination. “Come on, we can fill a pail before we leave.”
So they trailed down to the rocks and bent to the task of gathering the small, shiny black berries in their fragrant carpet of needle-like green leaves. But for Jake, the ease was gone and the task mechanical. He was glad when the pail was full and they were tramping across the grass toward Gertrude and the jetty. He felt as cranky as a rutting moose, he decided, helping Shaine load their gear into the boat before casting off.
Back on the mainland, he carried the berries to Shaine’s back door and refused her polite invitation to come in. Daniel would be home from school shortly; he’d had enough emotional ups and downs for one day. He drove back to the motel, took a shower and lay on the bed, flipping through the channels on the TV. Shaine had never really loved him and his son couldn’t stand the sight of him. For a man with more dollars in the bank than starfish in the ocean, he wasn’t doing too well.
