You Must Remember This

by Clara Wimberly

  “You can’t tell this to anyone,” Sarah warned. “Not even the guy who’s there with you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “I’m really sorry to do this, but you’ll just have to get rid of him somehow. I’m. sure when you explain things to him later, he’ll understand.”

  “Yes…yes, I’m sure he will, too. All right…” Lacy seemed puzzled, but now there was a note of concern in her voice. As if she seemed to understand Sarah’s words for the first time. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  Sarah described Cord.

  “Yes, I know exactly who you mean.” Lacy said. “Every woman in town has noticed him.”

  “I need you to find him and bring him out to the old fishing shack.”

  “The old-?”

  “Don’t repeat what I’ve said,” Sarah warned.

  “Oh, yes…sorry. All right.”

  “I hate to ask you to do this, but I’m sure Cord will ex- plain everything to you on the way. All right, Lace? Can you do it as quickly as possible?”

  “Of course I can,” Lacy said, her voice determined. “I’ll leave right now. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Sarah glanced at Hagan and smiled.

  “I’m fine. Talk to you when you get here.”

  She hung up the phone and walked into his arms.

  “I still don’t like this,” Hagan said. “Especially since someone was there with her.”

  “It’ll be okay,” Sarah said, hugging him tightly. “Lacy likes to talk, but she can be as discreet as anyone when she needs to be.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Sarah glanced around the comer, watching as a cus- tomer walked out of the store with a carton of soft drinks and a loaf of bread under his arm.

  “Lord, what I wouldn’t give for a simple slice of bread,” she muttered.

  Hagan laughed softly.

  “As soon as this is over, we’ll raid your freezer again. And this time I’ll do the cooking.”

  The promise in his eyes sent shivers down Sarah’s spine. But in the back of her mind, she didn’t let it fool her. He was trying to make her feel better, trying to give her some- thing to look forward to. When all along, both of them knew he’d be leaving long before there was time for grill- ing steaks.

  She didn’t answer, but took his hand as he pulled her with him toward the shadows and back into the forest. It was getting late and Sarah thought they probably wouldn’t make it back to the shack before midnight.

  It seemed to take hours to find their way back. The di- rection seemed unfamiliar to her and for a while she was afraid they might be lost, that they might wander in the swamps for hours and when Cord came he’d find no one there.

  Just when she was ready to express her worries to Ha- gan, she saw the outline of the small building ahead of them.

  Hagan held her back, waiting until he was sure it was safe to go inside.

  Once they’d checked the interior and lit candles, Sarah stepped to the front door and peeked out into the gloom. She was hot and perspiring from the humidity and as she gazed toward the shadowy, airless forest, she saw light- ning flickering in the south.

  “Tom?” she called softly. “Here, kitty.”

  “He could begone for days, baby,” Hagan said. She felt him move up behind her, felt his hand at her waist and his chin resting on her hair. “Come on back inside.”

  “It’s so hot,” she whispered, turning to him. “I think it’s going to storm.”

  “It is hot,” he agreed. “I was just having fantasies about another quick dip in that pool your grandad built.” His voice was soft and tender, filled with that teasing quality she liked so much.

  “Wouldn’t that be glorious?” she mused, leaning her head wearily against his chest.

  “You sound beat,” he said. “Here, let me open the last can of juice for you. Come here.”

  She watched as Hagan spread a blanket on the floor and made a comfortable spot for her. She heard the soft swoosh of the can opening as he turned to offer the juice to her.

  She walked to him, never taking her eyes off his face. Had anyone ever looked at her with such sweet concern? Or was it just the heat? Had the long walk in the drench- ing humidity done something to her brain?

  She took his hand and let him pull her down to the blanket. As he cradled her in his arms, he held the can of juice to her lips. When she pulled away, he bent his head and kissed her fruit-sweetened lips.

  “Oh, Hagan,” she whispered. “If all this has taught me anything, it’s that we shouldn’t waste a moment of our lives.”

  “Oh, my little swamp witch is getting philosophical on me,” he teased.

  She nudged him playfully with her elbow, but contin- ued talking.

  “It’s made me realize that I’ve lost a year drowning in self pity,” she said.

  Hagan murmured a low protest, but she shook her head, indicating she wanted to continue.

  “No, it’s true,” she said. “I kept this scar as a kind of badge of pity. A badge that prevented me from seeing anyone or doing anything.”

  “You needed the time, Sarah,” he said.

  “I know…I did. But it’s time for me to get on with it now,” she declared. “And as soon as this is all over, I’m going to have the plastic surgery.”

  Hagan hugged her and kissed her softly on the cheek.

  “Good,” he whispered. “I’m glad.”

  “It’s hard for me to think this will really ever end sometimes,” she said. “Tell me about how we’ll be back at the house soon, taking a nice cool bath.”

  Hagan moved them both farther down on the blanket, propping them up on the pillows as he held her tightly against him and offered her more of the juice.

  “I think…” His voice sounded so soothing against her ear, his words soft and alluring. And his arms made her feel more secure than she’d ever felt in her life. “…that very soon, we’ll be back at your house. And while you take your nice cool bubble bath, I’ll be in the kitchen cooking your dinner. The air conditioner will hum softly in the background. Candles flicker on the lacy tablecloth and in the air…”

  “Yes?” she whispered. “Go on. Don’t stop.” Her voice sounded sleepy and soft with pleasure.

  “…in the air will be that wonderful, clean scent of roses that I like so much. From now on, whenever I smell roses, I’ll think of you.”

  Tears filled her eyes, but she said nothing. She only held him tighter.

  Hagan cleared his voice and continued, his words softer now and slower.

  “There will be music in the background,” he said. “Blues. You like blues?” He moved his head to look down at her and saw her smile and nod.

  “It’s my favorite. B.B. King,” she murmured, her voice wistful and lost in dreams. “Etta James and Robert Cray.”

  He lifted his brows in a look of appreciation.

  “I knew there was something about you I liked,” he said.

  “Tell me more,” she whispered.

  “The salad will be fresh and cold, the steaks crispy on the outside and juicy inside.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hot potatoes, with lots of butter and sour cream. We’ll worry about cholesterol some other time.”

  “And chives,” she said. “From my herb garden.”

  “Definitely chives from your herb garden.”

  “Oh God,” she whispered. “I’m drooling. You’re kill- ing me.”

  “Me, too,” he laughed.

  He continued talking for minutes until he noticed how quiet the cabin had become. Sarah’s body against him was soft and relaxed and when he glanced down he saw that her lashes lay closed against her cheeks.

  Hagan touched her face and hair, closing his eyes as he placed a kiss against her forehead and pulled her back into his arms.

  He thought about all the times in his life when he had wished for something he couldn’t quite name. That wist- ful longing feeling in the quietest part of his sou
l that left him restless and dissatisfied. Now he knew that this was what he’d been looking for. Someone like Sarah to hold and to love. She amazed and delighted him and he thought if he made love to her for a million years it wouldn’t be enough.

  He was torn between wanting Cord to come and not wanting him to. Because he knew that Cord’s arrival would mean he’d have to leave Sarah and the serenity of this strange, beautiful place where she lived. He’d had a lot of regrets in his life, but none more torturing than the fact that he couldn’t have this woman in his life forever.

  His memory had practically all returned now. All ex- cept that terrible night when Cindy died and they left him on the side of the road to die.

  He had remembered her, though. Her blond hair, cut straight and short, streaked with sunlight. The small, muscular body, tanned and kept in the peak of condition at the agency gym.

  She was a funny girl. Bright and sweet. Sharp with the male agents when they did something that offended her sense of feminist pride. Sometimes tender and shy when she looked at Hagan a certain way.

  “God,” Hagan murmured, shifting his weight slightly on the hard floor.

  She’d been like a kid sister, tagging along with him on every assignment she could get with him. Cord laughed about it. So had the rest of the agents.

  But they’d liked Cindy and respected her. When it came right down to business, she had been a good cop, willing to make tough decisions and willing to carry them through.

  With a little more experience she would have made as fine an agent as he’d ever known.

  Had he been responsible for her death? Was there any- thing he could have done to save her?

  He wanted to remember and he couldn’t.

  Hagan glanced down at Sarah, letting his gaze wander over her tousled auburn hair, down to her face that looked pale in the candlelight.

  She’d been through so much. He didn’t want to put her through anything else. She deserved happiness. She de- served a regular guy who could come home to her every night. A man who didn’t carry a gun into the bedroom or wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares about his job or the sudden vision of someone dying.

  She needed children to care for. She’d substituted old Tom so quickly for her lost dreams, although he didn’t think she realized what she was doing.

  When he’d found that picture of her husband and the baby, Hagan felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. Sud- denly he’d known the full measure of her grief. He’d felt it, saw it in every small stroke of her brush on the canvas. He’d felt guilty as hell and for the first time, he wished it had been another house he’d stumbled into that dark rainy night. Another person besides Sarah who had become in- volved in this mess.

  She’d spoken just now about how it had changed her. How it made her not want to waste another minute of her life. The experience had changed him, too. But noth- ing…nothing in his life had ever affected him as much as these few days spent with her. In her simple life here near the swamps, she’d shown him more beauty, more joy than he ever thought existed. She was honest and good, yet filled with a passion that surprised and moved him. That even now made his body stir from wanting her.

  But would it have been better if he’d never known her and involved her? Even if that meant never touching her or looking into those expressive blue eyes? Never making love to her?

  “No,” he groaned softly. He had to catch his breath for a moment as he looked down at her sleeping face.

  “Yes,” he said, forcing himself to be painfully honest. He cradled her tenderly against him, not afraid now that she was sleeping to let the true emotion in his eyes show.

  “Better for you, darlin’,” he muttered. “But not for me. Definitely not for me.”

  Chapter 16

  Hagan hadn’t intended to sleep. He wasn’t sure what the sound was that woke him, but he was more alarmed that he had fallen asleep than he was by the noise.

  It was storming. As he lay very still, he was aware of the flash of lightning around the blanketed windows and the sudden, violent crack of thunder. It jarred the earth and actually seemed to send the soft earth beneath the cabin into tremors.

  But it hadn’t been the storm that woke him. His in- stincts and experience told him that much. That and the hair at the back of his neck.

  Carefully he moved Sarah out of his arms and leaned forward, blowing out the candles on the table. Then he sat quietly, waiting and letting his eyes become accustomed to the darkness.

  Sarah roused. He could feel her stiffen beside him when she woke in the dark and he wasn’t holding her.

  “Hagan?” she said, reaching for him.

  He took her hand, pulling it to his lips for a brief mo- ment.

  “Shh, I’m here, darlin’. Go back to sleep. I thought I heard something.”

  “Maybe it’s Cord,” she said, coming fully awake. She sat up beside him, pushing her sweat-dampened hair back from her face. “It has to be Cord, doesn’t it?”

  “Or Tom, back from his prowl,” he said carefully, not wanting to scare her. “You stay put,” he said. “I’ll see.” He touched her shoulder as he stood up, then crouching low, moved toward the windows.

  Hagan stood to the side of the window, squinting so that he could see through the crack without moving the blan- ket. His hand moved automatically to rest on the gun and holster at his side.

  Through the rain he saw a movement in the stand of moss-hung trees that surrounded the cabin. But the wind was blowing so fiercely that he couldn’t be certain if what he saw was the flailing tree limbs, or something else.

  Then in a flash of lightning, he saw a glint…a glim- mer of light on something at the edge of the woods.

  Hagan sucked in his breath and held it.

  “Hagan?” he heard Sarah whisper.

  “Shh.”

  In the next burst of lightning, he saw the man crouched in the rain beneath the trees.

  It wasn’t Cord.

  As Hagan watched, the man moved forward in a low run. Everything happened so quickly that there was no time to warn Sarah. Hardly time to pull his weapon from the holster and turn to the door before the man was there.

  Suddenly, with a loud crash, the door burst open.

  In a split second Hagan was aware of the scent of rain and swamp water coming into the still air of the shack. Aware in an odd, crazy way of the pleasant breeze, cooler now with the storm.

  There were two of them. Two men, one behind the other, assault weapons raised as they burst through the door, then lowered as the barrels began to spurt fire.

  “Sarah!” Hagan yelled as he threw himself toward the door.

  He landed on the floor in front of them, rolling over and firing twice at the man in front. The man fell onto Hagan with a grunt and one last lifeless gasp of air.

  His body trapped Hagan’s arm and the pistol against the floor.

  Suddenly everything seemed dreamlike. His actions and those of the man turning the rifle toward him seemed to be in slow motion as Hagan struggled to pull his arm and gun free.

  The man at the door was coming toward Hagan, stag- gering awkwardly like a lumbering giant in the darkness.

  Hagan knew he was going to die and oddly his last thought was one of anger. He couldn’t save her. It was happening all over again.

  “No! Sarah!” he screamed as he pulled his gun free and raised it. His voice was lost in the blast of gunfire, his eyes sightless in the fire and smoke.

  Then he remembered it all. In one violent rush, he re- membered…the look of trust in Cindy’s eyes when she’d looked at him that last time. The determination on her face as she fought with the men who held them captive in the van.

  Why had she fought? And, dammit, why hadn’t he been able to somehow get free of the ties that held him?

  In a matter of seconds, the man had jerked Cindy to her feet and struck her, then dragged her to the cargo door. Hagan had felt all the blood leave his body as he lunged forward on his knees in horror, calling
out her name and seeing her pushed from the van.

  He realized he was in the cabin now, not the van. And that suddenly the noise had stopped and he was still alive. It was only in that eerie silence that he realized some of the gunfire had come from outside the cabin.

  He could hear his own ragged breathing as he dragged himself completely free of the lifeless body on top of him. The second man now lay sprawled on his back, partly outside the cabin, partly in.

  Hagan pointed his gun once again toward the door.

  “Hagan,” a voice called. “Don’t shoot…it’s me… Cord.”

  Hagan felt every ounce of adrenaline rush from his body. Suddenly he was weak…shaking from his efforts, and from relief.

  And just as suddenly he realized there were no other sounds coming from the cabin.

  “Sarah?” he yelled, turning, scrambling, half crawling toward the table where the candles were.

  He found her behind the table, curled up with her back and hips against the wall. Her body was limp and lifeless.

  “No,” he whispered. “No…please God, not Sarah. Not Sarah!”

  He couldn’t find the flashlight and as he fumbled with the candles, he swept them and the matches onto the floor.

  He was aware of Cord beside him, murmuring reassur- ances. And he was aware of someone else, a young woman who rushed in and fell onto her knees beside Sarah’s still body.

  “Sarah,” she cried. “Oh, God…this is all my fault. But I didn’t know. Sweetie, please believe me, I didn’t know.”

  Hagan didn’t know what her words meant. And at the moment he didn’t care. He scooped Sarah up into his arms. His stomach tightened when he felt the blood on her face and in her beautiful hair. And he closed his eyes and groaned.

  “Hold on, darlin’,” Hagan whispered, pushing his face against her neck. “Don’t leave me now…do you hear? You can’t leave me.”

  He couldn’t see for the tears that suddenly flooded his eyes and choked his throat.

  “Let me look at her,” Cord said.

  “There’s no time,” Hagan said, marching with her in his arms toward the door.

  “There’s a cut above her eye,” Cord said, moving with Hagan. “Maybe she hasn’t been shot. Maybe the blood is just from the cut.”