by Valerie Parv
“What happened after you went with her?”
Jo came more upright and felt the press of the rock wall at her back. Instead of comforting her, the rock felt alien, dangerous somehow. Instinctively, she wanted to shrink away from it. Another breath steadied her enough to continue. “We went to her home across the road from the park. She told me I’d have a better view of the concert from there. She kept calling me Lisa, although I told her my name was Joanne. Later, I found out her daughter’s name was Lisa.”
In the torchlight, she saw his smile flicker. “So Jo is short for Joanne.”
“Privileged information. Use it and you’re a dead man,” she warned, feeling less shaky by the second as she felt herself drawing strength from him.
He skimmed her hairline with his lips, eliciting a sharply indrawn breath. “I prefer to live, so I’ll stick to Jo.”
“Smart man,” she said, feeling shaky for an entirely different reason. The temptation to seek solace in his arms rather than keep talking was almost overwhelming.
He wasn’t letting her off so lightly. “What happened after the woman took you to her home?”
“We watched television, ate ice cream. She seemed happy just to have me there.”
“What about the cave?” he asked out of the blue.
Jo crammed her fingers against her mouth. “How do you know about the cave?”
“I don’t, I was guessing,” he said. “Being down here triggered your nightmare, so I figured there’s some connection between this place and your childhood experience.”
“It wasn’t really a cave,” she said, hearing her voice coming as if from a great distance. “It was a shallow grotto in her garden. If I had to describe it now, I’d say it was one of those kitschy concrete structures made to look like stone. In the middle was a religious statue decorated with plastic flowers. I’d almost forgotten about it.”
“Consciously, anyway.”
She took his point. “She took me outside to show me the grotto. I don’t remember much else until the police came and took me home.”
“Did the old woman give you the idea it isn’t safe to be perfect?”
She stared at him in the torchlight, feeling chilled. “That’s crazy.”
His hold tightened. “Somehow you got the idea that being perfect is dangerous.”
She could hardly speak for the lump clogging her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Everything in her urged her to get up and run, but there was nowhere to go. She clung to Blake, biting her lip to keep from whimpering.
Suddenly, like a door opening in her mind, fragments of recollection tumbled back. “In the grotto, she started to act strangely. She called me her darling child, her perfect angel. She said she’d make sure nothing bad ever happened to me.”
He put both arms around her and held her close. “It’s all right. You don’t have to go there if you don’t want to.”
“I want to. I have to. It’s been so long. She— Oh, God, I can’t, but I must.” She lifted her chin. “She said angels were too perfect to live on Earth with ordinary people. She told me—oh, this is so hard—she told me I would go to sleep in the grotto and wake up with the other angels where I belonged.”
“Did she try to drug you?”
She nodded with an effort, her neck muscles stiff as if with disuse. “I think so. I don’t know with what. I was too young. But young as I was, I knew I shouldn’t drink whatever she tried to give me. Although she could have put something in the ice cream I’d already eaten.”
“She probably wanted to gain your confidence first.”
“I guess.”
“She sounds fiendishly clever. If I ever get my hands on her—”
It was Jo’s turn to soothe. “She died not long after, before anything could come to trial.”
“So that’s why nothing ever came out. My poor, poor Jo. To have gone through such an ordeal and kept the details inside all these years.”
“I didn’t know what was there,” she whispered. “The dreams about a motherly woman trying to give me something to drink make sense now. I used to wake up sweating and pushing her away, with no idea who she was.”
“And tonight I made you sleep in the grotto again.” His tone was filled with remorse.
She put a finger to his lips. “Don’t blame yourself. If I hadn’t landed here, I might never have made sense of the dream.”
“Or your resistance to being overprotected and called perfect.”
Even now, knowing what she knew, she bristled with rejection. “I’ll never like hearing it.”
“Then I won’t say it,” he assured her. “I’ll show you in ways you’re guaranteed to like. Not now,” he said when she stirred. “It isn’t the right time. You need to rest, to process what you’ve uncovered. When you go back to the city—” strange how hard he found it to say the words “—you can get professional advice to help you deal with this.”
“Repressed memory syndrome,” she said. “Karen Prentiss wrote a series of articles about it. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it ever would apply to me.”
“I used to doubt there was any such thing. Not anymore.”
She grazed his cheek with the back of her hand. “Thank you.”
He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers. “For what?”
“Believing me. Not treating this as a joke.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you? What you went through was hardly a joke.”
She shrugged. “I was six and already well-known for flights of imagination.”
“Do you think it’s why you buried the angel thing in the recesses of your mind?”
“Probably. My parents used to give me grief about making things up. I was already afraid of getting into trouble for going with a stranger, when I’d been told countless times never to go with anyone. I probably didn’t want to make things worse for myself.”
“I’m sure blaming you would have been the last thing on your parents’ mind. All they would have cared about was having you back safely.”
She freed her hands from the space blanket to link them around his neck. “You don’t think like that at six years old. You think everything’s your fault.”
He unlinked her hands and kissed each palm in turn, sending shivers coursing through her, but of desire this time. Then he gave a slight smile. “I remember the feeling.”
She inclined her head in understanding. “You blamed yourself for being abandoned as a baby?”
“Not after I was old enough to work things out, but for a long time.”
She managed an unsteady laugh. “What inflated opinions we have of ourselves as children, thinking the world revolves around us.”
“Until reality comes along and knocks it out of us.”
“Just as well or we’d become egomaniacs.”
He touched her chin, lifting her face. “Des and Fran taught me that, in the middle, there’s healthy self-esteem.”
She was aware of sounding slightly out of breath. “Sometimes I think I’ve found the middle, then along comes a night like tonight.”
“Things will be better after this.”
She didn’t ask how he knew. She felt it, too. “Yes.”
“Is it okay if I turn the torch off now?”
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
There would be no more bad dreams tonight.
A pale stream of morning sunlight threading through the ferns into her eyes awoke her. Blake was gone and the space blanket had been neatly tucked around her and the pack placed under her head as a pillow. Determined not to feel cheated of his arms, she sat up and looked around. He must have gone exploring.
Shrugging the space blanket off her shoulders, she folded it into a compact bundle and pushed it into the pack. Then she saw his note wrapped around a high-energy food bar. “Looking for the exit, Sleeping Beauty. Room service left breakfast. Back soon. B.”
Self-reproach rolled through her. After her performance last night, he probably hadn’t known how to f
ace her. How could she have thrown all that angel stuff at him and expect him to want to be beside her when she awoke?
His words about healthy self-esteem came back to her. He’d claimed to understand, she remembered. Okay, he might not hold last night against her, but her outpouring wasn’t likely to improve their relationship.
She had enough balance to know she couldn’t be blamed for the repressed memories. Burying them had been a child’s act of self-preservation. Dragging them into the open meant they had far less power to hurt her any longer.
As for Blake, she could only hope he would take his cue from her and leave well enough alone. Letting her guard down with him so completely had rocked her. What was she supposed to do with real closeness? Just because she understood why she’d gravitated toward shallow relationships where she’d felt safe—like her relationship with Nigel—didn’t mean she was ready to deal with anything deeper.
Thinking she might be the focus of a man’s hopes and dreams still made her uneasy. Didn’t scare the hell out of her, true. So she was making progress. But she had a way to go yet to feel comfortable with real intimacy.
Lost in thought, she unwrapped the food bar and took a bite. It was like eating dry cereal but, according to the wrapper, it was full of essential nutrients. Alternating bites with swallows of water she managed to get it down, then used what passed for the bathroom. The trickling stream provided washing facilities but no change of clothes, unfortunately.
One way or another, she felt as desirable as yesterday’s pizza.
By the time Blake returned, she had convinced herself that not only was she not falling in love with him, after last night she was the last woman he’d be interested in.
So why was he looking at her as if she was the eighth wonder of the world?
After her revelation last night, Blake hadn’t wanted to leave Jo alone, but she was sleeping so peacefully he’d decided to risk it, hoping to have some encouraging news for her when she woke up.
Instead, he’d have to tell her that his first conclusion was the right one. It seemed the only way out was to traverse the full length of the hidden valley until it merged with the main gorge.
Too bad her cell phone didn’t work in the valley or they could have contacted Judy and asked her to drop a longer rope down to them from the overhang. As it was, his foster sister wouldn’t raise the alarm until a few more hours had passed without him reporting in. Before then, he hoped to be back in cell phone range and able to assure her all was well.
He could imagine the ribbing he’d get from Judy and the family once they knew he’d been stuck down here. He could blame Jo and come out looking like a hero, but that wasn’t his way, either. Last night, she had bared her soul to him and he had no intention of taking advantage. Not because he hadn’t wanted to. Making love to her last night would have been the easiest thing in the world. But seeing how vulnerable she was, he couldn’t have lived with himself.
She was washing her face in the creek when he got back, and his heart felt as if a giant hand had grabbed it and was squeezing tight. Tousled from sleep she looked young and fragile, and his protective instincts went on full alert.
Thinking of what had been done to her, he wanted to kill. Since that wasn’t possible, he settled for the next best thing—wishing a long stay in purgatory on her tormentor.
So Jo wouldn’t see how angry he felt on her behalf, he pinned a smile on his face. “Good morning, Ms. Francis. I trust the room was to your liking?”
She matched his jocular tone. “Room service leaves a lot to be desired.”
“I’ll speak to the management.”
“While you’re at it, tell them there’s no hot water in my bathroom.”
He sketched a bow. “Immediately, madam. Anything else?”
She became serious. “How are you feeling?”
He dropped onto a rock beside her, resisting temptation by staying out of touching distance. Where he’d been knocked out cold, the back of his neck was sending messages of pain all the way to the top of his skull, but he kept the details to himself. “I’ve lived through a lot worse.”
Her look said she understood what he wasn’t saying, but she played along. “What about a way out?”
“It looks as if there’s nothing before the main gorge.”
Her shoulders drooped and he saw the shadows in her eyes. She was bracing for his reaction to her revelation last night, he realized. Didn’t she know that nothing could change the way he felt about her? Should he say something or nothing? Which would make her happy?
He decided to say nothing. Coward’s way out perhaps, but he trusted his instinct. She would talk to him if and when she was ready. “Ready to take a hike?” he asked.
Bingo, he thought as he saw her eyes brighten. So much for the theory that women always wanted to talk about their feelings. Silence could be golden for them, too.
“I wish I had my camera. I took some shots of you lying under the overhang, resting I thought. I might have caught Eddy at the scene,” she said after they’d walked in silence for a while.
“You do have your camera. It looked okay when I found it, so I shoved it into the pack. We can check when we get back. How are your bruises this morning?”
She rotated one arm, then the other, sharing about as much of her discomfort as he’d done with her. “Not pretty, but I’ll survive.”
He hooked his thumbs into the straps of the pack. “I admire your resilience.”
He saw her shoot him a sidelong glance, probably wondering if he’d meant anything by his remark. He had, but he’d leave it to her to draw whatever conclusions she liked.
“Thanks,” she said softly. “For everything.”
Wrapped up in three words, he heard her acknowledgment of his support and appreciation for not rubbing in the necessity. “You’re welcome,” he said in the same code. “You always will be.”
This time, she looked startled, as if he’d given her more than she’d expected. If she only knew it was taking a lot not to sweep her into his arms. In fact, the more he considered the matter, the more inevitable it seemed.
They were in a scenic part of the hidden valley. Dappled light sifted through from above, highlighting a thick carpet of mosses and ferns that gave with every footfall. No one would be worried about them before afternoon, and they would reach the main gorge long before then, even taking time out for themselves.
He imagined letting the pack fall.
He saw them tumbling together onto the mossy carpet. She would shriek, but wouldn’t fight him. The slightest resistance and he would back off at once. But there would be none. Instead, she would link her arms around his neck and pull his face down, kissing him as if he were the room service she’d missed out on earlier.
Instantly, his gut tightened and his hormones went into orbit. Walking became distinctly uncomfortable. He lifted his head and smiled at her, but determinedly kept moving.
She looked at him, frowning a little. “What?”
“I was just thinking.”
She knew, he saw, when her color heightened. Had she been imagining a similar scenario? Was she waiting for him to make the first move? Hoping he would? He felt like a bush tracker who had lost the ability to read signs. Adrift, directionless.
This love business was tougher than it looked, he thought. For with a blinding flash, he knew he was in love with her. Not just wanting to make love to her, but the full deal. The white dress, walking-down-the-aisle, kids and a dog, till-death package. The kind of package Des and Fran Logan had shared.
A tremulous sensation tore through him. How could he be picturing any of that with Jo when he had no idea if it was what she wanted?
She had to, he decided. For the simple reason that he didn’t intend to live without her.
Chapter 12
The discovery kept his thoughts busy for the hour it took them to complete the walk.
“Do I see sunlight up ahead?” Jo asked, perking up visibly through her tiredness.
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For the past thirty minutes, he had been aware of walking slightly uphill. “We’re almost at the junction with the main gorge.”
He pushed his way through a curtain of greenery like a waterfall cascading over sheer rock. The greenery completely curtained the entrance to the valley. Unless, like Jo, you literally fell into the side gorge, you could walk right past and never know it was there. “No wonder we never stumbled on Francis Valley before,” he said.
“Francis Valley,” she tried the name on for size. “I like it, although I’m not sorry to be out of it for now.”
“Amen to that.”
Blissfully she lifted her face to the sunlight as they walked on. Another thirty minutes and she was staring in undisguised joy at the Jeep parked ahead of them in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. “If that Jeep were a horse, I’d say you whistled and it came like they do in old cowboy movies, but I guess we have Andy to thank for leaving it here.”
“We could also have my call to thank for spending the night in the side gorge.”
“You think Max was with Judy when you contacted Andy?”
“How else did he know where to send Eddy to find us?”
“I hope you’re not blaming yourself? I was the idiot who fell down the fissure.”
“You weren’t an idiot. The crevice was so well camouflaged that anyone could have made the same mistake.”
“Then we’re even,” she said.
It was his turn to say, “Thanks for not holding last night against me.”
She summoned a smile. “Is a thank-you all I get?”
“We could shake hands.”
But even as he said it, she was moving toward him, her expression intent. As in his fantasy, he dropped the pack to the ground and welcomed her into his arms.
Her kiss was chaste enough to start with, but he’d settle for what she was offering, and the wonderful feel of her pressing against him. For now, anyway.
When she wrapped her hands around his neck, his temperature soared. Her lips moving against his felt like more of the fantasy. When she pulled away, he let her go with only the slightest exhalation of regret. He didn’t think she heard. Being noble was playing havoc with his hormones.
