Only His Touch ( Forever Friends, Book 2 of 4)

by Webb, Peggy

  ONLY HIS TOUCH

  (FOREVER FRIENDS, BOOK 2)

  PEGGY WEBB

  Copyright 2013 by Peggy Webb

  Cover design 2013 by Kim Van Meter

  Publishing history/Bantam/Loveswept Copyright © 1994 by Peggy Webb.

  Smashwords Edition

  PROLOGUE

  Six years was too long to live a lie. Standing at the railing with her back to the sea, Kathleen Shaw watched her husband cross the teakwood deck. His generous smile would have broken her heart if she’d had a heart to break.

  When he got close enough, he slid his arm around her and leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “I don’t know which is more breathtaking, darling, you or the sea. No wonder you spend so much time up here.”

  “The water is peaceful, Earl.”

  He pulled her close, and she leaned against him, unconsciously reaching for the gold locket that nestled between her breasts.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts. We’ll be docking at Cape Town tomorrow, and you’ll be the belle of a social whirl that will make Mardi Gras seem tame.”

  “You’re the one who will cause the stir, Doctor.”

  “My Kathleen. Always sweet and sassy.” He kissed her on the tip of her nose. “Are you ready for dinner, darling?”

  “You go ahead. I’ll be down in a while.”

  “Don’t take too long. Time drags when you’re not at my side.”

  She blew him a kiss, and he caught it in his left hand and pressed it to his lips. Dr. Earl Lennox, brilliant scientist, great humanitarian, adoring husband. How could she ever tell him good-bye without destroying him?

  As soon as he was out of sight, she hurried to their cabin and got a small silver box that was buried underneath her lingerie. Just holding the box felt like a betrayal of her husband. He would be sipping a glass of wine now, probably smiling, expecting at any moment to see her slip through the door and take her place at his side.

  Her hands trembled as she pressed the spring on her gold locket and took out a tiny key. Opening the box, she took out the contents, a stack of letters yellow with age.

  She was shivering now with the need to see the words that had sustained her for so many years, but she couldn’t bear to read them in the room she shared with her husband, in view of the bed where they had made sedate, gentle love. With the letters pressed close to her heart, she hurried topside. The moon was out and the water had turned to pewter.

  Leaning against the railing, she opened the first letter and began to read: Kat, Even as I write I can feel you lying naked in my arms. I can see the pattern the sun makes on your skin as it comes down through the Spanish moss. Here is my heart, love. Wear it next to yours until I come again. Hunter.

  She’d worn the locket over her heart and waited for him, waited seven long years. At first she could track his quest for his father through his letters. Then the letters had stopped.

  And when he finally came, it was too late.

  She unsnapped the locket and looked at the photograph—Hunter at eighteen, with his untamed black hair blown even wilder by the ride on the ferris wheel, his arm thrown carelessly across her shoulders as if he had no need to hold her closer, as if he knew she would always be his. How they had laughed when they crowded together in the cheap booth at the carnival and posed for the photograph. Then, afterward, in the heated closeness with the tinkling music of the carousel coming through the curtain, they looked at each other and their laughter died.

  “Kat,” he whispered with his cheek against hers. “Will you love me forever?”

  “Yes. Forever.”

  His kiss set them off on a journey of frantic exploration. A security guard had threatened to call the cops if they didn’t come out.

  Slowly Kathleen closed the locket. A breeze from the Atlantic ruffled her hair and cooled her hot cheeks. She carefully refolded the letter and slipped it into her pocket; then, turning, she looked out across the sea. Somewhere in the distance was Africa. And deep in its dark heart was Hunter La Farge.

  Below decks, her husband would be glancing at his watch, wondering what was taking her so long and trying to decide whether to start the first course without her. If she didn’t go down soon, he would come up to look for her.

  She took one last, longing look across the water, and then she turned her back on the sea and started below to her husband.

  The first explosion tilted the deck and knocked her back against the railing. The second spewed fire into the night sky.

  “Hunter!” Kathleen screamed.

  And then she was sucked into the center of the holocaust.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The boat slid quietly through the waters of the Zambezi. The only sounds were the hushed whisper of oars and the click of the camera. With the grace of the jungle cats he often photographed, Hunter stood up in the boat, hardly causing it to sway.

  “Someday you’re going to do that and we’ll both fall in and be eaten by a crocodile,” Rick said.

  Loyal from the top of his flaming red hair down to the tips of his elevated cowboy boots, Rick Ransom would do anything for his boyhood friend except be eaten by something that swam, flew, or stalked through the jungles. He’d left a comfortable home and an easy life in Jefferson Parish to follow Hunter La Farge all over South Africa in pursuit of diamonds, and regretted it only in times of danger. Which was more often than he cared to think about. Why Hunter felt compelled to leave his tightly guarded estate in Johannesburg to trek all over the jungles for months at a time was beyond him.

  “Any crocodile worth his salt would run screaming at the sight of me.” Hunter braced his feet and took aim with his camera.

  “That’s the truth. What I don’t understand is why the women don’t do the same thing?”

  “Women love nothing better than trying to tame something wild.”

  “Maybe I ought to grow a beard too.”

  Hunter’s hearty laugh boomed across the water, sending a flock of birds into flight. “You’d still look like a boy scout. No, Rick, I think you should leave all the women to me and stick to escorting old ladies across the street.”

  “Just for that I ought to dump you in with the crocs.”

  “Then how would you get back to Johannesburg?”

  “My charm, maybe?”

  They fell into an easy silence, and when they docked, Hunter’s Baron was serviced and ready to fly. He geared up and slid into the cockpit.

  “Home, here we come,” he said.

  “You call this hellhole home? Home is a front porch under the live-oak trees, a tall mint julep, and a long-stemmed Louisiana beauty at my beck and call.”

  “You can have Jefferson Parish. I find hell more to my liking.”

  Hunter set the plane down on his sprawling private compound that held a landing strip, a house that looked as if it had sprung up naturally among the trees and exotic flowering vines, and the offices of La Farge Diamond Company. The first thing he did was go to his office and plow through the backlog of newspapers.

  With the papers towering between them, he and Rick began to read, gleaning information pertinent to the diamond market and the political climate of the nation they now called home.

  “Listen to this,” Rick said. “‘Yacht explosion off the coast of Cape Town claims lives of—‘“

  Rick stopped reading, and a silence like death fell on the room. Suddenly chilled to the bone, Hunter reached across the stack and took the paper out of Rick’s hand. The item was headline news.

  “‘Yacht explosion off the coast of Cape Town claims lives of scientist Earl Lennox and famed prima ballerina Kathleen Shaw. ‘“

  Hunter forced h
is hands not to shake, forced himself to sit still while he continued reading.

  “‘Best known for her roles as Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Ms. Shaw was accompanying her husband, who was scheduled to deliver a paper on AIDS to a conference of colleagues in Cape Town.’”

  He looked at the paper’s date. Kathleen had been dead three months and he hadn’t known.

  “This is wrong,” he said.

  “Here’s another.... ‘Search for the bodies of Kathleen Shaw and her husband, Dr. Earl Lennox, has been called off. All who were aboard the yacht are believed to be dead....’” Rick turned to look at Hunter. “It’s dated six weeks after the one you have.”

  Hunter folded the paper, tucked it under his arm, and started toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Rick said.

  “I have to know if she’s dead.”

  o0o

  The pale sliver of a moon looked as if it had been thrown carelessly into the sky and had snagged itself on the topmost branches of a massive live-oak tree. Standing at the window of a small cottage nearby, Hunter stared at the tree. A breeze off the Mississippi stirred the Spanish moss that dripped from its branches and brushed the ground. Hunter watched the shadowy dance of the moss.

  Suddenly he grabbed the windowsill, gripping it so hard, his knuckles turned white. The moss swayed in the breeze, and inside its lacy curtain, another shadow moved.

  “Kat,” he whispered.

  A pale glimmer of moonlight fell on a filmy white skirt, and a whisper of wind lifted it like a bird. Hunter pressed his hands to his eyes and bent his head.

  “I must be going mad.”

  When he looked at the tree once more, the phantom had disappeared. Shaken by his vision, he went into the kitchen and made himself a stiff drink.

  “This is what comes of chasing a dream,” he said. “Insanity.”

  His hands shook as he lifted the drink to his lips. For six months he’d combed the ocean, searching for Kathleen Shaw’s body. And now when’d he come back to Jefferson Parish to bid her good-bye, his weary mind had conjured her up, waiting for him under the oak tree just as she had when she was sixteen.

  He finished his drink, then fell into his bed, exhausted. Sleep claimed him quickly, and with it came the phantom of the oak tree, tossing her long gypsy hair and teasing him with her full red lips.

  “Do I kiss better than anybody you know, Hunter?”

  “You’re the only girl I’ve ever kissed, Kat.”

  “I would be furious if you’d said yes.”

  “Then I would have kissed you until you lost your breath and forgot your question.”

  “Kiss me until I lose my breath.”

  Her lips were ripe as berries, and when she parted them, he thrust his tongue inside, tasting all her sweetness until he was drunk with her. Reeling, he propped one hand against the tree trunk and gazed down at her. Her face was a perfect heart in the moonlight, framed by her lustrous black hair.

  “If I don’t stop now, I won’t be able to,” he said.

  “Don’t stop.” She wove her hands into his hair and pulled him closer. “Oh, please. Don’t stop.”

  “Do you know what you’re asking, Kat?”

  “Hunter La Farge, do you take me for a fool? I know exactly what I’m asking.” She tightened her grip in his hair until his scalp hurt. “I’ve loved you since I was five years old, and if you don’t relieve me of the burden of my virginity right this very minute, I’m going to start screaming.”

  He laughed, loving her so much, he was hurting with it.

  “You’ll wake the neighbors, and they’ll all come pouring out of their houses asking what’s going on. Then what will you do?”

  “I’ll say I saw a snake and you refused to kill it. And then you’ll be branded as a coward.”

  “I’m no coward, Kat.”

  “I know.” She slid her hand inside his shirt, and his skin caught fire. “Are you going to kill that snake, or what?”

  “This is blackmail, you know.”

  “I know.” Her hands were white as lilies as she unbuttoned her blouse and shucked her jeans. Exposed, she stood before him, her skin as creamy and soft as the gardenias that perfumed the sultry air. “I’m yours, Hunter.”

  “You’ve always been mine... even before we were born.”

  How he knew those things, he couldn’t say. All he knew was the certainty he felt when he touched her silky skin, the joy he felt when he kissed her satiny lips. Fear that he would fail her never entered his mind. She lay beneath him on the soft ground, offered up to him like the tender bud of a rose.

  Slick rain-drenched leaves swayed in the night breeze and sprayed droplets of water across her skin. Bending over her like some fine animal from an exotic faraway place, Hunter licked the moisture away, licked with slow, sweeping movements as if he were absorbing her through his tongue, branding himself forever with the feel and taste of her skin.

  The moon dropped down to the top of their private tree, and a drop of moisture on her cheek caught the light and sent it, prism-like, bursting into a thousand colors that blinded him. He caught the prism between his lips and carried it deep into himself where it exploded, brilliant as a comet.

  Bright with her colors, he entered her, seeking to take possession. And buried deep in her, he found himself possessed. Her cry was one of pure primitive pleasure, and when she began to move beneath him, it was with a certainty and a fluidity that said more clearly than words that she was where she belonged and that she’d waited all her life for this moment.

  With the vigor of youth and none of its awkwardness, they rode the waves of passion until the moon paled and the stars fell from the sky, rode until they entered a dimension of their own making, a place beyond time and space where nothing existed except the two of them and their love, forged over the years and finally given form by their simple act of trust.

  When finally he lay back, slick with sweat and carrying her scent upon his skin, she lifted herself on her elbows and gazed into his eyes, far back where he carried his secrets.

  “Oh, Hunter... I am lost.” She pressed one hand over her breast and the other over his heart. “Don’t you feel it? We’ve traded places. You are me and I am you. We’re the same person, Hunter.”

  “I’ve always known that. I carry your soul and you carry mine.” He pulled her down to him, and her hair curtained their faces. “We’re one. Now and forever, Kat.”

  Hunter woke himself up calling her name. Sweat covered his body, and the damp sheets were twisted around his legs. He reached out to the other side of the bed, half expecting to find her there, her black hair fanned across the pillow, tangled from their lovemaking and gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Kat,” he whispered, and the sound of his own voice mocked him.

  If he lived to a hundred he’d never understand why she’d married someone else while he was gone off trying to find a father whose name he didn’t even know. Hunter went into the bathroom and turned on the light. He looked like something that had been dragged through the jungle. He splashed water over his face, then stuck his head under the faucet and stood while water saturated his hair.

  Even then, he couldn’t get cool.

  Calling himself every kind of fool, he slipped outside and hurried to the oak tree. Her fragrance lingered there, caught in the moss that swayed in the river breezes like a lace curtain. Riveted, he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He was being foolishly romantic, of course. The perfume that sent his senses reeling was not Kat’s, but belonged to the gardenias that bloomed against the fence.

  Nevertheless, he knelt and studied the ground, trying to see footprints in the dark.

  There... Was that the imprint of her foot? That dainty curving indention in the moss?

  He pressed his hand over the imprint. His body pulsed with heat, as if he’d stuck his finger into an electrical outlet. A breeze caught the leaves, and they seemed to whisper her name.

  Dark clouds tha
t had been hovering off the coast moved inland and dumped their contents on the parched earth. The tree protected Hunter for a while, and then even its thick branches couldn’t keep the onslaught away. Thunder crashed and lightning splintered the skies.

  Hunter lifted his fists and cursed the rain. He cursed every drop of water that had ever dared to fall. If there had been no water, there would have been no ocean. And if there were no ocean, Kathleen would not be lying in a watery grave.

  At last, drenched, wretched, and haunted, he made his way back to the house. Pulling a chair close to the window, he sat down and stared into the dark at the tree.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As soon as it was daylight, Hunter walked the city, revisiting all the places that held her memory—the bend in the river where she’d sat on the stone wall and told him he would be king of the world; the streetcar she used to ride up and down St. Charles, pointing out the grand houses where she would go for tea when she became famous; the cathedral where she’d stood in white satin and pledged her love to another man.

  And finally the tree.

  Just after dark when the fireflies began their dance of lights, Hunter returned to the live-oak tree that guarded the two tiny cottages where they’d grown up. Hunter La Farge and Kathleen Shaw, poor white trash with last names their mothers had made up. From the time Hunter had rescued her from the tree where she was throwing stones at the children calling her a bastard, they’d stood two against the world.

  He stood underneath the tree with the moss touching his face and fireflies lighting the branches like tiny Christmas tree bulbs.

  “Goodbye, Kathleen,” he said. “Goodbye, my love.”

  The leaves whispered in the wind, a ghost voice bidding him farewell.

  Inside the cottage, he propped his hips against the faded Formica countertop and telephoned Rick to get a report on his diamond mines.

  “The mines in the Transvaal are producing like Aladdin’s Cave,” Rick said. “We’re going to be obscenely rich.”

  “I’m already obscenely rich. And I’d give every penny I have for one glimpse of Kathleen.”