by Jean Barrett
Ronnie snapped at her younger son, and Stuart snapped back. They were all of them getting on each other’s nerves. That was when Lane decided that she had to get away from the lodge before she started snapping at someone herself. There were too many emotions at work in this place. The very air seemed charged with the strain of them.
Besides, with Jack safely hiding out in the guesthouse, this was her chance to escape another of his challenges. She could walk in the woods where the wind was no serious menace.
Murmuring an excuse before dessert was served, she left the dining room and headed for the foyer where her coat and boots were waiting.
Minutes later she was out of the house and already feeling better in the bracing air. She remembered someone mentioning a trail that originated at the side of the chapel. From there the path cut along the edge of the high bluff before descending to the shore where it eventually reached the dock. Just the long hike she needed.
Lane didn’t plan on company, but it was there patiently waiting to ambush her as she rounded the chapel. Hands buried in his pockets, he leaned negligently against a wall of the building, looking infuriatingly confident.
“Took your time getting here, didn’t you?” Jack observed with one of his slow, appealing grins.
Chapter Six
“This is getting ridiculous,” she accused him. “Every time I turn around you’re there.”
His maddening grin was still in place. “And you enjoy it, too. Admit it.”
She ignored that piece of brashness. Why encourage him? “All right, what’s your explanation this time? How did you know I’d be here?”
“Actually,” he confessed, standing away from the timber wall, “I didn’t. I just happened to be over there in the trees watching you and wondering which way you’d decide to come. Didn’t you feel me willing you to head in this direction?”
“Naturally. And how did you just happen to be in the trees? Aren’t you supposed to be working in the guesthouse? No, don’t bother. I knew that had to be an act.”
“As long as Lady Bauer bought it.”
“She did. She was very disappointed that you weren’t there to admire her eating her spinach quiche. Instead, you’ve been investigating again, haven’t you?”
“Exaggeration. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to look around.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing.”
“Too bad, because if you’d had the courage to stick with Ronnie, you wouldn’t have missed the news.” She told him about Dan.
Jack was immediately sober. “Judge or not, the man’s a fool to try it. I just checked the conditions out on the ice, and the visibility is worse than ever.”
“Well, it’s too late to stop him. All we can hope is that both he and Nils make it. With their skis and truck gone now, we certainly have no way to go after them.”
He nodded in agreement, then asked, “And what brings you outside?” His question caught her off guard.
She hesitated before admitting, “Just wanted to walk.”
He didn’t wait for an invitation. “Not a bad idea. I could use the exercise myself.”
“Jack—”
“Perfect opportunity for us to talk. No interruptions, right?”
Trapped. How was she going to elude him this time? For a moment she was frantic about the situation, ready to raise the first objection that occurred to her. And then she realized how silly she was being. It was pointless to go on evading him when he was absolutely determined to confront her. Maybe he was right. Maybe there were issues that, as two mature individuals, they needed to settle.
Closure. She had never particularly favored that popular term, but it was suitable in this instance. All right, she was willing to pursue closure for Jack and her. And wasn’t it much safer to do that out here in the open? Providing, that is...
“No funny business,” Lane specified.
“Translation, please.”
“The little performance last night in my room,” she reminded him. “If we’re going to walk and talk, okay, but I don’t want any more sneaky maneuvers.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he promised.
She might have trusted that guarantee if he had expressed it differently, but she didn’t argue about it.
The trail was wide enough to accommodate them side by side as they struck off along the edge of the bluff, their boots crunching in the snow. The wind that was so awesome out on the open ice was blocked by the luxuriant growth of the woods and presented no obstacle to their leisurely progress.
Lane was enchanted by the beauty of the hemlocks and the pines intermingled with beech, maple and white birch. Every branch, every twig was coated with a hoarfrost that made a dazzling display. It was hard to associate this place, this fairyland of ice and snow, with murder. And yet, every now and again, a wild gust of wind would penetrate the forest barrier, showering the air with snow from the laden boughs and reminding her that horror and violence had come to the island.
Lane waited for Jack’s arguments to begin. She knew that a reconciliation was his objective, not closure. But the silence between them lengthened as they strolled. Of course. She should have remembered that Jack Donovan knew the value of delay, how to heighten a target’s anticipation until they were practically begging for his assault. She had watched him use that technique in the past, along with his Irish charm, to secure vital funds for his work. It was a lethal combination. Well, she was ready for him.
Only she wasn’t. He surprised her, after all, with a sudden but perfectly congenial opening. “So tell me about your life these days, Lane.”
“Just like that?”
“Sure. I want to know.”
“It’s not exciting. Not like an expedition to uncover some rare sauropod. But it is fulfilling,” she stressed. “I have the prospect of managing one of the chain’s inns on my own someday, an attractive apartment in St. Louis and plenty of friends.”
“Any of those friends a special friend?”
Was she involved in a relationship? That’s what he wanted to know. If she’d been a capable liar—and she wasn’t—she might have settled this whole uneasy business here and now. Instead, she gave a circumspect response. “Who has the time?”
Jack didn’t play fair. Any other opponent would have asked her to elaborate, and she could have resisted. All he did was turn and gaze at her without comment where they were paused at the edge of a small clearing.
No, he did much more than that to unnerve her. He had the effrontery to stand there and, with no effort whatever, make her positively weak with the sight of him. How did he do it? Look so potently, tantalizingly male in ordinary jeans, a narrow-waisted ski jacket and that battered Aussie hat crammed at an angle on his head?
She remembered the outback hat with its rolled brims from the days of their marriage. Jack had worn the rakish hat, along with Western boots, to protect himself from snakes and a scorching sun out on the digs. They had earned him the nickname of Cowboy from his team members.
But it was dangerous to remember the past. Dangerous to go on standing here while those soulful, penetrating blue eyes of his went on searching her face. Lane forced herself to look away from his gaze, distracting herself with the contents of the clearing.
Off to one side, weathered logs in a tangled heap poked up from a drift of snow. Chickadees chirped and fluttered along the tops of the logs, busy pecking away at fallen birch seeds.
“Look over there,” Lane said brightly, trying to direct those disturbing blue eyes away from her face. “Do you suppose it’s the remains of a pioneer cabin? Must be.”
Jack scarcely glanced at the ruin. His voice was low and husky as he asked her, “Don’t you want to know about my life, Lane? My friends?”
He was standing too close. Even with the cold air that separated them, even through the thickness of their coats, she could feel the seductive heat that radiated from him.
“No,” she answered quickly, her voice hoarse with emotion. �
��Why are we standing here? I thought we were going to walk.”
She escaped the situation, or thought she did, by hurrying along the path where it continued into the woods on the other side of the clearing. But when he caught up with her, he paid no attention to her denial. He began telling her about himself and his family, anyway.
“Not so many expeditions these days,” he said. “I’m leaving the fieldwork more and more to the younger crowd. Concentrating instead on the writing and teaching end of it back at Northwestern. Makes me more settled.”
“Jack, I don’t want to hear this.”
“Yes, you do. The family, Lane. They still miss you.”
She thought about the Donovans, that big, noisy, jocular family of his back in Philadelphia, so proudly Irish and so different from her own reserved parents and brother in Indiana. Jack was the maverick of the clan, the only one who had refused to be involved in the family’s construction business.
“I—I miss them, too,” she conceded, remembering how they had overwhelmed her in the beginning. In the end, though, she had found their easy affection irresistible.
“My mother still blames me for our divorce,” Jack confided.
Lane chose not to comment on that. She tried to concentrate on the trail, which had started to drop gradually now in the direction of the shore.
“Want to know something else about my life, Lane?”
“No.”
“I don’t have any special friends, either. Oh, I’ve had relationships since we parted, I don’t deny that. But they never lasted because I was never able to commit to any serious attachment. Why do you suppose that is, Lane? Why do you suppose, after all this time, that neither one of us ever got permanently involved?”
“This is a mistake,” she said, willing herself not to choke on her words. “I should never have agreed to walk with you.”
“I’ll tell you the mistake, Lane. Our divorce. That’s the mistake.”
“I don’t remember you making much of an effort to try to stop it,” she said, unable to keep the sudden sharpness from her voice.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I should have fought it. Instead, I gave you your freedom because that’s what you seemed to need. I got out of your way, and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped paying for it. Anyway, what could I do when I was off in Africa while you were making your decision?”
“That was the trouble, Jack. You were always off on a dig in Africa or China or Canada. Wherever the fossils were. Some wives have other women for rivals. I had dinosaurs.”
“I was too ambitious,” he admitted. “But you could have come with me. At least, when the expeditions were summertime ones. They wouldn’t have interfered with your education then, and that was before you were involved in your own career.”
She laughed wryly. “You’re forgetting how I tried that once, and what a disaster it was.”
The memory of that sweltering six weeks in Montana was still painful to her. The primitive conditions were deplorable, the weather abominable. She had suffered both without complaint. It was the clannish world of paleontology that had defeated her. No matter how she’d tried, she had felt left out, in the way. And after one particularly bad experience, she’d also felt hopelessly useless.
She had learned how the most valuable fossils recovered from sites were encased in special plaster casts to preserve them while they were transported to labs or museums. On that occasion, she had volunteered to mix the batter. Somehow she’d managed to introduce into the simple formula an ingredient potentially harmful to the find. She had deserved her husband’s wrath for that stupid error. Instead, Jack had treated her with the humiliating patience reserved for a slow child.
“You were too hard on yourself,” he insisted now.
Lane knew it was more complicated than that. The summer in Montana had merely been a symptom of a much larger problem. Because even back on campus she had failed to relate to his lofty academic world. She had been too young, probably too naive, and he had treated her as something fragile needing his protection when all she had ever wanted was to be his equal. Differences. Insurmountable differences. They had driven them apart in the end.
His skill in reading her concerns was as amazing as ever. It gave him a decided advantage, because now he was able to offer a persuasive argument against her thoughts. “Lane, we’re no longer those two people you’re worrying about. We’ve changed. You’ve gained maturity and self-confidence. I could see that right away. And I’m no longer career driven like I was. I’m ready for other priorities.”
Lane didn’t trust herself to respond. She quickened her pace until she was moving briskly down the trail. Jack never lost step beside her and never faltered in his appeal.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Lane? The reasons for our divorce might have been valid back then, but those reasons no longer exist.”
She wouldn’t answer him. She couldn’t answer him. Anything she said would only contribute to her mounting confusion. Might even encourage him. Oh, why had she ever agreed to have this discussion?
She was almost running now, rushing down the path in a growing panic. But escape was useless. There was no way she could flee this alarming conversation, no way she could lose Jack, who was persistently close behind her.
She reached a wall of thick, gnarled cedars. There was a narrow opening between them. She ducked her head to avoid the low boughs dusted with snow. When she emerged on the other side, she found herself in the open.
The sudden contrast was startling. The dense, sheltered woods were behind her. In front of her stretched a vastly different scene—the awesome expanse of frozen sea that was Green Bay, blasted by an icy wind that stung her eyes and made them water.
She was standing on the edge of a stony beach, and there was nowhere left to run. Jack had come through the cedars and was close beside her. She refused to look at him. Using her gloved hand as a shield against the blinding glare, she gazed out at the ice.
Through the swirling snow clouds she could make out the dim shape of a breakwater several hundred yards offshore. The massive boulders that formed the low ridge cradled something gray and squat, like a strange beast crouching among the rocks. It took Lane several seconds to realize that it was a fair-sized boat tipped on its side. It was plainly a derelict.
“Look,” she said, pointing toward the rotting vessel. “It must have run aground on the breakwater years ago, and the owners just left it there.”
But she knew Jack was no more interested in the wreck of the sailing craft than he’d been in the ruin of the cabin back in the clearing. There was only one thing on his mind, and he wouldn’t let it go.
Moving around in front of her so that his compact body blocked both her view of the ice and the worst of the wind, he faced her squarely.
“You told me a couple of minutes ago, Lane, that your life is fulfilling. You never said anything about it being happy. Are you happy, Lane? Because I’m not happy. It took me all these years to finally figure out what’s missing. Us.”
Just like back in the clearing, he was standing too close to her. His face was mere inches from hers, square jawed and perpetually tanned from his years in the field. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. They mesmerized her, made it difficult for her to breathe. Damn him for his eternal sexiness!
“I’ve gotten over you, Jack,” she informed him emphatically. “I put you behind me long ago.”
“Did you? Then why didn’t you find someone else after all this time? Why haven’t I found someone else?”
“I don’t know,” she said wildly. “I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “We both care, because the truth is we’ve never stopped loving each other.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I can prove it.”
“No!”
“All it takes is...” He leaned toward her until his nose was almost touching hers. She could taste his warm, clean breath smoking in the cold air between
them.
“Stop it!”
“And maybe...” he whispered.
His hands, stripped of their gloves, reached up to frame her face. The callused pad of one thumb began slowly stroking her jawline.
“Jack, don’t do this,” she pleaded, trembling under his touch.
“What?” he demanded gruffly as his thumb went on performing enticing patterns on her sensitive skin. “Don’t do what?”
What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she just step away from him? What had happened to all her hard-won willpower? She couldn’t let him do this to her. She had to regain her self-control. Not by running away, either. Not this time. Fleeing would only further demonstrate her weakness for him.
“This isn’t going to do you any good, Jack. You’re not going to prove anything.”
It was a challenge she should never have issued. The words had scarcely left her before his mouth captured hers in a long, deep kiss more compelling than any argument.
When his lips touched hers, the years of separation slid away as though they had never existed. She was back in his arms, and they felt absolutely right holding her. As familiar as his hard body pressed longingly against hers. There was no bitter, searching wind from the bay, no frigid winter air. There was only the fantastic incandescence of his mouth joined with hers.
Sensations. Sensations that consumed her. Her lips parting without choice. His tongue penetrating her mouth to perform an intimate dance with her own tongue. His hands sliding up inside her coat to caress the sides of her breasts. His groin pushing wantonly against hers in a rigid evidence of his desire.
The memories came with the sensations. All those raging memories of their long, lustful nights following his returns from China, Canada, Africa. It had been impossible for them to get enough of each other, to satisfy the hungers fired by their separations. But they had tried. Oh, how they had tried.
Lane hated herself for feeling the pangs of loss and unfulfillment when Jack finally released her.
