If You Loved Me

by Vanessa Grant

  Gray was in the bathroom, draining her tub.

  She hated the thought of him cleaning the tub behind her, picking up her dirty clothes from the floor. She gritted her teeth and yanked the clinging panties over her damp buttocks. Too late to do anything about it now. Being a man, he'd probably just kick her clothes into a corner if they were in his way.

  Getting dressed was the first priority. She fastened her bra, then pulled on a pair of maroon slacks and an off-white silk blouse from her suitcase.

  She frowned at herself in the mirror. The turban around her head made it plain she'd just stepped out of the bath. She unwound the towel and finger-combed her damp hair. The mirror showed the silk of her blouse clinging to her breasts as she lifted her arms.

  If he saw her like that, he might think she'd dressed to issue an invitation.

  She pulled a colorful quilted vest out of the suitcase, Chris's Christmas present to her last year. It was different from the plain blazers and slacks she normally wore, but she liked it, although she thought it made her look a bit bohemian.

  It covered her breasts quite effectively.

  She hung both towels over the back of a chair, then opened her makeup bag and applied lipstick—no perfume and no other makeup. She wasn't issuing any invitations or doing anything he might interpret as an invitation. That would be stupid after last night.

  Her face flared as she remembered the storm that had swept over her in his arms. She'd ached to feel Gray buried deep inside her. Nothing else had mattered, nothing at all. It had been the situation, of course—the wilderness, the wind howling in the trees, Chris somewhere out there in danger, and Gray, the only solid thing in the world to cling to.

  So she'd gone a little mad. People did act in bizarre ways in extreme situations. When the emergency was over, they returned to normal, as if the aberration had never happened.

  Last night she'd wanted him so badly. At first his touch had felt like home, soothing her anxiety over Chris. Then, suddenly, it had changed, and she'd lost herself in a deep hungry world where nothing mattered but Gray's arms around her, and her body crying to be possessed.

  Then she'd realized there could be a child, and the knowledge evoked a powerful image of Gray's child suckling at her breast, Gray's strong arms about them both. For a moment, in madness, she'd welcomed the primitive craving that welled up inside her body to mate and procreate, to feel his seed growing within her.

  It was insanity—too much adrenaline in her system, her brain producing endorphins in response to crisis. It was good he'd reacted the way he had when she told him, good he'd turned away and stopped them from going over that edge. She should thank him for that.

  Thank you, Gray, for not taking advantage when I tried to climb all over you last night when I was mad enough to think everything would be solved if I could carry your child. Thank you for not making love to me.

  Well, that was a speech she'd never make. She'd thank him for finding Chris, for promising to check on her son tonight and keep an eye on the boys' journey to Prince Rupert. As for their passion in the midst of the storm in a wilderness inlet—best to leave that memory to die a natural death.

  She combed her hair and then packed everything away in her suitcase. Her medical kit was still in the plane. She'd brought nothing else, so she was ready to go.

  She picked up the suitcase and opened the bedroom door.

  In the same instant, the bathroom door opened and Gray stepped out, naked—or almost naked.

  She swallowed her gasp and stared at his face. His chest was naked. Further down she didn't know, wouldn't look.

  She took one step back.

  "Emma..."

  "I have to go." She focused her gaze on a spot over his shoulder. The doorjamb was painted a dusty rose, contrasting with the deeper shades of the wallpaper. "Can you fly me home now? I mean, to Prince Rupert."

  He wore a towel slung over one shoulder. Above the towel, his damp hair curled over his ears. She told herself if he were naked, he'd have the towel wrapped around his hips. She took a careful breath and let her gaze dodge downward to his naked chest and midriff to the jeans below, zipped and fastened at the waist. His feet were bare. She swallowed hard.

  "The first time I met you, you were in a hurry to get home. You were afraid of your father then. What's the rush today?"

  She stared at the sprinkling of hairs on his chest. Of course she had to go. There were reasons, dozens of reasons. All she needed was one, and a voice.

  "Alex."

  He lifted the end of the towel and blotted a bead of water that had escaped his hair. "The man you're going to marry."

  "Yes," she agreed. "He'll be worried," she added, and realized that it was true. Alex would be worried. She should have phoned him from the cell phone when she was in the air. Gray said her phone would work in the air over Stephens Island, but she'd forgotten to call. She hadn't tried to call Alex even once during the long air search for Chris.

  Standing here staring at Gray's naked chest, it seemed unforgivable, though not as bad as the fact she wanted to reach out and touch the man in front of her.

  She'd never seen Alex with his shirt off. Maybe—

  Lies. Damn it, she was telling herself lies.

  When she saw Alex she would have to tell him the truth. If she was going to marry him, it couldn't be with Gray as a ghost between them.

  "Chris isn't your child." She didn't know where the words came from, but recognized them as a barrier between Gray's probing eyes and her pounding heart.

  "I knew that as soon as I saw him."

  "He looks like Paul."

  "Yes." Gray shifted his stance, and for a moment she thought he was going to step closer. She braced herself then slowly let her breath go when she realized he'd actually moved away from her.

  "Chris is a good kid, Emma. He was determined to finish that trip even after a week trying to carve a paddle out of a tree."

  "I wanted him to feel... not trapped by my worrying."

  "You did a good job."

  She felt off balance. Gray was not quite close enough to touch, yet too close.

  "I wouldn't have married Paul if the baby was yours."

  His eyes flared. "How could you be sure it wasn't mine? When we had sex—"

  Her bitter laugh stopped his words. "Have sex. You always said it like that. Never love."

  "You said love and made it into a fairy tale. When you realized you were pregnant, how could you be sure the baby wasn't mine?"

  "I was on the pill. I went to the doctor that spring, when we started seeing each other again."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" He held a hand up to stop the words on her open lips. "Why did you marry Paul?"

  She made a helpless gesture. "Because you didn't love me. I tried to pretend you did. All the time we were going together I pretended eventually you would realize you loved me." She pushed the old dreams away with another restless motion. "When you asked me to come with you, I realized you didn't love me—you couldn't. If you'd loved me, you wouldn't have asked me to forget everything I cared about, to give up my dream of being a doctor and follow you to the ends of the earth."

  "You'd have come if I loved you, but if I loved you, I wouldn't ask?"

  She smiled sadly. "Exactly."

  "And what has any of that to do with marrying Paul?"

  She wanted to touch his forehead, to smooth the crease from between his eyes.

  "Does it matter now?"

  "I don't know."

  "I guess I wanted someone to love me. You didn't—you didn't even want me to come with you, not really. You'd no sooner asked me than you were telling me all the reasons I would never make it in your wilderness world."

  Gray pulled the towel off his shoulder and Emma gasped, "I have to leave."

  "Don't go."

  She forced a smile. "I'd have given anything to hear you say that when I was eighteen. It's different now. We're different people."

  She found herself pressing against th
e wall without knowing how she'd gotten there. "You know how different we are, Gray. You understood that from the beginning. I think you were right about me. I wanted everything, all the bits of life I'd missed by spending so much time in the hospital and on crutches. We never would have made it together, and now I need to go home. I need my life back."

  "I want you, Emma."

  His voice rumbled through her whole body, from her shoulders through her breasts, over her belly to her thighs, down into the secret center of her hunger.

  "I think you want me, too."

  Her lids went heavy. Her lips felt so full she needed to part them. Recklessness surged inside, words came, but she wasn't sure what they were. Her fingers curled in on themselves with the force of her need to reach for him.

  "I don't know you, Gray. I don't know who you are. Maybe I've never known." Her words made a kind of sense to her, enough to allow her to turn away from him, to step into her room and pick up the suitcase.

  Chapter 9

  Her room? What kind of insanity was that? It was only a place she'd slept, a spare room in Gray's house. He'd had a wife, probably other women. Right now he wanted her, and she had to get out of here while her life still made sense. Did she want the tears back, the confusion, the yearning for something she could never have?

  Outside the bedroom, she heard Gray's bare feet going down the stairs. He might want her, but when she came back out of the bedroom with her suitcase, he'd be fast enough to take her to the plane. Their relationship had always been a push-pull affair. Whenever they came close to sharing intimacy, Gray pulled back.

  Or she did. She was the one who'd come running into this bedroom to hide when he said he wanted her. It was self-preservation. Whatever she did, she had to keep herself together until she got away from Gray. If she didn't, she could melt in a moment, just as she had last night in Kxngeal Inlet.

  When she got home and talked to Alex, her real life would come back into focus. She'd remember how natural it had felt to say yes when Alex asked her to marry him, the quiet contentment that she wouldn't be living alone, that she'd have a friend in her home. Of course, they would be lovers, too, she and Alex. It wouldn't be this storm she felt inside when she thought of Gray, but she didn't want that. It was too much.

  Her feet sounded loud going down the hardwood stairs, the noise distorted and unreal. She needed a glass of water, something to fight this dizziness. She certainly wasn't going to let herself faint in Gray MacKenzie's house!

  She put her suitcase beside the front door.

  Where was Gray? Where had he gone?

  When she was a girl, she'd thought of Gray with alternate desperation and excitement, but these last two days she'd learned another Gray—a man she could sit beside for hours in an airplane, a man who could make her feel calm and confident even when she was searching for her lost son, a man who touched her in the night with the storm blowing above.

  She stared at the sofa bracketed by two overstuffed easy chairs. What would it be like to sit there on a Sunday afternoon, lazing a rainy day away with a book? On a day like that, Gray might slip out with his camera to catch a deer, head turned and eyes alert in the misty rain. When the film was gone, he would come home.

  She would look up when she heard him call out her name. She would...

  Damn! She was too mature to become tangled in old dreams. She had patients and a man she'd promised to marry waiting for her back in Seattle.

  Had he gone out to the plane? She hadn't heard the front door, but maybe he'd opened it softly, slipping outside to wait for her.

  She'd be a fool to walk into the arms of a man who'd never loved her. He gave love to the kids he helped in that camp around the corner, to his dog, to the wife he'd told her he once had, but wouldn't talk about. Why had he loved another woman enough to marry her, while Emma had always yearned—

  Get over it!

  Seattle. She needed to focus on her own home. She would walk through her front door and find the answering machine blinking because her mother would have called Sunday, and there would be at least one message from Alex, wanting news of Chris. Marmalade would wind around her ankles and—

  No, Marmalade was at the kennels.

  Okay, so she'd pick the cat up on her way home. The point was, she'd be home where she wanted to be. Where she was comfortable.

  It took less than half an hour to fly to Prince Rupert. That was the first step.

  This was stupid, really stupid. She was acting like the woman in that movie she'd seen with Alex two weeks ago, a woman who ruined her life because she couldn't let go of the past.

  Next time she saw Gray's name, it would be on the cover of one of his books. She had a picture of his life now. She knew a little about his world. When she turned the pages of his books, she would recognize some of the places. She would know what it was like to come down out of the sky and glide over a pod of killer whales with Gray at her side. She would remember hearing a wolf howl in the dark and knowing she was safe with Gray close by her, the breathless memory of a thin tent all around and Gray only a touch away, of standing in the moonlight in his arms, Gray beginning to make love to her, the wilds all around.

  An album of memories.

  For years a part of her had regretted not being rash enough to go with him past the end of her world. Now she would have a new regret. She'd only ever had a few moments of his loving. She'd been empty for him all the years between, and last night she had been so close to loving with him, until the moment she shoved the possibility of a pregnancy between them.

  They'd been right to stop last night, but if she walked away now, she would always regret not taking that chance to discover what it would be like with him...

  She found him in the darkroom.

  The door stood open, revealing Gray sorting a pile of prints on the counter. He'd put on a checked shirt that looked as if it would be soft to her touch and he wore casual shoes over his bare feet.

  Her breath caught as if she were a panicked child. Fear pulsed in her veins as it had when she was wheeled into the operating room at the age of eleven, old enough to know people could die on operating tables.

  Today, the danger was to her mind and her heart, not her body. If she left now, it would be cowardice.

  She cleared her throat. "You asked me to stay."

  He put the prints down on the counter. She wished he would smile, but his mouth was sober, his lips straight. He stared at her until she shuddered and the world was nothing but the man watching and her own pulse beating.

  "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

  She was back in that room, back in his arms, Gray staring down at her. She could feel him trembling from their loving, hear the echo of her own cry when the sudden pain flashed through her and away. She'd stared into his eyes, their bodies still touching intimately, the damp flush of passion everywhere, and knew she belonged to him.

  As if he could read her thoughts, he said, "All you need to do is dash outside and climb into that airplane."

  He inclined his head slightly as if daring her, but she could still feel his touch warm and insistent on her flesh, her dreams whirling out of control. With his eyes on her and her veins pulsing with memories and fantasies, she knew the danger. She could lose herself.

  It could happen again. The void of the weeks afterward—Gray gone, his apartment empty, the number she dialed answered by a mechanical message—no longer in service. Nowhere. Nothing. She had been so far from reason in the pain of loss. She might have jumped off a bridge or stumbled in front of a speeding car or any desperate insanity.

  She'd married Paul instead and tried to be a good wife, to love him as well as she could, to push down that part of herself that yearned for Gray.

  She pressed her hand against the tightness in her chest. "It would be foolish for me to stay."

  The line of his jaw seemed to harden. "And foolish for me to ask you."

  "So I should go."

  "No, don't go. Not yet."

>   Last night's reason for drawing back was gone now. In the house he must have what he needed to protect them from all the technical risks of intimacy, but he couldn't protect her from her own heart, from tomorrow and memories.

  She had run once before—had run standing still and saying nothing while he told her the cost of being with him and her world fell apart, trying to stay safe and losing the only man she'd ever loved. She'd let him push her out the door.

  She was older now, more mature. Surely she could do this.

  "Don't make any promises," she said.

  "No," he agreed, and she knew if she stayed now, it would hurt terribly later and there would be no way to ease the pain.

  They weren't reckless youths now. They were adults who could become lovers if they chose, but she had no way of knowing what he would want afterward... or what she would want.

  He'd always denied loving her, but he'd called her his friend more than once. Friends could see each other, couldn't they? Didn't everyone who lived in the north come to Seattle? Gray had mentioned a trip to New York last year to see his publisher and agent. He must have flown through SeaTac, the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

  After today, when he was in town he might call her. She would put him on her Christmas list, remember his birthday with something in the mail, ask him to call her. Surely there was some casual way she could suggest it before he dropped her off in Prince Rupert.

  She could come up here next summer on a wilderness excursion. Didn't he sometimes personally guide those excursions from the camp? He'd had all sorts of groups up here, students and movie stars and overworked accountants. A doctor of pediatric orthopedics could surely come for ten days away from her busy practice.

  It wouldn't work, not really. She had no future with Graham MacKenzie; he'd told her so often enough. How could she find happiness with a man whose distrust ran so deep he could believe she would hide his own child from him?

  If she let herself love him here, now, afterwards she would be truly alone.