Return to Tomorrow

by Marisa Carroll

  Brett had made love to her time and again through the night. He’d been gentle and persistent and rough and cajoling by turns. He had teased and tantalized and filled her with heat and longing until the ice inside her melted away and she found herself a woman once again.

  He had made love to her and she had loved him in return, would always love him. Oh, God, what was she going to do?

  Rachel dropped her head onto her knees. Why now? Why had she allowed him to show her that the passion and desire inside her weren’t dead but only dormant and capable of being brought to life once more? He had taught her to love again. Her joy was in their love and in their sharing; her sorrow was in knowing neither could last. He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. If she admitted she loved him and something happened to him, she would lose her soul.

  She started to push aside the woven cotton blanket that covered them both, only to have Brett’s fingers close strongly about her wrist.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good morning.” She looked at him because she couldn’t stop herself. He was wide awake, completely alert, harder and more dangerous-looking than ever with two days’ growth of dark blond hair on his chin.

  Dangerous. Rachel shivered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying.” He stood up, completely unconcerned by his nakedness, and pushed aside the mosquito netting. Rachel clasped her hands around her knees and stayed where she was. He pulled on his pants and yanked the belt through the buckle. He stood watching her for a long moment. “Do you regret making love to me last night, Rachel?” he asked bluntly.

  It wouldn’t do her any good to lie. He could see the answer in her face. “Yes.”

  “Do you want to tell me why?”

  Rachel felt him drawing away and knew she’d hurt him. She wished she wasn’t naked under the blanket. She wished she could tell him to come back to bed, to love her again, to keep on loving her until the world went away and left them alone together for the rest of time.

  “I regret making love to you because it makes it that much harder to leave you.”

  He went very still for a moment, then snuffed the flame of the guttering candle between his fingers. He came back to the bed and sat down at her feet. “Why do you have to leave?”

  “I have to go,” she repeated stubbornly. “I’m falling in love with you.” The words caught in her throat. She had to force them past the tears that threatened to break free. “I can’t afford to love you. If I do, I’ll lose myself again. I won’t have the strength to find my way back.” She leaned forward, drew her hand along the strong column of his neck, let her fingers linger for a moment on the slow, steady beat of the pulse in the hollow of his throat. “I have to leave here today, now.” She leaned back, away from him. But she ached to have him hold her close again. She wanted him to touch her, love her, make her feel whole.

  “If that’s what you want.” He didn’t beg her to stay. He wouldn’t. He had promised her never to make her do anything against her will.

  “It’s not what I want. It’s what I have to do.” Rachel looked at him in the pale dawn light inside the monk’s cell. She tried to read his thoughts in the twilight blue of his eyes and saw only herself reflected in miniature in their depths. “Can’t you feel it?” she asked, her voice low and sad, almost overpowered by the awakening jungle outside. “It’s in the air around us. I sense it whenever you’re near and it frightens me.”

  “What? What frightens you, Rachel?” He took her cold, shaking hands in his, warming them with his body heat and with his strength.

  “Danger,” she said, looking away into the future, into the unknown. “Danger and death.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “HAVE YOU AND SIMON been arguing again?” Rachel asked. She’d been sitting quietly in the sun on the step of her hut, half daydreaming, half watching Micah trim his beard.

  “It wasn’t an argument. It was a discussion.” He finished his beard, surveyed himself in a small hand mirror and started to work on his thick head of dark hair.

  “I heard your discussion all the way down the street.” Rachel frowned at the memory and at the mess Micah was making of his haircut. “Here, let me do that.” She took the scissors from his hand and started to trim the hair at the nape of his neck. “Sit still.” She flicked the scissors a fraction of an inch closer to his earlobe than necessary. He stopped fidgeting and sat still as a stone on the hard wooden chair he’d appropriated from the main room of the hut. “Can’t I leave you two alone for a couple of hours without a fight breaking out?”

  Finding her brothers firmly entrenched in her small hut when she returned to the camp had produced an emotion blended of almost equal parts of happiness and dismay.

  “I told you it wasn’t a fight.”

  “Did you win or lose?” Rachel persisted. Micah didn’t flinch again, although the scissors continued to hover very close to his ear.

  “Actually, I won. That’s why we’re talking. Simon’s idea was to chloroform you and keep you drugged until our plane landed back in Chicago.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Rachel couldn’t help laughing at the exaggerated menace in Micah’s cloak-and-dagger tone of voice. It was wonderful to hear him tease her as he’d done when they were younger, even about so touchy a subject as her staying in Thailand. “I don’t want to go home,” she reminded him for the hundredth time.

  Somewhere nearby a cock crowed, although it was almost noon. Rachel automatically checked her watch. Hospital rounds with Dr. Reynard had taken longer than she expected, but she was glad to be back at work. Around them, women were lighting charcoal cook fires to boil rice and vegetables for the noon meal. She was hungry, too. Her stomach growled.

  “We think it would be a good idea for you to come home with us.”

  Rachel wasn’t sure how much of her heavily edited description of the events of the past two weeks her brothers had believed. She hadn’t kept anything back except for their visit to Khen Sa’s camp, because she was afraid they might ask her if she could get back there—and she thought, just possibly, that she could. And she had told them nothing of her involvement with Brett. It was her memory, alone, not one to share. She had also warned Ahnle not to discuss that part of their adventure with anyone, and Ahnle seemed happy to comply, probably Rachel suspected because Ahnle had fallen in love with Billy Todd. As Rachel had fallen in love with Brett, although she wished she could say it wasn’t true. She didn’t see much hope of happiness ahead for either of them.

  “No,” she said firmly, brandishing the shears. “I won’t run out on Father Dolph again. And I can’t get the necessary papers for Ahnle to accompany me until at least the first of the year.”

  “Mom and Dad are going to be disappointed if you aren’t home for the holidays.”

  “I stayed home for the holidays last year,” she reminded him.

  “Father Dolph will look after Ahnle. You can be all settled back in the States by the time the visas for her and the baby come through.”

  “Micah,” Rachel said warningly. “Don’t push it. I know how much I owe the two of you. I probably won’t ever be able to come up with enough money to reimburse Simon for the pearls.” Her brothers had steadfastly refused to disclose the value of the pearl necklace that had bought her and Micah’s freedom from the Vietnamese. She’d given up trying to find out—for the time being.

  “Forget the pearls. Having you back was worth every cent, you know that.”

  She squeezed his shoulder. “I know that.” A group of young boys in the saffron-colored robes of Buddhist monks strolled by, alms bowls held in front of them as they begged for rice for their noonday meal. Devout Buddhists came to the front doors of their small huts to put balls of sticky rice, vegetables and even bits of meat in the bowls. They were both silent a moment, watching the ritual that underlined how far from home they were, yet made them both aware of how beautiful and unique this country
was.

  “If you’d let me work out a payment…”

  “Rachel,” Micah growled.

  “Maybe I could forget how much the pearls were worth if you both didn’t have families to support and educate.” For many months she hadn’t even been aware that Micah’s Michigan home had been mortgaged to pay Simon his share of the expense of the pearl necklace.

  Simon had balked, refused to take the money, but Micah was equally insistent that he did. They had argued for days. In the end Micah won, by the simple expedient of depositing the money into an account in his brother’s name.

  It made her more determined than ever to find a way to pay them back. “I should have done a book or sold the movie rights….” She stopped talking, knowing she could never go on living her carefully orchestrated lies if reporters or scriptwriters began probing into the darkness beneath the surface of her life.

  Micah lifted his hand and circled the wrist holding the scissors. He swiveled around on the chair seat to face her.

  “Is that why you’re here? Is this some kind of penance?”

  “Of course not.” She spoke too quickly and he knew it.

  Micah nodded, his blue-gray eyes, so like her own, searching for the emotions beneath her carefully shielded gaze. “I know what you’re doing here is important to you, but it’s not the only reason you’re not ready to go home, is it?” He lifted the hand still holding the mirror to stop her automatic protest. “What’s keeping you here is your own business, unless it has something to do with Tiger Jackson.”

  “Don’t press your luck or I’ll be arguing with you, just like I’ve been arguing with Simon for the past three days.” When she thought about it rationally, it amused her to see her two dominating and aggressive brothers so thrown off balance by her refusal to look at things their way. They weren’t used to her asserting herself quite so forcefully. “Bullheaded” was the word Simon had used as he stomped out of the hut just before she left for her hospital duties that morning.

  “Tiger was always quite the ladies’ man,” Micah continued, ignoring her warning. “I remember one time when we were on R&R in Vientiane when he had three…” He seemed to remember he was talking to his sister. “Never mind….”

  “Go on,” Rachel laughed, enjoying the red stain of embarrassment that crept above the collar of his shirt. She was pleased to hear Micah talk about the war, no matter how disreputable the story. For so long he’d suppressed his memories of the three tours of duty he’d spent with the Ravens in Laos.

  “I need to talk to Tiger, Rachel. Take me to him.” He looked down at her wrist, still circled by his own strong fingers.

  “No.” He’d changed the subject so suddenly she was caught off guard. She couldn’t meet his eyes, but she felt him looking at her. “I…I don’t think I could find my way to his camp. I…I told you that when his men brought us back.”

  “Liar.” He said it gently and released her hand.

  “Micah…” She was trembling and he’d felt it.

  “Tiger always did inspire loyalty.”

  “I’m not involved with Tiger, Micah.”

  “I think you are. You hide your thoughts pretty well but I think you’re in love with him. After all,” he said, smiling as he thought of his wife and son back home, “I know the signs.”

  Rachel remained silent. Anything she said would only be more lies. She couldn’t make peace with her own feelings; how could she explain them to another? She loved a man she ought to despise. She’d made love with that man and wanted to go on doing so for the rest of her life.

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said at last.

  “It’s the company Simon’s been keeping since we got here that’s got you scared, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “They’re DEA, aren’t they?” The Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States government kept a low profile, but they were active in Thailand, all the same. And Simon had managed to get himself attached to the district office in Chiang Mai on a temporary basis. Rachel felt as if she had to guard every word she said to him. She hated the awkward position she was placed in by her divided loyalties.

  “They’re not hard to spot when they show up in a place like this,” Micah agreed. “Our little brother is doing what he thinks is right.”

  “Imagine, Baby Simon, the authority figure in our lives.” She shook her head, laughing softly. Micah chuckled, too. She felt so torn. She could confide in Micah, she knew. He had trusted Brett Jackson with his life countless times in the past. He still trusted his friend, and he would go on believing in him until he had undeniable proof of his guilt. She couldn’t put him in the position of having to lie to Simon, as she was doing.

  She was protecting Brett for reasons she scarcely understood herself. She hated what Brett was doing out there in the jungle. She hated the men he dealt with, Khen Sa and his henchmen and how many others just like them? Brett was involved in criminal activities, and she couldn’t condone his actions for a moment. Yet she would go on protecting him as long as possible. It made no sense. Unless she admitted she was in love, as Micah contended. Her heart knew the truth, but saying the words out loud was impossible.

  Micah stood up, towering over her. He pulled the towel off his shoulders, gave it a shake and draped it over the back of the chair. “I’ll bet Brett Jackson is doing what he thinks is right, too.”

  Rachel looked into his eyes, narrowing her own against the brightness of the noonday sun. “You knew him a long time ago. It’s possible he’s a different man…it’s possible that life has…changed him into someone you couldn’t possibly know or trust.” Someone living a lie, as she was herself.

  “Not here,” he said, touching the second button of her blouse with the tip of his finger. “Nothing could change in his heart, where it counts. You don’t change there, no matter what happens to you in life.”

  “I wish I could believe that.” For the sake of her own sins, as well as for Brett. “I wish I could.”

  “You do.” Micah handed her the small mirror. He smiled, looking pleased with the result of the conversation and so sure of himself. He ran his hands over his beard and through his neatly trimmed hair. “Got another mirror so I can see the back?”

  “Only the one over the sink.” Did she believe what he had said about Brett? About herself? She wasn’t sure she dared, but later, when she was alone, she would think about Micah’s words some more. She gathered up the towel as Micah picked up the chair to return it to the hut. “What do you want for lunch? Rice? Or rice?” she asked with a smile of her own, a little thin and quavery around the edges, perhaps, but a smile nonetheless.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Micah said, smiling back at her. “Let’s have rice, for a change.”

  BILLY TODD STOOD BEYOND the small circle of light that spilled from the single window and door of Rachel’s hut, a darker figure in the shadows that surrounded him. The woven mats that served as protection against the cool winter nights had been pushed back from the screened openings and he could see the two women moving around inside, talking, laughing softly as they worked.

  Rachel’s brothers were nowhere to be seen. He’d made certain of that before he ventured this far into the camp. He had already ascertained that they were playing poker with Father Dolph and Dr. Reynard in the priest’s quarters at the far end of the dusty, narrow street. The game probably wouldn’t break up before midnight. He intended to be long gone by then, back on the road to Chiang Mai, where he planned to spend the night.

  As he watched Ahnle through the window, she knelt to place her son in a sleeping basket on the floor. He could hear her singing to the baby, a haunting, melancholy tune that was a Hlông lullaby. Her hair was uncovered, twisted high on her head in an intricate knot. It caught the light from the naked overhead bulb in its ebony depths and he remembered the feel of it beneath his hands, the softness of her body pressed close to his, the taste of her mouth, sweet and shy, the first time he kissed her in the temple courtyard.

  His
body tightened and hardened and he wanted her in his arms again. He wanted her in his bed so that he could know every inch of her, and beyond that, he wanted to keep her with him forever. He’d never considered having a woman of his own, a family of his own, not for twenty years. He wanted them now with an intensity that sometimes took his breath away.

  But if he didn’t talk Rachel Phillips into coming back to the temple with him so that Brett could find out what, if anything, she’d told her bloodhound of a brother, they were all going to be deader than a mackerel inside of ten days.

  Rachel sat down at a small table along the far wall of the hut’s main room and began to write a letter, or work on a report, or something. Ahnle stood up and walked out of his line of sight. Billy waited, his eyes fastened on the hut, the rest of his senses sorting through the myriad of sounds and scents that swirled around him as the camp settled down for the night. A few moments later, Ahnle appeared in the doorway, carrying a small basin. She opened the screen and stepped outside to empty the water carefully over a small plot of plants growing outside the door.

  She was wearing a phassin, a Thai-style sarong, in some dark color, that she probably slept in. Her feet were bare and she’d taken the pins from her hair. It hung straight and free, almost to her waist.

  “Ahnle.” He stepped out of the shadows where he’d been standing. He didn’t raise his voice because he didn’t want Rachel to hear. And he certainly didn’t want to disturb the dogs and chickens and people sleeping in the huts around them.

  “Who’s there?” she asked in Thai. She moved out of the square of light from the doorway. For a heartbeat he lost her in the darkness, then found her again, moving gracefully forward, her face a pale oval in the fading moonlight.

  “It’s Billy, Ahnle.” He came to the edge of the dusty street and a moment later she was in his arms. He couldn’t stop himself. He pulled her close, wrapped her in his arms and savored the scent and shape and feel of her against him. When he held her like this, nothing else mattered, not the difference in their ages, their cultures, their race. He was in love with a girl young enough to be his daughter and he didn’t give a damn who knew about it.