Washed Away

by Carol Marinelli

  “Snapped back,” Noah admitted, “and then I paid. Just as you were being served, I took a call from a client, Jack. His horse had broken its leg….” She was frowning now, sheer frustration etched on every feature as she tried to remember. “That’s about it, Cheryl.”

  “What about my Jeep?”

  “I didn’t really see it at the station. I only saw you running to it….”

  “So what color was it?” Cheryl asked impatiently. “Come on, Noah. I’m the one who’s supposed to have amnesia here. What color was the Jeep? Surely you can remember that much.”

  “No,” he said helplessly. “I was looking at you at the time.”

  “At me? Why? What was I doing? Was there someone else there? Was I—?”

  “Cheryl,” Noah broke in, and she registered his embarrassment. “I was just looking.” He gave a tiny helpless shrug. “Doing what guys do the world over when a good-looking woman runs past, only I’m the only idiot who ends up having to explain himself.”

  “Oh.” Embarrassed, but pleased, she started to laugh.

  “I didn’t see it till you were on the bridge,” Noah continued gruffly. “It was getting dark by then. It was blue…gray, maybe.” He gave a shrug. “I couldn’t really see. The rain was too heavy, and the ground was really muddy. I just knew someone was in trouble. The bridge started to buckle. I was shouting for you to go back.” He was waiting, watching, hoping for something to spark, for something in those delicious eyes to register, but instead she stared blankly back. “That’s it, Cheryl, that’s all I can tell you for now. Once the lines are back up, once the roads are cleared, we’ll contact Mitch. Either you’re one of his volunteers from California, or at the very least he should remember talking to you. Who knows, maybe by then you’ll remember for yourself. It doesn’t all have to happen tonight.”

  But it did.

  Cheryl knew that.

  Suddenly it was imperative that she remember, imperative that she knew about her past. She needed to find out once and for all if there was someone significant in her life, because sitting so close to Noah, tension sizzling in the air like a fizzing firecracker, Cheryl simply couldn’t bear not to hold him, couldn’t for a second longer deny the sensations he caused in her. But someone bigger than them both had other plans right now. All thoughts of romance flew out of her mind as the room suddenly went quiet, the storm stilling for an ominous moment. Hair rose on the back of her neck as Noah stood up and tossed their mugs into the sink.

  “I’m going to turn the generator off,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked, bemused, wanting to follow but too terrified to move. “You never said anything about that before….”

  “Because I didn’t know then how close the hurricane was going to come. This is going to be bad, Cheryl.” Noah’s face was quilted with tension. The opening door let in the frenzied yelps of the animals, the rattle of cages as they spun in panic, and not even the absence of windows muffled the screeching sound of the wind and popping of tiles as the storm ripped them from the roof. “This is looking worse than even Mitch and I imagined.” Noah had to raise his voice just to be heard. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. We don’t know what we’re going to face tomorrow.”

  And even though they’d had ample warning, even though Noah had told her to expect it, Cheryl still jumped when the warning siren played over the radio and the broadcaster’s voice insisted everyone move to safety and remain calm.

  She sat shivering on the bed, staring at Georgina’s petrified eyes. The horse’s tiny, fat body was trembling. The poor horse was missing her mistress, but her owner had figured somehow this would be for the best. “It’s okay, Georgina,” Cheryl called over to her. “It’ll pass soon. It’s going to be okay.”

  If only she could believe her own words. Nothing could have prepared Cheryl for the full impact of being so close to a hurricane. The powerful wind that had been present for hours reached a crescendo now, infiltrating walls, dimming lightbulbs, rattling cups in the sink. Noah plunged the clinic into darkness and she couldn’t pretend it was okay anymore. A strangled moan of terror escaped her as the world seemed to erupt around them.

  “It’s making landfall.” Noah was back, frantically turning the dials on his portable radio in the darkness. “I can’t get a signal.”

  He gave up trying and joined her on the bed, where she sat cross-legged. Reaching out to her in the darkness, he took her hand, and Cheryl clung to it, wishing she could say something brave, wishing that his hand was enough.

  “It will be okay, Cheryl,” he shouted in the darkness, and she nodded back, holding her breath, biting on her lip to stop tears of sheer terror. “The clinic was built to take this.”

  He almost sounded convincing, had her partially reassured—until his shout was drowned by an earsplitting noise so fierce Cheryl truly believed the walls were caving in. From his actions it seemed Noah was thinking along the same lines. Pushing her down on the bed, he lay over her as if he believed the roof would fall in, and she held on to him for dear life as, for the second time in a few hours, she faced her own mortality head-on.

  “It’s okay.”

  It was all she could hear, over and over. His breath was hot as he spoke into her ear, their bodies so close she could feel his heart hammering in his chest, feel the scratch of his jaw against her cheek, and she gave in then, just closed her eyes and held on, praying for it all to be over.

  “It’s okay,” he said again after the longest time.

  The difference was that she actually believed him, and the tension in their bodies should have been seeping out a notch as they realized they had made it, that the building was still standing, that the storm was actually abating. But as he held her, as they lay wrapped in each other’s arms, the tension merely heightened. His male scent filled her nostrils, and every fiber of her body was on high alert, every pore saturated with the thrum of sexual awareness, which had been growing in intensity since they first met, as overwhelming and as fierce as the storm they had just survived, and possibly just as dangerous.

  “Cheryl?” His voice was thick with lust, and the pressure of his arousal confirmed the intensity of his desire, stirring her own response ever further.

  His weight was deliciously heavy on top of her, a body fine-tuned by the land. Muscles that could never be manufactured in a gym rippled beneath her fingers, and she would have lied just to save herself if it meant she could have him, would have said anything to prolong this moment.

  “There’s no one else, there can’t be….” Cheryl stared back at him. “Not with how you make me feel.”

  She felt him tense, and knew that her assurance wasn’t enough. But these were not ordinary circumstances. Tonight the world was being turned upside down, and them along with it. Smoldering passion ignited as his lips crushed hers; he was almost savage in his desire. His tongue, cool yet hard, tasted her, and his hands sought the softness of her skin. As if by unspoken command, they easily dispensed of their clothing. Noah groaned as he cupped her breasts in his hands, and his lips blazed a trail down her shoulders. Cheryl’s breath caught in her throat as his mouth closed around a swollen nipple, suckling her flesh until she arched into him with a need that was primitive. Urgency overrode tenderness, and when his muscular legs gripped her thighs, she tilted her hips up until his arousal grazed her heated flesh, causing tiny shocks to radiate from this epicenter.

  The foreplay had started hours ago, and now at last she could touch him, feel him, hold him. His heated length hardened beneath the rhythmic stroking of her fingers, he was as close as she was. Yet teasingly she prolonged the delicious torture, gaining as much pleasure from giving as receiving. His moan of approval told her she was doing it right, and ever so slowly she guided him between her thighs. She closed her eyes and begged him to enter, but a heady rush of excitement cascaded through her as he surprised her. He slid down her, his hands gliding over her sweat-sheened skin, his lips trailing across her abdomen and lower st
ill. His tongue searched her most intimate place, and her thighs trembled as he took control, teased her, caressed her. Suddenly everything was shifting, moving out of her control.

  The strength of her orgasm caught her unaware, and she whimpered his name, begged him to stop, but her hands delivered a different message. She thrust her fingers in his hair as a tremor shuddered through her. Before it had completely subsided, he slid inside her, and though she should have been exhausted, she felt revitalized now. She gripped his loins with her thighs and drew him in deeper, elation building as she shuddered toward another climax. He swelled within her, and she could hear him calling her name, crying out to her in the darkness. She called for him, too, holding on tight to the one thing that was good and true and surely right.

  The man who held her in his arms.

  The man who had rescued her all over again.

  “TURNING POINT.” Half asleep, drunk on the heady cocktail of hormones their lovemaking had unleashed, she mumbled the words. As she lay wrapped in his embrace, listening as the storm slowly blew itself into oblivion, Cheryl found it easy to feel secure, easy to believe that the world was following its natural course and there was nothing she or anyone could do other than go with the flow, get on board the amazing ride that life offered and lie back and enjoy.

  “Did you remember something?”

  A tender hand stroked her bare arm; a lazy kiss on the top of her head followed.

  “Just thinking what an apt name for the town I ended up in. Turning Point.” She lingered on the words for a moment, and she could sense him smiling. “Because whatever tomorrow brings, I know life’s never going to be the same again for me.”

  There was the longest pause. Her lashes tickled his chest as she blinked into the darkness.

  “Nor for me,” Noah replied, a beautiful honesty in his simple words. “They say whoever comes to Turning Point and stays long enough to taste the water ends up coming back for good, or something like that.” He shrugged, but not dismissively. “That’s a very loose translation.”

  “From where?” Cheryl asked, genuinely interested, but Noah just laughed.

  “From my grandmother. Her grandparents were the ones who first came out here. It would be well over a hundred years ago now, in the midnineteen hundreds.”

  “Ewa?”

  “That’s right.”

  “From Poland.”

  “Ewa was from Poland, but Alexis, my great-great-grandfather, was Russian.”

  Snuggling closer, Cheryl waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t, she thumped him playfully.

  “Tell me about them!”

  “Tomorrow,” Noah mumbled. “Right now, all I want to do is go to sleep and dream about you.”

  “And I want to talk, find out about each other. Anyway, how can you sleep with this storm going on?”

  “Easily. I’m thinking of all the work I’ll have to do tomorrow when it’s passed, and given we don’t even know your surname, my guess is it would be a pretty one-sided conversation.”

  “Tell me, Noah,” Cheryl grumbled. “Tell me how they came to be here, why they couldn’t leave.”

  So he told her, holding her close, and she closed her eyes as she listened to his low, husky voice, trapped between reality and a fairy tale, his story slow and measured. He halted at times as he attempted to recall a detail, and apologized every now and then for a gap in a story that had been passed down through the generations of his family.

  “My great-great-grandmother was called Ewa. Apparently she didn’t want to come to America. She loved her homeland, but her brother had come out several years before and sent enough money for his two sisters’ passage, and since she was only eighteen and in those days you didn’t disobey your brother, she had no choice.”

  “What about your great-great-grandfather?” Cheryl asked.

  “They hadn’t met yet. He was orphaned when he was fifteen. His synagogue had grouped together and raised the money to send him to America, figuring he deserved a new chance in a new life. His name was Alexis—Alex.”

  “Are you Jewish?” Cheryl asked, not because it mattered, but because she was interested.

  “Part Jewish,” Noah answered. “Part everything, come to think of it. Anyway, they arrived in America, and they set out to find their settling point, traveling along Texas’s coast—”

  “Is that how they met?” Cheryl broke in, smiling into the darkness as she pictured the scene.

  “You’re too impatient. If you want to hear, you have to let me tell you.”

  “But they were in the same group of settlers?”

  “Yes, but they were also kept apart. Ewa stayed with the Polish folk, the same way the Germans, the English and the Czechs all clung to their own, and Alexis was with the Russians. None of the groups trusted the others, they only dealt with the people who spoke their language, shared their background. The only person who kept the peace among the people was the wagon master. He was something of a legend apparently. He spoke enough of everyone’s language to keep the peace, to give directions to forge ahead.”

  “So how did Ewa and Alexis get close, then? How did they start talking?”

  “We’ll never know for sure. Even they didn’t know for sure! Apparently Alexis insisted that it was Ewa who first came over, offered him some cake, some bread or something, while Ewa remained adamant that one night Alexis walked past their campfire, that he smiled at her and called her over. But whatever story is the true version, I guess at the end of the day…”

  “They just knew?” She felt like a child listening to a fairy tale cuddled up, safe and sound, knowing the ending must surely be happy.

  “They knew,” Noah responded, “but it could never be. Ewa’s sister sensed something was going on and forbade her to talk with him, while Alexis was told that a bride had been found for him, and as soon as they reached their destination he was to be married. The elders told them to stay apart, to stop talking, but…”

  “They couldn’t?”

  This time he didn’t chide her for her interruption, just nodded into the darkness.

  “The wagon train plowed on.” Noah’s voice lulled her, even though he was talking over the wind. “And like tonight, a fierce storm was about to hit. The wagon master knew what to do. He had seen this type of storm before, so he turned the convoy inland to look for shelter. The storms hit off the coast here. He knew that waves would follow, and if they stayed on the coast they’d be in big trouble. So he picked up speed, leading them to shelter, but his horse lost his footing in the mud, and rolled over, trampling his master….”

  “He died?” Suddenly Cheryl didn’t like this story so much; it hit her then that Noah was talking about real people, that this wasn’t some fairy tale, but a true story. That he was talking about his past, the brave people who had braved unknown territory in the hope of forging a better life for themselves and their families.

  “Instantly,” Noah said softly, “and everyone in the convoy had respected him, everyone had liked him, and so everyone wanted to do the right thing by him—to bury him in a way that seemed fitting. So for the first time, they pulled together, different cultures merging at his graveside, all the different religious rituals somehow incorporated, everyone respecting each other’s grief.

  “They never moved on,” Noah finished. “Then and there they chose to work together to build a better life, to embrace one another. They realized that even though they were different, deep down they all wanted the same thing. They didn’t just turn away from the storm that day, they were forced to turn to each other.”

  “What about Alexis and Ewa?” Cheryl asked. “Was the relationship allowed to continue?”

  “Not quite.”

  She felt his grimace and could almost see his smile as he gripped her tighter.

  “It wasn’t that much of a merger, but the elders finally had to admit defeat when baby Noah Arkin was born precisely seven months later.”

  “Your namesake,” Cheryl whispered, and No
ah nodded.

  “Despite fierce insistence from both sets of families that little Noah was premature, a pinker, chubbier, more bonny babe was never seen.”

  “So it wasn’t quite innocent smiles over the campfire?”

  “Apparently not.” His voice was growing lazy now, that heady mix of lust and satisfaction taking over. “Try and get some more sleep.” He kissed the top of her head and held her just a little bit tighter. “Everything will seem better in…”

  Only as his body relaxed beneath her touch did Cheryl realize he had fallen asleep midsentence. As she felt his tension slip away, she began to understand all that he had been through, and marveled at his strength. Already exhausted, he had dived into a river, carried her home and nursed her. Wriggling free, she pulled the blanket tighter over his shoulders and tucked it in around him, staring in the darkness as his features slowly came into focus. The long straight nose. The hollows of his cheeks. That gorgeous face relaxed now in sleep.

  Staring over at her bedmate, Cheryl smiled into the darkness, listening to a wind that seemed to sing to her now, picturing in her mind the people who had come before.

  CHAPTER NINE

  PERFECT.

  It was the only word that came close to describing the feeling of waking in his arms, the warmth of his body against hers. As shards of dawn came in from the skylight her eyes drifted open, and she smiled at Georgina, then started to laugh as the little horse turned her haughty, disapproving face away.

  “What’s so funny?” Noah was stretching like a lion beside her, his hand not so lazy now as he gently kneaded her soft buttocks, his arousal stirring along the shivering length of her inner thigh.

  “I don’t think Georgina approves,” she told him.

  “Then tell her to look away or it’s back to the cage.”

  “She’s really cute.” Cheryl stared at the strange little animal. “I can easily see how her mistress spoils her.”

  “That doesn’t come close to describing it,” Noah murmured, still half asleep. “I have it on excellent authority that someone looked through the living room window once and saw Georgina around the coffee table with Mary, eating biscuits and jam for afternoon tea.”