CHAPTER FOUR
Gen blinked in confusion. “Save me? From what?”
Again that distracted expression, as if he was searching somewhere inside himself. He spoke with a thrumming of urgency that was transmitted right through his hands. “I... I don’t know. Damn it, I don’t know. I just have this... feeling.”
Well, Gen knew all about feelings. She also knew that Rafe was beginning to look really pale again, and that worried her more than his assertion.
“Rafe, it’s okay. You’re here now. You’ll probably remember after a little sleep.”
“But, Gen...”
She pulled a smile out of somewhere. “Let me put it to you this way. If I do need help, you’re not going to be in any shape to provide it until you’ve had a little rest. Now, how about some sleep, and we’ll worry about it in the morning? Believe me, Rafe, nothing much can happen until the weather clears.”
He didn’t look happy. “Do you have any ideas?” he asked. “Any reason you could be in danger?”
Gently she shook her head. “None,” she said simply. “I’m not a spy or a member of the Mafia. I’m just a mother with a little time off before I have to get back to work.”
That seemed to provoke a new concern. “A mother?”
Gen found herself frowning at his reaction. “Yes. I have a five-year-old daughter named Annie. She’s in Oregon, visiting her grandmother.”
“Annie... Annie...” He ended up shaking his head. “God, I wish I knew why that meant something.”
This time it was Gen who reacted. “She’s not in trouble, is she?”
Rafe shook his head. “No. No, it’s not that.” Pulling a hand away, he rubbed at his eyes, and Gen saw that his hand was still shaking. “God, I wish I knew. I wish I could remember something!”
Gen tried yet again. “You remember me. The rest will come.”
He pulled his hand away and challenged her. “You’re sure?”
And Gen, not knowing what else to do, smiled. “Of course. It works that way in the movies all the time.”
She’d thought she’d get acquiescence out of him. Instead, she got another frown.
“The what?”
Which brought her back to a dead stop. He wasn’t being funny. “The movies,” she said deliberately.
He just shrugged.
Gen shrugged back, deciding that she really didn’t want to deal with that right now, either. Maybe it would all make more sense in the daylight.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she offered. “Now, let’s get to bed.”
And for the first time since he’d opened his eyes, Rafe shot her a real smile. A four-point dazzler that took the stuffing right out of her knees and set up a weird harmonic of reactions in her. Tinglings and warnings and yearnings racing along nerve pathways that had never spoken before.
At least, not that she could remember.
“Alone?” he asked, his voice laced with every innuendo a man had used since crawling up from the slime.
Gen wanted to giggle. She wanted to preen and flutter and melt. Gen, who drove a Volvo station wagon and bought her business suits from Anne Klein. Which just proved how far removed from reality this little episode had taken her.
So she smiled back in the best quelling fashion she could manage right then, even with her heart doing triple time and her hormones coming to sudden, breathtaking life. “Trust me, Rafe. Neither of us is in any condition to do otherwise.”
She got him to bed. She got herself to bed, after closing down the house and making sure everything that could be blown away in the new, more intense storm wouldn’t be. And then she lay there in the dark, listening to the dissonant chaos around her, and shook.
Her windows faced the water. The wind battered them with rain and salt spray driven all the way across the dunes. The water thundered, and the thunder cracked and snarled like a live thing. The lightning never seemed to stop, so that even if Gen could have closed her eyes, she couldn’t have slept.
