But he was real. Whatever else she’d believed or wondered or questioned, Rafe was flesh and blood, and every emotion she’d felt for him in her dreams was alive in her, tenfold, in his arms.
As if she had always been there, and had only been waiting all these years to find her way back. As if his were the only arms that mattered, the only mouth that gentled her to silence. The only eyes that awoke wonder in her.
It took Gen a second to realize that Rafe had finally pulled away. Her body thrummed with sudden life. Her chest was on fire, and her head was reeling, and she didn’t even question it. She simply knew that she would never know this kind of communion again.
“I’m sorry,” he was murmuring. “I shouldn’t have.”
“You had to,” she answered, finally opening her eyes to see the trenchant light in his eyes.
He didn’t question her. He simply pulled her into his arms, and she went. She didn’t close her eyes this time, though. She just rested against his chest and listened to the steady cadence of his heart, felt the rise and fall of his breathing, soaked in the vitality that had slipped inexorably from her hands in a terrible dream.
She soaked in it like a first sun and shuddered at the thought that it would be taken away again.
But it would. Whatever it was, whoever had given her this impossible gift, could not have given it to her without cost. It was a loan of some celestial kind that she shouldn’t question, only savor. Minute by minute, hour by hour, until she woke with the clothing back in the trunk and the bed down the hall unslept-in.
The thought truly terrified her, in ways she would have never known until she’d had the temerity to reclaim an old house her mother had wanted to rot away.
Had her mother known? Had she had a visitor like this, and never shared the miracle with her daughter? Or had she simply felt the tremor of memory in this house and been afraid?
Gen had to know. She had to ask, the minute she called Annie.
“Annie,” she whispered, and the sound of the wind came back to her. The rain battering at her walls, the surf lashing angrily at the beaches. The storm. And an entire continent away, her daughter would be watching the weather channel and fearing for her mother’s return.
The bubble of insulation vanished, and the world rushed back in. Gen couldn’t simply pretend that nothing mattered but the man who had come to her in the night. She had to protect her daughter. She had to deflect that terrible, abiding fear before it festered in her little heart as it had in her mother’s. Before it took root and grew into a beast that couldn’t be tamed.
Rafe pulled gently away. “Your girl?” he asked.
Gen satisfied herself with another long gaze up at his strong, beautiful features. All shadows and angles in this dim place, with that wild hair tumbling over the swath of white, and his eyes like hot fires in the dark. Gen heard the small warnings, the stubborn voices of reason and logic that told her to pay more attention to the shadows and less to the fire. She felt the disquiet take hold in her belly, and tried for once to ignore it. Tried and failed.
She looked down again, pulled away as easily as she could. Took a breath to cover the sharp loss of dislocation, the feeling that she should be bleeding from the movement. She used her daughter to dredge up some latent sense of coherence.
“She’s terrified of being left alone,” Gen admitted. “Something I’m afraid she picked up from me. Right after we batten down hatches, I need to get hold of her somehow. She’s probably heard about the hurricane already, and she’ll be terrified.”
Rafe nodded and smiled. “A good mother.”
Gen couldn’t help an answering grin. “Well, the only one she’s got.”
Gen wasn’t sure she trusted the new ease between them. It was as if that kiss had unlocked some new level of understanding, some common recollection of easy camaraderie, familiarity, friendship. They climbed back down into the bedroom and descended the stairs in silence, as if they had done so together a hundred times. It was only when they made it into the kitchen that the disparity once again became apparent.
“Nothing?” she asked.
Rafe looked around and shook his head. “Not a thing. I know it’s a place to prepare food, but I’m not sure how.”
Gen just snorted. “That’s only because you’re a man.”
“I think that’s an insult.”
“You think right. Michael wouldn’t go near a kitchen unless there was a board meeting in it.”
They sat at the butcher-block table and ate, and Gen tried to probe Rafe for recall of any kind. She pointed out items, mentioned popular icons, historical dates. He was like a slate that had been faultily wiped.
He couldn’t remember any more about himself than he’d told her—except for the growing feeling that she was somehow in danger.
Gen quashed that idea. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not an impulsive person.” Except now. “I’m not going to try and go sailing in the storm.”
“What if the hurricane’s bad?”
She shook her head. “Not the way it looks now. These houses have withstood worse. My only problem is getting hold of Annie. I think one of the fuses has blown in my old radio, and I don’t think I have any more. If not, I have to try plan B.”
