CHAPTER TWO
She didn’t need to open his eyes to know. For the past five nights, she’d held him in her arms, stroked his brow, wrapped her arms around his chest and tried to hold on to his life by the sheer force of her will.
But there was more. There was the certainty that she knew that body. Had gloried in it, first shyly, catching glances over the top of a fan, then, more boldly, in a dance or two. And then...
Dear God, what was she thinking?
“Get up,” she commanded nonsensically from where she stood frozen by his side.
He never heard her. Then another bolt of lightning showed her why. There, along his left temple, was a ragged gash, a wound of some kind. Gen immediately bent back down and gave in to some awful instinct.
“Don’t die,” she pleaded, her hand to his bare chest.
She felt how cold his skin was where the rain pattered against it. She reached out shaking fingers to find a thready pulse at his throat. She battled the overwhelming conviction that she had once possessed that hard, athletic body as only a lover could, had buried it on a stifling summer day when even the birds were silenced by the weight of what was happening.
“Please,” she whined uselessly. “You have to help.”
He didn’t.
Gen looked around again, this time for some kind of transportation. A board, a raft she might have left here before. Anything on which to drag a body up the dunes. For a second she thought she saw something flicker by the back of the house, but it must have been a reflection off a bottle or something. There was no one on the island but her, no kind of help, and she needed some way of getting Rafe off the beach.
Rafe.
She looked down, stunned by her own assumptions. She’d already named him. God, this was getting too hallucinatory. Next she’d look down and find herself in hoops and gray serge.
In the end, Gen called on old first-aid classes. The fireman’s hold, guaranteed to get just about anybody out of a building. Or off the sand, she hoped as she pulled his limp body up to a sitting position and wrapped it in the thick afghan before attempting to haul the deadweight over her shoulder.
The storm was passing through, leaving behind sleeting rain and dropping temperatures. But that wasn’t why Gen was shivering. She was suffering from reality shock.
She kept expecting to wake up yet again, and she didn’t.
It took every ounce of her strength, but with a lot of hauling and straining and not a little cursing, Gen got the injured man up to the house. She even got him up the stairs before completely giving out. That left him dripping water on the polished floors and her gasping for breath.
And then she looked, to find that she’d left him crumpled in the corner of the living room. Just like...
She couldn’t consider why she had to do it, but she did. By the time Gen finally finished, her unexpected guest had been settled on the middle of the floor, wrapped in dry blankets and cushioned on a sacrificed pillow for warmth.
It didn’t help. The sense of déjâ vu was so strong, it actually took her balance. Gen knew what to do to help this man as much as she could, but she couldn’t for a good five minutes, until she could open her eyes without feeling the nausea of dislocation.
She could still smell that place, could hear the lost moans of the dying. She could feel that terrible grief exploding in her chest, and she knew better.
Maybe if she called Annie everything would right itself. Gen would turn away from the phone and find that her visitor had vanished like a well-behaved hallucination.
She didn’t think she’d be so lucky.
“Don’t...”
Gen was all set to get some supplies from the bathroom. The raspy mutter pulled her to a dead stop.
“Don’t what?” she demanded, crouching down next to him.
His features pursed, as if in concentration. He groaned and moved just a little.
“Die ...” He sighed, as if it were the heaviest word in the world.
Gen just stared at him.
“Please, my love,” he said quite clearly. “Don’t die.”
