Face the Fire (30 page)

It rubbed at his temper, as he supposed she’d intended it to. “Don’t thank me too soon. You wondered why I’d maneuvered you into dating. I needed to show you, and maybe to prove to myself, that there’s more than sex between us.”

“Of course there is.” Calm again, she began to walk. “There’s magic, a shared history. And though I didn’t initially believe it, a shared love of the island. We have mutual friends.”

“We were friends once.”

“We’re friendly now.” She breathed in deeply. “How do people live without the sea close? How do they breathe?”

“Mia.” He touched the tips of her hair. “When we made love, I didn’t intend to ask you to share magic with me. It wasn’t calculated.”

“I know that.” Though she stopped walking, she kept her back to him.

“Why did you let me?”

“Because you would’ve stopped. It meant something to me that you would’ve stopped when I asked. And, I
suppose, because I’ve missed it. Sharing power excites and fulfills.”

“Was there no one else in all these years?”

“You’ve no right to ask me that.”

“No, I don’t. So instead I’ll tell you what you don’t ask me. There was no one but you. Never anyone but you in that way.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“If it doesn’t,” he said, taking her arm before she could move away, “then you should be able to listen. I never got over you, and if I was with another woman, it was never the way it was between us. Every one of them deserved better than I could give. I couldn’t give them better, because none of them were you.”

“There’s no need for this,” she began.

“I need it. I’ve loved you all my life. No spell, no incantation, no act of will has ever been able to change that for me.”

Her heart stumbled in her chest. It took all of her strength to balance it again. “But you tried.”

“I tried. With women, with work, with travel. Not loving you is beyond my power.”

“Do you think, Sam, that even if it were only my own heart at risk, I could pour it into your hands again?”

“Then just take mine. I’m not doing anything else with it.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how much of what I feel is an echo of what was. How much mixed with that is anger. More,” she said, turning back to him, “I don’t know how much of what you believe you feel is real. Everything’s at stake now, and clouded emotions are dangerous.”

“My emotions aren’t clouded. They were, for a long time.”

“Now mine are. And I’ve learned to step back from them. I care about you. The link’s too strong for that to be
otherwise. But I don’t want to be in love with you again, Sam. And that’s my choice. If you can’t accept that, then we need to stay away from each other.”

“I can accept that it’s your choice, for now. But I’m going to do everything I can to change your mind.”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “By sending me flowers, going on picnics? Those are frills, trappings.”

“Those are romance.”

“I don’t
want
romance.”

“Deal with it. I was too young and stupid to give it to you once. I’m older and smarter now. There was a time when it was hard for me to tell you I loved you. Didn’t come naturally off my tongue. And it sure as hell wasn’t a phrase that was bandied about in my house.”

“I don’t want you to tell me.”

“You always said it first.” He saw the surprise on her face. “You never realized that, did you? I was never able to say it to you, unless you’d said it. Times change. People change. Some people take longer than others. I realize I’ve been waiting, Mia, maneuvering again, so you’d say it first. Easier for me that way. You used to make things too damn easy for me.”

“Fortunately, that’s changed. Now I have to go. It’s late.”

“Yeah, it’s late. I love you, Mia. I love you. I don’t mind saying it a few hundred times until you believe it.”

It hurt to hear it. A quick, pinching pain. She used that pain to keep her heart cool and her voice even. “You gave me words before, Sam. We gave each other words. They weren’t enough. I can’t give you what you want.”

She ran down the path, away from him.

“Won’t give me,” he replied. “Yet.”

She didn’t stop until she got to her car. Didn’t go
into the house for her shoes, or think about them. She thought only of driving away, driving fast until her mind settled again.

She had let herself love him again. Or rather, her heart had turned on her when she’d been vulnerable. But that was her problem, and one she would deal with.

Rationally, reasonably, if loving him were the right choice, it wouldn’t make her so unhappy.

If hearing him say he loved her was the solution, how could it have been like a blow to the heart?

She would not become a victim of her own emotions, not a second time. She wouldn’t throw herself mindlessly into love, putting herself and everything that mattered to her at risk.

Balance, she told herself, and clear thinking. They were essential when one was contemplating a life-and-death decision. Maybe it was time to take a few days off, regroup. She’d been spreading herself too thin, she decided. She needed to be with herself.

Alone.

“What the hell do you mean she’s gone?” Annoyed
at being roused out of sleep before eight-thirty, on a Sunday, on the
only
day that week she could sleep in, Ripley scowled at the phone.

“She’s off the island.” A pulse was pounding in Sam’s throat, making speech almost painful. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. Christ.” She sat up in bed, scrubbed her hand over her face. “I’m not even awake. How do you know she went off-island? Maybe she’s just out for a walk or a drive.”

He knew, Sam thought, because he’d tuned in to her.
And the snapping of the connection had awakened him. Next time, he thought grimly, he wouldn’t limit the link to the island.

“I just know. I was with her last night. She didn’t say anything about plans on the mainland.”

“Well, she doesn’t keep me as her social secretary. Did you have a fight or something?”

“No, we didn’t have a fight.” What they’d had could never be boiled down to such an elemental word. “If you have any idea where she’s gone—”

“I don’t.” But the worry in his voice got through. “Listen, ask Lulu. Mia wouldn’t go anywhere without letting her know. She probably just went over to do some shopping or something and—” Scowling, Ripley held the phone out and listened to the dial tone. “Well, goodbye to you, too.”

He didn’t bother with the phone this time, but
jumped in his car and drove to Lulu’s. He barely noticed that she’d changed the paint from the pumpkin orange he remembered from his boyhood to a wild purple. He knocked on the front door.

“You got two seconds to tell me why you woke me up out of a dream where I was dancing with Charles Bronson and we were both naked. Otherwise, I’m kicking your—”

“Where’s Mia?” he snapped.

He slapped a hand on the door before she could slam it in his face. “Just tell me she’s okay.”

“Why shouldn’t she be?”

“Did she tell you where she was going?”

“If she did, I’m not telling you.” She could sense his anger and his fear. “You try any hocus-pocus on me, and
I’ll not only kick your ass, I’ll mop the floor with it. Now back off.”

Disgusted with himself, he stepped back. When the door slammed he just sat on the porch steps and rested his head in his hands.

Had he driven her away? Was it some kind of ugly joke fate continued to play on them that one of them would love so much that the other was compelled to flee?

It didn’t matter, he told himself. Not now. All that mattered now was that she was safe.

When he heard the door open again, he stayed where he was.

“You don’t have to tell me where she is, what she’s doing, or why she left. I just need to know that she’s all right.”

“Any reason you know of she shouldn’t be?”

“I upset her last night.”

With a sniff, Lulu marched over and gave him a quick boot with her bare foot. “I should’ve figured it. What did you do?”

“I told her I loved her.”

Behind his back, Lulu pursed her lips. “What did she have to say to that?”

“That she didn’t want to hear it, basically.”

“She’s a sensible woman,” Lulu said, then immediately felt nasty. More nasty than she was comfortable with. “She’s taking a few days off, that’s all. On the mainland—shopping, getting pampered. Do her good to decompress, if you ask me. She’s been working ’round the clock.”

“Okay.” He rubbed his hands on the thighs of his jeans, then turned to face her. “Okay. Thanks.”

“Did you tell her you loved her to mess with her head?”

“I told her I loved her because I do. Messing with her head was just a side benefit.”

“I don’t know why the hell I always liked you.”

Sam was shocked. “You did?”

“If I hadn’t, I’d have peeled the skin off your face for putting hands on my baby. Well, I’m up,” she said and buried both hands in her disordered mop of hair to scratch her head. “You might as well come in and have some coffee.”

Too intrigued to refuse, he followed her into the kitchen. “I always wondered why you didn’t live at the cliff house.”

“First off, because I couldn’t stand those pompous, self-absorbed Devlins.” She dug coffee out of a canister shaped like a piglet. “Didn’t mind spending a few days there when they were off on one of their trips, but when they were at home, I needed a place of my own. Otherwise, I might have smothered them both in their sleep.”

“When did they leave—for good?”

“Few months after you did.”

“After . . . but she was nineteen.”

“Just shy of her twentieth birthday. They headed off to—who the hell cares. Came back once or twice during that year, for form, if you ask me. Mia hit twenty-one, and that was over. Guess they figured their job was done.”

“They never did their job,” Sam stated. “You did.”

“That’s right. She’s been mine since her grandmother put her in my arms. She’s still mine.” She shot him a challenging look over her shoulder.

“I know it. I’m glad of it.”

“Maybe you’ve got some sense in that pea brain of yours after all.” She poured water from a cherry-red kettle into the coffeemaker. “Anyway, after they moved off-island, Mia asked if I didn’t want to come up and live with her. Plenty of room. But I like my place, and she likes being up there on her own.”

She studied him while the coffeemaker burped and
grumbled. “You thinking of trying to convince her to let you move up there with her?”

“Ah . . . I hadn’t thought quite that far ahead.”

“Don’t change much, do you? Always dance back from the sticking point.”

“And what would the sticking point be?”

“That girl,” she said and drilled a finger into his chest. “
My
girl. She wants marriage, and she wants babies. She wants a man she can share her whole life with, thick and thin, and not one who gets pale when the word
marriage
comes up in conversation. Like you’re doing now.”

“Marriage isn’t the only serious commitment—”

“You think you can bullshit her with that, or are you just bullshitting yourself?”

“A number of people make and keep a bond without a legal ceremony. Mia and I are hardly traditionalists.”