Upon a Mystic Tide (24 page)

He was dying to know. Why couldn’t he make himself look to see?
Was
she wearing his ring? What if she’d taken it off? Wouldn’t that mean that he’d blown this second chance already? If he had, the sooner he found out, the better—right?

Wrong. Watching hope die hammered the soul hard. And his soul had suffered about all the hammering it could take for one night.

She mumbled something he couldn’t make out, talking to her hands. Not wringing them, though she was giving the edge of the quilt hell. “I know you’re stable, Bess.”

“Tony
is
talking to me without a phone,” she confessed, then glanced up at John, letting him glimpse her appreciation of his support. “I thought he was telepathic.” She stared right back down at her hands. “But now I know he’s
 . . .
not.”

And that scared her senseless. John sat up, too, nude as a newborn, and knee to knee, confronted Bess in the roundabout way she definitely needed to draw the same conclusion John had drawn. “Maybe he’s something similar. Psychic?”

She lifted her gaze to his groin, sucked in a little gasp, then pulled the quilt up to cover him from the waist down. Her hands trembled, but her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes warmed. “He, um, said he wasn’t.”

That admission or her reaction to seeing him naked brought with it a grimace. And now her chin trembled, too. Tony, not him, had been the reason for the grimace and, while John was relieved by that, he didn’t like seeing her distressed. She wore some kind of ring. But he’d only glimpsed a view of it from her palm. Why wouldn’t she turn over her hand? He wanted her to, wanted to know. Really. “If he isn’t a telepath or a psychic, how is he communicating with you?”

“I don’t know.” She shuddered and rubbed a chill from her arms.

Lying to him, again. Well, maybe not lying, but not being totally honest. If she didn’t know, she certainly had her suspicions, yet, he softened toward her, it wasn’t obstinacy that had kept her from sharing them with him. It was her fear of how he’d react. John draped the quilt around her shoulders. “How long have you been hearing him?”

“Since that night he called into the station with the rumor of our divorce.”

“And he gave you that message.”

Bess nodded, remembering then that she’d been so certain they were experiencing telepathy. So certain. God, didn’t she wish she could be certain of that now? His one word message, however, pointed distinctly and irrevocably in a different direction. One she wasn’t ready to admit to herself, much less to John. It was absurd, of course. Ridiculous. So much so, she couldn’t bring herself to even think that god-awful “G” word.

But what other explanation was there?

The storm outside hit with a vengeance. Rain pelted against the window and the side of the house. Lightning flashed so frequently the Cove Room seemed illuminated by a strobe light. And the clashes of clapping thunder pierced Bess’s ears, set them to ringing.

“I’ve been thinking about his message that night,” John said. “What do you remember him telling you exactly?”

“You mean about leaping upon a mystic tide?”

John shook his head. “No, before then.”

Surprised, she raised her brows and twisted the covers. Their bare knees rubbed and she shifted away. “Have you figured out what he meant about the tide?”

“Not yet.” Sounding gruff, he grabbed the quilt then pulled it back up over his thighs.

Feeling a draft, she glanced down. Her robe had fallen open and her right breast was as bare as John. She jerked the gap closed.

His gaze went hot; his gruff voice, husky. “I am human, honey.”

She swallowed hard and gave her robe another solid tug, then held the quilt draping her shoulders closed at her chin. “Sorry.”

He nodded and cupped a hand over her foot. “What did Tony say right before the tide message?”

Bess thought back, though concentrating was darn difficult. Between the almost constant thunder and lightning and John staring at her and rubbing delicious circles into her arches, it was a wonder she could think at all. He remembered how much she hated storms, how much she loved having her feet massaged. “Not to give up hope. That so long as there’s life, there’s hope.”

“That’s it!” Realization shone in John’s eyes.

And Bess didn’t get it.
“What’s
it?”

John shoved aside the quilt, took her other foot in his hand, then rotated her ankle. “Just before Tony told you that, he said, ‘My situation is hopeless, but yours isn’t.’”

“Yes.” So what did that mean? What was John seeing that she was missing? Unrequited love certainly wasn’t uncommon enough to warrant John’s eureka reaction.

“Think about it, Bess.”

“You sound just like him. I hate that god-awful phrase.” She cringed then frowned at John. “Every time I hear it, another bomb drops on my head.”

“Like the words or not, would you stop and just think about this?” John squeezed her instep. “He said his situation was hopeless. Then right afterward, he said—”

“That so long as there’s life, there’s hope.”

A shiver of pure terror shot up her spine. She’d known it but, Lord, she hadn’t wanted to know it. She’d denied it and prayed she’d be permitted to go on denying it. “He has no hope, Jonathan.”

“He has no life, Bess.”

Determined not to faint, not to hyperventilate, or to give in to sweet oblivion, she sat statue still for a long moment, then let her gaze drop to John’s chest. That it was still rising and falling in smooth even motions when she felt frazzled to the core both comforted and infuriated her. “He warned me from the start,” she finally said.

“And tonight something happened with him that frightened you.”

“Scared the fool out of me, and that’s the truth.”

“What happened?”

If John had demanded she tell him, she wouldn’t have. But he hadn’t. He’d asked in a soft, sweet voice that said he knew she was reeling. She couldn’t
not
tell him. This was bizarre—beyond bizarre, and scary as hell—but it
was
happening.

“He, um, gave me a message,” she said, resolving to look him in the eye even if it killed her. But she couldn’t do it. The sheet and quilt lay rumpled near his waist. She lifted her gaze but, at the mat of hair on his chest between his nipples, stopped cold.

“Honey, what did he say?”

John sounded so calm. Lord, how she envied him that. And how she resented him for it. She looked up into his eyes. They were solemn, serious, and questioning. Maybe she shouldn’t tell him. Maybe she should protect him from the truth for so long as she was able. It would be the humane thing to do. Not the easiest for her, but the most humane.

No. No, she couldn’t. She’d tried protecting him before and it’d backfired. She’d fallen under the misconception that his relationship with Elise had been entirely different from what it had been. She’d misjudged him, and she had to live with that. It had been a difficult lesson, but she’d learned from it. Tonight, when they’d been doing the role-playing and she was Elise, he’d kissed her forehead. At that moment, for the first time, Bess had known the truth. John had never had an affair with Elise Dupree. She’d come first with him, true, but for some other reason. Not because they’d engaged in an affair.

This time, Bess would share her fears with him. What more did she have to lose? “Tony just said one word, John.”

“It must have been some word. I’ve never seen you so rattled.”

She was shaking, and very close to tears. “Don’t start giving me hell about getting emotional. Frankly, I’m doing well to not already have soaked your sheets.”

That worried him. He dug his fingers into her hip. “What was the word?”

“It was a question.” Why didn’t she just say it and have it done? The delay wouldn’t lessen the shock, only his response to it. And if that wasn’t a good reason for a delay she didn’t know what was.

“All right, then,” he said from between his teeth. “What was the question?”

“Well, it wasn’t actually a question.” She went back to wringing her hands. God, she couldn’t keep her thoughts straight. With the contents of them, she couldn’t really blame herself, though. Who would want to keep
these
thoughts straight? “I asked if he was a telepath. He said he wasn’t. I asked how then was he talking to me without speaking. He told me we could solve the mystery, and then I stupidly asked how. I never should have asked that. Never.”

She paused for breath, uncertain if she could say the rest without falling into a dead faint. That she hadn’t fainted before in her life made no difference. She’d never before encountered this type challenge either. And, in the way she dealt with it, patience and grace could just fend for themselves.

“Well,” John muttered in a whispered shout,
his
patience clearly deserting him. “What the hell did he say?”

Taking exception to his tone, Bess glared at John. “Boo.”

Hattie climbed the stairs
up to the attic room just after dawn. The temperature change midway didn’t surprise her; she’d become accustomed to it years ago. She paused in Tony’s room—the one, when he’d reached his early teens, he’d asked his parents, Collin and Cecelia, to let him move into. He’d been growing up, making the change from boy to man, and had wanted to exert his independence, and to feel confident of their acknowledgment of his rites of passage. Being compassionate angels, and wise and loving parents, they’d given it to him.

To the right of the stairs sat his bed and desk and the chest that, now and then, held his clothing. All the dustcovers lay puddled on the floor like puffy, white clouds. Again, not uncommon, though, for years, on finding them off of the furnishings, Hattie religiously had replaced them. But for the last decade or so, she’d replaced them or not depending on the temperature of the room. If it felt cool enough to raise goose bumps, she’d left them where they’d lain. If not, then she’d replaced them. Today, the room felt cool, but not chilly. Tony wasn’t here. And that left her feeling a little bereft, and a little sad that she’d come up here.

The wall nearest the stairs was covered solid with shelves full of his treasures. His baseball cap, his favorite fishing lure, his own photo of her in her yellow, floral dress. She’d worn that dress the night he’d proposed and, when she’d accepted, he’d sworn that yellow flowers would forever be his favorite. Remembering that vow had him stealing her heart all over again.

She let her gaze drift to a little silver frame, a photo of him and Hatch. She’d snapped it the day they’d gone fishing and had found that silly doubloon. They’d been as excited as if they’d recovered a trunk full of gold. Anthony Freeport. Her beloved Tony. Tony
 . . .
She lovingly caressed his familiar face with her gaze. His hair was a mess. He’d been embarrassed about that but, my, how she’d loved it. Tony was touchable. Loveable. And, oh, how she’d loved him! How she still loved him
 . . .

Her heart wrenched. She sucked in a steadying breath and, wistful, looked around. It’d been a long time since she’d been up in this room; since Maggie and T. J. MacGregor’s visit, when she’d wanted so desperately to help them heal and had been at a loss as to how to do it. And she wouldn’t have come here again now—the material reminders of Tony being in the house were a comfort, but seeing them, touching them, smelling them, when she couldn’t see, touch, or smell him
 . . .
well, that still hurt.

Yet she couldn’t be spiney about this. Jonathan would call spiney, wimpy. Bess, no doubt, would have a mile-long clinical name for it. But spiney was good enough for Hattie. And, to get to the widow’s walk, she’d had to not be spiney and to come to the attic. When John Mystic had left the house in the middle of a violent storm, she’d had to see where he was going.

She walked to the little door leading out onto the narrow widow’s walk. Rain beat hard against it, so she only cracked it ajar enough to glimpse the cliffs. He hadn’t yet moved. Continued to sit there on the jagged cliffs as still as a shadow, staring out onto the ocean.