in his eye that sent her back a step. “I’ll explain later.” He paused, and his eyes softened into something more familiar. Something she almost understood. Something that tugged at her and made her wish things were different. “Let’s go inside and get warmed up. I want to have a look at that bump on your head, too. You may need a stitch.”
“It’s fine. And if I needed a stitch, I’d do it myself,” she replied, feeling the adrenaline and the fear, the cold and the confusion, all catching up to her at once. “Your sutures are lousy. And don’t think you’re getting out of an explanation, Metcalf.”
His eyes softened further, though something dangerous still lurked at the back. “Atta girl. Come on.”
He led her up the porch. A hollowed-out shingle near the scratched brass mailbox yielded a key that slipped easily into the simple lock. The faded plaque beside the door contained a single word.
Metcalf.
As she passed through the door into a bare hallway, she murmured, “Welcome home, Dale.”
She got a pithy curse in reply. For some reason, it made her smile. But when she turned, she found him watching her with cold, angry eyes.
“This isn’t a joke, Tansy. You don’t belong here. There are things going on that you have no part of, and I don’t want you hurt.”
Though his words and expression were hard, she couldn’t help the quick lift of her heart. He cared what happened to her. The hot, wanting pulse returned. “Oh? I assumed you didn’t want me along because of what happened between us.”
Emotion, or maybe desire, flared hot in his eyes, then iced as quickly as it had sparked. “Don’t fool yourself. There is no ‘us’ anymore.” He turned away and toed a pile of towels and clothes near the staircase. “The shower’s the second door on the right. The water takes a few minutes to warm up.”
Then he walked away, leaving only an echo of footsteps on dry floorboards to mark his presence. Tansy dropped her salty, aching face into her hands.
That was what she’d wanted. No regrets, no hard feelings. Nothing between them. He hadn’t been able to give her what she needed, and they’d parted ways. Simple, right?
But there was nothing simple about the ache in her heart. There was nothing simple about the landing gear ripping off, or about an outbreak that was too deadly, too virulent to be shellfish poisoning.
And worst of all, there was nothing simple about the man she’d once thought herself in love with. The playboy doctor who’d looked like a leading actor among extras in the Tehru clinics, and instead had turned out to be…what? A lobsterman’s son? The prodigal returned?
She had no idea.
Let me inside, she had pleaded during one of their last real fights. Don’t keep shutting me out. I can’t help you if you won’t let me in.
Now, she glanced around the cold, bare entryway, noting where squares of darker wood on the walls suggested pictures long gone. If this was the inside of Dale, she might be better off back in Boston. At least there, she understood the rules.
Here, she understood nothing.
WHEN HE FINALLY HEARD the shower thump to life, Dale pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the kitchen window and closed his eyes. If she had followed him and demanded answers, he wasn’t sure what would have come out of his mouth. There is no
“us” anymore. It was the truth. It had to be the truth. Everything that had happened between them was based on a lie.
He wasn’t the son of a wealthy Boston shipper. His family’s single boat had gone down one night amidst a ferocious spring storm. Or so he’d been told. Nobody, not even the uncle who’d lost his wife in the accident, had wanted to hear Dale’s suspicions. The day a drunken Trask had tried to beat the questions out of him was the day seventeen-year-old Dale had fled the island with Walter Churchill’s help.
Make yourself into someone else, Churchill had demanded, and sent him off with enough money to do it. You’re better than Lobster Island. You don’t be long here.
But he’d never felt like he belonged where he’d ended up, either. Boston, and the wealthy doctor’s life, hadn’t sat easily on his shoulders. He’d worked hard to make it fit, even harder when Tansy had come into his life, but the more he tried, the worse the role had pinched.
The shower rumbled overhead, shifting his attention. When he was a child, the noise had made him think of monsters. Now it made him think of Tansy, naked, slick and pink beneath the water. Suddenly, his clothes were more irritating than cold, sticking to the sensitive places. Dale pulled off his ruined shirt and winced as his bumps and bruises throbbed. His quick arousal faded with the memory of those last moments on the runway.
They could have died in the plane crash. They could have sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Dead. Like his parents. And it would have been his fault for bringing Tansy along.
The pipes rattled again, making him think of the shower again. Of Tansy. Without trying, he could imagine steam wreathing her soft, rosy body. Briefly, he let himself remember their time together, let the memory beat back the shadows and the ghosts. The fear.
They had first made love on a pallet in Tehru, barely taking the time to loosen the clothing they wore to bed, to be ready for the next emergency. They had come together in need and despair, wanting to forget the dead and the dying at a time when the outbreak had seemed unbeatable. Then, they’d wanted to feel alive. Later, they’d just wanted to feel. After that first time, they’d stolen moments for quick, furtive couplings when they were too tired to save lives but too wired to sleep.
With the outbreak’s source discovered and the disease leveled, they’d headed home, stopping halfway to rent a room with lush plants, marble, brass and silk. And a shower… God, what a shower.
They’d made love in that shower, naked together for the first time, as perfect for each other as two people could possibly be.
Except that she was perfect for the man Dale had created—wealthy and pedigreed. And that man was nothing more than fiction. If Tansy ever met the real Dale Metcalf, she’d be horrified.
Worse, she’d be disappointed.
And maybe that was why he hadn’t fought harder against bringing her. Maybe Lobster Island would do what he had failed to do. Maybe it would kill the attraction between them. Kill the want, and the desperate kick of his heart every time he saw her.
He stepped out of his ruined shoes and eyed the pile of clothes Mickey’s wife had left beside a flashlight and a small box of staples. He scowled at the worn jeans and the rough Irish-knit sweater. Dr. Metcalf, infectious disease specialist, didn’t own jeans or bulky sweaters. But he’d grown up in them. Shrugging, he scooped the warm clothes off the floor near the stairs and set his foot on the lowest tread.
With the motion, his blood buzzed, and emotions, those things he so often avoided, threatened to swamp him. He’d never needed Tansy’s quiet strength more than he did right now. And he had no right to it.
Did he dare go up? If he paused outside the bathroom door and heard her singing in the low contralto that never failed to set his body afire, would he have the strength to keep walking?
Dr. Metcalf would have the strength to
