Aquamarine (16 page)

“Letterman okay?”

“Fine. Would you care for some coffee? I can call room service.”

“Not right now. Why don’t you move over here next to me?” He patted the loveseat in invitation. “You’re going to get a stiff neck if you try to watch TV from that angle.”

Better her with a stiff neck than him with a stiff … “I’m okay. Really.”

“Yeah, but I’m giving myself a sore throat yelling across the room.”

She made a face. “It’s not
that
far. I’m not straining my voice at all.”

“What?”

She tried to frown but couldn’t control the twitch of her lips. “Very funny.”

Teague yawned, stretched, and settled back against the throw pillow with a sigh of contentment.

“Don’t you dare fall asleep, Teague Harris.”

“Come keep me awake,” he suggested, opening one eye.

“Forget it. If I went over there, the first thing you know we’d be kissing.”

“That
would
be a tragedy.” He laughed. “So if kissing’s out, I guess cuddling’s off limits too, huh?”

“Teague, I … What about Kirsten?”

“Kirsten has nothing to do with us.”

“Us?” There was an
us?
Shea’s heart raced.

Teague crossed the room in three strides. He tugged her out of the chair and into his arms. “Us,” he said softly. “You and me.”

“You and me?” Three whole syllables. Pretty good, considering that her brain had shorted out again.

He pulled her into a tighter embrace, one hand cupping the back of her head while the other rested in the small of her back. She looked into his eyes and felt as if she were drowning in their smoky depths. Her heart drummed madly. She slid her hands up the hard muscles of his back and felt the shudder of his response.

“I think I’m falling in love with you, Shea McKenzie.” His voice was a ragged whisper in her ear.

Good thing, because I’m definitely falling in love with you, Teague Harris
.

This time when he kissed her, it was different, as if they’d progressed to another level of intimacy. This kiss offered a promise, a challenge, and a passionate intensity that was almost frightening.

She gasped for breath when he released her. Her bloodstream was nine-tenths hormones. She couldn’t have framed a coherent sentence if her life had depended on it.

“I want you, Shea, but you’re not sure yet, are you?” His eyes had darkened to charcoal. They burned into hers.

“I …” she started, but the words refused to come. She clung to him desperately. “I—”

“Shh.” Teague pressed a finger to her lips. “Don’t say anything. It’s all right. I’m a patient man.” He pressed a final soft kiss to her forehead and was gone before she realized quite what had happened.

A cold shower helped, but not much. Shea kept picturing Teague naked in the shower with her, naked in the
hot tub, naked in her bed. She paced back and forth in front of the French doors, trying to calm her fevered emotions.

Why had he left? That was the question that plagued her. She’d been ready to drop into his hands like a ripe peach. All right, so maybe there would have been some regrets in the morning, but it was a long time until morning.

She paced some more, hoping the management wouldn’t bill her for the hole she was wearing in the carpet.

A cold shower helped, but not much. Teague kept picturing Shea naked in the shower with him, naked in the shower with him, naked in the hot tub, naked in her bed. Dammit, why had he left? She’d been as aroused as he was. She wouldn’t have refused him.

He sighed heavily. But she probably would have regretted her impulsive actions in the morning, and he didn’t want that.

Too keyed up to sleep, he went for a swim. The icy water off the point soon chilled his fevered blood. He swam halfway to the island and back, until he was almost too tired to drag himself back up onto the dock and into bed.

Shea slept restlessly and woke early. After grabbing a quick bite at the coffee shop, she set off for the island in the grayish light that accompanied the fog in the predawn chill. Traffic on the lake loop road was light, too early for both tourists and commuters.

Teague’s pickup was in the carport and no lights were on in his apartment. Shea parked her car beside his truck, then fumbled in the dark for the boathouse key.

“You’re up early.” Teague’s voice startled her. He loomed out of the mist like the villain in a horror movie.

She jumped, one hand at her throat. “Don’t sneak up on me like that! I nearly had a heart attack.”

“You didn’t sleep any better than I did.” It wasn’t a question. He knew.

Shea’s cheeks burned. “No,” she admitted.

“Want to come up for a cup of coffee?”

The two of them upstairs in Teague’s cozy little apartment, insulated from the world by a blanket of fog? Her heart cartwheeled a time or two as she considered the possibilities. “No thanks. I already had breakfast.”

“It’s only a little after five,” Teague said. “No one’s up yet on the island.”

“I know.”

He shot her a puzzled look. “If you didn’t come to see me or one of the Raineys, then why
are
you here?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy.” If he didn’t already.

“You’re going to visit the old cabin,” he said.

“How did you guess?”

“I noticed how agitated you were yesterday when we were with Mikey and before that, the time we took the walk along the shore. The closer we got to the cabin, the more you dragged your feet.”

She shivered. “Agitated isn’t quite the right word. Try scared. Or petrified. I admit my fear was irrational, but it was, nonetheless, an incredibly powerful emotion.”

“So why go back? What are you trying to prove?”

“That I’m not a coward, I guess.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. My theory, the
only one that makes sense to me, is that Kirsten had a bad experience there, perhaps saw something that frightened her. I can’t prove it, but I believe I was experiencing her emotions, not my own.”

“Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say it was Kirsten’s fear you felt. Why would she be afraid of the cabin? She used to spend hours down there sorting and identifying rocks.”

Shea sighed. “I don’t know. But if it’s not her terror, then what’s going on? I certainly don’t have any firsthand associations to trigger panic.”

“At least none that you’re conscious of.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you could have deeply buried memories of a similar spot. Did you ever get lost in the woods when you were a child?”

“No. Besides, the woods in Ohio don’t look like the forests here.”

He leaned against the hood of his pickup. “Okay, so maybe we’re on the wrong track,” he said. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me you’d read about the Rainey massacre?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Then maybe that’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“The cabin’s where all those people were butchered. If you’re as sensitive to the atmosphere as I suspect, it may be the psychic pollution left in the wake of the massacre that’s affecting you, and nothing to do with Kirsten at all.”

Shea could tell he was pleased with his new theory. And though she had to admit it made sense—supposing
one accepted the existence of psychic pollution—she still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced. For one thing, Teague’s theory didn’t explain all those other flashes she’d had, like the one on the stairs in the Rainey house.

“If so, then there’s nothing to worry about, and the sooner I face my irrational fear, the better. I’m going to the cabin.”

“But it’s dark and foggy.” His objections made sense, but Shea had a feeling that if she didn’t face her fears now, she might never work up enough courage again.

“The sun will be up soon, and the fog won’t last long. It never does.”

The mist was thinner right on the water than it had been along the shore, for which Teague was grateful. He’d had visions of them missing the island altogether in a pea-souper, then wasting half the morning and a tank of gas trying to get their bearings. But their trip across was uneventful. No one was around this early, not even the mallards that nested along the unpopulated end of Crescent Lake.

He tied the boat to the mooring at the end of the dock, then leaped onto the silvered boards with a hollow
thunk
that sounded preternaturally loud in the early-morning hush. He stretched out a hand to help Shea. Her fingers were icy. She stepped onto the dock with a muttered “Thanks.” Huddling in her sweatshirt, she cocked her head to one side as if she were listening to the water lapping onto the pilings. “I hope we didn’t wake the Griffins.” She nodded toward the boathouse apartment.

“No lights,” he said.

“What’s the quickest, most direct route to the cabin?” She couldn’t quite disguise the tremor in her voice.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“Yes. I do.” Scared spitless, but stubborn as ever.

“Straight across the island is the shortest route, but it would probably be faster to follow the shoreline than to stumble through the underbrush in the dark.” And the fog, which was growing thicker by the minute. Mist cloaked the boathouse, distorting its outline.

Shea gave herself a shake. “If we’re going, let’s get on with it.”

The shoreline was steep and rugged, lacking the occasional beaches and gentler slopes of the southern shore. Though the heavy undergrowth provided good handholds, they were soon wet to the skin. Every time they brushed against the lush foliage, they were showered by a misting of fine dew drops.

Once she slid down a steep incline and nearly landed in the lake. She caught herself just in time, grabbing a young pine seedling that thrust up at an angle from the rocky soil of the cliff.

As they circled around to the western shore, there was a reappearance of the ledges so common on the southern edge. This made walking marginally easier. The rocks were slippery, though nowhere near as treacherous as the wet grass and pine needles had been.

“We’re almost there,” Shea said suddenly. “I feel it.”

All Teague felt was the chill of his wet clothes, but the murmur of the spring told him she was right. “We can still turn around.”

She wanted to, he could tell. But she forced herself
forward until she stood at the very edge of the alder thicket. She poised there, listening. “Do you hear that?”

“What? The stream?”

“No, that thrumming sound.”

He listened intently. No thrumming sound. Just water whispering over the weathered granite of the streambed and birds twittering in the trees.

Suddenly she gave a nervous laugh.

“What’s the joke?”

“The thrumming. I figured out what it was … nothing more sinister than my own heartbeat. Sorry, Teague. I’m acting like an idiot. What is there to be frightened of, anyway? What’s the worst that can happen? So I experience the memory of whatever traumatic event inspired Kirsten’s terror. Big deal. Memory’s the operative word here.”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

“Myself. And it’s not working.” She took a deep breath. “The cabin’s just beyond the trees, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” And he didn’t know if her apprehension was contagious or what, but suddenly he wasn’t any more anxious than she was to penetrate the leafy barrier.

The wind shifted subtly, stirring the mist in coiling currents. The sky had lightened. To the east, where the morning sun now blazed behind a blanket of vapor, the fog was so white, it made his eyes ache. It would be a fine day once the shrouding haze burned off, but right now the alder thicket was dark and dank. Wisps of mist moved sinously among the trees, muffling sounds and intensifying odors. He sniffed pine, leaf mold, catnip, and, underneath it all, something else. Something unpleasant. Something that made the hairs stand up along his forearms.

“Kirsten?” Shea whispered.

Teague frowned. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“I’ve come this far….” Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the thicket.

He was right behind her. Their noisy progress startled a covey of nesting birds that took off with a wild whirring of wings accompanied by shrill, frightened chit-tering.

“Be still, my heart,” she said grimly.

Another step or two brought them into a tiny clearing almost entirely filled by the small, dilapidated cabin, its shake roof covered with moss, its door gaping open, as if surprised at their intrusion.

Teague grabbed Shea’s arm in a restraining grasp. “Don’t go in. The floor’s probably rotten.”

Shea shuddered. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Rotten floorboards aside, like I told you before, I’m the poster kid for claustrophobia.”

He peeked inside, but little was visible in the darkness beyond the doorway, curtained by cobwebs.

“I smell something dead.” Her voice shook.

He nodded grimly. The stench of putrefying flesh was unmistakable. “Some animal must have plunged through those rotten floorboards and died in there.”

“Poor thing.” Shea shuddered again. “Maybe I caught a whiff of that smell the other times I came this way. Maybe that’s what frightened me.”

“Probably. Your subconscious made the connection even though the odor wasn’t strong enough to alert your conscious mind.” Braving the spiderwebs, he stuck his head in the door and took a deep breath. Unpleasant for sure. Dust, mold, and dampness. But the stench of death
was definitely weaker. “Odd,” he said. “We guessed wrong. The smell isn’t from inside the cabin. Let’s check around back.”

Shea went one way and Teague the other, hugging the rough log walls and ducking to avoid the encroaching tree branches.

Once he rounded the corner, the smell was strong enough to gag him. Holding his breath, he inched forward through a bramble patch.

He cut his hand on a thorny cane when Shea let out a shriek so sharp, it shaved half a decade off his life span. A flock of crows, what seemed like dozens of them, flew up in a flurry of shiny black wings, several fluttering around his head like the crazed birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller. The din was incredible. For endless seconds the world was reduced to a whirling vortex of black feathers and a raucous cawing so loud, he felt as if his eardrums were about to burst.