Embers (45 page)

And that was when it hit him with the full force of a blow to the gut: there probably wouldn't be a next time.

He was due, overdue, at his career. The faxes and phone messages from the department had steadily increased
—
there
had been
three of them at the
Bar Harbor
station just now
—
and he didn't know how much longer he could keep his captain at bay.

Convalescence from a gunshot was one thing; trying to use up, all at once, the years of vacation that he'd piled up was another scenario altogether. If he didn't go back soon, they'd be convinced he was having re
-entry problems after the shoot
out
—
the kiss of death to his career.

"Problems at the office?" she asked him out of the blue.

How did she know that? Had she been intercepting his faxes in town? No, he realized; she was merely being her psychic self.

"My boss thinks I'm stalling; that I'm a burnout case," he said, surprising himself with his candor.

She looked taken aback. "I was just being facetious," she said. "Anyway, aren't you on vacation?" she added.

"They don't like you to take too much of it," he said dryly.

"Because?"

"A good cop's not supposed to need it. You get out of the rhythm, out of the flow. And your case load goes all to hell." He added laconically, "It shows a lack of dedication."

She'd been listening intently to his answer. "It does make sense," she admitted with a rueful shrug.

If only
Lydia
had been so understanding.

He said, "You got home all right the other night?" It was a fairly dumb question, but he wanted to bring the subject around to the dance, to the kiss.

He was watching her for a reaction and he got a surprising one: her face clouded over into a dark frown.

"Yes," she said, clearly troubled. "I went into the shed when I got back." She hesitated, then said, "Someone had broken into it. The dollhouse was ransacked."

''What?"

He made her tell him everything. It was like pulling teeth; she was as reluctant a witness as he'd ever interrogated. Exasperated, he finally said, "You didn't report this to the police. You didn't tell me. How do you expect us to know about this, for God's sake? By reading tea leaves?"

She rounded on him and said, "Well, I've told you now, haven't I
—
and look what's happened. We've brought the outside world here, into
Acadia
. Who cares about ransacked toys? Who cares about police politics, for that matter? We can't care, because there's nothing either of us can do about the other's problems. All we can do is enjoy what we have. Here. Now."

She climbed back on her bike and rode off angrily.

She was right. God help them both, she was right. Wyler's days in
Bar Harbor
were numbered; they'd known that from the start. It was absurd to think that he could just up and forget about
the
ransacking, but he could set it aside. For here. For now. Just as Meg could set his career
—
and her sister
—
aside. For here. For now.

They resumed their journey south, riding in silence. The plaintive sound of the swaying balsams gradually resumed its hypnotic hold on Wyler, and his spirit became serene once more. They saw no one else. He began to think that she'd led him to some enchanted, primeval place where only they existed.

They passed a couple of sailboats moored in a picturesque cove, then headed north alongside an open meadow surrounding a quiet, picture-perfect pond. Meg pointed to a small boathouse hanging over the water.

"We can stop here for an early lunch, if you like," she said. He did like. He wanted to put things right again between them, and that wasn't possible when they were riding alongside each other.

They walked their bikes through the meadow, scaring up crickets in their path, and laid them against the wraparound deck of the little shingled building.

The boathouse, still privately owned, was in perfect repair. They peeked through multipaned windows and discovered a small rowboat floating inside the locked doors, ready to save lives or to carry away guests who were lucky enough to have access to it.

Wyler whistled softly in admiration. Who had this kind of money? Okay, the answer was easy enough
—
the Rockefellers —
but really; who had this kind of money?

They sat down in the shade of the freshly painted deck. With an ironic flourish, Wyler opened Meg's box lunch for her: roast-beef sub, brownie, carton of lemonade.

"I have a feeling that caviar's a more common snack on this deck," he said, hating Mr. Rockefeller and all his kin, despite their generosity to the public.

"This is perfect," Meg said with a smile that left him begging for more.

She sat back against the building and took an appreciative bite out of her sub. He did too, while they gazed in lazy contentment at the scene before them: a field of golden grass rolling gently down to a pond of clear water dotted with white lilies and—yes, he had to admit—charmingly picturesque patches of seaweed.

To the south and west was the enchanted forest they'd just ridden through, and beyond that, the sea. To the north, a trio of mountaintops reminded him, if he needed reminding, that this was not
Illinois
. It was an unbelievably lovely sight. If some hack painter had decided to put one of everything scenic into a single painting, this was what he'd come up with.

"You're not really envious of the owners, are you?" she asked him suddenly.

Amazed by the question, he said, "Of course I am. I'll admit it; I'
m not proud: i
t bugs the hell out of me." He added, "Doesn't all the wealth bother you?"

She laughed. "You're kidding. Who would I be jealous of? Some poor guy in a sealed-in office in
Manhattan
who's trying to do right by the family fortune? We're the ones with the view. We 're the ones with the picnic lunch."

"We're the ones with each other," he said, reaching out to caress her cheek. He had to do it; she was completely irresistible to him.

Meg's cheek flushed a deep rose, as if his touch had burned her; it gave him an absurd amount of pleasure to see it. They went on eating in companionable silence.

One of Meg's bigger speeches came when she pointed to a water-lily leaf and said simply, "Frog."

He was struck anew with the difference between Meg and her sister. Allie would've jumped up and said, "Oh, look, a little green frog, isn't it cute, let's try to catch it, we'll take off our shoes and wade in after it, come on, are you game?"

Yep. Allie made him feel young, all right. But Meg
—
he glanced at the woman enjoying the scene so contentedly
—
Meg made him feel whole.

It was a nice old frog, sitting in the sun and minding its own business. Wyler was happy to leave it that way.

They finished their sandwiches and Wyler was careful to pick up every last crumb. It was the least he could do for the poor joker in
Manhattan
.

After that they ate their brownies and drank their lemonade and
—
somehow or other
—
Wyler ended
up telling Meg about the shoot
out in
Chicago
that had cost him a piece of his thighbone and a chunk of his confidence.

It was a violation of her
Acadia
rules; he knew that. But he had to let her know that he wasn't going back merely to be captain, or superintendent, or ambassador to
Rome
for that matter. He was going back to
Chicago
to prove that he could go back.

He had to. Everything he was, everything he'd ever struggled to be, was in
Chicago
. He felt honor bound to explain that to her. Here. Now. In this magic place where silence was golden, and words, if they were to be spoken at all, had to mean something.

Oddly enough, Meg didn't turn away from the subject the way she did when he'd talked about his ambitions on the force. Maybe it was b
ecause the outcome of the shoot
out
—
a little girl murdered, her stepfather killed, a copper wounded
— touched her maternal instincts. Whatever the reason, Meg seemed to want to hear him out.

"But why are you blaming yourself?" she asked when he was done. "From what you say, these hostage, or barricade, situations are extremely unpredictable. You couldn't have known that the man had another gun besides the one he threw out."

"You have to assume it," he said in a grim voice.

"But what difference could you have made?" Meg argued gently. "The little girl was already dead when you got there."

"Her stepfather wasn't. The negotiators were right," he insisted doggedly, "and I was wrong. I never should've gone anywhere near the kill zone. The guy was clearly suicidal. I was his hand-picked audience. I've racked my brain, trying to remember him. But sixth grade was a long time ago. I don't know how the hell he remembered me, or why I was important to him.

"All I know is, he was waiting for me. He expected to be taken out, and he wasn't disappointed. I don't even think he wanted to hurt me. He only wanted to die. Suicide by cop: it's a modern phenomenon. And I played right into it."

"You're a homicide detective, not a hostage expert."

"Right," he said bleakly. "Good detective, lousy cop."

Meg wrapped her arms around her knees and stared at her ankles. "The girl was only four?"

"Yeah," he said morosely.

"Do you know why he shot her?"

Wyler shrugged. "He'd just got fired. His girlfriend was leaving him. A double whammy. He'd planned to take her out, too, but she managed to get away."

Wyler closed his eyes. The event washed over him with a pain more searing than the rip of the bullet through his thigh. He'd done everything he knew how to put that saga behind him. Nothing had worked. Thinking about it, not thinking about it; talking about it, not talking about it
—
nothing had worked.

He stared at the frog, so close that you could have thrown a potato at it, and began being sucked back into a depression. Christ, he thought. Not here. Not now.

"Tom," she said softly. "Let it go. It's over."

He opened his eyes and turned to her, and she put her hand on his shoulder and kissed him. Her lips were warm, her skin petal soft from their exertions on the trails. Her hair clung to her neck in dark, damp strands and she smelled, not of designer perfume like her sister, but of something more elemental and infinitely more appealing: the warm, seductive scent of a woman.

He shuddered and returned the kiss, turning it into something more, his tongue deep inside her mouth, his hands sliding restlessly across her back. Meg moaned softly, sending his arousal to a new, more fervent pitch. He kissed her with wet, random caresses, ending at the hollow of her throat, chanting her name again and again, lost in the wonder of his hunger for her.

She was wearing a sleeveless blouse the color of gold wildflowers. He unbuttoned the top buttons, sliding his mouth to the top of her breast, cupping her breast in his hand, some primitive part of him relishing its weight. Earth goddess, he thought, not for the first time. He wanted to come to her, into her, to encircle her and have her legs surround him.

He slipped her bra away from her breast and kissed the nipple, teasing and tasting until it was swollen and erect. Meg gasped and arched herself into his kiss; the slow, shuddering intake of her breath reminded him of the sound the swaying balsams had made high over their heads in the woods.

She was silent, not protesting with pretty words, not even uttering his name; nothing. The effect on him was profoundly erotic; he felt as if he was making love to some mythic creature, half goddess, half woman.

He lifted his head from Meg's breast and watched her face, her closed eyes, her partly opened mouth, as he slid open the zipper of her cutoffs and slipped his hand inside, stroking and petting, making her wet. Her arousal made her more beautiful than ever to him: her high cheekbones, flushed with desire; her soft brown lashes, caught together in tears; her full, unpainted mouth, erotically, invitingly parted.

He was hard in a way he'd never thought it was possible to be, hard enough that he ached. He bent his head over hers and kissed her again, awestruck by the depth of her arousal, wildly frustrated by the depth of his own.

"Meg
...
ah, Meggie
...
let me make love to you," he whispered into her parted lips.

A tear slid from under her eyelid, down her cheek. She put her hands behind his neck and kissed him deeply, her desire rippling through her.

"But not here," she murmured.

Only then did it occur to him that he had Meg half undressed on the deck of a boathouse positioned over a pond by an open meadow.