Hard Rain (9 page)

“Don’t leave me this time,” she yelled, made brave by the fact her words would be swept away by the fearful wind before they reached Jesse. She looked at his face as he held her strong in his arms, even as the waters fought to take them down, jerk them apart. Shamelessly she wished she had made love with him when the house still stood and the world was not a screaming vortex of madness. Damn her pride. Damn his pride. We should have made love, she thought with a wildness rising like the wind. She clutched at him. He responded, his arm tightening, holding her fast against him as if he’d heard her plea.

Don’t leave me.

A ceiling beam struck them from behind, but it was traveling in the same direction as they were and didn’t hurt them. It moved on swiftly and was sunk by the waves before they could grasp it.

The water took them. Jesse reached out and grabbed a thick branch of a tree that had fallen, stopping their travel. They draped themselves over the limb, leaning against each other, shuddering. The clouds were racing at them at ground level. The sky kept changing from gray to black, black to that odd green. Every few minutes it would ignite with white lightning, spotlighting the trees, cars, various household items as if proud of the destruction it had wrought.

Amy watched in fascination as everything from tele
vision sets to shoes came swirling by while the churning surge made its way across the land. Jesse aimed his flashlight beam around them. It bounced off what looked like a pair of red eyes about thirty feet away. Monster eyes, Amy thought, her own eyes widening with terror. He directed the beam back at the eerie gaze. Others were reflected in the light like a hallucination. Then she saw them. Snakes weaved among the low limbs of a tree. Four or five dozen of them, their yellow and black bodies stretched long as if a waking nightmare. Cottonmouth water moccasins. One bite could bring a man to his knees.

Amy looked at the tree they clung too, ready to submit to the surge over snakes. Anything that touched her now made her fearful. She felt something long and cylinder-like brush against her leg and she started, kicking her legs furiously, pulling out of Jesse’s hold.

“Snake,” she screamed in answer to his puzzled look.

He reached down into the rolling waters and retrieved the length of rope left loose between them. She stilled her legs. She heard the edge of hysteria in her laughter. Jesse’s brow knitted into deep lines. He pulled her back to him, his arm tight around her waist, his fist pressed into her rib cage. Through the wet cloth, she could feel the strong lines of his body, the powerful muscles. Lifting her head, she kissed him full on the mouth because he was there. Because she was scared. Because despite the number of times she’d told herself the opposite, she had never stopped loving Jesse Boone.

She kissed him long and deep, pushing her tongue into his mouth with a desire and a desperation, feeling as out of control as the storm around them. She hated the fact she wanted him, that she reveled in the hard thrust of his arousal. She had once believed they’d be together forever. All she knew now was that they were together this moment, her mouth on his, her body pressed to him. Past that, she had no idea what would happen. Life had taught her not to make predictions. She reached up, smoothed her hand over his forehead, trying to ease his worried brow.

She felt the wind drop. At first, she thought she’d imagined it. The kiss ended. She looked into Jesse’s eyes, dark with passion and concern. The noise had died down too. She only needed a slightly louder than normal tone to ask, “It’s over?”

His brow pleated again as he looked around. The world grew calmer, as if the eye of the storm had returned. It had to be the end. No sooner had her hope flared than the winds struck again, crueler after the false calm. The tree gave a violent shudder as if being twisted under the water. Amy held on to Jesse and together they went down again, plunged back into the rushing water, tumbling, fighting fate. Amy lost her grip, felt Jesse’s strong, powerful body slip from her hands. She opened her eyes under the water, saw Jesse’s figure, blurred by the water and movement. She reached out toward him, the waters trying to carry her away. She tumbled, turned upside down and lost him. She fought toward the surface, screaming his name as she broke through the waters. A sound hushed
her, made her fear escalate. A buzzing that was not animal but man-made. Thirty yards away she saw the loose whip of live electric wires ripped down by the storm. The power grid had not shut down yet.

“Amy.”

She swung her head. Jesse was fighting to make his way to her, struggling against the current carrying him in the opposite direction. The rope had tangled around something solid, leaving Amy paddling in place as Jesse tried to reach her.

“I’m caught,” she screamed. A wave rose over her, took her down. She dangled like a marionette, thrashed by the water’s movement, then was thrown to the surface again. She grabbed on to a branch long enough for the wind to lift her, as if it were fighting with the water for her. The wind lost as the branch snapped and she was sucked back down into the dark flood, her screams for Jesse silenced.

Branches scraped her body. Her head hit something solid. She thought of the snakes, her legs thrashing, kicking out in case the serpents had found her in the hellish night. Whatever had snagged the rope had broken free. She was moving with the speed of the waters and wind, not even the resistance of Jesse’s weight dragging on her. With frenzied movements, her hands searched the water, finding the rope that led from her waist, connected her to Jesse like an umbilical cord. She pulled on it hard, bringing it up from beneath the depths. It came easily, the end jaggedly sliced by sharp debris.

She flailed in the water, trying to turn, grab some
thing stationary to stop her runaway motion and allow her to look for Jesse. The cut rope still clutched in her hand, she hit hard against an unmoving surface. She groped blindly, feeling an uphill slope. A roof. She scrambled to gain footing but the pitch was steep and slippery, sending her sliding down into the water again and again until finally she crawled onto its crest. She clung to the roof, her body draped along its slope, heaving gasping breaths of exhaustion.

Jesse.

Buttressed by the roof, she searched around the whirling waters but saw no sign of human life. Electrical lines lay limp across the water’s surface. Thank God the power grid’s safety had kicked in, turned off the juice. The current would have killed a man instantly.

“Jesse,” she screamed. She clung to the roof, wet and shivering, her teeth chattering except when she screamed. She heard a howling as if the earth had answered. Straddling the roof, she twisted her head in the eerie green phosphorescent light to see another cat floating by in a tree’s branches.

“Jesse,” she cried into the wind and sullen light, her fear becoming fueled by anger now. No sense could be made of finding him after fourteen years, only to lose him again…forever. Her mind could not conceive of a god that cruel. “Jesse,” she screamed into the night. A car floated by. She tried to see beyond its windows but doubted Jesse would have crawled inside. It would be too difficult to get out.

“Don’t you do it, Jesse Boone. Don’t you dare leave
me again,” she railed, her fury born of exhaustion and shock and despair. She sat crouched along the roof, clinging to a chimney, refusing to succumb to hopelessness.

She considered her options. She could go back into the water and try to search for him, but if the current had carried him away, it might be impossible to find him. Debris seemed to be coming from every direction, piling against the roof. She saw a baseball cap, small, as if for a boy’s head. Amy thought of her son.

She glimpsed something in the odd assortment of objects floating by. She peered more closely, her fatigue and the green light making much indistinguishable or fantastic. She saw a hand, an arm waving as if in celebration.

“Jesse,” she screamed, clinging to the chimney so hard her muscles ached and begged for release. Through the roar and the howls and the moans, she heard a faint but sweet sound.

“Amy.”

She smiled for the first time in many hours and slumped against the chimney. Jesse, gripping a large slab of siding, was heading toward her. She saw the rope trailing in the water behind him. He crawled up onto the roof, wet, bruised, blood trickling from scratches along his cheek, but very much alive.

Amy clutched his wet shirt. She was shaking so hard she could hear her bones rattle. “I thought…the rope…it was cut…and I thought—” The words were coming out as incoherent and out of control as the night.

“I thought…I thought…” She clung to him now, her
hands feeling his shoulders, arms, chest with a healer’s touch but also a touch of wonder. “I thought…”

Her voice was trembling with feeling and she couldn’t finish her sentence, overcome by emotions—relief, anger, fear. Her hands clutched his wet shirt again, her fingers fisting the cloth.

“Amy,” he said with a tenderness so at odds with the havoc around them.

For the first time in fourteen years, she started sobbing.

“I thought you’d left me again.”

N
EITHER OF THEM
knew how long they stayed like that, clinging to the chimney and each other. Huddled together, their bodies provided heat as well as comfort. She had cried. He had stroked her hair, kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her forehead until her sobs had subsided. He didn’t say he would never leave her again. Now was not the time for promises.

Together they waited for daylight. The wind pressure eased. The temperature rose. The heavy rain was soon only drizzle. The clouds rolled back. Amy and Jesse leaned on each other, their legs pulled up and their chins on their knees, and faced east. The morning broke calm and blue as if proclaiming its innocence of the night before. They had survived the night, the storm. Would they survive the secrets that had been revealed? And the one secret Amy had not yet disclosed?

She straightened her back and gazed out at the crazy waters around them, objects floating by in nonsensical fashion. In the light, the beachfront was like a battlefield. The waters had carried them far up the coast. Several houses looked as if they had exploded or collapsed in on themselves, but two or three on tall
stilts remained almost untouched. The only pattern was that there was no pattern. Amy sat, thinking of life’s caprices.

As the storm dissolved, the sea had receded, leaving behind only a few feet of water in which to float a menagerie of items, like a Daliesque bubble bath. Piles of cars, boats, houses, furniture and mattresses rose up like ruins.

“The Coast Guard should be the first to come by,” Jesse said, surveying the landfill. “Patrolling against looters.” He looked at the houses, high on their pilings, that had survived. “We could go to one of those houses. There’d be food. Dry clothes.”

He looked at her, his scarred face scratched and cut with the night’s terror. She saw the weariness in his eyes and knew the same was reflected in hers. She tucked back a limp strand of hair behind her ear and nodded.

They shimmied down the roof and trudged toward the standing houses. The water wasn’t icy or high, but the dampness had reached down to their bones, wrapping them in a chill as if they’d never be warm again. As they approached the houses, they saw the back and side had been blown off the first one, revealing the contents, which were untouched by wind or water. It was like the open back of a child’s dollhouse. Even the stairs were intact.

They moved on to the next house. The windows were blown out and shingles torn away, exposing the black tar paper below, but otherwise, it was untouched. Amy and Jesse climbed the stairs and unlocked the
door by reaching through a hole where a window panel had been. They entered a wide living room separated from the kitchen by a long, curving counter. Large windows in the spacious room looked out at the devastated houses, the fallen, broken trees, the small hills of refrigerators, appliances, cars and construction materials. Amy didn’t realize she had begun to shake again until Jesse laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Let me see if I can find towels, a blanket.”

She nodded, although her trembling was not from the cold. It was from fear. Within the house’s shelter, she was again struck by how close they’d come to death…and how lucky they’d been to survive. Jesse came back in to the room. His arms were filled with a stack of towels.

“It’s amazing they’re dry.”

“It’s amazing we’re alive.”

He set the towels on the table and shook open a large one. He wrapped it around Amy’s shoulders, lightly massaging the length of her arms and back to warm her. “It is amazing,” he agreed. His voice was husky. He stepped away from her, selecting a towel for himself. Turning his back to her, he stripped off his shirt and began drying his upper body. She saw the scars again in the new daylight, symbols of his survival. A survival fought for again only hours ago. Fought with her instead of alone. He’d had no choice this time.

He turned, the towel draped around his neck, to find her in front of him. Her hand came up slowly, her fingers tracing the new scrapes and scratches on his face. Death had never been as close as the life that now swept through her veins in a hot rush. She did not know what
she wanted or what Jesse wanted. She did not know what would happen in the days to follow. All she knew was that she wanted to feel this alive for the moment. Alive. Her senses heightened. Her fatigue recharged with pure adrenaline. Jesse Boone was right here in front of her, beneath her touch. Anything seemed possible.

“Amy—”

It was a question. She touched a forefinger to his lips. “Don’t say it.” Words that would stop her.

“Amy…”

She moved closer, leaned into him. “Don’t say it.” she whispered.

“Amy…” The question was weakened by desire and a need too long aching inside him. Amy knew because it was the same for her.

Her body fit against him. Only a breath of hesitation now. He still had not touched her, as if he’d given up the right long ago. She felt the hard tension of his body, the way his breath held tight in his chest, the desire. She lifted her face to his.

“Amy,” he said, just as she’d imagined for fourteen years. A single tear slipped down her face.

“Jesse…” she whispered in a trembling breath.

He bowed his head and captured the word in his mouth as he touched his lips to hers. Her mouth quivered beneath his. He lifted his mouth and whispered her name again. His gaze asked a final time.

“I don’t know what we can have, Jesse,” she answered, her voice shaking with desire and need. “All I know is we can have this. We can have now.”

He bent his head to her. He did not ask again. They did not speak again. There was no need. Everything was said with a look, a touch, a shuddering breath, a sigh. The innocent light of the new day bathed their skin, the warm air caressed them. They stripped off their wet clothes, left with nothing but their aching, throbbing need. He stepped back, his hands running up and down her arms, and she felt bereft at even this temporary separation.

She stood before him and let him look at her now. No longer a teen with a newly formed figure but a woman of thirty-two who had won battles also. Her scars were not so many and hardly visible. A softening of the belly stretched by childbirth, a fullness to the breasts. The waist was not so narrow, the skin not as tight and unblemished as in youth, but otherwise she was slim and strong. With a wildness, an eagerness of the young and the innocent inside her. The way Jesse had made her feel fourteen years ago. The way she’d never thought she’d feel again.

Raising her hand, she laid it on his abdomen, felt it contract beneath her palm with a sharp intake of breath. With a growl, he pulled her to him. Cupping her face, he claimed her mouth, plundering it with long, slow, voluptuous strokes of his tongue, claiming her the way no other man ever could. She drew him into her mouth, nipping at him, wanting to own him as he already owned her.

It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t possibly be enough. But it was more than she’d dreamt possible.

They moved as one across the room and fell onto a
long, deep-cushioned sofa. She heard her own voice, a moaning, triumphant, powerful sound like the wind that had ravaged them throughout the night. A guttural groan answered her. The wildness was inside them. Jesse ravished her mouth, drawing the breath from her body and making it his while her hungry, eager hands explored every inch of heated flesh.

Her skin was like fire everywhere he touched. He moved his mouth down her throat, opened it on a breast and drew her inside with a fierce need while his hands cupped her buttocks and lifted her against him. Still it wasn’t enough. The hunger between them was too great. Fourteen years of pain and desire and dreams stripped away the gentleness, exposing a raw, aching, overwhelming need. She wrapped her legs around his hips. He lowered the length of his body, and with a soul-wrenching groan, entered her soft and willing body.

Amy cried out her own sound of conquest. They’d beaten fate, not once, but twice. She opened wide in triumph, taking him in deeper and deeper while the dark ripples of sensation spread through her. Her body hugged him in possession and with unbridled pleasure. Her muscles contracted, pulsing as he drove into her. They moved together with wordless pleas. She wanted to remember everything. The taste of salt on skin, the wondrous relief of his muscled body, but the sensations blended, became warm and wet, hard and soft. Need. Urgency. They met in a crescendo, a shattering climax that drove through her like a lightning bolt and exploded. She cried out. Their gazes locked. Her heart split wide open.

It was like seeing the clouds roll away and the blue sky of morning rise triumphant after the night’s attack. It was like coming home. Even as exhaustion and satisfaction swept over them, his lips moved over hers, against her scratched cheek, her damp hair, as if the chance might not come again and he had to get his fill now. They lay in each other’s arms like two lovers, as if fourteen years had never separated them.

But it had.

Even now, as they lay sated and together, a sorrow ran through Amy. A sorrow for what they had missed, for what Jesse had missed, the sacrifice he had made that he didn’t even realize yet. She would not deny her love for him. It had always been a part of her. Even when she didn’t know what had happened to him, when she feared him dead, when she’d hated him, she had loved him. She had never had a choice. Her heart had been his from the beginning. It could not belong to anyone else. But there were other considerations now besides Jesse and her.

She looked at him, naked to her soul. “I dreamed of this.”

“You were supposed to forget me, get on with your life.” Gruffness filled his voice.

“You never thought, maybe late at night, or in the early dawn, there was a chance? We could be together again?”

“I did.” He paused. She traced the curve of his shoulder.

“It’s all I thought about the first seven years after the accident. Getting well enough, strong enough to go to you. Not as a cripple but as a man.”

“And?” she asked when he didn’t continue.

“I found out your address in California. I called the phone listing.”

She stared at him.

“Your husband answered.”

She looked down at the finger where her wedding band had once been. “If he hadn’t…”

“It was too late.”

She idly ran her fingertips up and down his arm. The question hung in the air between them unspoken, neither anxious to know the answer.
Was it still too late?

Later they could be brave, but not now. Not when they’d only just found each other again.

They spent the next several hours in each other’s arms, alternately making love and holding each other, trying to erase the years apart. Even though it was late afternoon, they heard the boat engines too soon. Too much had been left unsaid.

“The Guard must have made it to the beach.” Neither of them moved. Their gazes locked but neither spoke. Finally Jesse rose to a sitting position. “We should find some dry clothes, get dressed.”

She sat up. “Yes, we’ve got to get back.” She stood, started toward another closet to look for clothes when he grabbed her hand and pulled her back against the length of his body. Cupping her face between his palms, he looked at her as if he feared it was the last time he would see her. He lowered his head, captured her lips one last time.

“Thank you,” he whispered against her parted lips as if it were already over.

Was it?
she wondered. She had no answer.

She found an oversize sweatshirt, a pair of bike shorts and rubber thongs. For Jesse a T-shirt, sweat-pants and sneakers a little too small. He scribbled a note with his name and telephone number to the homeowners, detailing the clothes they had borrowed and asking them to contact him so he could reimburse them. They stepped out onto the deck and waited until the motorboat faced their way, then flagged their arms.

The boat pulled along the shore as Amy and Jesse made their way down the deck steps to the beach.

“I’m Sheriff Jesse Boone from Turning Point,” Jesse called to the two guardsmen as they came near. “This is Dr. Amy Sherwood from Courage Bay, California. Came in with a team yesterday morning to assist during the hurricane.”

“You two were out here on the beach last night?” one of the guardsmen asked as they climbed into the boat.

Jesse explained that they’d been looking for a group of teenagers when they were stranded.

The men shook their heads. “You two are damn lucky.”

Amy looked at Jesse. “We know,” she said with a rare smile.

“We can bring you in through the laguna, hook you up with a vehicle, but you’ll probably have to go north and backtrack if you want to get home. Even then, roads might be impassable.”

“It’s worth a try,” Jesse told them.

The boat sped north toward Corpus Christi which
except for heavy winds and rains had escaped the worst of the storm’s wrath. But along the way, even from a distance, the scenery was a wasteland of shattered homes, destroyed dreams. Houses were no more than flat stacks of debris. Wires hung like snakes from telephone poles. Crushed cars were piled on top of each other or protruded out of the water. Above, the sun shone fierce and high, the sky a brilliant, bold blue; below, devastation.

“Do you know how far in the storm hit?” Jesse asked the men.

“It made landfall farther south than expected and moved inland forty, fifty miles or so, but it hit hardest along the shore. You folks saw it at its meanest. We’ll be cleaning up this one for some time.”

Jesse nodded, his face grim as the boat sped by the miles of houses tipped on their sides, ripped from their foundations. “Any word on the area around Turning Point?”

“Storm did a good amount of damage, but reports are it weakened as it headed inland. You’re seeing the worst of it right now.”

Jesse expelled a breath. His disconcerted expression was the only sign of his fear for his town and its people. He was a man who revealed little emotion, a fact that underscored the depth of his feeling, Amy thought. She knew. Over the years, she too had trained herself to keep her emotions under control. Until last night. She glanced at Jesse, her heart as vulnerable as fourteen years ago. It was not a comfortable feeling. She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the oversize
sweatshirt to her body, and forced herself to focus mentally. There would be people who needed her help. She could not afford to be distracted by emotion.