If You Loved Me (18 page)

"What would you do this time, Emma? What would you do if you were carrying my child?"

She sat and pulled one of the sleeping bags toward her.

"This time?" she echoed, her voice false in his ears.

"Would you do it again? Would you marry Alex and have my child, pretending it's his?"

"Chris is
not
your son."

He wanted to take her shoulders in his hands, shake her until there were no words, then touch and...

Instead, he left her there, naked in his tent with his sleeping bag clutched close as if for protection. Outside he found her jeans and her shirt lying where he'd tossed them when he undressed her. He left them, too.

Down by the water he sat on a log and stared at the past, remembering the day he'd come home from the meeting with the lawyer to find Emma waiting outside his door. He had a mass of debts hanging over his father's estate and a girl too firmly under her father's possessive thumb.

"I love you," she had whispered.

Even as a kid, he'd known promises of love meant less than nothing.

Chapter 8

Gray woke to a silent morning. No wind stirred as he fed the fire and boiled water for coffee. Even the animals seemed to be on holiday, motionless or gone to the next inlet.

He let Emma sleep while he got the coffee ready, then poured it into a thermos he fetched from the plane. He'd been aware of her restlessness through the night. When he'd come back from his midnight walk, he'd known she was awake, holding herself stiff and silent.

Although his fury at her continued denial that Chris was his son had cooled to ice along with his ardor, he wasn't going to lie beside her, listening to her silence.

He'd grabbed the sleeping bag and spent the night on a bed of cedar branches near the fire. Eventually he'd slept. From the sounds of tossing and turning in the tent, Emma must still have been awake when he dropped off.

He left the thermos and a mug by the fire, went down to the plane and turned on the radio, but couldn't raise Prince Rupert Coast Guard. He hadn't really expected to make contact; he figured the hill on the north side of the inlet would block the radio signals. He'd check in after they took off.

He untied the Jerry cans he'd hung from the wings, dumped the seawater from three of them back into the ocean, then stored those cans and the rope in the back.

The tide was lower than it had been last night, exposing a couple of deadheads, waterlogged boom logs that would be in the way when he tried to run the plane out into the water. They were too big to shift, so he dug into the back of the plane for his chain saw, pulled it out, fueled it and checked the chain, then fired it up.

He knew the chain saw's roar would wake Emma when it split the quiet morning air. He was frustrated and angry enough that h didn't give a damn.

He cut four pieces off the logs, each about a foot long, and rolled them up the beach above the high tide line where they wouldn't float off on the next tide, one more hazard to navigation.

When he got back to the campfire, he found Emma up and dressed, struggling to roll her sleeping bag. He left her to it while he collapsed the tent.

"Coffee in the thermos," he said.

"Thanks."

In silence, he collapsed the tent and packed it up, then doused the fire with the Jerry can of water he'd carried up from shore.

"Let's go," he said.

* * *

It was a good day for searching, bright enough to see details on shore easily, while a light cloud formation in the east masked the sun's glare. From the activity on the radio, Gray knew twenty miles to their south the Coast Guard helicopter was flying its search pattern over the area Gray and Emma had searched the day before. Setting out from Kxngeal Inlet, he and Emma would be covering ground the chopper had searched yesterday.

He noted the white line around Emma's mouth. In the last twenty-four hours they'd investigated an orange Jerry can, several scraps of ruined orange tarps, and an abandoned fisherman's Scotsman float. With each false alarm, the woman beside him grew visibly more tense.

As the sun broke over the top of a mountain to the east, Gray dropped the plane down to escape the glare. In the headphones, he heard Emma gasp.

"There!"

The bay below them was too shallow for most fishing boats. Gray couldn't see anything in the direction Emma pointed, so he dropped his starboard wing and saw what had her attention. A splash of color through Emma's window, debris on shore.

Or people.

Emma grabbed his shirt with her clenched fist as he banked away from the beach. "Back! Turn back! It's them! It's got to be them!"

He snapped her name and she fell silent with a gulp.

"I'm circling back to check. We'll check everything."

His memory of the inlet told him there wasn't enough water for a takeoff or landing much past half tide. Right now the tide was falling, so it would be tricky.

He gained some altitude and circled the inlet, then grabbed the chart from Emma's lap and concentrated on the details. He'd go down for a landing, leaving himself room to abort if he found a hazard in his path.

He knew the people on the beach might be anyone—sports fishermen, a honeymoon couple, or even two middle-aged office clerks taking a break from bureaucracy. Adding a downed seaplane to be rescued wouldn't help find Chris and Jordy.

He circled and lined up on the little bay for the second time, then came in low and slow enough to catch a flash of two heads; one brunette, the other blonde. He felt Emma's fist pound his thigh.

"It is! It's Chris! He's waving! They're okay! They're really okay!"

He turned and made his final descent, landing into the wind, facing away from the boys on shore. A blonde and a brunette. Gray himself had been blonde until his hair darkened to copper in his late teens.

As the plane slowed in the water, Emma twisted to keep the shore and the boys in sight. Gray gripped the controls and made the plane turn in the water to face the boys.

"They look healthy, don't you think?" Emma's lips were parted, asking Gray to tell her everything was fine. He realized in that moment he would always want her. Despite her lies, despite the fact she belonged to another man, he needed to reach for her, to imprison her shoulders and pull her close, bend his head and plunder those parted lips, his need and his anger so deeply mixed there was no line between.

The dark-haired kid waved to them. Chris's friend. Gray signaled with one arm and the boys backed away from the clearing toward the trees. He tuned out Emma's words and tried not to feel her hand on his arm as he ran the plane up on the scrap of beach.

Emma exploded from the plane as it stopped, flying through the door on her side and down onto the sand. As she moved toward the boys, Gray saw she was limping slightly.

He reached for his door, wondering how the hell a man greeted a son he'd never known existed, the living evidence of his obsession for a woman he'd be better off without.

As Gray opened his door he heard Emma's voice.

"Chris! Oh, God! I was worried sick!"

"Aw, Mom..."

Gray landed on the float with both feet.

Emma stood on the beach, her arms around a tall skinny youth. Over Emma's shoulder, Gray saw the boy grin with a mixture of relief and self-consciousness.

"Aw, Mom," he said again, "we were okay."

Emma's son was slim and wiry, as if he'd grown too fast. Even the hand he raised to his hair was thin. Gray recognized the gesture, recognized the thin youthful stance and the voice.

"You didn't need to worry about us. Nothing drastic. Three more days and we'd have had it beat."

Gray hadn't seen Paul Garrett in eighteen years, but Emma's son was the image of his father. Paul's image.

The blonde kid must be Jordy, the friend.

Ever since Emma told him why she had come, he'd been consumed by anger. Even in the midst of losing himself in her arms, the anger had boiled close to the surface. The only thing that made sense was that she'd had his child, that she'd kept it from him, pretending all those years that it was Paul's. He hadn't once considered she might have told the truth, that her kid would turn out to be Paul Garrett's son, her husband's child.

Gray felt a sharp rage because Christopher Garrett was not his son. It didn't make any sense at all, but if Emma had
his
child, it would be almost as if she had never been with anyone else, as if she had truly belonged to Gray MacKenzie through all these years, as if he possessed both the younger Emma and the woman she'd become today.

That was the fairy tale.

The truth was that once, when they were both too damned young to have any sense at all, Emma had declared love for him in one breath, then married his best friend only weeks later and borne that friend's child.

The fury slashed through his body. As if she felt it, Emma turned toward him and her eyes widened.

Deliberately, he stared at her until she flushed with memory. Last night... his hands on her flesh...

One thing hadn't changed. He could still stir her passion, and he'd make damned sure she never forgot him again. Maybe he couldn't stop her from marrying Dr. Alex Whosis, but he'd do everything in his power to ensure it was Gray MacKenzie in her dreams.

* * *

Emma climbed into the seaplane with a sense of unreality. With one hand on the door of the plane, she turned back.

"Three days," she called to the boys on the beach.

"I know," Chris answered. "If you don't hear in three days you'll send out the search parties. Don't worry." He was grinning, a sign Emma hadn't fussed too much over the reunion.

She had always been determined her son would not live his life restricted by overprotective parents. Because of that determination, she'd fought back her need to insist both boys climb into Gray's plane and fly back to Prince Rupert with her.

"We can't leave all this stuff behind," Chris insisted when she mentioned the possibility, as if afraid she would make him do just that. Her son had looked to Gray for support.

Gray had watched as if he'd been turned into one of those nasty looking rocks that boats struck before they sank. Emma was unnerved by the expression on his face, but it didn't have that effect on Chris, who acted as if Gray were an old family friend.

"We're set now we've got the paddle you gave us, sir, not to mention the extra grub." He grinned at Gray, then turned to his mother. "See, Mom? Two days to Prince Rupert. We can change our tickets and be home with days to spare before I have to go back to school."

"We'll be careful," Jordy offered. " No foolish stunts."

Emma's eyes caught on Gray. What was he thinking? He'd been glowering ever since they got out of the plane, his anger masked so thinly she felt it surging through herself, too.

Something hot flashed between them. Gray
was
furious with her, but why?

He turned to the boys. "No foolish stunts? What about ferrying through that pass at maximum flood?"

Chris grimaced. "Yeah, that wasn't too bright of me, trying to slide across that line of waves." He made a gesture of embarrassment. " It was too rough for ferry gliding."

Emma's body tensed. She didn't know what ferry gliding was, but it was obviously hazardous.

"...that Eskimo roll," Chris explained. "The tide rip was a killer. When I came back up without my paddle..."

The lack of a paddle had held the boys in this inlet for over a week, because the spare paddle clipped to the outside of Chris's kayak had also been lost in the roll. When Gray's plane landed, they'd almost finished carving a new one. Paring a tree down into a paddle with a small hatchet and two penknives wasn't an easy job. When Gray produced one of the kayak paddles strapped to his pontoon, the boys had been happy to abandon their jury-rigged effort.

"But it would have worked," Chris had insisted.

"It would have gotten you into port," Gray agreed. "But why not take the new paddle and cruise in comfort?"

Comfort! Sitting in the floor of a kayak in cold seawater, paddling through choppy channels, doing Eskimo rolls in cold water when the current caught the boat wrong—it certainly wasn't her idea of comfort.

"If you do a roll again," she'd ordered the boys, "get to shore immediately and dry out. That water's cold. You're at risk of hypothermia even in the summer."

"Come on, Mom! We know the rules!"

She knew they did, and the thought of her overprotective father made her suppress a whole series of cautions. She could have hugged Gray when he got the boys to take out their chart so that he could pass on what he termed a bit of local knowledge.

"We'd appreciate it, Mr. MacKenzie," Jordy said.

"Right," agreed Chris. "We can use any inside info we can get."

Gray went over the whole route with them, and then mentioned casually he'd be flying over the anchorage they'd planned for tomorrow night. "I'll drop in and beg a cup of coffee."

Chris laughed. "Come for dinner. You'll be eating your own food. And thanks again for the grub."

"Any time." Gray stood and brushed off his jeans. "Your mother and I had better take off now. If we don't get out of here, we'll be stuck for six hours until the tide comes in."