If You Loved Me (21 page)

Outside the bedroom, she heard Gray's bare feet going down the stairs. He might want her, but when she came back out of the bedroom with her suitcase, he'd be fast enough to take her to the plane. Their relationship had always been a push-pull affair. Whenever they came close to sharing intimacy, Gray pulled back.

Or she did. She was the one who'd come running into this bedroom to hide when he said he wanted her. It was self-preservation. Whatever she did, she had to keep herself together until she got away from Gray. If she didn't, she could melt in a moment, just as she had last night in Kxngeal Inlet.

When she got home and talked to Alex, her real life would come back into focus. She'd remember how natural it had felt to say yes when Alex asked her to marry him, the quiet contentment that she wouldn't be living alone, that she'd have a friend in her home. Of course, they would be lovers, too, she and Alex. It wouldn't be this storm she felt inside when she thought of Gray, but she didn't want that. It was too much.

Her feet sounded loud going down the hardwood stairs, the noise distorted and unreal. She needed a glass of water, something to fight this dizziness. She certainly wasn't going to let herself faint in Gray MacKenzie's house!

She put her suitcase beside the front door.

Where was Gray? Where had he gone?

When she was a girl, she'd thought of Gray with alternate desperation and excitement, but these last two days she'd learned another Gray—a man she could sit beside for hours in an airplane, a man who could make her feel calm and confident even when she was searching for her lost son, a man who touched her in the night with the storm blowing above.

She stared at the sofa bracketed by two overstuffed easy chairs. What would it be like to sit there on a Sunday afternoon, lazing a rainy day away with a book? On a day like that, Gray might slip out with his camera to catch a deer, head turned and eyes alert in the misty rain. When the film was gone, he would come home.

She would look up when she heard him call out her name. She would...

Damn! She was too mature to become tangled in old dreams. She had patients and a man she'd promised to marry waiting for her back in Seattle.

Had he gone out to the plane? She hadn't heard the front door, but maybe he'd opened it softly, slipping outside to wait for her.

She'd be a fool to walk into the arms of a man who'd never loved her. He gave love to the kids he helped in that camp around the corner, to his dog, to the wife he'd told her he once had, but wouldn't talk about. Why had he loved another woman enough to marry her, while Emma had always yearned
—

Get over it!

Seattle. She needed to focus on her own home. She would walk through her front door and find the answering machine blinking because her mother would have called Sunday, and there would be at least one message from Alex, wanting news of Chris. Marmalade would wind around her ankles and—

No, Marmalade was at the kennels.

Okay, so she'd pick the cat up on her way home. The point was, she'd be home where she wanted to be. Where she was comfortable.

It took less than half an hour to fly to Prince Rupert. That was the first step.

This was stupid, really stupid. She was acting like the woman in that movie she'd seen with Alex two weeks ago, a woman who ruined her life because she couldn't let go of the past.

Next time she saw Gray's name, it would be on the cover of one of his books. She had a picture of his life now. She knew a little about his world. When she turned the pages of his books, she would recognize
some
of the places. She would know what it was like to come down out of the sky and glide over a pod of killer whales with Gray at her side. She would remember hearing a wolf howl in the dark and knowing she was safe with Gray close by her, the breathless memory of a thin tent all around and Gray only a touch away, of standing in the moonlight in his arms, Gray beginning to make love to her, the wilds all around.

An album of memories.

For years a part of her had regretted not being rash enough to go with him past the end of her world. Now she would have a new regret. She'd only ever had a few moments of his loving. She'd been empty for him all the years between, and last night she had been so close to loving with him, until the moment she shoved the possibility of a pregnancy between them.

They'd been right to stop last night, but if she walked away now, she would always regret not taking that chance to discover what it would be like with him...

She found him in the darkroom.

The door stood open, revealing Gray sorting a pile of prints on the counter. He'd put on a checked shirt that looked as if it would be soft to her touch and he wore casual shoes over his bare feet.

Her breath caught as if she were a panicked child. Fear pulsed in her veins as it had when she was wheeled into the operating room at the age of eleven, old enough to know people could die on operating tables.

Today, the danger was to her mind and her heart, not her body. If she left now, it would be cowardice.

She cleared her throat. "You asked me to stay."

He put the prints down on the counter. She wished he would smile, but his mouth was sober, his lips straight. He stared at her until she shuddered and the world was nothing but the man watching and her own pulse beating.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

She was back in that room, back in his arms, Gray staring down at her. She could feel him trembling from their loving, hear the echo of her own cry when the sudden pain flashed through her and away. She'd stared into his eyes, their bodies still touching intimately, the damp flush of passion everywhere, and knew she belonged to him.

As if he could read her thoughts, he said, "All you need to do is dash outside and climb into that airplane."

He inclined his head slightly as if daring her, but she could still feel his touch warm and insistent on her flesh, her dreams whirling out of control. With his eyes on her and her veins pulsing with memories and fantasies, she knew the danger. She could lose herself.

It could happen again. The void of the weeks afterward—Gray gone, his apartment empty, the number she dialed answered by a mechanical message—no longer in service. Nowhere. Nothing. She had been so far from reason in the pain of loss. She might have jumped off a bridge or stumbled in front of a speeding car or any desperate insanity.

She'd married Paul instead and tried to be a good wife, to love him as well as she could, to push down that part of herself that yearned for Gray.

She pressed her hand against the tightness in her chest. "It would be foolish for me to stay."

The line of his jaw seemed to harden. "And foolish for me to ask you."

"So I should go."

"No, don't go. Not yet."

Last night's reason for drawing back was gone now. In the house he must have what he needed to protect them from all the technical risks of intimacy, but he couldn't protect her from her own heart, from tomorrow and memories.

She had run once before—had run standing still and saying nothing while he told her the cost of being with him and her world fell apart, trying to stay safe and losing the only man she'd ever loved. She'd let him push her out the door.

She was older now, more mature. Surely she could do this.

"Don't make any promises," she said.

"No," he agreed, and she knew if she stayed now, it would hurt terribly later and there would be no way to ease the pain.

They weren't reckless youths now. They were adults who could become lovers if they chose, but she had no way of knowing what he would want afterward... or what she would want.

He'd always denied loving her, but he'd called her his friend more than once. Friends could see each other, couldn't they? Didn't everyone who lived in the north come to Seattle? Gray had mentioned a trip to New York last year to see his publisher and agent. He must have flown through SeaTac, the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

After today, when he was in town he might call her. She would put him on her Christmas list, remember his birthday with something in the mail, ask him to call her. Surely there was some casual way she could suggest it before he dropped her off in Prince Rupert.

She could come up here next summer on a wilderness excursion. Didn't he sometimes personally guide those excursions from the camp? He'd had all sorts of groups up here, students and movie stars and overworked accountants. A doctor of pediatric orthopedics could surely come for ten days away from her busy practice.

It wouldn't work, not really. She had no future with Graham MacKenzie; he'd told her so often enough. How could she find happiness with a man whose distrust ran so deep he could believe she would hide his own child from him?

If she let herself love him here, now, afterwards she would be truly alone.

Chris was away at college, her mother was traveling the continent in a motor home. Marmalade wouldn't be with her forever. And Alex... after Gray, she would never be able to marry Alex.

As Gray's hands settled on her shoulders, she felt a sob catch in her throat. She swallowed hard, but her heartbeat was thundering and her breath broke as she lost herself, staring at his eyes, his mouth.

His head moved closer and blanked out the prints, the photographic equipment. There was only Gray.

Tremors radiated along her flesh from the places he touched. The breath from his parted lips caressed her as he moved his mouth across hers, his lips touching, clinging, pulling away, tempting hers to open and welcome him.

"Are you going to leave, Emma? Walk out on me? You've done it before."

He was doing it again, challenging her, as if willing her to leave.

"Gray, you were the one—"

His lips shifted. Her mouth tried to cling to his kiss, but he whispered harshly against her cheek, "Love was a word you used to excuse your need for this."

She tried to open her eyes, but her lids felt weighted. Need pulsed slowly in her body as his lips tenderly inflamed her.

"Fire." His hands slid slowly down her back, touching off a sensual restlessness in her despite the fabric of her vest.

The sun outside must have slipped behind a cloud. The world inside his darkroom had turned dull and flat, harsh, like the lines of his face.

He pulled her closer, his chest hard, moving with his harsh breathing as if he'd been running too far and too fast. His face was buried in her hair; his breath warmed her scalp. She closed her eyes and shuddered. She needed so much more than he would ever give.

"You'll scorch me," he groaned, "but I don't give a damn."

She lifted her face and found his mouth. Then there was nothing but his tongue and hers seeking oblivion in the dance of intimacy. She cried out when he broke the kiss.

"Now's the time if you're going to run." His voice was rough with heat that would turn to passion when he touched her again.

Her breath tore in and out. Would this free her from memories—a completion, healing an old love? She loved him, always had, even knowing it was madness.

His gaze moved slowly from her face to her throat, on to the swelling of her breasts. "Be sure you know what this is."

Making love. She'd ached for his love all the nights.

"I want you," he said. His gaze dropped to caress the swelling of her hips, the long curves of her legs concealed by her slacks. Suddenly he was staring directly into her eyes, and he said slowly, "I've wanted you a long time. Not love, not promises or fairy tales, Emma. We're a man and a woman with needs, that's all."

She found truth in his eyes. Whatever happened afterward, she was his. It had been true when she was eighteen and it was still true. She didn't understand why he couldn't admit he loved her, but she saw love in his eyes. His hands reached toward her, and she felt his touch before there was any caress, their heat flushing everywhere.

He pushed her vest back from her shoulders and it slid away, dropping to the floor with a soft sound. He traced the shape of her arms through the silk of her blouse, his palms flat as they brushed down to her wrists. His gaze followed his caress down, then back up to her shoulders.

Please, please love me.

She didn't know if the words were on her lips or only in her mind. He would caress her until all her walls were gone. She would drown in the needs.

His fingers were in her hair and her scalp fragmented with sensations that sizzled down throat and arms and swelling breasts to the very center of her need. He took the pins from her hair so it tumbled into his hands, then caressed her throat with the silky strands as he taught them to lie wild around her shoulders. A low moan tore from deep inside her.

"I dreamed this." His voice was husky, buried in her hair. "Your hair... I dreamed of sleeping, waking with your hair over me, with you in my bed."

His eyes were half closed, heavy with the sight of her parted lips. Her soft body melted into his arms, warm and flashing with desire.

His hands hardened on her. "Don't pretend it's love. Don't do that to me again."

She would never survive this. He'd tear her apart and send her away, and she'd be crippled in her heart forever.

His fingers touched her throat and her face and her scalp and tangled his hands in her hair. His eyes, once dark and molten, turned blue again. She could not bear to hear him remind her that tomorrow she would be gone, not while his touch was on her and she was trembling and vulnerable.

"No talk," she begged huskily. "Please, no more talk."

He swung her up into his arms. She closed her eyes. It was a long way up the stairs—up and up and the hard flex of his chest against her face through the soft fabric of his shirt. In a moment he would be beside her and she could touch him, feel the warmth of his flesh under her fingers. She'd ached so long and he'd never believed she loved him and never would and now she was sinking, so far down... she opened her eyes and dizziness welled up. She stared at the ceiling of his bedroom, which seemed to slip away as she sank down.

"Gray?"