In the Midnight Rain (28 page)

"I know, but I can't help looking."

"Lucky for me." He took her hand, and led her back to the house, where they ate and talked of other things, then wandered back to his bed for a very, very gentle last round of making love. She slept curled into the cradle of his arms.

* * *

The days after that first night spun together like the tigers Sambo tricked in one of Blue's favorite stories from childhood. He let himself fall into the gildedness, into the orchid-sleekness of Ellie's body curled into him, the velvet sound of her voice in his ear. At night, he slept hard, the sleep of a man at peace.

Mornings, he made coffee and sent her down the hill to work because he didn't want to get blamed for her missing a deadline. Even the mornings seemed unreal, soft as a tiger's fur, and sometimes there was a mist rising up from the ground that swirled around her knees, making her look like a ghost floating toward the cabin his mother had believed was haunted.

It was on one of those mornings that he was simply standing on the kitchen steps, watching her go, that Marcus came up, carrying a green metal thermos filled with the coffee and chicory Alisha made. Blue watched until the last of April's white tail disappeared into the cabin, and only then turned to admit Marcus to his world.

There was soberness on the mouth framed with its graying goatee, no smile in his eyes as he stared at the cottage. Blue almost thought there was anger on his face. After a minute, Marcus looked at Blue. He said nothing.

They went to work. All day, Blue waited for Marcus to make some remark about Ellie spending her nights with him, to comment on the fact that Blue had taken a lover again after a long time, and maybe ask what that meant to him. Marcus didn't hold back. He had opinions on everything and he expressed them.

But not this time. He said nothing until Ellie was coming back up the hill at the end of the day. Her hair was smoothed back tight from her forehead, caught in a ponytail at the back of her neck, and it showed off the perfect shape of her head and her small ears and the clear, high brow. Blue halted, watching her with that hot twist in his chest, looking at her long legs below the wrinkled khaki shorts, and the straightness of her shoulders below her plain shirt. It surprised him anew every time he saw her, that stab of a hot poker right through his breastbone. She felt like summer, like sunlight.

Too late, he realized he wasn't alone this time, and a man didn't like to think his expression showed what was in his mind. He tapped his shovel on the ground and glanced at Marcus to make sure he hadn't seen.

But Marcus, too, had stopped, and he didn't notice Blue because he was watching Ellie, too. Watching her approach with an expression of such raw pain that Blue could only call it stricken.

A flash of jealousy burst in him. Had Marcus wanted Ellie for himself?

No. The man had been crazy in love with Alisha since she appeared in Gideon, and that had not changed.

Blue nudged his friend without really knowing why, except he didn't want Ellie to see that expression.

Marcus, jarred from wherever he'd gone, looked up briefly, then bowed his head. "Alisha sure is fond of that little white girl," he said gruffly. "Told me to tell you to bring her for supper soon." He paused and gave Blue a faint smile. "She also said she'll kill you dead if you break her heart."

Blue nodded. "It'll be the other way around this time, Marcus," he said quietly, and stepped forward to greet Ellie, take her hand, draw her back into his world.

* * *

Camp: golden days overlaid with a kind of honeyed brightness. Silvery nights spent entwined and laughing and talking.

Maybe because she was so eager to be able to enjoy the nights, Ellie worked by day, and she found a new inspiration and enthusiasm for her project. She lined up interviews with a baker's dozen of elderly Gideon residents and spent three days solid driving around town to talk to them—and the results were better than Ellie had expected. People remembered Mabel vividly, remembered the first time they heard her sing—in church as a nine-year-old, belting out "Rock My Soul" to a stunned congregation at the Church of God; at a school program when Mabel was twelve; at Hopkins' one hot summer night in 1943.

It was great material, and one hot afternoon more than two weeks after she'd started sleeping at Blue's house every night, Ellie transcribed the notes carefully to index cards, letting the visions of Mabel move through her while a CD of her music played in the background. Ellie hummed along, making a mental note to seek out stories from more whites. The accounts she'd collected thus far were heavily weighted to the black, and that was fine, but Ellie wanted the white side of the story, too. How had the other half of the segregated town felt about Mabel Beauvais? How soon had they known the little colored girl with the big voice would be a star that would put Gideon on the map?

She still hadn't had a chance to talk to Gwen Laisser, the woman she'd met on the river. Blue said she often left town for fairly long stretches. The truth was, Ellie was computing enough information she didn't strictly need Mrs. Laisser's tale, but she had liked the old woman and wanted to get her memories down.

Ellie yawned. Afternoons were tough. She grinned at that and looked up at the big house. She wasn't sleeping as much as usual, after all.

The phone rang. Startled from what had promised to be a lovely daydream, Ellie answered. "Hello?"

"Well, I guess you're still alive, then, if you can answer the phone."

"Grandma!" A teeny stab of guilt pricked her. "Hi!"

"Hi, yourself. Do you know it's been nigh on a week since you called me, girl?"

"No way!" Ellie swiveled in her chair to look at the calendar. "Oh, wow. You're right. Sorry about that. I've been up to my elbows in interviews. Time got away from me. Is everything okay?"

"Fine. Got the corn planted and cut some fresh rhubarb for pie this morning. How's the book going?"

"Pretty good. I'm not sure I'm going to get to the bottom of Mabel's disappearance, but it'll be a good book anyway. She was really something."

"And your other search?"

Ellie sighed. "I don't know." She thought, suddenly, of Connie's husband with the green eyes. She hadn't looked him up yet, and to remind herself to do it on her next trip to the library, she scribbled a note. "I haven't been following up those leads much. I did see some pictures of Mama, though. And some people here do remember her. It felt kind of. . . odd."

"Don't let it break your heart, sweetie. It's all water under the bridge."

"I know. You been walking every day? Taking all your meds?"

"I have. Doctor dropped the blood pressure pills to one a day."

"That's great!"

A pause. "And how's that man?"

"What man?" Ellie asked, biting her lip, then couldn't quite pull it off. "Blue, you mean?"

"Blue? Is that his name? Oh, brother!"

"It's a nickname, Gram. He loves the blues. That's where it comes from."

"Not another musician! Don't you ever learn, child?"

Ellie let her grandmother hear her exasperated sigh. "He's not a musician and it's not like that."

"Girl, you think I can't hear the sloppiness in your voice when you say his name? I wasn't born yesterday."

Ellie laughed. "Okay, okay! He's gorgeous and doomed and I'm trying to keep my distance, but it's not easy. This time, though, I promise, I'm grown-up enough to manage a broken heart."

"I see." There was disappointment in the word. "Well, do you know when you might be coming home?"

"Well, I'd like to get a few more interviews, and give it a little more time to see if I can get someone to tell me what happened to Mabel. Somebody knows, but I haven't been able to get anyone to crack yet. Maybe another couple of weeks. Not much longer than that."

"All right. Keep in touch, huh?"

"I will. I promise." She hung up the phone, feeling faintly hollow.

A broken heart.

Somehow, over these magic days, she'd managed to keep that reality at bay. It was just so easy to be with him, to laugh with him. He was smart and funny and good-looking and wry, and they shared spectacular sex. Sex she would never forget. Wild or tender, intense or lazy, it didn't seem to matter. They matched.

Nice try, Connor.

Oh, all right. She tossed down her pen and went to the fridge for some tea. It wasn't just great sex. She knew about that physical connection; she'd found it once or twice before. Some men—especially the kind she tended to be attracted to, the artists and musicians and lost souls of the world—were just born knowing how to please a woman, and Ellie had been lucky enough to find them.

This was . .. different. When she was with Blue, she found no need to erect walls against him, to be anyone but herself—the plain, unadorned Ellie Connor. She'd never felt that freedom with anyone before this, and she realized, dropping ice into her glass, that it had started way before she arrived in Gideon.

It had started with the E-mails they'd exchanged, and grown with their shared taste in music, and through the friendly debates they'd engaged in, and on through to the surprise and delight of discovering that he laughed—at the same moment and with almost the same level of amusement—at the exact same things she did.

And it was all of that, all those moments and other things they shared, that made the sex so much more than just fantastic orgasms. All those other moments added to and underlying the pleasure of pressing naked against him, and kissing him.

"Damn it." She put her hands on the counter and took a breath. How long had it been since she arrived to find a hard-drinking, wild-loving, lost, and beautiful man sitting on his porch? Three weeks? Four?

People didn't change that fast. He might be feeling infatuated and happy for the moment, the darkness diverted by a new love affair, but how long would that last? The problems weren't solved. He still drank a little more than she liked, though she had to admit it was quite a bit less than it had been. He didn't get drunk, but he didn't seem to like to face an evening without a drink or two. Did that mean he had an alcohol problem? Or not?

She had no idea. She did know he was self-destructive. Or was he? She thought about the way he'd been with her, so funny and warm and sweet. She thought, too, of the way he'd taken his grief and built that beautiful world of orchids, and of the way he was using beauty to try to find economic answers for people in faraway places. That didn't seem destructive.

Frowning, she took a long gulp of sweet tea and put the glass down. On the stereo, Mabel sang a moody blues song about lost love, and it felt like she was singing Ellie's future, that future that would not contain Blue.

But why wouldn't it? Maybe he wasn't as lost as she had originally thought. Maybe he was just now emerging from a long tunnel of grief and he was ready to love again.

Maybe.

"Oh, Ellie, stop rationalizing." She did this every time. Convinced herself for a month or a season that
this
lost man was different from all the others.
This
one could be saved. All he needed was love—her love, of course—to make him whole.

Such a seductive scenario. And just as doomed as it was every other time. No one could be saved by anyone outside themselves. No one.

Bowing her head, she allowed a little honest sorrow to fill her, make her ache. She wanted Blue to be saved because he was so different from anyone she'd ever met. She wanted him to thrive because he had so much to give. And selfishly, she wanted it because it would mean she could stay.

With a faint smile, she shook her head and moved back to the desk, ready to dig back into work. The only way she was going to get out of this with her sanity intact—the heart was already doomed—was by recognizing right now that this small, beautiful time was all there would ever be. She could keep Blue as her friend if she was firm and strong, if she promised herself to walk away with dignity and honor the minute the research was finished.

Because the first vision she'd had of him was the true one: Blue Reynard was lost, and she couldn't save him. And she'd learned enough to know that she couldn't bear to stick around and watch him self-destruct. The minute she finished her research, she had to go.

15

T
hat night was the first one since Ellie started sleeping next to him that Blue had his dream. They'd had dinner with Lanie in town, and Blue had sensed a distance in Ellie through dinner, a faint aloofness that he put down to the visibility of the three of them out in public. Maybe it embarrassed her a little, or made her self-conscious. Lanie sure enjoyed it, and after a while, Ellie seemed to relax over a steak and a glass of wine.

But later, she still seemed kind of vague, and for the first time, they didn't make love. Blue showered and came into his room to find her sound asleep. He crawled into bed next to her warmth, but didn't wake her.

Thunder wakened him, thunder and a wild wind howling around the eaves. Dry-mouthed, he woke with a start, thinking immediately of tornadoes. It was that time of year. Ellie slept on, oblivious. She slept like she ate, as if she were ten and played outside all day.