Larger than Life (11 page)

“Maybe it isn’t a matter of trust,” Cory suggested. “Saber hasn’t had an easy life, Travis. You’ve guessed that?”

He nodded.

Cory seemed to be weighing her words carefully. “She’s been … cheated in a lot of ways. She has incredible courage, more than she realizes. But there are debts and promises in her past, and they have to be dealt with.”

“If I lose her to him—” Travis grated out, shooting a glance toward Matt and not finishing the savage sentence.

Biting her lip, Cory stared at him worriedly. “Travis, Saber needs you. She needs someone who loves her for what she is—not because she’s beautiful and famous. She needs an anchor. A person with a special kind of strength.”

“A hero?” he suggested wryly, thinking of that larger-than-life part of her.

“In a way, yes. Not a doer of great deeds, though.” Cory smiled. “I think you’ll find that Saber’s definition of a hero is something entirely different. Ask her sometime. You may be surprised.”

Travis nodded, then rose abruptly and shrugged into his robe. “I’ll tell her Preston’s here.” He managed a smile for Cory’s anxious eyes, then left the pool and made his way to their cottage.

Saber was in the kitchen, busy making pancakes, and Travis only greeted her lightly before going into his bedroom to change. When he came out and joined her, she had set the small table for two and was pouring coffee.

“Hope you’re hungry,” she said cheerfully. “I got carried away and made lots of pancakes.”

“Starved.” Travis thought that he carried off this carefree routine pretty well—until she spoke about ten minutes into the meal.

“What’s wrong, Travis?”

After a moment, he said casually, “Cory introduced me to two new guests out at the pool.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” He sipped his coffee as he watched her finishing her meal. “One was Alex—didn’t catch his last name. The other was Matt Preston.” Her face did a fine job of hiding whatever she felt, he thought, but there was dismay in the quick glance she threw him. Evenly, he added, “He asked Cory if she’d told you he was here.”

Saber pushed the food around on her plate for several moments, then lifted her eyes to meet his.

Gazing into the serene, unreadable silver eyes, Travis was unable to stop the words escaping from the very heart of him. “Is he the man, Saber? Is he the one you have to prove something to?”

“Yes,” she said steadily.

“You’re in love with him,” he said.

Something flickered in her eyes, then vanished. “No. But I love him.”

Travis put his napkin aside and rose to his feet in the very controlled motion of a man who had to
move
or do something violent. He left the kitchen, pacing the larger space of the living room.

Saber followed him, watching him silently. When she finally spoke, it was in an oddly anguished voice. “Travis, there are things I can’t explain to you right now. I made a promise, and until I’m freed of it …”

“You can’t tell me why Matt Preston’s important to you?”

“No,” she said, badly unnerved. He was pacing like a tiger in a cage, and she wondered dimly why until now she had seen only that rare surface beauty. Why she had glimpsed only the rippling muscles and deadly grace of a vital primitive creature? She was not frightened, but something inside her was awed, made wary and uncertain.

He stopped pacing, gazing across the room at her. It was her vulnerability that reached through the fog of his painful jealousy.

“I love you,” he said huskily. Swiftly, he moved to stand before her. “And I’ll fight for you. But I have to know what I’m fighting, Saber.”

“You’re not fighting Matt,” she whispered.

He reached out to enfold her in his arms, holding her tightly. “I’ve never been jealous before,” he said. “I don’t … quite know how to handle it.”

Saber burrowed closer to him, obeying a sudden need for the touch of him, the feeling of his hard body pressed to hers. There was an unfamiliar ache in the pit of her belly, a hollow longing she’d never known before. Disturbed, she tried to keep her mind on his words.

“Give me time,” she murmured.

He framed her face in warm hands, turning it up so that she could see the tenderness in his green eyes. “We’ll take all the time you need,” he said gently.

Saber gazed up at him for a long moment, then said quietly, “There is something I want to tell you about now.”

Travis watched the lovely, delicate face tighten, felt tension flow into stiffening shoulders. Silently
he led her to the couch and sat beside her. “Then tell me,” he said.

So she did, her voice level and calm, her silver-gray eyes flickering from time to time with the caged wildness that had fascinated him from the beginning. She talked about the months missing from her life, and a battle that had scarred her physically and wrenched a woman from a girl.

A battle of survival … and she lived it again.

It had been a freak accident, a combination of violent storm and the failure of delicate instruments. The chances of her surviving the crash had been a million to one. And the odds against her continued survival—alone, lost, too many miles from civilization, and in a hostile, unfamiliar environment—had been astronomical.

She was a delicate creature with no experience of physical or emotional hardships. Educated for city streets and dinner parties. Accustomed to soft beds and clean clothes and processed foods. She
had never before seen violent death or wilderness or her own blood.

Now, as the midday sun glinted off twisted, ugly chunks of metal, she tied an awkward knot in the strip of material torn from a silk blouse. Blank gray eyes stared at the improvised bandage covering the jagged cut on her thigh. She’d been unable to find the first-aid kit in the Lear; there was so little left. And the cockpit …

She didn’t look toward the ungodly tangle of fuselage and trailing wires that had held the controls of the jet and was now a tomb for the two men within it. She had shared two nights and two days with the dead men and the dead jet, clinging numbly to the vague understanding that she was supposed to remain at the crash site and await rescue.

Her shocked gray eyes combed the sky constantly, endlessly; her ears strained to catch the comforting throb of engines. Nothing.

It came to her slowly, reluctantly, finally, that no one was coming.

There was no one to help her.

No one to tell her what to do.

The storm that had beaten them to the ground had first driven them far off course, crippling the delicate instruments that should have told them where they were.

Lost. And alone for the first time in her life.

She unfolded a grimy handkerchief and slowly chewed the last of the berries she’d found near the jet. They did little to ease the empty ache in her stomach. Then she picked up the backpack she’d improvised from bits of salvaged clothing and slung it over one shoulder. She gained her feet, leaning awkwardly on the slender, strong branch of a tree she’d found; it was hardly a comfortable crutch, but at least it braced her weak, throbbing right leg.

What little food there’d been on the jet had not survived in an edible condition. There’d been nothing to carry water in except a Thermos, and it was empty; she’d stuck it in the backpack. She had taken three small bottles of liquor that had miraculously survived the crash unbroken; the fourth she
had poured on her thigh to splash agony on the raw, jagged flesh.

Planning to do some hiking, she had at least packed comfortable boots, and she had a broad-brimmed hat. She had cut her jeans off at the thighs because of the wound, and found a torn but relatively intact, overlarge cotton shirt that had once been sleepwear.

She had a penknife she always carried because her father had given it to her years before. And she had found a couple of very dull knives among the scattered remains of the Lear’s galley cutlery.

Not much. Not much at all to spell the difference between survival and a lonely, agonizing death.

Hobbling painfully, she turned away from the crashed jet.

North. For want of a better choice. It was, at least for a while, downhill. She had carefully calculated the direction this morning, finding east when the sun rose and hoping she was right. She had reason now to be thankful for a lifelong habit of reading; among others, she’d read a great many
“how-to” books and was especially grateful for those titles that had seemed merely ironic and amusing, considering her sheltered life-style:
How to Live Off the Land; How to Cook Over an Open Fire; How
Not
to Be Lost in the Woods …
and others. So amusing then.

So vitally important now.

She wished she had been a Girl Scout….

S
ABER TOLD HIM
everything. She told him of those first days when, weakened by hunger and pain, she’d very nearly died. She told him of the desperate search for water, for food. She talked distantly of mountains, forests, lakes, loneliness. Of learning to hunt and fish, and read the signs of coming weather.

She didn’t look at him, but into the past.

“I found later that countless times I’d barely missed people. It was hard to travel in a straight
line because of the terrain; I’d have to walk south for a day, or follow a meandering stream. When I tried to chart my journey later, I saw that at times I’d been just a mountain away from a town.

“A part of me wanted to give up at first. And I think … that part of me died. I can remember when it happened. It was the fifth or sixth day, and I hadn’t had anything to eat. I was trying to catch a tiny fish in a stream with my hands. But it moved so quickly and I was awkward and weak. Then—somehow—I was looking down at that fish on the bank, and I felt suddenly strong. I
knew
then I was going to make it.”

She dropped her eyes to the strong hand holding her own; it was white-knuckled with tension, but gentle in its touch. Meeting his gaze for the first time since she’d begun talking, she wondered at the oddly blurred look of his green eyes, the pallor beneath his tan. But he said nothing, and she went on.

“You wondered if I was the same singer who recorded two years ago; I’m not. That girl, that weak girl. She didn’t know how to live. So she
curled up inside herself and didn’t exist anymore.”

She sighed, a breath of sound. “Once I’d learned how to survive, I was—well, proud. After a while, I learned to enjoy being alone. Really alone. The world seemed so new and fascinating. The last few months, I even avoided people once I’d found them. I just wandered.”

Travis stared at her. He wasn’t aware of holding his breath as he gazed into those silvery eyes, as he saw what she’d kept carefully hidden until now. Behind the glaze of intelligent serenity lay the explosive power she allowed to escape only on stage, the almost primitive, driven strength that had enabled her to survive when she should have died.

“You made it,” Travis said softly, saluting her courage. “No one helped you. No one told you what to do. A devastating crash, a terrible injury, and nothing but your hands and your wits—and you
survived.
You survived alone and, instead of losing yourself, you found yourself. The hothouse
flower grew and flourished under the most hostile conditions possible.”

“Did I find myself?” she asked, eyes flickering. “Or … lost part of myself? I … I regret what I lost, Travis. But I can’t regret what I found. I never knew until then how badly I wanted to live. I never knew I was strong enough to live like that.”

“Larger than life. No wonder your voice changed,” he said slowly. “Everything but strength and determination was stripped away from you.”

“But is that all that’s left?” Saber gazed up at him, troubled. “It used to be easier to laugh. And to cry. It used to be easier to … do what was expected of me. I never had to wonder about my place in the scheme of things. Now I wonder if the best part of me was destroyed during those months.”

“No,” he said flatly.

Saber smiled. “You never knew me before.”

“I saw the pictures,” he said. “Heard the voice. That girl was a gentle, fragile creature, with no power, no passion in her voice. But you—you have the gentleness; it’s in your eyes, your soft voice.
And when you sing, that passionate part of you is released.” He looked at her steadily. “That’s what puzzled me about you from the beginning. Onstage, you are explosive, powerful. You reach out and grip the hearts of thousands of people. But why … only onstage, Saber? Why do you hide that part of yourself the rest of the time?”

She turned her eyes away from him, gazing into distance and time, or perhaps another life; she was too far away for him even to guess where she was.

“I … When I got back, there were—people—who were troubled by what I’d become. People who regretted the loss of that girl. It seemed there was suddenly … too much of me.” Saber shook her head, blinking away those disturbing thoughts and meeting his eyes again. “Onstage, it seems right,” she finished simply.

Travis, listening, was suddenly aware of a yearning ache within him. Though he had seen both, he had yet to hold either Saber within his heart and his arms. Instinct told him Matt Preston
was the “people” troubled by Saber’s metamorphosis, and that she had tried to find a bridge linking those two parts of her. Neither one nor the other, strength disguised as stage presence and vulnerability masked by control.

What had her manager said? That … at best her energy was an illusion and at worst a shield? That offstage she caged the jungle-cat wildness and hid behind the bars …. A perceptive man, Travis thought. But not entirely correct.

The stage presence was the reality; it was the cage that was a manufactured illusion.

Travis suddenly lifted her hand to his lips. “One day,” he said, “I hope you’ll realize you never have to hide anything from me. There could never be … too much of you.”

She looked at him, her silvery eyes puzzled. “How can you be so sure?” she asked, the vulnerability peeking through. “Why is it that you … seem to understand me? Without
knowing
me?”

“I love you,” he replied.

After a moment, Saber gently pulled her hand from his grasp and rose to pace the room. She
seemed distracted, troubled. “I just wanted to be free,” she murmured as if to herself. “But now I don’t know—” Suddenly she faced him, her eyes focusing on him. “I think I’ll go for a walk, Travis. D’you mind?”