Lord of Lightning (23 page)

All the emotion Lise had held back broke free in one aching wave. If Stephen hadn’t been holding her, she would have sagged to the floor. There was no way to salvage her schoolteacher’s dignity, no way to stop the tears. She cried for the joy she felt, for the pain they’d all been through. She wept for Em’s rebirth, and for the child’s future. And somehow in the sweet, sobbing aftermath of it all, she remembered those three words Stephen had whispered.

What had he said? In all the upheaval, it seemed entirely possible to her that she was hearing things again. Somehow she mustered the strength to draw back and search his face. “Stephen? ... What did you say?”

He blotted her tears with his fingers and gazed at her, his features blazingly tender. “I said Em is okay—”

“No, I mean that other thing.”

He scooped her up, turning with her in his arms and nearly squeezing the breath out of her with his stormy passion. As he set her back down, he pressed his lips to her temple and breathed out a husky groan of masculine need. “I love you, Lise.”

She had definitely heard that. And so had everyone else in the room.
Julie and Danny and Mrs. Baxter were staring at her and Stephen with bewildered expressions.

It took Lise a moment to clear the ringing dizziness from her head
. Em was safe ... Stephen was holding her, telling her he loved her?
Was any of that possible? As soon as she could manage it, she disentangled from Stephen’s arms to address her astonished audience.

“Could you excuse us a moment?” she asked, her legs barely navigating as she drew Stephen with her toward the door. “Please, I know this isn’t exactly appropriate, but I—
we
—need some—time. Alone.”

“Well, okay,” Julie said, grinning. “I guess maybe Flash Gordon can be trusted. I got a postcard from the Davenport sisters this morning. It was postmarked Acapulco, not Mars.”

Danny Baxter looked quite sincere in his concern. “Maybe you shouldn’t, Miss Anderson. I know they caught Buck Thompson with those museum statues in his trunk and everything, but the other morning I noticed some funny-looking pods in the backyard, and—”

“Go,” Mrs. Baxter ordered, pulling her son close and shushing him with a hug. “Talk it out, you two. Or whatever it is you have to do.”

As soon as they’d escaped the oppressive confines of the hospital for the cool evening air outside, Stephen pulled Lise back into his arms. “What am I going to do with you, Lise? What am I going to do
about
you?”

Lise pressed her hand to his shirt and felt the heavy thud of his heart. An aching tightness rose in her chest. She had never loved anyone so much that it hurt even to breathe.

“That’s easy”—she cleared her throat, but the hoarseness wouldn’t go away—“You could marry me, live here, and teach science at Abraham Lincoln. We need a good science teacher.”

Pain flashed through his golden features. “I
can’t
, Lise. You know I can’t.”

Lise closed her eyes, tears welling. Her heart was going to break, dammit. It was going to crack right in two. She wouldn’t live through it if he left her again, especially now, after telling her he loved her. “Well, then,” she said, barely managing a grainy whisper, “you could always commute.”

“From the Arctic circle?”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him, all the misery inside her rushing into her words. “Yes, why
not
from the Arctic circle. Why not from the moon if you have to? Do you want to be with me or don’t you, Stephen?”

He gripped her tighter, searching her features. “Lise, are you serious? I could only get back a few times a year—”

“That’s better than the alternative.”

“Do you know what you’re saying? That you’ll wait for me?” His eyes blazed with fire, with hope. “I can’t ask you to do that, Lise. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get the laser operational—”

“One thing at a time. Can you stay tonight?”

“Yes—yes, I’ll stay the weekend. Hell, I’ll postpone my next test and stay the week!”

She laughed as he pulled her close and hugged the breath out of her. She laughed and cried and wondered if she could survive a bipolar relationship with a stormy Viking god of a man. “No need to be rash,” she whispered.

He held her in his arms, caressing her hair and thrilling her with husky, heartfelt promises. He told her he didn’t exist without her, that she would be his sunlight when he was away. He told her he
would
come back someday, to live in Shady Tree, to marry her, maybe even teach science.

Wait for him? she thought, sighing rapturously. How silly could he be? She would have put herself in a deep freeze if necessary. She would wait until Johnny Carson was canceled or the sun burnt out, whichever came first.

Lise might have been totally content in his arms, her face soaked with tears, her thoughts floating in bliss, if only it weren’t for the unanswered questions creeping back into her awareness.

“How did you find me, Stephen?” she murmured against his red flannel shoulder. “And how did you know Em was sick?”

He stroked her hair. “Sorry, Miss Anderson, but a man in my line of work has to keep some secrets.”

Her eyes blinked open and she knuckled away the dampness. She fully intended to pursue that particular secret, but it could wait for another time. “Okay then,” she said, drawing back, “what about that thing you do with watches? Stopping them, I mean. How do you do that?”

He just laughed, another secret apparently. And then he began to stroke the hollow of her throat in the most heart-catching way. “Speaking of stopping time, I’ve got an idea. I know this mountaintop where you can touch the stars.”

“The mountain? You want to go there? Now?”

“There, somewhere,
anywhere
... all I need is a starry night and a Rain Maiden who dreams about being carried off.”

Lord, she thought, it was a dangerous thing falling in love with a man who knew your fantasies. “But we can’t, Stephen. There’s Em—”

“Em is all right, Lise. She
is
all right, trust me.” His blue eyes touched hers, flaring as though with some special knowledge that only he had. “She doesn’t need us now. And we do. Need us. Come on, Lise, the clock has already started ticking. Let’s run away together. Anywhere you want to go, I don’t care, but let’s not waste another precious second.”

She let out the sighing softness that had become her inevitable response to him.

His long fingers swam in her hair, contracting as though he were fighting the need to make love to her right then and there. “I’d better tell them we’re leaving,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Hey—!
My
watch has stopped.” He did a double take and looked up at Lise, his eyes sparkling with curiosity. “How did you do that?”

Lise smiled and raised on her tiptoes, touching her mouth to his. “My secret,” she said as a sweet little shock tingled her lips. “But you might want to check the batteries.”

“Batteries?” He laughed through the emotion welling in his voice and glanced up at the sky. “Not a chance, Miss Anderson. This is a sign. This is someone’s way of telling us it’s going to be all right, that we don’t have to rush crazily through life, stealing every moment, counting every second ... that time will stand still when we’re together.”

Lise pressed warm against his body, aware of his heartbeat as she searched the night sky with him. She expected a lightning bolt, but all she saw was stars, a rich and endless corridor of stars. There were enough for several lifetimes, and she intended to touch every one of them in one way or another. Because now he was here ... the hero of her past, the soul mate of her future ... and anything was possible.

Suzanne Forster, the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than forty romance novels, was on a career path to becoming a clinical psychologist until a life-altering car accident changed everything. While recovering, she tried her hand at writing to pass the time and quickly found that it was her true passion. Before she was ready to return to school, her first manuscript had won second place in a contest sponsored by the Romance Writers of America for unpublished writers. Before she knew it, she sold her first novel,
Undercover Angel
(1985), and embarked on a new path.

Throughout her career, Forster has made unconventional plot choices for the romance genre, such as setting her novel
The Devil and Ms. Moody
(1990) in the gritty world of motorcycle gangs, an idea her publisher resisted for years. The hero, Diablo, an intimidating yet tender rogue in black leather who rides a Harley-Davidson, was given the WISH (Women in Search of a Hero) Award by
RT Book Reviews
. For her Stealth Commandos trilogy she chose mercenaries and bounty hunters as her heroes.
Child Bride
(1992), the first in the trilogy, became her publisher’s top-selling series romance that year. The romantic thriller
The Morning After
(2000) appeared on several bestseller lists including the
New York Times
.  

RT Book Reviews
has twice honored Forster’s work, first in 1990 with a Career Achievement Award in Series Sensual Romance, and again in 1996 in the category of Best Contemporary Romantic Suspense. In 1996 she was also a nominee for the Romance Reader’s Anonymous Award for Best Contemporary Author. Her mainstream debut,
Shameless
(2001), won the National Readers Choice Award. Forster’s 2004 novel
Unfinished Business
was made into a movie, called
Romancing the Bride
, for the Oxygen Network.

Forster lives in Southern California with her husband, and has taught women’s contemporary fiction writing seminars at UCLA and UC Riverside.