The Bride Wore Blue (4 page)

That was when he felt the first raindrop fall. A big splattering drop bulleted its way in through the trailing flaps of the pup tent, which were suddenly snapping like sheets in the wind.

He poked his head outside.

“Holy hurricane, Hersh!” He swore above the sudden and aggressive slap of the wind and rain pelting him full in the face. “Looks like we’re in for a dam buster.”

Hershey, ever the loyal companion, took one peek outside the tent, gave J.D. an every-dog-for-himself look and broke for the cabin. He was whining and scratching on the door—something J.D. was about ready to do himself— when he heard a screech of metal scraping against wood.

He snapped his attention toward the dock. With the rising wind came rising waves. The smoothly rolling surface of the bay had transformed in a heartbeat into a boiling
cauldron of black water and crashing surf. And the Cessna, tied as she was to the end of the dock, was taking a hell of a beating against the cedar pilings that were anchored with re-rod stakes and rock.

J.D. didn’t stop to think. He just reacted. He had to get her out of there or his beloved plane would end up a twisted, scattered mass of mangled metal and shattered glass.

Quickly slipping into his shoes, he made a mad dash for the end of the dock. In the next instant, he was on his knees, tugging at the ropes securing the plane, struggling with rain-soaked nylon and swearing into the wind when the knots wouldn’t give.

By the time the first knot grudgingly slipped free, he was soaked to the skin. The icy wind and the force of the rain stung like tiny, piercing needles against his face. Ignoring the pain and cold, he scrambled to the front float. With concentrated effort and fingers rapidly stiffening and growing clumsy due to the cold, he freed the other rope.

Then and only then, did he allow himself enough time to make a decision. The Cessna was like a crippled bird with her fuel line pulled. He cursed himself for his “brilliant” maneuvering that made it impossible for him to crank her up and drive her to the safety of a sheltered harbor. If he simply let the plane go and the wind took her, she wouldn’t stand much more of a chance of surviving intact than if he’d left her tied to the dock.

That left only one alternative. A brilliant flash of lightning lit up the night like a strobe, lighting the way to the beach thirty yards away. If he could tow the Cessna around the rocks to the beach, she could weather out the storm there without taking a battering. He could beach her on the sand and she’d sit as tight as a hen mallard on a nest, free from harm.

Thirty yards. Through a curtain of wind whipped rain, he gauged the angry breakers and the jutting ridge of massive
boulders and jagged rock that lay between the dock and the beach. It might as well be thirty miles. On a deep breath, he considered the distance around the rock pile and the water’s fifteen-foot depth, and the power of both to crush him.

Thirty yards of black, angry water and the very real probability that even if he survived the rock pile, he’d get sucked under and never come back up.

The Cessna cracked hard against the dock again, shaking the wood beneath his feet. When she bobbed up like a huge, gangly cork, he saw the damage. The tail end of a re-rod spike securing the cedar dock cribbing had gouged an angry-looking hole in one of the floats. It was then that he realized that if he stood there much longer debating, he’d lose her for good. When water filled the float, there was every possibility that she’d sink like a stone. And he simply couldn’t let that happen.

Without another thought to his own safety, he peeled off his sweatshirt and toed off his shoes. Clutching the rope attached to the front float tightly in his fist, he sucked in a deep breath and took a running leap off the end of the dock.

Maggie had fooled herself into thinking she could sleep. Why she thought tonight would be different from any other, she didn’t know. Insomnia had been her companion for several years, her persistent nemesis, always crowding her, always winning the battle of wills.

Tonight, with Blue Hazzard camped on her doorstep, it was a sure winner hands down.

She knew she had to concede that battle, but she wouldn’t give up the other one. She would not invite him in. She would not let him and his every-mother-loves-him grin and his sneak-up-on-you sense of humor, or even her own tendency to mother stray dogs and feed alley cats, sway her.

Or the memory of his kiss.

A swift, sweet tug of arousal arched through her body, then settled heavy and low. It was bad enough that she’d let him kiss her. Even worse, she’d kissed him back. And she’d enjoyed it. She’d enjoyed the sure and sudden reawakening of desire, the honest ache of passion. She’d welcomed the reminder that she was a woman who could still be ruled by instincts that could so decisively eclipse her unbreachable control. At least she’d thought it was unbreachable.

Her relationship with Rolfe had taught her the power and necessity of control. A relationship with a man like Blue Hazzard could threaten, if not destroy it. And loss of control could end up destroying her.

That’s why she couldn’t let him any closer. That’s why he couldn’t sleep on her sofa. He might have stumbled on to her by accident, but the fact that he was still here was as calculated as her plan to drop out of life as she’d known it.

He’d set her up. She could feel it as certainly as she felt her fatigue fight with her inability to get a good night’s sleep.

So she made herself stay in bed. Made herself quit getting up every five minutes to look out the window and see if the camp fire was still burning. Made herself stop trying to catch a glimpse of the sculpted angles of his profile as the firelight played across his features, tipping his golden hair with shades of amber and burnt sienna.

She willed herself to quit wondering if he was the kind of man he seemed to be. A man who loved life, loved to play, wasn’t above a little good-natured manipulating to get what he wanted, but didn’t have a mean bone in his body beneath all that sizzle and sex appeal.

No, she told herself firmly. Don’t get caught up in wishing for the impossible. Don’t get fooled by the pretty package. And for God’s sake, don’t forget what you’re running away from.

She rolled to her stomach, determined to ride this out until tomorrow when he’d be gone. The first drop of rain pelted the bedroom window then. The unmistakable howl of a rising wind was quick to follow. The sharp scrape and whine at her door came soon after that.

She scowled into the pillow then assimilated the sound with the cause. Hershey.

Her nurturing heart ruled her actions then. Poor baby. The lab was scared. Maggie knew all about fear. The fear of being left alone. The fear of wondering where her next meal would come from. The fear of wondering if she’d ever find a safe haven.

She tossed back the covers and snagged her robe from a chair by the bed. Shivering with the chill of the Minnesota night, she tied the robe tightly around her waist and walked on bare feet to the living room.

When she opened the door, it was to the most pitiful sight she’d ever seen. Hershey sat, one paw up, his ears hanging low, his brown eyes big and soulful and pleading. And while his thick brown coat had shed the rain as effectively as duck down, he was shivering as if he’d been caught in an ice storm.

“You ought to take that show on the road,” Maggie murmured with an amused shake of her head, then opened the door wide enough for the lab to snake through. “People would pay big money to see such a stellar performance— Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

Just that fast, Hershey, with the instincts of a coonhound, homed in on the bedroom, made one huge happy leap and landed in the middle of her bed. With a grunt of satisfaction, he nosed under the covers and burrowed deep.

“You little finagler,” Maggie scolded as she trailed after the damp dog and tried to coax him out from under the blankets.

Hershey’s only response was a low, warning growl.

Maggie grinned. “So you want to play hardball, huh?”

Hands on her hips, she stared at the lump in the middle of the mattress and wondered why she wasn’t more upset. In the next instant, she knew the reason. Where the dog went, so went the man. So why hadn’t he been begging at her door with Hershey?

An electrifying bolt of lightning cracked through the night, illuminating the dark cabin and the world outside the window.

She stood transfixed as her eyes took in the sudden storm, the violent crash of water to shore—and the figure hunched on his knees at the end of her dock.

Even through the dark and even at this distance, his size made it impossible to mistake him for anyone but Blue. Her brows drew together in instinctive alarm as she walked closer to the window. “What is he doing?”

Though her vision was hampered by darkness and rainwashed windowpanes, she didn’t have to wonder long. Another lightning flash lit up the night just as he leaped into the bay.

“Oh, my God.” One hand rose instinctively to her mouth while the other hugged her waist. “Is he crazy?”

For a full minute she stood there, trying to search him out amid the flashes of lightning and the black murky swells that battered her dock and crashed against the shoreline. When she saw a slow and gradual inching of the plane away from the dock, struggling to stay clear of the rocks, she understood.

He was trying to save the plane. That stupid, beat-up plane. And he was liable to drown himself or get fried by lightning in the process.

“Not only are you a conceited, arrogant jerk, you are certifiably insane, Blue Hazzard,” she muttered under her breath. “And you’re really going to get yourself killed this time.”

For all of ten seconds she debated. Then she whipped off her robe, tugged on a pair of sweats over her panties and
T-shirt and jammed her feet into her tennis shoes. Snagging a flashlight from above the refrigerator, she grabbed her slicker from the coat rack and headed out the door.

Shoulders hunched against the downpour, she hurried down the slope toward the lake, rounded the boathouse, stopped, then backtracked. After finding a length of rope inside the boathouse, she headed back along the shoreline toward the beach. With every step she refused to think that he might have already drowned out there. With every stumble, she took solace in the fact that though the Cessna was not making much progress, she could still spot its silhouette bobbing wildly in the confines of this small finger of the bay. As long as the plane was inching its way toward the beach, that meant Blue was out there struggling. The damn fool! If he got out of this alive, she was going to cheerfully strangle him.

The beach was only thirty yards from the dock by water. By land, it was more like a hundred. She had to skirt an outcropping of rock, work her way carefully through a weaving uphill path through the woods and then, at the clearing, maneuver her way down a ten-foot cliff wall that gradually sloped to the small, protected cove with its sandy beach below.

In daylight and dry weather, the sandy gold beach was a pleasant little hike and a prize worth pursuing, a rarity in this glacial lake where shoreline was carved primarily from stone. In the dark, however, it was a slippery, treacherous trek. Uneven stones and gnarled tree roots grabbed at her toes and tried to trip her. Jagged rock and rain-slickened lichen made purchase hazardous and the going slow.

Finally, she reached the bottom of the rock wall, her ankles scratched, her shoes soggy, her hair flattened to her head and dripping over her eyes, blinding her.

She shoved it away from her face and ran to the edge of the sand. Fanning the flashlight’s beam out into the water, she searched the rolling surface for a sign of Blue.

She’d weathered her share of wild, unexpected rainstorms in the past two months. Sometimes the skies turned heavy and gun metal gray in the hours before the rain came. Then it would settle in for days, the rain itself steady, the winds rising and falling with the tide. Sometimes, though, like tonight, the storms came with little or no warning. Screeching out of the night like a banshee, the wind would flex its muscle, turning the lake into a hazardous tumult of four- and five-foot swells that rolled over everything in its path.

Blue Hazzard was in its path right now—and it was battering him like a heavyweight going in for the knockout punch. She sucked in a harsh breath when she saw his head surface, then disappear when he was sucked into the belly of a swell that swallowed him completely.

“Blue!” She screamed his name above the wind’s roar, then cried out in relief when he bobbed to the surface again.

“He’ll never make it,” she thought frantically, gauging the distance between him and the shore. Not with that damn plane in tow. And yet she knew he’d never let it go.

Fueled by anger as much as by fear for him, she planted the heel of the flashlight in the sand. The light beam arched upward like a beacon for him to follow. Then she searched for the nearest boulder. With the wind and icy rain slowing her down, she dropped to her knees in the sand and tied one end of the rope securely around it.

Rising to her feet and fighting the slicker that flapped against her legs and hampered her movements, she gripped the loop of rope and ran to the edge of the beach. With all her strength, she threw the loose end of the rope as far as she could toward the spot where she’d last spotted Blue.

The limp nylon barely made it ten yards before the wind sucked it down, stopping its outward arch. The coil of rope landed uselessly in the water several yards short of the mark. Her hopes of reaching him sank as the waves washed the floating tangle back to shore like sea foam.

With a deep, determined breath and a silent curse for her own poor judgment, she made a decision. If she was going to help him, she wasn’t going to be able to do it from here.

She shrugged out of her slicker and stripped down to her panties and T-shirt. Shivering violently, she grasped the rope snugly in her hand. Setting her sights toward the nose of the Cessna, she waded into the hammering, icy surf toward the spot where she’d last seen Blue go under.

J.D.
had made some reckless decisions in his life. Diving into this churning lake at midnight might just top the list. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat if it meant the difference between saving or losing his plane.

When he saw the flash of light on the beach in a short, focused moment of clarity, however, he knew that this time he might have gone too far. This time it wasn’t just his own safety that was being compromised.

Maggie.
My, God! She must have seen him out here, figured he was in trouble and decided to come in after him.

“No!” he yelled around a mouthful of lake water as a vicious undertow yanked him beneath the surface again with the zealous strength of a possessive lover.

Muscling his way to the surface, he broke the crest of a wave spitting water and gulping for air. “Maggie—g-go back!”

The screaming wind stole his water-choked words, whipping them back into the midst of the storm and out of her earshot.

“Go back!” he yelled again as she stumbled and went down fifteen yards ahead of him.

He lost sight of her completely then. And in that moment, he discovered fear as he’d never known it. Heartstalling, chest-crushing, forget-to-breathe fear. His lungs burned. His ribs ached with each wild, laborious lurch of his heart as he searched the undulating surface and swore at the undertow that was determined to suck him out into open water and away from Maggie and the beach.

“Maggie!” he roared. He was desperate to find her, determined that he would, or die trying. It came down to saving her or the plane. Without a second thought, he let go of the tow rope and dove for her.

Cold, murky blackness—so thick it made his lungs contract, so heavy it felt like his eardrums would burstblocked his way. He groped blindly for a connection—any connection—with an arm or a leg or, please, God, a handful of that glorious chestnut hair.

When he could stand it no longer, he broke to the surface, sucking air, stalling panic. Clinging to the necessity of a clear head, he dragged in another lung full of air and was ready to go under again when he heard her voice.

“Hazzard!”

Through a vortex of funneling wind and pounding waves, it came to him. The sweetest sound. The truest tone. The proof that he hadn’t lost her to the lake. He whipped around toward the sound that was now behind him, straining to see through the darkness.

“Maggie!” he swore, disbelieving when he spotted her, only her head and the slope of her shoulders visible above the aggressive surf.

“Grab—grab the rope!” she yelled, fighting to be heard above the wind and the crash of water to rock. “The rope!” she repeated in a frazzled, frustrated command. “Grab it!”

Only then did he realize she’d strung a lifeline from the shore to the spot where she treaded water. And only then did he realize she held it in one hand, and the Cessna’s rope was in her other hand.

With a whoop of jubilation and relief he dove for her. “You sweet, stupid woman! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded when he reached her. Wrapping her snugly in his arms, he lifted her above the choppy surface.

“I’m saving your worthless neck!”

Spitting water and trying, unsuccessfully, to rake the soaked tangle of knotted hair from her face, she let him relieve her of the weight of the Cessna’s rope as the waves fought to lure the plane out to open water.

“Damn right you are!” Rain pelted him in the face as he laughed into her eyes. “And you saved my plane, too! When we get out of here, lady, I’ll show you just how grateful I am.” Lightning cracked across the night sky. “But you gotta get out of this water, Maggie. Now!”

He turned her around and shoved her none too gently ahead of him toward the beach. “Get the hell back to shore!” he demanded, making sure she had a death grip on the lifeline. “That lightning is too damn close.

“Go!” he ordered as he fought with the tow rope and she hesitated, determined to help him.

With a scowl as dark as the night, she finally obeyed. She worked her way slowly along the rope as the water and the wind combined in an attack force against her. Only when she was well on her way did J.D. tie the ends of the two ropes together, securing the safety of the plane. And only when he was sure his knot was fast did he follow her, fighting his way by inches, to the beach.

Drained and winded, he crawled the last yard to the shore on hands and knees and collapsed face first in the surfsoaked sand.

Beside him, prostrate and exhausted, Maggie lay like a limp rag doll, her breath coming in labored, gasping gulps.

With the last of his strength, J.D. rolled toward her. Gathering her in his arms, he sheltered her against the wind and rain that pummeled them both.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, raking the tangled snarl of wet hair away from her eyes.

She nodded and burrowed closer to his heat.

“God, Maggie.” He lowered his mouth to her hair. “You scared ten years off my life. If…if anything had happened to you, I’d never be able to live with myself.”

He drew her closer still, shaken by the violent trembling of her body, taken by her valor, seduced by her near-naked wet length. And there, with the wind and the rain cocooning them like shipwrecked survivors, the romantic in him eclipsed his concern and his current discomfort.

She was a quivering bundle of lush feminine flesh. Near naked. Near freezing. Nearly his for the taking.

Her soaked T-shirt had ridden up high on her hip, exposing a strip of delicate white silk banded together by tiny ribbons of lace at her hip point. The soft fullness of her breasts with their diamond-hard nipples pressed against him, separated from his bare chest by the mere barrier of clinging, wet cotton. Another movie scene came vividly to mind, this one a foreshadowing of everything he wanted to share with Maggie—the heat, the passion, the desperate need:

A man and a woman lay entwined in each other’s arms on a remote, moon-lit beach. Not just any man. Not just any woman. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolled in the surf-swept sand, oblivious to the crash of the breakers around them, locked in each other’s arms, lost in each other’s love…

“Blue…”

“Yes, Maggie,” he whispered, closing his eyes, letting himself get swept up in the moment and the miracle as it unfolded.

“Blue…if you don’t get your grubby paws off of me, my knee is going to connect with a part of your anatomy that
you,
no doubt, highly value, and that
I
could happily put out of commission for the rest of your natural life.”

His eyes snapped open. He pulled back, blinked, then blinked again. “Huh?”

“Back off, buster,” she gritted out between chattering teeth.

“Oh.” Reality interloped on fantasy with grating finality. “Oh, yeah. I’m…ah, sorry. Can…can you, ah, get up?”

She glared at him. “I could if you’d get off me.”

“Oh. Ah, yeah. Sure.”

He wasn’t quite sure when he’d been reduced to monosyllabic mutterings. Somewhere between here and eternity he’d guess—or between the mention of her knee and his highly valued parts. The look in her eyes warned him that she meant business. Since he had plans for those parts that included both him and her, instinct took over.

With a strength he hadn’t thought was left in him, he sprang to his feet. As an afterthought, he offered her his hand.

She didn’t just ignore it. She made a great show of looking at his outstretched hand, then glaring at him as if to say, “I wouldn’t accept your help if you were the last degenerate on earth.”

She rose to her feet on her own steam. Without a word, she gathered her soaked clothes in her arms and headed up the stone cliff.

Halfway up the slope, she turned back to him. “Hershey, at least, was smart enough to come in out of the rain. If you can muster up a fraction of his intelligence, you can
do the same. That is, if you don’t strain something dragging that damn plane to shore.”

While her words were harsh and judgmental, the look in her eyes gave him hope. She may be mad—okay, so she was livid—but she was also concerned about him. Just when he’d thought all was lost. She cared, bless her. She didn’t want to but she did.

Even the glare she leveled at him before she turned and began making her way along the slope didn’t fool him. Katharine Hepburn always gave Spencer Tracy that lookjust before she threw herself into his arms and told the big lug she loved him.

“Everything was so simple yesterday,” Maggie muttered under her breath as she lifted the whistling teakettle off the stove and filled two mugs with boiling water. “I was alone. I was in peace. I was not up at two in the morning with a seventy-pound ball of fur hogging my bed and a two-hundred-twenty-pound drowned rat occupying my shower.”

She tried not to be concerned about Blue while she stood in the kitchen and he stood in the bathroom under a hot shower trying to coax some warmth back into his bones. But he’d been out in the storm a lot longer than she had and she’d felt awful by the time she finally made her way back to the cabin. She’d been cold to the point of brittle, her joints aching, her fingers and toes stinging and her teeth chattering so hard she’d managed to bite her tongue.

A long, hot shower had helped her. So had the fire she’d laid in the little wood stove—as she’d done every night in the event she needed to take the chill off the cabin. She sent a silent prayer of thanks toward whatever power had sent her Abel Greene two months ago. He’d just shown up out of nowhere that day she’d arrived, and in addition to helping her open up the cabin and making some minor repairs to the place, Abel had taken to checking on her at regular
intervals and seeing to it that her wood pile was well stocked.

Unlike Blue Hazzard, who had been nothing but a pain, Abel Greene had been a gift. Like Blue, Abel was a big man. Big, uniquely beautiful, and at first meeting imposing. The first time she’d seen him emerge from the woods looking for all the world like an untamed and savage warrior with his long black hair flowing down his back and his silver-eyed wolf dog by his side, she’d almost packed up and headed back to civilization. She’d gotten used to Abel’s unannounced visits since then. And to his silent stoicism.

Abel was an enigma she had given up trying to figure out. That was her gift to him. She didn’t pry. Didn’t prod. She accepted that what he gave her was also satisfying some need of his own. And she recognized the wounded spirit inside him. She recognized it because it was so like her own.

A crash of thunder rattled the windows, making her jump. The storm had not lessened in intensity. If anything, it had gotten worse.

Dressed in dry sweats and heavy socks with a towel wrapped turban style over her hair, she gathered all three oil lamps she’d discovered in the cabin in preparation for the loss of electricity that seemed inevitable.

That done, she settled into the worn sofa with her mug of hot cocoa and a warm blanket, and waited for Blue to join her there. That, too, seemed inevitable. After all, she couldn’t very well refuse him the comfort of a fire—even though a firing squad was more to her liking.

He’d followed her to the cabin a full half hour after she’d left him on the beach. When he’d finally rapped on her back door, his lips had been as blue as his eyes. She didn’t have to ask what had taken him so long. He’d been beaching the Cessna. Putting his precious baby to bed.

She’d shoved a dry towel into his shaking hands, pointed him toward the shower and shut the bathroom door.

Staring thoughtfully into the fire, she turned out the sounds of the storm outside and grudgingly admired him for his devotion—even though she thought he was a fool for risking his neck like that. Wistfully, she wondered what it would be like to have someone care about her as much as Blue cared about his plane. Foolishly, she wondered what it would be like if that someone was Blue.

The bathroom door opened just in time to quell that dangerous thought. With concentrated effort, she schooled her attention and her eyes to remain on the fire.

It was a temporary respite at best. Avoiding him would be impossible. Although the little log cabin in the woods had all the basic amenities of electricity and indoor plumbing, square footage was not its greatest asset. The single bedroom and bathroom were the only rooms with doors. The kitchen-living area made up the bulk of the floor plan, open by design cozy by intent and close by proximity.

The wood stove sat in the corner of the knotty-pine paneled great room, nestled in the mortared lake-rock portion of the walls and sitting on a hearth of the same rock. The furniture—sturdy pine frames with upholstery of hunter’s plaid—was arranged to face both the fire and the picture window and gave a postcard view of the bay by daylight, and an eye-of-the-storm sensation on a night like this.

“Is this for me?”

She looked up at the sound of Blue’s voice to find him standing by the kitchen counter, looking hopefully at the mug of hot chocolate she’d left for him there.

All of her resolve to remain distant melted like the marshmallows floating in her mug when she met his blueeyed smile and the obvious embarrassment he was trying to hide as he stood there in her pink chenille robe.

She couldn’t help it. She smiled. Then she laughed. Giggled, actually. It just slipped out, a little rusty from lack of
use, a little surprising in the ease with which it had escaped at the sight of his very huge self in her very small robe.

“You find this funny?” he said, deadpan, when she’d spent herself. “Fine. But I just want you to know that mini has never been my size. And pink has never been my color.”

She sniffed and buried her nose in her mug to quell another chuckle. “Oh, I don’t know. I think you look kind of pretty in pink.”

They shared a grin then. How could she not smile at six feet two inches of testosterone packed into a robe made with estrogen in mind? Where the robe covered Maggie from chin to knee, it strained at the seams to hit him from midthigh to elbow, and wasn’t having much luck at either. That wasn’t even mentioning the bare expanse of muscled chest and, um, other things that threatened to peek out.

“Sorry I couldn’t come up with something better. But until your clothes are dry, it’s the best I could do.”