The Bride Wore Blue (6 page)

“You will keep my little secret, won’t you, Blue?” she pressed on anyway, determined to extract a promise from this man who had already proven to her that if he made a promise, he kept it. Even if it was as fanciful as keeping a promise to himself that he would kiss her after all these years.

A long moment passed as their eyes met and held. “A lady’s secret is always safe with me,” he assured her with a soft smile that did little to hide his curiosity and concern. “Especially if the lady happens to be you, Stretch. Remember that,” he added with an edgy emphasis he proceeded to drive home. “You can count on me. Anytime. For anything…anything you would ever need.”

The relief she felt was like dead weight lifted from her chest. She drew a deep breath, thanking him with her eyes because she didn’t think she was capable of speaking. She hadn’t thought she was capable of moving either until he set his mug aside and leaned toward her.

“I’m your man, Maggie.” He touched his hand to her face. “Whatever the need. Whatever the reason.”

His eyes had turned a smoky indigo, like a shimmering midnight sky as he held her gaze, mesmerizing, tantalizing, promising things she yearned to believe in, offering things she dared not indulge in.

He was so close she could see the pulse beat at his throat, steady, strong, vital. He was so tempting, as the warmth of his callused hand caressed her face and he lowered his head to hers, that she couldn’t make herself pull away.

She wanted more than life to give in to it all, to the pleasure he promised, to the safe harbor she’d been seeking her entire life. She tipped her head to the sheltering warmth of his palm, closed her eyes in anticipation of his kiss, then bolted like a deer in the sights of a hunter when lightning sizzled across the sky and a crack of thunder burst into the silence like a rifle shot of warning.

Her eyes snapped open in tandem with a heartbeat that leaped to her throat. She shot off the sofa, eyes wide and wary, arms wrapped protectively around her waist. She swallowed hard, working, working at catching her breath, working, working at regaining her equilibrium.

This couldn’t happen. She couldn’t let it. She didn’t need it. She couldn’t give in to the wants his kisses fostered. Couldn’t expose herself to that kind of dependence again.

With a darting glance that she prayed wasn’t as wild as the rapid-fire beat of her heart, she turned away from him. Without a word to explain her action, she hurried to her bedroom, shooed a disgruntled Hershey out of her bed and shut the door soundly behind her.

Hours passed before she slept. Hours of restless yearning that argued with common sense and made a shambles of her resolve. She lay in the dark and prayed he wouldn’t come to her door. Then she’d pray that he would. That he’d taken the responsibility out of her hands by taking her, without asking, without hesitation.

Shamed, she buried her face in the pillow and hated herself for nearly succumbing again to the weakness that Rolfe had always used against her and that she seemed unable to control.

All she’d ever wanted was for someone to love her. It didn’t seem so much to ask that someone felt a need to
protect her, to care for her. To drive away the inner voices that had jeered and sneered at her since she was a child, ravaging her sense of self-worth, convincing her she wasn’t worth the effort. At a very early age, experience had shown her she wasn’t worth loving, wasn’t worth cherishing, wasn’t worth anything as a person. Only as a personality. Only as an object.

Blue Hazzard made her want to stand up to those voices that had taunted her forever. Blue Hazzard made her want to discount that her own mother hadn’t wanted her. That a series of well-intentioned foster parents hadn’t cared enough about her to make their arrangement permanent. He made her want to forget that Rolfe Sebastion, the man she’d thought loved her for what she was, had only been in love with her face and her body and the manipulative pleasure and profit he could gain from both.

She rarely gave in to the pain. Rarely let herself indulge in the selfishness of self-pity. Tonight she had no choice. It overwhelmed her like the storm. It surrounded her like the darkness. And only her fear of yet another rejection kept her from running straight to the man who could, for tonight at least, subdue and slay the beast that prowled so close to the edge of her northwoods sanctuary.

T
he storm had blown itself out by morning. J.D. awoke to sunshine on his face, the orange red embers of last night’s fire in the grate and Hershey crowding him off the sofa. Though Maggie was at the center of his thoughts, she was nowhere in sight.

Last night she’d been a bewitching assemblage of soft, wistful sighs and slow, tentative gazes underscored by sexual awareness and faraway looks containing sadness and pain.

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stared hard at the ceiling. Something was very wrong in her life. He was convinced of it. No matter how valiantly she tried to hide it, she didn’t stand a chance of masking her true feelings. Not with that face. That beautiful, tragically sad face that projected every emotion she owned. She’d lose the farm in a poker game. Just like she’d almost lost her resolve last night—to keep whatever it was that was eating at her a secret from him.

The cabin had provided them with more than protection from the storm. It had cast them together, isolated them from the rest of the world. They’d settled into an easy intimacy that had encouraged confidence and trust—until he’d blown it by giving into his need to kiss her and that hunted look had returned to her eyes before she’d run away. But not before she’d extracted a promise that he keep her presence a secret.

As if he needed a reason to keep her to himself, he thought, remembering the feel of her cheek against the back of his knuckles when he’d finally worked up the nerve to reach out to her. He’d been about ready to tell her that— hell, he’d been ready to show her—when she’d shot off the sofa like someone had lit a stick of dynamite beneath her.

He sat up and plowed his fingers through his hair. The niggling concern about what had put that fear in her eyes had eaten at him all night. Her tight-lipped silence about it made him madder than blue blazes. It also drove home the fact that among the feelings she had awakened in him, this sense of responsibility was as strong as the tide and just as mysterious.

He wasn’t a believer in karma or kismet or any of that transcendental hooey, but he wasn’t prepared to blow off the possibility that their chance meeting after all these years had happened for a reason. He’d followed her career. His air cargo business took him all over the world—frequently to New York. He could have approached her a number of times. Yet he’d held off. He only realized now—now that he was with her again—that what he’d told her earlier was true. He really had been waiting for her to return to the lake where they’d first met.

And she’d come back. After fifteen years. There had to be some significance to that. And there had to be a reason.

Whatever it was, he wasn’t fool enough not to take advantage of the opportunity life had handed him on a golden
platter. She was here. They were together. He intended to keep it that way.

The problem was that if she kept shutting him out with forced silences and hurried getaways, he’d never find out if this was supposed to lead anywhere.

“Scooch over, you sofa slug,” he grumbled when Hershey took advantage of his shift of position to stretch out full length across the cushions.

Hershey just moaned in doggy ecstasy and wriggled onto his back.

J.D. rolled his eyes and made room. “Your trouble is, you don’t know who the dog is in the duo,” he muttered, giving the lab the belly rubbing he was begging for.

“And my trouble,” he said, tugging a blanket from under him and wrapping it around his hips as he stood up, “is solving Miss Maggie Adams’ problem, then figuring if I’m going to be a factor in her life.”

Tucking either end of the blanket securely around his waist, he laid some kindling on the embers and set to work coaxing the fire back to life. Though the day promised sunshine and July heat, the cabin held the lingering chill of last night’s storm at this early hour.

He glanced at his watch, surprised to see it was already a little after seven. After loading the stove with wood, he rummaged around quietly in her cupboard, searching for something to secure the blanket before he bared it all to God and the rest of the free world.

“A woman after my own heart,” he murmured with a pleased grin when he found a roll of duct tape tucked in the back of the cupboard. After tearing off a strip and taping the blanket around his hips, he craned his neck around to get a glimpse of the bedroom door. Seeing it open, he skirted the pine dinette set, padded barefoot across the worn puncheon floor and peeked inside.

The bed was made and the woman was gone. He hadn’t any more than let that thought settle when footsteps announced her approach at the back door.

“Well, aren’t you the early bird,” he said, swinging open the door—and connecting squarely with the glacial stare of eyes as black as midnight—belonging not to Maggie but to a man as big and as unyielding as a mountain.

Abel Greene topped J.D.’s six-two by a couple of inches, outweighed him by possibly twenty lean pounds of muscle. In attitude, he also had J.D. beat by a country mile.

His long black hair, which was held back from his face with a dark blue bandanna, added to the drama and the intensity of his predatory glare and supported the story that he was a descendent of a French fur trader and a Chippewa maiden. And J.D. was
not
happy to see him at Maggie’s door.

“What the hell are you doing here, Greene?”

Abel Greene stared back at J.D. with a stone-hard expression that relayed neither intimidation nor compromise. It was Greene’s unreadable facade of impenetrable indifference that had earned him a reputation as an unfeeling loner and had made him the subject of speculation around the lake for years. Behind his back, he was also the target of a guarded ridicule that masked unease about the enigma he’d become.

J.D. had shared the speculation, but not the ridicule. His inclination, based on his few encounters with Greene, leaned more toward healthy respect and justifiable curiosity. Unfortunately, though, because of Greene’s proximity to the black bear population around the lake area, J.D. was also reluctantly forced to accept the Department of Natural Resources’ theory that Greene might be involved in the poaching ring.

The question of the moment, however, was what was the big man doing at Maggie’s door.

“I said, what are you doing here, Greene?”

Greene answered with a question of his own. “Where’s Maggie?”

More demand than query rang in Greene’s words. Liking neither his attitude nor the implication that he had a right to ask about Maggie, J.D. crossed his arms over his chest and deepened his scowl.

His attention shifted abruptly when the dog by Greene’s side—a dog the size of a small pony with the look and demeanor of a wolf—began to whine and scratch at the door.

“Nashata, quiet.” Greene’s short, soft command was nonnegotiable. The dog settled, sat, then stood again, her long tail tucked between her legs, slowly wagging as Hershey bounded off the sofa to investigate.

While the dogs pressed their noses to the screen to sniff and size up each other, J.D. and Greene did the human equivalent.

J.D.’s gaze was drawn to the angry-looking scar that ran the length of Greene’s face from temple to jaw. Word had it a bear was responsible for that scar. It added to Greene’s mystique and the hard fact that Greene could never be mistaken as anything but formidable.

Neither could J.D. mistake the fact that he and Maggie knew each other. He didn’t much like that conclusion. And when Greene turned to the sound of approaching footsteps, J.D. didn’t much like the way his features relaxed and the wolf dog left his side to accept, without hesitation, a pat from Maggie’s hand.

Dressed in no-nonsense gray sweats, well-used running shoes and a sheen of perspiration that beaded on her flushed face, Maggie walked past the dog to Abel’s side.

“My, my,” she said, her speech stilted by the obvious fact that she was winded from a recent run, “seems there’s no end to my unexpected visitors these days.”

She gave Abel a reassuring smile. J.D. felt something clench in his gut like a vise grip. Just once, he’d like to see that kind of trust relayed in a look she gave him. Just that
fast, he was determined he’d see that look directed at him. Soon.

“What brings you by this morning, Abel?” she asked as she raked the hair back from her face with her fingers, then dragged her forearm across her brow to wipe away the perspiration.

“It was a bad storm,” he said in a voice made gravelly by lack of use, made deep by restrained concern. “Thought you might have had some trouble.” His gaze swung meaningfully back to J.D.

“No trouble,” J.D. said, opening the screen door and stepping outside. “At least not for the lady.”

Hershey slipped out behind him. After gingerly approaching the wolf dog, he sniffed happily, woofed a friendly greeting, then bounded into the woods for a morning romp. The wolf dog waited for a nod from Greene before she followed.

“It’s okay, Abel.” Maggie laid a hand on Greene’s arm in a gesture of reassurance when the big man stood at the ready. “Blue had engine trouble. When he couldn’t get it fixed, he ended up spending the night.”

Greene, with that implacable, dark-eyed glare, looked J.D. up and down, taking in his morning stubble, his sleepmussed hair and his bare body wrapped at the hip with nothing but a blanket and duct tape.

“He got caught in the storm,” Maggie added, reacting to Abel’s silent appraisal, then turned with a puzzled scowl to J.D. “Your jeans are almost dry,” she said, nodding toward the cabin, where she’d hung them by the fire. “I don’t hold out much hope for your shoes, though, and your sweatshirt is still in a soaking heap on the dock.”

Never taking his eye off Greene, J.D. jerked his head in the general direction of the lake. “I’ve got a duffel with extra clothes in the plane. With a little luck, there should be something dry in there.”

Greene gave J.D.’s bare chest and low-slung blanket another dark once-over. “Might be a good idea if you were to go get it right now.”

Now there was an engraved invitation to leave if he’d ever heard one. J.D. clenched his jaw, straightened his shoulders and narrowed his eyes at Greene.

“I’ll get it,” Maggie interjected, her look relaying that she was both puzzled and annoyed by the presence of megadoses of testosterone suddenly wafting on the cool morning air.

“In the meantime,” she added, her voice expressing her irritation, “why don’t one of you put on a pot of coffee. And try to keep it down to glares until I get back, would you, please? Because, so help me, if I see any bumps or bruises when I get here, I’m going to add a few more.”

With a men-will-be-boys roll of her brown eyes, she left them to their own devices.

Since it was damned near impossible to look imposing when your bare skin was crawling with goose pimples and your nipples were puckered into tight little pebbles in the nippy morning air, J.D. hiked his blanket higher on his hips and stalked back into the cabin.

Greene followed a deep breath later, then set about making a pot of coffee while J.D. poked grumpily around in the fire.

“You seem to know your way around,” J.D. said, irked beyond measure by that knowledge as Greene pulled the coffee can out of the first door he opened, in what J.D. concluded was not a good guess, but the familiarity of a man who’d done it before.

“And you seem to have imposed—” Greene paused, his judgmental glare once again skimming the length of J.D.’s blanket-clad body “—on a friend of mine.”

“Friend?” J.D. asked. The one word and the inflection he gave it clearly told Greene he wanted some clarification here.

“Friend,” Greene echoed after a long moment, but with a clarity of intent and a strength of purpose that satisfied J.D. that friendship was the extent of Greene’s involvement with Maggie.

While he was relieved—okay, he was elated—that Greene had no interest in her romantically, J.D. still wasn’t comfortable with this man befriending her.

“I was in the mechanic’s pool in the Marines,” Greene said when the coffee was ready. He poured two cups, then slid one J.D.’s way. “I could take a look at your plane.”

“And send me merrily on my way?” J.D. speculated with a sardonic smile, and hoped to hell Greene hadn’t already taken a gander under the engine cowling. In the next breath, he figured the big man hadn’t looked, because if he’d spotted the pulled fuel line, J.D. might not be standing here in his goose bumps and blankie. Greene would have already had a good start on tearing him apart. At least he’d give it a try, J.D. thought, figuring he could hold his own against him if it came to that.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said, wrapping his hands around the mug and leaning a hip against the kitchen counter. “I’m sure I can pin down the problem and set her right.”

Greene nodded, then turned the tables on J.D. by assuming the role of protector. “How was it that you ended up at Maggie’s cabin?”

J.D. fought a grudging respect for the man in that moment. Like it or not, they were, by virtue of his role in the poaching investigation, adversaries. Even knowing that, he had to admire the fact that Greene was looking out for Maggie’s best interests. Admiring it, however, was a helluva long way from liking it.

“Maggie and I go way back,” he said, offering the same reassurance he’d asked for and received from Greene. “It was my good luck that when I set down yesterday, it was in Blue Heron Bay. My
better
luck that I found Maggie in it.”

Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it, J.D. thought, intending for Greene to accept that J.D.’s involvement with the lady went far beyond friendship. At least that was the plan. He wasn’t so confident of his plan or his involvement, though, when Maggie swung open the back door and dumped his duffel on the floor.

“I swear to God, Hazzard, your whole world is held together with duct tape.”

J.D. eyed the beat-up duffel, which, he agreed, had a little tape wrapped around it holding it together—-all right, a lot of tape, he conceded upon a closer look.

“The whole world could be held together with that tape,” he said defensively. “It’s the best invention since the propeller.”

She just snorted and walked to the cupboard to snag a mug. “So,” she said, filling it with coffee, “you two get better acquainted?”