The Love Shack (21 page)

The sleeveless, thin cotton garment floated over her damp body and when she crawled between the cool sheets, she shivered. Gage gathered her close, his nakedness already warm, and she burrowed her back to his front and let herself drift away, floating on an ocean of sweet forgetfulness.

Later, she woke, instantly aware of Gage’s heavy arm across her waist and a need to use the facilities. She slipped free of his hold, took care of business, then flipped off the bathroom light. Tiptoeing across her floor, she heard him make a little sound.

Dreaming, she thought, with a smile.

Then another sound came from his throat. More guttural. Urgent.

“Gotta get out of the dark,” he suddenly muttered. “The dark is gonna kill me.”

“Gage,” Skye said, alarmed at the rough rasp of his voice. He sounded as if he’d been screaming for a week straight. She hurried to his side of the bed, sat on the edge.

“I can’t read the letters in the dark.” His groan sounded as if it was tortured out of him.

Skye’s stomach tightened. “Hey.” Her fingertips brushed his shoulder.

He sat bolt upright. Even in the shadowed room, she could see his eyes were open, though he moved his head about as if he was blind.

“Gage.” Her palm cupped his whiskered cheek.

At her touch, he jerked, then reached out to grasp her upper arms. His fingers curled, digging tight. “Give me light, you fuckers,” he yelled in that ruined voice. His eyes were on her face, but unseeing.
“Give me goddamn light!”

Shocked, she could only stare at him.

Then he shook her, hard enough to rattle her teeth. She bit her tongue, the sharp pain causing her to cry out. Only then did Gage freeze. He blinked several times, clearly orienting himself to the real time and place.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Skye.” He released his hold on her and lurched across the mattress toward the bedside lamp on the other side. Fumbling to turn it on, he almost knocked it to the floor.

When light flooded the room he inhaled deeply, over and over, as if the yellow glow were oxygen. His back was to her, and she could see the shudders that racked his large body.

Something was definitely wrong. Something big. The issue that his twin had been sensing? “Gage—”

“The lights were off. I can’t have all the lights off.”

“Why?” she asked, keeping her voice soft.

He waved a hand, the movement jerky. “A little phobia.” His voice sounded breathless.

Without another word, she got off the bed and padded into the bathroom. She brought back a glass of cold water, handing it over as she stood in the lamplight.

He drank it down in thirsty gulps. “More?” she asked, taking the empty cup from him.

Shaking his head, he glanced up at her and went rigid. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, baby.” His hand shook as it reached toward her upper arm.

She looked down, saw the ring of incipient bruises above her biceps. There was a matching band on the other side. His fingertips grazed the mottled flesh; then he met her eyes, his expression hardening to a mask. “I hurt you.”

Before she could respond, he hurtled out of the bed. He shut himself in the bathroom, and she detected the sound of water, the rustle of clothes. Clearly, he was planning to escape.

Determined not to let that happen, she wrapped her fuzzy robe around herself, taking a seat on the mattress. A second thought had her scurrying to the kitchen, and then she was back on the bed, hands folded in her lap as she prepared to drag the truth out of him.

The bathroom door popped open and he came into the room, pausing when he saw her expectant pose.

“You’re going to tell me what that was about,” she said.

His expression still unreadable, he shook his head. “No.” He slid his hands in his pockets as his gaze roamed the room. “Have you seen my keys?”

Lifting one hand, she let them dangle.

He zeroed in on their merry jangle, then strode toward her.

Skye shoved them deep in the patch pocket of her robe. “Tell me what happened first. I’ll give them to you after.”

His expression darkened as he halted a few feet away from her. “Don’t play games.”

“I’m serious.”

Shaking his head, he started forward again. Skye instinctively shrank back, and he stopped, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Shit!” he said. “Now I’m scaring you. Give me the keys and let me get the hell out of here.”

Skye straightened her spine. “Not until you talk to me.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” he said, the stony mask falling from his face. Temper vibrated his body and throbbed in the air. “You’ll wish you never knew.”

It made her belly jump, but she didn’t let that or his menacing stare move her. Crossing her arms over her chest, she pinned him with her gaze. “Tell me anyhow.”

And when he did, Skye realized she’d never have to worry about sleeping alone.

Because she’d probably never sleep again.

January 20

Dear Gage,

After a week of low skies and drizzle, we’re enjoying a string of halcyon days—you know the kind, when we hope they’re not televising a golf tournament from Pebble Beach or a surf competition in San Diego. When that happens, and the forecast is 77 and sunny on the SoCal sand...well, you can hear the stakes pulling up all over the rest of country and we brace for more freeway traffic.

The ocean is winter-green and white, its surface choppy, the waves throwing themselves on the shore like temperamental teenagers taking to their beds. But warmth radiates from the golden sand, and the jade plants are flowering, the scent from their pink, star-shaped flowers sweet and alluring. My mother used to tell my sister and me it was the perfume of the fairies, lingering in the air after their nights of mischief and magic.

Best, Skye

Skye:

Please send more word warmth! Our high yesterday was 2 degrees Celsius (that’s 35 to those Fahrenheit-inclined). After reading your letter, I shivered my way to the bazaar and found a shemagh (desert scarf) in the cove colors of sun and skye (sic). I told the shopkeeper it’s because I’m from California and he wanted to know which of the L.A. Lakers live next door to me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I can’t claim actual neighbors because I haven’t had a permanent address in years. When I think of home, however, my mind increasingly turns to Crescent Cove. Perhaps the fairies’ magic at work?

Gage

Fuming at Skye’s stubbornness, Gage stalked about the room. The nightmare was still clanking inside his skull like a tossed salad of nuts and bolts, bruising his synapses and scrambling his mental processes. He should come up with a cover story, blame some innocuous trigger like indigestion or allergies, but his head felt heavy, making it too clumsy to concoct believable untruths.

And then there was Skye herself. Thoughts of her had been the only dependable illumination for two terrifying weeks in the darkness. Her letters the good-luck charms that had gotten him through. When she looked at him the way she was and when he thought of how she’d trusted so much of herself to him, he couldn’t lie to her.

Still, it made him angry as hell, because he’d never intended to tell anyone. “I was kidnapped,” he stated baldly. Because what was the sugarcoat?

Her sharp intake of breath was a second delayed—as if her mind needed a moment to catch up—but it sounded loud and shocked in the quiet, shadowed room. “H-how?”

“I wrote you about that new contact I’d made, remember?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“He was supposed to take me to a new Taliban training camp in the border region.” Jahandar had been too smiley, too obsequious, Gage thought now. Except that wasn’t true. The young man had seemed sincere, and the money he wanted to act as guide was within the norms of what Gage had given to others.

“But instead?”

“Every time you get a new opportunity, you’ve got to make a decision,” he told her. “You weigh what you know, what could go wrong, what you hope to accomplish.”

“You take a gamble with your life.”

“No.” His temper was rising again, making his voice harsh. “Well, yes. But it’s not a death wish like you’re implying.”

She raised a brow.

“Somebody’s got to get the information, Skye.” He dropped into an upholstered chair positioned in the corner of the room. “I’m good at what I do. I’m good at seeing things in a way that clarifies what’s going on out there.”

“And you thrive on the danger.”

She didn’t get it, he thought, shaking his head. “If I consider myself in actual, impending peril, I don’t take the chance. Yes, I’m aware I could get hit by a stray bullet or have the bad luck of running over an IED, but that’s different than thinking I’m an actual target.”

Gage felt his hands tightened into fists. “That day I was set up,” he said. “Instead of taking me to the Taliban, Jahandar drove to the site of his family’s lucrative business. A ransom farm.”

She flinched.

“It’s exactly what it sounds like. The family specialized in kidnapping wealthy businessmen, mostly, but they were willing to branch out to journalists, too. Anyone who they suspected had family in America from whom they could extort cash.”

“Were you...were you held at an actual farm?” Skye asked.

His sharp laugh tore at his throat on its way out. “I was put in a hole in the ground.”

She went still. “I think you better give me the details before the ones I make up are worse than reality.”

“Reality likely isn’t much better.” But he explained that after being driven to Nowheresville, he’d expected to be met and vetted by the Taliban leader. Instead, he’d been confronted by three young men with Kalashnikov assault rifles. Adrenaline had flooded Gage’s system, though he’d tried to keep calm as they ordered him away from the car and up a dirt track. There, they’d slid away a piece of plywood the size of a manhole cover.

“That was home, sweet home,” he told Skye now. “They didn’t bother trying to coax me into the shaft, they just picked me up and dropped me down, about eight feet. One of my new friends followed me in, shooing me forward into a tunnel by prodding me with the nuzzle of a pistol.”

Shoving his hand through his hair, he tried to forget the smell of the earth, the tannic and ash taste of it on his tongue. “Then we got to a square-sized ‘chamber,’ that was six feet long, three feet wide, four feet high and braced with pieces of half-rotted wood. Inside was a dirty blanket, a dirtier pillow and a single lightbulb hooked up by wires to a corroded car battery.

“Once I was shown my new digs, my captor backed out and put another piece of wood over the opening that led to the shaft. I tried moving it, of course, but it wouldn’t budge.”

Skye stared at him. “How did you breathe?”

“There was a pipe that poked up to the surface. Oh, and I had a waste bucket, a watering can filled with rust-flavored H-two-O, and a backpack stuffed with boxes of mango juice and packaged cheese cracker sandwiches.”

All the temper was drained out of him now, leaving only the dark, oily stain of the memories.

“You were there for how long?”

“I was in that hole for two weeks.”

Skye shuddered. “How did you manage?”

“You...” He hesitated, sliding his palms down the denim of his jeans. “You got me through.”

“Me?” Her eyes went round.

“Your letters. I happened to have them with me.” She didn’t need to know he’d carried the thin packet whenever he left the place he rented in Kabul—he was that afraid they might get lost if someone robbed his rooms while he was out. “I’d read them, imagining you and the cove. Almost better than TV.”

She tried to put on a smile, but it quickly failed. “You didn’t always have light, though.”

His fingers tightened on his knees. “How...?”

One of her shoulders lifted. “When you were dreaming, you were demanding it.”

Begging, probably, Gage thought, feeling heat crawl over his neck. For a guy used to action, to movement, independence, autonomy, when the bulb sputtered out he’d believed he was being smothered. If he couldn’t see himself, there
was
no self. If he couldn’t read Skye’s letters—even though after a few days he could whisper aloud each word by heart—then there was no sunlight or ocean or Crescent Cove where he might someday return.

He tried on his own smile. “Let me just say I have a new appreciation for fresh car batteries.”

Frowning, Skye eyed him as she drew the edges of her robe more tightly around her. It was the color of a duckling and looked just as soft. “How did you get free?”

“I have a colleague, an Afghani photojournalist. They asked for a cell phone number and I gave his. We have an...agreement of sorts. To make a two-week-long story short, he has a contact in the national police. They ultimately arrested the patriarch of my kidnapping crime family. Then a deal was struck—he was freed upon the release of the farm’s current hostages.”

Skye blinked. Dawn was delivering its gray-fingered light into the room, mingling with the glow from the lamp. It created an odd visual field around her, obscuring the edges of her body. Squeezing his knees, Gage stayed where he was, ignoring a sudden and urgent craving to touch her, to make sure she was solid and real.

“You’re going back to that place, aren’t you?” she asked. “You’re going back to see if that family is at it again.”

His jaw dropped.

“I overheard you discussing your next assignment with Rex one afternoon,” she said. “And I can’t believe you’d walk into the lion’s den like that.”

He frowned at her. “Look, they are no more lions than I’m a lamb. And from what I’ve learned, that particular group has scattered.”

“Then why—”

His temper took hold of his tongue again. “Because I have to. Because I have to go back and photograph those holes in the ground. Those empty holes in the ground, to prove that I didn’t leave anything of myself behind.”

She opened her mouth, but he pointed a finger at her before a word came out. “You of all people should understand that, Skye,” he said. “You should get that I can’t allow anyone to keep a piece of me.”