скачать книгу бесплатно
Thanks for the flowers, he’d written in a tall, narrow scrawl. You’ve given me a different memory.
No signature. But then, none was needed.
Kat raised her head, gazed into the woods.
A different memory.
Deep in her soul she knew that it wasn’t the flowers, but her.
She was the memory, the difference. And, she sensed, neither held regret. Note secured in her shirt pocket, she turned back into the house wondering if he realized how often she would read his ten words before the day was done.
Chapter Three
The nightmare stampeded into Dane’s sleep with a vengeance.
Reaching. He was reaching again. Reaching to no avail, even though his hands closed over thin shoulders, shielded terrified dark eyes. Everywhere hung the stench of smoldering flesh. His own and Zaakir’s.
Still, he pretended. Lied. I’m here. I’ve got you. Help is coming. Except, wasn’t he the help? Wasn’t he the doctor?
He’d arrived too goddamned late. Again.
He wrenched upright. Struggled for air. Fought against smoke, against fire. Fought, fought, fought—No. No.
He was in bed. In the cabin he’d rented.
Gradually, his grip on the comforter eased. He was okay. It was just a dream.
His heartbeat leveled. The panting abated.
Another damn night shot. Two in the morning and he might as well rise and shine. Three, four hours sleep was his normal now.
Tossing back the quilt, he climbed naked from bed. Cool air struck his hot, damp skin like a blessing. He’d take a walk along the ocean, let the night wind sweep the mess from his brain.
Ten minutes later, dressed in a thick flannel shirt, jeans, army coat and hiking boots, he stepped out onto the cabin’s porch.
As always at this hour, the first thing he noticed was the chilly punch of winter and the raw spice of ocean on the breeze, so different from the desert sand. Tonight, no moon or stars cluttered the sky. Instead, he stood surrounded by inky darkness. Beyond the steps, the flagstones vanished into the woods, and above them cut the roofline of the house where Kat and her son slept.
Flicking his flashlight, he went into the forest, found the rough, overgrown trail he had discovered his first evening here. The one meandering down the slope, toward the shoreline and ending at the fish-and-tackle shack and weathered boatshed amidst the conifers. He had wandered around the shed on several occasions, tried the locked double doors at both ends, peered into its three grimy windows.
From his initial inspection that first night, he knew the old fishing trawler or lobster boat was constructed of wood—a beautiful wood, given the right TLC—and might have been built in Maine.
Tonight, he shone his light once more against the gray walls, the deadbolt locks, the windows. Barely visible through the dirty panes, he noted the peeling name on the rear of the boat: Kat Lady.
A name her husband conceived? And had she docked the craft after his death?
Dane itched to get inside the building, to assess what could be done to make the vessel viable in the ways his grandfather had taught when Dane was a kid and rode the Sound with the old man. He’d been thinking about scraping and varnishing and remodeling the craft since he’d made his discovery. Three months would get the job done. A perfect time frame.
Okay, his bent was selfish. He couldn’t help that. He needed a motive to get up every day, an objective to mull over at night, to dream about—and Kaitlin’s old trawler fit the bill.
He didn’t need to ask why she had locked the vessel away, why she hadn’t sold this part of her late husband’s life. Selling, he knew, would mean goodbye…forever. Something he’d had to do in an instant with his medical career, with Zaakir. And then there was his marriage—although that goodbye had happened in stages. Still, the sorrow and regret he’d felt when Phoebe left Iraq to live stateside had sometimes overwhelmed him. He’d let her down in so many ways. Sure, she’d remarried, but that didn’t negate the fact he’d been a lousy husband.
The briny-scented wind filled his lungs as he skirted the light along the rear window frame. Had he been a less decent man, he would break the pane, reach in, unlatch the window. Except, he wasn’t a burglar, or a destroyer of property. He was a healer. Or had been.
Damn it to hell. Quit letting those memories hound you. Quit letting them rule your life.
Wheeling around, he strode past the boatshed and down to the shore where a wooden pier thumbed forty feet into Admiralty Inlet. Against the planks his boots thudded like hollow shots as he walked to the end of the quay. An icy wind whipped drops of seawater against his face. He jacked his collar up to protect his ears. His hands found the carryall pockets of his jacket.
He shouldn’t care about her boat. He shouldn’t speculate about her reasons for leaving it to decay in that cavernous shed.
Tomorrow he’d knock on her door, ask if he could fix the vessel.
And if she tells you to go to hell?
If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn’t he be tempted to tell her exactly that?
Restless, Dane strode off the pier and headed for the cluster of boulders a short distance away. Settling on top of the largest rock, he gazed at the night sea tossing its whitecaps ashore.
He tried not to think of the way she’d looked when she brought him that armful of flowers, or why he’d left a note on her doorstep. He tried not to remember Iraq, and the reason he was no longer a doctor. That his hands, his surgeon’s hands, were scarred and disfigured from a war which shattered the life he’d worked his guts out to attain. The life—when all was said and done—he’d loved more than his marriage. And he tried not to mull over his own skewed logic for ignoring his parents and sister.
In the end, he thought of them all. And when he finally returned to the cabin, his brain was in a worse muddle than before.
Until he spotted the flash and color of the bouquet on his table and recognized Kat O’Brien as the one quiet element in his mind.
His lifeline.
Three nights later, he heard the creak of a twig to the right of the porch where he sat in a wicker chair enjoying the evening quiet. Something stole through the forest. Ears straining for the slightest sound, Dane remained motionless, two traits he’d learned in Iraq when darkness closed in and rebels prowled villages, on the hunt for drugs brought along by medical teams.
These days on Firewood Island, night fell around five p.m., obliterating shadows and outlines and things that moved in the trees.
Several silent moments passed. Then…a soft crunch, as though someone stepped on a thick carpet of dead leaves.
Dane’s body tensed. Had the person noticed him on the porch?
His gaze zeroed in on the large cabin in the trees across Kaitlin’s backyard. Last night, Dane had observed lights in two windows. A second guest? He didn’t care, as long as they kept to their side of the property and left him alone.
Without making a sound, he got to his feet—and waited. The rustling had stopped. Creeping down the steps, he went around to the side facing the wooded hill. His eyes narrowed against the forest’s obscurity.
Someone panted softly.
Dane stepped into the block of light shining from the window of the eating nook.
“Holy crap,” a boy’s voice muttered, before the kid scrambled like a wild animal back up the slope.
Dane leaped toward the escapee, entering the trees like a predatory animal, silent, quick. Without a word, he sprang over moldering logs, and ducked grasping branches. Ten feet ahead the kid dodged right and left. Suddenly, he turned and scrambled farther up the hill, and then—abruptly—twenty feet ahead, Dane saw arms, legs and branches whip like miniature windmills. Thunk.
“Ow!” the boy yelped. Gasping and wheezing and clutching his leg, he writhed on a wet bed of leaves.
Dane approached slowly.
“Please,” the boy whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Easy, son.” Dane frowned at the slashed denim along the boy’s left leg. Crouching on one knee, he shrugged from his jacket and laid the garment across the boy’s chest. “Got a name?”
“Y-Yes sir. Blake.” The winded words came out Yea seer bake.
Kaitlin’s son?
The wheezing accelerated. Blake’s face altered, faded, and for an instant Zaakir stared up at Dane.
He swiped a hand across his eyes. He was losing it, and this kid was showing every sign of an asthma attack. “Where’s your inhaler, son?”
“Home.”
Sure, it was. Damn kid, creeping through the woods in the dark and forgetting his lifeline. Dane squashed the urge to give Blake a good shaking. Instead, he scooped the boy into his arms. “Hang on.” Careful of wayward limbs, he trotted through the trees, crossed Kaitlin’s back deck and, while the boy clung to his neck, yanked open the mudroom door.
“Inhaler,” he hollered, storming into the kitchen with Blake wheezing against his chest. “Now.”
Kat didn’t have time to think or ask questions.
The second Dane set her son next to the plate of hard-boiled eggs she’d been slicing for the spinach salad on her big worktable, Kat ran to the dining cabinet and grabbed the emergency inhaler.
“Darn it, Blake,” she said, shoving the tool into his hands. “What have I told you about keeping this with you at all times?” Heart pounding, she forced herself to watch calmly as he tilted back his head and put the instrument to his mouth. Still, she couldn’t help advising, “Breathe deep.”
He rolled his eyes.
She released a shaky sigh. Okay. Not as bad as she’d first thought when Dane banged into her house. Already the first healing puff had altered her child’s skin from pale and sweaty to pink and dry as added oxygen rushed into his blood.
Relieved, she turned to Dane. He stood in a white T-shirt, dog tags dangling from his neck, gloved hands clutching the end corners of the worktable. His dark eyes were fastened on Blake, his expression harsh. Kat’s stomach looped at the man’s scrutiny. Had she misread him after all? “What happened?”
“It was my fault,” Blake interjected before her guest could reply. “I was trying to look into Mr. Rainhart’s window and—and he caught me, and then I ran into the woods and fell and…” When he straightened his leg, she noticed the bloody damage for the first time.
Kat’s pulse bounced. “Oh, baby.” She bent over the torn skin. Deep and raw, the gash measured about four inches along her son’s bony shin.
Removing the desert jacket from Blake, Dane said, “He needs stitches. If you have gauze to wrap the wound, I can ready him for transport to the clinic.”
Ready him for transport? Disregarding the odd turn of phrase, Kat hurried to the cupboard with its stored First Aid supplies. Had Blake told her the truth, or had Dane Rainhart hurt her son somehow, perhaps frightened him into lying?
She nearly dropped the kit when she heard her son whimper. She hurried back as Dane gently straightened Blake’s leg. “Looks like that tree root did quite a number on you,” he said, inspecting the gash.
From what Kat could see “the tree root” had gouged the flesh just below the knee. Blake puffed his cheeks at the sight of his blood-soaked jeans. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
Dane placed a gloved hand on the back of her son’s neck. “Lower your head down toward your knees. That’s it.” He waited a few moments. “Feeling better?”
“A little.” Blake raised his head. “I—I didn’t m-mean to spy on you. Honest.”
“That what you were doing?” Dane hauled the knife off his belt and Kat’s heart lurched—until she saw that he meant to trim away the jagged edges of denim from her son’s wound.
Blake gaped while Dane deftly cut a neat rectangular hole. “Kaitlin,” he said, “we’ll need some warm water, a pinch of mild soap and a washcloth.”
She rushed to get the materials. Behind her, Blake murmured, “I—I just wanna be a soldier when I grow up.” She couldn’t catch Dane’s response.
Moments later, she watched as he cleaned Blake’s wound with the gentlest of motions, dipping the cloth into the water and touching it around the torn flesh. When it came time to dress the gash he directed her to cut the gauze—not that way—bind it around the gash—to the left—snip the gossamer ends, and knot them correctly.
If he knew first aid, why wouldn’t he remove his gloves and do the procedure himself?
Shoving him from her mind, she hunted down her stash of Children’s Tylenol.
“Bring your car to the front door,” Dane told Kat after she observed her son swallow the painkiller. “I’ll carry the boy outside.”
“I can walk,” Blake assured. He jumped off the worktable onto his good leg and limped from the kitchen.
Two minutes later, Kat locked up the house. Driving down the lane, she caught sight of Dane in the Honda’s side mirror. Arms crossed, he stood on the bottom step of her veranda, a formidable, forbidding man watching her leave the property.
What do you really know about him, Kat?
He’d had medical training, that was a given. Had he become the military doctor her sister Lee alluded to years ago? Given the desert fatigues he wore, Dane Rainhart had clearly served his country in some capacity.
That being the case, the sadness, the aloofness, the loner attitude seemed to resemble post traumatic stress disorder. Last winter, Lee had pondered the symptoms during her brief relationship with Col. Oliver Coleman before he was killed in action in Iraq.
“You mad at Mr. Rainhart, Mom?” Blake’s question from the rear seat jerked Kat away from the memory.
“Not at all. Why?”
Worried brown eyes filled the rearview mirror. “I was scared at first, but then I realized he was only trying to help. He wasn’t mean or anything.”
“You shouldn’t have spied on him, Blake. Looking through people’s windows is an invasion of privacy and very wrong. You know better. What on earth made you do such a thing?”
“I dunno.” He hung his head; dark hair fell over his smooth brow. “I’m sorry.”
Kat turned out of their wooded lane and onto Shore Road leading into the village of Burnt Bend. “It’s Mr. Rainhart you need to apologize to.”
“I will,” the boy murmured.
The promise did nothing to loosen the knot in Kat’s stomach. Her son had never peered into the windows of her guests’ cabins. Why did he do so now?
She wondered what Dane thought of Blake. She wondered what he thought of her parenting skills. Then she wondered why his opinion was important enough for her to contemplate. The man was part of her past, not her future. Right now, she needed to concentrate on getting her son medical attention. Beyond that, nothing else mattered.
Yet, the feeling Dane Rainhart wasn’t finished with her continued to hover over Kat’s shoulder.
He sat on the cabin steps, watching for her headlights to play peek-a-boo through the lane’s trees, to tell him she had returned home with the boy. The moment her car disappeared, he’d gone for a hard, fast hike through the hilly forest behind her property.
The kid’s chest hadn’t been crushed under the weight of metal. The wheezing was the result of asthma.
The knowledge had punctuated Dane’s every step. Guided by the flashlight, he’d climbed across mossy stones, through thick undergrowth and dodged gnarly tree limbs until his chest heaved, and the whistling sound of her son’s condition subsided.
Now he waited. Without light or warmth from the cabin.
He heard the grumble of a motor before headlights trickled through the forest. Seconds later, she pulled into the carport. Doors slammed. Voices, hers and the boy’s, drifted softly on the night.
