Sandra Field – Wildfire (страница 2)

The sound struck Simon to the heart, for in it was a quality that he had ground to dust in his own soul during the last ten years. He felt involuntary tears prick at the back of his eyes, and furiously willed them back. The woman had wrapped the towel around her body and was loping up the sand towards a venerable pine tree that overhung the beach. For the first time he saw, tucked among the tree-trunks, a weathered cabin with a wide veranda and a stone chimney. Even as he watched, she disappeared among the trees in a flutter of scarlet. A few moments later he heard a screen door bang shut.

Simon let out his breath in a long sigh. His emotions were in chaos, a chaos he had no wish to analyse. He needed to get out of here. He needed to go back to Jim’s cabin, to the world that was sane and normal and known. As he picked up his paddle, he briefly looked down into the water to check for rocks, and saw in its mirror his own face. It looked no different from the way it usually did; somehow he would have expected the last few minutes to have marked it in some way.

His hair was thick and unruly, blacker than the surface of the lake, while his eyes, in startling contrast, were as blue as a summer sky. His will-power, which had driven him for so many years, was matched by the hard line of his jaw and the uncompromising jut of his nose, features that gave his face character rather than conventional good looks. That he was attractive to women he had long known and never really understood. His eye for detail failed him when it came to his own countenance: he was blind to the hint of sensuality in his mouth, to all the shadings of emotion that his eyes could express, to the thickness of his dark lashes which contrasted so intriguingly with the strength in his cheekbones.

He might not understand why women gravitated to him. He did know that there had never been a woman he had chosen to pursue who had not gone willingly to his bed. Willingly and soon. This he had come to take for granted. What it had meant was that he had slept with very few women in the last number of years, because what was easy and available was not always what was desired.

Scowling down at his face, Simon plunged the paddle into the water so that the reflection disappeared in a swirl of ripples. He brought the canoe around with a couple of strong sweeps, then began stroking back down the lake as though all the demons of the underworld were after him, digging his blade into the water so hard that his wake was marked by miniature black whirlpools.

He had been in danger of being sucked into such a whirlpool, he thought savagely, navigating the channel into the next lake with less than his usual caution. So he had seen a naked woman swimming in a lake. So what? He had seen naked women before. Seen them, painted them, made love to some of them. There was no reason for him suddenly to be feeling as though he was the only man in a world newly created, and she the one woman fashioned for his delight. No reason for him to feel as though all the warmth of the sun had fallen into his lap, like a gift of the gods. No reason at all. He was thirty-five years old, experienced and wise in the ways of the world. He was not sixteen.

As though mocking him, his inner eye presented him with a graphic image of the woman’s sensuous play in the water, of her pleasure-drenched smile and her water-streaked breasts. It was an image that made nonsense of reason in a way that both infuriated and frightened him. Apart from anything else, he had no idea who she was. Perhaps she was a visitor who would be gone from here by the weekend. Perhaps she was happily married. Perhaps he would never see her again. And even if he did, would he recognise her?

Only if she’s naked, the little voice sneered in his ear.

Go away, he growled. This is ridiculous! It makes no difference whether she’s from Vancouver with a husband and ten children or from Halifax with a live-in boyfriend. He, Simon, had not come to Canada to get involved with a woman. He had come to get acquainted with his brother; and to break away from a city that had been stifling him. This unknown woman was nothing to him. Nothing!

Driven by his own thoughts, and despite the headwind that had sprung up, Simon made it back to Jim’s cabin in record time. Physical action, as always, had made him feel better. Grinning ruefully to himself as he felt the twinges in his shoulder muscles, he tied the canoe to the dock. Then he strode up the path to the deck, took the steps in two quick leaps, and pulled open the screen door. It slammed shut behind him with a sound that struck into his memory: just so had another door on another cabin slammed shut half an hour ago.

Determined not to allow that aberrant turmoil of emotion to seize him again, equally determined not to ask a single question about the woman who lived in the cabin on Maynard’s Lake, he said, ‘Mmm...smells good.’

Jim was frying bacon in a cast-iron pan on the gas stove; his cabin, for all its rustic air, had all the modern conveniences. Turning over a rasher with a fork, he said casually, ‘You must have gone quite a way...see anything interesting?’

Jim was all that Simon was not, and in a group of people they would never have been taken for brothers. Ten years younger, four inches shorter, tow-haired where Simon had black hair, Jim had a sunny smile and an open nature, as far from the man of secrets that was his elder brother as a man could be. Jim was like a tabby cat stretched out in a patch of sunlight on the floor, purring in contentment; whereas Simon was like a wildcat, wary, deep-hidden in the shadows of the forest.

‘I went as far as Maynard’s Lake,’ Simon replied. ‘Shall I put some toast on?’

‘Sure...how’s your J-stroke doing?’

Simon grinned. ‘I’ll have you know that I can actually canoe in a straight line, brother dear.’ He cut four slices of the thick molasses bread that was sold at the nearest bakery. ‘I might marry the woman who makes this bread,’ he added.

‘You can’t,’ Jim said amiably. ‘She’s married to the local police chief who also happens to be the county’s champion arm wrestler. Pass me the eggs, would you?’

As Simon took the carton of farm eggs out of the refrigerator and handed them to his brother, he said awkwardly, ‘You’re a good teacher, Jim. Two weeks ago I’d never even been in a canoe. You’ve spent a lot of time with me—thanks.’

Jim shot him a keen glance. But all he said was, ‘You’re welcome. Can’t have you going back to England never having experienced something as quintessentially Canadian as canoeing.’

‘I even saw a beaver this morning. Plus several hundred maple trees.’

‘Then you’re practically a native,’ Jim laughed. Cracking a couple of eggs into the pan, he added, ‘As I recall, the best canoe lesson we had was the one on rescue techniques—that was the morning you turned into a human being.’

After a tiny hesitation Simon said evenly, ‘You believe in direct speech, don’t you?’

‘I say it like it is, yeah...life’s too short for anything else. The first three or four days you were here I figured it was going to be one hell of a long summer.’

Simon remembered the lesson on rescue all too well. It had involved him standing upright in one canoe pulling Jim’s swamped canoe up over the gunwales, and later hauling his brother out of the water, too. Jim had been pretending to be panic-stricken; it had been an interesting few minutes. Certainly it had been the day when the first of the barriers between the two men had fallen to the ground; Jim’s memory was entirely accurate. ‘Do you still feel that way? About the long summer, I mean.’

‘No. Although, like an iceberg, nine-tenths of you stays beneath the surface.’

‘That’s the way I live,’ Simon said, exasperated.

Expertly Jim flipped the eggs over. ‘That the reason it took you the best part of six weeks to answer my letter?’

Simon very carefully buttered the toast, taking his time. He said finally, ‘When I first got here, I mentioned that things hadn’t been going well for me lately. I’m in a rut as far as my painting’s concerned, London feels like a prison—dammit, I don’t even want to talk about it!’

He paused, knowing he had been guilty of understatement. For the last six months he had quite literally found himself unable to paint. In the north light of his studio he had spent hours standing in front of a blank canvas, paralysed by its whiteness, its emptiness, its mute quality of waiting. Since the age of sixteen he had lived to paint. To find himself cut off from his life’s blood had terrified him. And the more terrified he had become, the less able he had been even to hold a brush, let alone use it.

He took a ragged breath, knowing he had to pick up the thread of his story. ‘When your letter came in April, it took me totally by surprise. I’d tried to trace you once, years ago, but the records had been destroyed in a fire, and that was that. There was nothing more I could do. So when I heard from you it was like a voice from the past. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to look at that past. Not in the shape I was in. So I didn’t answer your letter right away, no.’ He added irritably, ‘Those eggs are going to be as hard as rocks.’