Dream Lake

  “Cruel to be kind,” Alex said in agreement.

  The ghost barely seemed to have heard him. After a contemplative silence, he said, “That was the last time I ever saw her. When I walked out of that bedroom and headed to the stairs, I passed by this window. The glass had changed. The leaves had disappeared, and the sky had darkened, and a winter moon had appeared. An honest-to-God miracle. But I couldn’t let myself think about what it meant.”

  Alex couldn’t understand what the ghost thought was so appalling and shameful in such a confession. He’d acted honorably in offering to marry Emma when circumstances had merited. There had been nothing wrong about breaking off the engagement after the miscarriage—Emma had hardly been left alone and destitute. And Tom was going to enlist anyway.

  “You did the right thing,” Alex volunteered. “You were honest with her.”

  The ghost looked at him with a flare of incredulous anger. “That wasn’t honesty. It was cowardice. I should have married her. I should have made sure that no matter what happened, she would have always known that she meant more to me than anything else in the world.”

  “Not to be insensitive”—Alex began, and scowled at the ghost’s humorless laugh—“but you probably would have died in the war anyway. So it’s not like you would have gotten any more time together.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” the ghost asked in disbelief. “I loved her. And I failed her. I failed both of us. I was too much of a coward to take a chance. Some men go their whole lives dreaming of being loved like that, and I threw it away. And all my chances to make it right went smashing down to the ground along with me and that airplane.”

  “Maybe you were lucky. Have you thought of that? If you’d lived through the war and made it back to Emma, you might have ended up with a lousy marriage. The two of you might have ended up hating each other. Maybe you were better off the way things turned out.”

  “Lucky?” The ghost looked at him with horror, fury, disgust. He stood and wandered aimlessly around the landing. A couple of times he paused to glance at Alex as if at some mildly repellent curiosity. Eventually he stopped in front of the window and said in a hostile tone, “I guess you’re right. It’s better to die young, and avoid all the miserable, messy business of loving other people. Life is pointless. Might as well get it over with.”

  “Exactly,” Alex said, resenting the moralizing. After all, he was willing to make his choices and pay for them, just as the ghost had. It was his right.

  Staring at the window, with all its flourishing colors, the ghost said with quiet malevolence, “Maybe you’ll be lucky like I was.”

  Twenty-two

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky like I was.”

  Although Alex hadn’t wanted to admit it, the words had bothered him more than the ghost would have suspected. He knew he’d been a jerk, telling the ghost that he might have been better off dying young. It was all kinds of wrong to say something like that, even if it was what you believed.

  The thing was, Alex wasn’t entirely sure what he believed anymore.

  Introspection had never been his strong suit. He’d grown up thinking that if you expected nothing and then got nothing, you wouldn’t be disappointed. If you didn’t let someone love you, you’d never have your heart broken. And if you looked for the worst in people, you’d always find it. Those beliefs had kept him safe.

  But he couldn’t help remembering a line in that grief-stricken letter Emma had typed so long ago … something about her prayers being trapped like bobwhites beneath the snow. The ground-roosting birds, sleeping in a tight circle in winter, welcomed the falling snow that covered them with a layer of insulation. But sometimes the snow iced over, trapping them in a hard shell that they couldn’t escape from. And they starved and suffocated and froze to death. Unseen, unheard.

  There were times he had felt like Zoë was breaking through the layers of protection. She had given him some of the few moments of happiness he’d ever known in his life. But he would never be able to inhabit the feeling fully because of the unshakable conviction that it wouldn’t last. And that meant Zoë was a danger to him. She was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

  He was different from his brothers, who were both more easygoing, more comfortable with giving and receiving affection. From what he remembered of their sister Vickie, she had been like that, too. But none of them had still been living at home when their parents had sunk to the worst of their alcoholism. None of them had been neglected for days or weeks at a time in a silent house. None of them had been given cups of booze to keep them quiet on weekends.

  Despite his own issues, Alex couldn’t find it in himself to begrudge Sam’s newfound happiness. Sam had gotten back together with Lucy. He had told Alex that the relationship was serious, and he was going to marry Lucy someday. Their plan was that Lucy would accept the year-long art grant in New York, and she and Sam would maintain a long-distance relationship until she came back to Friday Harbor.

  “So it’ll be convenient to have you move in at Rain-shadow Road,” Sam told Alex. “I’m going to go to New York at least once a month to visit Lucy, while you keep an eye on things for me.”

  “Anything to get rid of you,” Alex said, unable to hold back a smile as Sam gave him a jubilant high five. “Jeez. A little too happy. Can you bring it down a notch? Just so I can stand being in the same room with you?”

  “I’ll try.” Sam poured some wine for himself and looked askance at Alex. “Want a glass?”

  Alex shook his head. “I’m not drinking anymore.”

  Sam gave him a brief, arrested glance. “That’s good.” He began to set aside his wine, but Alex gestured for him to keep it.

  “Go ahead, I’m fine.”

  Sam took a sip of wine. “What made you decide to stop?”

  “I was getting too near the invisible line.”

  Sam seemed to understand what he meant. “I’m glad,” he said sincerely. “You look better. Healthier.” A deliberate pause. “Looks like going out with Zoë Hoffman has its benefits.”

  Alex frowned. “Who told you that?”

  Sam grinned. “This is Friday Harbor, Alex. A supportive close-knit community where we all live to know the sordid personal details of each other’s lives. It would be easier to list who hasn’t told me. You’ve been seen out with Zoë about a hundred times, you’ve been remodeling her cottage, your truck has been parked in her driveway overnight … I hope you didn’t think any of this was a secret.”

  “No, but I didn’t figure on everyone being so damn interested in my private life.”

  “Of course they are. It’s no fun to gossip about something that’s not private. So about you and Zoë—”

  “I’m not talking about it,” Alex informed him. “Don’t ask me how the relationship is going, or where it’s headed.”

  “I don’t care about that stuff. All I want to know is how hot the sex is.”

  “Mind-blowing,” Alex said. “Orgasms on a cellular level.”

  “Damn,” Sam said, looking impressed.

  “All the more amazing in light of the fact that there’s usually an old lady in the house, and a cat howling outside the door.”

  Sam laughed quietly. “Well, you’ll have a chance at some time alone with Zoë next week. I’m going to New York for a few days to help Lucy settle into her new apartment. So if you’ve moved your stuff here by then …”

  “It’ll take me half a day at most,” Alex said. Hearing a text message alert from his phone, he pulled it from his back pocket. It was from his real estate broker, who had recently been approached with a potential offer for Alex’s Dream Lake parcel. Although Alex had said he wasn’t interested in selling—he wanted to develop the land himself—the Realtor had insisted that this offer was worth considering. The buyer, Jason Black, was a video game designer for Inari Enterprises. He was looking for a place to build some kind of a learning community retreat. The project would be huge, with several buildings and facilities. Whoever built it would
make good money. “And here’s the interesting part,” the Realtor had told Alex. “Black wants it all built LEED certified, with all the latest environmental and energy-saving requirements. And when I told his broker that you were accredited and you’d had experience building green-certified homes … well, now they’re interested in talking to you. There’s a chance you could sell the property with the stipulation that you’d be hired as the builder.”

  “I like working on my own,” Alex had said. “I don’t want to sell. And the idea of having to answer to a video game geek—how do I know he’s not a flake?”

  “Just meet with him,” the Realtor had pleaded. “We’re not just talking good money, Alex. We’re talking sick money.”

  Glancing at his brother, it occurred to Alex that Sam might be familiar with the game company. “Hey, do you know anything about Inari Enterprises?”

  “Inari? They just came out with Skyrebels.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What rock have you been living under? Skyrebels is the fourth installment in the Dragon Spell Chronicles.”

  “How could I have missed that?” Alex wondered aloud.

  Sam continued with enthusiasm. “Skyrebels is the most played game out there. They sold over five million in the first week of release. It’s a role-playing open world format that features nonlinear emergent play, and it’s got this incredible graphic fidelity with self-shadowing and motion blur—”

  “In English, Sam.”

  “Let’s just say it’s the biggest, best, coolest time waster of a game ever known to man, and the only reason I don’t play it twenty-four hours a day is because I occasionally need to take a break for food or sex.”

  “So have you heard of Jason Black?”

  “One of the top game creators of all time. Kind of mysterious. Usually a guy in his position speaks at a lot of gaming industry events and award shows, but he keeps a low profile. He has a couple of front men to do appearances and speeches for him. Why are you asking?”

  Alex shrugged and said vaguely, “Heard he might want to buy property on the island.”

  “Jason Black could afford to buy the entire island,” Sam assured him. “If you have a chance to do anything associated with him or Inari, take it and run.”

  “Is it a game like Angry Birds?” Zoë asked a few days later, when Alex told her about Skyrebels.

  “No, this is an entire world, like a movie, where you can explore different cities, fight battles, hunt for dragons. There’s a potentially unlimited number of scenarios. Apparently you can take time out from the main quest to read books from a virtual bookshelf or cook virtual meals.”

  “What is the main quest?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Zoë smiled as she scraped cooled melted white chocolate from a small saucepan into a bowl. She and Alex were alone at the house on Rainshadow Road. Sam had gone to visit Lucy in New York, while Justine had volunteered to stay with Emma at the Dream Lake cottage. “I’m not doing it for Alex, I’m doing it for you,” she had told Zoë. “You should have an occasional night when you don’t have to worry about Emma.”

  Setting aside the empty saucepan, Zoë said, “Why would anyone want to spend that much time in a virtual world instead of the real one? You could go to all the trouble of making a virtual meal, but you still wouldn’t have a real dinner to eat.”

  “Gamers don’t want a real dinner,” Alex said. “They like things you can eat with one hand. Potato chips. Pop-Tarts.” He laughed at her expression, and watched, intrigued, as Zoë used a spatula to mix the white chocolate into a bowl of whipped cream. “Why are you stirring it like that?”

  “I’m folding it. If you stir it the regular way, it won’t be fluffy.” She cut the rubber spatula vertically through the bowl of whipped cream and liquid white chocolate, swept it across the bottom of the bowl and up the side, and over the top of the mixture. Each time she finished the movement, she rotated the bowl a quarter turn. “See? This way it keeps the mixture light. Here, try it.”

  “I don’t want to ruin it,” Alex protested as she gave him the spatula.

  “You won’t.” She put her hand over his, and showed him the motion. He stood behind her, his arms around her, while she guided his hand deftly. “Down, across, up, over. Down, across, up, over … yes, that’s the technique.”

  “I’m starting to get excited,” he said, and she laughed.

  “It doesn’t take much for you.”

  He gave the spatula back to her, and nuzzled into her curls as she finished folding the batter. “What are we making this stuff for?”

  “White chocolate strawberry shortcake.” She dipped a fingertip into the rich whipped cream and turned in his arms. “Taste.”

  He tasted the cream from her finger. “My God. That’s good. Give me another.”

  “No more after this,” Zoë said sternly, dipping her finger once more into the bowl. “We need the rest for the shortcake.”

  Her finger was drawn into the warm suction of his mouth. “Mmmn.” Bending his head, he shared the taste with her, his tongue sweet like white chocolate. Zoë relaxed against him, her lips parting. The kiss lengthened, turning lazy and deep, while his hands slid over her arms and shoulders. Grasping the hem of her T-shirt, he began to pull it upward, and she stopped him with a little squeak of protest.

  “Alex, no. We’re in the kitchen.”

  His lips dragged gently to her neck. “No one’s here.”

  “The windows …”

  “There’s no one for miles around.” He stripped the shirt away from her. His mouth caught hers with a sensual greed that made the down on her neck and arms rise. When she felt him pulling down her bra straps, she tensed uneasily but let him do it. His fingers, so clever and sure, went to the back of her bra and unfastened the tiny hooks. One … two … three. The straps and elastic webbing fell away.

  His hand covered her breasts with warm, stimulating pressure, his palms rubbing softly, and then his thumbs flicked until the tips were rosy and hard. She leaned back against the hard edge of the counter, forcing words between shallow gasps. “Please … upstairs …” She wanted the dark enveloping privacy of a bedroom, the softness of a bed.

  “Here,” Alex insisted softly. He took off his own shirt and dropped it to the floor, all toughness and masculine brawn, his body rampantly aroused. His eyes were light and devil blue as he reached into the bowl of frothy cream and scooped some with two fingers. She blinked as she realized what he intended.

  “Don’t even think it,” she wheezed, giggling, trying to slide away. “There’s something wrong with you.” But his free hand gripped the front edge of her shorts, anchoring her in place, and he dabbed the chilled white chocolate mixture over the tips of her breasts. She closed her eyes, trembling as he bent to lick and suck the sweetness from her. He stood and kissed her again, his mouth delicious and hungering. His hands were in her shorts, his palms hot against her skin. She couldn’t think, could hardly breathe. Just let him, her body urged, the pleasure unfolding in wanton blooms. Let him ease her shorts and panties off, let him kiss the vulnerable curve of her stomach and grip her bottom with his hands. Let him kneel in front of her, his mouth following the taste of her excitement.

  Her legs shook, and she leaned back against the cold granite counter for support. Gooseflesh covered her skin everywhere. He reached for the bowl of cream. A dab of cool sweetness between her thighs. He opened her with his mouth, his tongue flickering. Down, across, up, over. The rhythm was persistent, merciless, allowing her no time to think, lavishing her with a feeling so intense that it shortened the spaces between her heartbeats. She heard herself making sounds like a distraught dreamer, her hips moving in tight circles against his mouth. Her flesh swelled, and he licked deeper, rougher, faster, sending her into a commotion. She cried out, their surroundings shimmering in a brilliant blur. He stayed with her, stroking while the release melted through her, until she was moaning and spent.

  Rising to his feet, Alex tug
ged at the zipper of his jeans. His arms went around her, pulling her upward against the stiff shape of his erection. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her head falling to his shoulder. There was no need for condoms, she had started taking the pill. Reaching down, he angled her hips and positioned himself, and she gasped as a heavy upward thrust nearly lifted her toes from the floor. Her body closed around him, working at the hard invasion until he groaned and thrust again. She was weightless, anchored only by the force of him inside her, shudders of pleasure rebounding from her flesh to his and back again. The breath hissed between his teeth as he came in rough pulses, his arms curling tightly around her. They stood locked and shivering, exchanging soft, sated kisses that soon turned greedy … the kind of kisses you shared with someone you might not have for always, but you could have for right now.

  They went upstairs to Alex’s bed, with its cool white sheets and the screened windows open to the salty breeze from False Bay. As Alex kissed and caressed her, the September moon shed cold lavender light into the room. She felt the pull of it, the moon tide of emotion and energy rising as Alex made love to her as if he owned her. As if he wanted the feel of him to sink deep in her nerve memory and never be erased.

  He was so strong over her, so deliberate, filling her with heavy lunges while the moonlight wrapped around them. His hand went beneath her bottom, lifting her into his movements. The lust gathered to an agonizing pitch, and she groaned the moment before it uncoiled, but he backed off, slowing, not letting her come. He circled his hips, teasing until she writhed. She gasped out a few pleading words, telling him she wanted him, needed him, she would do anything for him. It wasn’t enough. He brought her to the edge and retreated until they were both sweating and shaking with desire, and he breathed her name with each thrust as he drove her at a slow, merciless pace. She felt hot pleasure-tears leak from her eyes, and he kissed them, pressing wordless gasps against her cheek.