“I haven’t noticed you having any problems.”
“That’s because I’m being very macho. You know, laugh if it hurts, smile if it kills you.”
Alex wanted to be flippant again. She wanted to laugh and change the subject and get herself off his lap before she lost her head and her heart. But it was too late and she knew it. She had already lost her heart, and her head held nothing but memories imperfectly remembered, memories with beginnings but no endings.
What ending would this memory have?
“Noah—”
“Blue-ribbon judging panel still out?”
She couldn’t bear the half-shadowed look in his eyes or the taut steadiness of his voice. “No.” Her hand rose of its own volition to touch his cheek. “No, the decision’s in.” She felt a muscle tense beneath her hand.
“Did we win?”
“We got—the blue.” She heard her own voice break, her throat closing up.
Noah pulled her closer, one hand cradling the back of her head gently. She could feel a pulse throbbing in his throat and she snuggled even nearer, hiding her face because she was afraid of what he might have read in it.
“So we have … more than a beginning?” he asked.
Alex managed a shaky laugh. “That depends on you. I—I want more than a beginning.” I want a lifetime! “More than just the moment.”
He felt a jagged sense of relief that she was at least willing to try, at least sure he was important to her. But he couldn’t help remembering she had told him once she wasn’t looking for a ring and a promise.
He was important—but for how long?
Steadily he said, “Then we have more than a beginning. Because I want more too.”
Ladders and paint buckets clattered loudly on the stairs outside the loft, and Alex smiled regretfully at him as she raised her head.
“Never the time and the place …” he muttered, as regretful as she.
Alex got to her feet, feeling again a wrenching sense of loss when she left his embrace. “You’re spending a fortune to convert this building,” she reminded him. “Those guys have to work. And so do I.”
He stood, smiling. “I know. Well, the sooner we get to it, the sooner it’s finished. Then there’ll be time for us.”
SIX
THE CAMPSITE WAS bare and empty, only the blackened pits of their fires remaining to give evidence of the Gypsies’ stay.
He felt cold; emptiness ached in him. Gone. She was gone. Why? For the dear Lord’s sake—why? Surely she had not put any credence in the jeering disbelief of her brothers? She could not have doubted he’d come back.
Obviously she had doubted.
With a muttered curse he turned and strode toward his waiting horse. He would find her. Somehow. If he had to search the world, he’d find her.
Noah woke with a start, his heart pounding and his chest hurting as though he had run a very great distance. He lay in the darkness of his bedroom and listened to the predawn silence, waiting for his pulse to slow and for the ache in his chest to ease.
It took a long time.
And he couldn’t stop remembering the dream. It had been so vivid, so eerily real. He had felt pain and known the determination of a man driven to search for a Gypsy girl with green eyes.
Green eyes …
He linked his hands together behind his neck, staring up at the dim ceiling with a frown. He could remember another dream, one with soldiers and a blond woman, and himself wounded and hidden away in a musty barn. And now this odd dream, with himself another man, in search of a Gypsy girl. It made no sense, he thought. Unless …
The instant a wild supposition crossed his mind, Noah rejected it. Dreams, he decided firmly, were merely the aimless ramblings of the subconscious. No more than that.
His decision made, a certain relief enabled Noah to turn over and try to go back to sleep. The present, he thought, was difficult enough to handle without additional problems from the past. Alex had as good as said he was important to her, that he mattered, but if anything, she seemed more elusive than ever.
And believing he was her “blue-ribbon affair” was, after all, no more than a belief. Alex could easily decide she had been mistaken, and vanish from his life. Noah was determined to prove to her that their relationship was indeed what both of them had wanted and needed, but he was worried that Cal’s possible exposure would rob all of them of needed time.
He didn’t want Alex to lose Cal. But, even more, he didn’t want to lose Alex.
The work on the building had reached a critical point during the past several days—critical in more ways than one. The place was full of workmen; decisions were required of either Alex or Noah or both of them constantly, and Cal and Buddy had been shifted from one loft to another. The cats could safely remain in Alex’s loft now since the workmen were finished there, but Theodora Suzanne Jessica Tyler had shown up without warning more than once, and Noah could feel the tension behind Alex’s smiling façade.
Noah had said there would be time for them, and he hadn’t pushed. They were always exhausted at day’s end, content to share a meal and talk quietly for a while before turning in. He wanted more, needed more, but he was strongly aware that Alex required the peace of mind that only Cal’s safety would give her. As for his own peace of mind …
He swore softly and pounded his pillow, closing his eyes. If only she would promise to stay.
It was a long time before Noah fell asleep, dreaming more peculiar dreams in which he was a stranger and a participant. This time there was a blond woman with green eyes in his arms, in an unfamiliar room before a roaring fire, and there was a blue uniform lying nearby on the floor….
The wagon jolted and rattled, and the wavering image of the manor house was lost to sight behind the trees. She dashed a hand across her wet eyes, swearing in a weak imitation of her brothers. It served her right, they’d said, falling in love with an earl’s son—the nobility loved easily and briefly, and a poor Gypsy girl would never be a countess. They had laughed and sneered, and shown her the gold he’d paid them to take her away.
And now she was going.
But she was leaving her heart behind with the man who had trampled it.
Alex pushed the dream out of her thoughts as she showered and got ready to face another day. It was just another depressing indication, she thought tiredly, of fate taking a cruel twist. The night before last she had watched a blue-clad soldier ride away from her in a dream, and last night she had seen the Gypsy girl abandoned.
She pulled on jeans and a light sweater, brushed her hair automatically and left it free around her face. She stared into her bedroom mirror for a long moment, looking into green eyes that were dark and anxious.
“You’ve lost him twice,” she murmured to her reflection. “What makes you think you’ll win this time? Third time lucky?”
Alex was hardly convinced that failure in the past automatically meant failure in the future, but she was worried. Fate seemed set against her in the person of an animal control officer and in the intrusive presence of a building full of workmen.
More than once during these past days Alex had wanted to throw herself at Noah and beg him to take her away somewhere. But this place had come to mean home because she was putting her mark on it and because he was here, and a part of her was unwilling to run away without first attempting to fight. She was torn between an urge to protect Cal at all costs and an ever-growing need for Noah.
She was sick with dread at the fear that she’d have to choose at some point between the man she loved and the lion she’d protected for more than six years.
And all at once it was just too much. A temper that the years had taught her—for the most part—to control snapped. Alex didn’t like not to be in control of her life; she didn’t like the feeling that she was half mad because she was remembering other lives; she didn’t like being on guard and uneasy out of fear for Cal; and most of all—most of all—she was furious that circumstances had conspired to tau
nt her with her love for a man she just might have already lost twice.
Very steadily she walked into the living area of the loft, crossed to the couch, and bent to pick up a pillow.
When Noah hastily opened the door to Alex’s loft, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What met his incredulous, fascinated gaze, however, was a scene he would recall in later years with a grin.
Cal, his little white Buddy sitting trustfully between the great paws, lay sprawled on the carpeted platform, and both were observing their mistress with a comical serenity.
Noah didn’t dare come in.
Pillows were flying across the room and pelting the wall near a stuffed and impervious polar bear, their quiet thumps going unheard amid the other sounds filling the loft. And it was those other sounds rather than the flying pillows that held Noah’s attention.
Alex had not exaggerated her temper tantrums. Her tiny voice could never be roused to a shriek, he thought, but it was truly amazing how it had achieved the tone and general level of sound more commonly found among enraged dock workers. And she had borrowed the dock workers’ vocabulary, along with a judicious sprinkling of furious truckers’ swearing, and a wonderfully colorful mixture of curses most probably originating among sailors long at sea.
Then, quite abruptly, everything ceased. Alex shook her hair away from her face, took a deep breath, and gave Noah a very calm look. And her voice was utterly normal, unthreateningly tiny and sweet, when she said, “Want to help me pick up the pillows?”
“Is it safe?”
She chuckled softly, looking more relaxed than she’d been in days. “Of course. I wasn’t mad at you.” Crossing to begin to gather the pillows, she added thoughtfully, “I needed that.”
Noah took a deep breath of his own, shut the door behind him, and came into the loft. “I apologize,” he said. “I thought you were exaggerating.”
“The tantrums?” Alex thrust a couple of pillows into his arms. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that.”
“I see you didn’t.”
Alex grinned faintly. “You look very wary.”
“I’m just wondering,” he said, “what set you off.”
“No one thing. Just a general mad.”
“Nothing to do with me?”
“I wouldn’t say that. You might say I got mad partly because of you, but not because of you.”
Noah carried the pillows to the couch, then turned to her with a frown. “Want to run that by me again?”
She dumped an armful of pillows beside his pile. “Well, you were part of why I was mad, but it wasn’t anything you’d done.”
“Was it something I didn’t do?”
“No.”
He stared at her. “Alex, at the risk of enraging you again—why were you mad?”
Alex wasn’t about to confess her jumbled emotions. She settled for a relatively simple definition. “Fate. I was mad at fate.”
“Why?”
She sat down among the pillows and gazed up at him. Well, she thought, why not? He probably knew exactly how she felt about him anyway. Mournfully, she said, “Fate has not been kind. Started out kind, mind you. Here I am in a new city, with a new life and a fairly new career. Then I met you, and that certainly looked like it was going to be a good thing.”
“It didn’t turn out that way?” he asked uneasily, sitting down on the coffee table to face her.
“That,” she told him, “is where fate started to twist on me. It threw an animal control officer into the pot, along with assorted workmen just to keep things nicely crowded and confusing, and then other peculiar—things.” She wasn’t about to confess to insane dreams and speculations.
“What other things?”
“Just things. The point is,” she added hastily, “that it all just got to be too much. And I got mad.”
Noah was thoughtful, obviously trying to work his way through her explanation. Then, very carefully, he said, “Do I understand you to mean that you got mad because fate sort of dumped a group of quite unnecessary people between you and me?”
“How clearly you translate,” she murmured. “Yes, that was the crux of the tantrum.”
Gravely he said, “All you had to say was ‘Noah, take me away from all this.’”
Alex didn’t want to speculate on the similarity between his advice and the wistful thoughts she’d been harboring all week. Leaning forward to prop her elbows on her knees, she said, “Noah, take me away from all this.”
“I’d love to,” he said promptly.
She leaned back and gestured with a thumb toward their furry friends. “Them too?”
Noah sighed, “They are a problem, aren’t they?”
“They certainly are. It’s not easy—I speak from experience—to travel anywhere at all with a full-grown lion in tow. There is also the matter of the workmen; you and I are both needed until the work is completed. And just to add a bit of icing to the cake, if we did manage to sneak away somewhere, there would undoubtedly be suspicion in certain quarters.”
“Teddy.”
“The very same.” Alex felt depression creeping over her again.
Noah was frowning slightly. “We could slip out at night,” he said slowly. “Park your van at the door and get Cal into it unseen.”
“And where would we go? Besides, the workmen—”
“Never mind the workmen.” Noah’s blue-gray eyes were bright. “Tell me, sprite, if neither of us was needed here, would you really want to go away with me for a while?”
Alex wavered for only an instant, thinking of two other loves she’d lost. Then she nodded steadily. “If we weren’t needed. And if Cal was protected.”
“He’ll go with us,” Noah said calmly.
“Go? Go where?”
“Away.” Noah leaned forward. “Trust me?”
“Yes.” It was an instinctive response.
His eyes were even brighter. “I’m glad.”
“Yes, but, Noah—the workmen. Teddy.”
“I’ve got a feeling we’ll have to face Teddy sooner or later; why not postpone the inevitable and give ourselves time to think? As for the workmen, there’s nothing easier—I’ll just have them suspend the work until we return.”
Alex blinked. “Return from where? How many places can you go for a visit and hide a lion?”
“I know of one place at least.”
“Where? Noah—”
“I want it to be a surprise,” he interrupted, but in a soothing tone of voice. “Just keep trusting me, okay? I’ll talk to the men when they get here. You pack enough things for a week or two, and then we’ll draw up a list of groceries for ourselves and the pets.”
“Groceries?”
“Can’t take a lion into a restaurant.”
“True.”
“Besides, there aren’t any restaurants.”
“There aren’t any—”
“Get busy, sprite,” he said cheerfully, rising to his feet as a clatter out in the hall announced the expected arrival of the workmen.
Alex sat there for a long moment, gazing after him. She was relieved at the thought of getting away for a while, with Cal out of harm’s way at least temporarily. And she was torn between excitement and wariness at the thought of days of uninterrupted time with Noah.
She pushed the memory of dreams—or dreams of memory—aside, and let excitement win the tug-of-war.
“Hello.”
Alex looked up from pulling a large suitcase through the door of her loft, and gave silent thanks that Cat was shut up in the bedroom. “Hi, Teddy.”
“Kick me if I’m being nosy,” the redhead said dryly, “but did Noah throw you out?”
Working on the principle that it was better to get over difficult fences as quickly and easily as possible, Alex aimed directly for this one. “Oh, no,” she said happily. “As a matter of fact, he’s so pleased with my work that he’s giving me a little vacation. Isn’t that nice?”
“Very. Going anyplace special?”
Alex s
aid a silent good-bye to what was left of her virtuous reputation. “He hasn’t told me yet. A surprise, he says.”
“Oh, you’re both going?”
“Uh-huh. For a week or so.”
“Is the work on the building finished, then?” Teddy asked casually.
“Not quite. The workmen will finish it up when we get back.”
There was a faint gleam of laughter in Teddy’s brown eyes. “I see. And you’re just the hired help?”
Alex managed to get all the dignity she could into a level stare at the other woman. “I started out that way,” she said.
Teddy began to laugh. “Please don’t be offended, Alex—I think it’s great. You two seem to belong together.”
Sighing, Alex said, “We’re in the process of working that out at the moment.”
“Hence the vacation?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, good luck to you both.”
“Thanks.”
Teddy started to turn back toward the door, then paused. “Oh—Alex, d’you think Noah would mind if I hung around and kept an eye on the place? I still haven’t found my lion.”
Alex made a mental note to remove every last trace of Cal’s presence in the building. “I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask him.”
“Ask who what?” Noah asked as he came down the last few steps to Alex’s side.
Teddy smiled at him. “Ask you if you’d mind me hanging around and keeping an eye on the place while you two are gone.”
“Not at all,” Noah said promptly.
“Thanks. Well, have fun, you two. I’ll probably see you when you get back.”
“’Bye, Teddy.” Alex listened to Noah echo her good-bye, then she sank down on her suitcase. “D’you know what really irritates me, what makes me absolutely furious?” she asked him.
Noah studied her for a moment before deciding that there wouldn’t be an explosion. “What?”
“I like her. I mean, I really like her.”
He grinned a little. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like feeling friendly toward an IRS agent.”
“Scary,” she agreed, deadpan.