Snowflakes on the Sea

Nathan sighed, the sound broken, heavy. “I know, Mallory—I’m sorry.”

Sorry for what? Mallory wondered silently, sick with the anguish of loving a man who belonged to so many. Sorry for accusing me like you did or sorry that you have a number of nubile groupies to occupy your many nights away from home?

“I’m very tired,” she said instead.

“I see. You weren’t tired in the kitchen tonight, were you?”

The sarcasm in his voice made Mallory’s cheeks burn bright pink. “That was a long time ago,” she snapped, not daring to meet his eyes.

“At least an hour,” Nathan retorted.

“Leave me alone!”

“Gladly,” he snapped. Then, slowly, Nathan turned and left the room. When the door closed behind him, Mallory dissolved in silent tears of exhaustion and grief.

Nathan stood at the bedroom window, looking out. There wasn’t much to see in the darkness, but the storm had stopped anyway. That was something. Behind him, Mallory slept. The soft meter of her breathing drew him, and he turned back to look at her.

The dim glow of the hallway light made her fine cheekbones look gaunt and turned the smudges of fatigue beneath her eyes to deep shadows. She looked so vulnerable lying there, all her grief openly revealed in the involuntary honesty of sleep.

Nathan drew a ragged breath. How could he have urged her to surrender her body the way he had, when she was so obviously ill? And what had possessed him to imply that she was attracted to Brad Ranner, knowing, as he did, that that kind of deceit was foreign to her nature?

Quietly, he approached the bed and pulled the covers up around her thin shoulders. She stirred in her uneasy sleep and moaned softly, intensifying the merciless ache that had wrenched at Nathan’s midsection since the moment his press agent, Diane Vincent, had thrust Pat’s cable into his hands after the last concert in Sydney.

The night was bitterly cold. Nathan slid back into bed beside his wife and held himself at a careful distance. Even now, the wanting of her, the needing of her, was almost more than he could bear. Raising himself onto one elbow, Nathan watched Mallory for a long time, trying to analyze the things that had gone wrong between them.

He loved her fiercely and had since the moment he’d seen her, some six and a half years ago. Prior to that stunning day, he’d prided himself on his freedom, on the fact that he’d needed no other person. Now, in the darkness of the bedroom, beneath the warmth of the electric blanket, he sighed. If he lost Mallory—and he was grimly convinced that he was losing her, day by hectic day—nothing else in his life would matter. Nothing.

She stirred beside him. Nathan wanted her with every fiber of his being and knew that he would always want her. But there was one thing greater than his consuming desire, and that was his love. He fell back on his pillows, his hands cupped behind his head, his eyes fixed on the shadowed ceiling.

Her hand came to his chest, warm and searching, her fingers entangling themselves in the thick matting of hair covering muscle and bone. “Nathan?” she whispered in a sleepy voice.

Despite the pain inside him, he laughed. “Who else?” he whispered back. “Sleep, babe.”

But Mallory snuggled against him, soft and vulnerable. “I don’t want to sleep,” she retorted petulantly. “Make love to me.”

“No.”

Her hand coursed downward over his chest, over his hard abdomen, urging him, teasing. “Yes,” she argued.

Nathan was impatient. “Will you stop it?” he said tightly. “I’m trying to be noble here, damn it.”

“Mmm,” Mallory purred, and her tantalizing exploration continued. “Noble.”

“Mallory.”

She raised herself onto one elbow and then bent her head to sample one masculine nipple with a teasing tongue.

Nathan groaned, but he remembered her thinness, her collapse on the set in Seattle, the hollow ache visible in her green eyes. And he turned away, as if in anger, and ignored her until she withdrew.

2

The telephone was ringing when Mallory awakened the next morning. She burrowed down under the covers with a groan, determined to ignore it. If she waited long enough, Nathan would answer it or the caller would give up.

But the ringing continued mercilessly, and Mallory realized that her husband wasn’t nestled between the smooth flannel sheets with her. Tossing back the bedclothes with a cry of mingled irritation and disappointment, she scrambled out of bed and reached automatically for her robe.

The house was pleasantly warm, and Mallory smiled, leaving the robe—and an aching recollection of Nathan’s rejection the night before—behind as she made her way into the kitchen and disengaged the old-fashioned earpiece from its hook on the side of the telephone. “Hello?” she spoke into the mouthpiece, idly scanning the neat kitchen for signs of Nathan. Except for the heat radiating from the big woodburning stove, there was nothing to indicate that he’d been around at all.

“Hello,” snapped Diane Vincent, Nathan’s press agent. “Is Nate there?”

Mallory frowned. Good question, she thought ruefully. And where the hell do you get off calling him “Nate”?

“Mallory?” Diane prodded.

“He was here,” Mallory answered, and hated herself for sounding so lame and uncertain.

Disdain crackled in Diane’s voice. “One night stopover, huh? Listen, if he happens to get in touch, tell him to call me. I’m staying at my sister’s place in Settle. He knows the number.”

Mallory was seething, and her knees felt weak. She reached out awkwardly for one of the kitchen chairs, drew it near and sat down. She despised Diane Vincent and, in some ways, even feared her. But she wasn’t about to let anything show. “I’ll relay your message,” she said evenly.

Diane sighed in irritation, and Mallory knew that she was wondering why a dynamic, vital man like Nathan McKendrick had to have such a sappy wife. “You do that, sugarplum—it’s important.”

Mallory forced a smile to her face. “Oh, I’m sure it is—dearest.”

Diane hung up.

Outside, in the pristine stillness of an island morning, Cinnamon’s joyful bark pierced the air. Mallory hung up the phone and went to stand at the window over the kitchen sink, a genuine smile displacing the frozen one she’d assumed for Diane Vincent. Nathan and the enormous red dog were frolicking in the snow, their breath forming silvery white plumes in the crisp chill of the day. Beyond them, the towering pine trees edging the unpaved driveway swayed softly in the wind, green and snow-burdened against the splotchy sky.

Mallory swallowed as bittersweet memories flooded her mind. For a moment, she slid back through the blurry channels of time to a cheerful memory….

“One of these days,” her father was saying, snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his checkered wool coat and water pooling on the freshly waxed floor around his feet, “I’m going to have to fell those pine trees, Janet, whether you and Mallory like it or not. If I don’t, one of them is sure to come down in a windstorm and crash right through the roof of this house.”

Mallory and her mother had only exchanged smiles, knowing that Paul O’Connor would never destroy those magnificent trees. They had already been giants when the island was settled, over a hundred years before, and that made them honored elders.

With reluctance, Mallory wrenched herself back to the eternal present and retreated into the bedroom. There would be time enough to tell Nathan that Diane wanted him to call, she thought, with uncharacteristic malice. Time enough.

Mallory crawled into bed, yawned and immediately sank into a sweet, sound, dreamless sleep.

When she awakened much later, the sun was high in the sky, and she could hear the sizzle of bacon frying and the low, caressing timbre of Nathan’s magical voice. Grinning, buoyed by the sounds and scents of morning, Mallory slid out of bed and crept to the kitchen doorway.

Nathan, clad in battered blue jeans and a bulky blue pullover sweater, stood with his back to her, the telephone’s earpiece propped precariously between his shoulder and his ear. While he listened to the person on the other end of the line, he was trying to turn the fragrant bacon and keep an eager Cinnamon at bay at the same time. Finally, using a meat fork, he lifted one crispy strip from the pan, allowed the hot fat to drip off and then let the morsel fall to the floor. “Careful, girl—that’s hot,” he muttered. And then he moved closer to the mouthpiece and snapped, “Very funny, Diane. I was talking to the dog.”

Mallory stiffened. Suddenly, the peace, beauty and comfort of the day were gone. It was as though the island had been invaded by a hostile army.

She went back to the bedroom, now chilled despite the glowing warmth that filled the old house, and took brown corduroy slacks and a wooly white sweater from her suitcases. After dressing and generally making herself presentable, she again ventured into enemy territory.

Nathan was setting the table with Blue Willow dishes and everyday silver and humming one of his own tunes as he worked. Mallory looked at the dishes and remembered the grace of her mother’s hands as she’d performed the same task, the lilting softness of the songs she’d sung.

Missing both her parents keenly in that moment, she shut her eyes tight against the memory of their tragic deaths. She had so nearly died with them that terrible day, and she shuddered as her mind replayed the sound of splintering wood, the dreadful chill and smothering silence of the water closing over her face, the crippling fear.