Husbands and Other Strangers

He was gone.

Gone as if he were nothing more than smoke, as if he hadn’t existed at all. But he had. She knew he had. He had been as real as she. Now she was left alone, shackled to a hard bed of loneliness.

The moan that came from her lips this time was devoid of pleasure. It was a keening sound, filled with the sorrow of bereavement and loss.

And then something else cut into it. Another sound, another voice.

Something…someone…

Someone was calling to her. Calling her from this oppressive, weighted darkness she was lost in.

The heaviness began to lift. Hands were on her again. But this time they were not gentle hands. Rough hands, trying to snatch at her consciousness. Trying to bring her back around. She could feel hands rubbing her arms, her legs, coaxing the color, the strength back into them. Back into her.

Gayle tried to listen. To recognize. But the voice calling her name belonged to someone she didn’t know. A stranger’s voice.

“Gayle, please wake up. Honey, please, just open your eyes. Just look at me. Please.”

Fingers. Gentle fingers, not running along her body but lacing her fingers with them. More words.

Supplications? Prayers?

Prayers. Someone was praying over her. She felt more than heard the words, as if they were being whispered into her subconscious.

Gayle tried hard to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t move. Each lid felt as if it had been sealed permanently shut.

She had to open her eyes to find who’d been loving her. She had to find the man who had so abruptly left her side.

The man she couldn’t see.

Slowly, mercifully, she could feel herself rising from the depths, the almost life-threatening heaviness leaving her. A moment longer and it would be all right. She would be out of this lonely, stark world and reunited with the man whose passion had set her on fire. Already she could feel her body warming again. Warming, as if touched by sunlight.

Sunlight.

It was the sun she felt on her face, on her body. The sun. Nothing more, just the sun.

The realization underlined the emptiness in her soul.

Something moist slid from her lashes and slithered in a zigzag pattern along both cheeks. Gayle opened her eyes and looked up at the concerned ring of faces hovering over her.

It took her a moment before she could focus on them. Sam. Jake. The emptiness within her shifted a little as she recognized the familiar faces of her two older brothers.

And then she saw someone else.

Taylor Conway wasn’t easily given to allowing his emotions to overtake him, but in the past twenty minutes he had unwillingly sped through an entire gamut of emotions. Every one of them had warred for complete possession of him as he had frantically worked over his wife’s body. Equal amounts of CPR and desperation had gone into his attempts to force air into her lungs again. He’d prayed every single prayer he could summon to his numbed brain, making deals with a god he hadn’t, until now, known firsthand.

Anything, as long as Gayle came back to him. He couldn’t lose her like this. No, not in any way at all. He refused to lose her.

Taylor had never tasted real fear before. It was metallic and bitter on the tongue, worse than anything he’d ever sampled. It had almost choked him.

Just the way the sea had almost choked the very life out of Gayle.

But she was alive. Beneath the green bathing suit top her chest was moving ever so slightly. She was breathing, thank God. Taylor was vaguely aware that at this point, he was into God for plenty, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered as long as Gayle was alive.

The next moment she was coughing, the water she’d taken in spilling from her nose and mouth. Taylor felt light-headed, giddy and only half-conscious of the hot tears stinging his eyes as what had almost happened began to take hold, getting a death grip on his mind.

Gayle struggled to sit up. He almost smiled. That was his Gayle. A fighter. She didn’t have enough sense to lie down. Taylor laid a restraining hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t try to get up,” His voice threatened to break. Damn, but she had scared the hell out of him.

Taylor quickly looked her over. There was a gash on her forehead just beneath the blond hairline. That would explain why she hadn’t come up. She must have hit her head against the side of the boat when she dove off the sloop into the choppy blue water. The gash was still bleeding. The blood trickled down, a few drops mingling with the ring of water that surrounded her body on the deck.

Now that she was safe, he could feel his temper beginning to rise. But he couldn’t shout at her yet, demanding to know what the hell she’d been thinking of to pull a stunt like that. Not when she was still so pale and weak.

So he bit back the hot words as best he could, turning instead toward his brother-in-law.

“Sam, where the hell is that first-aid kit you keep around here?”

Jake was already ahead of both of them. It was his sloop and his invitation that had brought everyone together in the first place.

“Right here.” Jake knelt beside Taylor, flipping the lock on the dark-blue box. “What do you need?”

“Something to stop the bleeding for now. That gash looks nasty.” Rummaging, Taylor found the last butterfly Band-Aid in the rusted box. He peeled off the wrapper and applied it along with pressure to the cut.

He frowned now. God, but she had scared him. Really scared him. Now that it was over, now that she was lying here on the deck of her brother’s sloop, alive and fully conscious, Taylor was aware of his own racing pulse, his own shaken feelings. If he didn’t love her so much, he would have wrung her fool neck. He might still do it, just on principle.

Shaken, Jake rose to his feet, the first-aid box in his hands. He pushed it toward Sam. “Right.” Sam looked down at his sister dubiously. She still looked really pale. “Is she going to be—”

“I’m okay,” Gayle cut in, waving away the concern buzzing around her like a swarm of bees.

Why were they talking about her as if she were in another dimension? She was right here. And she hated being fussed over. At least she thought she hated…yes, she did, she hated having a fuss made over her.

Despite the pounding going on inside of it, her head felt as if it was wrapped in cotton.

Gayle narrowed her eyes as she focused on the man who was rising. “Sam.” She said the name that came to her aloud, exploring it. Her vision and the fog about her brain slowly began to clear. Sam was her brother. One of her brothers. Silly that for a moment she hadn’t remembered. She could just hear what he’d have to say to that if he knew. They both teased her unmercifully as it was.

Sam quickly dropped back to his knees beside her. “What is it, Gayle?”

“Nothing.” It took effort to talk. Her throat felt incredibly raw, as if she’d swallowed then coughed up a seashell. “I just wanted to say your name.”

Sam and Jake exchanged looks. That sounded way too subdued for Gayle, but then, she’d never almost drowned before. Of the three of them, it was Gayle, the youngest and most agile, who could swim like a fish. Gayle on whom their father had pinned all his hopes from the very beginning.

Gayle took a deep breath. It was cut off by a sharp pain in her lungs. Jackknifing up, she began coughing violently. Half the ocean was still sloshing around inside her. Without being fully conscious of who she grabbed, she clutched at a strong arm, leaning against it as the cough racked her.

“Easy.” The same strong hands held her. The hands that had pressed her down before, when she’d struggled so hard to discover the identity of the man who was fading away. The man who’d made love to her. “Don’t try to get up just yet,” the deep voice warned her. “We don’t want you falling over and hitting your head again. I know it’s hard, but even your head has a breaking point.”

The familiarity and humor veiled an undercurrent of concern. She tried to smile at the words and succeeded only marginally.

“She’s not biting your head off. She must have done more damage to her head than we thought,” Jake murmured, then went back to the wheel.