She should have considered that sooner.
Immobile beneath the quilt, she listened with renewed interest to the sounds she had identified only a few minutes earlier. Had she locked the doors? She rarely did. It would probably be a good idea to do so now.
Flipping back the covers, she stood up beside the bed, but she didn’t turn on the light. Instead, she went to the window and parted the lightly blowing curtain. A chill draft fingered its way through the worn-thin fabric of her sweatpants. The isolated highway curving black in the night remained empty but for the glint of a car window beneath the stand of scrub pine up the road. A quick stop for teenagers bent on whatever teenagers did in the dark in their cars these days. Not much different from her youth, certainly. She moved to peer through one of the ocean-facing windows and pulled back the curtain. The garden below lay shadowed and whispering in the breeze. The beach showed no sign of habitation.
Biting her lip, Meg headed out into the hall and down the stairs, striding through the darkness to check the locks on the three doors and lower windows. In the room where she painted, she turned on the light, gazing at the illustration on the board, still unfinished. To the right, under the old sheet covering, rested the painting of the sea on its easel. She moved to stand in front of the easel and lifted the edge of color-smeared cloth to peer at a dark ocean that seemed to breathe with movement. Usually her own worst critic, she recognized the quality of the work. Even so, from her sudden detached perspective, she recognized the oppressive and deeply disturbing qualities of this particular painting.
It needed something to give it a little light. She had no idea of the time and didn’t care as she squeezed paint from several tubes onto her pallet. With a few strokes, she painted an object into the foreground, well off-center so that it would not be the focus but an item of interest, and then proceeded to add detail, working quickly, filling in with color the object floating in the water, making the water wash over the bit of debris, the flotsam nearly concealed. Thrown up there, one might think, in the course of nature. She executed the object, following a stream of subconscious impulse. When she finished, she cleaned the brushes and returned to the painting. Looking at it, a chill coursed her spine.
She hadn’t added just any bit of debris floating beneath the surface of the dark tide. Bobbing on the current, a broken board bore the name, nearly illegible, of her husband’s ship: Bonafide Venture.
Stepping back, she pressed her hand to her mouth. “Oh, God,” she whispered against the icy flesh of her palm.
What had made her do that? The addition had not elevated the subject matter but plunged the painting deeper into the darkness that had spawned it.
Backing away from the easel, Meg felt blindly for the light switch. Moving with speed through the shadowed house, she stumbled over a kitchen chair on her way to the stairwell. Shoving the chair back under the table, she limped up the steps to the guest room.
“Caleb.”
He made a noise in his sleep but did not waken. Meg crossed the floor and lowered herself into the chair beside the bed, taking care the wood did not creak. She folded her hands between her knees. Turning her head, she stared through the window at the night sky.
The bedsprings groaned as Caleb rolled beneath the light cover. “What’s wrong, Meg?”
He showed no surprise at finding her there, his tone sleepy, concerned. He sounded kind. Was he kind? She didn’t even know that for certain.
“I’m afraid, Caleb,” she said.
He didn’t ask of what but reached out to take her hand in silence, closing his eyes and falling back asleep without letting go.
* * * *
Lying motionless on top of the blanket, Meg listened to the gentle, growling breaths Caleb made above her head, careful not to move, not to disturb him. She didn’t want him to wake up and find she had crawled into the bed beside him. In subliminal recognition, he had known her there anyway, indicated by the fleeting, involuntary erection that rose and then receded against the curve of her posterior. Eventually his arm had come up as well, flopping across her waist. After, he had not moved, settling back into a deep slumber with his body pressed up against hers.
She found comfort in the closeness, even if stolen and premature and risky. She knew she took advantage of him, seeking solace and warmth where she had no right to expect any. But the contour of that single arm around her waist, the weight if nothing else, protected her. She, who prided herself on her independence and fortitude, recognized in the small hours of the night, lying beside a stranger, that it had been an outward show. Almost a defiance, as if somehow word would get to Matt she had survived his leaving her, continued in her career, made a life without him. Well, she had done all of those things and none of them, and now it didn’t matter anyway.
Just let it go, she told herself. Just let it all go.
She had been telling herself that for three years, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Suddenly Caleb’s arm tightened around her. Meg’s complacent acceptance of her own bold action—lying down beside a stranger—vanished with a thrust of concern. Caleb’s hand moved under the hem of her shirt and settled around her breast, cupping the weight of it in an unconscious caress, perhaps in vague memory of another woman in his bed beside him. She didn’t want to think on what that relationship might have been, might still be, once the details of his life returned to him. She didn’t want to think at all, startled but aroused by a stranger’s hand on her flesh. Holding her breath, she waited for his fingers to relax so she could pull them away without disturbing him.
They didn’t relax. As she lay there, his thumb began to move across her stiffened nipple in slow strokes. She bit her lip to silence a verbal reaction to the sensation, of heat flooding her limbs, her loins, coursing through her blood. Her toes curled, her hips moved, and then she forced herself to lie still. He would stop. He would drift more deeply into slumber and stop. She would get out of his bed and return to her own. Hope he would have no recollection of what he had done to her in his sleep, so she would be able to face him in the morning.
But he didn’t stop and she didn’t get up. He took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger and began a gentle and erotic tug and release. Her heart thudded in her chest. The flesh between her legs grew slick. In a fiery instant of realization, she knew he no longer slept. He turned her onto her back as he rose up from the mattress beside her. Both hands pushed her oversized T-shirt up and over her head. She found herself exposed to the chill air, to the draft seeping in from the raised sash of the window, to the exploration of his hands over the stippled flesh of her breasts. His fingers moved across her stomach, then pushed the ragged sweats down over her hips. His fingers slipped between her legs, which parted willingly to his exploration as his teeth clamped lightly down on her nipple. She thrust her breasts eagerly toward him with a whispered word. Please. One hand in his hair and the other arm laced through the iron railing of the headboard, she arched her back further. Fired by her eagerness, Caleb greedily consumed her flesh with his mouth, seeking out and finding every nerve ending to increase her arousal, his fingers doing exquisite things to the flesh between her legs, stroking her clitoris until she was ready to explode. As his hands firmly grasped her thighs and his mouth closed over her, she arched up from the bed with a cry of release that echoed in her ears long after it had ended.
“Oh hell,” she murmured, breathing hard, the word followed by one of his, not nearly as innocuous. He sat up, settling back over his heels. Her gaze darted to a discovery he slept in the nude. His erection stood firm against the line of dark hair trailing up his belly to the silky, curling mass on his chest.
The accusation in his eyes made her scramble up against the headboard, struggling into her shirt to hide her nakedness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, ashamed, swinging her legs over the side of the bed as she reached for her discarded sweatpants.
He closed his hand around her wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t leave.”
“I have to,”