The Stormriders Read online

  She leaned back in the chair, rubbing the back of her neck. "How's everything out there?"

  "Most everybody's asleep. What's the temperature?"

  Meg glanced at the gauge. "Fifty-three below."

  He grimaced. "Well, there goes my first idea."

  "What's that?"

  "Taking a little stroll in the moonlight to clear my head."

  She smiled in spite of herself. "No moonlight."

  He got up and walked toward the window. "Anything on the radio?"

  She shook her head. "I raised Little Creek a while ago, but they're in just about as bad shape as we are. Nothing from the weather service."

  "Where are the good guys when you need them, hmm?" he murmured. He leaned against the window frame, studying the window as though he could see out, though he didn't bother to raise the shutter. The space between the glass pane and the metal shutter was solid ice.

  "Do you know," he said thoughtfully, "if I could get above the cloud cover—"

  "No," Meg said sharply, spinning her chair around.

  "I don't mean now. But the wind's got to die sometime..."

  "Maybe here, but who knows what it's like a few miles out? Not to mention the metal stress in these temperatures..."

  "Come on, Meg, I know what my plane can do. I've flown in lower temperatures than this—"

  "And lost an engine!"

  "I got it started again, didn't I?"

  "Forget it, Red." Her hand tightened around the coffee cup, and all semblance of fatigue left her. "This is not an option, so just put it out of your mind."

  He turned back to the window without answering.

  Meg sipped her coffee, hoping the bourbon would have some effect on her tensing muscles, the tightening knot of anxiety in her stomach. It didn't. And why did she even try? It was futile to argue with Red; he would do what he wanted no matter what she said, whats she wanted, what she needed. She couldn't control him. She had never been able to.

  She said, keeping her voice as matter of fact as she could, "Do you think there was ever a time when we didn't fight?"

  He turned around, and she could see his taut muscles visibly relax. "Not that I recall. Your first words off the plane the day I brought you here, if I remember right, were four-letter ones."

  She smiled reminiscently into her cup. "You were a maniac. I thought you were going to kill us both before we ever landed, the way you were flying."

  "You were such a bossy little know-it-all I couldn't help it. It was about time somebody shook you up a little."

  "You did that.

  And in more ways than one. Barely twelve hours after her feet had touched terra firma, she was lying naked in Red's arms, and nothing had ever seemed more right. Six weeks and uncounted fights later he had gripped her face between his hands and said simply, "Marry me." It had never occurred to Meg to do anything else.

  "Anyway," Red said, coming over to her, "they say fighting's good for you. Clears the air."

  "It doesn't appear to have been very good for us. We're getting a divorce."

  He helped himself to her coffee cup and took a sip. "But neither one of us has ulcers."

  "Great." She slumped back in the chair, rubbing the back of her neck. "Save your health, lose your marriage."

  His eyes were mild and steady as he sat on the edge of the desk. Quiet, beautiful eyes. Not judging, not arguing, not expecting anything, just watching her. The Look.

  Meg shifted her gaze away. "I'm not very good at this, Red," she said, her voice a little muffled. "I mean, I'm not used to being bad at anything. To failing."

  "Yeah." He dropped his gaze. "Me, neither."

  "It's just that—" she made a helpless gesture with her wrist "—it wasn't like I expected. Being married."

  His glance was alert and curious. "What did you expect?"

  Meg had to think about that for a minute and was surprised to discover no clear answer. "I'm not sure," she admitted, frowning. "I never really thought about it. I mean, with my parents it was so...civilized. Cocktails at six, dinner at eight..."

  His eyes twinkled. "No hot sex on the laundry-room floor?"

  Meg must have been more tired than she realized, because she laughed. "Right. And my mother never threw a single dish in her life."

  ''You went through a whole set in two weeks."

  She sobered a little, regarding him curiously. "What did you expect, Red?”

  “Hot sex on the laundry-room floor," he answered immediately. And then the levity faded, and he glanced around the room as though he expected to find the answer floating in the air. "I never expected to get married, for one thing."

  "Me, neither."

  He took another sip of the coffee. "I don't know. What most men expect, I guess. A place to come home to, somebody waiting..." A frown crept over his features as he stared into the coffee cup, because as hard as he tried, the only things he could think of were the things she had given him. Somebody to love. Somebody who mattered more than anything else in the world. Somebody to make him feel important when he was low, to make him feel like a fool when that was exactly how he was acting, to stand up to him and stand beside him and give him a reason for being. Meg.

  She sighed tiredly. "We never thought about it. If we had thought about it for even a minute, we would have known it wouldn't work. Neither of us had the faintest idea what marriage was all about."

  "Maybe we made it too hard," Red said slowly, a little confused by all that was going through his head. "Maybe...I don't know." He lowered his gaze again. "Maybe marriage is no more than—" he smiled a little and put the cup on the desk "—drinking from the same cup."

  He stood up, aware of the hesitancy and question in Meg's eyes, and put his hand on her shoulder. "Go on, get some shut-eye. I'll take over."

  After a moment, she pushed away from the station. Her voice was subdued and a little distracted. "Thanks, but I can't sleep. I need to check on some things, but I'll be back. No point in us both staying awake all night."

  Meg walked quietly through the common room, trying not to disturb the sleepers. Dancer had fallen asleep with Joe's head in her lap, and both seemed to be sleeping normally. A few people were awake, and they nodded to her when she passed. Some even smiled. Meg smiled back. Nothing like a disaster, she thought, to bring people closer together. And she wondered if that was what had happened to Red and her over the past few hours. If that was all it was.

  But that couldn't be the case. Their entire marriage had been a disaster, one crisis after another, storm and riot and high adrenaline rush; they functioned best in a state of emergency. Maybe, she realized slowly, there was nothing wrong with that.

  She left the common room and the heated corridor, where people had made pallets for themselves wherever they could find the room, and slipped through the swinging doors into the closed-off part of the building. Though no part of the building was ever completely unheated, there was a distinct chill in the air as she entered the dimly lit hallway. She welcomed it. She needed to be alone, and maybe the cold would help clear her head of the feverish, uncertain thoughts racing around in there.

  She had always known that the things that attracted her to Red were the things most women would call faults: his stubbornness, his temper, his fierce independence, even his harshness and what some might even call his crudeness. She always knew where she stood with Red, and she never had to hide anything about herself from him. They never bothered to pretend with each other. And there was something good and solid about that, something worth preserving; instinctively she had always known that. But was it enough on which to base a marriage?

  Without her realizing it, her footsteps had taken her to the end of the corridor, and she found herself facing the metal door to the regions below. She took out her key and unlocked it, carefully descending the steps. It was warm here, and the pulsing of engines provided a soothing, secure insulation from the rest of the world. Perhaps that was why she had always liked it so down here. Because here, alone
with her machinery, she felt safe, capable, in control.

  She released a long breath and leaned her forehead against one of the low pipes, trying to take comfort from its familiar life-giving pulses. Why did she have to keep beating herself up over this, going over and over it in her head, trying to find answers? Did she think that if she could figure out what had gone wrong between Red and herself she could somehow fix it? Wasn't it too late for that?

  A marriage wasn't like an overloaded circuit. You couldn't just reset it, rewire it, wrap it up and turn it on again. Not when so much had gone wrong.

  Only now she was beginning to wonder just how much had really gone wrong and how much was her imagination.

  Of course if she analyzed it the list of what had gone wrong was enough to fill a marriage manual. They had nothing in common and they were too much alike, their goals and their values were poles apart, she couldn't live in this god-awful place and he wouldn't leave it... And there were other things, deeper and far more complex things, things that she had not, until now, been able to tell even him. She might have, but he never gave her the chance.

  What had gone wrong? The fighting, the instability, the loneliness and anxiety when he was gone, the desperation of passion when he was near, all that was part of it. But she had lived with those things and loved him in spite of them, loved him so much that she had finally driven him away, for that, in the final analysis, was what had really happened. He had left her. He had walked away before she was ready to let him go and no one had ever done that to her before; she couldn't forgive him for that. That was when love had turned to hate—or so she thought.

  Because he had also come back.

  "Oh, Red," she murmured out loud. "What a mess."

  She pushed away from the pipe and looked around the room solemnly, a little wistfully. That funny little pang of regret that had struck her this morning when Dancer had reminded her of how much she would be leaving behind was back again. It was crazy, but she really would miss this place. She had done some of her best work here. Not the work she was contracted to do, of course, but the perfections and improvements she had made on the generator, the new designs she had started on her own. She had never had that kind of creative freedom in Washington. She wondered if she would even fit in there again. The tailored suits, the nine-o'clock meetings, the sterile labs and the endless bureaucracy. The truth was, she had never fit in there in the first place, which was why she had ended up here in exile.

  God, she thought, I'm getting as crazy as everybody else around here. I'm actually starting to like it....

  Which wasn't much different from the way she felt about Red.

  Her life had been so simple only this morning. She'd known exactly what she wanted and exactly where she was going; everything had been in order and she was on her way. But now... even the hum of the machinery, which had for so long been her only friend, seemed somehow changed. This was a workplace, not a refuge, and the machines were just machines. Her life was upstairs, just out of her reach.

  She closed her eyes, fighting back the confusing, conflicting emotions gnawing at her. "What's the point?" she whispered. "He's never going to change." So why couldn't she let him go?

  Because she loved him, as blindly and desperately as the day she had first met him, and it was just that simple. She loved the man who had made love to her in the storeroom at Maudie's, and she loved the man who could take a roomful of frightened, injured people and make them forget for a moment how much trouble they were really in. She loved the daredevil bush pilot and the tender lover and the man who could make her forget her anger with a chocolate bar. She loved him in the heat of anger when he said cruel and hateful things to her that he didn't mean, and she loved him because he understood without being told that she never meant the things she said, either. She loved him fiercely and helplessly, and she had no more control over that than she did over the flow of blood in her veins or the beating of her heart.

  And that, she knew, was the only thing that wouldn't change.

  When she went back upstairs, Lewis was awake and so was Gilly. She spoke briefly to Gilly, who had no encouraging news, but neither did he have anything disturbing to report. When Lewis volunteered to go back and man the radio, she hesitated, then shook her head.

  "Go back to sleep," she said softly. "I'll take care of it."

  She went inside the radio room and closed the door behind her.

  Red had spread out his sleeping bag on the floor and was sitting on it, his back resting against the wall. The contents of the box that held his personal belongings was disarranged, and the snapshot of the two of them was in his hand. She did not have to read his face to know what he was feeling; she had felt the same things when she looked at it.

  He let the photo drop back into the box when she came in and forced a smile. "Checking up on me?"

  ''I thought it might be smart."

  He lifted his eyebrows. "Who, me? Desert my post?" He gestured toward the radio. "Nothing. I guess everybody's in bed."

  The attempt at levity fell short, and they simply looked at each other. Meg could feel her heartbeat, slow and heavy, filling her chest with heat. She said, "What were you thinking just now?"

  He hesitated. "The truth?"

  She nodded.

  He leaned his head back against the wall, and the smile that crossed his lips was rueful and fleeting, almost embarrassed. "It sounds crazy in the middle of all this...." He gestured toward the outer room. Then he looked up at her. "I was thinking about the way you look in the morning, " he told her softly, "with your hair all messed up and coming out of its braid, and your eyes kind of sleepy and easy, and the way you smile when you first wake up, without even thinking about it, almost like a little kid. And that ratty old red bathrobe of yours, and the fuzzy socks you wear to bed.That's what I was thinking." And he shifted his gaze away with a shrug. "Like I said, crazy."

  Red had hung his jacket on the hook over the door, obscuring the frosted window. Meg leaned back and pressed the door lock with her thumb.

  She unbelted her sweater and slowly drew it over her head. Red watched her steadily as she unfastened her bra and let it fall to the floor. Her skin prickled as it met the room temperature, and she came to Red, kneeling between his legs.

  His hands caressed her back, a lighter-than-air circling embrace, then drifted over her shoulders, tracing her rib cage, the length of her waist. His eyes were brilliant and they never left hers.

  "Darlin’,” he said softly, "are we making another mistake?"

  "Probably."

  She looped her arms around his neck, bringing her forehead down to rest against his. His eyes filled her vision, his warmth encompassed her. She slipped her fingers inside his collar, drawing in a long deep breath as his hands cupped her breasts.

  "Red," she whispered, "take off your clothes."

  His eyes crinkled with a slow smile.' 'All of them?"

  "Every stitch."

  Completely unclothed, they wrapped themelves around each other, folding themselves each into the other. For the longest time they simply held each other, not moving, not caressing, wrapping each other in a silent communion of warmth and surity. The urgency of physical need was put aside in the face of a deeper, more demanding need, the desperation to hold this moment, frozen in time, forever. Every part of his body became a part of her. And more than his body, his very essence seemed to flow into her, just as all that was good and right about her flowed into him, as it was always meant to be, as it had always been.

  No words could intrude, no caresses could deepen the emotion. They simply held each other, a fierce, silent union of bodies and minds and hearts that had been denied too long but could never be broken again. And though the joy that flooded her made her almost delirious in its intensity, it was a little frightening, too, because the love they made now would last longer than one night. She had known that from the beginning. And so had he.

  They made love as though it were the first time, knowing it was t
he last. Understanding, finally, that the physical passion that had always flamed between them was, in the end, nothing more than their souls’ yearning for each other, and it always had been. She clung to him as they turned together on the sleeping bag, exhausted, content, and Red pulled up its folds to cover them. He drew her onto his shoulder and she insinuated her legs between his; he entwined his fingers with hers and held her hand against his lips. She could feel his heartbeat, his heat, his dampness, the unsteady rhythm of his breath against her fingers. She could feel her own weakness, the shock of her heart pounding against her ribs, the fever that still invaded her skin. But all of that faded into the background against the depth of what she felt inside.

  She was helpless, as she always was in his arms; she was stronger than she had ever been before; she was awed and shaken by the enormity of what they could create together, of what they, together, became. How could she ever have thought, even for a moment, that she could live without him? Without him she was only a shadow of what she was meant to be, and having once loved him she could never settle for less again. She had always known that—which was why it was so hard to let him go.

  And, having rediscovered in his arms all that she had almost lost, how could she ever let him go again?

  She spread her fingers over his chest, aching inside with all she wanted to say to him and the words that wouldn't come. She lifted her eyes to him, loving him so much it hurt, needing him so much she could taste it.

  "Red," she whispered, "it wasn't... it wasn’t ice you thought you saw in me. It was fear."

  His eyes were tender and confused. "What, darlin'?" Gently he pushed a strand of hair away from her face. "What were you afraid of?"

  She buried her face in his shoulder. "Of... loving you too much, needing you too desperately. Losing you."

  His arms tightened around her.

  "You never took me up in your plane," she said tightly, unable to look at him. "After that first time.. .you never did. It was as if that part of your life was closed to me. You pushed me away—and it scared me."