LITMIR.BIZ

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was taking inventory.

      His gaze stayed on her long enough for her to think, He hates my hair. And Oh, for God’s sake, am I in my Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas?

      “Throw the damn rope!” she ordered him.

      Then the thick coil of rope was flying toward her. The throw was going to be slightly short. But if she leaned just a bit, and reached with all her might, she knew she could—

      “No!” he cried. “Leave it.”

      But it was too late. Lucy had leaned out too far. She tried to correct, taking a hasty step backward, but her momentum was already too far forward. Her arms windmilled crazily in an attempt to keep her balance.

      She felt her feet leave the dock, the rush of air on her skin, and then she plunged into the lake. And sank, the weight of the soaked flannel pajamas pulling her down. Nothing could have prepared her for the cold as the gray water closed over her head. It seized her; her whole body went taut with shock. the sensation was of burning, not freezing. Her limbs were paralyzed instantly.

      In what seemed to be slow motion, her body finally bobbed back to the surface. She was in shock, too numb even to cry out. Somehow she floundered, her limbs heavy and nearly useless, to the dock. It was too early in the year for a ladder to be out, but since Mama no longer fostered kids she didn’t put out a ladder—or maintain the dock—anyway.

      Lucy managed to get her hands on the dock’s planks, and tried to pull herself up. But there was a terrifying lack of strength in her arms. Her limbs felt as if they were made of Jell-O, all a-jiggle and not quite set.

      “Hang on!”

      Even her lips were numb. The effort it took to speak was tremendous.

      “No! Don’t.” She forced the words out. They sounded weak. Her mind, in slow motion, rationalized there was no point in them both being in the water. His limbs would react to the cold water just as hers were doing. And he was farther out. In seconds, Mac would be helpless, floundering out beyond the dock.

      She heard a mighty splash as Mac jumped back into the water. She tried to hang on, but she couldn’t feel her fingers. She slipped back in, felt the water ooze over her head.

      Lucy had been around water her entire life. She had a Bronze Cross. She could have been a lifeguard at the Main Street Beach if her father had not thought it was a demeaning job. She had never been afraid of water.

      Now, as she slipped below the surface, she didn’t feel terrified, but oddly resigned. They were both going to die, a tragically romantic ending to their story—after all these years of separation, dying trying to save one another.

      And then hands, strong, sure, were around her waist, lifting her. Her head broke water and she sputtered. She was unceremoniously shoved out of the water onto the rough boards of the dock.

      Lucy dangled there, her elbows underneath her chest, her legs hanging, without the strength even to lift her head. His hand went to her bottom, and he gave her one more shove—really about as unromantic as it could get—and she lay on the dock, gasping, sobbing, coughing.

      Mac’s still in the water.

      She squirmed around to look, but he didn’t need her. His hands found the dock and he pulled himself to safety.

      They lay side by side, gasping. Slowly she became aware that his nose was inches from her nose.

      She could see drops of water beaded on the sooty clumps of his sinfully thick lashes. His eyes were glorious: a brown so dark it melted into black. The line of his nose was perfect, and faint stubble, twinkling with water droplets, highlighted the sweep of his cheekbones, the jut of his jaw.

      Her eyes moved to the sensuous curve of his lips, and she felt sleepy and drugged, the desire to touch them with her own pushing past her every defense.

      “Why, little Lucy Lindstrom,” he growled. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

      All those years ago it had been her capsized canoe that had brought them—just about the most unlikely of loves, the good girl and the bad boy—together.

      A week after graduation, having won all kinds of awards and been voted Most Likely to Succeed by her class, she realized the excitement was suddenly over. All her plans were made; it was her last summer of “freedom,” as everybody kept kiddingly saying.

      Lucy had taken the canoe out alone, something she never did. But the truth was, in that gap of activity something yawned within her, empty. She had a sense of her own life getting away from her, as if she was falling in with other people’s plans for her without really ever asking herself what she wanted.

      A storm had blown up, and she had not seen the log hiding under the surface of the water until it was too late.

      Mac had been over on the wild side, camping, and he had seen her get into trouble. He’d already been in his canoe fighting the rough water to get to her before she hit the log.

      He had picked her out of the water, somehow not capsizing his own canoe in the process, and taken her to his campsite to a fire, to wait until the lake calmed down to return her to her world.

      But somehow she had never quite returned to her world. Lucy had been ripe for what he offered, an escape from a life that had all been laid out for her in a predictable pattern that there, on the side of the lake with her rescuer, had seemed like a form of death.

      In all her life, it seemed everyone—her parents, her friends—only saw in her what they wanted her to be.

      And that was something that filled a need in them.

      And then Mac had come along. And effortlessly he had seen through all that to what was real. Or so it had seemed.

      And the truth was, soaking wet, gasping for air on a rotting dock, lying beside Mac, Lucy felt now exactly as she had felt then.

      As if her whole world shivered to life.

      As if black and white became color.

      It had to be near-death experiences that did that: sharpened awareness to a razor’s edge. Because she was so aware of Mac. She could feel the warmth of the breath coming from his mouth in puffs. There was an aura of power around him that was palpable, and in her weakened state, reassuring.

      With a groan, he put his hands on either side of his chest and lifted himself to kneeling, and then quickly to standing.

      He held out his hand to her, and she reached for it and he pulled her, his strength as easy as it was electrifying, to her feet.

      Mac scooped the blanket from the dock where she had dropped it, shook it out, looped it around her shoulders and then his own, and then his arms went around her waist and he pulled her against the freezing length of him.

      “Don’t take this personally,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival, plain and simple.”

      “Thank you for clarifying,” she said, with all the dignity her chattering teeth would allow. “You needn’t have worried. I had no intention of ravishing you. You are about as sexy as a frozen salmon at the moment.”

      “Still getting in the last shot, aren’t you?”

      “When I can.”

      Cruelly, at that moment she realized a sliver of warmth radiated from him, and she pulled herself even closer to the rock-hard length of his body.

      Their bodies, glued together by freezing, wet clothing, shook beneath the blanket. She pressed her cheek hard against his chest, and he loosed a hand and touched her soaking hair.

      “You hate it,” she said, her voice quaking.

      “It wasn’t my best entrance,” he agreed.

      “I meant my hair.”

      “I know you did,” he said softly. “Hello, Lucy.”

      “Hello, Macintyre.”

      Standing

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