White lies

He looked up at her, Ms gaze assessing. "I made fresh coffee. Drink a cup. You still look a little shaky. Does the thought of making it with me scare you that much?"

"You scare me." She couldn’t stop the words. "Who you are. What you are."

An icy motionlessness seized him as he realized that she had guessed. "You said I was using Super Spy tricks."

"Yes," she whispered, and decided she did need that cup of coffee. She poured it and watched the steam rise for a moment before sipping. Why had she said that? She hadn’t meant to. She was in agony, afraid that it would trigger his memory and he would leave, and equally afraid that he might never get his memory back. She was caught, trapped, because she couldn’t call him hers until he regained his memory and chose her. If he would. He might just walk away, to his real life.

"I didn’t think you knew," he said flatly. Her head jerked up. "Do you mean you did?"

"There had to be more to it than the possibility that I had seen something before the explosion. The government doesn’t work that way. I guessed, and Frank confirmed it."

"What did he say?" Her voice was thin.

His smile was equally thin, and a little savage. "That’s about it. He can’t tell me more because of the circumstances. I’m a security risk right now. How did you guess?"

"The same. There just had to be more to it."

"Is what I am the real reason you turned me down?"

"No," she whispered, an aching, needing expression in her eyes as she watched him. How could loving a man hurt so much? But it did, when the man was this one.

His entire body was taut, his mouth twisted. His voice was harsh. "Stop looking at me like that. It’s all I can do to keep myself from pulling your pants off and laying you down on that table, and that isn’t the way I want to take you. Not this time. So stop looking at me i as if you’d melt if I touched you."

But I would, she thought, though she turned her eyes away. His words made her feel hot and shivery, thinking of the act he’d described, the scene forming in her mind. It would be raw and hot, and purely sexual. If he touched her, they would burn each other up.

He spent most of the day outside, but the tension between them didn’t ease; it hung there, as thick and heavy as fog. When darkness finally drove him inside, his eyes burned her every time he looked at her. Instincts she hadn’t known she possessed pulled her toward him, despite the reasons her mind presented for not letting their relationship progress. She lay alone in her bed that night, aching with the need to go to him and spend the long, dark hours in his arms. He was right; what did her reasons matter? It was already too late. She already loved him, for good or bad. That was the real danger, and it had been too late for a long time now. Keeping herself from him wouldn’t lessen the pain if the worst happened and she lost him.

But she didn’t go to him. Things often seemed different in daylight than when lying alone in the darkness, but caution wasn’t what kept her in her own bed. Circumstances were hard enough; she had to call him by a name that wasn’t his own, had to pretend he was someone else, but she wanted to be able to see his eyes when they made love. More than anything she wanted to know his real name, to be able to call him by it in her heart; failing that, she wanted to see his eyes, for they were his own.

A chinook blew in during the night, chasing away the weather system that had covered them with new snow. Mother Nature must have chuckled to herself as she promptly began melting the high white drifts with her hot winds, teasing them with a hint of a spring that was still over a month away. The melting snow dripped from the trees with a sound like rain, and there were crashes in the night as limbs dropped their white burdens.

The rise in temperature made Jay even more restless, and she was up at dawn. She could barely believe what she saw when she looked out. The hot wind had turned their winter wonderland into a wet, brown meadow dotted with shrinking patches of snow. The melting snow still dripped off the roof, and the heated air made her feel as if her skin would explode. How could it have happened so fast? "A chinook," Steve said behind her, and she whirled, her heart jumping. She hadn’t heard him approach, but he moved like a cat. He looked so ill-tempered that she almost stepped back. His eyes were hard and frosty, and a day’s growth of beard darkened his jaw. He glanced, from ner to the window. "Enjoy it while you can. It’ll feel like spring while we have it, and then it’ll be gone, and the snow will come back."

They ate breakfast in silence, and he left the cabin immediately afterward. Later on in the morning, Jay heard the solid bite of the ax into wood, and she peeked out at him from the kitchen window. He had taken off his coat and was working in his shirt sleeves, which were rolled up over his forearms. Incredibly, sweat had left dark stains under his arms and down the center of his back. Was it that warm?

She walked out onto the front porch and lifted her face to the warm, sweet wind. It was incredible! Her skin tingled. The temperature was at least forty degrees higher than the day before, and the sun burned down from a cloudless blue sky. Suddenly her jeans and flannel shirt were much too heavy, and her skin began to glisten with moisture.

Like a child made giddy by spring, she hurried to her bedroom and stripped off her heavy, restricting clothes. She couldn’t stand them another minute. She wanted to feel the air on her bare arms; she wanted to feel fresh and free, like the chinook. So what if winter could come back at any time? Right now, it was spring!

She pulled her favorite sundress from the closet and slipped it on over her head. It was white cotton, sleeveless, with a scoop neck, and far too flimsy for the temperature, which was probably only in the fifties, but it suited her mood perfectly. Some things were just meant for celebrating; this chinook was one of them.