Dead Calm. Lindsay Longford

really, really meant to go home.

      But he’d thought about the baby. Laying there in the manger for over an hour before they’d taken it to the hospital. He shook his head and slewed rain drops off his helmet. Not it. Her. Taken her to the ER.

      To Sophie, who’d cradled that baby to her as if the tiny mite was her own.

      Sophie, whose pale skin and big eyes had swallowed her face and whose scent lingered treacherously in his nostrils. A Judas of the senses, that perfume that was only Sophie.

      Streaking down back roads and over bayou bridges, he’d lifted his face to the rain, let it wash over him, and he still smelled her, the scent of woman underneath the cinnamon and antiseptic.

      Even with the sensory memories flooding him, the memory that sent a shiver of foreboding down him was the one of Sophie holding the baby.

      An hour before dawn, with rain blinding him and Sophie’s scent filling him, he’d braked hard, tires screaming against slippery pavement, and headed west over one more bridge.

      To the island.

      To her house.

      To Sophie.

      He told himself he could interview her there just as well as at the hospital or the station house. No problem. He was cool. She didn’t have any power over him. He was immune. The interview would be official, nothing more.

      A less honest man would have believed it, too.

      Even so, even knowing he was being a damn bonehead, he crouched over the Harley and rode its rumbling engine into the storm wind. To Sophie.

      The thought of her name brought her face in front of him, mixed the remembered scent of her with the clean rain smell and sent his blood skipping and slipping through his veins.

      He didn’t pretend that the pulsing in his groin had anything at all to do with the throbbing of the bike beneath him. He didn’t want to see her again.

      He wanted to…

      And so he’d whipped the bike around and damned himself for a fool as he flew onto the bridge, coming down with a hard bounce that jolted him to the top of his aching shoulder.

      Now, a surly gray sky shrouded gray surf thundering onto the beach. Storm-driven salt spray stung his face, clung to a two-day stubble and dripped down his jacket. Gritty with sand and sleeplessness, his eyes burned as he peered through rain and mist at the surf.

      She was out there.

      Far out on the horizon where the Gulf of Mexico blurred into the sky, he could see the narrow stripe of black against gray that was Sophie.

      She hadn’t slept either.

      Hunkered down, nothing more than a shadow in shadows on the beach, he watched as she rose from bended knees. She crouched over the board, riding the power, waiting. Her small hands gripped the side of the board. Then, balanced, steady, she stood upright, arms flung out parallel to the board.

      He inhaled.

      Breathtaking, that small shape out there in all that darkness, facing nature’s might. He clasped his hands tightly against his knees.

      Watched.

      And waited with her. Forever, it seemed, in those moments as he watched powerless.

      Behind her the wave hung for a long time. Dark at the base, black in this light, its crest all white foam and shivering green glass.

      He thought she hesitated as the wave came up under her. She was in the backwash. She bent her knees again, curved forward, and the wave took her, enveloped her like a careless lover. Threw her forward, sent her board spiraling up into the sky and covered her with boiling white water that splashed high into the sky.

      Lunging to his feet, Finnegan scanned the distance and couldn’t see her, couldn’t find that sleek head bobbing in the water. He covered the three yards to the water without realizing he’d moved.

      Surf roiled around his knees, clawed at his chest.

      Far beyond him her board floated on the surge of a small wave and vanished into a trough.

      He couldn’t see her anywhere in the pounding waves.

      He yanked his shoes off and hurled them toward the shore behind him, struck out toward the deep. There, right between two waves, he could see her board again, could see now the wet white of her face as she crawled onto the board and slumped. Strands of heavy wet hair hid her face.

      Unseen, treading water, he rose and fell on the waves, their bodies joined in the great rhythm of the gulf.

      She struggled to hold onto the board, her arms trembling with effort.

      Or he imagined the effort. He wasn’t sure.

      Finally she brought her knees under her.

      And waited again.

      His eyes never leaving her, Finnegan sank beneath the water and moved slowly toward the shore behind him until his feet scraped against cold sand.

      He hauled himself up the incline of the shore. Turning back, he saw her stand.

      Behind her, bigger than the wave that had taken her under, a wall of water raced toward him. His throat tightened and in the roar of the waves that filled him, everything went silent. He wondered if her heart was thumping as hard as his. He yelled at her to let the damned wave pass, to wait for a smaller one, not to try this freakish thing leaping out of the Gulf.

      The wind caught his shout, shredded it into nonsense.

      Half crouched, arms balancing her, Sophie caught the edge of the monster and hung there, for hours it seemed, in the pre-dawn sky. Against the cold sand, his toes buzzed with the power of the wave. He could sense the thrust of the wave as it grew, its glassy green stretching, stretching, filling the horizon with shivering power.

      Then, in one perfect moment, it crested, spitting white against the gray sky.

      Puny against the glassy green, she rode its momentum all the way to the collapsing crash of soapy foam.

      Over the surf noise, her laugh rang with triumph, a bright, bell-like sound, as she trudged to the sand with her board.

      Arousal ripped through him. His skin rippled with it. He could smell it in the air, coming off him like bands of storm waves. He couldn’t even hear the surf over the roaring in his ears. His wet jeans flapped against his legs as he strode toward her. Even his fingertips thrummed with the need to—what?

      Mid stride, he stopped, took a deep breath. A second one.

      He forced himself to stroll toward her and was appalled at the struggle it took.

      He’d been stupid.

      Was being even more stupid. If he had an ounce of sense, he’d turn and run for the hills before she saw him.

      But he didn’t.

      Instead, water slopping at his heels, he approached her. Blowing off the Gulf, wind plastered his wet clothes to him. He should have been cold to the bone.

      He wasn’t.

      How could he be cold when his blood was pumping so damned hot through him? He half-expected to see steam rising from his every footstep. A pressure cooker of intensity, looking for an escape valve.

      Burning even the roots of his wet hair.

      He wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d swung around and seen a string of black, scorched footprints following him in the sand.

      Flopped on the wet sand and facing the storm surge, she didn’t see him approaching her.

      It gave him that extra second he needed.

      It gave him the element of surprise he wanted.

      Relief washed over him and left him feeling like a yellow-bellied coward as he pitched his voice lower than the booming waves. “Sophie.”