Heart on Fire Read online

  So, this was a dream, after all. No Chad. No Ethan.

  “Chad is already in the chopper, Janine. All we have to worry about, now, is getting you inside.”

  She hadn’t seen him put Chad in the helicopter! Surely, she would have seen him if what he’d said was true.

  “Tell me Chad isn’t dead, Ethan.”

  “Chad isn’t dead, Janine.”

  A lie? She didn’t care. It was enough, at least for the moment, to give her the incentive to take his hand and make the extreme effort it took to come to her feet.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BRIGHTNESS! BLINDING BRIGHTNESS!

  Now, this was more like the life-after-death experience she’d expected. How genuinely nice was the softness of cocoon-like warmth around her.

  Yes, this was definitely more like it.

  She wondered when her actual passing had occurred. How had she finally died? From asphyxiation? From burning? From dehydration? From starvation? From heartbreak?

  “I think she’s coming around!”

  The voice was familiar, but why not? Death was but a transition to meeting family and friends who had passed on before, wasn’t it? Whose voice was it, then? Aunt Fran? Aunt Marta?

  “Janine, thank God!”

  “Lou?”

  The bright lights were neon bulbs on a ceiling above her.

  The shadows weren’t spirits but physical bodies gathered around her.

  “Lou?” she repeated.

  “Damn right!” Lou’s hand was cool against Janine’s forehead.

  “Chad?” Even she recognized the growing hysteria in her voice.

  She’d felt for Chad’s pulse and hadn’t found it.

  She’d looked for him beside her, and he wasn’t there.

  “Chad!”

  “This is going to help you sleep,” someone, not Lou, said.

  She didn’t want to sleep. She’d just come awake!

  Somebody or something held her down. There was a sharp pain in her arm.

  “Chad?”

  “He’s fine, honey,” Lou assured. “Really, he is.”

  The lights faded.

  Janine didn’t want the darkness; she’d had too much of it already.

  She tried to fight its coming, but she was no more able to keep it at bay than she’d been able to summon sunlight on the mountain.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “AH, YES, HERE SHE COMES. Earlier even than the doctor predicted, I might add.”

  With great difficulty—her eyelids seemingly smeared with glue—Janine opened her eyes.

  Ethan was sitting by her bed. Or, was it merely wishful thinking that put him there?

  “I came to collect the Bible I loaned you. I did tell you it was only a loaner, didn’t I? But look—” He held up a Bible too new to be his. “—Sarah Zent gave me this one to leave with you.”

  “Sarah?” Things were so fuzzy. Janine couldn’t get her thoughts completely wrapped around anything. If Ethan hadn’t chosen that moment to thump the Bible with one hand, she would have doubted it, or he, was really there.

  “Actually, it was Sarah’s great-granddaughter who gave it to me to give to you,” Ethan confessed. “You remember Marianne?”

  For Janine, it was hard remembering anything.

  “I went over to Troutdale to tell Mrs. Zent how you were getting along,” Ethan said. “She and Marianne asked me to stick around for dinner.” He looked suspiciously like a little boy caught suddenly with his hand in the cookie jar. “Would you believe I stayed and actually enjoyed it?”

  “Tell me this isn’t a dream.” If it were a dream, it could have been far worse.

  “No dream!” Ethan assured. “I would have been in there to pick you up off the mountain sooner but by the time I got out, I wasn’t making too much sense; something about some of the mountain’s toxic gas that I’d inadvertently ingested. It took me a good day to get my wits back. Sorry about that.”

  “You landed the helicopter on that mere tabletop of rock?” Janine wasn’t at all sure it had happened. Remembering it somehow didn’t make it so.

  “A piece of cake,” he said modestly. “It was the least I could do once I found out that I’d been in the dispensary for six whole hours before realizing what end was up.”

  She didn’t ask about Chad, although it was only Chad she wanted to hear about; she was afraid the news would be bad news. She didn’t want or need to hear anything bad.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WHO SAID TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS?

  Janine had something to say about wounds of the heart.

  After six months, she was daily confronted by things that triggered painful memories of Chad.

  Mt. St. Helens had erupted yet again—big time. Dr. Roger Lewis’s research facility was utterly destroyed. Luckily, though, everyone had vacated the premises, forewarned by Janine, Chad, and Ethan’s ordeal on the mountain.

  Janine had resumed her original job at Marine World which had finished refurbishment during her recuperation.

  On TV, she watched a gymnast take off his shirt; she saw Humphrey Bogart kiss Ingrid Berman in a rerun of Casablanca; she saw one of the main characters wounded on a popular TV series. They all reminded her of Chad.

  Even the bad Seattle weather, sprinkling rain as she drove through it to church, reminded her of the cloud and dust cover that had surrounded Chad and her on the mountain.

  She’d taken to attending church regularly lately. Something about her experience, in the jaws of death, on the mountain, had left her with a hole that her re-acquaintance with things spiritual had a nice way of filling.

  Now, there was the letter from Ethan in her purse. It was only willpower that kept her from reading it for the umpteenth time and marveling at its irony.

  He was going to marry Sarah Zent’s great-granddaughter, Marianne.

  Everything had been so much simpler for Janine when death had been so ominously looming for Chad and her up on the perilous side of that erupting mountain.

  Afterwards, it became less simple.

  She’d recovered from her ordeal with a swiftness that surprised her and the doctors.

  Chad’s recovery was slower.

  Janine several times flew down to Portland where Chad had been airlifted for special care under the personal guidance of a specialist in internal medicine. He’d been too drugged to even know who he was, let alone know who she was.

  When he was finally able to converse, he was continually being wheeled away for some kind of test or for physical therapy.

  When he was transferred to the Menur Rehabilitation Clinic in Tempe, Arizona, where visitors were looked upon as distractions for every patient’s recovery, Janine had been left wondering where and what Chad and her relationship was, and/or if there still was a relationship. She was confused…and saddened…and uncertain…and downright miserable.

  She daydreamed all through the first part of church services.

  She was only vaguely aware of new members and visitors being introduced from the pulpit. Galen Wilks had just risen from his seat, a few pews down from her.

  Janine knew Galen. Just moved to town from Akron, Ohio, he was now at Marine World as an assistant oceanographer.

  Galen sat down.

  “Dr. Chad Samuels,” said someone over the loudspeaker.

  Janine’s head, along with everyone else’s, turned in unison toward the back of the chapel.

  There Chad stood, with wide smile and deeply dimpled cheeks.

  He nodded pleasantly in Janine’s direction and then sat down.

  Everyone turned back toward the front, except for Janine who couldn’t believe her eyes.

  Chad brought his right hand, palm forward, up before his chest, and wiggled his fingers in kind of a hi-there-Janine wave.

  Janine turned back to the pulpit.

  Her heart beat so fast that she though it was going to leap right on out of her rib cage. She genuinely wondered if she were hallucinating.

  After that, she didn�
��t have a clue what was going on, church-wise.

  Actually, she was surprised to find she hadn’t imagined Chad who was waiting for her, calm as could be, when services were over.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.” She was on the verge of tears, so glad to see him.

  He hadn’t changed. Not even the rigors of his ordeal on the mountain, and his lengthy medication regimen, and his long physical therapy, had made him any the less handsome. But then, even at his very worst—his lips cracked, his face and hair gray with volcanic dust, his eyes glazed over with fever, his body internally damaged—he’d remained the most handsome man she’d ever known or seen.

  “Why didn’t you call and let me know you were coming?” she finally accused.

  “I know what they say about separation making the heart grow fonder, and that was certainly the case in my case. However, when my senses finally checked in, one-hundred percent, I came to the realization that my doctors had rather boxed me in for weeks on end. I was afraid that, maybe, you’d moved on with your life. I thought it would be fairer to find out, in person, what was going on, rather than have you try and put it into words over the phone.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “Having parked outside your place, trying to get up the nerve to head on in, I just happened to spot you on the way out, and I followed you here. What say the two of us take a drive, maybe out to Alki Point, maybe stop for lunch?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Shall we go in my car and come back for yours later?” He took her arm, his touch as electric as she remembered, and eased her across the road to his sports car which was some kind of foreign model she didn’t recognize, all shiny black and obviously expensive.

  He opened the door for her, on the passenger side, and she got in. He joined her inside the car.

  “So, how’ve you been?” he injected into the silence that accompanied his skillful maneuvering of the vehicle out of its parking spot and onto highway pavement.

  It seemed ridiculous to Janine that the two of them seemed to be having more difficulty talking now, after all they’d gone through, than they’d had when they’d first met.

  She thought to tell him she’d been just fine, thank-you-very-much, but she hadn’t been fine. She’d spent too much time trying to figure out where their lives and relationship had been, was, and was going. She’d been too frustrated with how she would have preferred everything made easy and not made so complicated by his lengthy recovery, and by doctors who didn’t have a clue as to how some healing powers weren’t found in a bottle or on a therapy table.

  Janine regretted that she hadn’t just set her foot down and marched right on in, proclaiming to one and all, doctors and therapists included, that she was this man’s woman and no one was going to keep them apart, come hell, high water, internal injuries, or physical therapy. No way had Chad been in any condition to be so assertive.

  Had she been allowed, or had she insisted, to be constantly by his side, it could well have been a bonding experience to last them for the rest of their lives.

  Did he, like her, blame her for not being forceful enough to have been there for him?

  What had there been, about his long recovery, and her exclusion from most of it, that had made things, now, different and difficult? Or, did things just feel different and difficult?

  He steered the car into one of the marked parallel parking spaces along the beach. Because of the cool temperatures and recent rain, the walkways were pretty much deserted.

  “Let’s walk,” he suggested.

  She opened the car door and got out. He joined her.

  “I know I should have come to Tempe more often,” she said, glad finally to be out of the cramped confines of the auto.

  “Maybe not,” he surprised. “Maybe you did just the right thing. I needed as much a chance to sort things out as you did. After all, how long had we known each other? Three days? A little more? A little less? Not long at all to be proclaiming undying love for one another, was it?”

  Once Janine had gotten around to admitting her love for him to herself, she’d never again questioned that. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Her dilemma—and failure—had been in trying to decide what to make of it after she’d admitted to it. It hurt her deeply that he might somehow have come to think of his love for her as something too spur of the moment to be counted significant.

  “Although, actually, it was plenty long enough for me!” He stopped in his tracks; automatically, she was brought to a stop beside him. “My feelings for you haven’t changed, Janine,” he said and turned to take her shoulders in his hands as if he feared she was about to run away from him.

  She wasn’t going anywhere.

  “These last months,” he said, “have done nothing but give me time to reconfirm that everything I said, everything I felt, was right and valid. On the other hand, I realize that you might need a little more time, and I do intend to give it to you. I’m just back in your life to spend whatever time is needed to convince you, and all the Woofs and Farnwells, Great-Grandma Woof, even Sarah Zent included, that I’m truly worthy of you.”

  “I do love you,” she said and found it not half as difficult to get out as she’d imagined it would be. His being there made it genuinely right and easy.

  “Really?” He actually sounded surprised.

  “Jeez, you really are an ass not to know it.”

  “And you think we can convince your extended family that I’d make you an a-one husband? You are going to say yes to marrying me, right?”

  “Oh, Chad!” Her voice cracked. She was very near to tears.

  She wrapped her arms tightly around his powerful neck and drank in the pure wonder of his hard body against her. She basked in the pure magic radiating from his black-flecked golden eyes.

  “That was a, ‘Yes, Chad, I’ll marry you!’, was it?”

  “Yes, Chad, I will marry you. I thought you’d never ask.”

  Her heart was on fire with the love she felt for and from him.

  Tears unashamedly washed her cheeks.

  He kissed her long, hard, full and deep.

  As she clung to him, and he clung to her, her heart and body thrilled with the wonder of the miracle.

  The cloud cover opened above them and spilled bright and glorious sunlight whose resulting rainbow symbolized the final end to whatever the previous possibilities for more storm.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WILLIAM MALTESE was born in the Pacific Northwest. He has a B.A. in Marketing/Advertising and spent an honorable tour of duty in the U.S. Army, achieving the rank of E-5.

  He started his authorial career writing for men’s pulp magazines, and has since penned almost 200 books, both fiction and nonfiction, including a number of bestselling women’s romances under the names “Willa Lambert” and “Anna Lambert” for houses such as Harlequin, Carousel, and Passion in Print, including his internationally acclaimed Harlequin SuperRomance #2, Love’s Emerald Flame, which has been reprinted by Wildside Press along with many of his other novels.

  A long-time wine connoisseur, he’s written William Maltese’s Wine Taster’s Diary: Spokane and Pullman Washington Wine Region, the bestselling Back of the Boat Gourmet Cooking (with Bonnie Clark), the bestselling The Gluten-Free Way: My Way (with Adrienne Z. Milligan), and the bestselling In Search of the Perfect Pinot G! (with A. B. Gayle), all for the “Traveling Gourmand” series of Wildside Press.

  He’s been honored with a listing in the prestigious Who’s Who in America. He encourages his fans to visit his websites:

  http://www.williammaltese.com

  http://www.facebook.com/williammaltese

  http://www.myspace.com/williammaltese

 

 

 
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