Brenda's Dreams
Chapter Nine

Brenda lunged for the gull, lost her footing and fell headlong into the stormy sea. Waves slammed into her. She fought to keep her head above the water. Choking and sputtering, she tried to scramble to her feet but the water sucked at her legs, drawing her back under. Desperate, she struggled to the surface and gasped for air, trying to stand erect.

Numb with cold, she stumbled towards safety, battling the waves. She thought
she heard a cry and sobbed as she tried and failed to locate the gull.

A voice shouted Brenda's name and a hand gripped her arm, yanking her forward. Lightning illuminated Jax's face.

"I can't find Larry," she gasped.

"I have him," Jax shouted over the wind and the thunder. "Let's go!"

He pulled her along with him until they were free of cold water. They made their way through the darkness to the light of her house. By the time he opened the door, Brenda was so tired that she was barely able to make it inside. She stood shaking while Jax forced the door closed against the cruel thrust of wind.

Jax pulled a bedraggled Larry from his pocket and, after dumping some wood from a box near the fireplace, put the gull inside the box.

“Is he okay?” Brenda asked through her chattering teeth.

“He’s in a lot better shape then you are.” Jax wiped the water from his face and took his wet jacket off. “You better get out of those wet clothes or you will be catching pneumonia.”

Before she could even think about moving, he scooped her up into his arms and started for the stairs. Except for her father when she was little no man had ever carried, and she not only felt protected but thoroughly enjoyed the sensation. Halfway up the stairs, and fighting the urge to cuddle, a loud crash startled her into hanging on tighter to Jax. A few seconds later the house went dark as the electricity went out.

“Damn,” Jax muttered. He carried her the rest of the way up the stairs and paused at the top. “Do you have a flashlight somewhere?”

She was shivering so hard that her voice shook when she answered him. “There’s a candle in my room. Its the second door to the right. If you put me down, I’ll...”

“No, your about ready to collapse.” He shifted her in his arms, and she realized he was feeling his way to her room by running his shoulder along the wall.
When they reached her room, Jax set her down slowly and by following her directions found the candle. He found some matches in a drawer and lit the candle. Thank goodness that Grandma Quartermaine had believed in preparing for emergencies.

“Get out of those wet clothes,” Jax ordered.

Brenda slid out of her jacket. Despite the chills raking her body, she was very much aware of him in this, her childhood bedroom. What did he intend to do? The room and the entire house was cold, but if the two of them underneath the sheets could warm each other. She stared at him and wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was.

Jax took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Put on some dry clothes and I’ll light us a fire downstairs.”

Did his words relive or disappoint her?

He was almost to the door before she remembered that he was as wet as she was and that he didn’t have any dry clothes to put on.

“Jax, there is a cedar chest in the room next door. It has some blankets and quilts in it. And another candle on the stand between the windows. Grandma put them in all the rooms.”

He nodded and plunged into the darkness of the hall.

Brenda fumbled her sweatshirt and jeans off with shaking fingers and, too cold to make the trip down the hall to the bathroom for a towel, used an old terry clothed beach robe from her closet to dry her hair and skin.

I’ll turn the heat when I go downstairs she told herself. Then she shook her head and groaned. You dummy the electricity is off and that meant the furnace as well.

In her mind she started to picture a fire. Jax’s fire. The flames licking at the split oak logs and radiating a wonderful, blessed heat she couldn’t wait to savor. Thrown across her pillow was the mid-thigh T-shirt she had slept in. Hurrying as quick as she could she slipped it over her head. Slipped her feet into her slippers and grabbed an arrow quilt that was resting at the foot of her bed. She wrapped herself in the quilt and headed downstairs.

For a while Brenda couldn’t concentrate on nothing except getting warm as, sitting on the raised hearth, she soaked up all the heat she could. Jax, with a blanket draped over his body Indian-fashion, walked back and forth carrying wood from the shed off of the kitchen to the fireplace. Finally, Brenda noticed his stockpile.

“Looks like you have at least a two-day supply there,” she said.

“That’s because seasoned wood burns quickly and its hard to tell how long we will be without power.” Jax dusted his hands together and came over and sat down next to her on the hearth. “Do you feel better now?”

She nodded, then remembering the gull, and looked around for the box. She didn’t see it. “Where’s Larry?”

“I covered his box and carried it into the kitchen so that he would sleep.”

“He wasn’t injured?”

“Larry’s fine. Gulls don’t get soaking wet like we do.”

They were all safe...she, Jax, and Larry. Safe and warm. Brenda hugged herself under her quilt, surprised at how it felt so right the three of them in Grandma Quartermaine’s' house. It felt as though they belong together.

That was ridiculous! She sat up straight, careful not to look over at Jax, who was sitting to close for comfort.

“That was a stupid thing you did, running out into a storm like that. Didn’t it occur to you that I would take care of Larry?”

Brenda stiffened. “Why would I think that? I don’t even know you.”

“You saw how I was feeding him before you started.”

“You also remember what you told me? You told me Larry could take care of himself,” she accused.

Jax shrugged his shoulders and the blanket, an old cotton one as faded as the red sweatshirt he had worn on the beach, slid off his bare shoulders, dropping in folds around him on the bricks of the raised hearth. His tanned torso gleamed in the firelight, making it a shimmering gold. Flames flickered in his blue eyes. An almost tangible aura of virility pulsed from him, flowing around her, enticing her. She willed herself to look away but could not.

Everything faded form her mind, except for Jax. Touching her tongue to her suddenly dry lips, she watched breathlessly as desire sparked in his eyes and softened his mouth. The memory of his kiss from the beach flashed into her head. Without thinking about it, her body leaned towards his.

He blinked, mouth hardening, eyes shifting away from hers. “I’m hungry,” he said, a slight huskiness in his voice.

For an instant, starved for his touch, she mistook his meaning.

“Any food in the house?” he went on.

Brenda, feeling as though Jax had actively pushed her away, tightened the quilt around her and stood up, controlling the urge to tell him to go home and fix his own meal. The windows rattled as a gust of wind battered the house; obviously he was going to have to stay until the storm passed.

She tried of a casual tone. “I’ll see what I can find.”

He stood, folding over his blanket and tucking it around his waist. She couldn’t help but think he wore nothing underneath. He hands grasped her shoulders, pressing her to sit back down on the hearth.

“Relax,” he said. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

Why argue? She thought. The fire was warm and she was tired. If he wanted to wait on her she might as well let him. Since she couldn’t trust her reaction to him, she would welcome the barrier eating would create for them. Anything to keep him occupied and apart from her because this situation...the two of them sheltering together from the storm...was potential dynamite. She had already discovered her own fuse was much too short.

********************************

I can’t risk touching her, Jax told himself as he buttered bread in the kitchen by
candlelight. She had already been responsible for a major disturbance in his...well he didn’t want to go there. If I hold her in my arms again...

He held his hands above the bread as he stared off into space, remembering her softness against him as he had kissed her on the barrier beach. He felt his body react and muttered a curse. You’d think he’d never had a woman before.

In a sense, he hadn’t. Not a woman like Brenda anyway. There was an elusiveness about her that intrigued him while at the same time he was aware of what seemed to be an understanding between them. The rightness of being in this house with her circulated through him with each beat of his heart. Larry shifted and Jax glanced towards the bird. Even the gull was somehow involved, he thought.

He hunched his shoulders against childhood memories of the time he believed he could look in his mothers head and sense what she felt, always after she and his father had quarreled. He hated knowing her pain; he had fought to blunt his sensitivity and had finally succeeded. Had he really had this ability, or was it all childish imagination?

Jax shrugged. He certainly had no such ability now, nor did he wish to. In his profession it would be a disaster just waiting to happen. He was fantasizing about possessing Brenda, that’s all. Despite how much he wanted her, he knew better than to get involved with any woman at this point in his life. His mind must be making up this psychic nonsense to justify his need for her.

Just make the sandwiches and thinking, he chided himself. Eat, and maybe get some sleep. The storm can’t last forever, and once your out of Brenda’s house, stay away from her. In two days you’ll be gone and in two months you won’t even remember her name.

Jax slapped some peanut butter onto the bread and reached for a jar of grape jelly. He paused, hand outstretched. Looking at it another way, why not take advantage of this time with Brenda? Why not make love with her? He would never see her again. No complications. He didn’t know her last name and she didn’t know his. Neither one of them lived on the Cape. They would never see one another again.

He sighed and shook his head. Already she was far more than a casual itch that needed scratching. He couldn’t risk the chance she might become important to him. After the complications caused by Miranda, he certainly didn’t need another woman messing up his life.

He carried the tray into the living room with two and a half peanut better and jelly
sandwiches on it, plus two stemmed glasses filled with milk.

“I’m surprised you found all that. I’m just about out of everything.”

“I left some dried meat and bread for Larry. He’ll probably be hungry when he wakes up.”

Brenda’s smile lit her whole face and Jax wondered how long it would be before he
forgot that smile. Deliberately turning away, he searched for a place to put the tray down. Seeing a small table, he reached for it with one hand. A piece of driftwood on the tabletop wobbled precariously, and Brenda jumped up to catch it before it fell on the floor. Her quilt slipped to the floor.

Her thigh-length stripped shirt clung to her curves so snugly he was certain she was naked beneath and his breath caught in his throat. Her face flushed under his gaze but she didn’t react.

Clutching the driftwood to her like a talisman, she said, “I made this when I was
thirteen.” She sounded as breathless as he felt.

Setting the tray on the table, Jax forced himself to focus on the wood, not her. At first glance he saw an iron bolt affixed to the driftwood, with feathers, grasses and bits of colored glass strewn over and around both the bolt and the wood. After a minute, he discerned a pattern to the apparently random placement of the decorations, and he frowned, intent on pinning down the elusive feeling the pattern evoked inside him.

Suddenly a door opened inside his head, and he tensed as he sensed an emotion that was not his, an alien picture in his mind.

“Summers over,” he muttered. To his huge relief the door closed and once more his mind was his own. He glanced over at Brenda.

She stared at him in shocked surprise. Had she experienced what he had?