Rainsinger (17 page)

W
inona emerged from the laundry room, involuntarily smoothing her hair, which felt wild and unkempt to her guilty hands. Catching herself, she crossed her arms over her chest, all too aware of her bralessness, which felt somehow hedonistic and shameful. She felt as if her body were visibly marked by the passionate moments with Daniel, and worried that Joleen would sense something amiss.

It was almost impossible to look at Daniel, his hair loose over his shirtless torso. Impossible to look at that glossy mane and not think of how it felt, how he felt, the things they’d done.

The wild being in her was loose and gaining control. The being who whispered there could only be pleasure and joy in such a joining, the one who laughed wantonly at the cautions of her conscience, the one who said a woman was made for loving, and this man was designed to deliver it.

The girls told excitedly of the snake they’d seen. “It was three feet long!” Joleen said.

“With a rattle as big as my hand,” Giselle added, holding up her palm in illustration.

Daniel, seemingly perfectly content, sat in the chair. “What was it doing?”

“Just sleeping!” Joleen said. “All curled up in a ball, right there in the middle of the path next to the water. I almost stepped on him.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t dead?”

“No, he wasn’t dead,” Giselle said. “He woke up and shook his tail.”

“Good grief,” Winona said, feeling ill at the thought of rattlesnake bites. “What did you do?”

Joleen laughed. “We screamed and ran back here!”

“Good,” Daniel said. He started to lean back, and winced as his wounded shoulder touched the chair.

They’d never finished taking care of that wound, Winona realized with a flush. “Come upstairs and let me wash that out properly now,” she said. “I’d hate for it to get infected.”

“All right.” He stood up. “We’ll talk later about what you should do if you are bitten, but right now, I need to get some first-aid cream.”

Now the girls noticed the wide scrape on his back. “Oooh, what happened?”

“I tangled with a cactus patch.”

Joleen bent close. “I think there are still spikes in there.”

“Grab those tweezers,” he said to Giselle. They went upstairs, the girls trailing behind, making noises of sympathy. Gently Winona washed the scrape, trying to ignore the broad, brown back. She started to smear first-aid cream over it, but hesitated at the last minute. “If there are any spines left, that will hurt like crazy.”

“I know!” Giselle piped up. “Hydrogen peroxide.”

“Good idea.”

“Can I pour it on?”

Daniel grinned at Winona over his shoulder. “She wants to see me suffer.”

“No, I don’t. I just like the bubbles.”

Winona stepped back, her hands trembling slightly with reaction and strain. A faint sense of panic made her back away—if she didn’t get out of here, she didn’t know what she’d do. Already she thought Joleen sensed a difference in her. “Go ahead, Giselle. I’ll run out and get the yucca we left by the orchard.”

She didn’t look at any of them as she darted out of the room, into the full heat and calming brightness of the day beyond. On the porch she paused, trying to catch her breath. This was all too embarrassing. Too ridiculous. She was making a fool of herself with Daniel Lynch.

The thought repeated itself in her mind, over and over as she stomped through the orchard and fetched the upended wheelbarrow. The plants weren’t harmed by the jarring fall. She picked them up and carted them around the outside of the orchard, taking her time, hoping she’d have some semblance of sanity cloaked over this madness by the time she returned.

But her memory betrayed her. One vision particularly haunted her, unreeling over and over until she wanted to die of mortification: unwinding his braid, then burying her face in his loose hair, like some kind of harlot.

How could she have done such a thing?

And how in the world could she keep Daniel at bay now, when she’d given him such a wanton invitation?

As she came around the edge of the orchard, she saw him sitting on the edge of the concrete porch, Giselle behind him, Joleen beside him. Like a pair of hummingbirds at the mouth of a four-o’clock, they whirred and moved around him, drinking in his easy chuckles and the teasing comments he tossed to them like drops of nectar, feeding their vulnerable egos, making them feel beautiful, loved, appreciated.

Winona stopped, suddenly remembering her father’s wry humor, his easy hugs and twinkling eyes. In his company, she’d always felt like the most beautiful girl in the world. He told her she had racehorse legs, and hair like moonbeams, and a smile pretty enough to light the morning.

How she had adored him!

Just as Joleen and Giselle adored Daniel. He was the sort of father figure single mothers yearned to find, for he simply tended the children in his realm as naturally as breathing, as if anyone would do it. In a world suffering the lack of fathers for entire nations of lost children, Daniel Lynch was a rare and precious man.

As she stood there in the bright sunlight, her hands tight around the handles of the wheelbarrow, he laughed at something one of them said and clapped Joleen on the arm. Giselle made some comment, bending forward, and all three of them laughed.

A jolt of pure, blinding emotion passed through Winona, making her hands shake. For the first time, she realized she had a far larger problem than simply whether to sleep with him or not and, if she did, what her moral obligations were.

Somehow, when she wasn’t looking, she’d fallen in love with Daniel Lynch. Deeply, painfully in love with his laughter, with his mischievous and changeable eyes, with his strong sense of order and sometimes prickly ways. She liked the fierceness in him, and the hints of brooding darkness. She wanted to ease the loneliness she sensed buried deeply behind all his smoke screens. She wanted to take care of him and make him eat right, and make love to him forever and ever.

For one moment, she let the emotion move through her, sharp and bittersweet. She’d never felt it, not even a glimmer of it. Not like this. She wanted to inhale him, meld with him, mingle everything she was with what he was, because only then would she feel truly whole.

He caught sight of her, standing there in the desert as if thunderstruck. His face changed, lightened, and he lifted his hand to his lips, kissed his fingers and motioned blowing the kiss to her. Heat ripped through her at the simple gesture, and on its heels came despair. She’d done it this time.

Giselle looked up, delighted. Even at a distance of thirty feet, Winona could hear the singsong happiness in her voice as she chanted, “Daniel and Winona up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

Joleen looked up and back, and Winona found it impossible to read the expression on her face as she lifted a hand and waved.

Embarrassed, but determined not to show it, Winona waved back and made herself move forward, suddenly aware that she’d totally forgotten to put her bra back on. As Daniel’s bright, knowing gaze traveled over her body, she felt her nipples tighten, and knew that he noticed, and she wanted to flee once more.

She put the wheelbarrow down by the side of the house in a patch of shade. “I need something to drink,” she said.

“Me, too,” Daniel agreed, looking at her with laughter in his eyes. “I’m really hot.”

She blushed and hurriedly lowered her head as she passed him, feeling him get up and follow her inside.

In the kitchen, the dimness made her blind for a moment, and she paused, blinking, to let her vision clear. Daniel came in, and Winona instinctively moved forward to get away from him, a little panic in her chest. She bumped into a chair and he caught her, chuckling as he tugged her against him, her back against his chest. Surreptitiously he slid a hand under her tank top and brushed the lower swell of her breast.

“I’ll die before they go to bed,” he murmured into her ear.

“Daniel!” she protested, pushing his hand away just as the girls trooped in behind them. Although he stopped the shameful, delicious teasing, he didn’t let her go. Playfully he bent and kissed the side of her neck.

Behind them, Giselle made a sound. “Ooooh, Daniel, kiss her!” she said. “Like in the movies.”

He looked over his shoulder, playing to his audience, and Winona felt a small rise of panic. Didn’t he understand that Joleen would be wounded? That she had a terrible, if fleeting, crush?

“I think she needs a good kiss,” he said to Giselle. “Like the movies, huh?”

“Daniel,” she began, putting her hands on his shoulders to keep from falling as he turned her in his strong, lean embrace. She saw a flash of smile in his dark face before he tilted her backward, as if in a tango.

And kissed her, firmly, richly, and demurely enough for any 1930s movie. Still holding her in the awkward position, he looked at Giselle, wiggling his eyebrows. “Well?”

“Another one!” she cried out, obviously delighted.

He kissed Winona again, his eyes open and glittering and so close to hers, then let her straighten.

Dazed and breathless by his simple proximity, Winona gathered the protective denim shirt around her. “You’re terrible,” she said with a heated flush.

“How gross,” Joleen said. “I’m getting out of here.”

Winona looked at her quickly, dismay on her lips. “Joleen—”

But she’d already gone downstairs, her feet clumping on the wooden steps.

Giselle watched her go, perplexed. Then, shrugging expressively at Winona and Daniel, she followed Joleen down the stairs.

For one long moment, Winona stood frozen in the kitchen, staring at the door to the basement, a thousand emotions warring within her.

“Winona, she’s just a kid. This is normal. Relax a little, huh?”

She looked at him. So he did understand. And maybe that had been part of his plan. It wasn’t appropriate after all, for a thirteen-year-old to be jealous of the kisses of a man at least twenty years her senior, and he was too smart not to see that. “She isn’t just any kid, though, Daniel. She’s my little sister, and she’s still got a long way to go.”

“You have to stop protecting her, Winona. It’s time for her to take some of the knocks on her own.”

Winona shook her head. “Not yet,” she said.

* * *

Seeing that Winona struggled with the passion that flared between them this afternoon, Daniel made a tactical retreat. He called up U2’s Rattle and Hum on his Walkman and then turned on his computer, heading for the blogs and E-mail loops that gave him such safe companionship.

He hadn’t been on any of the services much lately, and his E-mail box was full. There were flirtatious messages from two women he suspected were in their sixties, a note about a powwow in Denver, three strongly worded messages about a note he’d posted about wanna-be Indians and a couple of notes from pen pals he knew only through the service, people he’d become friends with in the odd way of online relationships.

As he posted notes in return and caught up with the conversations he’d missed, he felt oddly disconnected. It didn’t matter today. None of these conversations, nothing anyone said, none of the furious, intense discussions called “flame wars” in which he ordinarily found such satisfaction mattered.

He nudged the feeling with a sense of surprise. Upon discovering the world of computer communications three years before, Daniel had been instantly entranced—and addicted. Online, he didn’t have to have a quick comeback. No one could see him. He jumped into the heated discussions with a wry voice, enjoying more than he could express the wonder of talking to people everywhere from the comfort of his house, through his computer.

Now he found himself scrolling through the messages with a sense of annoyance. The flame wars and intense debates seemed singularly unimportant, removed from real life. He kept wanting to jump up and find Winona, find out if she was okay, find out if he was going to have to fight through a brand-new wall.

He also wondered how Joleen was doing. He honestly didn’t mind the hero-worship angle of her crush. He knew a lot of needy kids, and knew it wasn’t uncommon for a troubled girl to fix her tangled emotions on some distant, safely unattainable male. It wasn’t uncommon for perfectly balanced thirteen year-olds to have crushes, come to that.

Joleen, however, needed a nudge to face the real world again. So when Daniel noticed how guarded Winona became in front of her little sister, he mulled it over, but not for long. His choice to kiss Winona in front of Joleen had been quite calculated. It was time for Winona to stop protecting the girl.

It wasn’t that he didn’t feel sympathy for the kid. She’d been living in a safe, protected, loving world, and in the course of one rainy afternoon, the whole thing had been shattered. He understood her lack of trust, her need to manipulate and control her environment. Daniel had been guilty of the same manipulations all too often—and in his case, he’d even learned to do it on purpose to get something done.

At least he’d understood what he was doing, right or wrong. Joleen was acting in desperation, and until Winona stopped allowing the kid to hide like a puppet master, Joleen wouldn’t ever be able to make peace with the loss of that safe, protected, comfortable world.

One day, this huge and terrible loss would provide Joleen with a wealth of material. It would give her a strength of character rare in young women. It would serve her well.

But first she had to get through it, and the biggest stumbling block to that was Winona.

Winona.
With a frown, he punched a key to scroll to a new message, watching graphics change and not absorbing a single word.

In his earphones, Bono sang about desire. The fever. The destruction it wrought sometimes.

Daniel listened and frowned again. Was he indulging his own manipulativeness now? He wanted Winona—with every fiber of his being. He thought of her lifting his hair and rubbing it on her face, on her neck, then touching his face as if his features were something sacred. He couldn’t remember anyone looking at him that way in his life. No one had ever touched him with that hesitant, dazzled hunger, and Daniel found it pierced him to be so wanted, to be the object of desire, to be touched so reverently.