'Then it's settled?' Gallagher asked smoothly.

  'I'll have to ask Kenny if he's interested,' she said without enthusiasm, hoping against hope that he wouldn't be. But of course he was, and he leapt at the chance to spend time alone with Gallagher.

  Charlie found herself facing three empty, lonely days, wishing Gallagher had had the sensitivity to invite them both out to his place. But actually the days proved to be anything but empty, and, though she spent them alone, she did not feel lonely. It was on the third day that she acknowledged the fact that she was having fun—trying hard not to, but having fun, none the less. She slept in. She ate peanut butter sandwiches, and experimented with gourmet creations that Kenny always turned his nose up at and refused to eat. She sipped white wine in a bubble bath. She went shopping for herself. She never turned on the TV or the radio, appliances that were running constantly, and usually together, when Kenny was at home. She luxuriated in the silence, breaking it only with the classical records that she seldom listened to because Kenny complained so much at having to hear any kind of music that was not rock and roll.

  Why had Gallagher done this for her? she allowed herself to wonder on the final day. Why had he done this to her? The ugly thought occurred to her that maybe he was starting to prepare her for a suggestion that she should make other plans for Kenny. Maybe he was trying to slowly wean her of her affection for her cousin, for his own purposes. Maybe he was trying to remove what he perceived as an obstacle to their relationship going anywhere.

  No, she thought, Gallagher wasn't devious. But what if he was doing it at a subconscious level, without even realising what he was doing?

  Suddenly, without warning, the dragon was there—huge and ominous—breathing a tortuous flame at her. She could not face the questions it asked of her.

  Gallagher dropped off an exuberant Kenny later that afternoon.

  'Did you have a good time?' he asked her at the door.

  'Not particularly,' she lied, tempted to slam the door in his face.

  'I thought I was doing something nice for you,' he told her testily.

  'Well, from now on, keep your niceness to your damn self!' she snapped, and was immediately sorry when hurt and bafflement leapt in his eyes.

  'Gallagher, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.'

  He regarded her thoughtfully. 'What do you want, Charlie?'

  'I don't know,' she whispered. But that wasn't true. She knew exactly what she wanted. Everything. She wanted everything.

  Oddly enough, over the next few weeks, that felt like exactly what she had. Everything. She joined the skiers on nights out more often, nights that always seemed to end up being for her and Gallagher. Nights that cemented the strong feelings that they had for one another. Nights of laughter and long talks and aching kisses.

  On other nights, Gallagher asked Kenny to join the group for sleigh-rides and toboggan-rides. Several times, Kenny, at Gallagher's invitation, went up in the helicopter with them. Several times, Gallagher came and spent a quiet evening at her house, watching the fire, playing Monopoly. Everything. She took it all. While it lasted. While she could. Waiting for the bubble to burst.

  Then one night she arrived at Gallagher's to find the normal crowd of people missing. They were alone.

  'Where is everybody?' she asked softly, knowing now why Kenny had not been included in tonight's invitation.

  'I cancelled the sleigh-ride. I think you and I have more important things to discuss.'

  'Oh?' she asked lightly, though her heart was throbbing painfully in her chest. 'Like what?'

  He poured her a glass of wine, handed it to her, chinked his glass lightly against hers. 'Like you and me. Like where we're going. When we're going to get there.'

  She put down her wineglass. 'I'm scared of questions like that, Gallagher.'

  He touched her downcast cheek. 'I know you are. I am, too.'

  'Well, then, why ask them? I'm happy—oh, lord, so happy—just the way we are.'

  'No, Charlie. Life doesn't stand still. It grows. It changes.'

  'I don't want it to,' she stated stubbornly.

  He kissed her. Long and lingeringly, until she ached with a need to grow. To change. To know him. To know all of him.

  He must have read each of these thoughts as they flickered across her face, because he smiled gently. 'Now tell me that you don't want it to change.'

  She leaned back from him, and drank in the features of his face. The ruggedness was muted with tenderness, an unmistakably loving light lit the depths of those astounding blue eyes. She realised that the look he was giving her now was not new. She had seen that expression flicker through his eyes on and off many times in the past few weeks. She'd been baffled by it at the same time she had been warmed by it. But now she identified his expression as yearning. He wanted her. He loved her.

  He pulled her close again, his warm, firm lips trailing tiny kisses over her upturned face. His lips erased her rational thoughts, her doubts, her anxieties. She was incapable of tainting this moment with worry about later. Gallagher drew her into the now, a wondrous place with no yesterday and no tomorrow, only moment upon precious moment, strung together like pearls on a golden thread.

  'I love you,' she heard herself whisper.

  He took her face in his hands, looked deep into her eyes with tender wonder. 'Now, when did that happen?'

  'At the dawn of time,' she responded quietly, 'and it will last until the end of time.' Her honesty was frightening, but she met his eyes squarely. If he wanted something else, if he wanted only a temporary relationship, he would back off now—and she would crawl into a little hole, curl up in a foetal position, and die.

  But he returned her intense gaze steadily. 'I felt it, too,' he said softly. 'The powerful tug of destiny, from that first moment I laid eyes on you. Only I didn't call it that. I called it trouble.'

  She laughed, a sound that came from her throat like a contented purr. What she saw in his face was a man who was incapable of lying. Gallagher Cole could have his pick if he wanted to satisfy a brief urge. She had seen how women flocked to him, sensing in him that rare combination of power and playfulness, manliness and gentleness. But he had chosen her. Chosen her because she was his equal.

  She firmly chased away the doubts that tried to crash into her serenity, that deep glow of contentment that was moving from her toes upwards. He was different. He was different from any man she had ever met. He had proved that he had more strength and more maturity than all the others. He didn't balk from realities. And he wouldn't balk from the reality that Kenny presented in their life.

  And then that brief thought, too, was gone, chased away by lips that grew steadily more demanding, that commanded her to free herself of all but this—heartbeat matching heartbeat, heated skin meeting heated skin, hungry lips devouring hungry lips.

  She was sand and he was ocean. At first he lapped over her gently, teasing, playing. But the waves grew in strength and intensity until she was finally swept up in a crashing, foam-crowned breaker. She found herself in his arms, sea-blue eyes washing over her.

  'Tonight?' he said huskily, his voice holding both question and command.

  'Tonight,' she agreed, and her lips fastened once again on his as he carried her up the staircase to his room.

  She barely noticed the room, except to note that it was perfect. A fireplace dominated the far wall, a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out on a silver-washed world took up most of another. The bed was huge, yet inviting, with its handcrafted quilt of muted greys and golds and browns. He set her down on the bed, and she looked up through an enormous skylight at a velvet night sky embroidered with a zillion twinkling stars.

  Gallagher came down beside her, capturing her lips again with an exhilarating urgency. Yet there was no urgency in the way his hands began their exploration of her. He moved slowly, stripping her clothes from her with such grace and sureness that she was barely aware of the transition—barely aware until his strong, dry hand traced the curve of her naked breast, moved with tender slowness over the flat plain of her stomach, and then dipped lower. She gasped with pleasure and need, arching against him. But he stayed her urgency, soothing her with his eyes and softly spoken words, even while he stoked the flame within her with his feather-light touch.

  'Be still, love,' he commanded softly. 'I will know you.'

  His mouth moved to trace the path that his fingers had mapped, and the shivers of delight and agony raced through her. His lips missed not an inch of her satiny skin; he anointed her from her eyelids to the tips of her toes.

  The shivers were quickly becoming tremors, and she lifted his head once again to her lips and began an exploration not very different from his, eagerly seeking to know each portion of him—the firm, moulded chest, the iron-hard stomach, the steel of his inner thigh.

  'Charlie,' he moaned.

  '"Be still, love",' she commanded softly. '"I will know you".'

  His firm, satiny skin began to ripple with tremors of delight, tremors that grew in intensity until they rocked this mighty man.

  She lifted her lips back to his, leaving her hair to dance over the surface of his muscled shoulders. His hand moved to both sides of her face and his lips accepted the invitation of hers, suddenly unfettered by tenderness, but fierce and commanding. She was his equal, even in this, and she came back to him, their tongues tangling, their teeth crashing against each other. His hands slid down the length of her, and up again, massaging with liquid fire, until she could feel the tremors within her building unbearably.

  They were a volcano, now, building with steady, roaring tremors that rocked the earth. She could feel the inferno within her, white hot lava boiling up, seeking the release only an explosion could give.

  Eruption! And again eruption—and then slow shuddering amid the towering geysers of molten-red rock and white-hot ash that showered down around them. And then stillness, an awesome stillness, as the survivors clung to each other in the aftermath of nature's most magnificent demonstration of her power, of her beauty.

  'Charlie,' he murmured against her hair. 'Beautiful, beautiful Charlie. How I love you.'

  She was silent for a long time, stroking the sweat-glistening muscles of his back. 'So this is what you brought me here to discuss,' she finally teased throatily.

  He hesitated, his discomfort like a brick wall between them. 'In a way,' he said slowly, 'but this wasn't supposed to happen first.'

  She felt a flicker of dread. 'What was supposed to happen first?' she asked with a casualness she did not feel.

  'I wanted us to talk. About the future. About where we might be going. About things that have to be worked out between us.'

  'Like what?' she asked, and now her voice was ice. She had been wrong. He wasn't any different from any other man. He wasn't going to accept her exactly as she was—or her circumstances exactly as they were. She had been a fool. She had overestimated him. On how many points about him had she allowed her emotion to cloud out her reason, cloud out the truth?

  Still, a small part of her wanted so desperately to be wrong. Maybe, she told herself wildly, he wanted to know if she wanted a church wedding. Maybe he wanted to know if she wanted children. Maybe he wanted to know if she would continue flying after they were married. Married? She laughed harshly at herself. He had not mentioned marriage.

  'I think you know what we have to talk about,' he told her quietly.

  'Kenny,' she said dully.

  He nodded, reached for her hand. 'Yes.'

  She pulled the hand away from him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Charlie jerked away from Gallagher, pulled the sheet around her, and sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling sick, feeling lost.

  'What about Kenny?' she asked woodenly.

  Gallagher tried to touch her, she stiffened, and he dropped his hand immediately. 'Look, maybe now isn't the right time.'

  'Now is the perfect time,' she insisted coldly.

  'What's wrong?'

  'Nothing. Just say what you have to say, Gallagher.'

  He sighed. 'Don't try and shut me out of one of the biggest parts of your life, that's what I'm trying to say. I want us to have a future, Charlie, but we have to sort out some things about Ken. We have to lay down some ground rules, now. If we don't, he'll be coming between us all the time. We'll be arguing about him all the time.'

  'Is that right?' she said coolly.

  'Look, Charlie, I know you're devoted to him. I admire you for it. But it's almost as though you're too close, and you can't see what's going on. You seem to overlook the fact that he's not a child. For heaven's sake, on Christmas Eve you tied his shoes for him!'

  'It was late,' she said weakly and wearily. 'He was tired. It was easier to do that than to have him take three weeks to get them done up himself.'

  'Charlie, he's a man! You wouldn't dream of tying my shoes for me, no matter what the circumstances. You have to try and stop treating him like a kid. Allow him some dignity. Let him grow up. Let him go!'

  She had known that was coming. 'Go where, Gallagher?' she asked, in a soft, carefully controlled monotone. 'Go to a home somewhere, tucked away where he won't offend people, and won't interfere with normal lives like yours and mine?'

  'That's not what I said,' Gallagher informed her tightly. 'You just said you loved me. Can you really think I'm that insensitive and callous, and claim to love me?'

  'Then what are you suggesting?'

  'How about a job? He's twenty-two years old, and you encourage him to play all day as if he were a little kid. He needs to have a place to go during the day, a reason for being. You should have seen him out here those few days that I had him. He was in his element.'

  She turned and faced him, fire leaping in her eyes. 'You know it all, don't you, Gallagher? You've known Kenny for so long! And already you know what's best for him—or maybe,' she added acidly, 'what's best for you, where he's concerned. Well, once I thought he should work, too. But do you know the kind of work people like Kenny are asked to do? Demeaning, boring things that they don't have to be paid a decent wage for because they're handicapped. People think that because they're mentally retarded they don't get bored, don't have to be shown their worth monetarily like ordinary people.

  'In Calgary, I forced Kenny to go to a sheltered workshop. He sat around all day and snipped up rags. And then one day he took a shortcut through the alley behind the place where he worked. And what did he see in the garbage? The bags and bags of rags that he had blistered his hands cutting. The bags and bags of rags that he'd been paid two dollars a day to snip.

  'He may be handicapped, but he isn't that stupid. He came home and cried. He cried nonstop for a week. He was ashamed. He wasn't so stupid that he didn't know that he lacked worth in the eyes of the very people who purported to be helping him. It took me almost a month to get him to go out of the house again. Work? You want him to work, Gallagher? At what?'

  'It doesn't have to be like that,' Gallagher said softly.

  'But how many times do I put him through that until we find the situation that isn't like that?'

  'As many times as you have to, Charlie. Sitting at home twiddling his thumbs isn't doing any more for his sense of self-worth than cutting rags was doing. He wants to be like his friend Mike. He wants to have a job, an apartment, a girlfriend—a life.'

  She turned and gave him a grim smile, then turned away and began untangling her clothes and shoving her leaden limbs into them.

  'No, Gallagher, you want him to be like Mike. Isn't that the whole point? Get him a job and an apartment and a girlfriend, so you can seduce his cousin without worrying about him, without sharing your life with him. You want to care about him, but from a distance, like people who assuage their consciences by sending money to foster children overseas.'

  'You're out of line,' Gallagher hissed coldly.

  'Am I? Why don't you tell me the real reason you took Kenny for a few days?' she demanded, her voice shrill.

  'The real reason?' Gallagher echoed, his puzzlement seeming genuine.

  'You knew! You knew I'd have a wonderful time without him. You knew how much I'd resent him once he came back. You knew that, after that, all you'd have to do was tempt me and I wouldn't be able to resist life without him!' She paled, the impact of her words hitting her after they'd already come tumbling out of her mouth. She slammed a fist into her mouth, and bit it until the tears stung her eyes, but she could not clear the vision of the dragon, looming in front of her, breathing fire, scorching her to her soul.

  'Oh, hell,' she murmured brokenly, and through her misted vision saw Gallagher rising off the bed, reaching for her, his face contorted with pain.

  'Oh, hell,' she said again, and whirled from him, dashed out of the room, down the stairs, and into the cold night. A freezing night heated to an inferno by the breath of the dragon that pursued her.

  'Chuck! You're late.' Kenny bounded into her room the next morning. He stopped, looked consideringly at her puffy eyes and pale face. 'You're sick.'

  She nodded bleakly.

  'I'll phone Gallagher. He's number three on the phone.'

  She nodded numbly, staring at his disappearing back. Sobbed. He had spoken so decisively, with such authority. Like a man.

  'He already knew you were sick,' Kenny told her a few minutes later. 'How'd he know?'

  Charlie shook her head mutely.

  'Tanya was going to take me cross-country skiing, but we'll stay and look after you instead.'

  Again the decisiveness. And a somewhat startling act of sacrifice. 'No,' she managed to croak. 'Go. Please, go.'

  He tried very hard not to look happy that his sacrifice had been refused. The house was empty and silent after he left. She stayed in bed—packing the contents of the house in her mind, crying, writing a letter of resignation in her head. Crying.

  Gallagher had done this to her. She had to get away. Run away. Forget. She cried harder. No, Gallagher had not done this to her. The dragon had always been there, inside her. Waiting. There was no place to run. Not now.