Whispering Rock

“It’s a long way to go for lunch,” she said.

“Practice,” he said. “Expand your boundaries. Get out there.”

“But what’s in it for you?” she asked quietly.

“I thought that was clear,” he said. “There are a hundred reasons I want to help you in recovery, not the least of which is, I like you. And … I’ve been there.”

It worked. Lunch in Santa Rosa at a small Italian restaurant where they had pasta and iced tea and talked and the patrons behaved themselves. He held her hand across the table for a little while.

It was strange to Mike that he’d first become attracted to a feisty, tough character and now, even though most of the time she was soft-spoken and had trouble maintaining eye contact, his feelings toward her hadn’t changed all that much. He would welcome the old Brie back if she could fully recover—but he realized that even if she remained this vulnerable, he was feeling something strong. Something he wasn’t going to be able to let go of easily.

“Where did you tell your dad you were going?” he asked.

“Out to lunch with you,” she said, shrugging. “I made sure he knew which restaurant and when I’d be home. He was thrilled. Of course he wants me to get back into circulation. He has no idea how far I am from that. This is something. Well, it’s not getting back into the world, but it’s lunch with a friend. And that feels good.”

Two weeks later they met in Santa Rosa again, this time at a French restaurant in a vineyard, again small, where Brie could see every patron. And two weeks later, again Santa Rosa. When he first saw her, he wanted to rush to her, grab her up in his arms and hold her for a while, but he always put his hands in his pockets, smiled and nodded hello. By the sixth week and fourth lunch, she hugged him goodbye. “Thanks,” she said. “I think this helps.”

In between lunches, there were the phone calls. When they talked, he was constantly reminded of the spunky, smart-ass woman he’d fallen for. But he was faced with an uncertain woman; her confidence had been shattered. Yet in her core, this was the same woman—honest, humorous, brave.

Mike was faced with a first-time challenge. He was gentle with her, and kind—not difficult for him, because if anything he was a gentleman. But he had to work at making it seem he wasn’t worried about her; that he held no pity for her, when in fact there was nothing quite as hard as knowing a woman he admired so profoundly, cared for so deeply, had been brutalized in such a way. He couldn’t have her add his pain to her agenda—her recovery was difficult enough. It wasn’t easy to keep his concern from showing in his eyes, his smile. She needed strength now, not weakness. He would not be the weakness in her life.

Neither of them ever mentioned Jack in their conversations, except when Brie talked about the family, about growing up, how she’d missed him after he’d left for the Marines. So far Jack had not mentioned the phone calls or lunches.

Summer was growing old. Mel and Jack had been back from Sacramento since June and the summer had been fraught with tension for Mel. Her fifteen-year-old patient was very much on her mind, as she had not returned to the clinic to be tested for STDs. She had two pregnant women in her care, not to mention the other patients who wandered into Doc Mullins’s little clinic.

And her husband had not touched her in weeks.

Jack’s routine was to go to his business early, chop wood, look at the schedule for the day, confer with Preacher and do what work was needed at the bar—inventory, supply run, help serve at mealtime. Then, if he could get away, he would go out to their new homesite to work on the house in progress.

The latter seemed to occupy him more, because there he could be alone. And Jack suddenly seemed to need a great deal more time alone than he had before his sister’s assault. He didn’t talk about Brie’s rape; he was stonily silent.

Sometimes when there was nothing going on at Doc’s, Mel would drive out to her new homesite with the baby and watch Jack driving nails into the wood, planing, leveling, hefting huge boards on his broad shoulders. Ordinarily, he stopped work immediately upon seeing her, spent a little time with her. But these days, these weeks, silence consumed him.

Brie called almost every day, because if she didn’t call Jack would call her. She was improving both physically and emotionally, but Jack wasn’t. Mel was painfully aware that this was the reason he hadn’t made love to her in so long, and for them it might as well be an eternity. Their lovemaking had always been frequent and satisfying; sexually, they were a matched set. It was one of the driving forces in their marriage. Jack had strong urges, powerful urges, and Mel had learned to depend on the amazing fulfillment he brought her. Nothing could make her feel adored the way Jack did when he put his hands on her. She reciprocated, doing everything in her power to show him the depth of her love.

Knowing that it was the assault on Brie that was deeply troubling him, crippling his desire, she had exercised patience and understanding. But it was hard to lie beside him every night and not receive his usual advances. She understood his pain, his anger, but she also understood that she couldn’t let her man brood forever.

She had to have him back.

A usual custom of theirs was to spend an hour or two at the bar at the end of the work day, perhaps having dinner, perhaps just a beer or cup of coffee with some of the patrons before going home to their own dinner. On this particular day, Mel simply went home. She hadn’t even stopped by the bar to say goodbye. She fed the baby and put him down, showered, put on one of Jack’s shirts and sat on the couch with the cool evening breezes drifting through the screen door. She could smell his scent on his shirt—his special musk mixed with the wood and wind and river.

He called and asked where she was and she said, “I decided to just come home tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because there was no one to talk to at the bar,” she said.

“But I’m here.”

“Exactly,” she said. And then she said goodbye.

Of course it took him only about twenty minutes to make his excuses to Preacher and get home. Mel knew that to have confronted this any sooner might not have given Jack the time he needed to work through it. In fact, she worried that it might still be too soon, but she was hell-bent to try. It had been a long time. Too long. The health of her marriage was everything to her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, coming in the cabin door.

“I’m lonely,” she said.

He sat down on the sofa beside her and hung his head. It was that hangdog look along with his silence that was eating at her. “I’m sorry, Mel,” he said. “I know I should have snapped out of it by now. I would have expected it sooner myself. I’m not a weakling. But it’s Brie …”

“Jack, Brie needs you, and I want you to be there for her. I couldn’t be married to any other kind of man. I hope you have a little left over, that’s all. Because I love you so. I need you, too.”

“I know I’ve disappointed you. I’ll do better …”

She knelt on the couch beside him, facing him. “Kiss me,” she said. He leaned his lips toward her, pressing his mouth against hers. He even made a noble effort to move his mouth over hers, opening and admitting her tongue. But there was no passion in it, no desire. He didn’t put his hands on her, didn’t draw her near, didn’t moan with his usual hunger.

She was afraid she was losing him.

“Come with me,” she said, taking his hand and leading him to their bedroom. “Sit,” she said.

She knelt in front of him and worked at taking off his boots. Then, rising on her knees, she began to unbutton his shirt. “This may not turn out the way you expect,” he said.

“Shhh. We’ll see.” She opened his shirt, pushed it off his shoulders and began to rub her hands over the soft mat of hair that covered his chest. She kissed his chest, running a small tongue over his nipples, one at a time. She pushed him back on the bed and slowly opened his belt, the snap on his jeans, the zipper. She kissed his belly. She hooked her small hands into his jeans and tugged, bringing them down over his hips. Down off his long legs. It did not escape her that he was barely rising to the occasion, and for Jack this was astonishing. He was known to spring to life at the mere suggestion there might be sex coming his way. But she wasn’t discouraged. Down came the boxers and she caressed a little life into him, then put her mouth on him in exactly the way he loved.

And there was that moan that she had longed to hear. That deep groan. He couldn’t remain passive during this, one of his very favorite treats. There. He responded, perhaps in spite of himself, but she didn’t care. It was a start.

Jack had never in his life had a problem that kept him from wanting sex. In fact, during the worst stress of his life, he found sex to be a wonderful escape. But not this time—this time he’d been numb. He was barely aware it had been happening to him, and then his wife let him know when she came after him, demanding a response, and he suddenly realized that he hadn’t deprived only himself in some pattern of grief. He felt her small mouth take him in, and his body allowed him blissful separation from his mind. He closed his eyes in luxury. She climbed on him, hot and sweet, and he ran his hands around her bottom and under the shirt she wore, up to her full breasts, and heard her hum in pleasure, “Oh, Jack—I have so needed your hands on me.” It hit him, how much they depended on each other. They should be helping each other through the difficult times, not closing off.

He lifted the shirt over her head and brought her breasts down to his mouth, tasting their sweetness. Then he rolled with her, bringing her beneath him, filling her, listening to her pleased sighs and purrs. “Baby, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant to neglect you.” He moved and she bent her knees, lifted her hips to bring him deeper and deeper, her hands on his shoulders and arms, her mouth on his mouth.

This is what he loved about his woman, his wife—that she was as driven sexually as he. In this they had been beautifully paired and it had taken boldness on her part to bring him back to life. He’d never before suffered so long a dry spell, and it meant the world to him that she wouldn’t allow it, that she was desperate for him, that she was determined to have this back in their marriage. Thank God for her, he thought. Anyone else would have become moody, angry, taken offense or even ignored the drought. But not Mel; she was committed to him. Committed to this passion they shared. She would not give it up easily.

He grabbed her small, tight fanny and held her to him, making it good, making it right, the perfect friction that caused her to gasp and cry out his name. He chuckled, a deep raspy laugh, for he adored this about her—that she couldn’t be quiet, that when he did the things he knew she loved, she was swept away, helpless.

When she heard that lusty laugh, the sound he made when he was again in control, focused on nothing but bringing her pleasure, making her body soar, she wrapped her legs around him and blasted him with an orgasm so hot and strong, he trembled. As she weakened beneath him, she knew immediately he had held himself back. Saved himself. He was going to do it to her again before he let himself go.

She touched his beautiful, sculptured face with her hands, saw the smile on his lips and the dark smoldering fire in his eyes, and said, “Welcome home, darling. Welcome back.”

Brie had to forcibly pry herself off the couch. She’d rarely left her dad’s house since it had happened. Most of her outings were to her counselor or support group and a lunch once in a while with Mike. Lunches she looked forward to with anxiety and delight. Sam, so afraid of making things worse, rocking her already rocky boat, hadn’t said anything to her about it, but he knew. And she knew he knew.

Brad called almost every day, and while Brie wasn’t really interested in talking to him, she knew he’d tell her the truth about what was going on with the investigation. That was one of the things they’d had in common from the beginning—casework. Right now, if Brad could deliver the news that they had taken Powell into custody, it would make a huge difference in her life. But of course that had not yet happened.

Another person who called regularly was Christine, her former best friend and Brad’s new woman. Those were calls Brie refused to take, but even Sam’s advice that Christine stop calling had no impact. “She says that eventually you’ll talk to her, let her tell you how worried she’s been and how much she loves you,” Sam reported to Brie.

Brie gave a huff of laughter. “She just loves way too many people, doesn’t she?”

With every call, she’d revisit that drama in her mind, still amazed by the way the whole thing had unfolded. They’d been couple friends since before Brie and Brad married; Christine’s husband was also a Sacramento cop, Glenn. Glenn and Christine had danced at their wedding. Christine was a surgical nurse who worked for a private practice surgeon; she and Brie had become close. In fact, besides her sisters, Christine had been the closest woman in her life. They’d talked almost every day, seen each other at least a couple of times a week, with husbands or without.

Brie was aware that Christine and Glenn had some marital problems. They bickered over the usual things—sex, money and parenting. With two demanding jobs, two little kids and a too-big house, it seemed to Brie they were destined to have certain squabbles until the kids got older, until they could mellow out and get ahead of the bills. But Brie was wrong—a couple of years after Brie and Brad married, Christine and Glenn separated and divorced. They were almost more amicable than when they had been married. It wasn’t too tough to sit on the fence on that one—Brad saw Glenn at work and he’d drop by the house for a beer occasionally, and Brie and Christine remained friends. After the shock of Glenn’s moving out settled a little, it seemed to Brie that her best friend was in many ways calmer and happier on her own, managing her own money, getting a break from the kids a couple of days a week when Glenn took them.

There were signs that Brie had taken no notice of. Christine didn’t date or talk about men; a year after her divorce, their phone chats had become fewer—but Christine was very busy. It wasn’t easy being a single, working mom. And Brie’s job was demanding, her hours long, so she was usually the one unavailable for girlfriend time. If she were honest, she could admit Christine had always done most of the phoning, inviting. What was still impossible for Brie to grasp was that Brad’s behavior had never seemed to change. They talked on cell phones several times a day, were together every night Brad wasn’t on duty, making love as often as before. Up until the time he told her he was leaving, that he needed some space, she had no idea anything was wrong.

Brie didn’t know how it started between them, but Brad admitted it had been going on about a year. “I don’t know,” Brad said with a helpless shrug. “A couple of lonely people, I guess. Glenn was gone, you were always working and Christine and I were pretty close friends to start with.”

“Oh, you are so full of shit!” she railed at him. “You never once asked me to take time off! My hours were just what you needed to pull this off!”

“If that’s what you have to believe, Brie,” he had said.

It had knocked the wind out of her. The only thing worse than the pain was the shock and disbelief. Six months after the divorce was final, she’d thought she’d made some important headway in dealing with it, but it was as though the rape brought it all back; her depression over the divorce seemed suddenly brand-new. Robbed, again and again, she kept thinking.

Most of the time all she did was watch TV, snack, sleep, tidy up the house. Her concentration wasn’t good enough to read a novel—something she had craved when work had been so consuming. Working a crossword puzzle was out of the question—she couldn’t focus; she used to do the Sunday-morning crossword in ink before Brad even got out of bed. She couldn’t even go to the mall. But she made it to those lunches with Mike. She came to think of them as her secret lunches, almost the only thing that brought her away from herself, away from all the blows of the past year. Her father’s silence on the matter intrigued her; she hadn’t even whispered of these meetings to her sisters. It was as if that would take the magic away.

She didn’t even recognize the woman she’d become. She’d been so tough. Some people—mostly men—thought of her as hard. At the moment she was limp and frightened. She was paranoid and afraid it would never pass. She’d been dealing with the victims of crimes for years now, and a number of them had been rape victims. She had watched them wither, paralyzed, unable to act on their own behalf. As she cajoled and coached them for their testimonies, she would become frustrated and angry by the reduction of feeling that seemed to weigh them down, overwhelm them. The helplessness. The impotence. And now she was one of them.

I’m not giving in, she kept telling herself. Still, it had taken her weeks. Months. “I need some exercise,” she told Mike during one of their lunches. “I can’t seem to get out of bed or off the couch if I don’t have a specific appointment or lunch with you.”

“Have you asked anyone for an antidepressant?” he asked. “I thought it was pretty routine after a crime.”

“I don’t want to go that route if I can help it. Up to now, I’ve always had so much energy.”

“I went that route,” he admitted to her. “I didn’t think I needed to, but it became clear I was depressed—a combination of major surgery and being the victim of a violent crime. It helped.”

“I don’t think so …”

“Then you’re going to have to think of an alternative or this thing can swallow you up,” he said. “Brie, fight back. Fight back!”

“I am,” she said weakly. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I am.”

He touched her hand gently and said, softly but earnestly, “Fight harder! I can’t lose you to this!”

Well, she couldn’t jog anymore—she was afraid to be out there alone, even in broad daylight. It couldn’t be a gym or health club—she couldn’t have men looking at her right now. She remembered with some longing how she had loved being looked at. She had a small, compact, fit little body and lots of long, silky hair that she braided for court but let swing freely down her back the rest of the time. It made her heady with power to garner the stares of attractive men. Now if a man looked at her, it threw her into panic.

But she wasn’t going down without a fight—so she joined a women’s gym and started running on the treadmill and lifting weights. If she couldn’t have a full life, she was at least going to fake one.

The joke was on her—a couple of weeks of vigorous exercise and she was sleeping better and eating better. She felt it put her into the next stage of recovery, every day a tiny bit easier than the day before.

There were times she thought that if not for Mike’s attention right now, she’d be lost. Oh, her family was amazing—the way they managed to hold strong for her, encourage her and make themselves constantly available should she want to talk. But Mike, the very man she had vowed would never get near her when she recognized his flirting last spring, was the only thing in her life that allowed her to feel like a woman. For that she would be forever grateful.

Tommy Booth was the new kid in town, just checking in for his senior year at Valley High School. His father, Walt Booth, had just retired from the Army and had given Tommy his choice—a military academy, a nonmilitary private academy or Valley High. Tommy chose to live with his dad for a couple of reasons—he’d lost his mom in a car accident a few years ago and it had just been him and his dad since, a couple of bachelors who got along fairly well for father and son. And his older sister, married and pregnant and separated from her husband by the Marine Corps, was going to come to Virgin River to live with them until Matt, his brother-in-law, got back from the Middle East. She was going to have her baby there—and Tom was secretly a little excited about that. Plus, there were his horses, which he couldn’t take to a private school.

Tom’s father, a retired three-star general, had found this property a couple of years ago; the general had a younger sister and niece a few hours south in Bodega Bay and had looked all over California for the right spot, not too far away from them. Aunt Midge was sick; she had been sick several years, bedridden the past three. She was worse than sick—she was terminal, with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and her daughter, Shelby, was her full-time caregiver. Walt Booth had been ready to settle in Bodega Bay to be there for her even though he was more of a forest and mountains than beach kind of guy. But Midge had convinced him not to choose Bodega Bay because of her presence there—she wasn’t going to last more than a couple of years. She might be gone by the time Walt retired from the Army and if she was not, he could visit. Thus, Virgin River—close enough to see Midge and Shelby as often as he could, but the kind of place Walt wanted to put down his final roots. It had begun to look as if Aunt Midge was right—she couldn’t possibly have much longer. By the time Walt and Tommy got to Virgin River, Midge needed twenty-four-hour care, and Hospice was on the scene.

While Walt finished his last assignment at the Pentagon, he’d had the house renovated via long distance and the new stable and corral constructed. Tommy had seen it only once before actually moving in, but he loved the land—the enormous trees, the rivers, the coast, the mountainsides and valleys through which he could ride.

Classes started in late August. He wasn’t that jazzed about the high school. The kids sure weren’t as sophisticated as the D.C. kids. And Tom was a little bit on the shy side until he got to know someone. This being a small-town high school, all the cliques had been established ages ago, so fitting in was going to take a while. He was a big kid, athletic, but he’d been too late for football.

He met a kid in first period right off—Jordan Whitley, a funny guy. Kind of skinny and hyper, but really friendly. He hung out with him a couple of times after school. Jordan lived pretty close to the school, while Tom had to drive his little red truck all the way from Virgin River every day. Also, Jordan’s parents were divorced, he was an only child and his mom worked—which freed up Jordan’s house until about six. As long as Tom got home before dinner, in time to take care of the horses, it was no big deal to go over there for a little while after school.

Tom also learned that there were frequent keggers at an abandoned rest stop area right at the edge of Virgin River. Weekend parties that Jordan really wanted him to attend, but Tom always had an excuse. He didn’t know anyone but Jordan. And he was quiet about the fact that he had a house to himself for a few days every other week or so while Walt went to Bodega Bay. He wasn’t about to be overrun by Jordan and his tribe—if Walt ever found out, he’d be dead meat.

Jordan somehow managed to score beer at his house. After-school beer. Tom was very careful about that because if the general smelled it on his breath he was toast. But the other thing Jordan had going on was girls. He seemed to always have a different girl. So far Tommy hadn’t seen one that got him excited—Jordan didn’t seem to draw the really pretty ones. But it was kind of fun to go over to his house and get all the flirtatious attention bestowed on him, being the new kid and not that bad looking.

“Come on over to my buddy Brendan’s Friday night,” Jordan invited. “We’re gonna get lucky.”

“Yeah?” Tommy grinned. “Who you gonna get lucky with?”

“I’ve got this girl who wants me so bad she can’t hold herself back. And she’s on the pill.”

“So you want me to come over and watch you get lucky? I might have to pass on that,” he said with a laugh.

“She’s bringing a girlfriend,” Jordan said.