Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

Savannah stared out at the heat. It seemed so thick, so oppressive, she thought she could see it hanging in the air above the bayou, pressing down on everything. It permeated the cabin, seeping in through the screens, soaking into everything, bringing with it the wild, feral scent of the swamp.

She brushed at the stray tendrils of hair that had escaped her topknot and shifted restlessly from one bare foot to the other. Sweat coated her skin like a fine mist, despite the fact that she wore nothing but a pair of ragged cutoff jeans and a black bandeau bikini top with a sheer white blouse hanging open over it.

The quiet was getting to her. She had promised Coop she wouldn't disturb him, but the day had come to a complete standstill. Even the birds had fallen silent beneath the blanket of heat. The sense of expectation that was so much a part of the swamp had thickened until everything waited, breath held, for something unknown, unseen.

The two-room cabin squatted on stilts above the murky green water. From Savannah's vantage point, no solid land was visible, only bald cypress, their thick hard trunks thrusting up from the water, scruffy, stubby branches sticking out like deformities, knobby knees jutting out at the bases. They looked like tortured creatures that had been cast under an enchantment and petrified so that they resembled death. Floating on the surface around their trunks were sheets of delicate green duckweed and rafts of water hyacinth, shimmering violet and looking deceptively fragile beneath the brutal sun. Lily pads lay scattered like an array of deep green Frisbees tossed randomly across the bayou.

She could see a partially submerged log lying at the edge of a thicket of cattails and knew it could well be an alligator. Not far to the south, the jagged stump of a dead cypress had become home to a nest of herons, and the pair posed there, motionless, looking like a woodcarver's exquisite craftings, their long necks arched and tucked, black beaks as straight and slender as fencing foils.

The birds' stillness irritated Savannah. She wanted them to squawk and fly away, huge wings beating the air. She wanted the gator to lunge for one of the fish that dimpled the surface of the water as they rose unseen to catch insects. She wanted the air to stir, wanted to see the reeds sway. Most of all she wanted Coop to move.

He sat at a rough plank table that was pushed up against one screened wall, staring out, making notes from time to time, nearly as motionless as the surroundings. He had bought the cabin as a fish camp, but he never fished when he met her here. He mostly stared. "Absorbing the profound intensity of life in the swamp," he'd explained once. He would sit there for hours, seemingly doing nothing, then he would come to her and they would make love on the old moss-stuffed mattress.

This was their secret hideaway; an idea that usually appealed to Savannah. She liked going out on the bayou in her old flat-bottomed aluminum boat, not saying anything to anybody, winding her way into the dense, lush wilderness to meet her lover. But today something about the arrangement grated on her. She blamed it on the fight she'd had with Laurel.

"Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to degrade yourself that way?"

She jerked around and burned a hole in Cooper's broad back with her glare. "Haven't you stared out that screen long enough?"

Coop sat back, wincing a little at the stiffness that had settled in his joints. He scratched a hand back through his blond hair like a man just waking from a long, deep sleep, and looked at Savannah over his shoulder. He was struck as always by her raw sexuality and by the soft, stunning natural beauty she had seen fit to make slightly grotesque with collagen and silicone. She was so alluring, so flawed, she never failed to captivate him utterly.

He longed to turn and jot those thoughts down in his notebook, but he refrained. Savannah 's mood seemed as volatile as the weather-a tense stillness that hid a building storm. Instead, he put down his pen, rose and stretched.

"I don't mean to ignore you, love," he mumbled in his low, smooth voice. "But I have to get my notes made. I'm doing an APR broadcast from N'Awlins next weekend."

Savannah 's eyes lit up like a child's. "You'll take me with you?"

It was more a statement than a question. Coop doubted she even heard him when he said, "We'll see." She was already racing ahead, making plans for them to meet in one of the cottages of the Maison de Ville, chattering about dinner in her favorite restaurants, the shopping she would do, the clubs they might visit.

Of course, he wouldn't take her. While he loved her, he knew that love must be contained within very definite boundaries. If he allowed it to escape the small pen of Bayou Breaux, it would run wild and in its delirium destroy itself and them. Like a fine wine, it was something to be sipped and savored. Savannah would drink it all in greedy, sloppy gulps, spilling it down her, splashing it all over, laughing madly.

He stroked a hand over the back of her head down to her neck and smiled with pleasure as she arched into his touch like a cat.

"Let's get you out of these clothes," he murmured, stepping away from her, reaching for one cuff of the gossamer blouse she wore.

"No." Savannah pulled her hand back, smiling shyly to cover her shame. Laurel 's words were too fresh in her mind. Coop would think the same when he saw the marks on her wrists-that she degraded herself. She didn't want to hear that from him, not today. Today she wanted to pretend they had a normal life. She sent him a coy look. "I want to wear it for you."

He said nothing, but stood and watched as she shed the bikini top and the cutoffs, leaving only the sheer white blouse to cover her. The picture she presented was more tantalizing than if she had been completely naked. She knew because she had stood in front of the mirror in her room and studied the look. Provocative. Dressed but not decent. The sheer fabric was a misty barrier that invited a man to reach past it to the treasures of her lush feminine body.

Time lost its meaning for her. They could have been in bed a week. She wanted it to last forever. With his slow, gentle lovemaking, Cooper made her think it could last forever, that they had all the time in the world instead of just a few stolen hours.

And time meant nothing as they lay together afterward, skin sticky with their mingled sweat, the air redolent with the exotic musk of sex and perfume, the dusty scent of the moss-stuffed mattress. They lay touching, despite the heat, limbs tangled, hearts thudding slowly, their breathing shallow, as if to keep from disturbing the peace that had settled around them.

This was happiness, Savannah thought, being here with Coop. She loved him so much it frightened her. Too good to be true. Too good to be hers. Sex with him was so different from what she sought out with others. With others she felt wild, wicked. With Coop there was nothing depraved, debauched, dissipated, dissolute. She felt all the things she had spent her life yearning for but never finding. She shivered a little at the thought. Too good to be true.

"Will you marry me, Coop?" The words seemed to spill directly out of her overflowing heart, and instantly a part of her wished them back, because she knew deep down what his answer would be.

The air hummed with silence for a few moments, then with the electric whine of cicadas, then with the tension of an answer unspoken. Tears stung Savannah 's eyes and seared her heart like acid, and all the gold wore off the afterglow, leaving her feeling like what everyone said she was-a slut, a whore, not deserving of anything like the love of a good man.

"Why do you have to degrade yourself that way?"

Because that's what whores, do, Baby.

Coop sighed and sat up with his back against the headboard as Savannah got out of bed. "I can't give you that commitment, Savannah," he said sadly. "You know that. I have a wife."