Loreth White - The Heart of a Renegade

A dark sense of depression descended on her. She was a fool to be so needy. It made her angry.

He got out, came round to the passenger side, her camera bag in his hand, and he opened the door. “Coming?”

She closed her eyes for a moment and sucked in a deep breath of cold ocean air mixed with brine. “Yeah. I guess I’m flat out of choices.”

He jutted his chin toward a row of houseboats interspersed with yachts. “My place is down there, on the water.”

The snow was dumping heavily now, big fat flakes waltzing on the wind and shimmying in the halos of lights that lined the wooden boardwalk to the boathouses. It was settling fast on the yachts and the stacked rows of kayaks, but the flakes melted into blackness as they hit the glistening dark water of False Creek.

He took her arm. “Careful. The boardwalk gets slippery.”

A quiver of heat shot through Jessica as her body connected with his again. She cursed to herself, wondering if his attentiveness was chivalry or chauvinism.

Or just another aspect of a job he didn’t want.

Luke strode into his living room, booted up his laptop and set his satellite phone next to it. He hooked his finger into the hem of his sweater and pulled it up over his head as he walked to the bathroom, desperate to scrub the lingering scent of booze from his skin and from his memory, knowing at the same time no matter how hard he abraded himself, he was never going to scrape deep enough to eradicate the drunken nightmares that lingered in the dark crevices of his brain.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he called back to her as he went around the corner, leaving her standing alone in the middle of his living room. He’d check in with Jacques as soon as he was done. “Make yourself at home. Take anything you want from the kitchen.”

“I might just leave!” she yelled after him, irritation snipping her voice suddenly.

He stilled, turned and stepped shirtless back around the corner, his eyes narrowing onto her. “Jess, all that stands between you and a bullet right now is me. I think you’re smart enough to see that.” He turned to go, hesitated, spun back. “But if you really want to go, please, be my guest.”

“You said it was your job to protect me,” she called out.

“Never wanted the damn job in the first place,” he muttered to himself as he kept on walking. He stepped into the bathroom, shut the door and turned the shower on scalding hot. Jacques and the FDS crew could wait. She’d be safe here. Neither the Triad nor the cops had a handle on his identity.

And he was damn sure she wasn’t going to leave. Jessica Chan’s memories might be pharmacologically cross-wired, but he doubted the rest of her brain was. The lady knew how to survive. She’d made it two days on her own with Chinese assassins after her blood. And he was impressed with how she handled tonight.

She wanted to survive.

He had to respect that. Luke knew just how easy it was to give up.

Jessica stared openmouthed at the space Luke Stone had just vacated. The man had one of the most ripped bodies she’d ever had the pleasure of personally encountering. But it was the back he’d turned on her that truly shocked.

Every little bit of exposed skin was crisscrossed with long, pale scars, as though he’d been lashed and shredded within mere inches of his life.

She began to tremble. She steadied herself by reaching out for the back of his couch.

Luke Stone understood torture.

Maybe…just maybe…this man would understand her.

She heard the shower go on and she ran her hands over her hair trying to force rational thought. Panic could bring the hallucinations on again, the doctors had told her that. She had to focus on the present. On moving forward. It was her only option. If she lost her grasp on reality now, they’d finally win.

She was never going to let them win.

She realized she still had Luke’s leather jacket on though it was warm in his home. He’d put on the gas fire and the kettle on his way through the kitchen.

She slipped out of his jacket, draped it over the couch and went to the floor-to-ceiling windows of his small living room. The windows looked right onto the water. He had a kayak tethered to a small deck and a bike was chained against the wall. The lights of English Bay twinkled on the opposite side of False Creek, everything muted by softly falling snow. It was a pretty place. She wondered if the yacht she’d seen moored to the side of the double-story boathouse was also his. She suspected it was.

She turned to take in the rest of his living space. It was paneled wood and purely male—the home of an outdoorsman. Touring skis and a snowboard hung from racks near the door. Technical snowshoes were propped against the wall near a hall closet that hung slightly ajar, exposing a tangle of ropes, carabiners and jackets.

Contour maps, a compass and a GPS device cluttered his dining table. Jessica walked over and examined the maps. They were of British Columbia’s backcountry. Luke Stone’s physique was honed by an obvious passion for the wilderness. He had a taste for thrill, adventure. She glanced up at the framed black-and-white photographs that covered one wall. Their evocative beauty drew her closer.

With mild shock, Jessica realized he’d taken them. He’d signed them in the bottom right corners. A shimmer of interest rippled through her as she peered closely at the haunting images. She understood photography—the artistic nuances of black-and-white in particular.

Black-and-white film was what she used. It was her sanity and she clung to it even in a digital era. Two years ago a nurse Jessica had befriended while in the psychiatric institution in England had given her an old Minolta camera. Jessica started using it to record her days, proving to herself that her day-today life was real, not imagined, that her memories of it were true. She’d become good at it. And when she’d started developing her own work, the act of watching those daily memories take literal shape in the darkroom had filled Jessica’s heart with indescribable joy. With progressive skill in the darkroom came increased mental confidence. That old Minolta had given Jessica the strength to fight back, the will to believe in herself.

Taking photographs had saved her.

Now it looked as though it might destroy her.

She leaned forward and closely examined Luke’s images. The way he captured light and contrasting shadow was beautiful. Poignant. He’d shot mountain peaks and ragged cliffs. Eagles, a grizzly. Oceans and ice at sunset. Deserts with nothing but undulating dunes for miles. A wolf pup in snow. A cougar in the crook of two branches. But no humans. Not even a footprint.

She touched a framed image of a small bear cub watching its mother. The look of need and dependence in the young animal’s eyes filled Jessica’s chest with aching emotion. It was poetic. All the images were. They told her that whoever had held this camera and captured these wild scenes had soul. It was an almost elegiac vision of life in its raw, harsh beauty. Luke Stone had a beautiful mind buried somewhere in that rugged brawn and Jessica suspected there was something sad in there, too.

Because there was sadness in these pictures.

She wondered if he was always alone when he shot his film. Did he need these open spaces for his sanity? Was this his freedom? She had a sense the man was a true loner, a transient who didn’t put down roots easily. Perhaps that’s why he lived here on the water—it offered a sense of escape.

She heard the shower go off and a voyeuristic guilt pinged through her. She turned quickly to take in the rest of the room before he returned. There was no sign of family or girlfriends—no female touch in the decor at all. The only sign of human connection was a small color print pinned to his fridge with a magnet. It showed three rugged and weather-browned men on pack horses in a red desert. She couldn’t make out the faces, but she thought one might be Luke.