Free If You Loved Me by Vanessa Grant Page B

town.
    Gray's father always seemed to be out of town.
    He'd been twenty, just two years older than Chris was now.
    They'd tempted fate all through June and July, touching, kissing, Gray always drawing back before it happened. Emma went to Dr. Kamfell for birth control pills, terrified her father would learn. Back then, she'd believed Gray's hesitation in taking her meant that he loved her; now she figured he'd felt guilty about taking a virgin, even a willing one, when he knew in the end he'd leave her.

 
     
     
    Chapter 5

     
    Gray frowned down at the pad of paper he was writing on. Mind over matter, that was the trick. He was not going to follow the motion of Emma's hand with his eyes as she picked up the piece of paper he'd just torn off. He was not going to look at her mouth and let himself wonder what she was thinking.
    He knew she was worrying, imagining things gone wrong for those boys. He'd taken part in enough searches to have collected an assortment of graphic images he wasn't about to share with her. The North Coast had fewer than a hundred thousand people scattered over hundreds of miles of coastline. Impenetrable forest on shore, swift currents, rough weather—the odds were against finding two missing kayakers before it was too late.
    "Who are these people?" Emma asked, waving the sheet of paper in her hands. She had long slender fingers, short unpolished nails. A surgeon's hand.
    "Contacts," he said. "People who might have seen two kayaks." From outside, he heard the sound of boots thumping on wood.
    Visualization was a powerful technique for mind control, but creating a mental image of his brain wrapped in chains wasn't helping much. He kept looking at Emma, seeing things that made him wonder.
    Her finger twisting a strand of golden hair. Her earrings, golden studs. She had a habit of absently twisting the right one with her thumb and index finger. Her ears hadn't been pierced when she was eighteen. Had she had them done for Paul?
    He jotted down another name, pressing so hard the pen made a deep dent in the pad. He conjured up an image of her in surgery, a patient on the table, Emma's hands moving, long fingers curved slightly, stroking...
    Not like that! Not her hands touching him, fingers digging into his shoulders as she moaned—God!
    That's the sort of thinking that had gotten him into a mess the year he was twenty-one. He knew he had no business seeing Emma. He'd tried to stop himself, but the tide of his desire had swept into her passion as if he had no will of his own.
    Emma at eighteen had been soft and inexperienced enough to believe she could let innocent passion have its head. He'd known he was way out of her league, had known it was wrong, that he should leave her alone, run fast and hard, out of her life.
    She had lived in the kind of home where people made rules and kept them. He'd had no business helping her break those rules. No business at all. She hadn't a clue about the world he lived in. She'd thought his cupboards were empty because he hadn't bothered to shop, had talked about a trip the year she was fifteen, a month spent in museums while wishing she could have a summer job instead of following aunt Carrie around Europe. She'd ached to live, but she hadn't a clue about life.
    She'd had a dream and he'd done his damnedest to destroy it, demanding she choose between him and her father's rules. He knew it was insanity, knew as he asked her to live with him that it was wrong. He had no resources to pay her way through medical school and he knew her father wouldn't if she was with a man. If he was going to tear her dream away from her, he'd damned well better be ready to give her something in its place.
    Like marriage and a stable home.
    Images of a picket fence and neighbors that stayed the same year after year scared him rigid. He couldn't do it, but she wasn't the sort of girl a man took without promises, and he wasn't the sort of man to make promises.
    At eighteen, Emma Jennings was a