Reawakening Eden Read online

  “She was beautiful.”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat roughly.

  Eden didn’t say more. She wasn’t in the habit of talking about the dead. Maybe it was wrong to want to forget them, but if she remembered one loss, she remembered all of them, and the weight of it was too much when every person you’d ever met was dead except a pair of children. Instead she just looked forward, remembering their cultural history—books and movies—but wiping the slate clean on her personal attachments.

  The kids burst out of the guest bedroom, bellowing gleefully as they ran to the front door and the bliss of a snow day. Eden rose from the table, checking to be sure scarves and gloves and hats were all in place and zippers zipped before sending the kids out into the cold, Precious bounding after them, snapping at the falling snow.

  “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have asked,” she said, watching the kids throw themselves onto the ground and swing their arms and legs to make snow angels.

  “No. You can ask. It is what it is.”

  She heard clattering in the kitchen where he cleaned up the mess from breakfast and stepped away from the window to help.

  Under normal circumstances being a widower would have been unusual. Perhaps she would have asked about his wife. But the conversation changed when everyone had lost not just someone but everyone.

  “They aren’t really yours, are they? Hannah Rose and Lucas? Not both of them.”

  Eden froze with her hands wrapped around a bowl. “I… Of course they are,” she lied, the words too rushed to be believable.

  Connor didn’t look up from the sponge in his hands. He didn’t have to.

  “How did you know?”

  He shrugged. “Breakfast. Lucas was telling Hannah Rose how his mom put brown sugar and raisins in his oatmeal. Didn’t sound like he meant you.”

  Eden swallowed around a lump suddenly taking residence in her throat. “Amber. His mother’s name was Amber. She was my stepsister. My dad married her mom when I was twelve and she was sixteen. She had three boys. Hunter, Lucas and Taylor.” She’d looked like a supermodel but laughed like a hyena and had the ugliest tattoo on her lower back.

  “And Hannah Rose?”

  Eden flinched. This part was harder to admit. Her responsibility for Lucas was tenuous, but her claim on Hannah Rose was nonexistent. But she loved those kids. They were her everything, and she didn’t want to lose them.

  “Hannah Rose lived down the street from Amber. I’d moved in with her and the boys when Taylor got sick. After…everything…Lucas and I couldn’t get the car to start. Amber didn’t have a garage, and it was January in Alaska. The engine block had frozen solid. I’d already checked the neighborhood for other survivors but hadn’t found any. They’d either died or left already. I was looking for car keys in a neighbor’s house when I heard a noise upstairs and found Hannah Rose. She’d been on her own for a while then. Probably three weeks or so. But she was neat as a pin. She’d been living off of Go-Gurt and cereal. I took her home and she’s been with us ever since.”

  “Did you find the car keys?”

  The practical question loosened a knot she hadn’t been aware her stomach had tied. “Later that week. The power grid had just failed, and I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere without a fireplace. Later we drove down to the supermarket. That’s where we found the other Anchorage survivors—though that came later. It was just us for the first couple months. For a while it felt like we were the only ones in the world who had lived, you know?”

  They were silent for a long moment, Eden drying the dishes Connor washed in the bucket in the sink.

  “When the second epidemic hit, I volunteered at the hospital,” he offered, startling her with the confession. “After so many people died, I was almost relieved when I got sick. But then I got better.”

  “That’s how it was with us too. We just bounced back.”

  “The doctors who were left tried to figure out how I’d fought it. They worked until the end to find a cure, but only three of us survived. The other two went to Spokane to look for more survivors. And I went home. I’ve been on my own ever since. Me and Precious.”

  Eden waited. She didn’t want to cut off his soul-baring moment, but she didn’t want to talk about this anymore either. They all had tragedy, but she’d never subscribed to the share your personal tragedy and we’ll grow closer brand of psychobabble armchair therapy. They all had weaknesses, but she didn’t want to be appreciated for her vulnerabilities but for her strengths.

  She set the last bowl on the open shelving and forced a smile. “Well. Now that we’ve gotten the tragic-past discussion out of the way, how’s about a game of Scrabble?” She nodded toward the board games stacked on a low shelf. “Though I should warn you, I’m undefeated. Librarians are notorious word nerds.”

  As she moved past him toward the living room, Connor curled one arm around her waist and pulled her against him. “I have a better idea.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” she admitted breathlessly.

  A slow smile started in Connor’s eyes and moved to his mouth. “How long do you think the kids will be outside?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “Then there’s no time to waste.”

  His first kiss melted her knees. His second melted her inhibitions. She leaned into his touch, just wallowing in the kiss because they couldn’t go any further with the kids right on the other side of the door, but she didn’t need further. The man was a world-class kisser. Eden licked, stroked and sucked, hoping the children played in the snow for a long time.

  Eden lay in the darkness, listening to the beat of Connor’s heart beneath her ear. She couldn’t stop thinking about the last three days.

  It had snowed constantly for the first two, so much so the kids had actually gotten tired of snow forts and snowball fights. Connor didn’t have a stock of toys lying around, but they’d played Crazy Eights, Go Fish and Hide-and-Seek all afternoon. Eden had set up a makeshift schoolroom and quizzed them on their writing, both kids being model students as a change to show off for Connor. In the evenings, Eden read to them from a leather-bound copy of Peter Pan Connor plucked from one of the shelves in the guestroom.

  It was all very domestic and idyllic—and totally artificial. For three days they played the parts of the perfect nuclear family. They could have given Leave It to Beaver a run for its money in American dreaminess. But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t permanent. A fact Eden had to keep reminding herself of.

  She tried not to fixate on Hannah Rose presenting Connor with a picture she’d drawn for him or the way the big man blushed and gave the girl one of his slow smiles. She ignored the studious intensity Lucas fixed on Connor as he explained flanking maneuvers in preparation for their next epic snowball fight—and the pealing laughter she hadn’t heard from Lucas in months when Connor stumbled dramatically to the ground beneath the eight-year-old’s tackle.

  After the kids’ bath time and bedtime, Eden and Connor were early to bed themselves—with the exception of one notable and slippery interlude against the shower wall. The sex had been great from the start, but sometime over the last few days it had become more than just intense physical chemistry and the pleasurable scratching of a mutual itch.

  Beyond attraction, beyond trust, Eden liked him.

  More than that, she liked who she was when she was with him. Who they all were. No longer a stressed-out single mom trying desperately to maintain some sense of youth in a pair of old-beyond-their-years children. Now they were a family. He’d fallen into the daddy role so easily—or perhaps an uncle would be more accurate. There was still a distance, a lingering caution in the way the kids approached him, but it was a start. And a start toward a normal family life was more than she’d even dreamed of a week ago.

  This wasn’t love. It was just casting a part in a fantasy. But she wasn’t sure her heart knew the difference. They hadn’t had a fight yet. Her stepsister always preached that you didn’t know how you really stood wit
h a man until you’d disagreed with him—but all those Cosmo relationship rules were from a different time. In just a year the mores of her world had shifted, and Eden wasn’t sure what love was and wasn’t in this new society.

  Maybe love was security and safety and the renewal of hope she hadn’t felt in months.

  Connor didn’t say much, but his actions spoke of honor and affection. Still, she didn’t have a clue where he stood emotionally, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know. If he cared for her, for them, she would never be able to leave—and they were too close to Seattle to ever have peace. And if he was just entertaining himself with her, biding his time until they left, she didn’t want to know.

  It had stopped snowing this evening. The visibility had cleared and tomorrow they would head to town and then south. South. For the first time in months the word didn’t fill her with hope, but a restless, shapeless sense of loss.

  She wanted to make this last day last. To hold tomorrow at bay as long as possible.

  And so, here it was, on the far side of midnight, when she should have been resting up for tomorrow’s long journey, and she couldn’t sleep. Connor’s arm held her pressed to his side, a heavy weight against her back. One she would miss in nights to come.

  “You okay?”

  Eden jerked, startled by the low rumble of his voice. “You’re awake.”

  “You keep twitching and turning. Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you up. Just thinking.”

  Connor brushed the hair back from her face, his fingertips resting for a moment on her temple. “Mm.”

  There was a slight inquiring inflection to the sound. It was about as close to an invitation for conversation as he ever came. Eden wasn’t going to confess she’d been trying to figure out if she loved him or not, but she did suddenly feel like talking, as if filling the night with words would stop her from thinking about the inevitability of the morning.

  “Everything has changed. Words, concepts, they mean different things than they used to. Like theft or ownership.” And reward. She wondered again what Jonah could possibly be bribing his soldiers with. “It’s like we’ve reverted back to a Native American concept of land ownership, because there are so few people left to compete for resources. No more keeping up with the Joneses. There are so many empty places, it’s just a matter of picking the one we want and moving in. Big ostentatious houses have lost their status, just becoming hard to heat and a foolish use of space for a single family.”

  But some people still lived in them. Jonah had picked a mansion for himself—one with solar panels and enough green features to make it useable in spite of their new fossil-fuel limitations. For him it was about projecting power. People still associated a large estate with wealth, even if the association was based on cultural memory rather than fact.

  “Money doesn’t exist anymore,” Eden mused. “Jobs with the highest salaries a year ago, people with the most security in the old world are now dependent on laborers who never had much more than enough to survive. The concept of luxury, of entertainment… Do you remember during the recession, when everyone was cutting back and movie theaters and restaurants were taking a hit? But internet and cable television were still necessities in American households. Economizing by shopping at Walmart was one thing, but suggesting someone give up Facebook? Sacrilege. We needed internet access. And now, no internet. No TV. And luxury? What is that these days?”

  Fast cars and designer clothing were just things you decided to take home. They’d lost their status.

  “America was set up with box stores and warehouses to supply hundreds of millions of people. All those resources are still sitting there. Dry and canned goods, nonperishables for a city of three hundred thousand with less than a hundred people using them.” The second epidemic had hit too fast for people to have time to stockpile or react. The American consumer machine had just stopped in its tracks.

  But eventually even the abundance of goods would be used up. Even if it took years to do it. Would the concept of theft come back then? When would it begin to feel wrong again?

  Eden traced a pattern on the warm skin of Connor’s chest. “I broke into the military base in Anchorage to steal an armored Hummer for the drive south. It felt like theft. I don’t know why. I’d commandeered other supplies, other vehicles, but that was the only time it felt like I was taking from someone. Even if every someone on the base was gone. It’s such a strange world we have now.”

  What did she really own? Herself? Her memories? Jonah had tried more than once to convince her that she didn’t even really own her own body. That it belonged to the commune. That she belonged to them, as a symbol and a breeding machine. But she’d never bought that line. And the definition for rape hadn’t changed in the new world.

  Connor’s arm around her was possessive, unmovable. He’d been proprietary toward her body—never asking permission to touch her after that first time—but there was a difference in the way he owned her body. He’d slipped into her life, commandeering her unclaimed heart the same way she’d take an abandoned car, but she wasn’t his possession. Any more than the children were hers.

  They were her responsibility, but she didn’t own them. Or perhaps, in this new world, that was what ownership was—the ability to protect something, to keep it safe from those who would try to take it away or destroy it.

  “Do you ever wish,” she asked softly of the man in the darkness beside her, “that we could put the world back on its tracks again? Not undo the plague…” they all wished that, “…but just get society back?”

  “It’ll come,” he said. “Not the same as it was, but something stable. Maybe something better.”

  Eden smiled against his skin, comforted by his surety.

  How different the Seattle commune would be if a man like Connor had stepped forward to take charge rather than Jonah. He was a natural leader of a very different type—the general rather than the pope.

  “Do you think you’ll ever…?” She paused, not sure how to ask her question. “Would you want to live in one of the new cities? Be part of shaping the new societies?” Would you want to live with me?

  Connor was silent for a long time, but Eden tried not to read anything into his pauses. He took his time, framing his words carefully, considering them from all angles, so she always felt certain he meant exactly what he said. It was a rare trait, in any version of the world.

  “This is my home. I’m not ready to leave it.”

  Eden forgot how to breathe, her throat closing off. The feeling of rejection was keen, even though what he said wasn’t a surprise. But knowing a blow was coming wasn’t the same as feeling it land. The shock of it was debilitating.

  “Eden…”

  The sympathy in his voice killed her. “No.” She didn’t know what she was protesting. She just knew she didn’t want him apologizing for the fact that they wouldn’t be together after tomorrow. As long as he didn’t say he was sorry, she could handle the rejection. If he apologized, she didn’t know how many pieces she would break into.

  “I—”

  Eden kissed him, suddenly, forcefully, putting all her desperate need for him not to speak into the kiss, and infusing it with a desperate we only have tonight passion.

  He responded instantly, pulling her more fully on top of him, so she was straddling his waist, her chest pressed to his as their mouths met and tangled. She’d held back emotion in their other encounters, giving him just her body but always keeping her soul to herself, but now she was swept away, aching with the knowledge that she needed more from him than he could give, and wanting all she could get from him in this moment. Foreplay was unnecessary, she was already hot and wet with need, and she could feel him hardening fast even though this was their third time tonight.

  Eden broke the kiss, sitting up and positioning herself above him, her gaze locked on his in the darkness. She fitted herself to him and slid down slowly, stretching the moment until he was seated deep
ly inside her.

  “God, yes, Eden,” he groaned, his hips thrusting upwards to urge her on.

  She drew herself up and drove down onto him, taking up a blinding rhythm, rocking and gasping his name, her hands braced on his pecs as his own squeezed her hips, guiding her faster and harder. The connection between their eyes never wavered, sharp in its intensity, amplifying each sensation to a keen edge of feeling.

  She felt her orgasm building in her blood as a matching rush of emotion contracted in her chest. Connor’s jaw clenched, his eyes hot and dark as his hands tightened on her almost to the point of pain. He lifted her and slammed her down. Eden ground her hips down in a tight swivel, and her world ignited as Connor swore and his hips pulsed up with the force of his release. Her breathing jerked raggedly, catching as each liquid wave of bliss shuddered through her body—and through it all her gaze stayed locked with his as she memorized the shape of fire and need on his face.

  Eden collapsed against him, still breathing heavily, his chest rising like a bellows beneath her. The knot of tight emotion in her rib cage was still there. It hadn’t unfurled with her release but contracted on her heart, squeezing it in a vise grip.

  She’d heard people talk about heartache before, but she’d never realized it would actually physically hurt.

  Connor held her close, his arms warm around her, and Eden loved him. And tomorrow, she would leave him.

  Chapter Seven

  “Do you have a plan?”

  Connor stood back, his arms folded tightly over his chest, as Eden crammed clothes into her backpack. It was amazing how her crap always seemed to expand whenever she unpacked. The kids lay on the living-room rug, stroking Precious with the air of death-row prisoners about to be led to their executions. They’d been moping all morning.

  Connor rocked from foot to foot. He’d been edgy ever since Eden started packing. “I know you’re heading south, but do you have a specific destination?”

  A couple days ago she wouldn’t have told him, but now she was certain no force on earth could make him betray their trust and tip off her pursuers. “Did you ever watch HGTV?”