It was quiet, too quiet. The old house that was the ancestral home of Lainey’s father seemed to press in upon her. It weighed her down with its traditions and moral clarity and high expectations. It caused her to feel unsure of herself. It made all her defenses based on moral ambiguity and shades of gray seem foolish if not disingenuous. It forced her to stare her responsibility in the face.
If she continued on her present course, she would be exchanging her daughter’s life for that of another child. She would be condemning a young innocent to death and his mother to eternal grief.
She couldn’t do it.
She might once have been able to, might have convinced herself that the suspicious deaths had nothing to do with her, that she was not to blame for what others might do, or that her need outweighed all else. No more. She was forced to accept the fact that she could not make Lainey’s life right with that kind of wrong. She couldn’t snatch this bitter, bitter cup from her daughter’s lips and pass it to someone else.
Nor could she allow Clay to be implicated in what she was doing or be endangered because of it. Regardless of his intentions, he didn’t deserve that. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of the shooting incident this evening. Next time, they might not be so lucky.
She must put whatever trust she could find in Clay and cancel the surgery. She would see Dr. Gower and take care of the latter tomorrow. She would tell him she couldn’t get the extra money, tell him that the discovery of the bodies in the swamp made it too dangerous, that Lainey was too sick or too closely watched by the Benedicts, something, anything to make him see that it was impossible to continue. That was, of course, if he meant to proceed after the hue and cry over the bodies in the lake and Anita Fenton’s threat to withhold the kidney.
Time seemed elastic, endless. She could feel her heart beating, almost hear the soft rush of blood through her veins. She was aware of where she sat, how she sat, the steady, corrosive paths of her thoughts and where they were taking her, but she was outside it all. Pain and fear were there, but their edges were muffled. She felt so strange, unreal, like an automaton that had come unwound. She needed something, had to have it, but couldn’t quite identify it.
As if from a great distance, she watched herself rise from the bed and leave the room. She walked along the dark hall, feeling her way along the wall until she came to the bedroom where she’d heard the sound of a shower earlier. The door was open a crack. She pushed it wider and stepped inside.
“Janna?”
Clay’s voice came from the big sleigh bed. She moved in that direction like a bat honing in on vibrating sound waves. Placing a knee on the high mattress, she lowered herself beside him, reaching for him.
His arms closed around her, warm and comforting and so very, very real. And abruptly the pain and the fear were just as genuine, so she was lost in a world of hurt and fear and unending, unbearable grief over the decision she had made.
“Hold me,” she whispered as she turned her face into his neck and huddled close. “Please, please hold me.”
16
Clay didn’t mind.
He accepted the warm, shivering, pliant woman into his arms, his bed, his mind and his heart. This was his purpose for living. He had been created for this and nothing else, to keep this one woman safe and whole and to banish her demons of the night.
He meant to do no more than that; he really didn’t.
Yet she felt so right, fit so perfectly against him, into him. He’d thought she might never want to touch him nor be touched by him again after the things he’d said. That she would come to him tonight had seemed a distant fantasy. He still thought it might be some form of a waking dream. Until he felt the soft press of her lips against the strong column of his neck.
He was just a man. He might have the best of intentions, but he had no immunity against the feel of soft skin, the woman scent that went to his head like fine brandy, or the powerful surge of the blood in his veins at the smallest hint of cooperation with his potent imaginings.
He could have rolled over her, into her, in a single fast act of penetration. The urge to do just that was strong, so strong. The lingering residue of his despairing anger at her refusal to be influenced by him drummed the need against the inside of his skull. Still he retained enough self-awareness there in the quiet darkness to know it would be inadequate. A fast, hard rut was a fine thing on occasion, but it would be over too soon. Janna required more, and so did he. He needed a deeper and longer connection. Tomorrow would come too soon, and he might never hold her, never see her after she found out what he meant to do at first light.
So he brushed her forehead with his lips in his first tentative move of the ancient pas de deux of love and waited for a response. It came, the delicate brush of her fingertips through the crisp yet sensitized hair that covered his breastbone, as if she could absorb some knowledge of him through touch alone.
He lifted his hand to her hair, threading his fingers through the damp strands, easing the long length from under her. The cool silken glide of it along his palm stoked the fire that burned low in his belly. Ignoring that building heat, he traced the curve of her ear, memorizing the small whorl and the petal softness of the lobe, before trailing along the gentle turn of her jaw to the point of her stubborn chin. The slightest pressure there tilted her face toward him. Then with a deep drawn breath, he set his lips to hers.
The kiss was sweet and powerful, and as long and deep as he intended to love her. He plumbed the heady recesses of her mouth, taking pleasure in the satin surfaces, the tiny, jell-like beads of her tongue, the slow and sinuous play of one slick surface against the other. His mind expanded as he took the taste and feel of her deep inside him and carefully stored away their myriad variations as vital sense memories.
When did he shift his hand to her hip? He didn’t remember. The discovery that she was naked under her borrowed sleep shirt burst into his consciousness like a silent explosion. That she had sat in his kitchen like that only a short time ago, virtually unprotected even as they quarreled, brought a wave of hot need that tightened his grasp so he turned toward her, pulling her close against him.
She came willingly, fitting herself into his body until she felt locked to him. Compulsively he explored the slim line of her thigh, the curve of her hip, then skimmed along her backbone. The movement slid the folds of cotton knit higher until he was forced to ease away while he disentangled her from the sleep shirt. Flinging it into the darkness behind him, he got rid of the loose sleep shorts he wore, then pulled her against him once more. He spread his fingers over the tender fullness of her hip, pulling her into him until the warm, diamond-shaped valley between her thighs cradled his hard, pulsating length.
Perfect, the fit was so perfect, so exact that it was as if she was made for him alone. The sensation of his strutted flesh against her soft, cushioned heat was such exquisite torture that a low groan vibrated in his throat. Janna’s breath caught, so her breasts pushed more firmly against his chest.
A shiver rippled over the woman he held, leaving goose bumps in its wake. Feeling it, all his deliberate, gentlemanly intentions vanished, displaced by naked, raging desire.
God, but he wanted her, wanted to taste every inch of her, delve into every fold and recess, to touch and hold until he knew her smallest secrets and felt her shudder again, out of control, in his arms. He had to have her completely and know that for this moment there was no shadow of anyone or anything between them.
And he did. Half-crazed with longing, totally absorbed, he pressed his face between the warm silk rises of her breasts. Climbing the peaks in slow, dizzying spirals with his tongue, he captured the tight peaks with cautious pressure of his teeth, then drew them into his mouth to abrade the raspberry nipples with the rough edge of his tongue. He smoothed his lips over her quivering abdomen and the resilient and flat surface between her hipbones, enjoying the fluttering reaction of her muscles. He tested the softness of the curls that protected the joining of her thighs,
laved the fine-grained skin on the insides of her thighs with his tongue, then swooped down to delve into her soft, magnolia-petaled, citrus flavored folds. Gently he plumbed them until she writhed and gasped in his hold, and was so liquidly, scaldingly inviting in her openness that his willpower and rigorous self-containment shredded like a banana tree in a hurricane.
He would have taken her then in pounding oblivion if she hadn’t raised up, shifted away, then bent to take him with her mouth in such hot yet delicate encasement that he couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t make a sound without the risk of exploding.
Nothing, nothing had ever been so endlessly right in all the vital march of his days. He endured it, exalted in it while holding, barely, to sanity and restraint. Until heart and stamina could take no more.
Shivering, forgetting every compulsion or intention he’d ever had, abandoning all hope and pretense of delicacy, every convention except the mutual and primal joining, he gathered her close and buried himself in her depths.
It was the most perfect thing of all. It was the glorious dance of flesh against pulsating flesh, two people striving together with panting breaths, slick skin and mindless transmission of ineffable joy. It was stupendous, transfiguring, a storm of wonder that burst over them, shook them, carried them, then left them spent and gasping. It abandoned them, in the end, leaving them on their opposite shores, with their opposite values and intentions.
Afterward, Clay held her until her muscles relaxed, her breathing slowed, deepened, and she slept. For him, however, all hope of rest was gone. He lay staring into the darkness, soothing his hand down her back over and over, as he accepted, finally, all that he had never known, would never know, and all that he was going to lose.
“What have you been doing with yourself? You look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”
It was Roan who spoke, looking up from his paperwork, as Clay stepped into his office. Clay gave him a sour glance before throwing himself into the chair across from the sheriff’s desk. “That’s because I haven’t.”
“But I thought you and Janna went home last night to—Never mind.”
Clay refused to rise to the provocation that lurked in his cousin’s gray eyes. He appreciated the fact that Roan could make a semisalacious joke, however. Until he’d met Tory and learned to relax a little, he’d been much too uptight for that kind of banter. “Janna slept,” he said now. “I didn’t. Getting shot at can do that to a guy.”
“So you were involved in the hospital fireworks, after all?” Roan leaned back in his chair. “I thought it was too much of a coincidence that you’d just left.”
“Somebody told you, I suppose?” Clay asked in disgust. People always told Roan everything.
“Johnnie.”
“At least nobody shot up the hospital the way they did when Tory was laid up there.”
Roan inclined his head. “But it’s still getting to be entirely too popular a place for ambushes. So did you see who did it?”
“Not really. Did you?”
“Long gone by the time we got there, though he might not have been if you’d given me a buzz. Why was it, again, that I got the news from someone else?”
“We weren’t hit,” Clay said with a twitch of one shoulder. “Getting Janna the hell out of there seemed a tad more important.”
“More important than seeing to it that it didn’t happen again?”
Clay propped one ankle on his knee and studied the laces of his running shoe. “Janna thought it might be a warning. She didn’t want you brought into it because…”
“Because she was afraid I’d put this Dr. Gower out of business.”
“Something like that.”
“Hell, Clay.”
“I know. I tried to talk her into reporting it, and into forgetting about this under-the-table transplant, but she’s determined.”
“In spite of all you can do?”
Clay gave his cousin a level stare. “I did try, believe me.”
“I thought you were more persuasive. I mean, look how you charmed Tory.”
“That was different.” The words were defensive.
“How? She’s a woman, Janna’s a woman.”
“If I have to tell you how, then you’re worse off than I am,” Clay said with precision.
“Meaning you had nothing to lose where Tory was concerned?”
“Something like that,” he agreed, then realized with irritation just how much he’d given away. “Damn it all, Roan…”
“Unfair, I know. So sue me.”
“I’ll let you make up for it instead, by telling me what you found out about the shooting. Or anything you may have dug up about this doctor.”
“Found out he was a medic in ‘Nam, went to med school after he returned stateside. Could be he saw more than his share of wasted human organs while out there.”
“Or how easily young men can die?” Clay suggested.
“You saw him, even if you didn’t talk to him. What do you think?”
Clay frowned as he tried to get a firm hold on his impressions. Finally he shrugged. “That nurse of his wasn’t exactly what I’d call well-balanced, but I didn’t see enough of the doctor to tell.”
“Everybody says he’s a hard worker, donates a lot of time to the project close to his clinic. On the other hand, several teenagers, mostly gang members and punks, have turned up missing over the past couple of years. Nobody took much notice except their mothers and maybe their aunts and grandmothers. I mean, it’s a rough area, crack houses on every corner, all-night Ecstasy bashes, drive-by shootings as common as sneezing, and it’s a slow Saturday night when at least a half dozen don’t hit local hospital ERs for knife wounds. Who misses a few punks, one way or another?”
“They should be missed,” Clay said, his voice tight.
“I’m not saying it’s right, just stating facts.”
“You think somebody is taking advantage of the death toll?”
Roan stared at him a long minute. “You want my best guess? I’d say someone took advantage of it for a while. Then maybe a patient about to have his organs harvested came back to life, or could be there was no convenient corpse when one was needed. This person went from taking from the newly dead to stealing from the living. Since it was twice as profitable to take both kidneys and not much more dangerous, they started making a clean sweep, so to speak.”
“Such a way with words,” Clay drawled with a wry glance at his cousin. Then he frowned. “Most of these kids we’re talking about are from ethnic groups other than white, aren’t they?”
“Not all, but people desperate for a new kidney don’t care,” Roan pointed out.
“Of course not, but our culprits have to be aware that there’s less chance of rejection with cadaver transplants when the donor is from the same ethnic group. No such thing as discrimination politics in organ donation. It just doesn’t work. So if Gower is doing transplants on patients like Lainey with organs of unknown origin, then he’s endangering them.”
“You been doing Internet research or something?”
“Or something,” Clay agreed.
“Could be he doesn’t care. Besides, dead patients don’t complain, or their families who’ve been involved in illegal activity.”
“Which scares the hell out of me when I think of how close he came to using a scalpel on Lainey,” Clay said.
Roan made a grim noise of agreement. “At least that won’t happen.”
“Meaning the investigation is on track?”
“And moving right along. The Baton Rouge police are set to raid the clinic before noon today.”
“Without you?” Clay asked in mock surprise.
“Not exactly. It’s out of my jurisdiction, but I’ve been invited to come along for the bust since the evidence for it came from this office. A helicopter is standing by. I’ll be heading out of here any second.”
Clay felt no surprise whatever. There wasn’t a Benedict alive who didn’t think he could do a better job t
han anyone else at practically anything in which he had an interest—or who didn’t hate to be left out of anything exciting.
He said, “Don’t let me hold you up.”
“I won’t. Oh, and you can tell Janna about it after lunch. It should be all over by then.”
“Are you suggesting that she’d try to warn Gower if she heard sooner?”
“Who knows? But it’s best not to take chances.”
Clay picked a dried sand burr off his shoestring. “Maybe I’ll wait then. You’ll let me know how it goes?”
“Sure. I’m anxious to see this clinic shut down myself, regardless of whether the good doctor is involved in organ harvesting.”
“I don’t know what Janna will say about it. Nothing good, I imagine, especially when she finds out that I helped set up this raid. She thinks Lainey’s going to die, you know.”
“Is she?”
Clay set his lips in a firm line. “Not if I can help it.”
“But can you?”
That was, of course, the question. “I’m working on it.”
From Roan’s office in the courthouse, Clay went by the combination flower and gift shop that lay on the other side of the town square. Immediately afterward, he headed for the hospital. He needed to relieve April, for one thing, but he was also anxious to see Lainey. It seemed he’d been away from her for days instead of mere hours.
As he stepped into the hospital room, she appeared different, more beautiful, more open, even a little older. It was, he thought, the effect of returning health. She held out her arms to him and he went straight to the bed, barely glancing at April who sat reading a book, before he swept his niece into a one-arm hug.
“What have you got?” she asked, her voice muffled by his shoulder.
“Nothing,” he said, keeping his gift shop purchases, a super-soft stuffed raccoon to replace Ringo who was in Arty’s care and bouquet of pink sweetheart roses, behind his back. “Why would I have anything?”
Clay Page 22