With Every Breath

by Beverly Bird

  Joe shook himself. He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers, going the last of the way downstairs. "Where’d you learn that song?" he asked finally, leading her into the kitchen to give her the drink he had made her.

  Maddie sipped and closed her eyes, letting the warm-cold sensation of the liquor and ice hit her stomach. She frowned, thinking about it, then she groaned.

  "I guess it’s one of those cracks in the wall. I don’t know."

  He’d figured as much.

  "Is it important?"

  Joe shrugged carefully. "I’m not sure, but that’s another thing we might want to find out."

  She’d finished the drink. He took the glass from her hand. "Tomorrow. Does Josh always sleep soundly?"

  "Hmm?" Maddie looked at him vacantly, then her breath fell short at his expression. She nodded slowly. "Usually."

  "Good. Because I want you in my bed. And this time, for a while, at least, I don’t want to stay on top of the covers. And I don’t want to wear clothes."

  Something expectant and excited scrambled in the area of her heart. It seemed impossible, she thought wildly, that she could react to him like this in the face of everything that was happening. She wondered again if she was reacting like this because of everything that was happening.

  Only time would tell, she reasoned, trying to breathe again.

  He leaned forward and kissed her without touching her with anything but his mouth. Slowly. Deeply. And she knew that for her, at least, the attraction would be there forever. If he ever decided that he no longer desired her, then it would just be a different kind of feeling. It would be a gnawing, endless ache.

  She leaned into him. He caught her hands and pulled her back toward the stairs again.

  Later, she would have no recollection of moving up them. They were in the kitchen, and then they were simply on his bed, his hard body pressing her down, and the time in between was a blur. He braced one elbow and tangled his hand in her hair, and he kissed her again

  as though he had lived all his life for this one moment and had no intention of ever moving on to anything else. He kissed her deeply, then softly, nibbling, then sweeping his tongue through her mouth.

  She felt his hardness pressing against her. "Been thinking about this?" she managed against his mouth, stroking him through his jeans, and somehow, impossibly, she realized she could smile.

  "A little." He grinned halfway. "Yeah. Off and on. All day."

  She crooked an elbow around his neck and pulled him back for more.

  His hand moved under her sweater, sliding over skin. And then she realized something else. She would never have believed that the scowling man who had walked, limping, into that real-estate office a lifetime ago could be this infinitely gentle, this tender, so good.

  "Forget," he said. "Forget it all, Maddie. For a while, for tonight. If you can."

  She could.

  He pulled her sweater up over her head, and she lifted her shoulders to help him. She knew from last night that she would have to act fast, immediately, or she would be too far gone in a moment to thoroughly appreciate what she was doing. Before he could find the clasp of her bra again, she dug her fingers into the front of his shirt and pulled.

  Buttons popped. She gave a sound that was a sigh, a sound like, "Ah", and it got inside him, under his skin, and turned to fire.

  He dragged at the clasp of her bra, finally breaking it. Her breasts spilled out into his hands.

  She pushed his shirt back off his shoulders, yanking impatiently when it got caught up on the arm that was still bearing his weight. He rolled a little to the other

  side so she could pull it the rest of the way. His mouth dived for her breasts. She stopped him. She put her hands between them, her Fingers tangled in the black hair on his chest, and when he looked at her quizzically, she pushed him back enough so that her own mouth could roam.

  Her tongue flicked over one of his nipples and she felt him tremble. She was overwhelmed. In that moment, her pictures came flooding back to her. They were all of his face, his eyes.

  So good, Joe thought, and enjoyed with pure amazement the sensations that rippled through him, already, so easily, with all promise and no pain.

  Ah, but there was pain. He was so hard it hurt, and he could no longer fight it off, pull his mind back from it, as he had all day. Her tongue moved over him and he closed his eyes, dragging blindly at her jeans.

  Satin, lace, just another barrier, he thought, ripping at the last of her clothing.

  She couldn’t get past his belt. She needed to look at it and didn’t want to, was too lost in the taste of his skin, the texture of it beneath her tongue. Then his fingers moved against her, inside her, and she fell away from him, back against the pillows again, gasping.

  "Don’t think," he said hoarsely.

  "No," she gasped.

  His fingers stroked and teased and circled and slid away. Josh. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth so that she wouldn’t cry out aloud. Don’t think. Joe’s mouth fell to her breast again, his tongue hot, rough, circling, too. Her hands found his hair, and she tried to hold him there, but he was strong, and he had purpose. His tongue dipped into her navel, and he paused long enough to watch her face, then he moved on.

  She would die, there and then, Maddie thought. She couldn’t take anymore, and couldn’t bear to end it.

  His tongue touched her intimately, and she forgot Josh, didn’t think, cried out. Again and again, there was warm, wet heat, and she found his shoulders, dug her nails in, arched back in a timeless plea for more, for an end to it, because some things in life really were so good as to be unbearable.

  "Joe," she whimpered, and he pulled away from her. "No!"

  Her eyes flew open again and she reached out for him. But he was only standing beside the bed, wrenching at his belt, hopping on one foot to pull out of his jeans. He came back to her and she stroked her hands down the length of him, loving him, and she felt the hardness of him probing, needing, and her own body yielded. He sank into her and went still for one precious moment.

  He looked down into her face. She saw so many things there. Need, fear, wonder.

  And then he started moving inside her, and she knew that whatever else happened to her on Candle Island from then on, she was never going to be the same.

  When Joe woke again, just before dawn, she was sitting up. Her back was against the headboard, and this time she was the one who was dressed. She had her knees drawn up, and her arms were braced tensely upon them.

  He barely had time to assimilate all that before she spoke.

  "All my life," she said softly, "I’ve fought off thoughts of my parents because it ... they ... always left a bad, sour feeling inside me. And I always thought

  that that was just because I didn’t want to be like them, and because they hurt me."

  Joe pulled himself up against the headboard as well to watch her. Her eyes were distant, not quite focused on the far wall.

  "Aunt Susan told me that they’d just ... walked off," she went on. "I carried the blood of two people who could abandon their only child, apparently on a whim. I couldn’t think about them because I was so repulsed by the idea of turning out to be just like them."

  "You’re not selfish," he said, his voice still husky with sleep. "You’re not whimsical or cold."

  Her eyes flashed to him, then away again. "No. I don’t think so, not now, because ..."

  Maddie trailed off. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she loved him, not aloud. That was irrevocable, and she had been wrong about it once before. She had said those words to Rick because she had so desperately needed to believe she was capable of loving. But she hadn’t been, and that had caused its own despair.

  At least, she’d never really loved Rick.

  That time, that relationship, had been nothing like this. She had never felt before the way she felt with Joe Gallen. She took a deep, shaky breath.

  "When I had Josh, I knew I wasn’t complete
ly like them, because I loved him with all my heart, from the first time I saw him—even before then, really. The first time I felt him move inside me, I loved him. And nothing, nothing, could ever make me leave him."

  "But your parents didn’t run," Joe said slowly. "They didn’t just walk off."

  Her eyes darted to him again. "That’s just it, Joe. It’s possible they didn’t. But something still makes me hurt on a gut level whenever I try to think of them. Why?"

  He thought about it, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  Part of him was still muddled in how good it felt to wake up beside her. The other part was struggling with what she was saying.

  He knew how Leslie would respond.

  "Because you witnessed something God-rotten that last day."

  But Maddie shook her head. "No. That’s not the kind of feeling it is. It doesn’t feel like a sharp, singular moment of something bad. It feels ..." She trailed off, thinking hard. "It feels pervasive. Like nothing I experienced those first nine years was any good. I can’t remember any of it, Joe. It’s not like I just blocked out that last day. And yet Tony Macari said she—my mother—used to take me to the mainland every weekend. To a hotel. I wonder if I would remember that place? Was I happy then? Tony said those were good times. Why don’t I remember my own house?"

  He felt helpless, and he hated it. "I don’t know."

  Maddie shuddered. "I don’t know either. But there was something more horrible about those people—my parents—than just that last day, Joe." She trailed off and shook her head. "Maybe they weren’t cold and callous. I know for sure now that I’m not, even if I can’t cry for Rick, even if I didn’t love him. I couldn’t be cold and feel... and feel like ... this."

  Everything inside him went painfully still. He was half-terrified that she was going to say the L-word, halfagonized knowing that she probably wouldn’t. Not this woman. She was far too cautious, too careful. Too sincere. She wouldn’t say it until she was absolutely certain of it.

  And he knew full well that admitting it to yourself was a whole hell of a lot different from actually speaking it aloud.

  He waited. Maddie raked her hands through the sides

  of her hair. "I do need to find out what it is ... was ... about them that makes me feel so bad inside," she went on. "Completely apart from the problem with Rick, I need to know now before I can ..." She shook her head, checking herself again. "It’s time now."

  His heart thumped. So much unspoken, so much in her eyes. "Could be," he said cautiously, and they both knew he wasn’t necessarily talking about her parents.

  "I need to find out what happened to them, what they were. I need to know who came close enough to me in that house last week to practically touch me, to leave those flowers, who would hate me enough to kill that poor kitten. If it wasn’t Rick, then I can’t ignore this any longer." She looked at him, shuddering. "I need to know now, before not knowing taints everything good that I’ve finally found."

  Chapter 28

  If Maddie had been resigned to digging into her past on Tuesday, then on Wednesday, Joe thought she was positively driven.

  By eight o’clock they had dressed and gathered in the kitchen. When Josh saw that they weren’t immediately going anywhere, he returned upstairs to Joe’s bedroom to watch TV for a little while. Maddie paused to look up the stairs after him, thinking that it was certainly indicative of something that in all the time she’d spent in that room so far, she’d never once noticed the television set.

  She sipped more coffee and whipped back and forth, back and forth, down the center of the kitchen.

  "Gonna have to work on that," Joe muttered.

  She looked at him. "What?"

  He motioned with his finger. "Zip, zip. It could drive a man crazy after a while."

  Her heart skipped. By some unspoken agreement, neither of them had mentioned a future between them. It was both too soon, and too late. She got the feeling that they were both waiting for this to be over, and she

  found she was content enough with that status quo. It gave its own kind of comfort.

  Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

  "I’m just trying to think," she explained, "and I think better when I’m moving."

  "About which particular aspect of this mess?"

  "Tony Macari."

  "And the hotel."

  "Joe, I want to go talk to him."

  He drained his own coffee and put the mug in the sink. He’d started this, and he still thought it was a good idea, for reasons of her own safety, and for all the reasons she’d spoken of earlier. Yet his heart did an odd hitch-thump.

  Fear. No, just worry, he corrected himself. For her. For what she would find out, for how she would handle it. And, if he was going to be completely honest, for himself, too. Because when this was over, he was going to have to grapple with a few of his own demons and come to some momentous decisions regarding his own life. The more steps they took to end this nightmare, the closer it brought him to that point.

  Maddie finally went to collect Josh again. A few minutes later they were back in the Pathfinder, heading north. Today the sun looked cold. The sky was too blue. The sea beneath the bridge was rambunctious, like a child pushing to see how much it could get away with.

  Maddie thought that Tony’s house looked much less imposing in the daylight. She realized that a great deal of the difference had to do with the terror she’d been feeling as she’d come out of the dunes the other night to find it looming above her. A day and a half later it was just a house, big enough, attractive enough, but hardly as immense and significant as she’d thought then.

  They went up the walkway, Josh between them, and

  Joe rang the bell. They heard it echoing inside and waited long enough for a response that Joe wondered if Tony had gone back to the mainland.

  The door finally opened. Tony looked momentarily surprised to find them there, then he just seemed wryly resigned. "Come in."

  They crowded together into the foyer.

  "Is this official business now?" he asked.

  Joe hesitated. "Yeah," he answered at length. "More or less."

  "Would hot chocolate be in order? Coffee?"

  "Please," Maddie said.

  They went into a yellow-and-white kitchen, where Tony made their drinks. Corian countertops swept around the room, along both walls, and topped a center island in the middle. Tony brought a pair of stools to the island, and Josh took his chocolate to look out at the inevitable deck outside the glass doors at the back of the room.

  Tony brought them their coffee. She watched Joe brace his elbows on the island and got the feeling that he wanted to start this. It was in the tension across his shoulders, in the frown in his eyes as he looked around.

  She knew him far too well to have known him such a short time.

  "So where exactly were you when all this was going on Monday night?" Joe asked after a moment.

  Tony looked amused. "I was right here. Obviously." "And before Maddie turned up?"

  "You’re reaching, Chief Gallen," he said dryly. "Think about it, please. I could not possibly have been at Ms. Brogan’s place, assaulting her ex-husband, at the same time I was opening my door to let her in."

  "Wouldn’t seem that way, would it?" Joe answered too idly. "Actually, my guess is that he was already pretty dead by the time you opened your door."

  Tony hesitated, then nodded. "Touché. I was reading a prospectus for a development down in Lewiston just before Madeline knocked. I spoke to an associate on the telephone perhaps ten minutes before she arrived." "Where was the associate?"

  "Lewiston."

  "Long-distance, then. At least a toll call."

  "That’s right, and it will appear in the telephone company records. I called him. It will also be on my bill."

  Joe nodded. He sat up, taking the weight off his arms. "The thing is, what I’m thinking here is that somebody killed this guy maybe by accident. What I’m thinking is that somebody went over to that
house looking for Maddie, and found Rick Graycie instead."

  "Why would anybody be looking for Maddie?" Tony asked, and Maddie noticed his voice change and tense. She scowled at him.

  "Oh, hell, I don’t know," Joe answered. "Maybe to urge her to leave Candle before anything came into her mind about those things that happened twenty-five years ago."

  For the first time Tony really looked at her. "You don’t remember?"

  "I thought that was pretty much common knowledge by now," she answered self-consciously.

  Tony scowled. "You said something the other night about remembering my face. Your amazement at that, and your conviction, make sense now."

  Maddie dived in. "There are things that seem familiar to me. Your face was one of them. But I have no memory at all of visiting the mainland with my mother, the way you mentioned."

  His face softened noticeably. Maddie and Joe exchanged glances.

  "The two of you would come over on the ten o’clock ferry," he explained. "Every Saturday morning until that last one."

  Maddie nodded. She swallowed carefully. "What was she like?"

  "Your mother? Annabel was beautiful."

  Maddie felt her heart beginning to race, though she could think of no logical reason for it.

  "You look very much like her, as a matter of fact," Tony went on. "You’re taller, but the hair is the same. Hers was that same dark golden color. And she had a laugh unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. It always reminded me of music."

  "You loved her," Joe said suddenly. His voice was a bark, and Maddie twitched unconsciously.

  "Few men didn’t," Tony said mildly. "She had that way about her. She had some sort of effect on everyone." "Did you ever act on it?" Joe demanded.

  For the first time, Tony seemed visibly angry. "No. I was a happily married man at the time."