by Gayle Wilson
“Because I’m a good cop?” she suggested. There had been a thread of challenge in her voice. “Could that possibly be the answer to your question?”
“How many women are in the Organized Crime Unit?” he asked.
She hesitated before she answered, knowing he was right. “One,” she admitted.
“So Andrews sends the one woman in the unit out here to play bodyguard. Would you like to explain the logic in that?”
“I’m as good a cop as any of the others,” she suggested.
He laughed, the sound as dark as the staircase they were standing on. She could see as little as he could. Not expressions or body language That was so hard, Abby thought again, just as she had when first confronted with those opaque glasses. So hard to know what was really going on in another person’s head when you couldn’t see him. Only a disembodied voice coming at you out of the darkness. So damn hard.
“Or do you suppose that, out of the kindness of his heart, your captain sent you here for recreational purposes?” Nick asked. “Or maybe you even volunteered for that assignment, Sterling. I thought there was something else in your voice…” He let the suggestion fade.
She waited too long to react, she knew. Too busy fighting memories. And when she managed the laugh, even to her it sounded forced, artificial. “Only in your dreams, Deandro,” she said. “I’m a cop. This is an assignment to protect a witness. Whatever else you’re imagining—”
“Tell me what you look like,” Nick’s voice interrupted. The timbre of it had changed, deepened perhaps. It sounded as it sometimes had in the familiar darkness of her small bedroom. Soft and very intimate.
“I don’t think your having a physical description of me is pertinent to my ability to do this job,” she said stiffly.
He laughed again at her awkward denial. “You’re pretty small, I know I could tell that much downstairs. From the sound of your voice.”
“You think I’m too small to keep you safe? Because I’m a woman?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and the silly comment hung in the air between them. “That bothered you for some reason,” he said finally.
“I don’t like sexism.”
He laughed again. “That wasn’t supposed to be sexist. I must be slipping.”
“Slipping?”
“Here I am trying to proposition you, Sterling, and you’re yelling discrimination.”
“Proposition me?” She supposed her shock was clear.
“Or don’t you sleep with blind guys? Blind guys who are ‘mad at the world.’ I think that was the phrase,” he said.
Her words The ones she had said to Rob at the front door. And anything she said in response to them would be wrong. It was almost like the old question about whether you were still beating your wife
I don’t sleep with blind guys. I don’t sleep with any guys. But she had. She had slept with this one.
Something about your voice, he had said. Whatever would be in it now would be even more revealing. Because again she was remembering that small dark bedroom. And again she was hungry for his touch in the darkness Such a long, empty hungriness
“You think being blind gives you the right to eavesdrop on people?” she asked, fighting memory.
“Maybe. Especially if they’re talking about me,” he said reasonably.
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re an assignment. That’s all you are. I always discuss assignments with my supervisor.”
Again the silence drifted between them before he broke it. “You don’t like me,” he said, his tone almost puzzled, as if she represented some problem he was determined to solve. “It’s in your voice. But I swear there’s something else there as well. I can hear it. I just can’t quite figure it out.”
“Guess that business about the other senses becoming more acute must be an old wives’ tale,” Abby said. Cruel, but not pitying. And hopefully not revealing.
“I don’t know. Senses are…deceiving sometimes. Or revealing. Like whatever that is you’re wearing…”
Her hand moved to her waist, spreading almost protectively over the stretched denim of the loose jumper she wore over a white cotton turtleneck top. And then, considering the circumstances, she realized what he meant. Not what she was actually wearing. Not her clothing. But the other very common meaning of that phrase. What she was wearing. Her scent. Her perfume.
She couldn’t smell it. Her own senses were too familiar with the fragrance. Now it was almost like the natural aroma of her skin or her hair. But Nick had liked it. She knew because he had told her so. And foolishly she had worn it here.
“I’m tired,” she said softly because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She realized that the whispered non sequitur sounded plaintive. Weary. But suddenly that was exactly what she felt. Weary of defending herself. Weary of being alone.
Now that she had seen him again, she was far more alone than before. Alone, even standing here again in the darkness with him. So damnably alone, considering all there had once been between them. “I’d really like to go up to bed now.”
She almost added please, defeated by the aching emptiness. He didn’t remember her. He didn’t remember any of it, and she could never forget. She looked up, raising her eyes slowly to the head of the staircase. To the moonlight.
And found it empty. There was no one there in the shadowed darkness On legs that trembled Abby climbed the rest of the steps, and when she reached the top, she looked down the long hallway. But the door to his room was closed.
It was a long time before she moved to the other end of the hall to hers. And an even longer time before she finally slept.
Chapter Three
Nick Deandro opened his eyes. Still night, he thought, preparing as he had on tens of thousands of other predawns to turn over, punch his pillow into shape, and go back to sleep.
Other times he had been pulled out of sleep by some subliminal sound, by a troubling dream, or maybe by the uneasy suspicion that he had been missing something in whatever case he was working on. The unconscious mind is a strange thing. Nick Deandro had always understood that. It keeps sorting through problems even during sleep, prodding the conscious mind to act, to think, to remember.
And this morning, when he finally did remember, he reached out to find by touch the bedside table and to read, also by touch, the hands of the glassless clock that rested there. Now oriented, he rolled over, facing the direction where he knew the windows were. Where the light should be.
He was testing, just as he had every morning that he had awakened in this bed. Testing to see if what they had all told him from the beginning was true.
It was no truer this day than it had been on any of the others. The blackness was still there, pervasive and unmitigated. He took a breath, fighting his despair, which was always worse in the mornings. That was another empty blackness, and one he couldn’t afford.
He despised the soft sympathy he sometimes heard in voices, and he always overreacted to it. He wouldn’t tolerate pity from those around him. He had decided months ago that neither was he going to tolerate it in himself. If this was what his life was going to be from now on, then he would damn well learn to cope.
Awake and listening now, he could hear the familiar sounds from the floor below. Maggie, cheerfully rattling pots and pans in the kitchen. That was routine. Morning ritual. And the other sound, unfamiliar for this time of day, took him a second longer to identify.
Someone was running water in the upstairs bath. Maybe that had been what awakened him. The sound of the water filling the tub. Mickey Yates had taken showers, usually at night, before he went to bed. And this noise wasn’t exactly the same.
For a moment Nick thought that there might be something important about the sound of water running into a tub. The significance teased at the back of his mind, tantalizing, taunting him to remember what it meant. But he couldn’t. Just as he hadn’t been able to remember any of the other. Nothing of what had happened since he’d been in N
ew Orleans.
There were the dreams, of course. Sometimes they, too, woke him. They drifted at him out of the darkness, visible, vivid with color, his vision unimpaired when he was dreaming. But despite that, they always reminded him somehow of another darkness. Reminded him of a lot of things. He awoke from them, his body trembling with need, his groin hard and aching.
He could never remember what—or whom—he had been dreaming about. But the incredible sense of loss was always the same. As desolate and as lonely as this other blackness he now lived in.
There was a woman involved in what had happened to him. He and the department knew that from more reliable evidence than the troubling dreams and his usually dependable gut instinct about cases. There had been the physical evidence that had been recovered from his clothing and his body after he’d been shot.
And of course, there was the woman who kept calling the hospital. Rob Andrews had been determined to find her, but she hadn’t screwed up—not even once—to give them a chance at her.
She always used pay phones, booths in busy locations where no one paid any attention to anyone else. Places where the person using a particular phone might have changed ten times before the cops sent out to check on the call arrived.
“Our mystery woman,” Rob called her. A little like the one he had sent out here to play bodyguard, Nick thought. A little like Abby Sterling, who was both distant and mysterious. And who, for some reason, didn’t like him. That had been pretty obvious yesterday. She didn’t like him worth a damn.
They had some background, he knew. He had put that together from the things she said. He doesn’t remember me, she had told Andrews after Nick stepped back into the house. He had stopped in the hall before he went upstairs, wanting to hear what they would say to each other when they thought he was gone.
“He doesn’t remember me” was exactly what Abby Sterling had said. And “all your maneuvering has been for nothing.” Which meant that she or Andrews had thought that he might remember her. And even more telling, she had called him Nick on the stairs last night. His name—his first name—had slipped out of her mouth as naturally as breathing when he’d surprised her.
There had been something else in her voice last night. He had been trying to provoke a reaction when he’d confronted her, but the one he had gotten had been unexpected. Not the anger or her dislike of him. Those were understandable, given what he had said to her—his mocking suggestion that she might be Andrews’s idea of a little recreation for a blind man.
Her reaction to that deliberate provocation was understandable. It was the other admission she made that had bothered him, long after he retreated to his own room. Her softly acknowledged tiredness and the defeat he had heard in her voice as they stood together in the darkness, separated by the rise of the stairs
He still couldn’t understand why Andrews had sent Abby Sterling out here, especially if she really needed some kind of rest cure Not unless they had decided nobody was interested in him anymore.
And if that was the decision the NOPD had come to, Nick supposed he couldn’t really blame them. He wasn’t going to do them much good if he couldn’t finger the people they needed him to finger. And so far…
He became aware that the sound of the running water had stopped. He tried to imagine Abby Sterling stepping nude into that tub, but he didn’t have any frame of reference for that image. No idea of what she looked like Except that she was small. That’s what he had told her on the stairs, those simple words which had resulted in the accusation that he was sexist.
He didn’t like women who played on that. Women who cried harassment when some idiot hung up a cheesecake calendar or told an off-color joke. To be fair, almost all the women he had worked with through the years cared a lot more about whether a guy could be trusted to do his job. Whether he was going to be there when things went wrong. They very rationally considered that far more important than whether someone guarded against every unthinking word that came out of his mouth.
If you wanted to, you could make something out of anything. Or out of nothing. He found himself hoping Abby Sterling wasn’t that kind of woman.
And what the hell does it matter if she is? he wondered bitterly. He wasn’t going to have to depend on her in a dangerous situation. Because he probably wasn’t ever going to go back to work. At least not in law enforcement.
Angry with the negative direction of his thinking, a pessimism he’d fought for months, he pushed the cover off his body and stood up carefully beside the bed. He put his hand down, fingers groping to locate the edge of the bedside table again. Making sure he was exactly where he thought he was.
That was a lesson he had learned the hard way. He waited a moment before he moved, trying to picture the room and the exact location of the objects in it, mapping it out inside his head.
There were places he could go for this kind of training. They would teach him skills that would make it easier to navigate in this endless darkness. He was eventually going to have to think about that, he supposed. About a lot of other things as well. Like what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life.
He heard the bathroom door open down the hall. He realized he was still standing beside the bed. Still nude. He hoped Sterling wasn’t the kind who like to keep close tabs on her witness. In that case, she might be in for a hell of a surprise.
Unbelieving, he felt the undeniable response to the thought of his new bodyguard walking in on him right now begin to move through his body. And for the first time in a long while, Nick Deandro’s lips tilted in amusement.
Then, remembering, they straightened back into a flat, cold line, jaw muscles clenched, as tight and hard as his aching body had been last night when her fragrance had floated up the stairs.
Familiar and evocative. He had made love to a woman once who had smelled like that. He knew it. He hadn’t exactly known it last night, but for some strange reason he knew now that it was true. But there wasn’t much doubt that that woman hadn’t been the cold and disdainful Abby Sterling.
You don’t sleep with blind guys? he had taunted her. She hadn’t answered him, he remembered. But then, he supposed, she hadn’t really needed to.
ABBY WAS SURPRISED to find Maggie already working in the kitchen when she came downstairs. To find the smells of the breakfast she was cooking invading the lower floor. She stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment before she spoke.
“How did you get in past the sensors?” Abby asked.
Maggie turned just her head, glancing up from the grits she was stirring. Her dark eyes examined Abby’s face before she set the pan off the stove eye, the white-coated wooden spoon she had been using still held in her hand.
“There’s no sensors in the back. I thought they would have told you that.”
“And into the house?” Abby asked, thinking again that these arrangements were all a little too casual for her to be comfortable with. Even the fact that Maggie seemed to know exactly how the security system worked bothered her.
“Used my key. There’s a delay before the alarm goes off. Time to reset the thing before it wakes up the sheriffs. You get any sleep, shug?”
The question was filled with concern, and Abby knew then that she did look as bad as the bathroom mirror had suggested. Her reflection had highlighted the bruisedlooking darkness under her eyes and the tiredness within them. It had also pointed out the unnatural tension at the corners of her mouth.
The truth was she had spent a lot of hours last night tossing and turning. And then, when she had finally managed to go to sleep, she had spent more hours dreaming about the same things she had spent the last six months trying to forget. The confrontation on the stairs had brought all those buried emotions to the surface. Emotions she had thought were buried, anyway.
“Obviously not enough,” she said. “What can I do to help?”
“You can just set yourself down at the table,” Maggie said encouragingly. “You want it black or white?”
Coffee. A
bby realized that was one of the aromas that had lured her from the hallway. The rich, fragrant smell of Louisiana coffee. She usually avoided caffeine but surely this late in her pregnancy one cup wouldn’t matter.
“Black,” she said. She pulled out one of the chairs, feeling as she had yesterday about the suitcase. It was just not worth struggling over. Maggie put a mug in front of her and poured a stream of black, chicory-enhanced coffee into it.
“A little sweetness?” she said.
Abby shook her head, picking up the cup and savoring the warmth against her fingers. Enjoying the smell of the coffee. And the first sip was almost as good as those preliminaries.
“You got to get over it,” Maggie said softly. She was still standing by the table, holding the handle of the coffeepot with a folded pot holder, her left hand touching the glass knob on its top. “Whatever happened to you, you can’t be thinking about it now. You got a baby coming. The time for grieving is past.”
“I know,” Abby said, looking up to smile at her.
“My mama used to say if you can’t change it, there ain’t no use worrying over it. That’s still true as preaching”
“I guess you’re right,” Abby said.
Whatever was going on in her life was none of this woman’s business, but Abby didn’t feel even a glimmer of resentment over the unsought advice. It was almost a relief to have someone notice that she wasn’t doing all that well. No one else in her life seemed to be aware of it.
“You not grieving over getting that baby, are you?”
Abby looked down into her mug, thinking about that. She had been grieving about the situation, maybe. About the loss of Nick. Worried about rearing a child by herself. But not grieving about carrying the baby. There was no grief in that. And no regret. She didn’t believe either of those things had ever had a place in her turbulent feelings these last few months.