by Beverly Bird
She touched his hardness, wrapping her hand around him, and then because her mouth had had such a reaction on him a moment before, she bent to touch her tongue to him there too, curious and wanting so desperately to give him the pleasure he had given her the night before. But after a few moments that passed much too quickly, his hands dove into her hair again, pulling her up.
“I don’t...I can’t...”
His voice was so low she could barely hear it. “What?”
“I have to make it better for you this time,” he managed.
“You couldn’t possibly.”
He made a deep growling sound. His hands went to her hips, lifting her, moving her until she straddled him, and then she felt him fill her again and it was so much easier this time. There was no pain at all, only liquid fire, sudden and overwhelming. It poured through her, raining flames. She found his chest again with her hands and braced herself against him, struggling to move with him. And, then, with an instinct as old as time, she picked up the rhythm and they rocked together.
This time the flowers were scattered over the quilt, and Adam never felt the hard plastic edge of a single petal digging into his shoulder.
It was a long time before either of them stirred. Too much time had passed, and her heart twisted in frustration.
“I don’t want to go to school,” she complained.
Laughter rumbled through his chest. She could feel it where her ear was pressed to his heart. “You sound like a little kid on the first really nice spring day.”
“I feel that way. I want to play.”
“Me, too.” He wanted it with enough urgency that he knew if he stayed there a moment longer, he’d be hard again, needy again, and a whole lot of kids would be milling aimlessly around that schoolhouse today on their own. And if her college education didn’t get her fired, then that certainly would.
That sobered him. He swatted her bottom, but he felt his muscles tense. “Go on. Get yourself ready. I’ll do something about coffee.”
Her lower lip pouted. He steeled himself not to kiss it, did it anyway, then gave her a gentle shove. “You’re going to be late. And I need to get to a phone, unless you’ve got one hidden away here somewhere.”
She gave a little shake of her head. “The Ordnung—”
“I know, I know.” Adam sat up, raked his hand through his hair. “As much as I’d like to hang around here all day myself, I need to find out if Jake got anywhere with that picture.”
“What picture?”
Something constricted in his gut as he remembered that he’d avoided her for several days over nothing that was her fault; that he hadn’t told her exactly what Jake had been doing. “He was going to make a composite of the guy who followed Jannel here,” he said neutrally.
“Ah.” She wondered what that could possibly tell him, and why he wouldn’t let the whole issue of Jannel just...go away. The question brought a tightness to her chest as she thought of the beautiful blond woman again, a woman he would marry. She scrambled to her feet and tugged at the quilt until he moved off it. Flowers scattered, suddenly looking like what they were—cheap plastic imitations.
She wrapped the quilt around herself and fled down the hall. Already the day was changing, she thought helplessly. She looked out the bathroom window and saw clouds scudding in on a strong wind, blotting out the sun, chilling her heart.
Adam dressed slowly, reluctantly, and went into the kitchen. The percolator she had put on the wood stove the night before was ruined. Neither of them had ever thought to remove it. Grounds were baked to a crust inside. He grabbed it, burned himself and swore. He found a towel and picked it up with that, dropping everything into the sink. He poured water over it and steam rose, hissing.
His body was craving caffeine now. He felt groggy. His limbs felt weighted. And he knew it had less to do with the conditions under which he’d slept than with the lethargic satisfaction of having loved her.
He scrubbed his hand over his unshaven jaw. He was in over his head, he thought. He hadn’t meant for this to happen, yet that sense of inevitability still lingered, and he wondered how much choice he’d really had. He couldn’t regret it. But there was an ache inside him now that it was over, a hard, tangled knot. And still that insidious thought...
What he had taken from her deserved so much more than the renewed silence he would leave in her life when he went home.
He cursed in self-defense. He had never lied to her. Never. He had given her the best of what he could. What she needed—okay, what she deserved now—was simply beyond him to give, and he had never pretended otherwise.
A stunning thought came to him. If she had been anyone else, if she had lived anywhere else, he might have taken the chance. No matter how horribly blind and foolish he’d been with Jannel, Mariah wore truth and honesty like a cloak. It was there, visible, the first thing anyone sensed about her. He didn’t have to fear his own perceptions with her.
But he couldn’t stay here with her because he simply couldn’t reconcile himself to her pious deacons and the gleeful punishment of her church. The faith that made her what she was was the same thing he wanted no part of. He believed in her. He believed in himself. But he could not trust a God who would allow the nightmare of his childhood, who would allow innocent children to suffer a man’s wrath without even a mother to guide them.
No, he couldn’t stay. But he loved her.
It hit him hard, slamming into him almost physically. He actually took a few stumbling steps back from the sink, as though the coffeepot had reared up and struck him. But even then, the truth remained, simple and just...there. She was the kind of woman he hadn’t known existed and certainly had never believed he would find.
And even loving her, he cursed her. Goddammit, let them take your school. Leave these people who don’t even want you. Come home with me.
“Adam?”
“Huh?” He jerked around to face her.
His skin was ashen. Mariah frowned. “Did you make coffee?”
“No. We nearly burned your house down last night.”
“I know.” She grinned smugly, almost seductively. And his breath left him all over again. God, how was he supposed to live without her? How could he do anything else?
He managed to thrust a thumb at the sink. “You left the pot on. It’s a goner.”
“Oh.” She scowled and went to the sink to peer down at the percolator.
Adam grabbed his jacket as if it represented some sort of salvation. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride to school and we’ll buy a couple cups along the way. Jake found someplace with a takeout window the other day.”
Mariah nodded. “There’s a drive-through place up on Route 30. We can go the long way to the school.”
“Well...good.” He was already halfway to the door, and he had to toss the words behind him.
Mariah hurriedly gathered her coat and shawl. She was going to miss seeing Katya this morning. She hoped Frank hadn’t hurt her badly overnight. Her morning visits were as much out of concern for Katya as they were for her own pleasure. Seeing her five days a week assured her that her friend was alive, if not well.
Outside, Adam honked his horn. She wouldn’t see Katya, she thought, but she would have a few more precious moments with this man. It was a trade-off she could live with. She went out, smiling.
Adam found Jake at work, at the detectives’ bureau. He gave his name to the dispatcher and barely had time to swallow a mouthful of coffee before his brother came on the line.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jake demanded. “I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”
Adam didn’t answer. He was doing his level best at the moment to forget where he had been, what he had done, what he was feeling.
“Like that, is it?” Jake muttered. “Should I applaud or worry? Best-case scenario is that at least the cold-water supply up there will last a little longer.”
Since he couldn’t threaten to hit him again, Adam ignored him. “What’s w
ith that guy who was following Jannel?”
Jake was quiet for a couple of heartbeats. “Okay. We’ll talk about him.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Sure. Well, Berry did. It’s the wonders of cyberspace, bro. Nothing is the way it was when we were kids. Plug in and presto—information. Millions of people cruise the Net every day. A healthy few visited our site and felt compelled to leave e-mail trying to ID this week’s composite.”
People always did, Adam thought, but the pictures were usually of missing kids and the tips tended to be wild-goose chases. He felt his heart begin sliding. “Well? Did we get a hit this time?”
“Yeah. An anonymous somebody from Toms River, New Jersey, identified the guy as one Devon Mills. Berry hacked his way into a few places and put together a dossier on the dude. It works. At the moment, he’s in custody.”
Adam’s heart hit bottom. “Berry or Devon Mills?”
“Mills,” Jake said scornfully. “Come on, bro, Berry’s too good to get caught. I had a friend in New Jersey arrange to have Mills picked up late yesterday afternoon. Admittedly, he’s being held on charges that fall into a gray area. Suspicion of kidnapping across state lines, both of an adult and a minor. We’ve got to be careful with that The FBI will come barreling in if they get wind of it, and we don’t want that.”
“We don’t,” Adam repeated, his pulse rushing.
“Nope. All we’re doing at the moment is bullying good ol’ Devon with a few felony threats. When push comes to shove, there’s nothing we can really charge him with. Jannel’s not currently with him, and we know where Bo is. But he’s just a small-time scam artist, real outclassed by the rest of our conniving, intelligent minds, and he’s been singing like a bird, anyway.”
“Scam artist,” Adam echoed. That single word stuck in his mind.
“Of the minor variety,” Jake clarified again. “He’s got a rap sheet as long as the tails on those horses you’ve been playing giddy-up with up there, but it’s all reasonably puny stuff. Possession of controlled substances, but not enough to get him into real trouble. Forgery and a few rubber checks, that kind of thing. We’re using it all to lean on him. He’s on probation, needs to keep his nose clean right now.”
“What’s he saying?” Adam asked hoarsely. “Where’s Jannel? Goddammit, Jake, what did you find out?”
“Hold your horses, cowboy. I’m getting to it.” Jake paused. “Are you sitting down?”
It was bad then. Adam stiffened. “Yeah.”
Jake cleared his throat. For the first time in Adam’s memory, his brother seemed awkward, uncomfortable. “Well,” he said finally, “you were had big-time, bro.”
“Had.”
“If this guy is to be believed—and according to my friend in New Jersey, he’s sweating bullets, so he probably can—then your happily-ever-after was all a grand scheme he cooked up with one Linda Porter.”
His happily-ever-after? His marriage? Stealing Bo? What? “He’s not a drug dealer? Not Jannel’s supplier?”
“Oh, I’m sure he kept her happy in that respect, too, but—no. No, what he actually was was her accomplice.”
Adam felt nausea begin to roll in his stomach. “Go on.”
“There was no Jannel, Adam,” Jake reminded him quietly. “That’s why we could never find any bureaucratic record of her. Her name was Linda Porter, and she was an actress with the regional theater in Atlantic City, if Devon is to be believed. Guess she got tired of waiting for her big break and Devon concocted a scheme to rake in a windfall a lot sooner.” He paused. “They used to do the nightclub circuit in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, upper-scale places, playing to the kind of rich guys they needed.”
“She was a hooker?”
Jake hesitated. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But it wasn’t that simple.”
“Go on,” Adam said again, his voice rough as sandpaper now.
“She didn’t...you know, charge these guys. Exactly. She took ‘gifts’ from them—ain’t that pretty? She’d keep one around for a few months, milk him dry, wreck his life, move on. Eventually, they outgrew the New Jersey tri-state, and one guy in New Orleans set her up in a real neat high-rise condo there. She talked him into putting that place in her name—there’s one conversation I would liked to have heard—then she sold the place and took off again. Shared the money with Devon, of course.”
This wasn’t the woman he’d known, Adam thought sickly. But she was. The hell of it was, she could be the cool, remote, perfect Jannel Payne he had married.
Adam swore aloud. “You’re wrong,” he tried, a little desperate.
“No. I’m not, bro,” Jake said levelly. “Sorry. Anyway, the condo thing was such a success, Devon said they decided to play the same thing on a grander scale.”
“Me.”
Jake hesitated. “Not you per se, bro. It could have been anybody with a high visible profile. They didn’t go after you by name, but you were the fish who bit.”
“Me,” he said again, his head pounding. His world was falling apart. Which was stupid—her betrayal was part of the past. It was four years old. He’d found his kid again. But he was sick with rage and his own sense of being played for a fool.
“You were in the right place at the right time,” Jake reiterated. “The idea was that she would stay married to you for a couple of years, funnel off what money she could whenever she could, and when they had a couple million collected they’d take off to an island somewhere.”
“She did that.”
“Yeah.”
“She took me for a couple of million.”
“Yeah.”
He snarled a few choice invectives. “So what the hell is Devon Mills doing in Toms River, New Jersey instead of Montego Bay?”
“She took your money and left without him.”
The motel room seemed to go very still. Adam had the wild feeling that the air was being sucked out of it. “Bo,” he said hoarsely.
“Yeah, well, Bo was never really part of the plan,” Jake said quietly. “She wasn’t supposed to get pregnant while she was married to you.”
His blood raged. “Then why the hell did she take him with her? Why didn’t she just leave him with me?”
“Because Devon thought to grab him and hold him until she coughed up his half of the money. I’d think she had to have anticipated that. So she hid him somewhere safe, instead.”
Suddenly, Adam understood it all. Her distance—the way she had never seemed interested in sharing anything with him. The way she’d always kept herself...apart. It had all been a game. Just a game. A role she was playing, and he was the male lead. She’d gone through the motions, but it had never been her real life or her real heart that she was putting into it.
Even Bo’s conception had been a sham.
He almost wished he didn’t know. He almost wished he’d never called Jake to the settlement. The first domino, he thought helplessly. It was the way it always happened. All it took was one little clue coming to the surface, then everything else fell down and into place. In this case it had been the milk-carton call placing Bo in Lancaster County. And that had led to Sugar Joe and to the strange man who had followed Jannel—information they probably would never have stumbled onto otherwise. Mills and Jannel had covered their tracks too well.
Sugar Joe’s revelation had led to more clarity than he could stand.
“She didn’t have to take him at all,” Adam said, his voice flat and deadly now. “She didn’t have to take Bo.”
“Hey, you don’t mean that, bro. Think about it. If she had left him, Devon would have grabbed him. Better that he was safe with the God-fearing folks of Lancaster County. At least she had one decent bone in her body.”
“She didn’t have to take him in the first place!” No matter what Jake said, no matter how right his brother was, he just couldn’t seem to get past that.
The words burned out of him, through him, a litany in his head, echoing over and over again. Adam s
lammed down the phone without waiting for a response he knew he wouldn’t want to hear.
His head was pounding. Fool. He’d been a world-class sucker. But he’d known that from the start.
There was no peace to be found in this answer, he thought again. There was no closure in the shutting of this door. It made him feel worse, incredibly naive, infuriated.
Adam grabbed the bottle of bourbon from the desk and pressed it to the throbbing pulse in his temple. But he didn’t want to drink. Suddenly he was drained. Exhausted. Hollow. He swore violently and hurled the bottle across the room. It shattered against the far wall, raining glass and spraying bourbon.
And still he didn’t feel better. Still his head pounded.
“Oh, Bo. Damn it. Damn it. I’m so sorry.” For what? he wondered. For not catching on to Jannel sooner? Or for stubbornly refusing to take him on the road again, giving Jannel the chance to take him? He was being irrational. He knew he was being irrational, but that did not soothe him.
He dropped down onto one of the beds, flopping onto his back, covering his eyes with one forearm because the dim light in the room was blinding. For a long while he counted his breaths, but the number that kept ricocheting through his mind was four. Four years. Four years! Long enough that Bo didn’t even recognize him.
He would have given her the goddammed money, if only she had left the boy behind. She could have let him know what was going on so he could have protected Bo himself. He laughed bitterly aloud as he heard his own thought. Darling, this was all a setup and I’m going to take you for all the cash you have on hand. Please take care of our baby, because my accomplice will probably try to kidnap him.
He kept seeing his son’s eyes as they had been yesterday, frightened yet somehow defiant. And that teddy bear he’d clung to for comfort in the face of changes too big for him to deal with. Adam swore. He could kill her for that alone.
He took a thick, steadying breath. After a long while he escaped from the rage and the pain into a place where his heart was numb. Somehow, mercifully, he slept.