On the Edge

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Groping through the silty water she encountered a small mountain of gravel blocking the entrance to the branch cave. She set the dive light down on the floor of the cave. Keeping one hand on the line, she used her free hand to claw at the pile of fallen debris. The thick water swirled around her but no more gravel fell.

  Amy didn’t try to read the tank’s pressure gauge. There was no point tracking the depleting supply of air. She had to keep working until she’d freed the line and discovered what had happened to Jed. It took all her willpower to control the images her mind insisted on conjuring up. He had to be alive on the other side.

  She was working blindly but steadily on the gravel pile, trying to convince herself she was making progress when she thought she detected a small tug on the nylon line. Relief rushed through her. Instantly she tugged back. This time the response was definite and deliberate.

  Jed was alive.

  Amy redoubled her efforts. Moments later she felt another distinct change in the tension of the line. This wasn’t a signal from Jed. It felt as though a weight had been lifted off the line itself.

  Amy groped hurriedly, following the line to the point where it disappeared into the loosened gravel. She could still see virtually nothing, but she was encouraged by the fact that her fumbling fingers were picking their way easily through the debris.

  A few minutes later her gloved hand encountered Jed’s. She couldn’t see it or his face, but when his fingers closed briefly around hers Amy knew everything was going to be all right.

  Having reassured herself that he was alive, Amy made herself slow down and finish the clearing process with greater caution. She realized Jed was doing the same on his side of the slide. Together they widened the gap until Jed could wriggle through.

  Amy groped for the dive light and tried to pick out Jed’s large frame as he swam into the tunnel beside her. She caught a glimpse of his shiny metal tank, but that was about all.

  He reached out a hand until he touched her. She felt the firm pressure and knew he was ordering her to start moving back toward the corridor entrance. She realized from the continuing tension in the line that he still had the reel. Typical Jed Glaze style. The man was good at the important little details. Amy clung to the nylon and started swimming.

  She had to go far more slowly on the way out because of the lack of visibility. It would be all too easy to blunder into a projection and either injure herself or cause another slide. The endless cloud of silt still roiled in front of her dive light.

  It was the sunlight pouring into the water that eventually told Amy she had reached the outer pool. The water was just as murky, but the murkiness was not the endless darkness of the cave interior. Amy found the original tie off point and surfaced. She knew without looking at the pressure gauge that there couldn’t have been more than a few minutes worth of air left in her tank. A few seconds later Jed broke the surface beside her. Amy drew a deep, shaky breath.

  “Jed Glaze, I have never been so terrified in all my life. Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that again, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you. I was just about to give you the same lecture.” His mouth tilted at the corner as he raised his mask. “Let’s get the hell out of this pool so we can go back to the house and yell at each other in comfort. There’s no point making another try for the box now. It’s probably going to take a day or two for this water to clear.”

  Chapter 16

  The skeleton was swimming slowly, inexorably, toward Amy. Jed could see the blind intent in those empty eyes. The teeth were set in a mocking grin, and pale, bony fingers moved in a curious, paddling motion that drew the thing through the black water. The long leg bones drifted in the slow current.

  Amy was trapped in an underwater shower of rock and debris. She couldn’t move as Wyman’s skeleton approached. Her legs were pinned. She was running out of air, and in another moment long, dead white fingers would close around her throat, choking off what remained of her waning air supply. Amy wasn’t watching the swimming skeleton; her eyes were on Jed, silently pleading for help.

  But Jed was also trapped, snarled in a deadly tangle of nylon line, regulator hoses and equipment straps. His weight belt had far too much lead in it. It was pulling him down, making it almost impossible for him to reach his knife so he could cut himself free and get to Amy.

  He had to get to Amy, which meant he had to free himself first. But somehow he knew he couldn’t untangle himself unless Amy helped him. And Amy was about to confront Wyman’s skeleton.

  “Jed! Jed, wake up. You’re dreaming. Please wake up.” Jed came slowly out of the nightmare, aware of Amy’s hands on his shoulders. He could hear her clear voice and the part of him that was still dreaming seized on the sound, seeking a way out of the murky, endlessly dark water of the cave passage.

  “Come on, Jed, it’s just a dream. Open your eyes and look at me.”

  Jed opened his eyes and found himself in Amy’s moonlit bedroom. She was kneeling beside him on the bed, shaking him gently, talking to him. In the pale light he could read the concern in her eyes.

  Jed blinked, groaned and sat up slowly. He forced himself to take a deep breath, aware of the perspiration on his skin. He was oddly embarrassed.

  “Sorry about that,” he muttered. He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear away the image of the skeleton reaching for Amy. “I must have read too much of your manuscript.”

  “Private Demons? When were you looking at that?”

  “I read part of it before we left Caliph’s Bay, and earlier today I glanced at some of the notes you’ve been making,” he confessed. He leaned back against the pillows, willing away the last of the disturbing dream. He looked up at Amy. “Do you mind?”

  “No, I’m just a little surprised. You never mentioned that you wanted to read it.”

  “Back in Caliph Bay I read the last few pages the night you had that bad dream. I wanted to see if you’d written anything so unsettling that it actually gave you nightmares. But it wasn’t your book that was causing the dreams, was it, Amy?”

  She sighed and lay back down beside him. “No. If anything Private Demons was a way of trying to work out some of the anxiety. I doubt it was my book that gave you that nightmare, Jed. It was what happened this afternoon in that cave, wasn’t it?”

  “No, not exactly, although that was probably part of it.” He searched quickly for a way of avoiding the discussion. “Remember we agreed once that sometimes it was better not to talk about bad dreams?”

  She turned on her side, pillowing her head on her arm. Her gently tangled hair fell in a seductive curve over her shoulders. Jed had made love to her earlier and afterward she had put on her nightgown. He found her taste in nightwear amusing, as well as very appealing. She had a way of doing that, he realized. She was both sweet and sexy, innocent and seductive, gentle and spirited. And she had a woman’s strength, the kind of inner strength that a man could depend on. Jed felt his body begin to tighten in a familiar sexual awareness. As usual, he wanted to both protect her and ravish her.

  Amy seemed oblivious of the subtle change in him. Her mind was clearly on other things. “I’ve been thinking about what happened in that cave.”

  “Don’t,” he advised.

  “I can’t help it. You may be able to put certain things out of your mind, but I can’t. Tell me the truth, Jed. Was it my fault?”

  “The slide?” He turned his head on the pillow and looked into her clear, anxious eyes. “No, it definitely was not your fault. It wasn’t my fault, either, as a matter of fact. It was just one of those things that can happen in an underwater cave. It’s one of the reasons cave diving is so damn hazardous. Whatever you do, don’t start blaming yourself for what happened today.” He was silent for a moment, then said aloud what he had been thinking most of the afternoon and evening. “You cut it very close, though, Amy.”

  “You mean when I was swimming through that narrow opening into the passage? That’s what I was afraid of. I don’t think I h
it anything or brushed the tank against the wall of the cave, but maybe I did. Maybe that’s what started the slide.”

  He rolled over, pinning her beneath him and gently cutting off her self-incriminating words with a palm over her mouth. Above his hand her eyes were wide and questioning. “That’s not what I meant when I said you cut it close. I meant that you hung around a little too long trying to dig me out. You used up your entire safety margin of air. You were into the third of the supply you were supposed to save for the return trip. Another couple of minutes and you might not have made it back out.”

  She pushed his hand off her mouth. “I couldn’t leave you there,” she said simply. “I was afraid you were trapped by the slide. I had no way of knowing whether you could get free to swim back to that ledge.”

  He stared down at her, reading the truth in her eyes. “Ah, Amy,” he muttered thickly, “what have you done to me?”

  “Done to you? I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “That’s what you think.” He bent to brush his mouth against hers. He arched his body, letting her feel his growing arousal.

  She smiled tremulously and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I get the impression you want to change the subject.”

  “How did you guess?”

  “A woman’s intuition.”

  “Is that right?” He pressed himself against her again, liking the feel of her soft, warm thigh. “I’m impressed.” He kissed her slowly, deepening the caress with a slow intimacy until she willingly parted her lips.

  When he heard her faint moan he felt his own excitement and anticipation quicken. She was so responsive, Jed marveled, not for the first time. So incredibly responsive. He’d never had a woman respond to him the way Amy did. He was getting addicted to her and he knew it. Sooner or later he was going to have to confront all the ramifications of that addiction.

  But right now he just wanted to make love to her, sheathe himself in her clinging warmth, find the sweet peace of mind he always found in the aftermath.

  Slowly Jed withdrew from her mouth and began to trail a hot, damp stream of kisses down her throat to her breasts.

  “Oh, Jed,” Amy whispered, her fingers twisting in his hair as she lifted herself against him. She sighed when he teased the peak of one breast with his tongue and then used his lips to gently tug her nipple erect.

  He flattened a hand on her stomach and slid his fingers down through the soft, curling tangle between her legs. “You’re getting warm and soft already,” he breathed.

  “You’re not soft.” Her voice was filled with gentle, seductive wonder. She ran her palms over the contours of his shoulders and down his back. Then she touched him more intimately. “Not soft at all.”

  “Not around you,” he agreed. Already he was aching with the force of his desire. It was a sweet, hot ache that could be tolerated only because he knew eventually it would be satisfied. In the meantime it left him feeling lightheaded. He trailed the string of nibbling kisses lower, past her cute little navel and down her thigh. Carefully he pried apart her legs with his hand. When he found the exquisitely sensitive center of her excitement with his lips, Amy gasped. Her nails sank into his skin and her legs shifted with a new restlessness.

  She tried to draw back slightly from the intimate contact, as if she wasn’t certain it was what she wanted. But Jed felt the instant response of her body and knew she did want it. She just needed a little convincing. He was more than willing to convince. He curved his hands around her lush derriere and anchored her while he continued to tantalize her in new ways. Amy’s slender, supple body tightened and her cry of mounting pleasure was a siren’s song in his ears.

  “Jed, that feels so…so good. I can’t stand it.”

  “Show me how good it feels, sweetheart.” He continued to tease her with his tongue and slowly inserted one finger into the dew-filled channel. Amy went wild beneath him, pleading for a release that he knew was soon going to swamp her senses.

  When it came, the tiny convulsions tightening her around his finger, Jed gave up trying to restrain his own raging need. He flowed up along her body, driving himself into her softness just in time to feel the last of her release pull him deeply into her. His own reaction was almost immediate. In another few seconds he was arching savagely against her, calling her name aloud as he found his own satisfaction.

  Amy clung to him as he came slowly down to earth. When Jed opened his eyes he found her smiling dreamily up at him.

  “You were asking what I do to you,” she drawled. “I’d say it’s more a question of what you do to me.”

  He shook his head, too pleasantly exhausted to argue. Reluctantly he withdrew from her warm body and settled himself beside her. “Go back to sleep, honey. We both need the rest. In case you’ve forgotten, we had a rough day.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she replied, the sensual amusement drained from her voice.

  Jed cursed himself for bringing up the subject. He stroked her hair in an effort to soothe her. “Go back to sleep,” he said again.

  “Jed, I was thinking about that skeleton,” she said slowly.

  “That’s the last thing you need to think about tonight.” His words were a little rougher than necessary, and Jed knew it was because the scenes from his nightmare were still hovering at the back of his mind. “Forget the skeleton. It’s twenty-five years old and it can’t hurt you now.” He wouldn’t let it hurt her, he swore silently.

  “What if someone else ever found it?”

  “No one’s going to spend much time investigating a twenty-five-year-old death, Amy. And no one’s going to automatically assume it’s Wyman. He went down at sea, remember? No one doubts the story. If anyone ever did find the skeleton, it would be assumed that some poor diver snuck into the caves and got lost. He managed to find the ledge but there was no way he could swim back out.”

  Amy shuddered in his arms. “What a horrible thought.”

  He smiled wryly. “I just made that little scenario up on the spot. Not bad for an engineer of somewhat limited imagination, huh?”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you have read too much of Private Demons.”

  “Could be.” He stroked her gently until she fell asleep.

  But it was a long time before Jed found refuge in sleep. He lay awake, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about what the woman in his arms was doing to him. His world was shifting on its axis and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  For the past eight years he had gone from one assignment to the next, never looking back or too far ahead. It was like living in an outtake from a full-length feature film—the past and future portions of the film went on without him. Cutter told him the work he did was important, and to some extent Jed accepted that. They told him there was a need for his kind of soldiering in a world that was in many ways still ruled by the ancient laws of the jungle. Jed was a natural predator. In some ways. He had a talent for the kind of work the agency wanted him to do. From the beginning his senses had adapted easily to the skills necessary for his survival. Too easily, perhaps.

  At first he had been motivated by a burning need for justice. He would have done whatever was necessary to get the man who had killed Andy. But somehow he had become trapped by the lethal success of his first mission. There had been nothing at home to keep him from taking another assignment. And another one after that. Eventually the work became the focal point of his world.

  Until Amy entered the outtake he was supposed to be inhabiting by himself.

  Amy had befriended him. Then she had become his lover. And then he had realized she needed him.

  The closer he got to Amy, the more involved he got, the more Jed realized that she was going to stretch the narrow perimeters of his well-defined world. He wasn’t sure what would happen when the bubble of isolation in which he lived finally burst.

  He was trapped. He had to get free so he could protect Amy. But only Amy could free him. He was trapped.

  Jed went to sleep with the twis
ted circle of problems still unresolved.

  The phone was ringing the next time Jed opened his eyes. He squinted briefly at the morning light pouring into the room and listened to the next jarring summons from the phone. Beside him, Amy stirred and stretched.

  “Phone,” she mumbled into the pillow.

  “Yeah.”

  “Better get it,” she said encouragingly as she snuggled down under the sheet.

  “I take it I’m elected?” Jed eyed her indulgently as he got up, reached for his pants and padded barefoot toward the door.

  “Right. You’re elected.”

  But she was yawning and he knew she would be up in another few minutes. Amy was a morning person. It was one of any number of her traits he was discovering since they had arrived on Orleana. Fortunately, he was also a morning person. Jed fastened his pants as he went down the stairs. He managed to capture the phone on what must have been the sixth or seventh ring.

  “Say hey, Glaze, I was just about to give up on you. How’s it going out there in paradise?”

  Jed yawned. “Hello, Faxon. It’s about time you called.”

  “Geez, all I ever get are complaints.”

  “Some people are born to collect complaints.”

  “Uh huh. And some people are born to hand them out, I suppose. Well, we also serve who only sit and stare at a computer screen. Are you interested in learning a few pertinent and amusing facts about one Michael J. Wyman or would you rather spend the government’s telephone money complaining?”

  “It’s a temptation to waste a little government money, but I’ll take option number one.” Jed walked toward the window, trailing the long telephone cord behind him. “Give me what you’ve got on Wyman.”

  “Well, to begin with, he’s supposed to be dead.”

  “I knew that much.”

  Faxon was obviously crestfallen. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me? You didn’t bother to mention that little fact when you called. Do you have any idea of how hard it was to start pulling records when I didn’t even know the guy was dead?”