Private Lives

by Karen Young

  He’d felt the gradual relaxing of her limbs as she surrendered to exhaustion and wished his own system would also shut down. She wouldn’t sleep long, he suspected. No one with an imagination as vivid as hers would be able to keep the demons at bay. She was terrified for Jesse’s life.

  Just as he was terrified for Jennifer.

  His brain ached from the intensity of his fury and frustration. Where was his daughter? There was no way Austin would choose to be saddled with two kids. If he wasn’t headed for Arizona and his mother, where would he go? What kind of insane plan did he have?

  Ryan stared at the ceiling, watching the play of moonlight reflected off the light fixture. From the moment this happened, he’d felt as if there was something right in front of him, something he knew but couldn’t quite pin down. Whether it was the key to what Austin might be up to, he didn’t know. But he couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing something. He just needed to bring it into focus.

  Liz stirred, made a small, anguished sound. Even in sleep, she wasn’t able to let go of her fear. In that, she was like all the mothers in the world whether she’d given birth to Jesse or not. Her child had been stolen and she was living a parent’s worst nightmare. He turned his head and pressed his lips to her temple, filled with a protectiveness he’d never felt before for anyone except Jennifer. Austin had a lot to answer for.

  “Mr. Leggett?”

  Austin dropped his head for a second, going very still. He spoke through clenched teeth. “What now?”

  “I think I saw some streaks of lightning on the horizon. Did you check the weather?” Jennifer knew he didn’t, because he’d never turned the TV on in the salon, which is where he’d have gotten a fix on the weather. And she’d seen no sign of a weather radio. Her dad always kept an eye out for weather, but this guy had already admitted he hated boats, so she’d bet he wasn’t up on the stuff you had to do when you planned a trip. Furthermore, she’d bet his father didn’t even know he was taking the boat out. Which made her wonder how he’d gotten the keys. Did Mr. Leggett senior just leave them lying around so anybody could rip off a million-dollar Bertram?

  She watched him trying to maneuver the boat out of the slip. He’d had a couple of failed attempts and been forced to put it in forward gear and start all over. She cast a worried look at the dock, hoping to see something or somebody who might help before they were off and running, but it was deserted at this hour. And there might be some storm warnings keeping other craft from starting out. The Gulf looked pretty choppy.

  “Did you check the weather?” she repeated.

  Suddenly, he turned from the console, stumbled over something he’d left on the deck and lunged at her. Grabbing her shirt, he lifted her off her feet. Jennifer’s heart was in her throat when he stuck his face in hers and yelled, “What does it take to shut you up!” giving her a vicious jerk that tore her shirt. Drawing back, he slapped her hard, putting the force of his anger behind the blow. Stunned, she saw stars for a moment or two, then she felt herself slung around and slammed against the bulkhead. Sharp pain pierced her side and she lay for a few dazed seconds, unable to move.

  Still dizzy, she heard Jesse scream. But Austin was caught in a red rage and didn’t spare a glance at his daughter. He came at Jennifer again, grabbed her arm and yanked her painfully to her feet. With his arm cocked back to land another blow, he failed to notice Jesse scrambling away from the skirmish to the other side of the boat. Climbing out of the cockpit, she balanced for a heartbeat, then jumped.

  “Jesse!” Jennifer screamed. Wrenching free, she lunged to the side of the boat and leaned over, searching frantically for a trace of the little girl. There was nothing but black water. Black, filthy water. And she knew it was deep. Oh, Lord, Jennifer thought, almost paralyzed with terror, could Jesse swim? Had it been fear of Austin that sent her over the side? Whatever the answer, there was no time to think about it. Taking a breath, she said a quick prayer and jumped overboard, too.

  Elizabeth came awake slowly, realizing the clock on the mantel was striking the hour. A few seconds ticked by before she recalled where she was. With a wave of despair, she remembered Jesse and Jennifer.

  Her pillow, warm and firm, turned out to be Ryan’s arm. He lay wedged in the bend of the sofa and she was snuggled against him, her hand on his chest, as if in her troubled sleep she’d given in to the need for intimacy. She could feel the even movement of his chest and thought he must have been able to sleep, too. She lay for a moment thinking she should move. This was so terribly inappropriate. She should slip away and sit in the big club chair across the room and wait for news of the children. She shouldn’t disturb what rest he was able to get. He had as much at stake as she. But that would mean waiting out the rest of the night alone in cold panic. Instead, she lay in the warm cocoon that almost shut out the harsh reality they shared. His chest was broad and warm, she discovered, cautiously moving her hand over the crinkly feel of hair through the fabric of his shirt. She wished his chest was bare so that her palm, opened wide now, could touch skin and muscle. She drifted a while in her fantasy and was startled when he suddenly gripped her wrist.

  “You’re going to have to stop that, darlin’,” he said, his voice a deep, low rumble near her ear, “or be ready to take the consequences.”

  She lay very still, not mistaking his intent. To stop now would be to risk nothing. There was safety in staying free of involvement, which is what she’d been doing for more years than she wanted to count. Evan’s betrayal had made her feel less of a woman. Ryan, she knew, would take pleasure in erasing that insecurity. And yet he wouldn’t go where she didn’t wish. Still, she felt the impatience in him now. He was a man who pushed an advantage, as she’d experienced in the short number of weeks she’d known him.

  Her nod was barely a whisper of movement, but he felt it. With one hand, he began working at the buttons on his shirt. When he had it open, he took her palm and placed it flat on his skin. “Try it that way,” he said in a thick tone.

  The skin was firm and warm to her touch, the muscle as solid as the thud of his heart. She sifted through the hair on his chest with delight, moving her hand leisurely, savoring the smooth, male texture of him, tweaking the tiny pebble of a nipple. Then she cautiously touched her tongue to it, drawing from him a muffled sound, a cross between a groan and a painful wince. Now her own body was heating up, going weak and urgent at the same time. She moved restlessly, pressing her thigh against the erection he could not conceal and she felt a thrill that she could arouse a man like Ryan. Then, with a shock, she realized that her own need was as fierce as his. She slipped her arms around him and lifted her face to his.

  His eyes, locked with hers, were ablaze in the dark. “Are you sure?” he managed to say.

  She nodded, burying her face in his chest. “Make me forget, Ryan.”

  He hesitated as if her reply fell short of what he wanted to hear. When he didn’t move, she looked up again, both her hands on his chest. “I need this. I need you,” she said.

  And for an instant, she thought he was going to stop. She felt panic, a tiny spurt of fear that she’d taken the risky step she’d carefully avoided for years only to have it thrown back in her face. She could feel his heart running away. He wanted her. And yet he wanted something more from her than she was ready to give. He might be tempted to reject whatever she was offering, but she knew it would cost him.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Liz.”

  “I know.” It would not be intentional. He didn’t have a wife tucked away somewhere. She was free. He was free. Still, she was one heartbeat away from pushing back and running to hide in her bedroom. But then he seized her face in his hands. “And I’m not going away, lady. If it’s not tonight, it’ll be soon.”

  “I would survive even if you did.” But would she? That was the source of her panic, she admitted, the certainty that Ryan had come to mean more to her than any man she’d ever met in her life. That she wouldn’t be able to throw herself into some
thing—anything—and pick up the pieces and go on as she had once before.

  “Are we having an argument?” he asked, his smile a little off center. “I have to tell you, it’s not a good time.”

  “I think you started it.”

  He lowered his lips to hers, barely touching her. “Then I’m ending it.”

  The easy caress of his hands had her muscles turning to water and her doubts slipping out of reach. With his mouth at her ear, he had her blouse open before she came to her senses. Heat radiated all through her as he curled a hand around a breast then bent to kiss a tingling nipple. “I could do this a lot better in a bed,” he told her, all the while he was slowly undressing the rest of her, laying kisses on her skin as it was bared.

  In a daze, she stood up and let him take her by the hand to her bedroom. By the time he lowered her to the bed, her shirt and pants lay on the floor in a tangle with Ryan’s. But she had no time to admire the look of him wearing nothing, because he was touching her everywhere. He was so good at this, she thought with distraction, dizzy with the pleasure of his hands and mouth and tongue streaking over her. She had a fleeting worry that she might disappoint him. She had loved Evan passionately, but their actual lovemaking hadn’t been particularly satisfying.

  But this. This! Ryan made her feel feminine and desirable. He made her feel that she was everything he needed, that his need for her wouldn’t be satisfied with a single night in her bed. Then the ability to think was gone. She came once with his hand between her legs, then again when he entered her. She rose to meet him and they moved together, their pleasure heightened by the sheer joy of discovering how well they fit. And when she was ready to erupt again, he buried his face in her auburn hair and took them both over the edge.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Louie told me that you once wanted to be a lawyer,” Ryan said in a quiet voice. There had been other hints dropped by Louie about Liz’s past and he hadn’t followed up on anything. Now he found he wanted to know everything. “Why did you give it up?”

  She lay facing him, propped on one elbow. “Circumstances. When it was time to enter law school, fate intervened. Besides, writing for children gives me far more satisfaction than arguing the rights of defendants in a courtroom.”

  “Fate intervened. What does that mean?”

  Taking her time, she traced the shape of his biceps with one finger. “A few weeks before I was to enter law school, I discovered that I was pregnant.” She raised her eyes to his.

  “Pregnant.”

  “Yes.”

  She’d pulled up the sheet and covered her beautiful breasts after they’d made love. He’d thought her endearingly modest. They hadn’t turned on a lamp in their haste to get to her bed. Now, he wondered if there were signs, not that he’d care. As a lover, she was warm and responsive and giving. And oddly innocent. “Was it a love affair gone wrong?”

  “It was never love, although I thought it was the real thing at the time.”

  “Did the baby not survive?”

  “Or did I have an abortion, you ask? No, neither.”

  “Am I asking too many questions?”

  She touched his mouth with the tips of her fingers, smiling softly. “You’re a lawyer. That’s what lawyers do.”

  “I don’t want to ask anything you don’t want to tell me, Liz.”

  She shifted, settling back on two pillows propped against the headboard. “When I was a senior in college, I got involved with a married man. Here’s a joke. He was a judge.”

  Ryan now lay propped on one elbow, facing her. “I bet he was older than you, too.”

  “A lot,” she said dryly. “I know what you’re thinking and it’s probably true. I was looking for a father figure. But what I was thinking was that he was handsome and sophisticated and wise, and why in the world had he chosen me?” She touched her chest with her fingers.

  “Because you were special? And intelligent, beautiful and young? Just a guess,” he said with a shrug.

  “I discovered he was married when I told him I was pregnant.” She turned her face to the window. “I will never forget that evening. We never went anywhere that he might be recognized—which shows how genuinely dumb I really was. I’d prepared a special meal in my apartment. He’d said he loved me, many times, so I assumed that he’d be pleased about our baby.” Her laugh was short and humorless. “Not only was he displeased, but he was furious. He accused me of deliberately trying to trap him into marriage. He said I was a scheming little—well, he used a word that I hate—and that he already had a wife. She was in academia as well and spending a year in Europe. He said that he wasn’t about to be stuck with child support for the next eighteen years and I was to get an abortion immediately.”

  Ryan forced himself to breathe evenly, wishing to have just five minutes with the bastard. “But that wasn’t an option, right?”

  She looked at him. “I seriously considered it. I even made the appointment and showed up at the clinic. Gina went with me.”

  “Were you going to get rid of the baby thinking to continue the affair?”

  “I was going to get rid of both the baby and the judge.”

  He didn’t know if she was aware that her hands were cradling the place where her child had once been. He placed a hand over hers. “What happened?”

  “When it came right down to it, I couldn’t do it. But I was lucky,” she said. “Many young women who screw up and find themselves pregnant don’t have options. My father left a trust fund. I had enough income to live on, so I went to work in a bookstore, mostly to keep myself from thinking and brooding over what a fool I’d been, and it gave me something to do to pass the time.”

  “Did you intend to keep the baby?”

  “No, although I wanted to with all my heart. I knew what a childhood without both parents was like. I couldn’t subject my child to that.” She pulled one hand from beneath his and turned his palm up, linking her fingers with his. Her eyes, when she looked at him, were too bright. “Giving him up was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. It was sheer hell.”

  “But very unselfish.”

  “It didn’t feel unselfish. It just felt painful.”

  He could imagine her anguish. And now that he knew, he understood why she was so protective of Jesse. Why she fretted when Gina neglected the little girl. Why guilt would kill her if anything happened to Jesse now. And why it was so difficult for her to trust a man. Any man.

  “He had black hair,” she said in a dreamy voice. “And probably dark eyes, but you don’t know so early. Seven pounds, six ounces, twenty-one inches long. He’s ten years old and lives in Denver today.”

  “Wow.”

  She turned so that their faces were almost touching. “I had a chance to be a mother and I gave it away, Ryan. If something happens to Jesse or Jennifer, I just don’t think I can survive it.”

  “We’ll find them, Liz.”

  She lifted a shoulder in a helpless little gesture. “I keep worrying about Austin’s mental state. He has to find a way to get Jesse away from here. That has to be the purpose of this crazy stunt. If he uses the car he rented, he’ll have to be on public roads. He can’t fly. So what would he do? I keep asking my—”

  “The boat.” Ryan sat up abruptly. “Curtiss Leggett’s boat.” He threw off the sheet and hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That’s it! Son of a gun, why didn’t I think of it before? I knew there was something—”

  “You think Austin has them on a boat?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “I can’t see Curtiss Leggett being a party to a kidnapping.”

  Ryan was up now and reaching for his pants. “I don’t think Austin would ask permission, but Curtiss has a Bertram that could easily cruise for days, long enough to get Austin to his destination. And there’s a way to find out fast.” He rammed his arm through a shirtsleeve. “I can put in a call to Steele and have him check the Galveston marina where Curtiss docks his boat.”

  “Is he as skilled
operating a boat as his father?”

  “No. And that’s why we have to hurry.”

  Steele picked up his cell phone on the first ring. “Ryan, I was just about to call you. We’ve spotted the SUV and you’ll never guess where.”

  “Galveston?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Steele said after a surprised moment. “It’s parked at the yacht club and we’re in the process of checking the people who’re registered for rooms there tonight.”

  “Send somebody else to do that,” Ryan said, sweeping up his car keys. “Go down to the marina and find Curtiss Leggett’s Bertram. If it’s put out to sea, notify the Coast Guard to try and intercept it. If not, see that it doesn’t leave the dock. Meanwhile, Liz and I are on our way.”

  The water was cold. Jennifer fought her way up to the surface, gasping from the shock as much as the need for air. She’d dived near the place where Jesse had jumped, or so she hoped. And prayed. The water was filthy, slick with the oily stuff that boats gave off. And now that she was in the water, she realized how slim the chances were of finding Jesse. Little kids who couldn’t swim could drown in a heartbeat.

  Can you swim, Jesse?

  Above her on the boat, Austin was cursing and pacing, but he wasn’t jumping in to save his daughter, Jennifer noted with disgust, although he was looking real crazylike over the side of the big Bertram. It was all going to be up to her. She took a frantic look around and then drew in a deep breath, prepared to dive.

  “Jennifer, here I am.”

  Jennifer thought her heart would jump right out of her chest. The words came in a hissing kind of whisper, but it was Jesse, no doubt about it. And she had enough sense not to say it loud enough for her nutty dad to hear. Jennifer squinted across the black water, trying to locate her. Beneath the dock were countless pilings which made it difficult to spot anything, especially a little kid.

  “Where are you, Jesse?” She kept her voice as low as possible. Not that there was much chance of the nutcase hearing anything. He was still ranting and raving and he hadn’t even had the brains to turn off the engines. Actually, he was calling Jesse’s name over and over. Maybe he got some credit for that, she thought.