And always there were the kisses—long, drugging, hot, hungry. Through them they gauged the mounting pulse of their passion, until glistening with sweat and feverish with longing for more, for everything, Zach coaxed her on top of him.
“You realize what a risk this is,” he warned softly, although his eyes relayed the message that he would die if she changed her mind.
Willa could think of two or three things he could mean, but she’d already come to peace with all of them. Slowly, ever so slowly, she eased herself down, careful as she took him into her body. They had already stretched the waiting beyond bearable. “We’ll talk about it…later,” she whispered back.
After that she couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to because where there had been hunger and passion, now there was desperation. Obsession. They didn’t explore, they clung and rode…existed on one breath…reached for one summit.
In the last second they looked into each other’s eyes. Hope, fear, yearning…all were there, along with something fragile and new. Murmuring unintelligibly, Zach sought a final kiss. Seconds later, Willa felt him explode inside her and, gasping, she surrendered to her own release.
It was beyond perfect, and she understood now that this had all been inevitable. They were too sexually attuned to have escaped each other. But in the peace and tremulous silence that followed, she wasn’t prepared for the added gift of wonder that shimmered sweetly between them.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Is it later yet?” Zach murmured, unable to take his eyes off the woman lying beside him. He hadn’t really wanted to ask. Already his body, too long denied such pleasure, was responding to her closeness, while his mind, rarely at peace at the best of times, waged silent war with known and unknown monsters.
Willa rose on one elbow, her expression luminous and gentle. “I didn’t mean to sound mysterious. I just didn’t want to ruin the mood.”
He couldn’t decide what he found more stimulating: her slow, slightly wicked smile, or her soft, feminine voice. The fantasy of watching the former and listening to the latter for the rest of his life was extremely appealing and, therefore, dangerous. He had to temper the panic that caused by sucking in a deep breath.
“You shouldn’t have put yourself at risk for me,” he said, once again lured by the silky feel of her hair.
“But did I, Zach? Neither one of us has been with anyone in years. What’s more, during your time in the hospital, they would have discovered if you were ill. You would have told me.”
Of course he would. But that wasn’t what he’d meant. “What about birth control?”
“I was on the Pill when A.J. died We wanted a bit more time to enjoy each other before we thought about starting a family. After…well, I was an emotional and physical wreck. My doctor thought it best if I kept taking them.” Again the smile crept out. “Ironically, I’m on my last prescription. She’s decided it’s time I consider other options.”
She would be a wonderful mother—nurturing and yet strong enough to let her children experiment, take risks and grow. He, on the other hand, wouldn’t know where to begin caring for a son or daughter. Hell, half the time he did a lousy job of trying to take care of himself.
“That wasn’t a proposal, Zach.”
He’d once read of an old witch doctor who claimed that when a man poured himself into a woman, it made him transparent. He’d never had reason to believe that until tonight.
“You shouldn’t be wasting your time on me. You deserve someone who could give you a full life. Children. A normal home.” The more he admitted to her, the tighter his throat became. The more he needed to touch her. “I’m not even sure I ever knew what ‘normal’ was.”
He expected his confession to upset her; after all, what rat seduced a woman, and only afterward warned her that he wasn’t worth an emotional investment? Instead, she continued watching him in that calm, serene way that turned his insides into a knot.
“I’ll put an ad in the paper advertising for that, first thing Monday morning.”
She was right; he did sound like a jerk who was pretending to be noble. But he knew himself too well. “I come with a lot of baggage, Willa.”
“Most people do. What makes you think yours is so unmanageable?”
He didn’t know if he could put it into words. He’d never told this to anyone. “As a kid I had an ordinary family life, in an ordinary small town in Pennsylvania—or so it seemed. My father was the area’s only vet, my mother helped him and I was the model son. No one ever held it against us for not going to church on Sundays because there were always patients to attend to and emergencies out at someone’s farm. No one ever thought it odd when a beloved pet didn’t survive an operation or that my father always volunteered to find homes for unwanted litters. People were simply glad to be rid of them.”
Willa’s expression turned wary. “What did he do with them?”
He hesitated, knowing it would be the last time she would ever look at him quite the same way. “Sacrificed most. Ate some.”
“No. Oh, no, Zach!”
She sat up and whirled away. Zach watched her take several deep breaths, press her hand to her mouth. She was so beautiful with her silver-and-gold hair shimmering down her back in sexy disarray, the long, elegant line of her back. But her shoulders were rigid with tension, her spine ready to snap. He waited, not knowing what she would do next, nor certain how to go on. He only knew that she couldn’t be any more ashamed, or despise him more than he loathed himself.
When she finally faced him again there were tears of compassion in her eyes. Not horror, he thought in amazement.
“How did you bear it?”
“Who said I did?” Could he dare believe what he was seeing? Hearing? “Even my earliest memories, when I was four or five, I remember it sickened me, and I tried to resist when they made me participate in the rituals. But they punished me.”
“How?”
“I’ll never burden you with those details.”
“Zach—”
“Never, Willa. The point is that if I wanted to survive, I had to submit. Sometimes I still have nightmares, wake up sick to my stomach and terrified.” Just talking about it had him breaking out in a sweat, so cold, so different than what he’d experienced when they’d made love.
“Let me get you something.” Willa slipped off the bed. “Is there a beer in the refrigerator?”
“There’s Scotch on the counter. With or without ice, it doesn’t matter.”
It helped watching her, noting her unselfconsciousness, how her concern was all for him. What had he done to deserve this? Feeling an uncharacteristic lump in his throat, he sat up and bunched the pillows. “Thanks,” he mumbled, avoiding her eyes when she returned with the bottle and a tumbler filled with ice.
“Don’t think I want you to drink the whole thing.”
He made a face as he poured. “So you’ve seen that I prefer taking my nourishment in liquid form?”
“You can’t keep producing all you do while drinking like that, Zach.”
“Yeah, well, living to a ripe old age so some TV weatherman can flash a picture of me with a birthday cake resembling a brushfire gone out of control, isn’t an inducement to hang around, honey.” He tried not to think of the downstairs window, and how grateful he was to be alive, to have followed his instincts and come back to the house.
He’d barely taken a generous swallow when Willa took the glass and bottle away and set them on the night table. “If you’re going to talk like that, I’m going to ration you. Now go on. Tell me how you escaped.”
“You don’t ever escape. You can’t. Not your memories.”
“You survived,” Willa said, taking his hand in both of hers. “What’s more, you want to survive, despite the shame and the haunting memories. I see it, Zach. It’s in your eyes when you look at me.”
Dear God, if he was dreaming, he never wanted to wake up. “You’re one sharp cookie, Mrs. Whitney.”
“And stubborn. Tell me t
he rest,” she coaxed, squeezing his hand.
It helped to focus on their linked fingers. “When I was nine, after one of my attempts to run away, they let it slip that I was adopted.” As if it were yesterday, he recalled the strange mixture of relief and fury he’d felt at the time. “It filled me with rage—well, as much rage as a nine-year-old can muster for a system that was so careless about putting a child into a home they hadn’t investigated thoroughly. After that, I became obsessed with escaping. Two months later I did.”
“Did you report them to the police?”
He smirked. “Only the first time I ran away. I never made that mistake again.”
With a moan, Willa shifted to brush his hair off his forehead and to kiss him there. “I can’t bear to think of how it was for you being all alone with nowhere to go, trusting no one.”
“It was heaven compared to where I’d been. Oh, it had its scary moments—I stole as much money as I could, but a few days later I got rolled and beaten up pretty badly. But after that I stayed away from cities, learned to travel at night to avoid the law who kept wanting to put me in juvenile homes.” He chuckled to himself. “Ten minutes around me and you knew I wasn’t a candidate for a foster home, let alone adoption.”
“What about school? How did you manage?”
“I never went to formal school again. As for surviving, I became a proficient thief.” He shrugged, not proud of it, but knowing at the time there had been no other way for him. “Then I found Lotty. This was in Tennessee and I was about…eleven. She was a retired schoolteacher. A sweet, sweet black woman, big as she was tall. She worked the acreage her husband had toiled over until he’d died of exhaustion.” Zach smiled, finally feeling the easing of the tension and coldness that always came when memories hurled him into the past.
“She took you in.”
He nodded. “And that tells you how brave she was because I was one tough customer. Wild. Sick, too…and I’m not just talking physically. She saved my life, pulled me back from the edge of madness—” from the valley of the shadow of death “—and she gave me an education.”
“So that’s where your gift for storytelling came from,” Willa said, lowering herself to his chest and kissing him over his heart. “Oh, I know I would have loved her. How long were you two together?”
“Almost five years. One night she gave me a volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. Said she’d prayed for a long time to the good Lord to stop my nightmares and screaming. Seeing as He hadn’t seen fit to do that, it struck her that maybe I was supposed to use them somehow. Then she went to bed and passed away in her sleep.” He’d cried like a baby, and although she’d said numerous times that the farm had been willed to him, he’d left right after her funeral. It was years before he returned, after he’d been published and had started to climb on the charts. By then he knew the right thing to do with the property, and signed it over to a young newlywed couple, relations of Lotty’s friends and closest neighbors.
“Now you know,” he said, stroking Willa’s hair.
“Did you ever find out about…?”
“There was a fire and he died.” Zach still refused to call the man who’d adopted him by name. “No one seems to know what happened to her. I hope they’re both burning in hell with their master.
Willa immediately sat up, and grasped his shoulders. “Don’t, Zach. Don’t let the bitterness and pain own a part of you anymore.”
“It is a part of me,” he nearly shouted, exasperated that she hadn’t listened. “That’s what I’ve been explaining to you. Bitterness, pain, fear, madness…they feed my work, and eat at me all at the same time. You want to understand me? Understand that I’ve faced death more than most lead-footed drivers deal with traffic tickets. I’ve been beaten and tortured, manipulated and threatened. I know what it is to look into the faces of the most despicable and soulless human beings and understand them. And I can’t stop writing about any of it or them,” he ground out, “because they’re still out there—the Judiths and the stalkers and the satanists and child abusers…all the monsters who look so damned safe. So trusting. So normal!”
“That doesn’t mean you’re like them. You’re not crazy!” she cried back.
He couldn’t yell at her anymore. It turned his stomach to see what that did to her. But saving her from what was outside and himself remained his priority. “I will go over the edge, Willa,” he replied, resigned. “Do you know when that day will be? When whoever’s out there gets to you. And as long as you have anything to do with me, they’ll try.”
“I’m not turning my back on you, Zach.” She touched his cheek, his lips. “After this is over, you can put steel bars on your windows and dig a moat around your house to keep me out. But until then I’m not letting you wait in the dark alone.”
“Then heaven help us both,” he moaned, dragging her closer and locking his mouth to hers.
This wasn’t the way he planned things to go. He’d lost. He’d failed in making her realize what a mistake she was making. And yet losing had never filled him with such relief or felt this good. Later, somehow, he would have to make her see reason. But just once more he wanted to experience the sweet, hot ecstasy of loving her.
As before, merely kissing her intoxicated him. He couldn’t get enough, whether he crushed her against him, framed her face with his hands to hold her still for his hungry plundering or plowed his fingers into her hair and tilted back her head to feast on every inch of her face and throat.
But Willa, too, seemed swept away by the wild current of their passion. He’d only started to reexplore her sleek curves, hadn’t begun to sate himself on the full taut breasts that fanned his flaming imagination when she reached down to take him in her hand. “Come inside me. Now. I want to hold you.”
She stole his heart and his soul. Feeling control slipping away, he could only hold fast as she rocked and undulated against him. “Willa…sweet…please…please.”
They came apart in each other’s arms, crying and gasping. And in that moment he knew life had never been more precious to him.
She fell asleep quickly. He couldn’t. Comfortable though he was, sated, as happy as he dared be, Zach’s racing mind would give him no peace.
He was falling in love, and it was wonderful.
But it was terrible, too, for on the heels of that revelation came the oppressive feelings that had driven him out of his house earlier in the evening, and they were returning with a vengeance. Bringing with them new ones, as well.
He had to stop the madness, stop Judith, but how? Damn it, who was her puppet?
Somewhere outside he heard a shrill scream. He shivered and instinctively tightened his arms around Willa because whatever it was, it had sounded almost human—or rather inhuman.
An owl, he told himself. Or a coyote. It was merely the night that toyed with the imagination; in that respect, he agreed with what one of his favorite poets, Ranier Maria Rilke, once wrote. Darkness did pull in everything. It made it its own and, therefore, mysterious. That’s all.
But after turning off the light and again attempting to sleep, the red-eyed demons behind his closed lids mocked and taunted his confidence and resolve. Resigned to a long night, he decided that at least he could watch Willa sleep in his arms.
Even that, however, didn’t keep him from listening just in case there was a repeat of that unholy cry.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Willa fought yet another yawn as the phone rang. “Good afternoon, Whimsy,” she said into the receiver, glad this was Sunday. They’d only opened minutes ago, and it was a relatively short day compared to weekdays—a good thing, since she’d only managed a minimum of sleep last night at Zach’s.
“Mrs. Whitney? Willa? This is Judith Denton.”
Nothing and no one could have chased away her grogginess faster. Willa gripped the curved edge of the check-out counter until the wood creaked in protest. “Yes, Mrs. Denton. What can I do for you?”
“What do you think?”
> Willa had expected a bold response, even a blunt one, but hardly this. “Excuse me? I’m not sure I understand.”
“I tried to call you at home earlier, but apparently you weren’t there.”
No, she hadn’t. At least not for longer than it took her to shower and dress for work. Before that she’d spent the morning making Zach his first real breakfast in who knew how long.
“I’m sorry I missed your call. What’s this about?”
“Haven’t you read the papers this morning? Watched the news?”
The woman’s attitude was truly trying. But because of her new closeness with Zach, Willa was determined to know what Judith was up to. “No. Between moving and catching up on things here, I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind on local goings-on. But you’re obviously trying to tell me something, so maybe you should get to the point.”
“There’s been a murder.”
She didn’t know what to say. “Excuse me? Do you mean your friend…?”
“No. Bless her, Nancy’s still in a coma, but holding on. This was another unfortunate soul. She was found near the creek around the corner from your street. You didn’t see the police on your way to the mall? I would imagine someone will be out there most of the day collecting evidence.”
Willa knew the spot she was referring to; only a quarter of a mile before her street, Cox Creek had a short bridge that transversed it. But the creek was more of a mosquito patch than a tributary, until it poured; then it became a body of water to be respected. “No. I took a shortcut. Are the police certain the two incidents are linked?”
“She has the same kind of markings on her neck that Nancy does, and her underwear is missing. You won’t read that in the paper. Detective Pruitt told me when he came to break the news.”
Watching for Willa Page 14