By ten o’clock Mark still hadn’t awakened. His snores, ragged but blissful-sounding, continually reminded her that he was sacked out one thin wall away. She was on the couch, dressed for sleeping in one of Mark’s T-shirts, so big on her it hit her at mid-thigh, and a pair of the plain white cotton panties. Having stolen a pillow from the bed and found a quilt folded on the bedroom closet shelf, she had made herself as comfortable as possible.
To keep herself from dwelling on the possibility that the black-ops death squad had discovered their hideaway and was even now creeping up on it with guns drawn, she turned the TV on. Low. So low, in fact, that she had to strain to hear the CSI episode that wasn’t really all that interesting anyway. Once she heard footsteps in the hall outside and her heart went haywire and she almost ran for Mark, but whoever it was went into another apartment, and after that silence reigned. Too nervous to turn on a lamp, Jess tried to read selected sections of the paper by the faint light of the TV. The comics, Ann Landers, and sports all provided a welcome distraction from the fear that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her gut.
She was even starting to get sleepy until she turned a page and found a picture of herself in the paper. Actually, two. One as a little girl. Soaking wet, wrapped in a blanket, and staring big-eyed at the camera. The other as she was now. With contacts, not glasses, taken from her driver’s license.
Death Car Survivor Had Previous Brush with Death, the headline read.
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Jess didn’t have to read the accompanying story to know what it said. Even as the paper fell from her fingers, she felt impossibly familiar waves of grief and pain. It had been so long now—she never thought of it anymore. Never, except maybe in the most secret depths of her deepest dreams. It was a tragedy of her past, long over. Long put behind her.
It could not make her feel this way anymore.
Standing up, she started to head for the bathroom and stubbed her toe hard on the coffee table.
“Ow! Shit! Damn it!” Clutching her injured foot, she hopped a couple of times, then sank back down on the couch, displacing more of the paper, which fluttered to the floor. Cradling her foot in her lap, rocking back and forth as she cursed under her breath now, she glanced down and saw the picture of herself looking up at her. Kicking at it with her uninjured foot, she closed her eyes.
She did not need this on top of everything else.
“Hey. I heard you yell. You all right?” Mark’s voice made her jump. Her eyes flew open, her head jerked around, and she saw him standing there in the doorway, frowning at her, wearing only his boxers, with his gun in his hand. It was an indication of her state of mind that her gaze slid over him exactly once, and she didn’t even flinch from the gun.
“Fine.”
“Are you crying?”
To her horror, Jess realized she was: She could feel the warm, wet slide of tears trickling down her cheeks.
Turning her head away, she swiped at her cheeks with both hands. “No.”
“What the hell?” Padding toward her, he put the gun down on the table at her elbow, then stopped in front of her. By dint of much blinking and sheer force of will, she got the tears under control. With her peripheral vision, she saw a very masculine-looking bare foot and a long, powerful-looking leg. A section of muscular stomach. A sliver of wide chest. A buff arm. “Did something happen?”
She wasn’t quite ready to look at him again yet. “I stubbed my toe, okay?”
“Hard enough to make you cry? Let me see.”
“It ’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
She heard him sigh. Then he sank down beside her on the couch. Feeling the brush of warm, bare male flesh and realizing she couldn’t order him to scoot over because of the pillow and blanket now piled on the rest of the couch, she looked at him with a forbidding frown. A well-muscled naked shoulder and a sculpted chest filled her vision as he reached for her foot, the one that rested in her lap. His hand slid around her instep, holding her foot still, his fingers long and strong. He leaned closer, peering at her toes.
“No blood. Can you move them?”
She jerked her foot from his grasp, put it on the carpet, and shot him a “back off ” look. “I told you. It ’s fine.”
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking down.
“Is that you?”
She already knew what he was reaching for even as he bent forward. The light from the TV played over the rippling muscles of his bare back, and she watched it as if mesmerized, trying her best to hold off the moment she knew was coming. The rustle of the paper being picked up made her grit her teeth and look away. She realized in that split second that he was going to read the article and they were going to talk about it, nothing she could do to stop it at all, and she needed a moment to steel herself.
“It’s too dark in here for me to read anything but the headline,” he said a moment later, and Jess felt a tiny frisson of relief until he continued, “so we can do one of two things: You can tell me what it says, or I can turn on a light and read it for myself.”
The idea of turning on a light, a light that would certainly be visible around the edges of the drapes and through the kitchen blinds and under the door, a light that could possibly lead to the killers that were certainly still hunting them finding them, made her shiver.
He was still holding the paper with the two photos topmost. She couldn’t look at them.
“My father took my sister and me to the beach when we were little.” Since there was clearly no help for it, she gave him the bare bones, her tone expressionless. “We got caught up in an undertow. He came out to try to save us. Courtney—my sister’s name was Courtney—and my father drowned. I managed to make it back to shore.”
For a moment her voice just seemed to hang in the air while the memories—the water closing over her head, her sister’s tiny hands dragging at hers, the punishing waves forcing them apart—hit her.
“Jesus. I’m sorry, baby.” Another rattle as he set the paper down on the coffee table. Then his arm came around her, bringing with it the smell of soap and warm male flesh. Jess felt the solid heaviness of it circling her shoulders, the comforting grip of his hand on her arm, the squeeze of a hug, and tensed. Until she got the memories corralled again, sympathy was the last thing she needed. She had to stay tough, stay strong, force them back. “I remember now. They ran all kinds of stories about you on TV this past week, and one of them said something about that. To tell you the truth, it kind of tore my heart out.”
“It was on . . . TV?” Jess could hardly breathe at the thought of the whole world watching something so personal. He was looking at her. She could feel his gaze on her face, but she couldn’t look back at him. She could only stare straight ahead, braced against the pain she knew would come if she didn’t armor herself against it.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly Jess remembered, while she was in the hospital, Grace saying something about the press wanting to talk to her because she was “the survivor.” With an emphasis, like it had a special significance. And her mother saying, “Grace, don’t worry your sister.” This was what they must have been talking about. Grace, like Sarah and Maddie, the children of Judy’s second husband, hadn’t even been born at the time of the accident, so it wasn’t much more than a curiosity to her, but their mother knew how deeply the tragedy was seared into Jess’s soul.
She and Courtney had been inseparable.
“I don’t ever even think about it anymore. It was a long time ago.”
“You were five, weren’t you? That’s a tough age to lose people you love.”
She remembered that he’d said his father had died when he was four.
“Were you close to your father?” she asked, barely breathing. It felt as if there was an iron band around her chest limiting the amount of air she could take in.
“Not really. From what I’ve been told, he was gone all the time, working.” His hand tightened on her arm and he pulled her more firmly against hi
s side. Jess refused to allow herself to relax against him. She was too intent on keeping the pain away. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember him at all. He ’s just somebody standing there with my mother and me in old pictures.”
It wasn’t so much sadness in his voice but regret, she realized. As if he wanted to remember and was sorry he couldn’t. Jess took a careful breath.
“I can’t really remember my father, either. My parents had split up, and he wasn’t around a lot, so I guess that’s why. But I can remember my sister.”
“She was younger, right? Three, wasn’t it?”
Jess nodded, surprised he remembered the details so well. He must have been watching the program closely, and the knowledge both touched and comforted her. What had he said? That watching had just about torn his heart out?
The thought made her dizzy. Some of the stiffness left her body. Hardly aware of her own softening, she let herself rest against him.
“Want to tell me about it?” His voice was almost unbearably gentle.
Her automatic answer, the answer she’d always given to anybody who had ever tried to probe her memories of the tragedy, was “no.” But this was Mark. And, well, suddenly she just wanted him to know. For whatever reason.
She took another, deeper breath, and this time her lungs actually expanded to let in sufficient air.
“We were wading in the surf. My dad and his girlfriend were lying on towels on the sand, and I was supposed to be watching Courtney. She had those little floaty things on her arms, and she kept sitting down in the water and letting the waves carry her in. Only one of them pulled her out. She was laughing; she thought it was great because she was riding the wave. I was trying to catch her—I could swim a little—and I couldn’t. Then one of her floaty things came off. I can still see it; it was clear with yellow-and-white fish on it, bobbing toward me. She went under, and I started screaming for help and dog-paddling toward her as fast as I could, only I couldn’t see her anymore. Then she popped up right beside me and I caught her, caught her hands, and we both got dragged under again, and then she got pulled away from me. I came up and I saw her come up, too far away for me to grab her this time, but I saw her looking at me. She ’d lost her other floaty thing by then and her eyes—she had blue eyes, like Mom, and dark hair like me—were big and wide and scared, and she was opening her mouth—I always thought it was to call to me, but I don’t know for sure—when another wave broke over her. I think my dad went rushing past me about that time, but I don’t really remember that. What I remember is Courtney’s eyes, and then a wave breaking over her and over me and me somehow winding up near the beach where somebody pulled me to shore.” She broke off and closed her eyes. “The next time I saw her, she was lying in a little white coffin at the front of our church. I touched her—I thought if I touched her she would wake up—and she was cold. And still. And she didn’t wake up.”
The pain that engulfed her as she finished was so intense that it made her shudder. Bracing against it, refusing to cry, she did what she had learned to do over the years: endure it until it ebbed.
“Jess.” Both Mark’s arms were around her now. He must have felt her violent quiver because he shifted his grip on her, lifting her onto his lap, holding her close. She felt something brush the top of her head, and thought it might have been his lips. “That’s a hell of a thing. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
Jess took a moment to just breathe. Sure enough, the sharpness of the pain, the hard edges of it that cut like knives, went away. What was left was a dull ache that would recede, too, if left alone, burying itself deep within her subconscious until something called it forth again.
“It was a long time before I would babysit any of the others. My mom used to get so mad at me.” She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work. Judy’s steely determination not to let grief disable either of them had been hard on her until she had gotten old enough to recognize it for the courage it was.
“Baby, it wasn’t your fault. You were five years old.”
It was twenty-three years in the past, and the guilt was still there. Buried under layers of time and reason but still there. He’d gone right to the heart of what had tormented her most over all the intervening years.
“I know.” Silently she added, but still. “I actually don’t ever think about it anymore. Unless something reminds me.”
“Like seeing an article about it in the damned paper.” His hand rubbed up and down her arm in rough comfort. Relaxing as the pain slipped away just as she had known it would, Jess rested her head against his shoulder. “Jesus, I wish you hadn’t gotten caught up in this.”
That almost made her smile. She slanted a look up at him. “You and me both, believe me.”
“ ’ Course, we wouldn’t have met.”
Her brows twitched together. Her head came up again. Straightening her glasses, she gave him a severe look. “For the record, we met months ago. When you brought the First Lady to Mr. Davenport’s office. You smiled at me. We talked. We talked several times after that, too.”
“I don’t remember.”
“That’s not exactly flattering, you know.”
The look he gave her was almost surprised. Then he smiled.
“When I’m working I don’t see anything except my principal and threats to my principal. Angelina Jolie could dance naked in front of me and I wouldn’t notice.”
Jess suddenly found herself looking at the history of their acquaintance in a whole new light.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“That ’s good to know.”
“Is it?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “You didn’t see me—which is what I thought—but it was for a reason. That makes it much better.”
“I’m not following you.”
Jess smiled. “Never mind. It ’s not important.”
She was suddenly acutely aware that she was sitting on his lap with his arms around her, and all he was wearing was a pair of boxers. Unbelievable that she’d registered the broad strokes of it but missed all the tiny details until now. The shirt she was wearing had ridden up, and her new panties were on the substantial side, but still she could feel the heat of him burning through them, and the solid muscularity of his thighs. Her bare legs lay on top of his so that the silkiness of her skin slid over the hair-roughened firmness of his every time one of them moved. Her shoulder butted into naked male chest. It was wide and buff and, she noticed with interest now that she was capable of noticing such things, sported a wedge of ash-brown hair that stretched from one flat male nipple to the other and tapered down over a trim abdomen and out of sight.
She glanced up to discover that he was looking at her. Looking at her looking at him, to be precise. There was something in his expression, a sudden sensuous glint to his eyes, a curve to his mouth that made her heart beat faster. His thighs felt harder, his arms around her more tense.
I want you so much. That ’s the thought that ran through her head as their eyes met, just as it had once before. Only this time, his eyes widened and blazed in response, and Jess realized to her horror that she hadn’t just thought it but said it aloud.
It was all she could do not to clap a hand over her own mouth.
Her dismay must have been apparent in her face, because he smiled, a slow sexy curve of his mouth that made her stomach clench and her blood heat and her heart turn over.
“Good to know,” he said.
Then he bent his head and touched his lips to hers.
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It was a gentle kiss, not hard or demanding at all, but the heat and thoroughness of it made her dizzy. Her lips parted. Her eyes closed. Her hands found his chest as her heart began to pound—and then he lifted his head.
“Mmm.” She made an involuntary sound of protest. Her lids rose to find that he was studying her face, his eyes dark and hot, his mouth almost tender.
“Talk about your coincidences.” His face was still so close she could
feel his breath on her lips. Her parted, damp, yearning lips. Her hands splayed over his rib cage in silent supplication. Kiss me again. . . . But this time she didn’t say it out loud; she did have, she was thankful to discover, some control. “See, here I was thinking pretty much the same thing: I want you like hell.”
“That is a coincidence,” she managed, trying to keep some perspective, trying to keep from totally losing her head, and he smiled that sexy smile again.
Then he kissed her again, tilting her so that her head was tipped back against his hard-muscled upper arm, brushing his lips over hers, licking between them, tantalizing her until she shivered and closed her eyes and surged against him and put a stop to the teasing. Her mouth clung to his, greedily prolonging the contact, deepening it with a building urgency that sent fire shooting through her veins and melted her bones and made her pulse go crazy.
Forget perspective. Forget not losing my head—it’s too late. Jeez, I’m in so much trouble here.
She knew it, recognized the future pain she was almost certainly storing up for herself, and she didn’t care. Her hands slid up over his chest, luxuriating in the freedom to touch him, taking sudden intense pleasure in the warmth of his skin, the firmness of his muscles. His shoulders were broad and thickly muscled, and she loved touching them, too, loved sliding her hands along the brawny smoothness of them before surrendering to the need to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him like she burned for him—which she did.
His arms around her tightened as he kissed her back with a torrid eroticism that sent her senses spinning. He was holding her so close now that she could feel every taut muscle and sinew of his chest and arms, feel the heat of him radiating through her shirt, feel the racing of his heart. Her breasts swelled and tightened and tingled at the contact. With a tiny, pleasure-filled sound, she undulated instinctively against him as the hot, rhythmic quickening in her loins intensified and spread, making her go almost mindless with anticipation, with need. Pressing her breasts harder against him, she squirmed deliberately in his lap, feeling his instant response with an upsurge of desire that made her shake.
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