by Beverly Bird
She shrugged. “Same sheik.”
“Damn it, Cait!”
She threw her hands in the air. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to confide in me!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted back.
Suddenly Cait heard Jared Cross’s voice again. You do know that that sort of squabbling often indicates suppressed sexual attraction. She felt her skin heat. Then something else struck her and almost knocked her knees out from under her.
He wanted to know everything she was doing and why, and he was irritated that she wouldn’t tell him. He was acting like a jealous, frustrated lover.
“Errands,” she said quickly to get that possibility right out of her mind. “I have some errands that have accumulated, the kind of things that can only be done on weekdays.”
“Oh.”
“And last night I had dinner with Tabitha.”
“Monroe?”
“Yes. How many Tabithas do we know? Are you going to check out my story?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know, Sam. Why are you asking me in the first place?”
Their eyes met and her heart shifted. What she saw in his gaze was a man in misery, a man who didn’t understand what he was feeling and who no longer recognized himself in his own skin. How could that be? Her knees felt weak. Cait dragged over a foot-stool and sat on it.
“By the way,” she said thinly to change the subject, “those brownies were terrible.”
“I know.” He leaned back against the door, looking glum. “Houdini was batting them around the kitchen floor like they were hockey pucks.”
“He batted the ones you gave me?”
“Why? Did you actually eat one?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Not without chipping a tooth.”
“It’s your fault, you know. We were supposed to have dinner. You stood me up.”
“I said no.”
“Why?” he demanded. “Why are you fighting this?”
“Because I don’t know why you’re pushing it!” The words were bald, blurted and took even her by surprise. Cait flushed.
“To tell you the truth, neither do I.”
She laughed shakily. “Then we have something in common.”
“The question is, what do we do about it?”
She stood. “For my part, I’m going home to feed my cat. He found your brownies to be somewhat lacking in the goody department.”
“Cait…”
She got to the door and wrenched it open. Then she looked back at him. Her heart was keening. “Please, Sam. Please, just let it be.” Then she strode off.
By nine o’clock, Cait was exhausted. She took a book to bed, determined to keep her eyes open until ten. There was something abnormal about a grown, single woman going to sleep before at least one evening-news program, she thought drearily. Then she wondered when she had started doubting the orderly, sweet routine of her life.
When suddenly it was no longer enough, she realized.
The answer jarred her and she got up for a glass of milk. She passed the picture of her mother on the dresser and paused to pick it up. Steadiness had always been her greatest treasure, she thought, blinking back sudden tears. But her whole world was upside down now.
All she’d ever wanted was peace. Monotony had come to her with a price. She’d fought hard for it. She didn’t want to move to Laredo, because she’d already jumped from home to home so many times in her life she’d needed her own zip code. She didn’t want to love, because she didn’t want anyone else to ever leave her again and go away.
But she was moving because she had to—to protect herself and her child. And she was pretty sure she was falling in love with Sam whether she liked it or not.
Shaken, Cait went back to bed without getting the milk. She turned her bedside light out and was asleep before shadows gathered in the corners of her room again. Then, somewhere in the darkness, she heard his voice again. Hines’s.
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’ll hurt you. I’ll snap you in two.”
Cait groaned and rolled over in her sleep.
“You’re mine. You’ll always be mine. You’ll do what I say, when I say it.”
“No,” she murmured, struggling up from sleep.
The darkness of her bedroom pressed in on her. Safe, she realized, her heart thudding; she was safe. She was home in her own apartment. But perspiration clung to her skin like dew. Then she heard him again.
“Plan all you want. You’ll never get away from me.”
Cait emitted a cry and threw the covers off her. She scrambled over the edge and to her feet. He was here! She fumbled for her bedside light and turned it on. Electricity speared through the room, illuminating it.
No one was there. The clock read 1:52.
“You’re mine,” Hines said.
His voice was coming from the other room. Suddenly Cait was a madwoman. She looked around frantically for something she could use as a weapon. There was nothing. She dashed into her closet and came up with the high-heeled shoe she’d worn to the dance. Hines wasn’t a spider to be squashed. She knew that. He was a treacherous, cruel human being. But the shoe was all she had. If she could startle him enough with it, maybe she could get to a knife in the kitchen.
She gave a howl of pure fury and ran that way. The sound ricocheted off her ceiling and seemed to echo off her walls.
“I’ll come back to you soon enough,” he said.
The kitchen. Cait lunged that way. She was ready to find him, to fight him, to tear him apart. She stumbled into the kitchen and threw on the lights.
And still, there was no one.
She stood, trembling, listening, clutching her shoe. It had all been in her mind. But it had seemed so real.
Dr. Cross had said that the PTSD might get worse, that she could dream.
Cait made a keening sound of despair. She really was losing her mind. She thought she could actually feel something breaking inside her with the realization. All her resolve. All her determination. The break-in, the feelings that someone was watching her…all of that, she knew, was really as insubstantial as Hines’s ghost was now in her kitchen. The note wasn’t proof, after all, because she didn’t have it anymore.
Cait grabbed the kitchen phone. She leaned back against the wall and felt her legs folding. She sat, melting into a puddle on the floor, ashamed and scared. For a long time she only held the phone against her chest.
Then she called Sam.
Sam wasn’t sleeping, though he knew he’d regret it in the morning. He was in his kitchen with his heels up on the table, leaning back in one of the chairs, a photo album in his lap. It depicted life, he thought, as he had known it.
There were pictures of his parents, and some of them dated back forty-five years. He looked hard for a smile on either of their faces and actually found a few this time. He went through photos from the various weddings of his three sisters—two apiece—and snapshots of his brother in China. Max was in the Peace Corps and probably a lot happier for it, foot-loose and fancy-free.
It was a ritual Sam undertook whenever he felt himself getting shaky. Whenever he was seeing a woman who seemed to have him by the throat. Normally he looked at these pictures and, as Nancy had said, broke out in hives. This time it didn’t work. He found himself staring at the pictures for something he might have missed before. Something that would explain why, with every moment he spent with her, he wanted Cait more and more.
Then the phone rang, scattering his thoughts. Startled, Sam glanced at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning. No phone call was ever good in the wee hours. It meant a patient had taken a turn for the worse or—
Then he knew. It was Cait. His blood froze.
He came up out of the chair as though someone had set it on fire. He lunged for the red phone on the kitchen wall.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Hines,” Cait’s voice whisp
ered back, “I think. I don’t know…. Oh, God, Sam, I just don’t know.”
His heart stopped. “Where?”
“In my kitchen.”
Sam slammed down the telephone. Though it defied reason, he knew she’d know he hadn’t hung up on her, that he was on his way.
He was out the door and standing on his balcony before he realized he was heading for his car in his boxer shorts. He swore and went back to his apartment. She needed him. And this time, damn it, this time he would do something about it. He wouldn’t let her down.
He pulled on jeans and ran downstairs to the parking lot. It was a well-known fact that Maseratis needed to warm up when they’d been left cold for a while. Sam shot the transmission into drive and hit the road, the engine groaning and protesting.
When he got to her apartment, all the lights were on. He ran up the stairs and lifted his hand to knock, but the door opened before his fist could make contact with the wood. She stood there, pale and swaying a little, something white and sheer draping her body. She was alive, whole, unbloodied.
Sam didn’t know what to do. He wanted to crush her to him and hold her. He wanted to beat the living daylights out of Hines. He wanted to find the man and tear him limb from limb. And he wanted Cait to do something besides stare at him as if she needed him desperately.
Because maybe he wouldn’t be able to save the day for her this time, either.
“Where is he?” he asked hoarsely.
“I…don’t know. He’s gone now. If…” Cait trailed off miserably.
“You saw him?”
“I heard him.”
Gradually, Sam’s brain cleared. That, he thought, changed everything. “Maybe you were dreaming.” But she’d called him, anyway, and that made his heart fill with something good.
Cait shook her head helplessly. She stepped back from the door.
Sam moved into her living room and looked around. Nothing was disturbed. He went to the kitchen. It was spit-shined and perfect, not a chair or a utensil out of place. Then he heard her bare feet padding into the room behind him and he turned.
She might as well have been standing there naked. The nightgown was long and diaphanous, and every contour beneath it was outlined in the overhead fluorescent lights. All her flesh and curves. Nothing else. Sam felt something tighten into a hot knot inside him. She kept pushing him away. And now she stood here like this. Shaken, lost. Beautiful and damned near wearing nothing at all.
“Cait,” he said hoarsely. “I have my limits.”
“What?” she whispered, pressing knuckles to her mouth, her eyes still wild.
“What do you want from me, damn it?”
She lowered her hand slowly. “Make me sane again. Please. Make me whole.”
He tried to hold on to himself while he wondered how he was supposed to do that without losing his mind. He tried not to look at her. “Was he here?”
“I don’t know.” Then she reached her hands out to him and he knew he was done.
For some reason his fingers always wanted to run through her hair. He went to her and let himself do it again, diving his fingers into all those fine, blond strands. It would have made sense to him if her hair had been long and flowing, wanton and free. But it was short and neat…and he loved messing it up.
He cupped her head and lowered his mouth to hers. He kissed her once. Neatly. Gently. Holding the last of himself back. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she whispered.
“No?”
“Make it all go away.”
Something inside him buckled. “You don’t mean that. You’ve spent weeks telling me you don’t.”
“I was wrong. I changed my mind.”
“There’s a woman for you.” He tried to joke, but his voice was a scrape in his throat.
“Sam, please, please touch me again.”
It was what he’d wanted. But suddenly, in that moment, he knew that it wasn’t going to cure him. He knew he wouldn’t make love with her one more time and be able to walk away. If he did it even one more time, he’d be hers forever, body and soul.
He slid his hands up her hips, anyway, up her ribs, gathering the nightgown in his wake. She would protest, he thought, and that would be that. But then she folded her hands over his own and helped him. He drew breath and then the nightgown was over her head and puddled on the floor.
“You don’t have to show me how this time, Sam.”
Did she do that on purpose? Did she know the power she had?
There were parts of her he’d only just met before she’d locked them away, far from his touch, out of his reach. Now he rediscovered them, the dewy skin on the underside of her breasts, the hollow at her throat, the narrow waist. Sam tucked his hand beneath her knees and lifted her, because searching those places with his fingers again wasn’t enough.
He carried her into the bedroom. The bed looked as though an animal had clawed its way free of the covers. And it was small. He hesitated.
“Don’t stop now,” she said. “One more time.”
Once, from any other woman, those words would have comforted him. Now he heard denial rasp from his own throat. “For now.”
She couldn’t stand needing anymore, Cait thought. It had been something so big inside her for so long, ever since she had first touched him, growing wild and unruly after she’d kissed him again Monday night. She reached for him and pulled him down on top of her as he laid her on the bed.
But that wasn’t what she wanted, either. She wanted his skin against her skin. She wanted to feel him inside her again.
She struggled with the snap on his jeans until he helped her. She groaned in protest when he eased away from her to pull his shirt over his head. He wore heart-patterned boxer shorts. She felt herself grinning, then laughing, until the sound hurt her chest. He was so good for her. So real. So unapologetically alive.
He leaned over her and caught her laugh with another kiss at the same time as he stripped off the hearts with the thumb of one hand. Then he had a moment of sanity.
“Cait, we can’t keep doing this.”
Something in her hazed brain tried to focus. She knew that, but she couldn’t bear the truth now. Not now. “Don’t.”
“I mean, I’m not prepared for this again. How many chances can we take?”
She understood and something peaceful settled over her chest. There were no chances left to be had. She already had his child. “One more.”
She arched up into him. His mouth sealed hers again. Then it traced hot and wet over her jaw, her collarbone, to her breast. His tongue tweaked her nipple, then he took it into his mouth, and things exploded inside her just as they had before.
She wrapped her legs around him and took him in. When she heard him groan her name, Cait smiled. For the second time in her life, she felt she was somewhere she belonged.
Eleven
Cait didn’t think she would ever be able to move again. Her limbs felt languid, her mind empty, her heart sated. She rested her head against Sam’s shoulder and made a sound that was half sigh, half moan.
Then, that quickly, she started shaking again.
She tried to ease away from him a little, knowing he would feel it. He caught her hip and tugged her back. “No, you don’t.”
“You don’t even know what I was about to do,” she protested, her voice husky and soft.
“You were going to regret.”
Cait felt a little twitch go through her. She would, she knew, sooner or later, but not now. Eventually there would be no help for it. She couldn’t let this go anywhere, not without telling him about the baby. And if she told him about the baby, that would change everything.
Anything that might have grown between them was already doomed, but she didn’t regret what she had just done. If anything, it filled her with a fierce sense of exhilaration. She’d taken a bite out of life for herself. She’d grabbed something glorious, a memory that would last forever.
She couldn’t explain any of that, so she t
old him the truth, instead. “Sam, I think I’m losing my mind.”
His chuckle was throaty, as though he, too, was drained from their lovemaking. “You? You’re the sanest person I know.”
“Not anymore.” Something about her voice must have convinced him to let her go. He made no protest when she sat up. “I heard Branson Hines’s voice in my kitchen.”
She watched his face and wasn’t sure if she was miserable or comforted when she saw doubt there. “What exactly did he say?”
“Does it matter?” She hugged her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “He wasn’t really there.”
“Tell me, anyway.”
Cait thought about it. It was harder to remember than she might have expected. “I’m not sure about the beginning of it. I was asleep. I woke up to the sound of him. I was groggy.”
“At the end, then.” He rested a hand on her calf, and it was the most comforting feeling she had ever known.
“‘Plan all you want,”’ she repeated. “‘You’ll never get away from me.”’
Sam’s brows rose. “Have you been planning anything?”
Cait flushed. So many things. None of them had anything directly to do with Hines. All her plans were about this man and the child she carried. But she had thought that leaving Mission Creek would help her escape from whoever was tormenting her.
Except…what if the only person who was tormenting her was herself? What if this was all in her mind?
“He said, ‘You’re mine,”’ she whispered.
“Well, that’s a crock. You’re not.”
“No.”
“You’re mine.”
She wasn’t prepared for the way her heart staggered or how much she wanted to believe him. She felt one corner of her mouth tug into a sad smile.
“Hey, hey,” Sam said at her expression, sitting up, gathering her closer. “You’re serious about this.”
“That maybe I imagined it? Yes.” But she let herself cling to him.
“Honey, that’s ridiculous.”
“I heard a man talking who wasn’t there. I thought someone broke into my apartment because Billy got out. But what if he did dart out when I opened the door?”