When the silence had stretched almost to breaking point, she saw his face close down slightly, as though he’d taken a chance and lost. He let go of her wrist and sat back slightly, squinting into the sun as he looked up at her.
“Well, hey,” he said with a lightness that didn’t fool her. “No need to fall all over yourself telling me I’m a pretty wonderful guy myself. I’ll just sit here wheezing quietly until you get around to it.”
The thought of his bruised ribs was a welcome distraction. “You are wheezing,” she said. “I think we should—”
That open, seeking look had all but disappeared from his eyes. Jayne struggled against regret as she saw it go.
“We should go back to the motel,” he finished for her. “I know. But first—what was it you said about some guy you know in the city attorney’s office?”
“Greg Iverson.”
“Good friend?”
“Yes.”
“Do I know him?”
She almost laughed. “He introduced us,” she said. “Back in college.”
She watched him grab hold of this new bit of information, storing it away as he’d done with everything she’d told him. “You trust him?” he asked bluntly.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
She already knew what he was going to say next. “Do I trust him?”
“I don’t know if you really trust anybody.”
Her words didn’t seem to surprise him. After all, she’d told him more or less the same thing the day before. He was looking away from her again, toward the busy street and the crowded beach beyond it. She could see that hooded, hawklike gaze settling back into place, the sharp-eyed, implacable look he’d cultivated and perfected in the job he’d come to love more than he’d loved her.
Then, without warning, he did meet her eyes. “I trust you,” he said.
How could she believe him, when his face was still masked by that cautious, wary expression? “No, you don’t,” she said. “Not enough, anyway.”
She didn’t want to go into detail, to explain about all the times they’d tried to restore the fragmented pieces of the trust that had once been so true, so complete. They’d been through this a thousand times.
And this noisy beachside street, with an already-suspicious cop around somewhere and a killer on their trail, was hardly the place to start digging into all those old heartaches.
“Look,” she said quickly, before he could answer. “There’s a phone in this convenience store. I can call Greg right now, before we do anything else. Will you be all right if—”
His eyes were shuttered, as if he suspected how much of the truth she was leaving out. But he didn’t argue, just shifted his big upper body and looked out at the steady parade of cars and people passing by.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Do what you have to do, and then let’s get back to that motel. I hate to admit it, but I think this body of mine could use some rest.”
Chapter 6
He was running. It was dark.
All around him he could hear dogs barking. He felt hunted. He knew he had to get away, but he didn’t know how. Or where.
Or why.
There were branches hanging down in front of his face. He kept pushing them away, but there were always more, tangling his vision the same way the underbrush kept snagging his feet as he tried to run.
Somewhere behind him he could hear shouting. It made him want to put his hands over his ears, made his heart sick for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand.
You never loved me.
You don’t know how to love anyone.
And somewhere, out of the darkness, the word Brady.
Was it a name? His name? Was someone calling to him, or was it his own voice he was hearing?
He couldn’t tell. But he tried to hang on to the word, certain it meant something. Maybe it was the clue that would save him. Maybe it could lead him out of this dark, tree-choked maze, out into the light again.
He knew there was safety ahead of him. He could picture it: a cabin, nearly overgrown with the underbrush that sprouted so fast in this tropical climate. There would be a light in the window, a haven from whatever was chasing him.
The barking dogs were farther away now. But he could still hear the voice calling to him. Brady... He muttered the name under his breath, trying to print it on his memory.
There was some kind of light up ahead. He reached up to push a leafy branch out of his face, straining to see past it. If he was coming to something, he wanted to know what it was. Was it the cabin he’d been imagining, the haven he somehow knew was out there?
But the damn branch clung to his hand, refusing to be pushed aside. He swatted it, trying to shake it loose.
It wouldn’t go. He could feel its feathery fronds brushing against his cheekbone, as if a sudden breeze had stirred it.
“Ryder.”
The same soft breeze seemed to be wafting his own name to him. He raised his arm again, still gripped by the certainty that he had to keep moving or he would be overrun by some unnamed, unimaginable danger. But that soft sound tugged at him as insistently as the vines he’d been trying to clear out of his path. When he lashed out against it a second time, it seemed to wrap itself around him.
“Damn it—”
“Ryder, wake up. It’s all right. You’re just dreaming.”
At first he refused to listen. Everything had been like a dream since he’d wakened in that hospital. Nothing had seemed quite real. Why should this be any different?
But the soft voice at his ear was getting louder now. The tangled vines seemed to be thinning. And all of a sudden he realized the obstructing leaves clinging to him were actually Jayne’s fingers holding his arm, trying to still his flailing in the motel-room bed.
“Ryder, it’s okay. You’re awake now.”
For an instant—one shining, tantalizing instant—he thought it really was all going to be all right, just as Jayne’s sultry voice was promising.
He was going to open his eyes—he was opening them, to see the red glow of the bedside lamp—and his memory was going to be back. The blank spaces that had taunted and maddened would be filled by all the names and facts he needed to keep Jaynie safe—to keep himself safe—to chase this nightmare away and let him start to put his life back together.
He hauled in a deep breath and waited.
But the memories didn’t come.
He could feel the slow panic building in his gut again. He tried to sit up, pushing against Jayne’s arm where it still held his own. But the dull pain in his ribs stopped him before he’d levered himself more than a few inches off the mattress.
“Ryder, if you don’t take it easy—”
“I was taking it easy.”
That much was coming back to him. He remembered crashing on the motel bed—how long ago? A few hours, he thought. It had still been daylight then. Now there was no light coming from behind the red-and-white curtains on the windows. The whole place had the hushed feeling of the hours just before dawn.
“I was dreaming—”
Hell, what had he been dreaming? There’d been something—a word—a name—
He fought against the shadows in his head, getting one elbow under him as he closed his eyes tight, trying to delve back into the dream Jayne’s soft voice had pulled him from.
A name—what were the words he’d heard echoing somewhere in that dark, overgrown landscape?
Brady.
He grabbed hold of it. “Brady,” he said out loud, barely realizing he’d linked his fingers around Jayne’s in his excitement. “I was dreaming about somebody named Brady. Who is that? Is it a name you know?”
For the first few seconds of her silence, Ryder was convinced she didn’t know the name, that it was some new clue that would lead them out of the mess they were in, if they could just figure out how to follow it. But then he realized she was only trying to let him down gently.
“Brady was the name of the judge who sentenced you,” she sa
id. “John Brady.”
Ryder eased himself onto the pillow. The adrenaline that had been coursing through him was starting to ebb now, leaving him drained and weary.
“It’s not a big surprise that you would dream about him,” Jayne added. “He called you every name in the book when he sentenced you. In fact, I was a little surprised when I found out you were up for parole so soon.”
Ryder closed his eyes tight again. Why couldn’t he remember any of this? How was it possible to have lived for thirty-six years, to have gone through a career-ending scandal, a year’s worth of prison and a near-fatal accident, and not to remember one single thing about it?
“So, it’s just another dead end.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice. “Damn it—”
He raised his now-free hand, but before he could bang it onto the mattress, he found his arm caught a second time by Jayne’s gentle grip.
“I always hated it when you did that,” she said.
“Did what?”
“Slammed things around. It never helps anything.”
He looked up at her. He had to move his head on the pillow to do it, and his shift in position angled their bodies closer together, his splayed out across the worn red bedspread, hers curled next to him, half seated, half reclining, as though she’d joined him in a hurry when he’d started thrashing in his sleep.
For the first time, he realized she must have been across the room in the single armchair. One of the spare pillows was leaning against the back of it, and the bedspread was rumpled near the foot of the bed, as though she’d been resting her bare feet there.
He had a dim recollection of arriving here sometime during the afternoon. His ribs had been on fire, his head pounding like an angry surf. He’d all but collapsed on the bed, fully clothed and nearly exhausted.
He didn’t know how long he’d slept. But it seemed to have done his body some good. He was able to move now without as much pain.
And the sight of Jayne’s face, when he tilted to look up at her, made him feel even better. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes wide and dark. A slight blush darkened her cheeks, and the pulse at the base of her neck was quick, as though her heart had been racing to match his when she’d eased him out of that dark, clinging dream.
She released his upraised hand and moved slightly away from him. He watched that pink flush deepen, and wondered whether she’d felt, as he had, the heat of the brief physical connection between them.
“Maybe slamming things around helps me blow off steam.” He spoke slowly, watching the play of light and shadow on her smooth skin.
“I never saw any signs of it.”
Ryder thought about how he’d pounded the wall in his hospital room yesterday morning when his sense of helplessness and frustration had gotten the better of him. She was right: it hadn’t really helped anything.
“Maybe I do it when I can’t think of what else to do,” he said.
Her faint smile creased her cheek in a way that was almost—but not quite—a dimple. Ryder found himself fascinated by it. If he raised a hand, he could trace that nearly invisible indent, that tiny silken hollow.
“That’s closer to the mark.” Her amusement colored her voice. “The thing is, there’s almost always something else you can do. We’re not out of leads on this yet, Nick.”
It was the first time she’d called him by his first name. And the richness of her voice was full of the same sympathetic exasperation that had kept him going through his pain this afternoon. There was something companionable about it, something that made them seem more like what they were supposed to be—a husband and wife.
Of course, he reminded himself, they were married only in legal terms at this point.
All at once he hated the thought of it, hated the realization that despite the connection that surged between them whenever they were close to each other, the hope and intelligence he could see in Jayne’s violet eyes somehow hadn’t been enough to hold their marriage together.
Part of him wanted to ask her what had happened. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. It suddenly seemed too hard to end this one brief moment of empathy, of comfort.
So he held the question back, and let himself savor the way Jayne’s clear gaze had turned luminous in the dim light of the lamp. When she spoke again, the quiet strength of her voice seemed to find its way into every corner of his bruised and exhausted body.
“Greg Iverson’s cleaning lady said he’d be back from Tallahassee late last night.” She spoke as if reminding him of it. And, in fact, he had only the haziest of recollections about her earlier phone call. While she’d been making it, he’d been nearly doubled up outside the convenience store, trying to keep air moving in and out of his lungs.
“We can call again—” She glanced at her wristwatch. “Not quite yet. But in a couple of hours. And then—”
The scent of her skin was spinning itself around him like silk. Ryder tried to keep his mind on her words, on the all-important question of what they were going to do next.
But there were too many potent distractions. The night air wafting in through the cabin window felt as warm and sultry as Jayne’s voice. The soft light on her skin was making his palms ache with the need to touch her again.
And the thought that in just a couple of hours it would all come crashing down on them... That this moment of sensual peace was going to vanish into the kind of fear and tension he’d spent all of yesterday battling....
It made his gut clench in protest. “Let’s deal with that when we get to it, okay?” he said.
His words seemed to surprise her. Or maybe it was the tone of his voice.
“Is this really Nick ‘Business First’ Ryder talking?” she said musingly. “The man who would rather lose a night’s sleep than risk missing a break in a case?”
Ryder raised a hand and stroked the backs of his fingers along the satiny skin from her elbow to her wrist. He couldn’t help it—the smoothness of it in the dim light was driving him crazy.
“Is that what I’m like?” he said. “All-business?”
“Yes. You are.”
He thought she was trying to sound businesslike herself. But the slight catch in her voice betrayed her. She was feeling that vivid connection between them as strongly as he was—he was certain of it.
“You weren‘t—always that way.” She was looking down at his hand where it was stroking her skin. Those incredible dark lashes fringed her eyes so Ryder couldn’t see the expression in them, but the pink suffusing her cheeks was deepening as he watched her. “When we were first married—”
She ended the phrase abruptly, as if she’d realized she was headed in a direction she didn’t want to take.
“Don’t stop.” He looked up into her face, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “When we were first married—”
She shook her head, refusing his prompting. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
Suddenly it did matter—it mattered almost more than anything else. Ryder sat up, clasping her shoulder with one hand. Her eyes widened at his sudden move. He could feel himself being drawn into those deep purple depths, drowning in the jeweled magic of her gaze.
“It matters to me,” he said. “I haven’t heard a single thing about myself yet that I liked. I’m a lousy husband—I’m a lousy cop—hell, I may have caused the accident that killed that kid from the FBI. I nearly got you shot twice yesterday. If there are some happier memories you don’t mind tossing my way—”
He stopped. He hated feeling as if he was begging, hated having to admit to Jayne just how sick at heart he felt when he thought about the few facts he knew of his own life.
The thing was, the simple warmth of her skin under his palm seemed to have the power to ease some of that heartsickness. And that made it impossible to back down from what he was asking.
Clearing his throat on a bearlike growl, he said, “We were happy at first, weren’t we?”
It took her a long t
ime to answer.
When she finally did, he heard regret and desire, memory and anticipation, all rolled together in her voice.
“Happy isn’t a strong enough word for what we were,” she said huskily.
He was reaching toward her almost before she finished.
He gave in to the temptation to slide his hand over her shoulder to the elegant line of her neck. With his fingers lost in her short, dark hair and her eyes locked on his in that bottomless stare, he felt as though he were almost a part of her, drawn into a world that seemed tantalizingly familiar and yet exotically new.
He felt her shiver as he caressed her, a long, slow tremolo that ran all the way up the length of her spine. Her response acted on him like a shot of straight whiskey. He gathered her against him, surrendering to the longing that seemed to rise like a flood tide every time he touched her, every time he was near her.
“I want to make you happy again.” He rasped the words against the velvet of her ear as he eased her down in his arms on the mattress. “You’re so beautiful, Jaynie—no one could dream anything half as beautiful as you.”
And nothing could have felt more perfect than the way her body merged with his, arms and legs entwined. Ryder could feel her heart beating fast against his own chest as they settled into the hollow in the middle of the overused motel mattress.
There was no mistaking the desire that her quickened breath betrayed. But her eyes were still troubled.
“It’s not that simple, Ryder.” He could see her struggling against her own longings, trying hard to resist the erotic current humming between them. “What we had is over.”
“Is it?”
He knew his voice was rough, uncompromising. But he couldn’t soften it. Part of him was angry—angry that she was trying to deny the only thing in the world he was absolutely certain of right now. He and Jayne Robards fit together so perfectly, and her shining eyes and enticingly parted lips only proved it.
“Can you honestly tell me you don’t want—this?”
The word ended as he captured her lips with his, letting himself fall headlong into the sweetness of her kiss, the welcoming recesses of her soft mouth.
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