A Marriage To Remember

by Cathryn Clare

  Her gasp this time had laughter mixed into it. “I wondered if that was going to happen,” she said breathlessly.

  Ryder had been wondering the same thing. He’d spent enough of his boyhood hours here, fantasizing about doing exactly this. But he’d been far too shy—and too isolated—to go beyond dreaming. The mattress hadn’t been built for two. And it had certainly never been used that way.

  Without letting Jayne go, he shifted to one side and lowered himself onto his knees on the floor next to the bed. The move left his head almost level with hers. He succumbed without a struggle to the urge to capture her mouth again in a deep, hungry kiss.

  The jeans she’d bought in Narvaez fit her like a second skin. Ryder’s mouth had gone dry every time he’d let his gaze follow her as she’d moved around the cabin this afternoon. The urge to peel the faded denim off her had been nearly overwhelming.

  And now he let it overwhelm him. Unsnapping the top button without even looking, he eased the zipper downward. His mind was reeling with images of the warm center of her body opening to him the way her mouth was opening under his.

  As though she’d been waiting for the gesture, Jayne lifted herself slightly off the mattress. Between the two of them, they slid her out of her jeans and panties. Ryder heard her sneakers clunk against the floor behind him and felt the whole world tilt at the realization that she was naked in his arms and responding to him with a passion that went far beyond anything he knew he deserved.

  For a moment that little voice in the back of his mind muttered at him again. He could almost hear the well-worn phrases, intruding on the pleasure that was racking him from head to toe.

  This won’t last.

  You don’t know how to love.

  You haven’t earned the right to this much pleasure.

  He felt his belly quiver with the very beginnings of doubt, and opened his eyes as he lifted his lips from Jayne’s. She looked so unimaginably beautiful, with her short dark hair tousled from his touch and her cheeks tinted rose pink with the flush of desire.

  How could he possibly claim this woman as his own?

  How could he offer her anything, when he wasn’t even certain he could keep either of them alive beyond the next few days?

  She opened her eyes, too. And she seemed to recognize the dawning doubts that Ryder was doing his best to hide.

  At first he thought he’d done it again—killed their pleasure dead before it had had a chance to take hold. He could already feel the guilt of it nudging at him.

  But then Jayne shifted her weight again. And the unabashed sensuality of her next move chased away every doubt his mind could throw at him.

  With a slow, sexy smile, she lifted both bare legs and wrapped them around Ryder’s torso. He’d taken off his elastic bandage earlier in the day, and although his ribs were still tender, Jayne’s leggy embrace was so gentle that he felt no pain, only an astonished arousal when he realized what her provocative caress meant.

  She didn’t speak. It was as though she shared his realization that words were too dangerous for the two of them, too loaded with all the difficulties of the past.

  But their bodies seemed to know a way around all that. As Jayne pulled them closer together, clasping him to the moist, eager center of her, Ryder gave up thinking and let himself sink into the overpowering seduction of the moment.

  He thought he was probably going to pop a rivet in his own jeans if he didn’t get out of them soon. Getting free of them without disentangling himself from Jayne’s body was a challenge, but he managed it. And then pure passion took over, and there was nothing Ryder could do but just ride the wave until it finally crested, taking him with it.

  She swung one leg around the hardness of his arousal, capturing him in the juncture of her thighs. Ryder groaned and leaned into her, sliding one hand under her bottom, lifting her slightly, delving into the sweet, wet core of her.

  Her cry of delight was music to his soul. He reached deeper and deeper into her, lost in the softness of her skin and the generous eroticism of the way she was responding to his touch.

  The silky expanse of her inner thigh was rubbing against him in a way that was close to maddening. He felt as though he was being absorbed into the night itself, into the hidden recesses of Jayne’s body and the realm of dreams he’d never dared to let himself reach for.

  “Jaynie—please—”

  He didn’t know what he was pleading for this time. He heard her cry out again as he reached some secret spot deep inside her. She was as sultry and mysterious as the tropical landscape around them. And he thought the scent and heat of her body might be what would finally drive him right out of his mind.

  The feeling of her fingers stroking him was too much to stand. Reaching briefly behind. him, he pulled one of the condoms out of the back pocket of his jeans, where he’d stashed them.

  He saw Jayne’s eyes widen at the sudden crackle of plastic as he opened the package.

  Don’t say anything, he begged her silently. Don’t let this moment disappear on us again.

  He had the thing on before she’d had a chance to say whatever was on her mind. And the questions that had troubled her gaze for those few seconds disappeared again when Ryder ran both palms up over the length of her body and then down along the gentle curve of her spine.

  Lifting her again, he settled her against him and felt her welcoming him inside her, pulling him toward her with intertwined legs, banishing the last of the wariness that lingered in his thoughts. There was nothing but the animal satisfaction of joining with her now, nothing but the delight of a discovery that seemed new and familiar at the same time.

  Her astonished, wordless cry told him she felt exactly the same way. Had it always been this way? he wondered. He was almost certain it had. How could anyone ever get used to something this all-encompassing, to a sensation that wrapped body and heart and soul into one excruciatingly compelling rhythm?

  He followed that rhythm blindly, moving farther into Jayne as though she was the source of everything he had ever longed for. His hands splayed against her back—her fingers dug deeply into his shoulders—they gasped in unison whenever the balance of their bodies shifted and they discovered another angle of pleasure, another level of longing.

  That longing had consumed the entire world now. There was nothing anywhere outside this room, outside the small, candlelit circle where they rocked together in each other’s arms, driven faster and faster toward the fulfillment Ryder had seen beckoning to him in Jayne’s eyes since he’d first turned and looked at her.

  The rope bed creaked, but he paid no attention this time. Jayne’s inarticulate cries were spiraling up farther and farther. They seemed to connect to something directly at the base of his spine. He felt as though he was burning up like the candle beside them, as though the heat he and Jayne were generating was a flame he would gladly let himself be consumed by.

  And then, suddenly, it exploded into one glorious blaze. He heard Jayne’s voice peak on a high, quivering note of amazement and awe. And then, as she shivered into reaction around him, his body answered her with a spasm so powerful he felt he might fly into a million pieces in the dark night around them if he let her go.

  It took a long time for things to stop smoldering. Ryder couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t do anything but hang on and wait while his heart rate finally caught up to the rest of him.

  He swirled one thumb over the smooth expanse of Jayne’s back, pausing to caress the little valley alongside her spine. Her breathing was as erratic as his. And she seemed to be just as lost in the moment, just as incapable of finding words for what they had shared.

  After a while, he moved far enough away to reach for the blanket he’d used as a mattress last night. With the red blanket from the rope bed on top of both of them, it made a rough enough place to sleep.

  But just as neither of them seemed capable of speech, neither of them wanted to let the other go. Ryder drew Jayne’s still-warm body close against him and set
tled his head next to hers on the single pillow she’d pulled down from the bed.

  The hard pine boards under them didn’t matter. This was heaven, or as close to it as a man could probably get.

  With that thought in his mind, and with Jayne’s soft hair ruffling against the skin of his cheek, Ryder drifted into the most restful sleep he’d had in a very long time.

  Ryder had left the beginning and the end of the trail as overgrown as they’d found it, to keep any prying eyes from noticing the way he’d been clearing the underbrush every time they’d trekked to the motorboat and back. He’d dragged a tree trunk across the boggy spot just before the clearing, though, dropping it so that it looked as though it had fallen there naturally.

  As Jayne crossed the log now, arms outstretched to keep her footing on its smooth, curved surface, she felt as though this balancing act mirrored the one she’d been doing all day.

  Ryder had already been up when she’d wakened. She’d heard him splashing in the rain barrel outside the cabin, and realized he was probably washing his hair, as he’d done yesterday morning.

  Had he awakened with the kind of lascivious thoughts that were quivering through her own body? And if he had, was he using the cold rainwater to dampen them down?

  When he came back into the cabin, however, she hadn’t seen the distant, cautious expression she’d feared. He’d looked mildly disappointed to find her already dressed, but he’d given her a quick grin and a casual kiss before setting out the cereal box for breakfast. While they ate, their conversation was confined to the safe, neutral subject of the faxes they were expecting that morning and the lack of milk and coffee to round out the breakfast menu.

  The rest of the morning had been the same. Ryder had shown no signs of the passion that had overwhelmed both of them last night. But he hadn’t retreated all the way back into himself, either.

  She didn’t know what he was thinking, or feeling. But she found herself acting in much the same way, half-cautious, half-intimate. It was as though they were both unwilling to plunge ahead into something that still felt shaky and uncertain, but aware that with last night’s lovemaking they had crossed the line into something new and undefined.

  The problem was, she couldn’t figure out whether they’d been heading forward or backward when they’d crossed that line.

  And the strangeness of it—the sense that the territory they’d entered was both familiar and unexplored—had kept her on edge all day, feeling as though she was balancing precariously between an unresolved past and a future that was still hazy and unchartered.

  “Hang on to those faxes.” Ryder’s voice was deep and gravelly behind her as she stepped from the log onto dry land. “I have a feeling we’re going to find what we’re looking for somewhere in there.”

  Jayne already had the same feeling. While Ryder had piloted the boat back from Narvaez, she’d been scanning the information her friend had dug up. Even at a casual glance, she’d noticed some things that shed new light on the court records they’d been looking at yesterday.

  Once they were back inside the cabin, they divided up the shiny pages. “We’re looking for any unusual background information about the defendants in Judge Brady’s cases,” Ryder said, uncapping the highlighter Jayne had bought. “Particularly the ones we thought he’d been especially tough or especially lenient with.”

  Those policeman’s instincts of his still worked so well, Jayne thought. Ryder had loved being a detective. She’d always wondered whether it was a way for him to take a stand against the chaos of the world around him.

  Unfortunately, the chaos inside him had been harder to control. Had it finally prompted him to betray his colleagues and his own early idealism?

  She found it harder and harder to believe, especially when she saw him digging into the information in front of him now, searching eagerly for the truth.

  But this isn’t the same Nick Ryder you said goodbye to a year ago, she cautioned herself when she felt the little tug of desire as he ran his big, agile hands through his newly cropped dark golden hair. If and when his memory came back, that other Ryder—that stony-faced, uncommunicative loner—could reappear.

  Their new, tentative camaraderie kept lifting her heart without warning. But she had to keep reminding herself that nothing had changed permanently. They were still on the run. They still didn’t know what Ryder had done, or what he had gotten in the way of someone else’s doing.

  They were still getting divorced.

  Nothing had happened to alter any of that. Stifling a sigh, Jayne turned to her own pile of faxes and started to read.

  Chapter 12

  She found something almost immediately.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “It’s a social column about some fund-raising dinner John Brady was at three years ago.” She read him the brief paragraph, and noticed his face change when she came to the list of attendees.

  “Jimmy Trujillo?” he echoed. “We came across that name yesterday.” He reached for the previous day’s faxes.

  “He was a defendant in one of Brady’s cases.” Jayne had already made the connection. “Racketeering, I think.”

  “Right.” Ryder had found the record he was searching for. “He was one of the people Brady went easy on.” He took the page Jayne was handing over to him. “Strange that they would know each other socially,” he commented.

  “Not that strange. I’ve photographed a lot of high-society dinners and fundraisers since I’ve been with the Bulletin, and you’d be surprised who gets onto some of those guest lists. Not everybody in those tailored tux jackets gets their money from family trust funds, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” Ryder scanned the clipping, highlighted a line or two, then set it aside. “I think it’s worth remembering.”

  Jayne agreed. “My friend may turn up something else about Trujillo in tomorrow’s batch,” she said.

  It wasn’t the only lead they found. Jayne’s memory started to click as they read through the dozens of newspaper articles her friend had sent. Before long it began to look to her as though the criminals Judge Brady seemed to favor might be associated with the same Miami crime syndicate.

  “Organized crime isn’t my beat,” Jayne said. “My editor’s like your grandfather—a little old-fashioned in his ideas. He thinks women shouldn’t be covering violent crime, so mostly I don’t get to photograph and write about those cases until they’re already in court. But I could swear that most of these names are boys from the same mob.”

  “So if this mob had bought Brady somehow—”

  Jayne knew it wasn’t unheard of. “And if you had somehow stumbled onto the fact during one of your own investigations—”

  “It could be that I was framed—and given a stiff sentence—to get me out of the way,” Ryder finished, running his hands through his hair once more, making it look more than ever like a lion’s mane.

  “It doesn’t explain how you got out on parole so early.”

  “I know. It would explain why the FBI was picking me up, though, wouldn’t it?”

  He raised his eyes to hers, and she could see him fighting his own frustration again. It was obvious his memory was creeping back, bit by bit. But it hadn’t completely returned yet. He was asking for Jayne’s confirmation, and annoyed that he still had to.

  His whole manner could change when he starts to remember what really happened. She swallowed and wished she could decide whether that moment was one she was eagerly awaiting or living in dread of.

  “The FBI does have jurisdiction over cases of corruption in law enforcement agencies,” she said. “But this still doesn’t tell us whether they were interested in you as an informant or a perpetrator.”

  He scowled at her. “Everything about this case cuts two ways,” he said. “Every piece of information we have could mean at least two different things. Damn it—”

  He raised a hand as though he was about to slap the tabletop, then caught Jayne’s eye and sto
pped.

  “I know,” he said ruefully. “It doesn’t help. I just can’t figure out what else to do.”

  He ran his hands through his hair again and looked at the pile of pages on the table in front of him.

  “We know there’s somebody in the Miami police department who’s in league with whoever tried to kill you.” Jayne went back to basics, partly to sort out her own tangled thoughts, partly to block out her reaction to the way Ryder’s strong forearms rippled as he dug his fingers into his dark blond hair.

  “Right.” He frowned, but let her continue.

  “And if our guesses are right, the mob may be mixed up in this somewhere, too.”

  “Makes sense. Those three attempts to kill me had a professional look to them.”

  “I agree. And cops may be good with guns, but they’re not trained to be professional killers, the way mob hit men are. So we’re looking at two components already, the mob and some corrupt element in the Miami police.”

  “Plus the legal end.”

  “I was getting to that. Let’s assume the mob has bought people in the police department, and that it also owns John Brady. So when its people get arrested—”

  “The cops can try to fudge the evidence, which will make it harder to get convictions.” He was already a step ahead of her. “Or if it does get as far as a trial—”

  “They’ve got a friend in the legal system—Justice John Brady—to tilt things in the defendant’s direction.” Jayne was so intrigued by the picture that was starting to emerge that she barely noticed how they’d slipped into their old pattern of finishing each other’s sentences.

  “And Ryder—here’s another thing. You had a case—I can’t remember what it was—where something went wrong with the evidence. You were furious about it—you said you knew you’d followed procedure. You couldn’t understand where things had fouled up. But if there was someone in the evidence room doctoring things—”