When he dropped to his knees on the floor in front of her, Jayne was already close to the melting point.
The feeling of his mouth exploring the hidden recesses of her body sent her straight over the edge.
Her knees threatened to buckle under her as his tongue worked its slick magic. She felt his strong hands supporting her from behind—or was that a caress, too? It was impossible to tell. She was drifting on a sea of pure sensation, trembling inside and out, longing for fulfillment and yet wanting this pleasure to go on forever.
When it did come, it was nothing like the sudden climax of the night before. She felt it building in her like a high tide, a slow swell that had her half laughing with delight even before the first spasms of release caught her.
Ryder tightened his grasp as she dissolved into his arms, laughing with her at the uninhibited response he’d conjured up. She felt him turn his face inward first to one thigh, then the other, kissing her slowly.
She could feel the adoration in his touch. Surely this was real, she told herself dizzily. It was the other Ryder who’d been a stranger—the man who’d walked away from her, who’d locked her out of his heart, the one who’d told her their love wasn’t destined to flower into the family she wanted so much.
This Ryder—this gentle, passionate, vulnerable man—was the man she’d fallen in love with so long ago. And all she could think about was the joy of recapturing that love as their slow exploration of each other’s bodies took them to new and astonishing heights.
The afternoon dimmed into evening, but they never noticed. To Jayne it simply felt as though they were going farther and farther inside a hidden world of wonders she thought they’d lost the key to. By the time Ryder finally lifted her against his chest, settling her around him so that they fit like two pieces of a whole, she was already giddy with enjoyment, light-headed with passion.
All her muscles quivered as he moved inside her. She saw his eyes close as they rocked together, and watched him go slack-jawed with the astounding rightness of the way they fit together. She felt unimaginably strong and safe clasped in his arms, rooted by his long, strong body.
And yet he sounded anything but strong as he matched her slowly building cries of longing. His voice was hoarse, almost broken. And Jayne could hear that desperate, urgent sound in it again, as though he was begging for something.
She didn’t know what he was searching for, what part of him was so far from whole that he’d let it come between him and the fiery perfection of the love they’d once shared.
She only knew that this—right here, right now—was like starting over. Like grasping at a promise as it glimmered somewhere out in the dusk.
As they rode the crest of passion together and tumbled headlong down the other side, Jayne held tight to that vision, to her dawning certainty that she and Ryder had been given an unexpected second chance to salvage what they’d lost.
She loved him, she realized suddenly. She’d never stopped loving him.
And as they eased into sleep together in each other’s arms, exhausted and sated, she wondered if there was any hope in the world that he might still love her, too.
Chapter 13
At first he thought it was another dream.
He couldn’t pinpoint the noise. It was like a shutter flapping against the side of the cabin, although Ryder knew there weren’t any shutters out there.
He’d heard the wind rising in the night. The branches of the trees had been clacking together in the clearing for hours now. This was a more regular sound, though. It was angry, like gunfire but deeper, booming around him.
The noise faded, and Ryder’s waking thoughts faded with it. He turned his face back into the gentle hollow of Jayne’s shoulder and felt sleep claiming him again.
But then the dogs started barking.
And something stirred down deep in his memory, where there had been nothing but shadows.
The sound was still distant, dreamlike. He could hear the dogs yelping and baying, high-pitched, eager. It came and went, as though borne on the wind.
Without warning, another sound cut into his thoughts.
It was the crackle of a radio, and a tinny voice—a woman’s —speaking through it.
Words caught at him now, all mixed in with the distant barking of the dogs.
You have the right to remain silent...
Please confirm your location...
Ryder, what’s happening?
Suddenly he knew exactly what was happening, and why.
It was no dream.
It was real. And deadly serious.
And it was almost on his doorstep.
“Ryder—”
Jayne grabbed for a branch and missed. There hadn’t been time to find her sneakers after Ryder’s shouted “Get dressed!” had jolted her out of a sound sleep. She’d grabbed her leather pumps instead, and they were next to useless on the slippery curve of the log that crossed the swampy hollow at the edge of the clearing.
Ryder was right behind her. She felt his arm circling her waist, half lifting her off the log and onto drier ground.
“Come on.” He shifted his grip and grabbed her hand.
“I don’t understand this.” She barely got the words out as they ran. “What makes you so sure—”
They’re tracking us had been his only explanation when he’d tossed her jeans and sweater at her. And he didn’t seem to want to go into any more detail now.
“I’m just sure.”
She had to admit, it did sound as though the barking dogs were getting closer. Her brain was finally shaking off the last haze of sleep, and she was starting to be able to think of something besides just following blindly in Ryder’s footsteps.
“How can anybody track us?” She grabbed another branch as her feet slipped going over a little hummock. She could feel the leather scabbard digging into her where she’d jammed Ryder’s knife into the back pocket of her jeans. “We weren’t anywhere near the main house. There’s no trail.”
“They brought a helicopter in. I heard it—that’s what woke me up.” He was pulling her along relentlessly, ignoring the branches that slapped his own face as he moved. “They’ll have spotted the cabin from the air. The dogs are just to sniff us out once they reach the clearing on foot.”
Jayne shivered. She knew it wasn’t only the fresh wind that was making her cold. There was something eerie about the baying and yelping sounds wafting toward them on the morning air.
Fear and frustration colored her voice as she said, “Darn it, we were so close to figuring this out. If we’d just had one more day before they found us—whoever they are—”
“Doesn’t really matter.” His voice was grim. “It’s all connected to the mob one way or another.”
They’d been starting to reach that conclusion yesterday as they’d pored over the faxes that had come in. But Ryder sounded absolutely sure now. It was as though something had clicked in his mind overnight.
“Could be police, could be FBI,” he was saying as he strode straight through another boggy spot in the trail. “But the mob will get the information sooner or later—probably sooner. We’ve got to get out of the way before that happens.”
“Ryder—” She tightened her grasp on his hand, half running to keep up with him. “What makes you so sure about all this?”
“The dogs barking.”
It made no sense. Maybe this was all a dream, Jayne thought. It had the right feeling to it—the strange, sudden bite of the wind after the mildness of the last few days, the remnants of sleep still clouding her thoughts, the way the soggy ground kept clinging to her shoes as she tried to run.
But Ryder’s voice was very definite, not dreamlike at all. And his next words were all too clear.
“There were dogs barking in the neighborhood the night they came to arrest me,” he said over his shoulder. “Remember?”
“I remember.” She felt a chill settle around her heart as she answered, as though the cool breeze had found its
way inside her. “The flashing lights set everybody’s dogs off.”
“Well, that was the sound that did it for me.” He still wasn’t looking back at her. She couldn’t see his eyes as he said the words. But his voice sounded more and more hard-edged, less and less like the man she’d been coming to love all over again during the past few days.
“I heard the dogs barking, and something clicked,” he was saying. “It all came back to me. I can remember it now, Jayne. I know what’s going on. And it’s not good news.”
He was tugging her to the left, off the path he’d cleared. Jayne saw the swampy beginnings of the stream that eventually led to the river, and realized he intended to wade into the muddy, slow-moving trickle.
She tugged against his hand, bringing them momentarily to a balt. “Just a minute,” she said. “In the first place, you’re out of your mind if you think I’m getting into that creek with the alligators. And you can’t just tell me you know what’s happening and leave it at that. Damn it, Ryder, what’s going on here? Are you sure your memory is back?”
He turned at last. And the rising storm in his blue eyes told her the answer to at least one of her questions.
This was the Nick Ryder she remembered, the man who’d shut himself away behind a wall so thick she’d never been able to breach it. She could see him battling whatever fears and doubts—and tenderness—he might be feeling under that armor-plated exterior.
This was the man she’d tried for so long to reach, the one who’d finally worn her out with his stubborn refusals to share his heart with her—or with anyone.
His memory was back, all right.
And so was everything else she’d been foolish enough to think he’d forgotten about for good.
“There’s no time for this,” he said.
“Then make it fast.” She held her ground against the power of his grip.
He frowned, but seemed to realize she meant it. With a tight, angry shake of his head, he finally answered her.
“I was working with the FBI on an undercover investigation,” he said. “They were looking into a corruption ring in the Miami police and legal system. That old case of mine you mentioned—the one where the evidence got screwed up—that was what got me started on it. I went to the FBI because I didn’t trust the Internal Affairs people in the police department.”
“You never told me any of this.”
His eyebrows lowered. “Jayne, you were—are—employed by the biggest cop-hater in the city. It was exactly the kind of story your editor would have put on the front page of the Bulletin, and you know it.”
Indignation rose in her like a wave. “I would never have—”
His fingers tightened around hers. “I knew you wouldn’t talk,” he said. “But the FBI didn’t. One condition of my joining their investigation was that I not say a word about it to you, or to anyone. Can we get out of here now?”
It was two miles from his grandfather’s house to the cabin, Ryder had said. And the woods would make for slow going. Jayne kept hold of his hand, and stayed where she was. Before she took another step, she had to get the facts clear in her mind.
“Why were you in jail?” she demanded.
“I was framed. The rotten apples in the police department suspected what I was up to, and they rigged it to look as though I’d stolen that money. Once I was arrested, it was easy to manipulate things so I was convicted.”
And he’d ended up in front of Justice John Brady, who’d made sure Ryder was sent away. But—
“Couldn’t the FBI have blown the whistle at that point?” she asked. “Surely they could have put a case together—”
“They—we—didn’t have the name of anyone inside the justice department who was in on the scam.” Despite her reluctance, Ryder was urging her to move, pulling her toward the stream. “I’d already logged enough hours on the investigation that I wanted to be in on the finish.”
He’d logged those hours as a way of avoiding everything that was going wrong between him and Jayne, she thought. And the deeper he’d buried himself in his work, the shakier their marriage had become. It had been a vicious circle, spiraling nowhere.
And despite everything, she’d let herself be pulled right back into it. She hated the way the ground was sucking at her feet, trying to slow her down. But she hated these unhappy old memories even more.
“I agreed to go along with the prison sentence because it seemed like the best way to get into the confidence of some mob members who were already serving time,” Ryder was saying. “We figured I might be able to get into their confidence if they thought I was one of the bad guys. My job was to get close to Jimmy Trujillo, the construction boss who’d just been sentenced. I was supposed to see if I could get him to spill a name.”
“And he did.” She tried to stay at the edge of the stream, but Ryder kept tugging her into the center, where her feet were slipping over half-buried obstacles she couldn’t see and didn’t want to think about.
“Right. The night before my release, he had a party for some of his buddies, including me. He was still well connected—he could get food, drink, cigars, whatever he wanted. And once he got a few glasses of wine under his belt, he let slip that it was John Brady who was on the mob’s payroll.”
He’d waited for a solid year for that information, Jayne thought—a year when she’d been trying unsuccessfully to convince herself that everything was really over between them. While she’d been hugging his pillow in those long, empty nights, Ryder had been playing felon, his mind full of nothing but his job.
“I was supposed to be debriefed by the FBI right after I was released,” he said. “I remember being checked out of the prison, but everything after that is still a blank.”
“The mob must have realized somehow that Trujillo had talked.” Thinking it through was a way to keep her mind off how the stream was deepening under her feet. “And they sent someone after you.”
“And the rest, as they say, is history.” That grim sound was back in his voice again. “And we’re going to be history if we don’t get out of here. Come on, Jaynie, let’s pick up the pace here, all right?”
Hearing his old nickname for her in that grating, impersonal tone made Jayne shiver again inside.
It had all disappeared, she realized—all the camaraderie and closeness, all the passion they’d shared over the past few days. It had been swallowed up in the cold, emotionless place Ryder used to protect himself from everything he couldn’t bear to feel—all the hopes he couldn’t admit to, the fears he couldn’t quite face.
“I am moving,” she said. “But I’d prefer to be doing it on dry land.”
He shook his head. “They’ll track us to the start of the stream. But this will make it harder for them to find where we came out again. It’s not much of an edge, but we need what we can get.”
She knew he was right. But a part of her hated the thought of leaving this place where they’d been so briefly, so unexpectedly happy together.
And besides—
“What about the alligators?” she demanded, tugging him to a standstill again. “And the snakes. If we get eaten—”
When he turned to look at her this time, there was no trace of the man who’d loved her so tenderly only last night. His blue eyes were blank and hard, his face set in an impenetrable mask she remembered only too well.
The old Nick Ryder was back.
And Jayne could feel her heart starting to break all over again at the sight of him.
“You don’t know the people we’re up against,” he said bluntly. “I do. And frankly, Jayne—”
He glanced back at the stream they’d been splashing through, as though he expected to see the baying dogs come nosing through the undergrowth at any second.
“Frankly, I’d rather take my chances with the alligators,” he finished. “Come on, we’re wasting time. We can talk about this later.”
We can talk about this later.
It had been one of Ryder’s all-too-fami
liar refrains during the last years of their marriage. Jayne curled herself into a tighter ball in the bow seat of the bow and tried to ward off the cold wind and the bleakness of her own thoughts.
They’d made it to the boat safely, though they’d both been soaked to the waist and Jayne had been trembling uncontrollably from the thought of everything that was probably swimming and lurking in the muddy water they were wading through.
Luckily, the mouth of the stream hadn’t been watched, no doubt because the overhanging branches gave the impression it was nothing more than a backwater. Ryder had let the boat drift silently downstream for a few minutes before starting the engine, which had coughed and sputtered but finally caught hold.
Since then he’d been running the thing with the throttle wide open, ignoring its occasional coughing fits. He’d made some minor adjustments when they’d stopped for gas, and had announced that they would head back the way they’d come, through Lake Okeechobee.
“It gives us more choice,” he said without looking up from the motor. “We can take any of the canals from there.”
And that was the only thing he’d said until they were nearly across the bottom end of the lake itself.
Jayne couldn’t tell if he was as chilled as she was. His blank blue eyes gave nothing away. His stance as he stood at the wheel was aggressive and unyielding. He seemed to be expecting an attack at any moment and wasn’t about to let down his guard.
When she thought of how they’d swayed in each other’s arms in the twilight only last evening—
When she felt the slow pulse of desire starting in her belly even now—
She shook her head and wrapped her arms more tightly around her chest. She didn’t know which emotion was uppermost in her mind, worry or anger or hurt at the way Ryder was closing her out of his thoughts again.
But anger seemed like the safest feeling to hang on to. At least it was something to counter the icy wind that was knifing into her as they sped across the big lake.
A Marriage To Remember Page 18
