by Laura Parker
Now she was back, absolutely back in his life, the fulfillment of every wish, dream and prayer he had ever uttered these last two years. Maybe she wouldn’t ever remember completely. Maybe her memory was gone for good. Maybe they could just go forward, start over, the slate wiped clean. They had this much. His love for her was unqualified, uncompromised, pure and sure. Maybe he could make her love him again.
Maybe.
“You’re clutching at straws, Guinn,” he muttered as he turned to kiss the top of her hair.
He was nothing but a dirty low-down sneaking coward to let her betray herself this way, in his bed, in his arms. But, God help him, he wasn’t strong enough to prevent it.
The only question was, would he survive the explosion when it came? Every muscle in his body tensed as if the anticipated pain would be physical.
The sudden tension in his frame disturbed her. She sighed against him, reached up and stroked her fingers down over his lips, her nails catching on the faint stubble at his chin. “Jag?” she whispered.
The fear redoubled. “Yeah, sweetheart. It’s me.”
“Hum,” she murmured as her hand drifted down over his chest. “I’m glad.”
He shut his eyes, scarcely breathing. The end had better come soon or he’d have no defenses left with which to shore up his reshattered life. None at all.
Her murmuring woke him an instant before she went rigid, her body shuddering beneath the sheet. He rose and half turned to her, laying a hand on her shoulder to jostle her. “Halle? Wake up, sweetheart. You’re dreaming.”
She shuddered again then jerked once and fell still. Though it was too dark to see her, he sensed she was awake.
“What? What—oh!” She put out her hand and pressed his bare chest. “Joe?”
“Yeah, babe. You were having a bad dream.”
“Oh. Yes.” She sat up, pushing her cascade of hair from her sleepy eyes as he snapped on the bedside lamp.
“What was it about, Halle? Tell me?”
She caught the concern in his expression but shouldered it aside in her confusion. Random recollections and impressions were raining in on her thoughts like autumn leaves in a stiff breeze. “Nothing. Nothing.” She shook her head, again sweeping the hair from her face. This time she held it back with fingers forked through the front. “Silly things. A nightmare.”
He leaned in close, kissing the curve of her bare shoulder then propping his prickly chin there. “What kind of nightmare?”
“I don’t know, exactly.”
She resisted the urge to pull away from him. There were things she needed to think about, alone, before she shared them.
“Tell me about it.”
“I’d feel foolish. It wasn’t even scary. No monsters or evil lurking.”
“Then feel foolish but tell me.”
He was touching her, running his palm soothingly up and down her upper arm. Then he reached across and cupped one naked breast.
She hunched away before she could stop herself. “I’m sorry.” She glanced in his direction but she didn’t meet his gaze. “I’m just feeling a little... touchy. Aftershocks, I suppose.”
He shifted a little away but she could feel the tension peeling off of him in waves. He was going to ask her if she had remembered anything. That thought hurried her into speech.
“It was nothing, really. I was dreaming that I was flying. You know the sort of dream where you feel weightless and happy, soaring against a deep blue summer sky. But then I saw these orbs, like gigantic soap bubbles, coming toward me. There were people inside. That’s when I realized I was in a bubble, too. I knew their faces—my parents, friends, colleagues. I kept trying to reach them but they didn’t see or hear me. Suddenly you were floating by but I couldn’t touch you, either. And then you floated away.” A rueful chuckle breathed out of her. “Ridiculous, right?”
“Your reaction was real enough.” How cautious he sounded, as if he were dealing with a very delicate personality.
She shivered and shook her head. “I felt so alone, Joe. It was as if I were doomed to spend my life looking at things and people I couldn’t be with. No connections at all.”
“You’ve had that dream before.”
She whipped around to face him. “When?”
His expression was as guarded as an armored truck. “Before we met. You told me you’d had the dream since you were small, each time one of your parents would send you back to New York after a European holiday. It doesn’t require Freudian psychoanalysis to figure out that the dream represents separation anxiety and loss. You grew up pretty much on your own.”
She looked down at her hands clasped together in her lap. “Why should it occur now when we’re together? Why not when I woke up in the hospital scared and completely alone?”
“Maybe because you’re more scared now.”
His voice drew her gaze his way. “Because we’re together again?”
He was looking at her with a regret and tenderness she couldn’t quite fathom. “The idea scares me a littie, too.”
Nodding, she turned away. Beneath the rumpled covers their legs were stretched out side by side like the spines of the Rockies, his upturned feet making higher peaks at the bottom, but together, for now. “Joe, I need to know about the woman you married.”
“Why?” Quick caution gusted the word.
“Because what I feel...” She tried to steady her swirling thoughts long enough to communicate them. “What I remember feeling doesn’t make sense. How could I have felt this way about you and let it all go?”
He was holding his breath, as she was hers. That was the only explanation for the sudden lack of sound in the room.
“What way do you feel?”
Halle heard her expelled breath like air escaping from a punctured tire. “There have been moments tonight when I’ve been so deliriously happy that I could float up right off this bed and hover about the ceiling like a helium balloon. Now I could die of this ache so deep down it feels like a toothache in my heart.”
His chuckle surprised her. “You’ve got the beginnings of a country-and-western tune there. ‘Your love’s like a toothache in my heart, darlin!”’ he sang in a fairly credible baritone.
She shot him a glance of annoyance. “Don’t tease me.”
“Why not?” He shrugged elaborately and folded his arms behind his head, leaning back against the headboard. It was the posture of concession or seduction. She could not but admire the masculine torso on display. She hadn’t been wrong that first morning to recognize the whorl of hair about his navel. She had dipped her tongue into it this night and tasted sweet memory.
She dragged her gaze away and sat up straighter. Once and for all, even after this miraculous fever and possession, she had to know the rest.
“Tell me about your wife, Joe. I want to know what made you marry her and why you left her.”
“I already told you—I didn’t leave her.” Flat, cold, unemotional. “She left me.”
“All right. Then tell me your side.”
Joe stared up at the ceiling, away from the well-remembered figure of his ex-wife. He couldn’t look at her and talk about her in the third person. For that he needed distance. “It’s not easy to talk about. I don’t know how to explain how she made me feel.”
“Where did you meet?”
A faint smile sketched his mouth. “On a city street. An elderly woman had fainted in the middle of Fifth Avenue and there she was, bending over that woman, trying to offer aid. All she had to do was look up at me and it was all over. I was baited, hooked and hauled in.”
“Did she feel the same?”
“She said she did, later. But at that moment it was hard to tell.”
“Why?”
“Because I was being a cop and she was a bystander in an incident. I took down every detail about her I could cram in my notebook. My superior said it was the most thorough report he’d ever seen. But I had what I wanted—her name, her address and her telephone number.”
He laughed. “That was the beauty of it. I needn’t have bothered. She had taken down my badge number and she called my precinct about an hour later on her break.”
“She sounds like a take-charge woman.”
“Not in the way you mean. Once I got to know her I realized how unusual that phone call was for her. But I’m glad she called. I might have waited too long and lost my nerve.”
“You don’t seem the sort to lose your nerve over a woman.”
“No. But this was different. I knew, really knew she was the woman for me. I was in love before I was in Like, if that makes sense.”
“Are you certain it wasn’t just good old lust?”
“That, too.” Joe frowned, absently seeking patterns in the random textural design of the ceiling tiles. “With her I never could separate my feelings for her into their components. She just was and I just felt for her. Whole. Complete.”
“You sound like the kind of man who falls in love a lot.”
“Never. Never before. Never after.” The conviction in his voice anchored the words in her heart.
“So, what did you do? Did you go out on a date or did you just jump her?”
“We had a date and it lasted four days.”
“Four days? Are you certain?”
“Positive. Oh, we had to do things like go in to work but those were intermissions between acts in our passion play.” His voice was now buoyed by his admission of delirium. “We called each other every free moment. We met for breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner, midnight snacks, 3:00 a.m. fried egg sandwiches at her place. Wherever.”
Halle kept her voice neutral. “So it began as a sexual marathon.”
“No.” Joe sat up and reached out, wanting to shake her, to turn her to him, to demand that she remember what he could not forget. But he had no right. His arm lowered back onto the coverlet. “I didn’t even kiss her the first time we parted. The parting was just too intense. We’d have ended up in the sack and sex would have exploded it. We just needed to see each other, to touch and talk and just be in the same place at the same time, to be certain it wasn’t a dream, you know?”
She nodded, clutching the sheet to her bosom. “Yes, I think I do.”
Joe heard the wistfulness in her voice but it scarcely registered. He had begun a journey of memory that he was loathe to abandon.
“We talked and smiled and laughed like each had at last found a missing part of themselves in the other. Then I did kiss her. Kissed her until our lips were swollen. Finally we decided that the first date was over so that we could set a schedule for other dates. We agreed to meet for dinner the next night and to not call each other in between.”
“Did you succeed?”
He harrumphed. “We lasted two hours. I kept getting a busy signal half that time because she was trying to get me.”
“You must have been very much in love.”
“Yeah.” Husky wisp of honesty.
“So, you married.”
“We married. It happened fast. Maybe too fast, looking back. Everybody we knew thought it was too fast. Between her friends and mine you couldn’t have found any subject they would have agreed upon but that one.”
“Your friends didn’t like her?”
“My friends never really got to know her. She traveled in vastly different circles from my middle-class friends. Now her friends I met. The stigma of being a cop...” He released a short sigh. “It was like being a sanitary engineer. Anyway you dressed it up, my job stank as far as they were concerned.”
“Did that bother you?”
“Sure it bothered me.” He reached up to massage the back of his neck where tension was building. “To be held up to ridicule before the one person in the world I would die for? It hurt.”
“Did she know how you felt?”
“I don’t think she knew how much I resented them. I tried not to let on because she liked them. They were like her.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they had money, cachet, knew the right people, haunted the right places, could order expensive wines and get tables at impossible restaurants where they paid exorbitant prices while snotty waiters insulted them. I couldn’t even afford the tip. They knew it and they made certain I knew it.”
“Did they really seem that bad to you?”
“Sometimes.” He nodded in accompaniment to his thoughts. “Towards the end. Yeah.”
“Is that why you cheated on her?”
Joe’s head swiveled toward her. “I didn’t.”
He saw her shoulders heave in a sigh then shiver with emotion. “You told me the other day that you had.”
The moment of truth, Joe. Tell her the truth. The truth and nothing but the truth. She’ll decide for herself, anyway.
His gaze riveted on her back, willing her to believe as well as hear him. “I said she left after someone told her I was cheating on her.”
She didn’t move, wouldn’t look at him. “There’s a difference?”
“I never cheated on her. Why would I do that? I loved her.”
When she turned to him he met her doubtful gaze head-on. The black pupils had engulfed the shimmering green of her irises. “Why would she believe a lie?”
“Because we weren’t getting along.” He looked away. It wasn’t easier to talk to her face-to-face. He felt raw, as if each answer he gave was stripped from his skin one piece at a time. She deserved her pound of his flesh but it didn’t come easily.
“We hadn’t been getting on for months. I told you, we married quickly. We hadn’t figured out how to live together first.”
“What’s to living together?” She sounded resentful. “You bring your stuff, she brings hers. You pile it together, sort it out and go on.”
“Some things don’t sort as well as others.”
Joe rubbed his jaw, seeking desperately the right words with which to express himself. “When we were together we could lick the world. Unfortunately we went out alone to meet very different worlds each day. And every day it got harder to see where we fit into one another’s lives. We were both overworked, not seeing enough of each other, arguing over money, time and other peoples’ intrusion into our lives.”
“Who was the supposed other woman?”
He flinched. Instinct told him to deny everything but conscience warned him against the ploy. Sooner or later she would regain her version of the truth. This might be his only opportunity to introduce his. “A female officer at my precinct. Sergeant Maria Garcia. We’d been assigned together undercover from time to time. We went out a few times before I got married, but I realized it wasn’t going to work. I guess she carried a thing for me long after I’d forgotten about it. I never noticed until the end.”
“What happened between you?”
“Not what you think. I had made the decision not to tell my wife about Ed and what I was going to do for him. I suspected she wouldn’t understand why I was risking my reputation. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t completely convinced myself of the necessity of what I was about to do. As I told you, Ed and I were arrested. When I was finally released I went home but my wife had locked the door. Someone had called her about my jam and she had gotten really scared. She said through the crack in the chained door that she didn’t know me anymore and for me to go away until she had time to think.”
“So you went...?”
“To Maria’s. I know.” Exasperation colored his voice. “Stupid move. But I was scared, in trouble and dog tired. I’d just been hauled into my own precinct on charges of police misconduct. Not many of my colleagues were anxious to be seen in my company. Suspicion by association. Maria opened her door. I went in.”
Halle had to try twice to find her voice. “Nothing happened?”
“Nothing. I ranted awhile, cried a little. My wife had locked me out! Maria listened. Shared half a bottle of whiskey with me. Finally, I slept.”
“How do you know nothing happened? Sounds as if yo
u got drunk.”
“I know.” He reached out then and turned her toward him. He cupped her face in his hands, that sweetly adored imperfect face more dear to him than any icon of beauty. “I was an ass, Halle, not a rat.”
He felt her gaze reach inside him, deep down where the old hurts and resentments and anger and impotent rage and self-recriminations had slithered in their own bile for two long nasty dark years. He’d lot her into that hell of emotions and now waited from her to run screaming away.
“You seem very bitter toward her,” she said at last.
“Do I?” He thought hard about that. “I didn’t feel that way until afterward. Twenty-four hours later I was looking at divorce papers accusing me of adultery. I went a little mad. I was already on the ragged edge and going down fast. Didn’t know yet whether I was going to prison or what. She still refused to see me, talk to me, read my letters. Her attorney came to see me after I made a public scene outside our apartment door.”
He sighed and released her, feeling he had lost more than his physical hold on her. “Her attorney told me my wife, my wife, would not allow further contact. If I pursued her, she’d get a restraining order.” He slumped back against the headboard, aching all over again.
Halle watched him with conditional sympathy. “She must have been very hurt.”
“She had a right. I had screwed up majorly. She had a right to be furious, hurt, afraid.” His face swelled with emotion, his mouth severe against the bitterness pouring out of him. “She had every right to shout and rage and maybe even toss me out afterward. But she should not have shut me out.”
“How did your wife find out you’d spent that night with Maria?”
“I didn’t know the answer to that for weeks. Not until after I’d signed the papers she so obviously wanted me to sign. I’d lost my job, my home, my wife.” He looked suddenly smaller, sadder, lost. “Maria told her. I know. I should have seen that coming. I’d been kidded by some of the boys in the precinct about Maria having a thing for me but I never thought she would do something like that. I was married, after all.”
