A Case of You

by Pamela Burford

  His masterful, no-holds-barred loving had left her emotionally drained and shaking like a newborn kitten. She’d wept afterward, and he’d turned her in his arms and cradled her there on the floor. Did I hurt you? Did I, Kit? And when she shook her head no, he held her tighter, held her with a fierce possessiveness that made her sob all the harder for what they could never have. And she knew he shared her grief.

  She’d thought then that their coming together had been as intense, as moving, for him as it had been for her. Gloomily she now realized that if it had been, he’d have wanted to spend the night with her. His rejection still stung.

  She tried not to think about the other Noah, the alter ego who’d emerged briefly, terrifyingly, before he’d somehow managed to bring it under control. Just for now, for this one morning, she’d allow herself to pretend things were normal between them, that her suspicions and fears were as insubstantial as smoke.

  That they were two ordinary people falling in love.

  “You sleep okay?” he asked.

  I would have slept better in your arms. “Fine.”

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, as he absently hitched up the waistband of his jeans, zipped up, adjusted the crotch, and fastened the brass button. She couldn’t have torn her eyes from the sight if a Sherman tank had barreled through the room.

  Noah’s fingers stilled, and she groaned inwardly with the knowledge that she’d been caught staring. She forced her gaze back up to his face, to find that his potent look had turned downright rapacious. His eyes flicked to the bed.

  Hastily she said, “What kind of surprise?”

  The boyish Noah returned as he grinned suddenly, then reached up to grasp the top of the doorframe with both hands and execute a couple of quick pull-ups, his lower lip caught between his teeth. She wondered if the exertion was an unconscious way of burning off sexual energy. Still grasping the doorframe, be stood twisting his torso side to side, stretching out sleep-kinked muscles. He was magnificent, all sinew and masculine grace, and the best part was, she knew he had absolutely no idea how damn sexy he was.

  She noticed a small scar on the right side of his abdomen. Round and pink. She was about to ask him about it when he said, “I’m going to take you to a special place I know. For brunch. You’ll love it.”

  “Maybe I should go home and change first.”

  He shook his head. “No need to get all dolled up where we’re going. Besides, I like you in that.” He nodded toward her gauzy oatmeal-colored dress, draped over a chair where he’d placed it last night.

  “You do?”

  “Especially in strong sunlight.”

  It took her about a millisecond to figure that one out. “You’re a perv, Dr. Stewart.”

  He shrugged. Yeah, so?

  “You’re a doctor!” she said. “People pay you cash money to take off their clothes for you. Why would you want to sneak a peek through someone’s dress?”

  “I thrive on the challenge. And anyway, it’s not someone’s dress I want to sneak a peek through, darlin’.” He smiled crookedly. “Just yours.”

  “I’m touched. Go away.” She slammed the door in his face and called through it, “At least let me get a shower.”

  *

  “IT’S BREATHTAKING.” Kit stood on a rocky outcropping bordering a clear, deep stream the color of Noah’s eyes.

  “I knew you’d like it. I think of this place as my own private retreat,” he said. “Sometimes I bring a rod and do some fly-fishing. I rarely see anyone else here.”

  She could believe that. This secluded niche tucked into the surrounding verdant hills wasn’t easy to get to even if you knew where to look. They’d had to leave the Jeep some distance away to hike through a thickly forested area and clamber over and around natural barriers of boulders and dense overgrowth. It had been a hair-raising trek at times in her slippery flats, but worth it when Noah gallantly held her hand and gave her the occasional hoist or boost.

  Now he turned and began climbing back up the rocky bank—easy for him with his sneakers and long legs. He stretched a hand back to her, and gratefully she took it. Together they picked their way up the tree-studded slope to where it leveled off, and flopped down on the quilt he’d laid in a grassy clearing under a humongous maple tree.

  He opened the backpack lying there and started pulling out paper sacks and aluminum takeout containers. The aromas emanating from them made Kit’s stomach whine. He’d called in an order to the Thackeray Inn and picked up their meal on the way out of town. Complete with flatware, linen napkins, goblets, and a frosty carafe of mimosas, a blend of freshly squeezed orange juice and champagne. Plus china cups and a thermos of coffee, naturally.

  “Here you go, Kit. Solid proof that I’m a man of my word. Did I not promise you brunch?”

  “At a charming little place with a water view and plenty of atmosphere, as I recall.”

  “Was I lying?”

  “Shut up and feed me.”

  And feed her, he did. What a strange and decadent idyll this was, she mused, watching him pry the lids off their meals and pour the mimosas. Here she was lounging on a blanket in the middle of godforsaken nowhere letting a very dangerous man feed her smoked trout with horseradish sauce, poached eggs Florentine—amazingly intact after their sojourn into the wild—cold asparagus tips, and warm sourdough rolls.

  They spoke little during the meal. As she watched him pack up the empty containers, she asked, “So is this the special guy thing you do?” At his quizzical look, she added, “Oh, you know. Most men, once they’ve been dating awhile, develop one particular routine to knock the socks off a woman on the first or second date. Something reliably impressive.”

  “Candy is dandy but smoked trout is quicker?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You wound me, darlin’.” But he didn’t look wounded. He looked amused as he uncapped the thermos of coffee.

  “You telling me you’ve never brought anyone else here?” She held her breath.

  “Well...”

  She couldn’t help noticing that he avoided her eyes, and inwardly chided herself. Why did you ask if you didn’t want to know?

  “As a matter of fact,” he finished with a devilish grin, “Henry and I have slain more than a few trout in that stream. We tried smoking them, but they wouldn’t stay lit—”

  She flung a sourdough roll, catching him on the ear as he tried to dodge it, chuckling.

  “Ow! Ungrateful female. Since you ask, I’ll tell you. You’re the first woman I’ve brought here.” He picked crumbs out of his ear. “And the last. Damn.”

  He poured the coffee, and she accepted a cup. Noah looked deliciously relaxed, leaning on his palm and sipping from his china cup, as mottled light filtering through the tree danced over him. She decided this excessively civilized outing was the perfect time to ask about a decidedly uncivilized matter. “Noah... I do want to understand.”

  She didn’t have to elaborate. He studied her face briefly before setting down his cup. For a full minute the only sound was the gurgling of the stream and the chatter of a pair of birds darting from limb to limb.

  He said, “And I want you to understand, Kit. I never wanted that before, never wanted anyone else to know about me. But with you...” He sighed, a heavy sound laden with regret, and looked away. “All I ask is that you keep an open mind.”

  How much more open could she keep it? She’d given herself to this man, a man whom she feared as much as she loved, a man of stunning contradictions. A man who’d killed at least once and might very well have murdered her best friend. She squeezed her eyes shut against the hellish thought. Keep an open mind? She’d opened herself to him in every way. At this point her mind was the least of it.

  He said, “It started when I was sixteen. A swimming party at my friend’s house. It was one of these free-form pools that’s made to look like a natural pond. Twisty-turny, surrounded by plants and rocks. We were fooling around and I didn’t pay attention and I ended
up diving headfirst into shallow water.”

  “My God.” This was the accident Jimmy Stark had referred to in his fax. “What happened?”

  “Severe head trauma. My heart stopped. They tell me I died.”

  “Oh, Noah,” she breathed.

  “‘Near-death experience’ is the correct term, I guess They brought me back, but things were never the same after that.” He sat up straighter and rested his elbow on a raised knee. “I started noticing changes in myself. In the way I reacted to things. In the way I felt about things.”

  “Brain damage?” She hated to think of it.

  “That’s one explanation, and that’s what my family thought. What they still think, I guess. And I bought it at first, but not for long. What was happening was just too... alien. I knew there was something else in there.” Hi looked at her and tapped his head. “In here.”

  She shivered. “And this feeling didn’t go away?”

  He smiled grimly. “It got worse. I was most vulnerable during times of physical and emotional stress, it turned out. Like when I had the flu, or pulled an all-nighter studying.”

  “Or spent two days at the hospital with a medical emergency,” she added, thinking about the day of Grace Drummond’s garden party.

  “Exactly. When I ran into Bryan on my way out of the hospital that day, I was so exhausted he tried to give me a lift. Afraid I’d drive the Jeep into a ditch, I guess.”

  “Bryan was at Wescott Community?” The day Jo died?

  “Yeah. Said he’d been visiting a buddy of his who’d gone in for exploratory surgery.”

  She wondered whether Bryan had been at the hospital before or after his big argument with Jo. With a repressed shudder she recalled the ease with which she’d gained access to curare at Wescott. Bryan was an enterprising youth, as skilled at picking locks as he was at chainsawing trees. Her vivid imagination pictured him tearing off the vial of Norcuron she’d seen taped to the IV bag and stuffing it in a pocket.

  Noah broke into her thoughts. “The dream started right after the accident, too.” She gave him a questioning look, and he added, “I have this recurring dream. A very disturbing dream.”

  “About...?”

  “Anita David’s murder.”

  He paused, as if waiting for her to mentally trip over that one, and it didn’t take her long to oblige him. “Wait a minute. This accident happened when you were a teenager, living in Georgia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How could you have known about Anita David?”

  “I didn’t. Not back then. All I knew was that I couldn’t let myself get to the end of this nightmare. It was too real, and it was leading up to something horrible, though I didn’t know what at the time. I just knew I had to force myself to wake up each time so I wouldn’t see it.”

  “Did it ever end?”

  “Not yet.”

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “Dream or no, in the middle of the night, when I wake up disoriented... well, that’s another bad time for me. A time when my control tends to slip.”

  The pieces fell into place. “You locked yourself out of my room last night. That’s why, isn’t it?” To keep her safe from him.

  He nodded. “Anyway, I started getting into fights in high school. Instigated them myself. That had never happened before. I’d always been a good kid, decent student but not great. My big thing was art. I was a terrific cartoonist, and that’s what I wanted to do for a living, believe it or not. I’d planned to go to art school.”

  She couldn’t picture it. “But...”

  “But after the accident, it was like that goal had never existed. All of a sudden I excelled in science and math. And I loved it. I went from B’s and C’s to A-plus in one semester. Aced all the standardized tests. I don’t have to tell you how thrilled my parents were when I announced I’d given up cartooning for a career in medicine.”

  “And your interest in art?” she asked.

  “It’s like it never existed. I can’t draw worth a damn now. Couldn’t care less about it.”

  “So you went to college...” she prompted.

  “I went to Columbia, premed. Did real well academically. But out of the classroom I was a hell-raiser. Got into a lot of stuff I don’t want to think about.” His face tightened.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I know about Rick Anders.”

  His gaze snapped to her face. She read surprise there, and sorrow. “What did you do, Kit,” he asked softly, “hire someone to dig up my past?”

  She swallowed and forced her chin up. “Yes.” She watched the play of emotion on his face as he absorbed this, and wanted nothing more at that moment than to take him in her arms and soothe his pain. “Noah—”

  “I had no choice. I hope you believe me, but that’s up to you. Rick Anders was a dangerous man. I had no choice,” he repeated in a hoarse whisper.

  She reached over to lay her hand on his arm. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  He sighed harshly. “I was involved with his ex-wife, Tiffany. Well, kind of. It was only our second date, if you could call it that, when it happened.”

  “She had a little girl.”

  A gentle half smile transformed his features. “Mandy. She was one sweet baby. Just over a year old. Just walking, toddling around. Poor kid deserved better than to live like that, on welfare in a city housing project, with Tiffany Anders for a mother.”

  That hit all too close to Kit’s own upbringing. “But you must’ve liked Tiffany if you were seeing her.”

  His smile twisted. “It wasn’t her mothering skills that impressed me at the time. She was a good-time party animal, made to order for a horny twenty-year-old like me.”

  “Older woman?”

  “A year younger, as a matter of fact. I picked her up at an off-campus hangout. That was before I found out about the abusive ex-husband who was heavy into crack.”

  “But he found out about you,” she guessed.

  “He showed up, coked to the max, when I was at Tiffany’s. Took one look at me and started bellowing and tearing up the place.”

  “But they weren’t married anymore.”

  Noah shrugged. “Way he figured, she belonged to him. She and Mandy both.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to kick him out. Not easy—this guy had a couple inches and about forty pounds on me. And it was all muscle. But I was holding my own till he grabbed this huge carving knife. Sliced up my arm and my shoulder when I tried to get it away from him. Tiffany was just standing there shrieking. And I... well, I was trying to hold back the thing inside.”

  “The alien part of you,” she said, using his own term.

  “Yeah. I sensed somehow that that part of me knew what to do with this animal, if I’d only let it, but I’d spent four years fighting to control the thing. The idea of deliberately letting it loose...”

  Something about his expression warned her. “But you did, didn’t you?”

  Noah’s voice turned flat. “Rick got hold of Mandy. Grabbed her out of her crib.” His eyes were wintry, his hands fisted. “He held that knife to his little girl’s throat and kept hollering about how he was going to kill both of them. And I knew he’d do it, Kit. Whether I stayed or left.”

  She felt the burn of tears in her wide eyes. “His own baby daughter?”

  “This guy was high on booze, coke, and blind jealous rage. He was capable of anything. Mandy was sobbing in terror, and Tiffany just started shrieking louder, saying all the wrong things. So I let it out,” he said simply. “The thing inside. Mentally I just kind of stepped back and let it swoop in and take over. I don’t remember anything after that till it was all over. I never do,” he added softly.

  Kit sat mesmerized, trying to imagine the horror that had unfolded while Noah had been deep within himself.

  He continued, “I remember forcing my way back to consciousness, like at the...” He shot her a cautious look. “Like at the cemetery. I was standing ther
e gripping the plastic handle of that knife so hard, my hand was cramped up and I couldn’t drop it. The knife was covered with blood. It was all over my hand. It had spurted onto my clothes—”

  “Noah...” she groaned, watching his eyes lose focus as the horror replayed itself behind them. She shared his pain, a physical ache that burned her chest and radiated into her gut.

  He blinked, the sound of her voice seeming to pull him back. “Rick was lying on his stomach, and the blood... the blood was spreading around him. Spreading out on the floor as I watched. And I didn’t even know where I’d stabbed him. Turned out it was the chest.”

  Kit felt the tickle of a tear sliding down her cheek. Impatiently she swiped it away.

  “Tiffany was still screaming,” he said. “She was sitting in a corner, squeezing Mandy, squeezing her so tight the poor kid was howling in pain. ‘You killed him!’ she yelled. Over and over. I’ll never forget that hoarse shrieking, or how she looked, bug-eyed and out of control. And I did something then that I’d never done to a woman before or since. I belted her across the face. Once. Hard. With my open palm.”

  Just once? Kit thought, admiring his restraint under the circumstances.

  “It did the trick. She started sobbing softly and rocking Mandy against her, and I walked to the phone and called 911.” Wearily he scrubbed at his face, as if the telling had taken something out of him. A mirthless half smile arose. “Then I concentrated on trying to let go of that damn knife.”

  She scooted close to him. Took his hand in both of hers and entwined their fingers. “Have you ever talked about this before?”

  “Just to the authorities. My folks. And then to Chief Jordon after Jo was killed. It’s not something I like to think about, much less talk about.”

  “Not exactly church-picnic chitchat,” she said.

  Noah looked at her hands cradling his, then at her small smile, as if amazed that she could stand the sight of him after his gruesome recounting. He squeezed her hands. “No,” he said softly, “not church-picnic material. Very few people would understand, anyway. Our image of violent death is warped by TV and the movies. The good guys off the bad guys—bang bang bang!—and never have a problem living with themselves afterward. It’s all cut-and-dried.” His grip on her hands became almost painful.