Triple Exposure

by Colleen Thompson

  “I—I brought my van,” she said, her headache pulsing.

  “You aren’t driving, Rachel, not after you were knocked unconscious. Probably I should take you to the hospital in Alpine, get you checked out thoroughly.”

  “No.” She spoke more sharply than she meant to, imagining yet another set of bills she couldn’t afford. “I’m feeling a lot better now. Just a little sore. And cold.”

  “I can feel you shaking,” he said. “I should have made you take another coat.”

  He had taken off his own and put it over her jacket in spite of her protests that he would freeze.

  “Neither of us could’ve imagined this would happen. What did happen, Zeke? Was it a woman driving that thing? That crazy lady here from Philadelphia to run me down?”

  “Couldn’t say—I never got a real look at the driver. Too busy getting the hell away before whoever it was shot me.”

  “Shot you? There was shooting?” She thought back to her wild ride but recalled no sound save the desperate pounding of her mount’s hooves against hard earth.

  “Yeah, but the SUV got hung up, stuck long enough for me to move out of range. Didn’t stay there long, though. I heard it driving off a few minutes later. Heading back toward town, I think.”

  “Did you recognize the vehicle?”

  “Didn’t ring any bells with me, but I didn’t get a good look, either. At first, I thought it could be local kids—teenagers joyriding. Could’ve felt like fun to them to chase the deer.”

  “Some fun,” she said, too exhausted to pay much attention to the doubt in his voice. “Damned jerks. But if they came on us accidentally, they would have turned around and taken off, right? Not kept coming.”

  “And not fired after us,” Zeke added. “Although it’s possible they only meant to scare us off. For all I know, the shooter could’ve been blasting away at the sky, not you and me. I just didn’t think it was a wise move to sit around and plot bullet trajectories.”

  She pressed even closer to him, laid her cheek against his back, and listened to the beat, so strong and regular inside him. A rhythm she could depend on, like his strength and warmth. “Glad you didn’t. I don’t want you to be hurt on my account.”

  “We can’t know for sure this has anything to do with you. For one thing, there’s that fellow who shot up my truck. And didn’t the sheriff say your caller’s left the area?”

  “I wanted to believe that, but now…How likely does it seem that a woman obsessed enough to come two thousand miles to get to me would make a single phone call, then turn right around and head home?”

  “I couldn’t make out the driver, but I did get the impression of someone on the small side. Could’ve been a woman.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “We could have been killed. Both of us. It might’ve taken days for anyone to find us.”

  “Someone would’ve looked for you.”

  “Not to night, I’ll bet. I told my grandma I was stopping by a friend’s house. She’s used to living on her own, and she’s always in bed early. Probably went to sleep thinking I’d slip in after a while. And I never mentioned which friend I was visiting.” She smiled, thinking about it before adding, “Though come to think of it, you’re the only real friend I’ve got here.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true.”

  She shrugged. “I wasn’t what you’d call popular in high school, and apparently, some people never move past that garbage. But even if I’d been the prom queen, who wants to buddy up to a killer? I might’ve been acquitted, but the whole situation was so ugly.”

  “I wish that asshole was alive. So I could kill him.”

  “Thanks, I think. That may be the most brutally chivalrous offer I’ve ever had. But it wouldn’t be worth what it would cost you. I wouldn’t wish it—” She blocked the memories, not only from that night but later, when she’d learned the DA’s office was pursuing charges, that the photos Kyle had faked—lies that ravaged her soul each time she’d been forced to look at them—would be used as evidence against her. Had already been circulated until her e-mail box was crammed with messages that made her feel as though she had been raped in public, then forced to endure critiques on her “performance” as a budding porn star. “I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone.”

  He had no answer, so she was left alone with the memory of her shame and horror—with the futility of hoping to ever escape it. But after a time, she must have drifted off, for the next thing Rachel knew, Zeke was squeezing her wrist and whispering, “We made it. We’re back home—at my place.”

  Through bleary eyes, she saw a light shining through a window at the end of the candelilla factory where Zeke lived.

  “Let’s get down,” he said. “Then I’ll help you inside, where you can get warm.”

  Her legs felt wobbly after he helped her dismount, but a moment later, he lifted her in his strong arms.

  “You don’t have to carry me. I can make it on my own.”

  “I know you can.” He pulled her closer to him, his tone surprisingly gentle for such a big man. “But you don’t have to. Not now.”

  He carried her straight inside, opening the unlocked red door to his apartment. She thought he’d set her in one of the chairs beside his kitchen table, but instead, he walked beyond the kitchen and laid her on his bed before removing her shoes.

  He smoothed her hair back from her face and tucked the blankets in around her. “Rest here and try to warm up. I’ll start a fire in the woodstove. Then I have to go back out.”

  “Are all the animals—?”

  “Cholla’s fine, and Gus’s found his way home safely. Stitches held, too.”

  “What about Candle? Will she be all right?”

  Zeke crumpled old newspapers and tucked them beneath some kindling in a metal woodstove. “I’ll do all I can for her. Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry. Such simple words and yet so soothing. Rachel thought she wouldn’t have needed sleeping pills, or even Dr. Thomas, if she’d had someone to say—and mean—that back in Philadelphia. If she’d had someone she knew and trusted to watch out for her interests while she rested.

  She meant to wait for him to come back, but she must have dozed again. She woke to hear Zeke moving around the apartment and wood crackling as it burned in the stove. She smelled the faint, sharp scent of smoke, a heady, resinous odor that reminded her of campfires from her childhood.

  From somewhere nearby, she heard running water, followed by Zeke’s footsteps. Looking up through sleepy eyes, she saw him carrying a steaming basin with a couple of towels draped over his broad shoulder.

  “Warmer now?” he asked and set the metal basin on a chair he must have brought out from the kitchen.

  “Much,” she said, suddenly aware of how comfortable she felt wrapped in the blankets, until she made the mistake of moving and hissed in sudden pain.

  “Your head?” he asked.

  “Mmm, yeah—but mostly my left shoulder. I think it took the brunt when I fell.”

  “Be right back.” He returned a minute later with a glass of water and a bottle of pain reliever. “This won’t hurt you, will it? It’s non-prescription.”

  “That’ll be great.” She tried to push herself upright, but groaned as pain spun up like a dust devil.

  When Zeke sat on its edge, the bed creaked in protest. Rachel held her breath, braced for contact.

  He put down both the glass and pills, then slid a hand behind her. “Ready?”

  With a tight nod, she let him help her up and rearrange the pillows to support her. When she sighed, “That’s good,” he handed her the glass and a pair of oblong white pills.

  She drained the water to the last drop, then used the back of her hand to wipe the excess moisture from her mouth. “I didn’t know I was so thirsty.”

  “Want some more?”

  “I’m okay. But I forgot to ask, how’s Candle?”

  “She threw a shoe and split the hoof. Nothing major, but I put on a pro
tective boot, and I’ll call the farrier to come tomorrow. I’m pretty sure she’ll be good as new in a few days.”

  Rachel blew out a breath. “I’m glad. I was scared to death she’d break a leg, galloping blind like that.”

  “Damned lucky. For her, for you. For all of us.”

  His green eyes looked at her face so intently, she felt a flush rise in response.

  He touched his fingertips to the still-steaming basin before saying, “Water’s cool enough now. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  A chill danced along her nerve endings, then coiled beneath her stomach. Reminding her that she lay in his bed, that they were so close, so alone.

  She swallowed hard, and spoke in a small voice. “I think I could drive home.”

  He dipped one of the towel’s ends into the warm water. “Your face is dirty,” he said. “And you’ve got no business driving.”

  “I—I should call, at least.”

  “It’s after one.” He wrung the towel and pressed its heat and moisture to her sore cheek. “Your grandmother must be sleeping.”

  Rachel leaned back against the pillows, allowing him to wash her face and hands. Knowing this was what she’d warned herself against, what she’d been warned against by others. Knowing and not caring, with the crackling wood fire a cold light in comparison to the flame igniting his gaze.

  She arched her body forward and let him help her out of both jackets. She didn’t stop there, but pulled her arms free of the long sleeves of her T-shirt, then eased it from her torso and over her head.

  The look she sent him was a wordless challenge to their previous denials, as well as to the logic that ruled their daylight hours. Because right now, it didn’t matter that her past had made her future so uncertain, or that his background was a great, unknown Here Be Dragons on the map. To Rachel, the only thing that mattered was that she felt safe in this place, with this man, safe for the first time in so damned long. Safe and warm and utterly aroused….

  He didn’t spoil it with words but instead let his gaze drift downward. He smiled gently as he reached around her torso and unhooked her bra.

  He removed it without touching her. Stared at her so reverently, she felt like something sacred.

  “So beautiful,” he whispered, watching in silence as she pulled back the blankets and carefully removed both jeans and pan ties, then slipped off her socks.

  Completely nude, she grew even warmer, but her skin felt tight and itchy, gritty with both desert sand and her desire. “Will you wash me?” she asked.

  “God,” he groaned as he dipped the cloth back into the water. Then he washed her, every inch of her, so slowly and carefully, it might have been a penance for the worst of sins.

  It was when he began to blot her with the dry towel that his resolve snapped. With a groan, he fell upon her lips, one big hand spanning her breast. She sobbed into his mouth, accepting the thrust of his tongue as her back arched in a helpless spasm.

  She pulled his shirttail out of his jeans, then slipped her hands beneath the chambray to run her palms along his hot flesh. Absorbing the play of muscles beneath the surface, tracing the groove that marked the column of his spine and murmuring approval as he fed upon her neck and stroked her still-damp breasts until the nipples peaked.

  She shifted, then made short work of the buttons on his shirt to bare the chest she’d studied so closely—for the sake of art, of course—in the photos she had taken. But she found the feel of that chest, so deep-breathing and hard-muscled and solidly male, with its scattering of coarse hairs and the hammering heart beneath its surface, a far greater aphrodisiac than any picture ever taken.

  Or perhaps it was the gentle nips along her shoulder that had her gasping and then…Conscious thought melted away as his mouth dropped to her breasts.

  She threw back her head and allowed the pleasure to spiral through all her senses, to carry her to a place beyond the crackling fire and soft blankets, beyond the aches caused by her fall. When he stopped, she nearly wept, until she saw him rise to strip off his jeans.

  And if his chest had been a work of art, the whole of him was a museum. The muscles of his thighs, his taut waist, the size and strength of his erection—she felt her flesh give way to heat, to liquid, felt every last misgiving melt as her mind filled with an imperative. To touch. To taste, to open herself to all that he could offer.

  Yet she saw hesitation war with the hunger in his expression. “Rachel,” he said, “This isn’t—You shouldn’t be—”

  She pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed it, then ran a single fingertip along his length.

  Whatever he had been about to say dissolved into a moan of pure need. He moved over her, their bodies undulating, desperate for skin-to-skin contact and for friction, hurrying before their better judgment caught up with their need.

  His fingers found her center, stroked her to a swift, explosive climax. A climax from which she had barely recovered before he ducked his head beneath her legs and laved the same spot greedily with his tongue. She was weeping with the feel of him, weeping with her pleasure as she maneuvered her body to take him into her mouth.

  And what they did together did not feel wrong or dirty, not when they tasted of each other, nor when he plunged into her with deep and hungry strokes. For here, the same acts that every pornographer on the planet perverted with vile photos took on a rightness, an inevitability that felt more ancient than the desert.

  This is what it should be, she knew as the darkness gathered tight around her, as it splintered into brilliance, into starlight, moonlight, then a joy so brilliant it cast all the rest into deep shadow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a “child of darkness” who is equal and complementary to the more obvious “child of light.”

  —Laurens van der Post,

  from The Dark Eye of Africa

  Zeke couldn’t recall the last time he had slept spooned against a woman. Breathing as she breathed, with his arms draped over her protectively. Sharing his body heat, his pillow, totally relaxed in a way that only came with satiation.

  It ended all too soon, with his body’s stirring, its recognition that a warm and willing female remained close at hand. With his mind waking to the realization that this was not just any female; it was Rachel. Rachel Copeland, naked in his bed.

  So he spoiled everything by kissing the sleek hair behind her ear and cupping her breast with his hand. She woke with a desperate gasp, her body tensing. “Get out, Kyle. Don’t. What are you—”

  “It’s Zeke, Rachel,” he said into a darkness barely tempered by the woodstove’s soft glow. “Just Zeke. Everything’s all right.”

  After a delay, he heard her panting. “Oh. Oh, Lord…I guess—it was a nightmare. I—I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for—” God only knew, she had a right to bad dreams. If he could, he’d kiss away each one, but he knew that couldn’t be for them. That he’d been wrong to take what she had offered last night, wrong to take one more step down a path he couldn’t travel.

  “What time is it?” she asked, sounding wide awake now.

  He saw the flash from her digital watch as she pushed a button to light its face. Saw, too, the tiny numbers reading 5:43 AM.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “My grandma will be up soon, and if I’m not there, she’ll totally freak out.”

  Rachel tossed back the covers and then grunted as she tried to push herself upright. “Owww. I—I forgot.”

  “What is it?” he asked, sitting up and laying a hand along the side of her neck to rub the tension from her muscle.

  “Shoulder, when I tried to use it. But now that I’m up, my head hurts, too.”

  “I should’ve taken you to the hospital. You could have a serious—”

  “I’ll be fine. Just sore. But I have to get going.”

  He reached for his pants. “Let me drive you.”

&nb
sp; “No.” The sharpness of her voice was softened by a gentle touch to his hand. “Listen, Zeke. Last night was horrible and scary as hell, and—”

  “Oh, great. Just what every man loves hearing,” he said dryly.

  “But the part afterward, with you—that part was wonderful. That’s what I was about to say before your male ego interrupted.”

  “It was taking a hell of a beating, after all.”

  She stroked his jaw, then kissed him. He wanted to keep kissing her, to drown her hurry in a rising tide of passion.

  She pulled away abruptly, saying, “It was wonderful. The only bright spot in a very dark night. A very dark year, really. But I’m not ready for this. Not the kind of ‘this’ that lasts.”

  “I’m not asking for that, Rachel.” He swallowed hard. “I can’t. But maybe we could—”

  “I have to be honest with you.” She began gathering her clothing, avoiding his eyes as she did so. “I’m not interested in sneaking around to scratch an itch every so often. Everywhere I look, I see trouble all around me. Threats and lawsuits—not to mention the usual array of family bullshit. It doesn’t leave me a lot of energy to wall off pieces of myself and make them off limits. Like the part that gets attached and the part that falls in—I just don’t have it in me to keep up the sex thing if I’m not allowed to get to know you.”

  He’d guessed that about her, warned himself that Rachel Copeland wasn’t the kind to settle for an occasional no-strings tumble. But the problem was, the type of woman who would accept the conditions he could offer didn’t interest him at all.

  “And I’ve already caused my family so much worry.” She stepped into an enticing pair of pale-pink pan ties. “When they hear about what happened in the desert last night, they’re going to freak out. Especially my dad.”

  To spare her shoulder, he turned her around and hooked her bra, in spite of his body’s protests. “I can understand that. After those phone calls and your glider crash, it’s tough to believe our run-in with that SUV was a random accident.”