by Mary McBride
Once or twice, he considered going across the hall and checking on her, but rejected the idea each time it occurred. No sense tempting fate. No sense tempting himself. He was a one-woman man. The fact that his woman was dead hadn’t changed that.
Most of him was dead, too. He was just going through the motions now. The gardening, the cooking, the rowing, the piano—they were just preoccupations to keep him sane. His occupation, the P.I. business, was nothing more than a way of paying the bills.
A close bolt of lightning colored his room blue for a moment and lit up Jenny’s face in its silver frame on his desk. Sam’s throat closed. He felt so alone that even Jenny looked like a stranger.
Shifting onto his side, Sam glanced at the glowing digits on his clock radio at the exact moment they winked out and thunder shook the house right down to the foundation.
“Sam?” Laura’s frightened voice sounded close by his bed. She must’ve covered the distance between their rooms in record time. “May I sleep in here? Just for a little while?”
“Sure.” He threw back the covers and slung his legs to the floor. “The top bunk’s all made up, but there’s no ladder. Here. I’ll give you a hand up.”
He reached out his hand for hers in the dark. It wasn’t her hand he made contact with, but rather the warm curve of her waist, covered by thin cotton, unencumbered by any sort of waistband. She might as well have been naked for the shock that went sizzling through him.
Just then another streak of lightning lit up the room, her tousled hair, her pretty face with its huge and frightened eyes.
“Here.” He got a better handle on her and lifted her up to the bunk, trying not to think about all the firm, smooth, fragrant flesh at his fingertips. “It’ll be fine, Laura. Just go to sleep.”
Easing back down on the mattress, Sam scrunched the pillow under his neck and stared straight up while he counted the seconds between the lightning hits and subsequent claps of thunder. Close, all of them. The damned storm seemed content just to hang right over his house. Directly above him, he heard Laura thrashing around, whipping the covers over her head, then following them with the pillow.
The next hit not only sounded as if it took out a tree, but it sent his bunkmate scrambling from hers down to his.
“Please, just hold me,” she whispered even as she was slithering under the covers, into his arms, all warm and trembling against him.
A man would have to have a heart of stone to resist. Sam gathered her closer. “It’s all right, Laura, honey. I promise.”
“Make it stop,” she whimpered.
Sam wished he could. He didn’t know how to make her feel safe. All he knew was that suddenly he was kissing her trembling lips.
He was thinking to console her with soft, warm, little kisses, but they quickly escaped his control. And then he wasn’t thinking at all, but was kissing her not so softly anymore, taking her mouth with a fierce need that ripped through him like the lightning that kept flashing again and again and again.
He kissed her until the fear in her voice turned to urgency, until her hands were reaching for him the way his were for her, until she breathed in his ear a deep and unmistakable Oh, yes. Please. Now. Then the storm outside seemed to come inside, to move through both of them as their bodies joined, fierce and wild, electric, sizzling, and impossibly, achingly complete.
With Sam’s warm body covering hers and her face buried in the damp crook of his shoulder, Laura wasn’t sure if it was still storming or not. The thunder pounding in her ears at the moment was the rush of her own blood. A kind of lightning had just snapped along every nerve in her body, leaving her exquisitely weak and deliciously wrung out.
When she stretched languidly, Sam immediately shifted his comforting weight.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. That was…it was…”
“Wonderful,” Laura said, still a little breathless, her body still reverberating like a bright silver bell.
“Well…yeah.”
He sounded surprised, Laura thought. And when he levered up on an elbow and gazed down at her, a flash of lightning revealed a rather surprised, almost baffled expression on his face. The man who had just made love to her like a ravenous wolf appeared sheepish all of a sudden. Superman had reverted once more to adorable Clark Kent.
Laura didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, regretting the question almost as soon as she spoke it, preferring to be blissfully ignorant just a little while longer.
But whatever it was that Sam was thinking, he didn’t get the chance to tell her because just then somebody began pounding frantically on the front door downstairs.
Chapter 6
Laura stood in darkness near the top of the stairs, hugging a sheet around herself, listening to Sam trying to calm the hysterical woman who’d been knocking on the door. Poor Sam. That seemed to be his lot in life. Calming hysterical women. Tonight, at least.
As nearly as she could gather from Sam’s questions and the sobbing responses, Janey Sayles’s young daughter was very ill. The storm had knocked out Janey’s electricity as well as her telephone. She didn’t know what else to do.
“Help me, Sam.”
“Where’s Samantha now?”
“Out in the car. She needs to get to the hospital. Now.”
“Are you sure it’s serious, Janey?”
“Of course, I’m sure. What are you asking me, Sam? Why else would I be here for God’s sake?”
“Okay. Okay. My vehicle’s better than yours in this weather. Can you move her while I get some clothes on?”
“Yes. She can still walk. At least, I think she can. Oh, hurry.”
The front door slammed and Sam raced up the dark staircase, nearly knocking Laura over when he reached the top.
“I heard,” she said. “I’ll get dressed. I’m going with you.”
When he started to discourage her, Laura practically growled, “If you think I’m going to stay here all by myself in this storm, Sam Zachary, then you better think again. Anyway, maybe I can help.”
“All right. Hurry up then.”
Laura was dressed before he was, and waiting for him at the front door. They ran through the fierce, slashing rain to the Blazer, and when Sam opened the rear door for her, Laura saw the precious little girl lying curled up and sucking her thumb in the back seat.
“Poor baby,” she said, climbing in and settling herself carefully so as not to disturb the child.
“What are you doing here?” Janey Sayles asked from the front seat. Then, when Sam got behind the wheel, the woman fairly snarled at him, “I don’t believe this. What’s she doing here?”
“She’s coming with us.” Sam twisted the key in the ignition, shifted, and stepped on the gas.
In the back seat, Laura shot out her hand to brace the little girl and prevent her from rolling onto the floor.
“Does she have to?” Janey whined.
“Yes,” Sam answered bluntly.
The woman aimed another dark glare toward the back seat before she shrank down into the collar of her raincoat. It was quiet in the front seat then except for the whooshing of the wipers across the windshield and the continued reverberations of the thunderclaps.
Laura kept one hand on the little girl’s shoulder, patting it reassuringly every so often. In the occasional flashes of lightning, she could see a pair of big brown eyes gazing up at her sleepily, but curiously.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Laura asked softly.
The child’s thumb popped out just long enough for her to respond, “’Mantha.”
“’Mantha, hmm.”
“Samantha,” her mother hissed from the front. “Be still.” The woman’s glare shifted to Laura. “Leave her alone. She’s much too sick to be talking.”
Laura leaned down to whisper close to the child’s ear. “That’s a very pretty name, Samantha.”
The little girl grin
ned for a second, her lips tilting up at the edges of her fist, then she frowned in her mother’s direction and closed her eyes.
Laura wanted to ask her where she felt bad, but refrained, not wanting to cause any more ill feeling than she already had by her mere presence in the truck. Samantha didn’t strike her as sick enough to require a visit to an emergency room. But what did she know? She wasn’t a mother, after all.
She wasn’t, was she?
Good Lord. Her gaze flitted to Sam’s image in the rearview mirror. Serious. Sober. In total control. Not like before when they’d both lost every vestige of control. Neither one of them had used their heads, not to mention anything else earlier during their storm-tossed encounter, had they? It had happened so fast that she hadn’t even had time to think.
Laura turned her face to the window and stared out into the wet dark night. Now, with ample time to consider the consequences of what she and Sam had done, she really didn’t want to.
Ten minutes later, the Blazer skidded to a stop at the Emergency entrance of the Summit County hospital. Sam jumped out, wrenched open the back door, and scooped the little girl up in his arms. After his two-year stint as county sheriff, not to mention all of Janey’s prior false alarms, he knew the drill.
“You can wait here if you want,” he said to Laura. “This probably won’t take long.”
“I’ll come in,” she said. “Why don’t I park the truck for you?”
“Great. Thanks. I left the keys in.”
Janey gave his sleeve a hard tug. “Hurry, Sam.”
He hurried through the sliding double doors, aware that his entrance would be greeted with muted groans from the ER staff and a silent chorus of “Here we go again.” He didn’t blame them a bit.
“You’ll be fine, sweetheart,” he whispered to Samantha as he passed her into the outstretched arms of Norma Jefferson, the charge nurse.
“What is it this time, Sam?” she asked with a slight roll of her eyes.
“She’s running a fever,” Janey said, edging between them. “Her head aches. Her throat is sore. And she keeps complaining that her neck hurts.” She fixed her gaze fiercely on Samantha. “Don’t you, baby? Tell them how your neck hurts. Tell them what you told Mommy earlier.”
“Does it, Samantha?” Norma asked.
The child responded with a sleepy nod.
“Okay. Let’s have Doctor Miller take a look at you. We’ll put her in Room Three, Ms. Sayles. I think you know where that is.”
“Yes,” Janey said. “Yes, of course, I do.”
She hooked her arm through Sam’s and started forward, but Norma turned, speared Janey with a glare that only a charge nurse was capable of, and told her in no uncertain terms what she already knew—that only parents were allowed in the examining rooms.
“Oh, but…”
Sam eased his arm from Janey’s grasp. “It’ll be okay. I’ll wait out here and get started on the paperwork for you.”
“Oh, but…”
“In here, Ms. Sayles,” the nurse called.
“Go on.” Sam gave her shoulders a gentle nudge to set her off down the little corridor with its curtained-off rooms.
“You’ll wait for us, won’t you, Sam?” Janey asked over her shoulder.
He tried to disguise his sigh. He tried even harder to dredge up a smile. It wasn’t all that easy. “Sure. Don’t I always?”
In the deserted waiting room, Laura sat rubbing the rain off her arms and face when Sam came in with two cups of steaming coffee.
“Thanks for parking the truck,” he said, holding out one of the cups to her. “Here. I think this is the one without sugar.”
Laura took a tiny, tentative sip. The coffee was piping hot and blessedly sugar free. “Perfect. Thanks. How’s Samantha?”
He lowered himself into the chair next to hers. “She’ll be fine.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
He sighed. “Well, this has happened before.”
“Ah,” Laura murmured noncommittally.
“Janey kind of panics. It’s tough, I guess, being a single mother.” He slung his long legs out, tipped his head back, and closed his eyes a moment.
Laura was tempted to say that she wouldn’t know about that, but she dreaded their conversation getting anywhere near what had happened between them earlier. She glanced at the clock on the far wall. It was almost two. She wished she could turn back the hands. She wished it were midnight again, that she’d stayed in that top bunk, or better yet, remained in the room across the hall.
From the look of him, Sam was wishing the same thing. The set of his mouth was positively grim. Laura’s heart did a surprising little flip as she remembered the feel of that mouth on hers, the taste of him, the sensuous glide of his tongue. She let out a long breath, banishing the memory as best she could.
A stern-looking nurse with a mouth as flat and grim as Sam’s walked into the waiting room, waving a paper at him. “She’s too upset, she says, to fill out the rest of this. Here you go, Sam.” The woman rolled her eyes as she thrust the printed form into Sam’s hand. “Again.”
“How’s Samantha?” he asked.
“Oh, fine. No fever. No rash. Except Janey won’t quit about the stiff neck, so we’ll have to do a spinal tap on the poor little kid just to be on the safe side and rule out meningitis.”
“Meningitis!” Laura gasped.
The nurse looked at her as if suddenly realizing Laura was sitting there. “Are you a relative?”
“No. Just…just a friend.”
“I didn’t realize Janey had any friends,” she said sourly, before turning back to Sam. “Doctor Singh is doing an emergency appendectomy right now, so it’ll be at least two more hours.”
“Okay,” Sam said wearily. “Thanks, Norma. If you’ve got a pen, I’ll just start filling this out.”
She plucked a ballpoint from her pocket and handed it to him. “Oh, and Sam?”
“Yeah?”
Her taut lips slid into a tiny, teasing grin. “I really hate to be the one to tell you this, but just to be on the safe side, since you may have been exposed to meningitis, we’re going to have to give both you and the lady here an antibiotic shot.”
Laura heard Sam swallow audibly, almost painfully before he responded, “Yeah. Okay. No problem, Norma.”
“I’ll let you know when we’re ready.” She walked away laughing.
“What was that all about?” Laura asked, thinking her Superman was looking decidedly queasy. “Why was she laughing like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He put his coffee down on a table, reached for a magazine to brace the paper on his leg, then clicked the ballpoint open decisively before adding, “I guess she just knows how much I hate filling out forms.”
Laura didn’t think that was exactly the case from the way Sam dived into it, filling boxes with perfect little Xs and moving methodically from line to line, his printing dark and squarish and wonderfully neat, as legible as the printed form itself. In contrast, Janey’s thin and shaky scrawl across the upper part of the page was practically impossible to read.
Well, except for what she’d written on the line under Name of Father. Laura leaned a little bit closer just to make certain she’d read it correctly. She squinted. No, there was absolutely no mistaking what Janey had written there. Name of Father: Zachary, Samuel Ulysses.
That stunning bit of information had barely registered on her brain when Norma whisked into the waiting room once more.
“It’s time for Mr. Needle, Sam,” she announced, thumping the clipboard in her hand. “Cindy’s waiting for you in Room Two. Let’s go, big guy.”
“Very funny,” Sam grumbled, getting up. He clicked the pen closed. “Here’s your form, all filled out.”
Norma took the paper and pen from him. “Room Two,” she said again. “Go on. I need to get a couple signatures from this lady and then she’ll be right behind you.”
Sam started to say something to Laura, but the nurse cut him of
f with a stern, “Now, Sam.”
“Right. Okay. I’m going. See you, Laura.”
As soon as Sam headed for the door, Norma plopped down in his vacant chair, crossed her white-stockinged legs, and shoved her clipboard toward Laura. “I’ll need you to sign your name here and here and down here,” she said briskly, pointing her pen at three separate lines on some forms. “These are just our standard releases for treatment. They’re no big deal.”
“All right.” Laura studied them briefly, then held out her hand for the pen.
While she signed, the nurse leaned closer. “Listen, since you’re a friend of Janey’s, maybe you can talk to her and get her to lighten up on Sam.”
“Lighten up?” She glanced up at the woman, whose expression looked earnest, completely sincere.
“This is the sixth time Janey’s dragged him here this year alone. She’s a wacko, a total nutcase, but Sam can’t see it. And the poor guy just doesn’t know how to say no where little Samantha’s concerned.”
Laura finished off her final signature with a flourish and handed the clipboard back to Norma.
Good God. Didn’t this woman read her damned forms? Didn’t she know that Sam was Samantha’s father? As for dragging poor ol’ beleaguered Sam, Laura wanted to suggest twenty miles behind a buckboard through a cactus-rich environment. And that was just for starters.
She’d been so wrong about Sam’s character. She’d been so sure that he was different. Better. A real hero.
“It’s really none of my business,” she said as coolly as she could.
“Okay. Well, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask,” Norma said. “Somebody really ought to do something about that woman before…”
Laura stood up. “If I have to have a shot, I’d like to get it over with as soon as possible, please.”
The nurse sighed. “Sure. Okay. Follow me.”
They crossed the brightly lit entrance foyer again, then turned down the small corridor with curtained-off cubicles. Outside of one of these, Laura saw at least half a dozen hospital employees in white uniforms and green scrubs gathered.
