Clay

by Jennifer Blake

  “Your work?”

  “As a fabric designer. I also hand-dye fabrics with natural dyes on commission.” She stared at him with a defiant look in her gray eyes, also a flash of something that might have been extra awareness.

  “Right,” he answered without inflection, letting that one laconic word stand as his comment on the value of her job versus her child’s life. “I don’t suppose that’s my concern, either. But what definitely is my business is why I’m here. Is there an explanation you’d like to make, or do I just deduce that you have kinky habits?”

  “You wish,” she said with a derisive twist of her expressive mouth, though her creamy-smooth skin turned all the colors of a sunset sky.

  “You mean you don’t want me for a sex slave?” His tone was limpid, but his gaze was as heated as he could make it when he surveyed her slowly from head to heels. She was magnificent; there was no other word for it. As full-figured as the Venus de Milo, round where a woman should be round, flat where she should be flat, she was an armful of paradise with enough muscle and sinew to make a long rainy afternoon spent on a mattress a backbreaking, mind-blowing experience. The tingling sensation below his belt buckle was fair warning that he needed distraction from that particular image.

  “It’s nothing like that!”

  “What’s a sex slave, Mama?”

  “You’re absolutely positive?” Purring insinuation, that was the ticket, Clay thought, as long as he could ignore the too-inquisitive frowns from the little one. “And here I was all set to tell you that you wasted whatever narcotic you slipped me. All you had to do was ask.”

  “As if I would!”

  “Mama?”

  “Then what the hel—heck do you want with me?” He sat up on the side of bed as he spoke. That too-fast movement threatened to turn his intimidating growl into a croak, since it gave him a strong urge to throw up. Swallowing down that sick feeling did nothing for his temper.

  “I want you quiet, immobile and where you can do no harm for the next few days,” she told him with a lift of her chin.

  “And why is that? If it’s money you’re after, I have to tell you that book authors don’t count too high in the celebrity and money sweepstakes. You should have chosen a rock star.”

  “I don’t want money.”

  “What then?” In his frustration, he jerked the restraint that held his wrists so hard that it jangled the old iron bedstead, though with little other effect.

  “You’ll see.”

  Her tone held such confidence that he went quietly ballistic. Voice taut with promise, he said, “You’re playing with fire, lady.”

  “My privilege,” she answered with a wintry smile. She swung to go.

  “Wait!”

  She turned back with one brow arched in inquiry.

  Clay hesitated. Finally he asked, “Do I know you? Have I done something to you, something I don’t know about, to get on your bad side?”

  “We never met before yesterday afternoon.”

  The words she used were precise yet he caught a glimpse of some secret intent in the depths of her eyes that was more than a little disturbing. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then why do I feel as if—” He stopped, not quite sure what he meant to say.

  “What?” she asked, her gaze steady, though the hot color returned slowly to her face.

  “Never mind.” He frowned to cover that moment of uncharacteristic indecision, as he asked again, “Why? What do you want with me?”

  “You’ll find out. Eventually.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Sorry.”

  She wasn’t; he could see it in her eyes, in the steely set of her mouth and the way she stood. She had a reason behind what she’d done all right, and it wasn’t trivial. The question was whether he would survive it. Voice tight, he said, “Fine. So who else is here with you?”

  “What makes you think there’s anyone else?”

  “I didn’t get here from the kitchen on my own two feet, and I can’t see you managing it by yourself.”

  “You’re right. I had help, a friend who will be back again this morning.”

  “An accomplice. I might have known.”

  Her lips curled at one corner. “I don’t know that I’d call him that.”

  “What then? I know he isn’t your husband because your daughter says she has no father. What is he then? Pal? Lover? Significant other? Or maybe pimp?”

  Her face congealed for a long second, becoming as hard as marble. Then she gave a short, winded laugh. “Nice try, Clay Benedict. But if you think the prospect of slapping your head off will make me come close enough to be grabbed, you’re mistaken.”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to give it a shot. But you know who I am? I mean, beyond my name?”

  “Sure. You’re Denise’s cousin, one of the so-called ‘Bad Benedicts’ of Turn-Coupe. She told me all about you.”

  “And you’re positive you don’t have a grudge against me?” His voice was flat with disbelief.

  “I assure you that neither Lainey nor I have ever laid eyes on you before, or you on us. We have no past between us. And when this is over we’ll never see each other again so we also have no future.” Spinning on her heel, she ushered Lainey from the room. She closed the door behind them both.

  “That’s what you think, lady,” Clay muttered to himself as he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. “That’s what you think.”

  He tried to nap in an attempt to overcome the headache throbbing between his temples. It couldn’t be done. Anger and irritation, bafflement and intrigue chased themselves around in his brain until he was dizzy with them. Step by miserable step, Clay went back over the previous afternoon in his mind one more time.

  He had set out to answer a call from Arty about his precious Beulah and also to swing by and check on Denise’s friend as a favor his cousin. With these two errands out of the way, he’d planned to catch the last of the daylight over the backwater beyond Arty’s place where the egrets roosted, since low-hanging dust clouds in the west promised good sunset color.

  Janna had opened the door to his knock. He’d been so taken with her face and form and quiet voice that he was inside before he knew it, though that was the last thing he’d intended. He’d sat down at the kitchen table near the door, glancing over an album and a couple of scattered packets of photos that she’d been working on. His interest was not unnatural given his line of work, but Janna had snatched up the album and pictures as if they held state secrets. He’d drank the coffee she served, talking of this and that to be sociable. Then the world went dark.

  What in God’s name was going on here? Was Janna really involved with whoever had put him in this bed? Was the guy her accomplice, and were the two of them using the camp for drug smuggling or something equally illicit? He didn’t know, and the puzzle, as well as being unable to see what he was up against, was making him nuts.

  Giving up all thought of sleep, he lay staring around him, at the amateurishly plastered walls, yellowed ceiling and cheap curtains that hung at the windows. A rough wooden table on the far side of the room was stacked with books, drawing pads and sheaves of papers. Next to them were brushes and pens stuck upright in pottery jars, while white plastic buckets sat under the tabletop. The air smelled of musty, unused bedding, plaster dust and the faint odor of pine oil cleaner mingled with turpentine and other caustic chemicals.

  The old place was run-down, in need of renovation; he hadn’t realized. Built by his great-granddad back in the early fifties as a retreat from female company, it had been refurbished by Denise’s dad as a family camp. Denise seldom came near it anymore. He himself had hardly been there, either, not since his brother had died.

  That thought triggered the memory of the strange sensation he’d noticed so fleetingly as he talked to both Janna and Lainey Kerr. It was one he hadn’t felt in a long time, a tenuous connection, almost like shared thought waves, which he’d know
n with only one person: Matt, his identical twin. That sensation was almost more unsettling than all the rest.

  Abruptly he lifted his lashes to stare at the yellowed ceiling tiles above him while a picture formed and grew clear in his mind.

  That was it.

  Lainey’s eyes were the key. Staring into their intense blue lit with interest and laughter had been like reliving the staring games he’d played with his twin when they were kids.

  Or like staring into the mirror.

  No. It couldn’t be. Clay took a strangled breath, held it, then let it out again. No, impossible.

  He had no yard children, had never been in a situation so fraught with uncontrolled passion that he’d forgotten protection. He’d been careful, he damn well knew he’d been careful. Besides, he was as positive that he’d never before laid eyes on Lainey’s mother as she was that she’d never met him.

  That left a few other Benedicts unaccounted for.

  Yet Matt had not been the kind of man who would abandon responsibility for whatever he might do, either by accident or on purpose. If he’d fathered a baby by a woman like Janna, Clay was certain, then both mother and child would be members of the Benedict clan today; that was all there was to it. The same could be said for his other brothers, Adam and Wade. All four of them had heard a thousand lectures on the perfidy of women who, like their mother, trapped men into marriage with this oldest trick in the book. It had made them several notches beyond wary of female wiles. No, it had to be something else.

  It should be, but was it? Was it really?

  Two weeks before he’d died, Matt had rhapsodized about some glorious female. He’d been cock-eyed in lust, if not in love, but had laughed in his brother’s face when Clay had demanded to meet the woman of Matt’s dreams. He’d bring her home to Turn-Coupe when his ring was on her finger, he’d said, and not before. His and Clay’s tastes in women were too much alike; he didn’t intend to risk his twin cutting him out. He’d bring her home, Matt had promised, the next time he came home in his two-week-on, two-week-off cycle with his job as a driller on an offshore oil platform. He’d be sure about her then.

  Thirteen days later, the oil platform Matt worked on had blown out then exploded in flames. The fire had burned for weeks. They never saw him again.

  Nine years ago, that had been. Nine long years during which hardly a day passed that Clay didn’t feel the loss. It was like having an arm or a leg chopped off, some part of him so necessary yet taken for granted that it was difficult to believe it could be gone, almost impossible to function without it.

  Was Janna the woman Matt had described? Could that and the mental closeness of a twin be the reason he felt he should know both her and her daughter? Was it remotely possible?

  Janna was in the kitchen for he could hear her moving around and clattering dishes in the sink. He considered getting up and standing in the doorway to watch, or maybe to test if the cable attached to his waist reached that far. It was too much effort. He preferred to lie back and rest his hands on his chest while he figured out whether he was going to make his break for freedom before or after he found out what the woman in the next room wanted from him.

  He couldn’t concentrate for the sound of her voice as she talked to Lainey. The melodious cadences played across his nerves, plucking them like the strings of a harp. He was aware of her movement from one place to the other and of her passing moods from affection to remonstrance to indulgent laughter. The prattle of the little girl was a high grace note weaving in and around the main instrument’s theme, enhancing it until the music seemed to be a part of a distant dream.

  “Well, doggone it, Clay, you so danged comfy that it’s too much trouble to even try to get loose?”

  Clay opened his eyes and turned his head on his pillow to stare at the swamp-thing apparition standing in the bedroom door. His energy was at such a low ebb from his narcotic hangover and the bump on the back of his head that he had only a single profane and highly descriptive name for Alligator Arty.

  “Now, now,” the old buzzard said with a delighted grin.

  “Traitor,” he insisted.

  “Figured it all out, have ye?”

  “It suddenly stands to reason,” he answered, his voice tight. “Why else would she let you in, after all?”

  “Well, don’t get het up. I know you’ve got reason to be testy, but it ain’t no use calling names.”

  “I guess you’re going to tell me you aren’t responsible for these?” Clay indicated his makeshift shackles.

  “As to that, the little lady was in a bind. What could I do except give her a hand? You’d have done the same.” He looked over his shoulder, as if to make sure Janna wasn’t following on his heels. “Anyway, I thought it might not be a bad idea for you to hang around a bit.”

  Clay lifted a satirical brow. “As a prisoner?”

  “Oh, come on, boy. When did it get to be such a hardship to loll around in the bed of a woman like—” He broke off, clearing his throat with a choking rasp as Lainey appeared.

  The little girl had a rope in her hand that she was holding so her fingers were white at the knuckles. Her eyes were as round as dinner plates and she walked with care and frequent looks back over her shoulder. Waddling behind her was a behemoth, a monster so moss-backed and clumsy that its progress was little more than a jerky crawl on the slick linoleum, and its arms and legs appeared as jackknifed as the joints of an overweight spider. It looked around with a frozen grin of such maniacal pleasure on its face that it was hard to say whether it was delighted with being allowed inside or merely judging the assorted legs within reach for breakfast possibilities.

  “Jeez,” Clay exclaimed. “You’ve brought Beulah?”

  “You can’t go to her, so she had to come to you. It’s her belly, doc. Something she et.”

  “Or somebody?”

  The old man gave him an indignant scowl. “You know good and well she wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  “Maybe,” Clay said, relenting somewhat. “But how the heck do you expect me to look at her while lying flat of my back?”

  Lainey spoke up then in piping tones. “I think Beulah swallowed a clock, like in Peter Pan.”

  Clay smiled at the earnest look on her face because he couldn’t help it. “Probably, and would like my arm as dessert.”

  The child gave him a scathing look. “Alligators don’t eat people parts except in movies, where they don’t know any better.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Arty told me. He tells me lots of stuff.”

  “Is that so?” Clay lifted a brow at the old swamp rat who had left out the essential fact that though alligators seldom attacked large living mammals such as human beings, they had no compunction about eating anything that was thoroughly dead. “And what else has he been telling you and your mama?”

  “That they need looking after,” Arty said simply.

  Arty was a dubious protector, Clay thought, though he didn’t say so. Few knew the swamp better, and he was a lot tougher and sharper than he looked, but he was erratic in his habits. He sometimes disappeared for days or weeks as he tended his whiskey still during the summer or ran his trapping lines in winter. He was the last of a vanishing breed, a man who eked a living out of the swamps. Once there had been thousands like him in the state, particularly around the marshes farther south. They’d had a fair return for their hard, wet work while fur prices were high, but that ended with the decline of furs as fashion accessories. Now they could hardly give skins away if they got them, and the nutria and muskrats and minks were increasing in such numbers that they were overrunning the wetlands. The nutria especially, being imports from South America instead of native animals, were destroying the vegetation, leaving only holes of water.

  Aloud, Clay said, “So now Beulah needs my expertise. If you’ll just release my hands, I’ll take a look at her.”

  “No!”

  That command came from Janna as she strode through the door and placed
herself between Arty and the bed. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Come on,” Clay said as anger rose inside him. “This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”

  “You can treat Beulah from where you are or not at all.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Arty began.

  “I mean it.” She didn’t even look at the old trapper.

  “Let me go. Now,” Clay said in his most commanding voice. “This isn’t funny anymore.”

  “I don’t think so.” Janna stared at him, her gray eyes hard. “And it never was funny to me.”

  “Be reasonable, woman,” Arty told her. “This ain’t no desperado you’re dealing with here.”

  “Any man can be desperate when he’s pushed far enough,” she declared.

  “Dang it all…”

  “You heard me.”

  “I’ll still need the use of my hands,” Clay said, his voice tight.

  “You can manage.” Janna stood unflinching, her shoulders as straight as the line of her mouth.

  Arty looked at Clay and cocked a brow in silent inquiry. It was plain that his old friend was torn, half inclined to switch his allegiance for the sake of his pet. Clay was tempted to encourage him just to see how Janna Kerr would handle it. However, Beulah chose that moment to let out a grunt that made him take a closer look at her.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “I think Lainey may be right, more or less.”

  The others looked down at the alligator. Beulah stared back at them with her rictus grin while waving her tail back and forth in slow sweeps with a back draft powerful enough to drag dust bunnies from under the bed.

  Janna met his gaze again. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Not exactly. I’d say she’s about to give birth to several dozen little Beulahs. That’s if somebody will take her home and leave her alone so she can build herself a nice mud nest in a quiet place.”

  “It ain’t possible,” Arty protested.

  Clay tipped his head in a warning look toward Lainey who was following their every word with rapt attention. “Positive, are you?”

  “It’s late in the season, but there was that one night when I heard a lot of bellowing…” He scratched his beard thoughtfully, then slapped his battered hat back on his mostly bald head. “I sure hope you’re right.”