Clay

by Jennifer Blake

  She did, but only because it sometimes became chapped in the winter. Instead of answering, she said, “What you’re really telling me, I suppose, is that you’re bored.”

  His smile was brief. “I’ve had more scintillating days.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Can you?” He stretched, making himself more comfortable in the bed. “Now just what do you see me doing. And where?”

  That was something he’d never know. “If you’re serious about the camera, you can have it. Arty brought it inside before he took the airboat away.”

  “Considerate of him.”

  “I think he was afraid the bag with your equipment might be stolen.”

  “Theft on top of kidnapping? What is the neighborhood coming to?” The irony faded from his voice as he added, “Where did he take Jenny?”

  “I’ve no idea. Somewhere safe.”

  “And out of sight?”

  She sent him a cool glance.

  Lainey piped up then. “Mr. Arty took it to his house, I’ll bet. He has lots of junk there.”

  “Good guess, punkin,” Clay said with a wry smile. “First place I’ll look when I get away from here.”

  The girl’s eyes widened, then she threw down her brush and ran to climb back up on the bed. “You’re not going yet, are you?”

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Janna said in acid-tinged sweetness. “He’ll be with us a little longer.”

  The look he sent her held the heat of anger and some other dark, fathomless emotion that kicked her heart into a higher rhythm. She held it as long as she could, then she put down her brush with deliberation and went to retrieve his camera.

  “What about the bag?” Clay inquired when she handed it over from a safe distance.

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “My extra film, lens, filters and so on, are in it.”

  She tipped her head. “And that’s all? No wire cutters or handy dandy file?”

  “Maybe a tool kit,” he said with the lift of one shoulder.

  “I noticed.”

  “You could take it out.”

  “Later,” she answered in dry tones, meaning much later, when she’d had a chance to see what other goodies he had stashed away for emergencies. She turned away without waiting for an answer. Her prisoner made no other protest, but she could feel his gaze burning into her back.

  Lainey abandoned all thought of art to sit enthralled while Clay took off the lens cap of his camera, checked and cleaned it, then fiddled with its settings. He shot a few frames of the girl with her drawings, making her laugh with his droll comments so she smiled gaily for the lens. It crossed Janna’s mind that Clay was doing his best to beguile her daughter, and was obviously succeeding. A moment later, she dismissed that idea; he had no one else to talk to, after all. Regardless, Janna kept a close watch on the pair. That was until she noticed that her watercolors were beginning to dry in their palette wells. She returned to work with ostentatious dedication then.

  Time slipped past. Janna was only marginally aware of the two on the bed as Clay explained F-stops and exposures and lighting as if Lainey were eighteen instead of eight. After one whispered consultation, Lainey left the room, returning shortly with three or four unopened film canisters held tightly to her chest. Clay reloaded his camera while Lainey bombarded him with questions about what he did with the empty canisters. When they began to discuss their use as doll dishes, Janna tuned out the pair completely.

  The next time she looked, Lainey was giggling helplessly as she tried to keep possession of the two empty canisters she’d stolen away from their owner, while Clay tickled her ribs and tummy to make her release them.

  “Stop!” Janna cried. She threw down her brush and palette with a splattering clatter, and ran around the end of her worktable. “Don’t do that! She can’t—”

  Suddenly Lainey’s laughter became a high scream followed by gulping sobs. She dropped the canisters on the bed as she clapped her arms around her middle.

  Consternation sprang into Clay’s face. He caught the girl’s shoulders. “What is it?” he inquired in low urgency. “Where do you hurt?”

  Janna hit him like a whirlwind, shoving so hard that he was thrown backward away from her daughter. Reaching for Lainey, she pulled her into her arms and dropped onto the bed, holding her daughter close while searching her abdomen for signs of blood.

  “What’s wrong?” Clay demanded as he came upright again with the coiling of hard muscles. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Stomach catheter,” Janna snapped. “For dialysis. If you’ve pulled it out—”

  “She’ll have to go to a hospital,” he finished for her as he turned white around the mouth. “I should have realized.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No hospital,” Lainey sobbed. “No sticks. Please, please, no more sticks yet.”

  Sticks. It was the word for injections that she’d picked up from the nurses who came at her with syringes in their hands. “Now there’s going to be a little stick,” they’d say, and they were right in their way. But administering little sticks day after day, thousands of little sticks, was considered heinous torture in some societies.

  The plastic tubing showed no sign of leakage that Janna could see, no bloodstains coming through the gauze pads that covered the eternally raw incision. The discovery triggered rage instead of relief. She turned it on the man beside her. “Why in hell did you start a roughhouse game? Did you want to kill her?”

  “I’m sorry. She seemed so near normal that I forgot.”

  “She has renal disease, you know that.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “End stage renal disease.” The words were bald; still she let them stand.

  “End stage…”

  His voice trailed to a halt while sick comprehension rose in his eyes. He needed no other explanation, Janna saw. He understood that no simple drug or procedure was ever going to restore Lainey to the health and ordinary kidney function of a normal child. She wasn’t normal, would never be normal again in that respect for as long as she lived.

  As long as she lived. Which might not be long if some chance virus, imbalance of the different chemical reactions in her body or other disaster caused a sudden emergency episode. It had happened before, the infection of the stomach lining, the sudden spike in blood pressure, the excess fluid around the heart. And so it would continue for crisis after crisis, until something went so terribly wrong that Lainey failed to recover. Or until she had a transplant.

  “She’s really that sick,” Clay said, the words harsh.

  Janna only looked at him as she rocked her daughter in her arms.

  “Then why is she way-the-hell out here in the middle of nowhere instead of close to a first-class medical center?”

  That was the nightmare question that Janna lived with from one second to the next. It was the one thing she couldn’t change or control, the enormous chance that she was taking for the sake of a better life for her daughter. That Clay had dragged this weakness in her plan ruthlessly into the open brought her anger surging back again. “I’m taking care of my daughter the best way I know how, just as I’ve taken care of her from the minute she was born,” she told him, her voice shaking. “You’re in no position to know or understand, can’t conceive of everything I’ve been through, everything we’ve been through together. Lainey’s health and what I choose to do about it is none of your business, not now, not ever.”

  He watched her for a long moment while cogent thought raced behind his eyes. Then he asked softly, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” She was proud of the certainty in her tone, though she couldn’t prevent the shiver that ran down her back.

  “I’m not. In fact, I have to wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with the reason I’m here.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” She was able, barely, to keep the tremor from her voice. Lainey, perhaps sensing the undercurrents between the
two adults, had subsided to only an occasional hiccuping sob as she watched their exchange from the shelter of her mother’s arms.

  “Then why am I still at the camp?”

  Clay held her gaze, his own so intense it was as if he willed her to tell him the truth. And he almost got it, would have if there hadn’t been so much at stake. Trying for a low laugh, Janna looked away from him. “I thought you had that all figured out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You were positive I had designs on your body.”

  He eased away from her, putting his shoulders to the wall beside the bed. “Are you saying I was right?”

  Men could always be distracted by sex or the promise of it, couldn’t they? Janna hoped that bit of common knowledge was true. Choosing her words with care because of Lainey, she said, “I’m a single mother who hasn’t had a decent relationship since well before my daughter was born. This camp is isolated and we’re alone here. Would it be such a bad thing?”

  “Possibly not, if I believed it.” His words were grim.

  “What’s so hard to believe? You’re an amazingly attractive man.”

  “But not,” he said with precision, “an idiot.”

  “You don’t think I’m attracted to you?”

  “I think drugging a man and tying him to a bed for the sake of a so-called relationship is going too far. I think any kind of affair that involves force is no affair at all. I think you’re much too gorgeous to have to coerce a man into doing what you want. I think the only reason you haven’t had a man is that you didn’t want one.”

  He wasn’t stupid at all, which was a real shame since it required something more drastic of her. With a tight smile, she said, “Maybe the word relationship was a bit much. Maybe what I want from you is more basic. Involvement is something I don’t need. All I really require is…”

  “Intimate bodily contact.”

  “Exactly.” She was grateful to him for providing that nongraphic phrase since she’d been stuck for one.

  “How about what I require?”

  “I thought the big deal with men was that they are able to separate love and lust?”

  “Some can, some can’t, and some prefer not to reduce the attraction between the sexes to that kind of self-serving rationale.”

  A knot of unreasonable regret formed in her throat as she stared at him. Still she tilted her head, summoning a smile as provocative as she could make it as she tightened her grasp on her daughter. “And just where do you fall in there?”

  “Guess,” he said, his gaze straight.

  “You said earlier that all I had to do was ask. Suppose I’m asking?”

  “I make love to you and then I’m free to go. Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, you didn’t, did you? So what’s to keep me from using my greater strength to compel my release if I ever take you in my arms.”

  The goose bumps that rippled over her skin had little to do with his suggestion and everything to do with the mental image created by his choice of words. Still, it was a reminder of the danger she’d forgotten in her concern for her daughter. There was absolutely nothing to keep him from tackling her now, this instant. What was stopping him? Guilt? Concern for Lainey? Or was it the suggestion she’d just made? Whichever it was, it seemed best to pretend she was oblivious in the hope that it would continue until she was out of reach again.

  On a strained laugh, she quipped, “Starvation, since I’m the cook?”

  The answering movement of his lips was grim yet undeniably amused. “It could be worth the chance.”

  It could indeed, Janna thought as her gaze caught on the slow curve of his mouth that deepened the smile brackets on either side and she felt the spiraling heat at the center of her being caused by his words. Could she risk it, risk making love to Clay Benedict? Could she bring herself to use sex to distract him from what she really wanted or possibly even to gain it without risking his life?

  It seemed that she might have to try.

  4

  The direction of her thoughts was so uncomfortable that Janna slid Lainey off her lap, getting ready to rise to her feet. Clay put out his bound hands to catch her arm, his grasp warm and firm. She paused, meeting the fathomless dark blue of his gaze. Seconds passed while Lainey stood staring from one to the other with a puzzled frown between her eyes.

  Clay glanced at the girl then released Janna with an abrupt movement and settled back until his shoulders touched the wall again. The expression on his face promised that next time he would not be so lenient.

  Janna let out the breath she’d been holding. She had her answer, she thought; it was Lainey’s presence that had saved her. Clay Benedict was reluctant to resort to violence in front of a child, perhaps, or was afraid of hurting the girl again if she should be caught between the two of them. Janna appreciated that consideration, but almost wished he’d not shown it. She didn’t want to like him or admire his values, didn’t want to feel the slightest regret for what she was doing to him.

  In a pretense at composure, she said, “It’s about coffee time for me, I think, my answer to the midafternoon slump. Care for a cup?”

  “I’m not exactly slumping since this isn’t my normal level of activity,” he answered. “But then, I don’t get up at night to check on…things.”

  “You heard.” It was not a question.

  “At one this morning, and again at four,” he answered, his gaze level. “I wondered. But not anymore.”

  She looked away, moving toward the door. “Yes, well. Is that a no to the coffee then?”

  “As much as I love it, ordinarily, I may have to pass on yours.”

  She looked back, saw the wary distaste in his face. Comprehension brought the heat of a flush. With a grimace, she said, “No additives this time, I promise.”

  “Not even for convenience?”

  He meant because it would make it easier to hold him, she thought. “It’s a great temptation, but maybe I can resist.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Would you believe that I prefer you awake?” If he could resort to double meanings, then so could she, in spite of the flush that refused to go away.

  He made a sound that might have meant anything, but his gaze didn’t leave hers.

  “Well?”

  “I take mine black.”

  “I remember,” she said, and gave him a grave look over her shoulder before she moved from the room and down the hall toward the kitchen.

  She was still nervous about leaving Lainey with Clay, but not as much as before. She was fast coming to think that Clay Benedict represented a more invidious threat. He was learning everything there was to know about her, would soon know enough to destroy her. The question was whether she could do what she needed before that time came.

  Janna put the kettle on and fresh grounds in the coffeepot, then leaned against the cabinet with her arms crossed over her chest as she waited for the water to boil. A minute later, her daughter’s footsteps sounded in the hall, then Lainey appeared in the kitchen.

  “Clay’s hungry, Mama,” she announced.

  “He had breakfast.”

  “I know, but he’s bigger than we are. Can he have one of my special cookies with his coffee?”

  Lainey’s diet restrictions made anything sweet a scarce commodity in her life. That she felt inclined to share one of her favorite chocolate-chip cookies with the man in the spare room was a sign of great favor. Janna smiled at her daughter. “I don’t see why not, though I suppose that means you get one, too?”

  “Just one,” her daughter agreed, her face solemn.

  Janna opened the jar and doled out the two cookies, then watched as Lainey skipped off down the hall. After a moment, she could hear the two in the other room discussing the various merits of chocolate chips, coconut and peanut butter as cookie ingredients. The murmur of their voices continued, barely heard above the boiling of the kettle, but it sounded as if Clay might be using Laine
y’s diet as an opening to ask more questions about her condition.

  Janna closed her eyes a second then turned to pour the water in the pot, then take down mugs and remove the half-and-half that she used in her coffee from the refrigerator. As she lined them up on the cabinet, she heard Clay make some comment followed by Lainey’s delighted giggle. Clay joined in, his laugh so rich and deep that it seemed to vibrate in the air. Suddenly memory flooded over Janna of another day, another man and another moment of transient pleasure. It sent a wave of wistful nostalgia over her, though she had trouble bringing the man’s face into exact focus.

  No. She wouldn’t think about Lainey’s father; it had been years since she’d allowed herself that luxury. For a long time, it had been too painful. Afterward, she’d been too busy, too determined to make a living for herself and her daughter, too dedicated to making certain that nothing ever hurt like that again.

  It hadn’t, either, not until Lainey got sick. Then nothing else mattered. Nothing.

  As the coffee finished dripping, Janna filled the mugs and added cream to one, then picked both up and started toward the spare room. She was almost to the door when she heard her daughter from inside as she spoke to Clay. Voice serious, she was saying, “Sharing is important. My mama says so.”

  “Absolutely,” Clay answered. “Mine always told me that only people with no heart refuse to share.”

  “My heart is all right.”

  “Yes, I know, punkin. It was nice of you to share your cookies.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “What?”

  Clay’s voice sounded wary to Janna, which brought a crooked smile to her lips. It showed he was beginning to take the measure of her daughter. But then she stopped breathing as she heard what Lainey said next.

  “Would you mind sharing a kidney with me? I mean, I know I’m only little, but a grown-up kidney would be all right because the doctor said so. Mama would do it, but her blood is all wrong. I’d only need one, so you’d be okay and not get sick like me. We would both be fine and stay alive a long time. It wouldn’t hurt so much, really. We could even be in the same hospital room, if you wanted. When it was over, there’d be no more mean nurses and doctors who think they know how you feel but don’t, and no more weird machines.”