by Sharon Sala
“He’s stable and improving.”
Before Wes could comment, the government arrived.
When Ally saw all the strangers, she frowned.
“Wes…who are these men?”
“Remember the calls I made at your father’s house?”
She nodded.
“They responded.” Then he pointed them out in succession. “Agent Hurley, DEA. Agent Black, FBI. Dr. Christopher Shero, CDC. Major Poteet and Lieutenant Williams from Fort Benning. They want to ask you some questions about Roland Storm and your brothers. Okay?”
“Oh. Yes, gladly,” Ally said, then scooted over so that Wes could sit on the bed beside her.
“I’ll just stand over here out of the way,” Wes said.
She frowned but didn’t insist, and the questioning began. She answered as best as she could but felt they were missing the point. Frowning, she finally interrupted Dr. Shero with a wave of her hand.
“Please…all of you…I don’t think you’re getting what I’m trying to say. May I just tell you what I know, and then you can ask specific questions later?”
Then, without waiting for them to give their consent, she began to talk.
“It began with my brothers looking for work. There’s not much work around these parts, and Danny had just been laid off. He came home one day all happy because he’d gotten both himself and Porter a job. They were to harvest a crop of Chinese herbs for Roland Storm, and he was going to pay them five thousand dollars apiece. I didn’t like it and said so, accusing my brothers of knowingly hiring on to harvest some kind of illegal drug. They denied it, but I think they both had their suspicions. It was at the end of their first day of work that everything changed.”
She took a deep breath, then her voice started to shake. “Right now, we don’t know if they’re alive or dead.”
“It’s all right, Ally,” Wes said. “They’ve seen tears before. If it makes you feel better, honey, then cry.”
Dr. Shero scooted a box of tissues toward her, and Hurley pretended to check a spot on his shoe as they waited for her to regain her composure. Finally she was able to continue.
“As I was saying, the first night, when they came home, they were filthy. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And they’d stripped out of their clothes outside. You see, our laundry room is in a shed attached to the side of the house, so they had put their own clothing in to wash before coming into the house. I can’t stress enough how unusual that was. Anyway, Danny wouldn’t even speak, which is completely opposite to his personality, and Porter, my oldest brother, was angry, almost mean. He scared me.”
She looked into each man’s face as she continued.
“I’ve never been afraid of a member of my family…until that day. When I offered to wash their clothing, Porter turned on me. He was like a rabid dog. There was spittle at the corner of his mouth, his eyes were bloodshot, and the muscles in his face were twitching, as if he had some kind of facial tic. He yelled at me and told me never to touch anything they wore while working for Roland Storm. Then later, he said it again when I offered to get the clean clothes from the dryer. When I questioned him, he all but admitted he knew something was wrong, but he said that Danny wouldn’t quit, and he wouldn’t let his younger brother go back without him.”
Hurley sighed. “Look, Miss Monroe, this is all interesting, but so far you haven’t given me any concrete evidence to make me believe it was anything but some dealer growing weed. Your brothers’ behaviors could have been nothing more than them coming down off a high.”
His arrogance infuriated Ally. She swung her legs out from under the covers, giving them a perfect view of her injuries, as well as her crippled foot.
“My brothers do not do drugs. Besides that, after several days, their behavior changed to what I can only refer to as crazy. Before, they rarely ever disagreed with each other, but it got to the point where all they did was fight and snarl at each other. I was so upset and concerned for what they were doing that I snuck up to the property to see for myself. As you can see, I’m not exactly built for uphill hikes, so I rode an ATV partway, then managed about a mile walk to see for myself what was going on. A short distance from the field where my brothers were working, I began to find dead animals. Deer, squirrels, skunks, birds, you name it. It was as if they’d just dropped where they lay, only no carnivores had fed on the carcasses, and I can tell you, there are plenty of carnivores up in the hills. It was eerie. When I got to the field, my brothers were…frenzied. They were just walking around and tossing these long green stalks toward a flatbed trailer without paying attention to whether they landed on it or not. Danny was digging at his face and pulling at his hair and ears, and then he walked too close to Porter. Porter just turned around and punched him in the mouth and knocked out one of Danny’s teeth. I saw him spit it out from where I was standing.”
“Did they see you?” Hurley asked.
“Not then. It wasn’t until I realized that Porter was covered in ants that I cried out. There were thousands of them, crawling on Porter’s face and arms and all over his clothes. He was slapping himself in the face and on the head. I was so horrified, I guess I cried out.”
Then she sighed and looked at Wes. She could tell he was just as appalled as the other men appeared to be.
Dr. Shero stepped forward. “Your brothers…what did they do next?” he asked.
“My cry startled a bird in a tree above me. It flew out, and they saw it. I guess they figured something or someone had spooked it, and at that moment Roland Storm appeared. They pointed to the forest where I was hiding. I think he gave them some kind of orders, and then he started toward where I was hiding. I tried to run…but as you can see, that’s not as easy for me as for some. I fell more times than I could count, but I made it to where I’d hidden my ATV. I would have gotten away, only it ran out of gas. Then I ran for my life, with Roland Storm in his truck right behind me. I made it to Wes’s house and told him what was happening. Only he doesn’t have a phone, so he carried me the two miles down the mountain to my house, and after I told him what I’ve just told you, he started making calls.”
“What happened to Storm?” Hurley asked.
“I stopped him,” Wes said.
Hurley frowned. “How?”
“I took a rifle and waited in the road for him. I could hear his truck coming over the hill. When he appeared, I aimed at him. He didn’t stop soon enough, so I stopped him.”
“Did you hit him? Is he dead?”
“No…all I shot was the truck. He bailed out, and I sent him back up the mountain on foot.”
Hurley’s smile widened. “Okay…so you dispatched Mr. Storm for the moment, then went to Miss Monroe’s home. What happened next?”
Ally resumed her story.
“My father arrived about the same time we realized there was a fire on the mountain. We started for town and almost didn’t make it. Wes saved our lives, and here we are.”
“Well, that’s enough info for me to warrant an investigation,” Hurley said.
“You’d better let my crew go in first and sweep the area to make sure it’s safe,” Dr. Shero added. “If there’s some kind of contaminant up there, we don’t want to spread it.”
“What if it burned?” Wes asked. “Then wouldn’t everything be safe?”
“Not necessarily,” Dr. Shero said. “I’m uneasy about the dead animals, but I’m most concerned about the insects being involved. What Miss Monroe described is most definitely abnormal.”
“What about fire ants?” Wes said. “They swarm on people.”
“Yes, but they also sting. The way she described it, the ants were simply crawling all over the men in some kind of frenzy. If the men were being stung, they wouldn’t have lived five minutes.”
“Oh, Lord,” Ally said, and pressed her hands to her lips to keep from screaming.
Wes moved to her side as Black added his two cents into the conversation.
“You were right to be conce
rned, but I’m going to have to ask you two to sit back now and let us work our investigations. If we have further questions, we’ll be in touch.”
Before they could leave, Agent Vernon came back and handed Hurley a computer printout.
At first Hurley only glanced at it, then suddenly he was muttering under his breath.
“What is it?” Wes asked.
Hurley looked up. “There may be something more to this after all. Among other things, Roland Storm is a geneticist. He has a background in chemistry and science, and was let go from Lackey Laboratories after some research project ended. He was picked up once for suspicion of making designer drugs for some dealer in Chicago but later released.”
“May I see that?” Shero asked.
Hurley handed him the printout.
“I need to make some calls,” Shero said, then glanced back at Ally and Wes. “We’ll be in touch.”
Everyone filed out, leaving Wes and Ally alone.
She started to shiver, then held out her arms.
“Get me out of here,” she begged. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Eighteen
Wes drove up to the motel, then carried Ally inside. Her clothing reeked of smoke, and the scent made her sick. She’d seen the smoking black scar on the mountain as they’d turned toward the motel, and it had been all she could do not to tear her hair and wail.
She didn’t have to ask to know that everything that had meant home to her was gone. Not only had she lost the house and the old family pet, but her father’s recovery was shaky and her brothers’ whereabouts unknown. The only constant in her life was Wes Holden, and although they’d known each other little more than a couple of weeks, it seemed like forever. They’d shared laughter and tears, as well as the depths of despair, and all she could think was, thank God he was here.
Wes touched the side of her face with a finger. “You got burned.”
She lay back against the pillows, watching the expression on his face as he smoothed the hair away from her forehead, then fingered the strands spilling across the pillows.
“I’m filthy,” Ally said. “So are my clothes.”
“Hair will wash, clothes can be replaced,” he said softly.
“When this is over, are you going to leave?” she asked.
A frown furrowed his forehead. “No, I’m not going to leave you.”
Ally’s heart skipped a beat. She had asked one thing. He had answered another.
“Wes…”
“I don’t want to lose another woman I care for.”
She closed her eyes briefly, letting his vow settle deep in her heart. It had been so long in coming, this loving of a man, that she didn’t want to forget a moment of how she felt.
Then she felt his mouth on her lips and his hands on her waist. That was when she opened her eyes. She’d waited even longer for this day to come, and she wasn’t going to blind herself to a second of it.
“Are we going to make love now?” she asked.
Her question hit him like a fist to the gut, bringing him to an instant aching need, and at the same time, scaring him half to death.
“I damn sure want to,” Wes whispered.
“Why do I sense there’s a ‘but’ in that answer?”
“Because my feelings for you are all mixed up with sadness and guilt.”
Ally sat up, then began unbuttoning her blouse.
“What are you doing?” Wes said.
“Taking the problem out of your hands. Later, if you have to, you can tell yourself I made you do it.”
Wes grabbed her hands.
“Wait.”
Her expression fell.
“Let me,” Wes said, and began to take off her clothes.
After that, it seemed time stood still.
Between slow caresses and hot kisses, he removed every piece of her clothing, leaving her trembling with need. Then when she was bare for the taking, he stripped, too, removing the last of the barriers from between them.
“I have no protection,” he said.
“Nor do I,” Ally said.
He sat for a moment, thinking of the consequences and weighing them against her virginity.
“We can stop this right now,” he said.
She held his face between the palms of her hands.
“Never. From this moment on, whatever happens between us is God-given. There is nothing about you that I would refuse or regret, and that includes bearing your child.”
Wes shuddered. The thought was breathtaking, but, at the same time, agonizingly painful. He would never see a child without thinking of Mikey.
Ally saw through his silence and gave ease to his pain.
“Wes.”
He looked down into her eyes and saw salvation.
“What you had before was precious. Nothing will ever change that or the memories that you keep. I wouldn’t want it any other way. I have no wish or intention of trying to make you forget any part of your past. I just want to be a part of your future.”
“You already are,” he said. “And I wish that what we’re about to do wasn’t going to hurt you.”
“Mama used to say that the pain of first taking a man into your body was not unlike the pain of giving him your heart. She said it’s all about trusting that he won’t damage either one. I never knew what she meant until now.”
“Do you trust me, Ally?”
“Forever.”
“I wish to God I trusted myself.”
“You won’t hurt me, Wes. It isn’t in you.”
He covered her lips with his own, then sighed when her hands slid from his face to his back. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. In a way, it was a first time for both of them.
With exquisite torture, Wes kissed every morsel of skin on her body, even tracing the faint but healing scratches with the tip of his tongue. Her skin was satin to the touch and warm beneath his lips. Her breasts were heavy in his hands, the nipples peaked and swollen from the laving of his tongue. More than once, he slipped his hand between her legs and stroked her to a fever pitch, but each time he withdrew before it was too late. She’d waited a very long time for this day to come; he didn’t want it to be over before it had begun.
They lost track of time. When she began moaning and clutching at his body, begging for something she had yet to know, he increased the pressure of his touch. Her breath began coming in shorter and shorter gasps, and she was beginning to buck against his strokes. He could feel the beginnings of her climax as her muscles trembled beneath his touch. Then, at the moment it took her, he rose up and slid between her parted legs. In one targeted stroke, he drove himself into the spiraling heat. Her body resisted, but only fleetingly as the barrier tore.
Ally cried out once as he claimed her, but then he began to move, and the climax crashed through her, emptying her to everything but the man. Blood pounded against her eardrums as her heart hammered within her chest. She had lost all sensation except in the valley between her thighs. Where she had been empty, now she was filled. She felt weightless and, at the same time, too heavy to move. When the spasms began to subside and she thought it was over, Wes rose up, braced himself with a hand on either side of her shoulders, slid a little deeper into her heat and began to rock.
When she realized he was still inside her—and he was hard and hurting in the same way that she’d been only moments earlier—she gave herself up to his need. She could see the tension in his muscles and the agony on his face as he chased that elusive mistress called lust.
Instinct led her to wrap her legs around his back, changing the angle of his thrust. Almost instantly, she felt a renewal in herself and began to rock her body against him, man to woman—heart to heart.
For Wes, it had been too long since he’d been with a woman for him to maintain any semblance of control. One moment he’d been riding the slowly building feeling, and the next thing he knew, she’d pulled him under. The sudden rush of blood from his head to his groin was instantaneou
s. He began to groan, spilling himself into her over and over until he was spent. Every muscle in his body was quivering as the echoes of their passion still held him where he lay.
It seemed like forever before he could move, and when he did, he took her with him until she was the one on top. He wrapped his arms around her, and began stroking her body and smoothing the long tangles of her hair away from her face. He could feel her trembling, then heard what sounded like a muffled sob. At that point, he panicked. He must have hurt her, and it was the last thing he had intended to do.
“Ally…sweetheart…I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She shook her head, then raised her eyes to meet his.
“Wes, you didn’t hurt me. I just…I never knew.” Then she buried her face against his chest, a little embarrassed. “I’m so glad it was you.”
He sighed with relief and held her a little bit tighter as he struggled to control his own emotions. With her trust and her love, she’d given him something precious, too—a new reason to live.
“Yes, honey, me, too,” he said softly, then scooted out from under her and slipped into the bathroom.
Moments later, Ally heard the sound of running water. She rolled over onto her side, wincing from the pain in her ankle and the unfamiliar pain between her thighs.
The bathroom door opened. Wes came out, picked her up, kissed her soundly again, then carried her into the bathroom, where he was running her a bath.
“This will help take the soreness out of your body,” he said.
She blushed but was grateful.
“Thank you,” she said.
He stroked a finger against the side of her face, then handed her a clean washcloth and the motel’s only bar of soap.
“No…thank you,” he said gently. “Take your time. We’ve got all day to get some more clothes, and the rest of our lives to worry about everything else.”
“Oh, Wes…the rest of our lives?”
A dark expression came and went on his face, then he managed a small smile.
“I am so falling in love with you, girl.”
