Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  So he kept his hands to himself, fought off every stray subversive impulse that assailed him, ignored an increasingly urgent erection, and simply lay there in the dark listening to her breathe. Until gradually her breathing slowed and deepened, and her body relaxed in his hold. That’s when he knew she was asleep, and he was finally able to relax enough to fall asleep himself.

  Only to be awakened abruptly by a hoarse cry and something slamming hard into his ribs. Instant alarm and exploding pain acted on him like a jolt of cold water to the face, yanking him out of sleep, making him instantly aware. Even as his eyes snapped open to a whole lot of dark, he jackknifed upright, or tried to, but his limbs were confined so he couldn’t quite do it. Sleeping bag—he remembered being zipped up in a sleeping bag. …

  With the wild thing who was now seemingly fighting for her life beside him.

  A flying elbow was what had smashed into his ribs. He knew, because he barely dodged another one headed for his stomach as he flopped over onto his back, freed an arm and grabbed for his gun.

  Only there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the cold, dark box with them. His eyes had adjusted to what was just enough charcoal gray filtering through the chinks in the boards to distinguish something from nothing, but that was about it. Still, after a lightning glance around, he felt pretty sure they were alone.

  “No.” This time her cry emerged as a single, intelligible word. He couldn’t see her face because her back was turned, which left him looking at a long, thick mane of tossing hair, but he could feel the tension in her body as she lashed out violently in what he was pretty sure was an attempt to escape the sleeping bag.

  “Mick.” Laying his gun back down on the floor, he hitched himself around so that he was facing her, wincing at the impact of her elbows and heels as he found himself catching the backside of her blows. He realized even as he reached for her that she must be fast asleep.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she moaned, struggling. “Mom. Mommy. No.”

  “Mick.” He wrapped his arms around her, not too tightly but just securely enough to, he hoped, calm her down, as she slashed and kicked at the side of the sleeping bag in what seemed like a desperate battle to be free.

  “No!” At his touch she turned on him, attacking fiercely, punching and kicking, fortunately with considerably less than the deadly force she’d loosed on him in Marino’s study. He dodged as best he could, but the confines of the bag worked against him, too, and she got in a few good kicks and blows that he wasn’t quite quick enough to ward off. She was battling not him, he knew, but something he couldn’t see, and he realized even as he grabbed her wrists and hooked a leg around hers to still them that she was deep in the throes of a nightmare.

  “Mick!”

  “No!” she cried. “No! Mom.”

  “Mick, shh, wake up. Mick, it’s me.”

  “Mom!” As he held her fast she tried to head butt him, and he jerked out of the way just in time. Jesus, he had to remember not to let down his guard with her. She might look and feel feminine and defenseless, but she definitely was not.

  “No, no, no!”

  “Mick!” he almost yelled in desperation, giving her a little shake, and at last her eyes flew open. With only the first gray fingers of approaching dawn and the red gleam of the stove to alleviate the darkness it was difficult to make out any details at all, much less read her expression, but what light there was reflected off her eyes, showing him how wide and disoriented they looked. Her eyes were open, yes, but he got the impression that she wasn’t yet fully aware. He could hear the ragged gasp of her breathing, feel the desperation in the still struggling, supple body he was trying so hard to contain, and knew she didn’t still quite grasp the situation. “Mick, it’s all right. You’re safe.”

  Well, not really, given where they were and what was going on, but still it seemed the thing to say. Anyway, for the moment she was safe with him.

  She went still, took in another big, ragged gulp of air, and blinked. Their eyes met, she frowned, and that was when he knew that, finally, she was awake and aware. That was also when he saw the wet gleam of tears spilling out over her lower eyelids to slide down her face.

  “Jesus, are you crying?” Probably there was dismay in his voice, because dismay was certainly what he felt. A crying woman, any crying woman, was bad enough: he had few defenses against female tears. But for this ball-busting, tough customer to cry—it made his gut clench.

  She took one of those gasping breaths again.

  “Hell, no.” Despite the trouble she seemed to be having with her breathing, her voice was iron hard, if low and a little hoarse, and her eyes narrowed challengingly at him. But then she swallowed another of those great, shuddering gulps of air and he realized that they weren’t gulps of air at all but sobs. He saw more moisture sliding down her cheeks, the wet tracks gleaming in the faint light, and his heart turned over.

  Yeah. She was.

  “Shit,” he muttered, resigned, and let go of her wrists to gather her close. “Hey, there’s nothing that bad.”

  Which was when she burst into full-blown, noisy tears.

  “Shh, baby, shh.” He cradled her against his chest. That didn’t help at all. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder and wept like she’d been holding the storm inside for years. What could he do? Swearing silently, he held her and let her cry. And did all those useless things that men do: stroked her back, smoothed her hair, murmured inane attempts at comfort like It’ll be all right and Don’t cry. She felt small and vulnerable in his arms, not like the Mick he knew at all. He kind of liked her like that, he decided, although the butt-kicking variation had its own charms, too. Whispering a disjointed stream of would-be soothing words in the general direction of her uppermost ear, he rocked her against him and patted her and held her close as she shook and gasped and wept. When he felt hot tears flowing like Niagara down his chest, he set his teeth. She was getting to him big time. Knowing he was skating dangerously close to trouble, he pressed his lips to her hair and pulled her closer yet, settling in for the long haul. And tried to stop noticing how sexy she felt in his arms.

  By the time her sobs slowed to the occasional gasp and sniffle and she lay spent against him, Jason had given that last up as a forlorn hope. They were on their sides, front to front, closer than ink to paper. He felt like every tiny detail of her shape had been branded into his skin for life. Her breasts, with their firm little nipples, had permanently seared his chest. Her taut, slender waist had generated enough heat to practically leave grill marks on the arm he had wrapped around it. Her shirt had ridden up, and her toned, flat belly pressing skin to skin against his abs blazed so hot that he wouldn’t have been surprised to find blisters there. Her bare, silky-skinned thighs made his sizzle every time they moved. Most damaging of all, the sweet triangle between her legs kept shifting against an erection he’d done his best to will himself not to have, heating his blood to the point where he felt like he was cooking from the inside out. In short, she made him burn like a four-alarm fire.

  And he liked it. The sad thing was, though, there wasn’t a damn thing he was going to do about it.

  Doing something about it would have been stupid, and he was an intelligent man. With a whole lot riding on getting out of this fiasco safe and sound.

  When she gave a big sniffle and withdrew her arms from around his neck, he almost huffed out a breath of relief, because he figured the worst was over.

  “Hey,” he said, moving a little so that he could see down into her face. Her head rested on his upper arm, warm and slightly heavy, with the thick mane of her hair waving around them every which way and giving off that faint flowery smell. Her lids were lowered so that he couldn’t see her eyes. The thick black fans of her lashes looked almost shiny in the gray light, probably because they were still wet with her tears. The tip of her delicate nose looked to him like it might have turned red. Her soft, wide mouth still trembled a little. He tried not to think of
it as kissable.

  “Okay, that was embarrassing. You can let me go now.” Flicking a quick glance up at him, catching him by surprise, she said that with much of her usual authoritativeness. It might even have fooled him into thinking that she’d experienced the world’s fastest recovery if she hadn’t had a major wobble in her voice—and if she’d made any effort at all to push him away. But there was, and she didn’t.

  “How about you clue me in as to what that was all about first?”

  She flicked another of those glances up at him. Wary, was how he decided to characterize them. As if she was afraid of revealing too much, of letting him see any further past her I-can-handle-myself outer shell into the vulnerabilities that clearly lurked beneath.

  He tried coaxing. “Mick? Please?”

  Her lips compressed.

  “I had a bad dream,” she muttered, her lashes lowering again. She sounded both ashamed and angry, and she dashed at the tears that still leaked by ones and twos from her eyes. But she didn’t move away, or resist as he brushed the long, tangled strands of her hair back from her face so that he could see it better. Instead she quivered in his arms, and rested both her hands and her cheek against his chest like a tired child. He could feel the warm weight of her lying bonelessly against him, track the volume of her tears by the dampness touching his skin.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t …” Her voice trailed off. He got the impression she had been about to say she didn’t remember, when, suddenly, she did.

  “You said something about your mom,” he prompted. Her hands curled, and he could feel her fingernails lightly scoring his pecs. “Along with a whole lot of no’s.”

  She shuddered, and he thought it was because maybe she didn’t want to remember after all. He could feel the brush of her lashes against his chest as she closed her eyes, then opened them again multiple times. Blinking, probably to hold back more tears. Not that it worked. They spilled out anyway. “Mick …,” he began, meaning to ease her distress by telling her that she could let whatever she had dreamed about go if she wanted to, if it caused her distress, that she didn’t have to tell him or remember anything at all, when she looked up at him again.

  “It was a double tap,” she whispered unsteadily. “I saw it. Oh my God, how did I miss it before?”

  Her lids swept down, and more tears slipped out. He held her tighter, because she was shaking like she was freezing cold again. Only he knew she wasn’t cold. It might have been cold as hell outside, and almost as cold as that in their little box of a shelter, but there, where the two of them lay entwined in their down-filled cocoon, it was warm.

  “What was a double tap?” he asked.

  She wet her lips. This time her lids stayed down. Her words were addressed to his chest. “My mom. It was—I saw—we were there at the funeral home, my sister and I, with our dad. My mom was in her coffin. I was looking at her lying there, thinking that if I just prayed hard enough maybe she would wake up, and I saw it. The … the makeup must have melted away on her forehead a little, or something, and there w-was a bullet hole just above her right eye. And then I saw the outline of another one just about an inch higher up toward her hairline. A double tap. Only I never realized it before now.”

  She breathed in noisily, not quite a sob but close. For a moment Jason frowned into the darkness above her head, holding her close, feeling her tremble.

  “We’re talking about your dream, right?” he ventured, not sure whether he was hearing details of the nightmare, or something that had actually happened to her, but for her sake desperately hoping it was the former.

  She took another deep breath and glanced up at him again.

  “That’s what my dream was about—but it also happened. For real.” She paused, and he thought he felt her swallowing hard. “My mother … was murdered … when I was eleven. We were outside. It was a winter night sort … of … like … this. My sister and I … saw the whole thing.” At the repeated catch in her voice, a rush of protectiveness so strong it amazed him flooded his veins.

  “Jesus,” he said, hugging her a little closer. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  She made a kind of a wry acknowledging face at him, then went on talking. He got the feeling that, having started, she needed to get the rest out. And he realized, too, that he really wanted to hear what she had to say. He wanted to know what made her tick.

  “She was walking toward us. Our mom. We—Jenny and I—heard a couple of loud bangs that at the time we didn’t really realize were gunshots. We were looking at her and the shots rang out and she just—just fell facedown in the snow. Even before we could get to her she was dead. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I just thought she fell, but when we got there she wouldn’t move and all around her it was like the snow had turned red.”

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again, not looking up at him now, dashing away with furtive fingers the tears that seeped out.

  “That’s a hell of a thing,” he said, hurting for her.

  “Yeah.”

  “No little girl should ever have to live through anything like that.”

  “No.” She shook her head and flicked another of those glances up at him. The now firm set of her mouth and the determined jut of her chin telegraphed what was coming. “It was a long time ago. I’ve gotten over it.”

  He didn’t say a word. But his silence must have spoken for him, because she added with a trace of defiance, “I have. Really. It’s just that … I think seeing those pictures—the ones of Edward Lightfoot—must have triggered a memory I’d forgotten about. You saw that there were two bullet holes close together in his forehead? That’s a double tap. It’s the sign of a professional hit.”

  “I know what a double tap is.” His voice was dry.

  The quirk of her lips said something he interpreted as being on the order of Yes, certainly, a criminal like you would, but what came out of her mouth was entirely different. “They always said my mother was the victim of a random shooting, wrong place, wrong time, that sort of thing. Now I’m not so sure.”

  Her voice was steadier, her expression more composed. He got the impression that she had taken refuge in her professional persona and was doing her best to look at the death of her mother from the viewpoint of a cop.

  “You think she was the victim of a professional hit.” His tone made it more of a statement than a question. She felt as warm and pliable and sexy against him as she had ever since he’d pulled her close, but he could tell the inner toughness that was so much a part of who she was was coming back.

  “It was a double tap.” She said it like that made it irrefutable.

  “Was she in some kind of trouble?”

  “How would I know? I was eleven. She and my dad had just split up, and she was working two jobs, her regular one in a bank and then waitressing at night to help pay the bills. I don’t think she could’ve been in trouble. I don’t think she ever did anything wrong in her life. But now that I look back on it, the way she was shot …” Her voice trailed off, and he could see the pain in her face.

  “Mick—” He hesitated. Considering the distress it had caused her, the last thing he wanted to do was make her revisit her nightmare, but there was something he felt he needed to point out, for her peace of mind, if nothing else. “Just because you saw that your mother suffered what you think was a double tap in your dream doesn’t mean it really went down that way, you know. Maybe you’re getting the pictures of Lightfoot’s wounds and the memory of what you saw when you looked at your mother’s body mixed up. Subconsciously, I mean.”

  She was silent for so long that he began to think she wasn’t ever going to answer. He held her and waited, and finally she did.

  “I remember standing with my sister and looking into my mother’s coffin.” She said it as if she was thinking out loud. “I remember what she was wearing—a blue dress with a white lace collar—and that her hands were crossed on her waist. And I remember thinking that if I could just reach out
and touch her, she would maybe wake up. Finally I did, just touched her hand, and she felt … rubbery and c-cold. I knew then. I knew she was dead.”

  Her voice cracked toward the end, and Jason tightened his grip. He felt his chest constrict in sympathy for the woman she was now, as well as for the bereaved child she had been then. She was plucking at his heartstrings, drawing him in, making him feel something for her, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. He might have been planning to leave her behind tomorrow, but for tonight, he found he cared.

  “Mick—”

  “You might be right. Maybe I am getting the dream and reality confused. I don’t know anymore. See, I just found out I can’t remember her face. How it looked in her coffin.” Her voice shook. “I thought I remembered. I thought I saw her, saw those bullet holes, but now I can’t see it. I can’t see her.”

  Their eyes met. He saw that hers were welling with fresh tears. He felt helpless and discovered that he hated the feeling. Just like he hated seeing her weep.

  “Baby, please …”

  “Don’t cry, right?” She sniffled and swiped at her eyes. “You’ve been saying that this whole time. The thing is, I never cry. I never have. Not once since she died. Just tonight. Just with you.” More tears brimmed up, and she dashed them away almost angrily. Then she glared up at him, like she was blaming him for this, too. “Is that stupid or what? After all this time I cry all over you, and I don’t even know your name.”

  More tears spilled out. Her mouth trembled. Her wide, soft, kissable mouth.

  “My name’s Jason,” he said, then gave in to an almost irresistible compulsion and touched his lips to hers.