Sleepwalker

by Karen Robards

  Glaring up at him, Mick was just opening her mouth to blast him when he bent his head and kissed her.

  It was hot and demanding, the kind of take-no-prisoners kiss that would have earned the wrong man a punch in the gut at the very least. But Jason was not the wrong man: as his lips slanted across hers and his tongue took possession of her mouth, she faced the dismal truth of that. In the very first instant, her body went up in flames. Feeling her heart accelerate until it seemed like it was hitting about a thousand beats a minute, feeling her breasts swell against his chest and her body start to throb deep inside, Mick lost the inner war she had been conducting with herself as temper and caution and guilt got swamped by a tsunami of passion. The last of her resistance amounted to taking a deep breath and closing her eyes. Then she kissed him back just as fiercely as he was kissing her.

  When, still kissing her, he picked her up and started walking back the way he had come with her, she didn’t utter so much as a murmur of protest. What she did was wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him back like she would die if she didn’t. She was so turned on, so consumed with desire, that she would have walked over hot coals barefoot to get into his bed. Deep inside, her body quaked and quivered and burned. She felt boneless, mindless, on fire with wanting him.

  Struggling against the intensity of it, grabbing at the last glimmer of coolheaded thought that remained to her, she pulled her mouth from his and opened her eyes. They were in his bedroom, she saw with the tiny part of her mind that was still capable of registering details like that. The same wall of windows as the living area, curtains open so pale moonlight spilled across the big, white bed.

  They were steps away from it. When they reached it, he would lay her down and …

  Their eyes met. His held a hot gleam that made her dizzy. God, she wanted him. So much that she was clinging to him like she would never let go. So much that she was melting right there in his arms and breathing like she’d just run for miles. So much that her body was already ready, already wet.

  And so far all they had really done was kiss. The ramifications were mind-blowing.

  “Mick.” His voice was husky, thick. His head was bending toward her again. Her lips parted automatically, craving his kiss.

  “This doesn’t change anything. I’m still going back to Detroit,” she breathed defiantly, fighting to keep from being swamped by the sheer force of her own need.

  He drew back a little so that he could look at her. His eyes were heavy-lidded and dark now. A flush rode high on his cheekbones. He was breathing too fast.

  “Baby, you have a choice here: do you want to spend the rest of the night fighting me or fucking me?” he asked.

  Her eyes widened at the graphic description. She sucked in air. Her arms tightened around his neck. Deep inside, her body began to spiral out of control, to ache and throb and clench. “Making love” is what she would have called it, and the idea of making love to Jason excited her almost unbearably. But the idea of fucking him—that was dirty and carnal and so erotic it made her shake.

  From that moment, she realized, she was utterly, totally his to do with as he wished. Helpless in the face of her own sexuality, which was now so wild and urgent that it seemed to turn her into someone she didn’t even know, as unable to pull away or call a halt as she was to vanish in a puff of smoke.

  She sat up a little straighter in his arms, shook back her hair, put up her chin.

  “Fucking you,” she said, owning it.

  The air between them crackled with a blistering heat.

  Then he kissed her and laid her down on the bed and came inside her, just like that, hard and fast, plunging deep, and she was naked and moaning and wrapping her legs around him and moving with him, blown away by the wonder of it, by the sheer unbelievable pleasure of it, by the feel of his hands and mouth and body on her and in her, lighting her up, making her cry out, taking her higher until she was coming and coming and coming in intense waves that were shattering in their intensity.

  “Jason. Jason.”

  But still he didn’t stop. He was so big inside her, so hot and so hard and so relentless, so incredibly, amazingly good at this that she kept on kissing him and clinging to his shoulders and arching up under him just because what he was doing still felt kind of incredible, but of course she was done, she had climaxed, this was just kind of going with the flow—until it caught her up once more. Then to her own amazement she was on fire again, crying out again, flying again. He had her writhing with passion, begging for his mouth and his hands, moaning, “Touch me here, kiss me there,” and then doing what she wanted and more, until she was driven past every boundary she had ever had, completely without inhibition, completely his.

  When she came again, in a burning, shuddering series of climaxes that dazzled her with the wonder of it, that made her scream out his name and caused the world to explode into a million white-hot stars against the screen of her closed lids, he was with her, thrusting himself deep inside her, holding himself there as, at last, he found his own release.

  As they lay there, spent, and she drifted slowly back to earth, he smoothed the hair away from her face and she felt his lips feather the curve of her jaw.

  “Mick,” he murmured with transparent satisfaction, and she opened her eyes to find herself looking into his. He was sprawled on top of her, his head propped up by a bent arm. Their bodies were still joined, and he was way too heavy to stay like that for long now that she was in her right mind again. But for just a second she absorbed the dark handsomeness of him, the breadth of his shoulders and brawniness of his arms, the solid muscularity of the long body pinning her to the bed.

  Her heart gave a curious little pang. Under other circumstances, with any other man, this would have been the start of something big.

  Instead of what it was: just a session of really great sex. All right, phenomenal sex.

  This man just rocked my world was the thought that flashed into her head.

  Because that worried her a little, because she was slightly embarrassed when she remembered how thoroughly she’d just been done, had, screwed, the whole gamut of sexual words, because she wanted to keep any hint of emotion out of it, because he was looking at her with the faintest of smiles and a whole wealth of new knowledge she wasn’t altogether sure she wanted him to have in his eyes, because she had to say something and she really couldn’t think of anything to say, she summoned every bit of cool composure she had left and said with the merest hint of bite, “You know, now would probably be a really good time for you to tell me your last name.”

  He laughed.

  “If all cops used your interrogation techniques, we crooks wouldn’t stand a chance.” Then he kissed her and rolled with her so he was the one on his back and she lay beside him, stretched out on her side, her head on his shoulder, an arm curved across his chest.

  “Funny,” she replied as he stuffed a pillow behind his head and tugged the top sheet, which, like most of the rest of the bedding, had gotten flung out of the way during the course of the proceedings, over them. Then he wrapped his arms around her and settled down with the apparent object of getting comfortable for the long haul. He seemed to take for granted that she was prepared to stay with him, which was fine, because she was. A smarter woman would no doubt have gotten up at this point and taken herself off to a separate bed, tucking what they had just done together away in her mental drawer of very special memories of the sexual variety. But even as she had the thought she faced the fact that she wasn’t that smart. In fact, she wasn’t smart at all. Because even though she knew their time was limited, that there was absolutely no future for them beyond this, she still stayed.

  And waited.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Davis. Jason Xavier Davis. There, does that make you happy?”

  Her lids were starting to feel really heavy, and she felt them drooping even as she flicked a suspicious look up at him. With difficulty she stifled a yawn. Well, she’d had a long day. A lo
ng couple of days.

  “No. I’m not even sure you’re telling the truth.”

  “Jesus, who would lie about something like Xavier?”

  That made her smile. Then she gave in to that yawn. Then she rested her eyes for just a second. Then she fell fathoms deep asleep.

  Only to find herself once again outside in the middle of an icy Detroit winter. Eleven years old, scared to death and chasing Jenny through the snow in the minutes before their mother died.

  But this time, something was different. This time, she saw a face. This time …

  Hands grabbed her shoulders, shocking her awake.

  Chapter

  25

  “Mick. Mick, stop. Jesus, Mick, it’s me.”

  Even as Mick jumped, even as she instinctively fought against the hands that constrained her, even as her heart leaped and her pulse went through the roof and her every sense screamed at her to run, she recognized his voice. It pulled her back from that terrible snowy night, pulled her into the present, to safety. She came reluctantly, aware that she had just learned something important, seen something that had been hidden from her until now. Something that was already slipping from her grasp …

  “Mick, wake up. Mick!”

  My God, she was on the beach, her toes inches from the frothy edge of the incoming tide, the vast, black emptiness of the bay stretching out in front of her, the night sky curving endlessly overhead. To her left was the overturned boat she had spotted from Jelly’s dining room. To her right the beach was empty for as far as she could see. The roar of the waves rolling toward shore filled her ears. The scent of the sea was everywhere. The moon was a pale ghost flying low in the western sky, its light dimmer and more lavender-tinged than before. Thousands of tiny stars added their wattage to the night, making the warm, white sand beneath her bare feet glimmer with a million opalescent sparkles of its own, making it possible for her to see that she was wrapped in what looked like the white top sheet from Jason’s bed, that a pair of long-fingered bronzed hands gripped her shoulders, that the tall, dark shadow looming so close behind her was no shadow at all but the real, solid figure of a man.

  “Jason?” Taking a deep breath, she turned her head to look at him. He was frowning, his eyes worried, his mouth tight, naked except for a pair of dark-colored boxers he must have grabbed before he’d come after her. The darkness rendered his eyes colorless, his expression hard to read. With the moonlight playing over him, highlighting his high cheekbones and the hard line of his jaw, silvering the sculpted muscles of his shoulders and arms and chest, he looked tall and strong and powerful and at the same time so familiar that it felt as if she’d known him forever, for all of this lifetime and a thousand more. Even though she was not quite herself yet, she felt the bond between them, felt his essence reaching out to anchor her own.

  “You scared the life out of me.” He sounded breathless, as if he’d been running. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Already the last dregs of it were leaving her. The past retreated back into the depths of her mind, and the present became as real and solid as the man gripping her shoulders. Of course she knew what had happened: she’d been sleepwalking again.

  “What the hell?” he asked, turning her around to face him. Her hair and the sheet fluttered in the wind, which was warm and steady as it blew in across the bay. Clutching the sheet, shaking back her hair, she looked up at him.

  “Sometimes I sleepwalk,” she admitted, and realized even as she said it that he was the first person she had ever willingly confessed it to.

  “Oh God.” He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close and held her. Mick leaned against him, her head resting on his shoulder. Despite the warmth of the tropical night, she was freezing cold. The mild vertigo she always experienced after an episode made her feel as if the earth was tilting beneath her feet. It was all there, the ringing in her ears, the dryness of her mouth, the racing pulse. She was afraid to ask, but she needed to know.

  “Did I scream?”

  She felt rather than saw him look down at her. “No. At least, not that I heard. I don’t know what woke me, but I did wake up and you weren’t in bed. I got up to find you and discovered the sliding doors in the living room were open. I looked out, and you were already almost to the beach. Just from the way you were moving, I could tell something was up. I nearly busted a gut getting to you. I thought—I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” He took a deep breath. “Do you usually scream?” His voice was so gentle as he asked that last that it made her throat tighten. Usually when this happened around a witness, when she came to herself again, she was mortally ashamed of her weakness. With Jason, she discovered she was glad he knew. Having him know was comforting. She felt less alone. Even, almost … protected.

  “Like a siren, apparently,” she said. It was an attempt to lighten the moment, but she didn’t think he even smiled. His concern for her was as palpable as the strong body against which she leaned. “I must not have gotten to that part of the dream yet.”

  She had been chasing after Jenny, running back toward their apartment, she remembered in a flash. Their mother hadn’t yet arrived. She had turned her head, seen the man over by the apartment building watching them. The man with the black metallic object in his hands that her eleven-year-old self had identified as a baseball bat or maybe a pole. He had stepped into the light spilling from an apartment above, and she had seen … God, what had she seen? A vague, blurry image popped into her mind. She had seen his face. The knowledge galvanized her. But try as she would to remember it, the face had no form or feature to it now. In the dream it had been recognizable, she was almost sure. Almost sure. Try as she might to recover it, though, the face, like the dream, had already receded into the mists of her mind.

  She didn’t know why she felt it was vitally important to remember that face, but she did.

  “Were you dreaming about your mother?” He stroked her hair, her back, his touch tender.

  She nodded. Then she said, “The night she was killed, there was a man walking over by the apartment building at the edge of the field where Jenny and I were. In my dream I always see him, and seeing him always makes me feel afraid. He’s carrying something, which I used to think was a pole or a baseball bat, but I don’t know. Tonight—tonight I saw his face.”

  She felt something brush the top of her head. She thought it might have been his lips. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. In the dream I recognized him, I think, but it’s gone now. I can’t see the face anymore. I can barely remember any of it anymore.” The frustration she felt was there in her voice.

  “If it’s important, it’ll come back to you.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if … if there’s something I’m supposed to remember. See, I’ve been having this dream for years. It bothers me so much that I sleepwalk when I have it. I always see the same man over by the same apartment building, and I always feel afraid. Then, with you, I had that dream where I saw my mother lying in her coffin with two bullet holes in her head—a double tap. The mark of a professional hit. Tonight I saw the face of the man by the apartment building. And now I wonder if maybe what he was carrying was a rifle. A rifle with a sight on it. That would explain the black, metallic gleam I remember.” Taking a deep breath, she lifted her head from his shoulder to look up at him. “I wonder if the man I saw might have been my mother’s killer. And if maybe, that night, I saw his face and recognized it and blocked it out. Because the whole thing was too terrible to think about, or I was afraid, or—I don’t know. But tonight, in my dream, I saw his face.”

  Lifting her head had been a mistake. The vertigo was still with her, and everything, the sky, the sea, the beach, everything except Jason himself swirled around her in a sickening series of slow revolutions. She swayed a little, closed her eyes and leaned heavily against him in self-defense. Her distress must have been obvious because his hold on her tightened and he said, sharply, “What’s the matter?”

  “A li
ttle dizzy,” she murmured.

  “Come on, let’s get you back to the house.”

  But when he would have turned her toward the house and started walking her back she shook her head and forced her eyes open. Oh, God, the world was still revolving. She closed them again.

  “The fresh air … helps. This happens—every time. I just need to sit down for a minute until it passes.”

  Without another word, he picked her up and took a few steps, then sank down on the beach with her in his arms. His back, she saw, leaned against the catboat for support. Settled between his spread knees, still swathed in the sheet, which protected her bottom from the sand, she rested back against his chest. With his arms tight around her, she let her head drop back on his shoulder and slowly opened her eyes. The world didn’t move. For a moment she simply stayed like that, silent and unmoving, looking up at the sky full of stars.

  “Better?” he asked.

  She nodded, although the world still shimmied when she moved her head. Then, afraid he couldn’t see, she murmured, “Yes,” glancing toward him. Seen in profile, his classic features were so handsome that she spent a moment just admiring them.

  He must have felt her gaze, because he slanted an inquiring look down at her.

  When she didn’t answer the question posed by his look, he said, “You’re beautiful.”

  That made her smile. “I was just thinking the exact same thing about you.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She nodded. And knew she was almost back to normal when the earth didn’t heave because she moved her head.

  “Remember what you asked me earlier?” he said. “About why I brought you with me?”