One tap down, one to go, he thought.
The duo disappeared behind Veronica’s door without so much as a word.
Terrance lost no time in driving over to Harris’s condo. It was located in the most upscale area of a city that possessed no poor section.
That was one of things he remembered liking about Bedford, Terrance thought, as he quickly manipulated the front-door lock. The fact that there were no rundown sections, no so-called “poorer” side of town. All of it, even the less expensive area, was well maintained.
Terrance let himself in.
The man liked the finer things in life, he noted, glancing around. Terrance worked quickly. Finding the master bedroom, he placed a surveillance device on that phone. He made sure that the tap was activated anytime one of the eight phones in the house was picked up.
Harris either spent a hell of a lot of time talking on the phone, or he had a phobia about missing a call, Terrance mused. He let himself out.
Less than ten minutes had lapsed.
Getting into his car, Terrance looked at his watch. It was after nine, though it felt a great deal later. He knew he should be getting back to the hotel. He needed to write his report and see if there was something he’d missed.
But the car seemed to have a mind of its own. There was no other excuse for why he was suddenly turning down the wrong street, heading in the wrong direction. Allowing his car to drive to Alix’s neighborhood.
To Alix’s house.
He’d looked up the address earlier, knowing he shouldn’t. No earthly good would come of his knowing where she lived, but he needed to. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t act on it, he just wanted to know, that was all.
It was the first time he’d lied to himself.
Well, maybe the second, he amended. The first time had been when he’d told himself that eventually he would get over the way he felt about Alix. That hadn’t really happened, either.
Alix sighed as indecision waged a minor skirmish in her brain. Standing in the hall just beyond her sleeping daughter’s bedroom, she was vacillating over whether or not she should take a warm, leisurely bath or go directly to bed.
A half smile curved her lips.
Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to bed.
The trouble was she was exhausted and tense at the same time. Julie had been particularly energetic, when Alix had come home from the hospital tonight, and although Norma had volunteered to stay over and take care of her little firecracker, Alix had sent the housekeeper home. Between her regular hours and the emergencies that took her away sometimes in the middle of the night, Alix felt as if she was shirking her responsibilities as a mother. Julie needed a little one-on-one contact, even if it meant having it with a woman whose eyes kept closing.
Alix had to admit that she’d regretted her decision a couple of times during the course of the evening, especially when Julie gave no indication of tiring out.
But eventually, mercifully, sleep had to come to everyone, and her little ball of fire began to extinguish slowly until she’d fallen asleep on the sofa while watching umpteen reruns of Scooby-Doo.
It was nice that she and Julie had that in common, Alix had thought, carrying the precious bundle off to bed. Scooby-Doo had been her cartoon of choice when she’d been Julie’s age. And older.
Nothing like the classics, Alix had mused fondly.
Bath, she suddenly decided. She needed to sink herself into a tubful of hot suds, sweet scent and promises.
The sound of the doorbell stopped her dead in her tracks. Instinct had her glancing at the pager she kept perpetually attached to her waist in case one of her small patients needed her.
Nothing was flashing at her.
No ignored phone number demanded attention. Whoever was on her doorstep hadn’t paged her first and there’d been no phone calls this evening, urgent or otherwise, other than a telemarketer trying to talk her into taking advantage of low travel rates.
She debated ignoring the doorbell, but when it rang again, curiosity got the better of her.
“Put away your gun, honey,” she called out loudly as she approached the door. “I’ll go see who it is.”
Standing on tiptoes, she looked through the peephole.
Terrance.
She would have been more prepared to see a pink elephant. Taking a deep breath, she braced herself and opened the door partway.
Terrance looked inside with mild surprise. “You have someone in here with a gun?”
Embarrassed, Alix laughed softly, shaking her head. “I just do that to scare off the wrong kind of people.”
He banked down the urge to ask her if she thought of him in that category. “It almost worked. Why don’t you get a dog?”
She thought of Algernon. She’d been the one who’d named the animal. “I have a dog—it’s at my father’s.” A small smile flirted with her lips before retreating. “Getting another one would somehow seem disloyal.”
A familiar feeling swirled around him. That was so Alix, he thought.
She shifted, not fully prepared to open the door to him. “What are you doing here?”
A pull that could only be described as sexual, no matter how he tried to disguise it, commandeered his body.
Damn but he’d missed her. Missed seeing her like this, soft and feminine, with tousled hair and hints of sleep about her eyes.
He’d missed everything about her.
“Searching for a little sanity,” he confessed.
His evening with Harris had left him yearning to touch base with something clean and good. Alix had come to mind instantly. That was why he’d driven here, he realized. To remind himself that the world did not belong to the Harrises and that his job was making it safer for people like Alix.
He looked weary, she thought. Alix stepped back, opening the door wider. Big mistake, a small voice taunted. She ignored it.
“Do you want to come in?”
Terrance hesitated, afraid that if he came in, perhaps he wouldn’t leave when the time came. He couldn’t afford slipups, couldn’t afford to be who and what he’d once been, even if he could remember the road back to that elusive place.
“I don’t want to keep you from anything.”
Again she laughed softly, completely unaware of how the sound affected him, how it made him yearn. “The coach to take me to the ball won’t be here for another half hour. I’ve got time.”
Taking a step inside, Terrance looked around. A feeling of well-being seemed to spring up at him instantly. “Nice place.”
Alix closed the door quiet behind him, unconsciously chewing on her lower lip. Maybe she should have just told him it was late and shut the door. “I like it.”
“It’s homey.” He turned to look at her. The urge to touch her was very, very strong. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It suits you.”
“So now I’m homey?” What was he doing here, really?
He laughed. Had she taken that as a backhanded compliment? He hadn’t meant it that way. “Only in the very best sense of the word.”
Suddenly she felt vulnerable. Alix deliberately kept space between them, wondering what had become of her anger. Anger was always a wonderful shield.
Feeling awkward, she gestured toward the kitchen. “Can I offer you something to drink?”
“Soda would be fine.” She began to walk off. “Or orange juice. Or water.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “Not hard to please, are you?”
He crossed to her, knowing he should stay put. “Actually, my standards are very high.”
Where had all the space between them gone? She was less than three inches from him, remembering what it had felt like to be in his arms. The smile faded from her lips. “Is that why you left?”
“I left because you deserved better.”
“I had better.” Her eyes searched his face. She had no idea what she was looking for. “I had you. Or so I thought.”
He looked at
her, thinking that he shouldn’t have come. Wishing he could stay.
“Mommy!”
The small voice broke the tension as it floated down to them. Saved by a two-year-old, he thought.
Terrance nodded toward the sound. “You’re being summoned. I’d better go.”
He was giving her a way out. She knew she should take it. Usher him out and close the door.
Instead, she heard herself asking, “Would you like to see her?”
See her. See a little girl who was the product of a union Alix had had with another man. With a man who wasn’t him. “Yes, very much.”
“Then c’mon.” Turning, she led the way up the stairs and to her daughter’s bedroom.
It looked a little like fairyland, he thought when Alix opened the door. He knew instinctively that Alix’s bedroom had looked exactly like this when she had been a little girl. With stuffed animals everywhere and storybook characters laughing and playing across light-yellow wallpaper.
And she had probably looked just like the small child sitting up in the junior bed. Long, blond hair cascaded down both shoulders of her pink nightgown as the little girl held out her arms to her mother.
“Bad dream, Mommy,” the little girl cried.
She could have been his child, he thought suddenly. If he’d stayed, Julie could have been his. He watched Alix gather the girl to her. Julie curled her body around her like a little monkey. He stood in the doorway, mesmerized. “How old?”
Stroking her daughter’s head as she began to rock, Alix looked at him. “Almost two and a half.”
“Precious.” Terrance ventured in a few steps. “Like her mother.”
Alix ignored the comment. What could she say to that? He couldn’t mean it. It was just lip service. Instead she pressed a kiss to the top of Julie’s head and asked, “Want me to rock you, monkey?”
“Uh-huh.”
Still holding Julie, Alix stood up and crossed to the rocking chair she kept in the corner. She was acutely aware that Terrance was watching her every move.
Sitting down, her arms folded around Julie, Alix began softly singing an old lullaby. The tune was familiar. Terrance recalled hearing it somewhere, although who had sung it wasn’t clear.
Something twisted and ached within him as he watched. Again he thought that this could’ve been his, if he hadn’t left.
But it wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be, he reminded himself. But it did no harm to stand here, pretending. As long as he remembered that he was pretending.
Julie cuddled against her and was asleep again in less than five minutes. Alix scooted forward on the seat, watching Julie for any signs of stirring. There were none. Placing a finger to her lips as she looked at Terrance, Alix slowly rose to her feet. With small, almost imperceptible steps, she made her way to the girl’s bed again.
Terrance pulled the covers back for her and together they slipped Julie into the bed. For a split second Alix found herself thinking that it seemed they were playing house.
They made their way back to the front door in silence, as if a single word would somehow manage to rouse the child again.
Or maybe it was because neither of them knew what they could say at a time like this.
And then they were at the door.
Sanctuary, Alix thought.
“She’s beautiful.”
His compliment made her smile with pride, as did everything about her daughter. “Thanks, I think so.”
Self-made promises of not touching her to the contrary, Terrance couldn’t help reaching out to tuck away a stray stand of her hair behind her ear. “Just like her mother.”
Alix pulled her head back. Warning signals shot off salvos through her system.
“Don’t start.”
Half plea, half order, the whispered words hung between them like a sheer veil, to be torn down or observed.
Terrance struggled to do the latter. “I’m not,” he promised.
But even as he was saying it, even as he meant it, Terrance cupped her face with his hand, tilting her head back.
The next heartbeat he brought his mouth down to hers.
Chapter 8
No!
Yes!
Diametrically opposed emotions warred inside her. Even within the confines of her own mind, Alix couldn’t win the battle that she knew she had to in order to survive, in order to continue.
But it had been so long, so very long since she had felt like this. As if there was a fire burning inside her. A fire that brought her to life. Everything seemed so much more vivid, so much more real the instant his lips touched hers. It was as if all this time she’d been living in a black-and-white world and now it was in Technicolor.
The years she spent with Jeff dropped away as if they had been lived by someone else, in another lifetime. It was Terrance whom she had always loved with a fierceness that consumed her down to the very core of her being. Terrance who owned her whole heart, because she was incapable of loving with only half.
For a moment Alix gave herself up to the rapture that had taken hold of her, tears forming within her eyes. They were tears of joy, of sorrow, of home-coming.
For this one moment she was his and he was hers.
Terrance felt control slipping away from him. He couldn’t stop himself.
He didn’t know what possessed him. Common sense had always been his mainstay. No matter what, he’d always been able to think clearly, to act rationally. That was why he’d left Alix in the first place, because he’d known that he was undergoing a transformation, one she would have trouble standing by. She deserved better, and because he loved her, he’d left so that she could eventually get on with her life.
But now common sense had somehow burned away in the heat of these feelings, the way a meteor burned up entering the atmosphere. There wasn’t even a cinder left for him to reflect on.
Holding her to him, pressing her warm body against his, Terrance slanted his mouth against Alix’s as memories of what they had once had, of what they had once been to each other came rushing back to him with a vengeance that shook him down to the bone.
Slowly the small, raised voice penetrated the blazing haze that had wrapped tightly around them.
“Mommy!”
Terrance stopped kissing her at the exact same moment that Alix put her hands against his chest. They both knew this couldn’t, shouldn’t be happening.
Steadying his voice, Terrance looked up toward the stairs. “I guess Julie wasn’t as asleep as we thought.”
“No,” Alix murmured, an ache beginning to grow within her even as she mentally stood back in disappointment at her own weakness. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, unconsciously savoring the taste of him. “I guess she wasn’t.”
She stood and looked at him for another moment, even though everything within begged her to make good her escape, to seize her reprieve, race up the stairs and offer up a silent prayer of thanks that she had been saved from making a mistake. Because with very little persuasion, she would have surrendered to her feelings and to him and that would have been a huge, huge mistake. For a second, while he’d been kissing her, she’d felt the way she had six years ago.
But it wasn’t six years ago, it was now, and she wasn’t the same person she had once been, not anymore. Things had happened, her life had changed. She had grown and now looked at the world with eyes that were no longer naive, no longer innocent.
More important, she was a mother now, with responsibilities, not a woman who could just risk everything because her heart told her to.
Not her heart, Alix amended, her body. It was her body that was reacting to Terrance, succumbing to the heat that was generated between them. It always had. They’d become lovers within the first week of knowing each other. He’d been her first.
You never forget your first.
The phrase echoed in her brain. She couldn’t remember when she had heard the sentiment. Was that all it was, this feeling that had come up and seized her by the throat, just a t
rip down memory lane? A trip to a happier, safer time, when she’d still believed that happily-ever-after was actually an option?
She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. Her head felt like a piece of Swiss cheese.
“Mommeee.”
Terrance nodded toward the stairs. Maybe it was better this way. For both of them. “You’d better go.”
She nodded, too numb to risk talking again.
“And, Alix?”
She paused, her hand on the doorknob, looking at him expectantly. Almost afraid of what he might say. Afraid that it might be what she wanted to hear. That he was staying the night.
“Try leaving the light on for her,” Terrance advised. “It might help. Being afraid of the dark is an awful thing.”
She already knew that. Because she was. It was in the dark that her greatest regrets rose up to seek her out. To taunt her with what wasn’t but might have been.
Alix dropped her hand to her side. “Thanks.” She took a step away from the door. “You’ll let yourself out?”
“I’ll let myself out.” With that he turned and went out, closing the door behind him.
The sound echoed in her chest.
Alix raced up the stairs to Julie’s room, focusing only on her daughter.
“Get anything yet?” Terrance asked the man sitting at the table, wearing state-of-the-art headphones around his neck like some kind of oversize, thick, stretched-out choker.
Slightly overweight, slightly balding, given to bland, nondescript clothing, Monroe Fontaine looked to be ten years older than he actually was. But his mind was cutting-edge sharp, and he had a tolerance for surveillance that was rivaled by none.
Sitting at a desk that was littered with Chinese takeout cartons, some dating back to the beginning of last week’s wiretap operation, Monroe shook his head. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Terrance looked at the reels of tapes that had begun to gather in the corners, all recording conversations that apparently went nowhere. Just like the investigation. If there was to be a drug drop-off in the immediate future, nobody was talking.
Undercover M.D. Page 8
