Accompanying Alice (10 page)

She blinked in the deepening stillness, at the unquiet shadows, listening to the no-no’s of generations echo around the room. Blinked at the disturbing buzz of her thoughts as her awareness of Gabriel increased with the beat of her pulse.

His tongue moved nervously between his teeth as he looked her up and down, found her eyes.

Her lungs constricted and her skin tingled, but she was cold.

Wasn’t she?

She dropped her gaze, acutely conscious of her body and the war it waged against her. Chastity versus lust versus set
a
good
example versus... Something else, something stronger, something terrifying and hopeful... And real.

Her breath became a painful weight in her lungs.

The air hung heavy, seductive between them. With great care, Gabriel fitted a palm to her throat and tilted her chin up with his thumb. He held her with his eyes; his mouth descended deliberately until every breath he exhaled she breathed in. Anticipation fluttered in her stomach, raced through her veins. She wanted to pull away but didn’t.

Silence drew them together. They were a hair’s breadth from one another when he sensed her hesitation and lifted his head. Wounds, doubts, needs flitted openly through the shadows on her face and he recognized them for exactly what they were. If they touched one another now, there would be no going back. For either of them.

He slipped a hand into her hair, drew the strands gently through his fingers, let them drop away. She wasn’t a woman he could bed once and leave. Somewhere deep inside himself he knew that, recognized it, accepted it—and gathered himself back into the box he’d labeled self-control because of it. He felt Alice’s sigh of regret, of relief, kiss his lips. Their breath mingled for an instant longer than their eyes held.

And then they were apart, on opposite sides of the room, caged in their own emotions, imprisoned by the desire that clung to the air.

It was a long night.

Chapter Four

U
nable to sleep, Alice restlessly prowled the darkness long after she’d shown Gabriel to bed in the girls’ room.

Convenient
both
when the girls had been tiny and
again
when they were older and out late and she could hear them from her bed, the room’s proximity now fed a mood, an itch she found
harder to ignore by the minute. She was an adult, she reminded herself. She didn’t have to scratch all her itches, satisfy all her urges. She was an adult, a mother, not an eighteen
year
old obsessed with the newness of her body who couldn’t see beyond the moment, and for whom every passion carried life or death weight. She was older. She had hindsight, she had history
.
S
he understood consequences.

She had learned from experience.

But denial of its existence only made desire worse.

The creak of bedsprings unthinkingly drew her to the crack in the sliding door to Allyn’s and Rebecca’s bedroom. Guiltily she peered in at Gabriel, listening to him breathe as she watched him sleep. It was an old habit, one she’d developed months before Allyn and Rebecca were born.

For the few brief days they’d been together she’d loved watching Matthew sleep. Sleep was full of promises and dreams, the hopes of tomorrow. Just as
they’d
been full of promises and dreams....

But they hadn’t been married long enough to meet any promises, fulfill any dreams.

Though old, the memories of that time were still painful, still caused her to cringe every time she realized how blindly, gullibly,
romantically
In Love she’d been.

Or perhaps the better term was In Lust,
perception told her now
.

It had taken barely a month after she and Matt had eloped for his parents to find them in their fifty-dollar-a-week, one-room-over-a-garage apartment near the high school and get Alice’s marriage to their son annulled. It had been easy to dissolve the union as though it had never been. She’d been slightly underage, and he’d been a university football recruiter’s dream, his eyes full of stars, his legs all raw talent and potential. A lot of emotional weight had been carried into that brief hearing, a lot of names Alice had never dreamed anyone would call her.
Slut. Money chasing skank. Whore.

She’d come out of the judge’s chambers
barely able to think,
feeling dirtier than she’d ever felt, morally bankrupt, a corrupter of children, wishing she’d allowed her parents to accompany her. But Helen was right: they did come from a family of stubborn, overly independent women, and Alice remembered deciding at the time that, since she’d gone into marriage on her own, she’d come out on her own.

Her father had been there afterward, anyway, waiting in the hall with tears in his eyes and a quick shoulder squeeze, and Alice never remembered feeling quite so loved or quite so alone.

She pressed her fingers to her lips and eased away from the sliding door. Odd, the things you remembered, the times you remembered them.

Though probably a wise move in the long run, the end of her marriage had been devastating at the time. To give him credit, Matt had wanted to “do right by her,” but he hadn’t known how, hadn’t been strong enough to buck his parents and their image of themselves
—
and him. It hadn’t
been enough to be told that she was a stronger person than he was. He’d been the same age as she, but emotionally much younger—the youngest of four where she was the eldest of seven. Where he’d grown up learning how to play, she’d grown up on the right hand of responsibility, counting heads at every family outing, keeping track of the little ones when her parents needed time for the older ones, time for themselves. If only she could make Becky understand how long it had taken her to forgive Matthew his age. Except she’d never really told either of the girls much about Matt.

She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. God, why did she have to think about all this now? The man sleeping in Rebecca’s bed had nothing in common with Matthew except gender
but he
seemed somehow safer at the same time
that
he was more dangerous. There was something infinitely seductive in the fact that someone like Gabriel chose to trust someone like her enough to sleep while she was awake. Seductive, and frightening, that is, because in order to be seduced, a person had to give up something of herself, like innocence, and allow herself to be led astray, tempted. Corrupted.

Momentarily, Matthew climbed back into her thoughts, and Alice swallowed. Seduction was such a lazy, powerful word. A woman should never allow herself to watch a man sleep; it made her too vulnerable to him. Because no matter what he was while awake, no matter how he treated her, asleep, he was pure potential and there was nothing more seductive to a woman than the illusion of what might be.

Unable to sleep, Gabriel listened to the rustle of her movements through the house. She moved with the soundless grace of a mother ever conscious of wakeful children nearby. He heard her because he was listening for her and so knew she was out there, beyond his door, disturbed by his presence in her house. As he was disturbed by her presence in his life. Even with his eyes closed he knew when she darkened the crack in the doorway to her daughters’ room. He had the rather disturbing feeling that he’d always know when she was near, if not through the physical sense of sight, sound or scent, then through an extra sense, a warning sense—through the same tingling in the small of his back that alerted him to unseen dangers during an investigation.

He turned over in bed and listened to the darkness, trying to distract himself by thinking of something else. Thinking how much more tempting the double bed in Alice’s room had looked, imagining how she would feel in it and beneath his hands, how she would look if he opened that damned robe....

With a dry and silent “Get your mind out of the gutter, Book,” he flopped onto his back. He hadn’t been this rattled by a woman since he’d been twenty. But then, maybe it wasn’t really Alice at all who disturbed him. Maybe she was only part of the circumstance.

His mind turned over to Scully and Markum. Innocent until proven guilty, he thought, and knew he’d hide behind that rationale as long as he could. Jack Scully, the FBI section chief who’d assigned him to the Oakland County undercover, a man Gabriel had worked for and trusted for almost ten years. Silas Markum, the Bureau legend, his instructor at the academy, his mentor. The man who’d asked him to be godfather to his youngest child twelve years ago.

The man who’d personally requested Gabriel to handle this investigation. Because he trusted him—or so Gabriel had thought.

Letting someone else do his thinking for him was dangerous.

He twisted savagely in the bed again. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to face the possibilities. Didn’t want to know how blind and naive he might have been. Shouldn’t have been. Shouldn’t be.

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up wanting to run from the claustrophobic silence of his thoughts. Outside the open window above the bed a lone cricket sang, tumbling him unexpectedly backward into the two years he’d spent on Aunt Sarah’s farm helping her with
the orchards after Uncle Luke had died. He’d been sixteen, shy, obedient and ill at ease, and upstate New York had been a far cry from the Quaker mission in
Southeast Asia
his parents had sent him from.

Odd to think how sheltered and innocent, how little of the world he’d truly seen up to that point
,
given the countries he’d lived in and the wars he’d grown up witnessing. At sixteen he’d wanted nothing more than to grow up and carry on his parents’ work, to share peace and understanding with people instead of violence, death and war. The thought of physical privation hadn’t mattered—he’d grown up with nothing else. And the fear of dying violently in some guerrilla-to
rn
backwoods... Well, fear was something his mother had assured him was best left to those without faith. Fear was a killer, an implement of doubt.

She hadn’t warned him that faith carried its own arrogance.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. It had been so simple to believe her before she and his father sent him away.

But far from their protective thumb and out in the world beyond the missions for the first time, he found Aunt Sarah’s to be a revelation—a parade of firsts, some but not all of them bad. First date—she was blond
e
, he remembered; they’d shaken hands good night. First kiss—his memory of the moment, if not the girl, was hot, wet and stimulating. First fight—a battle of wills and beliefs, over what he couldn’t remember now, that had begun as a sit-in protest in the school cafeteria and erupted into a melee the police had needed tear gas to quell. First killing...

Haunted, he struggled to keep himself from leaving Alice’s daughters’ room in search of escape elsewhere in the house. He owed Alice at least the privacy to roam her own home at night without intruding on her. But it was difficult. The room was barely the size of the stifling hut some
Thai guerrillas
had imprisoned him in when he’d gone back to see his parents. The incarceration had been brief—three days, nothing. But long enough for him to find out what his imagination could do to him if he let it.

He stood at the window and sucked deeply of the night air. The humid Michigan summer darkness tasted nothing like
Southeast Asia
, just a little like Aunt Sarah’s upstate New York. He shut his eyes and took refuge in the smell and taste of nighttime, forcing himself to finish out his thoughts.

He’d grown up a pacifist right down to his socks, belief so ingrained in him that even during his most volatile adolescent years he’d never defended himself—either verbally or physically. He’d allowed himself to be beaten or humiliated instead by fascinated peers who couldn’t understand his refusal to fight. He’d never even considered the possibility of taking a life—any life—for any reason. The killing at Aunt Sarah’s had been a mercy thing, a calf in the west pasture with a crushed rib cage, a case of watch it labor its life painfully away or kill it quickly. He’d been with two other guys, classmates who sometimes tolerated him. They’d wanted to get the little animal up and moving, but it had been too weak. One of them had taken out a knife and the three of them had sat there knowing what had to be done, none of them wanting to do it.