Buried Secrets (19 page)

He guessed denial was useful, on that subject, and hey, her hand was still on his chest, and her hair smelled really good.

He had to work harder than usual to string together a fitting sentence. “So we're all gonna die,” he conceded. It didn't come out as comforting as he'd hoped. “We're alive now.”

“But for how long? Even assuming we keep healthy and avoid accidents—how likely's that, in this business?—we've only got maybe forty to sixty years left. And then—boom.”

Zack took a deep breath, to focus on what was clearly an important issue to her. It probably would be to him too, if she wasn't smelling so good at this moment. He leaned his forehead against hers. “I don't think you can say ‘boom' about something that takes forty to sixty years to happen.”

She fisted the hand on his heart and gently thumped him. “You know what I mean.”

“Hiding out in Mayberry probably won't help either,” he reminded her. “You only get so much life—at a time, anyway.” They'd been hearing a lot about reincarnation this week, too. “Refusing to live it doesn't buy you extra.”

“You're right,” she conceded. Which was always nice to hear.

And since he at least
tried
to be a good guy, and not a testosterone-ridden pig, Zack asked, “So what else is—?”

Then she tipped her face up and kissed him, and his self-congratulations hit a new level.

Jo's kiss held everything great that he'd loved about their previous kisses, and then some. Her lips seemed to search his for some kind of validation, some kind of promise. If the questions were whether he wanted her, then the answer was
hell
yes, and he quickly relayed that with his own opening lips. He cradled the back of her silky head with one hand, holding her still so that he could explore her mouth even more deeply.

Hot. Wet. So incredibly, primitively alive that the air around them seemed to sing. Her fingers dug into his shoulder, wove into his hair. She half exhaled and half moaned around his tast
ing, questing tongue—so sweet, so real—and he shuddered at the hum it sent through him.

He wasn't thinking about the meaning of life anymore. They were living it. He was already getting hard with wanting her.

His elbow knocked the horn and sent out a blare that startled them both. Then they looked at each other, panting—he wasn't sure what she
saw,
but
he
could barely make out the shine of her eyes, the pale shape of her face. Somehow that was still enough to be surprisingly beautiful. Then he bent down to her, taking her mouth again, and she moaned happily.

He tried to turn to her more completely, and one of his feet wedged up against the door-panel. Now he
did
wish they were in her truck, with its bedlike bench seat. When he leaned into her, the gearshift stabbed him in the hip.

His thoughts were fragmenting.
Damned car.
And,
Jo.
Then,
need room.
And,
Jo.
Then—

“Crap,” he breathed, barely pausing in his exploration of her mouth as he tugged at the western shirt she'd tucked into her jeans. Her hip holster was getting in the way.

“Now you know how I felt,” she teased. But he didn't really mind that, because she also murmured, hot in his ear, “It snaps.”

Not enough room,
part of him realized dazedly, even while he took hold of the collar of her shirt and pulled, like some movie caveman. It popped neatly open, all the way down. Yes!

As before, Jo wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts were small, but large-nippled and inviting, and he bent quickly to their invitation.
Jo….

The gearshift jabbed him again. He swore again, increasingly frustrated. Then he readjusted his body to come at her kind of sideways—as long as he came at her—and lifted one of her delicate breasts to his mouth.

She tasted better than anything, than life. He loved how she hardened in his mouth, matching his own body's willingness.

Jo made more of those happy, lustful sounds that she'd made the last time they tried something like this. When she found his denim-captured erection with one questing hand, Zack moaned something similarly wordless back at her. Déjà vu all over again.

But more intense, because this time their need for each other had gone primal.

But still stuck in a damned tiny sports car.

That last time, Zack was pretty sure he'd gotten her to come. The way she'd shuddered against his hands, thrown her head back. But they'd been in opposite seats. This time he couldn't pull her into his lap, much though his lap demanded it, because of the steering wheel. If she tried unbuttoning his fly, an almost impossible task one-handed—especially now—they'd find out just how in the way the wheel was. Even if he dropped his seat back, like before, his feet would catch in the pedals.

All of which simply registered as,
no damned room.

So they made do. He kissed his intentions onto her other breast, so it wouldn't feel left out, covering the abandoned one with his hand. He'd left it wet. What with the nails of her free hand, digging through his shirt, Jo didn't seem to mind.

Even if they put her seat back, he couldn't get across the gearshift and parking brake like she had. He was just too big. So to speak. But somehow they had to do this. They could get out—it was the middle of nowhere. The idea of covering Jo James on the hood of the Ferrari had fantasy attractions. A nice insult to the burial grounds, to death itself. But he wasn't that young or that stupid. He'd been a cop and a city dweller too many years.

Besides, this was Jo. And their first time. She deserved so much better; lovemaking, not sex. They both did.

“Not—” his kiss, deep and desperate, muffled the words “—outside.” Especially not here. Death lurked out here.

“We can go to my place,” she offered, all breathy and writhing. “It's about an hour and a half away.”

An hour and a half?
Damned Texas…

But what was the alternative—at least, in this car?

“You drive,” he warned, proud to manage even two words in a row, even if his laugh came out uneven. Then he groaned at the way her hand was working him, hot, willing. “I'm distracted.”

Joyfully, deliciously, frustratingly distracted.

Jo had to know all those blood-diverted-from-his-brain jokes.
And she sure seemed to appreciate where his blood had drained to. Zack was appreciating that too, unable to sit still against her squeezing, encouraging hand. This was the kind of hard-on that a guy didn't just turn off again. If they couldn't finish things out
now,
he'd do well to just slump into the passenger seat and remember how to breathe for a while.

And he sure as hell didn't want to delay setting out.

Jo plucked at the top button of his fly, futilely, one-handedly, and leaned close to his ear, “Well, Zack, we can at least do something about that. Put your seat back.”

Sometimes he could take orders like a rookie. He groped at and found the seat-release, easing back slightly, so ready for Jo—
her,
in any way he could have her—that he was dizzy with it. She boosted herself up, to manage his straining fly with both hands—

And her head hit the dome light, switching it on.

Turning every window in the car into a freakish, nighttime mirror.

S
uddenly every window on the car became a surrounding mirror—Zack and Jo's wavering reflections floating ghoulishly against deep blackness—and he wasn't breathing after all.

Failure waited in that darkness. Loss. Paralysis.

Why bother? Why bother with anything?

Somehow, Zack slapped at the roof and turned the light off.
Breathe.
He felt humiliated. It was definitely too late to just soak that up and carry on as they were. But at least he could breathe, and he could move.

Moving, at this moment, meant lifting Jo physically back into the passenger side, readjusting his seat, then starting the car and U-turning viciously back onto the deserted dirt road.

“Zack?” Jo asked in a little voice, from where he'd put her.

He just drove. His dashboard lights stayed relatively dim, enough so the car windows no longer seemed dangerous. And all he wanted at this point—more than life, more than Jo, more than
sex
with Jo—was to get the hell out of here.

FIDO, his brothers sometimes said. Polite translation: Forget It, Drive On.
That
he could do, so he did, the car lurching and bumping over ruts despite its state-of-the-art suspension. The fan
of headlights on the rock-strewn dirt road ahead of them sometimes caught the reflective green of an animal's startled eyes. Usually a rabbit's or a rodent's. Once, what looked like a low, skinny dog. No snakes.

The animals did a good job of getting the hell out of his way before he could find out whether he had it in him to stop.

It was probably too much to hope for, that Jo would pretend along with him that nothing had happened. “Zack?”

He just kept driving, not trusting his voice, hating his life. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what the hell was wrong with him? And why
now?

He punched the play button on the CD, in hopes that noise would distract her. An old Eagles song filled the car.

But no, Jo had to push the matter. Hell, in her cowboy boots, so would he. “Zack, what's wrong? What
happened?
”

Of course something
had
happened. Even if he'd gotten her back into her seat before she felt the ice-water effect the unreasonable fear had on his erection, that had been a helluva sudden end to their lovemaking.

Or their almost lovemaking.

Zack shook his head. He
so
did not want to have this talk.

The two-lane highway loomed out of the desert ahead of them, dark and completely empty, so Zack hardly had to slow to turn onto it. Sure, sand flew. But this was a freakin' Ferrari. It knew how to hug even a dirt road when it cornered.

Back to the modern conveniences of blacktop, he accelerated.

Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. Seventy-five.

He'd only just reached the speed limit. Of all the things western states sucked at, speed limits weren't one of them. This much nothingness between one place and another made it pretty hard to put anybody else in danger even at a hundred, in the right car. Eighty.

Zack leveled out at eighty. Jo was with him. Soothed by the sense of control and power the car gave him, he glanced in her direction. It was dark, but he should've seen the outline of the lighter shoulder strap across her front.

Her resnapped-up front. Not that he was surprised not to have heard that, upset as he was. “Put on your damned seat belt.”

“Tell me what's wrong.” But he heard a comforting metal snick as she did what he said.

I don't want to.
That had to be the most childish response he could make, closely followed by the ironic
Nothing.
But what was he supposed to say—that he was a grown man, an ex-cop, a demon-chaser and he was afraid of the
dark?

Only through windows,
he reminded himself stubbornly.
Only with the lights on inside.

Then Jo had to go and say, “If I can't trust you, how am I supposed to work with you?” In case he didn't recognize his own words from the other day, she added,
“Period.”

Fine. So she needed to talk. She was a woman, wasn't she? He slowed the car, braking. Seventy. Sixty. Fifty.

“What are you doing?”

“Stopping so we can talk.”

Forty. Thirty. Twenty. He pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, left the headlights on, opened the door and got out. Music from the stereo harmonized into the night, through the door he left open as he walked around the Ferrari to Jo's side, where she just sat there looking confused and worried.

“Well?” he said. He hoped she didn't ask him to explain this, too. All he knew was he had to be out of the damned car, away from the sharp memory of her kisses, of her hands, of her breasts under his lips. He couldn't bare his soul surrounded by all that.

Instead he got a barren desert, a safer distance from that damned burial ground, and a starry—

Zack paused, really noticing them for the first time. Big stars. Little stars. Washes of stars, bright as a planetarium field trip, but real. Distant. Infinite. Holy God—he'd never seen that many stars in his life!

He realized that what he could see of the desert around them, except in the Ferrari's headlights, he was seeing by the illumination of all those stars.

Jo unfastened her seat belt. Zack opened her door. She got out without his help and, like him, left the door open. Then, when he made no move to walk away from the car, she hiked herself up onto its hood. “So…?”

She looked a lot like she had on that pink Formica bar in his former motel room. The first time they'd kissed.

He had a pang of guilt, to think that if he'd made love to her without her knowing everything, he'd be a real sonovabitch. Just because he wanted her wasn't enough. She had to want him.

The real him. All of him. Flaws and all.

And there was only one way to find that out.

He used one of Cecil's words. “It's kind of a phobia.”

Jo looked confused. “The
dome light?
”

Even Zack had to laugh at that, though not a happy laugh. “The windows,” he clarified. “At night. With lights on inside. I can't—” But it was beyond explaining even to himself. “Something about windows at night turns me freakin' useless.”

There. Now she knew. She'd thought he was some heroic demon-hunter, but he wasn't invincible at all.

Jo bent forward thoughtfully, bracing her elbows on her knees, and said nothing.

Unwilling to add anything more until he knew how she'd taken this much, Zack leaned onto the hood beside her, arms folded.

Finally Jo said something. “For me, it's being underground.”

That wasn't what Zack had expected. “What?”

“I can't go underground anymore. Did I tell you I sometimes work contract blasting? I can't do caves, or mines, even the deserted ones. Not even ten feet in. I feel the weight of all that rock and dirt on top of me, and…” She rolled her eyes. “One of my cousins invited me to New York with her, for a weekend, and when the cab went through the Lincoln Tunnel I passed out.”

“You?” Zack challenged—and it must have been the right thing to say, because she smiled. If he'd ever met a woman who didn't seem likely to swoon, it was Jo.

“Me,” she agreed wryly. “Even basements make me uncomfortable, though I manage. There aren't a lot, around here.”

Zack considered that, but he couldn't take as much comfort in her confession as she probably meant him to. “You've got reason,” he reminded her. She'd been in a collapsed mine; claus
trophobia kind of went along with that. Why would he be afraid of windows at night?

It wasn't like he'd been traumatized as a child by someone jumping up against the glass. It wasn't like anything had ever crashed through at him.

“You probably do too,” Jo insisted loyally. “I mean, everything has a reason, doesn't it?”

Maybe in make-believe land.

As if on cue, she added, “No such thing as coincidence.” It was one of the favorite phrases of the magic-user types they'd been interviewing. Zack was never sure whether he believed that or not. It depended on the day.

It wasn't anywhere near as painful as he'd thought, to tell her this. Probably because she was Jo. Because he could trust her after all.

So he said, “It started sometime after Gabriella died. But before I got into this ghost-busting biz, so it's not like I was cursed or anything. I don't think.”

Jo, elbows still on her denim-covered knees, slid her gaze toward him and said, “Gabriella's your wife, right?”

And Zack felt a completely different jolt from the whole selection of surprises that had shaken him tonight. Had he really not told her that much? He'd been trying so hard not to let on about failing Gabriella, not to let Jo think he was working some personal vendetta, that he hadn't told her Gabriella's
name?

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “She was.”

Jo just waited easily, seemingly willing—now that he'd finished his James Dean impression—to let him do this at his own pace. He watched her, not even touching her, and for the first time he thought he could really love this woman. Completely.

So he added, “She's dead.”

Just in case she was wondering.

Jo's smaller hand found his. “I'm sorry.”

They both knew how meaningless those words were—and how much healing power even that insignificance had, to someone drowning in grief. Zack wasn't drowning, anymore. If he still were, after four years, it was time he figured out that he could drop his feet, touch ground and keep his head above water.

Jo reminded him of that. The death of her parents, and Diego, reminded Zack that he wasn't alone in having lost someone. Nobody was. Her friendship over this past week—fighting, laughing, refusing to take crap off him—reminded him that he didn't necessarily have to be alone in finding someone, either.

He closed his hand around hers, took a deep breath and said, “Her name was Gabriella Romano. We knew each other our whole life, but it wasn't until junior year—my junior year, her freshman—that we started, you know, noticing.”

Lanky Gabriella turned pretty. Zack had grown shoulders. They'd gone from hanging to dating to going steady over the course of a year. Nothing near as fast as with Jo.

And look how good
that
worked out,
he thought, his mood as gloomy as the piano music into the darkness. Glenn Frye had never sounded so sad as when he sang about
Wasted Time.

“I married her when I was twenty-three, and three years and change later, she was dead. She passed out in the bathtub, probably a heart attack. I was mad at her that night. Hell, I'd been angry for weeks—I still loved her, but that doesn't keep the mad off, you know? I took a double shift to get out of the house.” And when he came home…

“It wasn't your fault,” said Jo firmly. Even though she couldn't really know, that helped too.

“Then her body disappeared,” he said.

“Oh.” Jo put an unknown gulf of meaning into that
oh.

And Zack finally admitted to Sheriff Josephine James just how personal this job had gotten.

 

Jo had been fascinated by Zack before now, sure. She'd felt vaguely linked to him from the minute she started breathing again. She got hotter for him than for any man in her life, too. But listening to his fears and frustrations, watching them play across his solid face and hearing them thicken his voice—that's what really started to validate those feelings.

It scared the hell out of her, how much she liked the man he was letting her see.

He'd been confused, even hurt when Gabriella up and decided to go to college—he didn't say that, but she could tell. He'd
seemed to think it meant he wasn't enough for her. He hadn't known about the Life Force Club either, though he'd noticed her weird interests, and the betrayal he felt about the secrecy still colored his voice. That, and the guilt.

“You think she's one of the people we saw in the cemetery,” Jo finished for him, and Zack raised dark eyes to hers.

“I don't know. There might be no connection. I'm not even sure if I want…” He frowned, looked down, but she got the gist. He wasn't sure which would be better—to confirm that Gabriella's soul had been imprisoned, these four years, or to continue living in limbo.

He'd been living in limbo just as surely as Jo had. His version of limbo just had a lot more activity in it. His limbo had accomplished more. His limbo took more courage.

But he still hadn't gone on with his life, other than the hunt. And it sounded like it had been such a sweet, normal life. Childhood sweethearts. Extended families. A clear idea of where good and bad parted ways.

“So we'll find out,” she told him firmly.

He lifted his dark, intense gaze to hers, his head still ducked. For such a big guy, he looked almost boyish for a moment—half hopeful, half skeptical. “Easy to say.”

“We'll find out,” she repeated. The music from the open doors of the car had moved out of
Wasted Time
and through most of
Hotel California,
one of the Eagles' most disturbing hits. Now the last guitar riff was finishing out its trancelike sorcery.

Zack lifted his head to look at her full-on. They were almost at an equal height, with her sitting on the car. Almost. He still stood a bit taller than her. His eyes burned as he gazed at her, warning her to be careful what she promised.

She could understand how he'd feel that way, after the years of impasse regarding his wife's fate.

His late wife,
she told herself.
She's dead.

Whether Gabriella's soul had been imprisoned or not, she
was
dead. That much they knew.

The song ended.

“Hey, Lorenzo,” Jo said, into the silence. “C'mere.”