Love at First Sight (14 page)

Jack motioned for Karen to be silent although he could tell by the way she’d tensed next to him that she’d heard it, too, and was also trying to pinpoint where the noise had come from.

Could it be the groundskeeper getting an early start? Not likely. It was still dark outside. And the movement had been too…furtive. Too close.

He heard it again. The sound of clothing rustling as if someone had just shifted into a different position and it was close. Very close.

He heard a soft click and dropped the bag as he lunged to pull Karen down behind one of the larger gravestones.

The shot whizzed past, the bullet striking a tombstone behind them, sending up a spray of granite. The shooter had a gun with a silencer and wasn’t a bad shot.

Jack pulled Denny’s pistol from its holster. “Stay down,” he ordered.

Karen nodded, her eyes wide with fear, her expression one of shock. Fortunately, Jack thought, she couldn’t remember the other times someone had tried to kill her. Unfortunately, he could.

He stared at her for a moment, then impulsively bent down to plant a kiss on her lips. She smiled and squeezed his knee, trust and love glowing in her gaze.

He glanced around, looking for a safe place for her. The hole they’d just dug loomed dark and deep. He motioned for Karen to slip back into the open grave. She didn’t look ecstatic about the idea but she quickly complied without question.

A dream wife, he thought crazily, as he handed her the flashlight.

With Karen safe in the hole for the moment, he moved stealthily toward the direction he’d first heard the sound, his pistol drawn. Another shot zipped past with a hum, the bullet boring into a tree trunk behind him.

He rushed forward, using the gravestones for cover as he charged in the direction of the shot, determined to catch the killer, to stop him once and for all.

T
HE MOON FLASHED
from behind the clouds, casting an eerie gray light over the cemetery. Down in the hole, the gray light only cast a long cold shadow.

Karen crouched, her body pressed against the damp earth, listening for Jack’s return, fighting fear for her husband. She kept telling herself he was a cop. He knew what he was doing. He’d be all right.

She looked down at the coffin at her feet, fighting her own fears. The darkness, the cold earth, the moon eclipsed by the clouds overhead and that terrible feeling of helplessness. She shivered and tried to think of anything else but her fears.

She huddled in the dark of the grave and thought of Jack. What an odd way to spend a honeymoon. She hadn’t even gotten to make love to her husband yet. And now they might both be going to jail. If they lived that long.

He had to come back to her. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him when she’d just found him.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the hole, she realized that Jack had left the casket open. She could see the doll. She couldn’t imagine someone putting a doll into the small box to be sealed and burying it, complete with headstone. It seemed so…sick.

She looked up at the clouds moving like waves overhead and listened for the sound of her husband returning. But she heard nothing down in the hole. Nothing but the frantic drumming of her pulse, her heart thundering in her chest.

Her gaze fell again on the coffin and the doll inside. The doll’s eyes stared out, blank, but…familiar. She knelt down to inspect it more closely.

Pretty Patsy Wetsy, she thought with a start. She’d had a doll just like it.

Carefully, she reached in and started to lift the doll out, then jerked back with a muffled cry as she saw something that froze her blood.

J
ACK LET HIS EYES
adjust to the moonlight. Exhaustion pulled at him. Weary from everything he’d learned, sick
from all that he still didn’t know or understand, he crouched behind a tombstone and waited for the killer to make his move. He didn’t have to wait long.

A dark shape leaned out from behind one of the mausoleums. The shot breezed by so close, Jack thought it had grazed the side of his face. He ducked back, breathing hard. He waited a few moments, timing it, then peered out again.

Nothing moved. Thin clouds sailed across the moon, washing the cemetery in a ghostly white light. Long shadows hid behind headstones and trees, hanging on to the darkness.

Suddenly a furtive movement caught Jack’s eye. Someone ran out from behind one of the grave markers and now zigzagged through the pines and granite headstones toward the chain-link fence, toward the road and a large, dark car parked at its edge, a long-barreled pistol in the shooter’s left hand.

Jack leveled his gun, leaning across the top of the gravestone, waiting for a shot. Just as the figure reached the fence, he pulled the trigger. Boom. The sound echoed across the graveyard, bouncing like a pinball through the granite stones.

The would-be assassin seemed to hesitate for an instant as if the bullet had found its mark. Jack had shot only to wound the man. A leg shot. But as the figure scampered up and over the fence, dropping to the other side, Jack knew he’d erred on the side of safety and had let the killer get away.

He took one more shot, knowing it was futile. Too
far to shoot for any accuracy. No chance of getting closer before the person reached the car.

The bullet shattered the back side window of the large, dark car as the driver leaped in. Jack heard the sound of an engine roar to life and watched as the car sped away in a cloud of dust and gravel.

Jack swore as he holstered the pistol and ran back to the open grave—and Karen.

“Did you get him?” she asked in a whisper.

He shook his head. “I didn’t even get a good look at him.” Medium height, medium build, wearing a baseball cap. Driving a large, dark, American-made car. He could have been the man Karen had seen with Liz at the Carlton. He could have been anyone.

“You’ll get him next time.” She smiled up at him with a mixture of relief and love that was almost his undoing.

He offered her a hand up out of the hole and noticed she was holding something.

Her expression changed as she saw his gaze shift to the doll in her hands. “You aren’t going to believe this, Jack.”

She held the doll out to him.

He hesitated, not wanting to touch it. Not because it was evidence, although it probably would have been, had they not illegally tampered with the grave. Touching the doll would be a connection to the person who’d put it into the grave. That was a connection he would have liked to have avoided, but he could see that wasn’t possible.

He took the doll, then reached for Karen. He just wanted to get the hell out of here. And fast.

“L
OOK AT THIS
,” Karen said after they’d left the cemetery far behind. The lights from Missoula bled through the low-hanging clouds making the buds on the trees glisten bright new green. It was the trees that made Missoula the Garden City. Soon the branches would be filled with lush green leaves that would form canopies over the streets.

Carefully, she held out the doll for him to see.

Someone had tied a piece of surgical hose around the doll’s neck like—like an umbilical cord, Jack realized with a start. “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

She put the doll down on her lap and stared at it. “It looks as if a child made the clothes for it.” He could hear the emotion in her voice and knew she was close to tears. “I think this doll was Liz’s.”

His gaze leaped to her. “What makes you think
that?
”

She turned back the small collar on the doll’s worn dress. The tiny homemade tag inside read: Jones Original.

“I had a doll just like this,” she said. “Twenty years ago. That’s when they came out. Every girl my age wanted one for Christmas that year. I got mine early, for my eighth birthday.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said, not wanting the doll to be Liz’s. Not wanting to believe she’d put it into the grave. Tangled a piece of hose around its neck, just as nature supposedly had done to her baby?

He didn’t want to think about the person who’d buried the doll. Or about the real baby, Joanna Kay. Could this mean that she was still alive? He knew that was what Karen was hoping. But he wasn’t so sure.
None of this made much sense. Who in his right mind would bury a doll?

At the hospital, Denny had been given something to sleep and was out like a light, visiting hours were hours away and the nurse wouldn’t let Jack and Karen stay.

Jack stopped by his apartment, just long enough to check the mail and answering machine. On the spur of the moment, he grabbed something for Karen and stuck it into his pocket.

Back in the Jeep, he noticed how exhausted she looked. She should have been convalescing. Not digging up graves. She looked so small and frail. It drew on every protective instinct in him. “I’m taking you home.”

She smiled. “Home. I love the sound of that.”

He smiled over at her, choked up by the rush of emotions she evoked in him. Just as impulsively as a few minutes before when he’d dug it out of the drawer in his apartment, he pulled the small velvet box from his jeans pocket. “With everything that’s happened I forgot to give you this.”

She stared down at the box, her eyes lighting up. He watched her take it, her fingers trembling, and for one moment he thought he’d only made matters worse.

But then she opened it, saw the thin worn gold band and said, “Oh, Jack.”

“It was my grandmother’s.” That was all he could get out. He’d seen her glance at her naked ring finger. He didn’t want her to think that her husband hadn’t cared. Everything else might be a lie, but he did care. God, how he cared for this woman.

She slipped the ring on her finger. It was only a little
loose on her slim finger. She looked up at him, love glowing in her eyes, the exhaustion and horror of the night washed away for the moment.

He couldn’t have asked for anything more than that. He started the Jeep and drove toward the lodge. Home. He didn’t care that it wasn’t true. He blocked out the guilt and the voice that tried to warn him he was about to make the worst mistake of all.

Karen curled against him. He put his arm around her and pulled her close as they drove through what little was left of the night.

A
COOL BREEZE
sighed at the panes as Karen padded barefoot into the living room. She could see her husband silhouetted against the fading darkness beyond the front window. He stood motionless, his hands buried in his jeans pockets as he looked out. She stopped to stare at his broad shoulders, his strong back, the ache in her almost overwhelming to hold him. If only she could remember, then there would be no reason they couldn’t make love. No reason he couldn’t lie next to her and hold her in the darkness of the bedroom.

Or would there be? Why did she sense there was more to it than her injury and memory loss? That whatever was troubling Jack had something to do with her? With them?

“Darling?” she called softly.

He turned, his eyes hooded but she saw his reaction to her standing there in the long silk nightgown, the fabric falling over her curves, cupping and skimming, as sensual as any garment she’d ever owned. The perfect
honeymoon attire. She’d purchased it earlier on the way to her shop for grave-digging tools. She’d run into a small boutique while Jack waited in the Jeep.

Now she realized the only thing that would make the gown more perfect was to have Jack take it off her. Slowly, lovingly. To feel his hands brush over the silk, over her expectant body.

“Karen,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse.

She moved to him, joining him at the window. In the distance she could see Missoula’s lights, twinkling like stars on a dark canvas of velvet black.

“Jack, I don’t care what the doctor said,” she whispered as she ran her hand along the top of his shoulder, down his arm to take his hand and press it to her heart. “I want you, Jack. I need you.”

She heard his sharp intake of breath; she could feel the same vibration humming through him. She had never doubted that he wanted her. She knew he was just trying to protect her health, doing what the doctor had ordered. Only the doctor didn’t know what was best for her. Jack was. She needed him. And now.

“Please, Jack. I can’t bear spending another night in that bed alone.”

S
HE LOOKED LIKE
an angel standing there in that long white gown. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. So sexy. So stirring. He could feel her gaze on him. A current ran through him, making him ache with need, filling him with a desire that threatened to drop him to his knees.

He ran a hand down her arm, over the silky fabric and
drew back, telling himself all the reasons this was wrong. Then why did it feel so right?

He cupped her face in the palm of his hand and thumbed across her cheek to her lips. She turned her head to kiss the pad of his thumb as it skimmed over her cheek in a slow arc. He closed his eyes and groaned as she sucked his thumb into her mouth.

His eyes flew open. “Karen—”

She hushed him with her gaze and the slow shake of her head. As she stepped closer, his free hand cupped her slim waist, sliding to the small of her back.

She unbuttoned his shirt and slid it from his shoulders. It dropped to the floor. He slid his hand to her round, firm buttock and pulled her to him. Silk against his bare skin, her breasts, heavy and firm beneath it, pressed against him.

He dropped his mouth to hers. The kiss was hot and wet and when he pulled back, his body felt on fire. He let his gaze slide down her slim neck to the deep V of the gown. Rosy-pink nubs of nipples pressed against the fabric, straining as if begging for his mouth. He turned her in his arms, kissing the back of her neck, telling himself all the reasons he couldn’t do what his body demanded, pleaded he do. This side of her was just as tempting as the other, he realized belatedly as she pushed her wonderful round behind into him.

He heard her pleased chuckle as she confirmed that he wanted her as badly as she did him. She reached behind her to cup his jaw in her hand and turned with a dancer’s grace to face him again.