Sleepwalker (38 page)

“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 little 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?”

“Yes.” She was warm now, and comfortable, wrapped in the thin sheet with his arms around her. The solid strength of his chest supported her back. His shoulder made the perfect pillow for her head. The sand beneath her was smooth and firm, and still retained just enough of the day’s heat to be pleasant. With the caressing breeze and the murmuring tide and a whole planetarium’s worth of stars overhead, Mick thought that she couldn’t have imagined a more perfect place if she had daydreamed about it for a hundred years.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said.

“What, it wasn’t because you didn’t want me to die?”

“Well, there was that. But that wasn’t entirely the reason, no.”

“So why, then?”

His eyes slid over her face. Mick felt their touch like a caress.

“I think the real, true, underlying reason I brought you with me was because I’m crazy about you.”

Their eyes met. As his words sank in, as she read what was there for her in his eyes, in his face, her heart started to pound and butterflies took flight in her stomach and her toes curled into the warm sand.

“Really?” What she didn’t want to do was sound as breathless as she suddenly felt, so her tone was maybe a little gruff.

“Yeah. Really.”

Mick could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. The last thing on earth she had ever meant to do was get emotionally involved with him.

Too late.

“That’s nice,” she said, turning in his arms, adjusting the sheet so that it would keep her minimally decent while she curled an arm around his neck.

He looked down at her. “Nice?”

There was a doubtful note to his voice that told her he wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

She was already fitting her mouth to his.

“Nice,” she repeated obligingly a breath away from his lips. “Because, see, I’m crazy about you, too.”

Then she kissed him, soft and leisurely, a long, deep kiss that lasted until his endurance snapped, until his arms tightened around her and his mouth went hot and hard and he twisted with her in his arms so that she was lying on her back with the sheet beneath her and only beneath her. And there it was again, rising up in her, the fire, the heat, the absolutely stupid hunger for him that there was just no doing anything about.

“Jason,” she whispered when his mouth left hers to trail hot, wet kisses down the side of her neck. When his mouth found her breasts, closed on each nipple in turn, she gasped. When his fingers slid between her legs, she cried out. When his mouth took the place of his fingers, branding her, possessing her, she was lost in the wonder of it, in the intensity of it, in the sheer exquisite pleasure of it.

When his mouth left her, when he rose up over her again, when she had just that split second to catch her breath and grab at her sanity and think as well as feel, she opened her eyes to find him looming over her. His face was hidden in shadow. But she could see the hot, dark gleam of his eyes, the heavily muscled shoulders, the strong arms. She burned for him. Her body quaked and throbbed for him. She was so turned on she was dizzy with it. She was consumed with images of all the ways they
had fucked before and she wanted more of that, more of the absolute abandon she had felt, more of the eroticism, more of the dark, sweet, unparalleled heat.

But the thing was, she recognized with something that felt like bedazzlement liberally mixed with fear, she didn’t want to fuck anymore.

“Make love to me,” she begged in a shaken whisper, knowing even as she did it that she was selling her soul to the devil, abandoning the principles of a lifetime, turning her back on everything she had previously held dear.

And the absolute worst, or best, thing about it was, she didn’t care.

“I want you more than I have ever wanted any woman in my life.” His voice was hoarse and deep, his mouth unsmiling as he bent to her. Even as she lifted her mouth for his kiss, even as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her, she had that one moment of clarity in which she saw the soot-black sky with its panoply of twinkling stars curving above his head, heard the murmur of the surf and felt the breath of the sea breeze on her skin, smelled the salt and the water and the faint muskiness that was pure man, and realized that she was lying naked on a beach with the lover of her dreams. And realized, too, that this night with Jason was the closest she had ever gotten to paradise in her life.

Then he came inside her, huge and hard and urgent, and the resulting undulating waves of passion that claimed her erased every vestige of coherent thought from her mind.

They made love for what was left of the night. Until, wrapped in her sheet, they fell asleep on the sand.

When Mick woke up, she was in Jason’s bed. Curled on her side, with a comforter pulled up to her chin, alone. The curtains were drawn, but she could tell it was full daylight by the sunshine that poured in through the open bedroom doorway. Jason, she discovered with a quick glance around, was not in the room.

But there was definitely someone standing in the doorway. Mick blinked to be sure, but the backlit silhouette, which was all she could see of whoever it was, bore no resemblance to Jason’s tall form. For a moment Mick lay still, battling an instinctive surge of anxiety, thinking the situation through. Then she clamped an arm over the comforter to hold it in place and sat bolt upright in bed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I dropped off some groceries. Jason’s hopeless at shopping.”

Tina’s cheerful voice banished the tension that had had Mick sitting ramrod straight, looking warily at the figure in the doorway. A glance at the bedside clock told her that it was almost noon.

“That’s all right. I was awake, just lying here. Um, have you seen him?”

“No, but that’s not surprising. He’s probably at work.”

“Work?” It was all Mick could do to keep the surprise out of her voice.

Tina nodded. “Tradewinds. The shipping company. He runs it, you know.”

No, actually, Mick hadn’t known. She’d thought her thief was just that, period. But she definitely wanted to know more.

“Usually he gets back around five. But with you here, I’d say there was a good chance he’ll be home earlier.” The amusement in Tina’s voice told Mick that the other woman had no doubt about the state of Mick’s relationship with Jason. Well, she
was
naked in his bed. How much could anyone misinterpret that?

“Wait,” Mick said. Tina was already turning away from the door. “Are you busy? Maybe we could have a cup of coffee.”

“Sure. You get dressed, and I’ll make it.”

Tina vanished. As Mick swung her legs over the side of the bed and faced a momentarily daunting dilemma—all her belongings were in the second bedroom, clear on the other side of the house—she heard Tina moving around in the kitchen. Luckily, the towel Mick had been wearing earlier was on the floor. Picking it up, wrapping it around herself, she went into the bathroom, which, like the rest of the place, was gorgeous. Some minutes later, with her face washed, her teeth brushed (courtesy of a new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet), and her hair brushed as well, wearing a white toweling bathrobe she had found hanging on a hook inside the door that she presumed was Jason’s and was way too big for her, she made her way to the kitchen.

“Coffee?” was how Tina greeted her. The smell was already filling the air, and Mick nodded appreciatively before sliding onto a stool at the breakfast bar. Immediately she spotted Iggy, looking like a minidragon, with his spikes and warts and long, pointed tail. This morning he was hunkered down on the kitchen floor, placidly munching chunks of what looked like apple out of a red pottery bowl. He paid not the least attention to her, and since Tina seemed perfectly fine with an iguana at her feet, Mick decided that the only thing to do was pretend he was a cat and quit worrying about him. She transferred her gaze to Tina, who was wearing pink Bermuda shorts and a floaty, multicolored top that had iridescent threads and made Mick think of butterfly wings. Her blond hair was twisted up, and her earrings were sparkly glass chandeliers that caught the light like prisms. And light there was, in abundance. The glass wall made the living area as bright as the day outside; sunlight sparkled everywhere. The lawn, the beach, the bay—the view could have graced a postcard. As Tina poured coffee and set it in front of her, Mick saw that the other woman had been busy making, if she had to judge from the ingredients on the countertop, chicken salad.

“I went ahead and made lunch, too,” Tina added. “Chicken salad. I
hope you like it?” Mick answered affirmatively, and Tina turned back to what she was doing. “It beats Jason’s favorite, which is bologna. Probably because all you have to do is slap packaged meat between bread and eat.”

Both of them laughed. Mick took an appreciative sip of coffee. It was really good, and she felt really good. Rested, restored and … happy. When she contemplated the undoubted reason why she was feeling so good, warmth radiated inside her like her own little personal sun. All she had to do was glance out the window at that beach, and she started glowing all over again.

“So Jason runs a shipping company?” Mick asked as she took another sip of coffee and Tina set a plate that included a sandwich and some kind of fruit salad in front of her. She was dying to know more, but she wanted to be delicate about it. The last thing she wanted was for Tina to think she was trying to pump her for information, even if she was.