Sterling's Reasons (6 page)
43
Joey Light
A need, a desire that Sterling didn’t know she possessed rose to the surface and cried for more. His gentleness was fast turning into urgency, his soft mouth was no longer asking, but taking. And she gave and took and gave some more.
His hands slipped under her shirt and found her. He rolled then, turning her beneath him. When the rain hit her full in the face again, reality came with it.
“Joe.”
He reared his head back and looked at her. Water ran from his face onto hers, but she could see the blatant desire in his eyes, then the steely control that flicked into them. He was on his feet pulling her up behind him. Without a word, he led her back to the cottage, up the stairs, across the deck, and into the living room. He left her standing near the doors and went into the bathroom.
He returned with two gigantic fluffy towels. He draped one over her shoulders and dropped the other to the floor. He undid the buttons of her shirt and pushed it back toward her shoulders. His eyes never left hers. They were dark and foreboding. She felt a chill from fear, not the cold. He ran his hands over the towel, absorbing water from her body. She wanted to lean into him. She wanted to shove logic from her mind and let her body and her heart rule. But somehow it almost seemed as if he were trying to vent his frustrations on her. It almost felt like he needed to hurt someone the way he’d been hurt, and she couldn’t let it be that way. She dragged air through her lungs and leveled her gaze on his dark and sleepy eyes. She put her hands on his wrists to stop him.
“Joe, I don’t…I…it’s too fast. We don’t…”
He stopped. Restraint seemed foreign to him. It seemed to Sterling that he was fighting his own nature. “You do something to me, Sterling. You touch me where I haven’t been touched in a long time, and sometimes I forget that we’re strangers. Go home, lady, and stay there. Next time I might not stop.”
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She wanted to be in his embrace, didn’t she? She didn’t want to even think of going back to her cottage alone. But if she held him, if she comforted him… Was that what she was doing?
No. Her body cried out for his, wanted his. What had gone wrong with the reason why she was here? All of a sudden she wanted to call Mr. Ramsburg and tell him that all Joe Timothy MacDaniels needed was Sterling Powell. That was foolish. She redid the buttons as he turned his back to her and looked out across the ocean. The muscles in his back rippled beneath his wet shirt. Wanting to comfort couldn’t be the reason for this.
Could it be she was falling in love with a man she barely knew? Could she be misconstruing all of this with her innate need to help her fellow human beings?
If making love was what this man needed could she… No, it couldn’t be any of those things. She picked the towel up off the floor and draped it over his shoulders, rubbing to chase the chill from him. Sand dusted to the floor.
He whirled on her and threw the towel across the room. “Damn it, woman, get away from me now before I never let you leave this house again.”
She jumped back from the wave of fury. Until now none of his real anger had been directed at her. She didn’t like it. She was afraid of him and yet she wanted to touch him all at the same time. She made a mad dash past him and sprinted toward her own cottage. The rain hid the tears. She was glad because the last thing he needed to see was that he had affected her so deeply.
She tossed her wet clothes on the floor and filled the bathtub with bubbles and water so hot that she could barely get in it. She tried to relax her tense muscles. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to block out the images in her mind.
Her assignments had never been this confusing.
Of course, she had to be realistic. She was dealing with a much more difficult situation than usual. Perhaps she should just go and leave him alone. Later might
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Joey Light
be a better time to assess his needs.
His
needs? What about
her
needs? She added more hot water and slid down in the tub till her chin touched the water.
He was a complex man. His emotions ran strong and deep. Joe was at war with himself and therefore the whole world. What would it be like? She could only guess what he was feeling. She would want to return to the womb. Curl up and go away, out of the world forever. Did men react the same way? She doubted it.
He wanted to kill again. She could see it in his eyes, in the way he moved.
Maybe kindness wasn’t what he needed. Maybe he needed to be yelled at and bullied. Maybe he required a good shake. He wanted the memories of what he did to die. That’s what he wanted to kill. What he had done.
She dried herself off and left the bathroom. Walking naked into the hall, she made a right turn toward her bedroom. It was then she saw him. Sitting on the couch, watching her.
“Get dressed, Powell. We’re going to drive up the coast till we reach sunshine, and then we’re going to a movie and dinner.” He wasn’t smiling. He was fresh from a shower himself; she could smell his spicy aftershave. Jekyll and Hyde? How could a man swing from one mood to the other so quickly?
“You’re going to catch cold.” He nodded toward her nakedness and she scampered into her room.
Sterling dressed in front of the mirror, noticing her cheeks were flushed. She hadn’t blushed since she was sixteen. She was beginning to think she had been jettisoned into the twilight zone. Things were not making sense at all.
Her aqua-blue skirt was set off with a shocking pink sash. Her hair always curled unruly when she didn’t dry it right away, falling this way and that over her shoulders. Shaking it, she drew herself up. Giving herself one last glimpse in 46
Sterling’s Reasons
the mirror, she took a deep breath and reminded herself she was getting paid handsomely for this job. She’d make a good one of it.
He stood up when she walked into the room. He had on stonewashed denims and cowboy boots. He wore a white shirt, with the cuffs rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were roped with muscles and tanned. She admired his wrists and hands. He had the hands of an artist, small-boned at the wrist, then widening out at the palm, and fingers that were blunt and competent. She pictured them wrapped around a gun.
“I’m not going to say I’m sorry about what happened. I’m not in control of things anymore. That’s why I isolated myself out here. I’d like to make it up to you even though you brought on most of it yourself.”
She nodded. He was right. “No apology accepted because none is needed.
And you’re on, but we’ll take my car this time.”
“What, now something’s wrong with the way I drive?” he growled.
She laughed as he followed her outside. “It’s simply my turn, cop. No big deal. Nothing sinister behind it. It’s just my turn. Okay?”
She stopped beside the rental that had been dropped off last night and raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for an answer.
“Okay. You drive.” Then he saw the sharp little black Porsche. “Do you have a fairy godmother?”
“Sort of,” she said slyly, and got into the car when he opened the door for her. She slipped the key in the ignition and had the 944 in motion before he was fully seated.
Sterling pulled away from the small ocean town and stomped on the gas pedal. “Sunshine, here we come.”
He covered his face and groaned. “The roads are wet.”
“Don’t be a cop today, MacDaniels.”
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Chapter Four
Kicking in the turbo, Sterling glanced at Joe only to see him turn disbelieving eyes on her.
She shrugged. “I just wanted you to see what it would do. Relax, I won’t get us killed.”
Good line, Sterling,
she said to herself as he turned to glance out the side window. Hurriedly, she added, “How far is sunshine? Any idea?” She let the car coast down to fifty-five
miles per hour.
“When you see yellow instead of gray, I’d bet that was it. Do you always drive like you talk, fast and nonstop?” He’d never met anyone like this lady.
Whoever was trying to do a job on him had picked a real challenge. Of course, what better way to keep him off guard. Send a beautiful, flighty, airheaded woman to live next to him and torture him into talking. And about what? He had no reason to kill Red. Red was his friend. It was more than that. It was probably pressure from the department to clean up what was a dubious operation to begin with. He knew that.
“Don’t be quiet, Joe. Sometimes too much thinking is worse than none.”
He looked back at her and stated flatly, “You must be one superior secretary to receive a salary that supports this car.”
“I am,” she thought fast, “executive secretary to the president of,” she hoped he missed the slight falter in her voice as she conjured up a name, “Preston Industries. Surely you’ve heard of it. Offices all over the world. Computers. Oil.
Gas.” She shrugged. “You name it and we’re into it.” Telling the lie made her squirm a little in the seat. Some things were necessary. She’d set them right later.
Sterling’s Reasons
He cranked the window to vent the smoke as he lit the long brown cigarello.
Examining the finery inside the car, he stretched his legs and tried to relax.
The road unfolded before them, flat and unending. Sand, grass, short and tall, tasseled and bent, lined the asphalt. The ocean veered away from them as they continued up the coast.
Sterling turned on the radio. A jumpy light rock tune filled the air and she turned the volume up full. Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and singing along, she felt his gaze on her just before he reached to turn the radio down to a whisper.
“You always try to put holes in your eardrums? I don’t understand it. People complain about excess noise on the job, kids playing too loudly, jets flying too low, and scaring Grandpa’s cows and then they get in their cars and blast themselves deaf.”
She merely smiled and flashed a glance at him. “You have to have it loud to feel it.”
“No, you really don’t.” He flipped the dial until he picked up a station that played classical music. “Now just listen to this…don’t be vibrated by it.”
The mood instantly changed inside the close quarters of the car. As the intimate sounds of a piano backed by violins filled the air, Sterling felt herself tensing.
She flipped her hair off her shoulder. “Richard Clayderman.”
His look was one of surprise, his voice sarcastic. “So you’re not totally unfamiliar with good music.”
Sterling ignored his comment and smiled to herself smugly, braking as the traffic in front of her slowed. It was still raining, but the sky was getting lighter.
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Joey Light
“Not totally,” she agreed evenly. “But there’s nothing wrong with a good old country song, and some of the light rock is okay. I’m pretty partial to the oldies, but I like music, all kinds.”
He nodded and tried to listen to the music. “At one time I found great pleasure in all types of music. Even wrote some pretty good songs.” He let the pleasure of the memories roll through him.
“Didn’t sing too badly, either. Me and Red, we used to sit on the porch of his hunting cabin up in Cumberland and pick and strum.” He remembered too well.
His voice softened. “We’d throw back a few beers and make up silly lyrics.” But now the music was just a sound. It didn’t touch him. It couldn’t reach him where he was now. He hated it.
When he rolled the window back up, he caught her scent. It was light and flowery. He wished his biological responses had become as deadened as his heart and soul.
“Traffic is getting thicker. Guess we’re getting close to a town. Want to stop here or go on?”
Without looking her way, he stated flatly, “Keep going. The whole point of this was to reach sunshine. Do you see any?”
I keep getting to him,
she thought.
But irritation is better than no emotion. It might
be only a little tiny bit at a time, but I’m getting there.
“Surliness will only get you turned around. I refuse to drive any more than another half hour. Whatever is there at…” she glanced at the clock on the dash, “four o’clock is where we stop.”
“Now that makes a lot of sense. I can see why your boss sent you away for a while. You must drive everybody crazy.” He watched the passing landscape as they drove. Once upon a time he would have enjoyed the view. But no pleasure came.
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Sterling’s Reasons
Was it her imagination or was he trying to press himself against the door to keep a good distance between them? No matter, she shrugged mentally. Distance was one thing she didn’t plan on giving him.
“What are you watching in the rearview mirror?” he questioned sourly. “It’s where we’re going that you’re supposed to be watching.”
“That one stupid car changes lanes when I do and speeds up or slows down along with me. Strange.”
“The car can’t be stupid,” he said drolly, “but the driver might be. And what’s so strange about it? We’re driving along the same stretch of road.”
At 3:55 they followed the road into a small village. She could smell the sea air immediately and broke into a wide grin. The houses lining the road into town were small cottages with picket fences, swings in the backyard and on the porches. Toys were scattered all over the yards along with scooters and bikes.
Turning right onto Main Street, Sterling said gleefully, “All right! Quaint, by the sea…Look down there. Masts, the tall ships and real fishermen. A real by-gosh fishing village. We’ll stop here.”
He grumbled, “No sun and it’s not four o’clock. Keep driving.”
“Sun will be out soon, and if I slow down and take my time parking it will be precisely four. This is the place. Oh, look, shops. I love to shop.”
“How come I knew that? And I suppose you’re hungry already, too.”
She pulled the sleek automobile into a parking space and turned the ignition off. “I could do with some seafood, shrimp deep fried and dripping with tartar sauce, or buttered lobster, white, sleek, and greasy. And curly fries. I wonder if curly fries have hit the outer banks yet?”
