SNOW FEVER
by
Evelyn Starr
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This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Snow
Fever
ISBN:
1-55410-752-0
Copyright
ã 2007 Evelyn Starr
Coverart
by Martine Jardin
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rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization
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For survivors of the latest Snow Fever, The
Chapter One
The sound of the crash seemed to echo on and on and on inside
Paulette's head. Even though she knew for a fact it had been there and gone in
less than half the time it took to think, and realize she'd heard anything at
all…there and gone in less than half the second it took to catch her breath and
realize she was having the most enormous difficulty releasing it again.
She knew the echo was just one more trick of darkness and fog that
pressed in tight around the sides of her car.
Concealing fog, she'd thought earlier, when
the morning had been younger than it was now.
Comforting fog.
Fog she'd welcomed with a grateful heart in the terror of her
flight.
Right up until the moment she'd
turned into the darkness of a curving residential street and glanced in her
rearview mirror. Right until she'd heaved a sigh of relief that the headlights
behind her had vanished at last. Not for long, she felt sure. But at least
temporarily.
In that sweet moment of bliss and hard-earned freedom, she'd
allowed herself to rejoice just the tiniest bit that nothing was out there.
Nothing was behind her, nothing pursued. Nothing now but January early-morning
fog, rising as it so seldom did in the semi-arid regions surrounding Denver, to
swirl in mad clots and streamers, blotting out sight of everything beyond a
hundred yards. Rendering even the brightest of sparsely scattered lights little
more than hazy blurs.
It had been a respite. One she'd known couldn't last.
Paulette screamed as a dark shape bounced against her hood and
windshield. Only to vanish again, almost the exact color and consistency of the
thick and fog-shrouded night, even before the final echo of its impact finished
dying away.
She screamed.
She couldn't help it.
And brought her foot down hard on the brake pedal.
The figure, barely glimpsed in the single moment while it sprawled
across the car's white hood, left her windshield a crazed and sagging
crisscross of fine-lined cracks. With a bull's-eye hole dead center.
A dog.
Paulette prayed it had been a dog. But common sense, remarkably
calm and unaffected by the crawling, clawing terror that was going to reduce
her to a state of shrieking madness in the next five seconds or so, spoke up
then. Common sense told her it had been something larger than a dog. Much, much
larger. Something that could only be…
Human.
"Oh, God!"
She'd hit a man.
In her complete inattention to anything ahead of her on the dark
street, in her complete self-absorption and certainty that nothing important did
lay ahead, she'd hit a man. And quite probably killed him.
"Oh, shit!"
Paulette had no clear memory of stopping the car. She had none
whatsoever of pulling on the parking brake or flinging open her door.
She had no memory of anything in the ages-long and infinitesimal
interval between the sound of the crash and the moment she opened her eyes to
find herself standing, trembling in heavily moist early morning air, over a
huddled form in the gutter.
"Oh, my God!" Her hands fluttered. Her heart
raced.
She didn't know what to do. Hadn't the slightest clue what she wanted
to do. But to her intense and everlasting shame, her primary thought wasn't for
the man in the gutter.
Her thoughts were entirely for herself.
Self-preservation.
It had to come first.
She had enough trouble in her life. More than her share of
trouble. And this, an accident and quite probably a death, was the very last
thing she needed right now. All the attention that was sure to come along with
such an accident and death would at best be dangerous for her continued
well-being. And at worst…
Police.
Paulette almost backed toward her car.
They were the very last thing she could afford. Even less
than she could afford discovery, or attention, or…or…
For a split second the idea of hit and run flickered through her
mind.
Hit and run would be the perfect solution. If she could just
figure out what to do with her Camry now that it bore one more scar…now that it
bore the tell-tale signs of her crime.
If she only had the criminal turn of mind necessary to figure out
what to do next…
Then he spoke.
His voice was low. Pleasant. And at the moment tight with no small
amount of pain.
"Son of a bitch!"
Barely visible in his dark-gray sweat suit that blended with
perfect fluidity into mist that tried harder than ever to engulf him, the man
in the gutter rolled to a sitting position.
"You're a…" Paulette's voice shook. As much as her
stomach, which threatened to empty itself all over the man, the dead leaves in
the gutter, and the street in which he sat.
The inside of her was shaky, too. Too shaky, she realized, wishing
she had something to lean against. Too shaky by far as a sudden tide of stars
swept up from deep inside her brain. A none too subtle warning that in another
moment…another second…
"My God. You're alive?"
The sound of her voice did a
little to steady her. A little…very little…to hold the incipient swoon at bay.
"Son of a bitch!"
The man in the gutter clutched his ankle. His left one. He rocked
back and forth a little, and with every word he said his voice shook as badly
as hers. So badly that for a terrible instant she thought they were both going
to faint, to be found there later just as they were. With him damaged and her
car sitting right in the middle of the street with its driver's door wide open,
the gleam of its interior light a perfect beacon in the foggy darkness. With
its windshield a perfect testimony to exactly what had happened. What she had done.
"Are you all…" Paulette couldn't make her hands stop
their terrible, useless fluttering. "I didn't see you. In the fog, and
the…I never meant to…for God's sake, are you all right?"
"Son of a bitch." Incredibly, shaky as he sounded, the man
was shoving himself to his feet.
Trying to shove himself to his feet.
And not having a whole lot of luck.
"Should you be doing that?" Paulette cast a worried look
over her shoulder. Back into the shrouded distance she hadn't really escaped at
all.
A slight rise in the ground and a wall of fog stood between her
and the busier side street that led in its turn to the even busier main street
where she'd finally managed to lose her pursuers.
A shiver ran up her spine. Then it ran right back down again.
While she'd been sidetracked, the man had gotten to his feet.
Somehow. And now that he had, he towered over her.
This time she did take a step backward.
Several steps.
And started to shiver again, though she couldn't immediately
decide why.
The man was big. That was true enough. He was a bulky and
well-muscled six-four, if he was an inch. But it was a placid enough six-four,
with no sign of overt hostility or menace. Even after she'd injured him and he
had every right to be hostile, every right to threaten.
So maybe it was the fog, thickening and encroaching even as they
stood staring at each other in the bloody glow of the Camry's taillights, that
made her shiver.
Or was it the thought of the pursuit she felt certain still went
on somewhere close by in the secret depths of that fog?
Or maybe it was just the low sigh of a train's whistle somewhere
far off to the north that left her feeling suddenly empty and vulnerable.
Suddenly alone, and too terribly exposed, even in the shroud of a
morning in which nothing could be truly exposed.
Whatever the reason, she did shiver.
Violently.
The man took a step. He
stepped down onto the ankle he'd been holding, and the odd spell shattered.
Placing his weight on his ankle, he cried out. And teetered,
growing visibly unsteady. Looking like he was about to drop to the ground
again. And this time never get up.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered between tight-clenched
teeth, managing somehow to stay on his feet.
Instinctively, Paulette rushed forward to catch him. To support
his weight…almost crushing weight…with her arms and shoulders and tight-locked
legs.
It might not be such a bad idea if he did go back to the ground.
Obviously he was injured. Obviously he…
"You need to go to the emergency room," she declared,
wondering at the same instant if it would be permissible…if it wouldn't rouse
even more suspicion, even more deadly and determined suspicion…if she just
drove up to the hospital door and dumped him out of her car. If she just left
him there to fend for himself while she went on her way. Though with her
windshield ruined the way it was…
Despairing, she glanced at the car.
From this angle, from the rear, the shattered and sagging mass of
safety glass was hardly visible. But from the front…
She wasn't going to get very far with that kind of damage.
She…it…was bound to get every bit of the attention she didn't want
for any reason.
"No," he said
firmly. Shockingly. "No emergency room. No way."
"But…" For a second Paulette couldn't breathe.
Relief, she supposed. Though the
very notion that she could be relieved at a time like this was enough to
rekindle the shame she'd only barely managed to subdue. Because if it was
relief, it was entirely self-centered. Entirely unforgivable, entirely
inexcusable.
"You just got hit by a car." She couldn't help herself.
She couldn't subdue the truth of that a second longer. "You need to get
yourself checked over. You know? To make sure there's no…"
With her help, at times seeming almost to overcome all her
attempts to help, the man dragged her along in his determination to hobble as
far as the back of her car. "No emergency room," he declared again,
emphatically this time, as he leaned against the back bumper. "The last
thing I can afford is to…look. Don't you think I should at least know your
name?"
"P…Paulette. Patterson. And I really think I ought to insist
on…" Paulette felt her eyes narrow.
There was something about this man. Something in the way he
refused medical treatment or even the suggestion of medical treatment that set
her nerves to jangling. Something that set her teeth on edge and her back,
still tight and painful with the muscle-locked stress of the crash, to
tightening and aching even more.
There was something not quite right about this whole
set-up.
As discreetly as possible, she stepped away from him.
He didn't seem to notice…didn't say anything, or make even the
tiniest sound.
"And you?" she asked warily when silence in the
fog-shrouded street got to be too much for her. "Do you have a name?"
"I know a doctor." The man twisted his head around. He
nodded once, toward the fog in the direction she'd been traveling. The darkness
that lay ahead of the Camry, safely away from
"And your name?" Impatience rose in her voice, and she
did nothing to try to hide it.
"Oh."
"Yes. Oh."
"Kyle." He held out a hand in the old, familiar and
oddly reassuring gesture. "Kyle Storm."
"Look. Kyle. I have to do something."
"That's not necessary." He pushed himself away from the
car. As if to prove he was up to making the trip back to wherever he had come
from, he took a step. Maybe two. "It's only a couple of blocks home. I
can…" But then he caught his breath again, and lifted all his weight off
the ankle that wasn't going to take him anywhere at all.
"You aren't going to make
it a couple of blocks. You aren't going to make it a couple of feet on
that ankle. At least let me give you a ride."
"I…" Kyle really
didn't seem to want to accept. Even if it was painfully obvious that he was
going to have to accept.
Paulette looked over her shoulder again. Along the street toward
She couldn't stay here. Not here, of all places!
She had to get going. One way
or another.
"Get in," she said,
a little more curtly than she intended.
Kyle looked where she looked. "Is something wrong?" he
asked. "You seem… I don't know… nervous about something."
"It's night." Paulette almost managed to force a laugh. "It's
a foggy, spooky night. And I'm a woman. Alone with a man I don't know. A man I
just ran over and nearly killed, a man who's behaving very strangely. Wouldn't
it be odd if I wasn't a little nervous?"
"I guess." Turning
away, Kyle hobbled along the side of the car. He had to hang onto it, had to
use it as a crutch to keep the weight off his ankle.
He sounded skeptical. And
seemed…
Paulette wasn't sure.
More alert than before? In some entirely indescribable way.
As if something… everything… she'd said and done had tripped some
kind of alarm inside his head.
All at once he did seem threatening.
At just about the time he finished settling himself into the
passenger's seat of her Camry, in the same moment he fastened his seat belt, he
looked like he had no intention of letting her get away any time soon.
Not now that he'd decided to accept her offer.
"You don't seem that kind of nervous," he observed
before she finished sliding into her own seat.
"You're going to tell me there are different kinds of being
nervous?"
Well, she certainly did sound nervous, didn't she?
"You betcha." For the first time Kyle smiled.
And Paulette knew immediately that he'd been right.
About the different kinds of nervous.
His smile gleamed bright-white in the glow of the overhead light
in the second before she slammed her door to extinguish it.
The light, but certainly not the smile.
Burning like the brightest beacon in a night turning toward day
much more quickly than she liked…day in which the fog seemed once again
determined to press tightly against her car's windows…Paulette thought nothing
could ever extinguish that smile.
She hadn't noticed before.
Kyle Storm was one heck of a
good-looking man. Not in a movie star way…his finely shaped nose showed signs
of having once been broken, for one thing. But handsome, yes. In a blue-eyed
and extraordinarily fit outdoorsman's kind of way.
A mountain man.
If they'd been forty miles farther west and into the edge of the
Rockies, if his hair had been six inches longer and maybe tied into a rough and
untamed ponytail, if he'd looked like he hadn't shaved in six or eight weeks,
Paulette would have thought the term described him perfectly.
Rough and rugged. A man with a distinct shell of hardness and
privacy beginning to set around him, a shell that had not yet completely formed
or sealed him in its inescapable grip. The term was the only one that could
ever describe him.
Mountain man.
He was good-looking enough, for sure, to start her body to
tingling in places and ways a woman in her position had no business tingling.
Because tingling could only complicate matters that were already complicated
enough. Tingling could only deter her from the one course of action she could
afford.
Once she'd taken care of this little mess she'd made, of course.
Tingling could only deter her from running away as far as she
could. As far away from
But the tingling was there. And Kyle was smiling at her in that
white-perfection way that was only…absolutely…guaranteed to generate more
tingles.
"There are all kinds of being nervous," he replied, his
tone making it clear he didn't have a clue…not the foggiest, Paulette thought
on a note of sour amusement…about the kind of power he wielded with that smile.
Or the havoc it could wreak upon any sentient, breathing woman under the age of
a hundred and fifty. "Trust me on that."
Trust him?
Paulette snorted as she
slipped the car into gear.
As if that was going to happen.
She would never trust a man again. Not as far as she could throw
him. Not if her life depended upon it.
"You'll need to replace that windshield," Kyle observed
with a calm serenity that turned Paulette's stomach inside out again. With even
more crushing force than his blindingly white smile had turned it before.
He was right about that, too.
She'd be lucky to travel half a dozen blocks without the sagging
mess splintering completely and spraying the entire car…spraying her…with a
rain of deadly, slashing shards. And that brought the truth home to her,
painfully. In a way nothing else could.
She wasn't going anywhere any time soon.
"Crap!" she exploded, humiliated by the feel of a tear
sliding down her cheek as she started to drive forward slowly, uncertain where
she was supposed to be going.
"It's nothing to cry about."
"You wouldn't know."
"Paulette, you bumped me. I fell. That's nothing to…"
"Bumped?"
"Turn right here. At the
corner."
"I did more than bump, and you know it. I ran you down at
high speed."
"Hardly. I'd be dead if you had. But I'm not dead. I'm okay."
"Except for your ankle."
"Except for my ankle. But it's not broken, so…"
"How do you know it's not broken?" She was driving more
slowly than ever, not so much because she was afraid of the windshield giving
way, but because she still had no idea where she was going. And that meant
there was a very real danger she'd inadvertently make a wrong turn and blunder
back onto one of the main streets. Where the search for her surely went on.
Glancing sideways at Kyle, the suspicion grew again that he didn't
want and couldn't afford attention any more than she.
"I've seen a few broken ankles in my time. I've had a
couple. And I'm sure this one isn't."
"I suppose we really should call the police."
"No!" He flashed her that look again. The one that
roused all her suspicions. "I don't think so," he said a little more
calmly, and much too smoothly. "It's better if we just keep this quiet. I'll
give you my address, and you can send me the bill for the new wind…"
"What are you running away from, Kyle?"
He made a little sound. One she couldn't mistake for anything but
exactly what it was.
A chuckle.
"What are you running from?" he countered.
Paulette fell silent.
That hit close to home. Way too close to home.
"Next cul-de-sac on the right," Kyle said without
prompting. "Then the house at the end, on the right."
It was a nice house. Not a rich one, but as nice as any in this
neighborhood of smaller, older ranches and split-levels. It boasted a wide
driveway into which Paulette drove, relaxing tension she hadn't realized she'd
been holding once her ruined front end and windshield were snuggled up as close
as they could get to the big garage door. Once they were no longer so easily
visible to anyone on the street.
"You'll have to help me inside," he said, and in the
yellow gleam of the overhead light when he opened his door, Paulette saw that
he was sweating. Heavily, considering the chill of the early morning.
His face shone with sweat, was
beaded with it, glittered ominously with droplets that caught every stray ray
of light and refracted it so that he appeared to have been sprinkled with
rainbow dust.
"I thought you were sure your ankle isn't broken?" Her
voice took to shaking again, and she didn't want to get out of the car. Because
she suspected she'd find her knees were pretty damned shaky too. And because
she sensed, based in no small part on the quiver of internal tingling that had
never completely stopped, that if she didn't leave now she was never going to
leave at all.
Never going to want to leave.
Son of a bitch.
Kyle hadn't realized an ankle that wasn't broken could hurt so
badly. Or all the rest of him, either.
He'd be a mass of black and
blue in the morning; that was for sure. If he wasn't well on his way to it
already.
Black and blue, and stuck behind a desk and a mountain of endless
paperwork for the rest of the foreseeable future if the captain ever found out
what he'd gotten himself involved in this time. If the captain ever got wind of
what he hadn't reported he'd gotten himself into.
"Son of a bitch."
The damned ankle was on fire. It was doing a torturously slow
burn, sending dagger-stabs of twisting-hot agony all the way up to his knee.
And beyond. Way beyond.
He had his arm around the woman. Around Paulette, the one who'd
done her utmost damnedest to kill him less than an hour before.
He had to lean most of his weight on her just to hope to stay
upright. Much less to move in any constructive, purposeful way.
It was just his luck that if he'd had to go and get involved in
one of his strange mishaps that more and more were meeting with skepticism and
outright disapproval from higher up in the Department, at least this time he'd
had the good sense to get mixed up with someone who was a real dish.
Dish?
He almost laughed. Almost shouted with laughter.
Dish?
Where the hell had that come from?
That was his great-grandmother's
word. And he wasn't sure another living soul on the planet used it anymore. Or
would even understand its outmoded meaning.
But whatever he might decide to call her…dish, or looker, or one
red-tamale-hot mama…there could be no argument that this little beauty was
indeed a beauty. With her copper-strawberry-carrot hair that brushed the middle
of her back and eyes that were neither green enough to be legally classified as
emerald nor golden-brown enough to be accurately labeled hot cinnamon, the
woman he had tucked under his arm was the dishiest dish he'd ever had
the pleasure to set eyes on. In any capacity.
He had to fumble to find his keys. Then had to fumble again with
fingers grown strangely benumbed and bewildered to coax the right one into the
lock. Had to clear his throat, then clear it again with a distressing dry and
rasping difficulty…and clear it again, and again, and again…before he
could make a single coherent sound.
"Lounge," he managed. And if he was gasping it wasn't
from exertion or the pain in his ankle. That was intense, of course. Both were
intense…were damned near more than he thought he could handle. But the real
trouble was Paulette. The real trouble came from her, sprang from her, started
and ended right there with her.
She was doing a good job of helping him hobble along. Of
supporting him though his weight had to be damn near crushing her. She kept
urging him to lean on her as he hopped, and he didn't have much of a choice.
Not unless he wanted to place more than a token amount of weight on the
throbbing, thundering stump at the end of his left leg…the ankle that wasn't
broken, though he still didn't understand how in God's heaven anything that
wasn't could hurt so hellishly bad.
And in the process of helping him, she nearly killed him. Again.
For real, this time.
The touch of her was that deadly. The smell of her, too. And the
softness.
Oh shit, the softness of her!
Quite deliberately, Kyle put his foot down on the thought.
Literally.
Right there at the top of the steps, right in the archway leading
into his bachelor-bare living room, he stepped down firmly on his left foot in
the very sincere, very naïve and foolhardy hope the pain would cancel
everything else he was feeling.
Like the strange sensation that his flesh had begun to flow.
Prickling, and pulsing as it
pounded, turning to quicksilver in the most confusing and irreversible way.
"Lounge,"
he gasped again, spending the last litle bit of his hard-won ability to speak
upon that one word. And to point to the one good piece of furniture in his
otherwise haphazard living room…the big, sculpted, modern and almost double
width dark blue lounge his mother had insisted he buy because, to quote her
exact words, the way he lived was 'disgusting'.
The thing
was comfortable. More than he'd ever wanted to admit, knowing the admission
would launch his mother into one of her full-blown 'I told you so' states that
could, and very often did, last for weeks.
But comfort
was the least of it.
Comfort didn't
even enter into his present desire for it.
He wanted
the lounge because it was the closest piece of furniture to the top of the
steps, the very first place he would be able to drop, and try to come to terms
with the blessedly God-awful pain that seemed like it had moved in to stay.
She helped him to it.
Drove him completely out of his mind before they ever reached it.
"I'm worried about you." Frowning, she stood over him
after he collapsed, a heap of sweat and thunder and agitation, across the
quilted, sapphire colored cushions.
Shit, he wished she would just…go.
Hoped she'd never so much as think of going.
And above all wished he knew
what the hell had gone wrong with him.
Something
inside him must have short-circuited. Too badly damaged to survive the accident
with the car, it had simply given up and failed him, leaving him to run on
back-up. And not all that well.
It was all
Kyle could come up with. That something must have short-circuited seriously in
the course of being damn near flattened to a pulp and knocked halfway into
eternity. It was the only explanation that made sense. The only one that could
go even halfway toward making sense of the buzzing peculiarity that had swept
over him the instant he'd opened his eyes and found himself lying in the
gutter. The instant he'd realized he was still alive, somehow, and at least
marginally rational.
Or maybe it
would be more accurate to say short-circuit was the only explanation he would
allow. For any of it. For finding himself half-sprawled across the width of his
own damned lounge chair, gaping up at a woman he'd barely met and didn't know
at all with kind of a half-witted, open-mouthed blankness that sure as hell
couldn't help but impress the living crap out of her.
If it didn't
drive her right, straight away from here.
Long, long
before he had any intention of letting her be driven anywhere.
"Look." Paulette was hovering now. Having deposited him
onto the lounge chair in a heap, she'd retreated halfway to the short flight of
stairs and appeared completely undecided what she wanted to do next. What she thought
she wanted to do next. "I really think you need to do something about that
ankle. I mean…I don't know what, exactly. But I don't think it's a very good
idea to leave it until later. I really wish you'd let me…"
"There's a first aid kit." He'd already removed his
running shoe, and was pulling off his sock.
At least the ankle had quit its infernal pounding.
Sort of.
"In the bathroom."
His flesh
was turning purple, though. And that couldn't be good.
"Bathroom." Paulette
made an indecisive movement. She waved an arm and turned halfway, toward the
kitchen. Then she did the same with the stairs they had just climbed. The ones
that in another second really would have her dashing out of here the way she so
obviously wanted to dash.
Because she was running away from something.
All Kyle's strange
entanglements and patience-trying bizarre involvements notwithstanding, he
really was a good cop. He had a good cop's instincts. Even the captain was
forced to admit that. And all those cop's instincts were hollering full blast
right now. They were hollering loud and hard, insisting Paulette Patterson was
on the run. From something. Or somebody. They were insisting she was a woman in
trouble, a woman in deathly fear of being caught.
"Down the hall." He
pointed. "First door on the right. Cabinet under the sink."
When she went, walking past him with more of that unmistakable,
secretive reluctance, Kyle made sure he watched her. Without looking like he
was watching anything.
She was up to something.
Even if she hadn't been so
damned attractive that he couldn't keep his thoughts off her, off all the
lovely things he'd like to do to her and with her before the night was out, he'd
have wanted to keep her here. Long enough to find out what the hell was up with
her.
And she had a nice ass.
A really, sensationally, wonderful ass.
She was wearing some little red thing under her short, old-looking
coat. Something that didn't reach quite far enough to conceal her ass. Some
kind of little, pleated skirt thing over gray tights. Something that skimmed
the backs of her thighs when she walked away and the fronts when she returned
barely thirty seconds later with the first aid kit in hand. Something soft that
swayed with her movements and hardly concealed anything.
And a sweater.
A black one, delightfully sculpted and shaped by the body…the breasts…that
lay beneath.
Kyle's mouth watered. It felt like his tongue began to swell and
swell, making it impossible to imagine ever speaking a coherent word again,
much less a sentence. On any subject.
Normally he was a breast man. A connoisseur of breasts, who
noticed them almost before anything else about a woman.
But Paulette…
Damn, but her legs were long!
And shapely. Really delicious above thick red socks she wore over
her tights. Socks that on her actually managed to look sexy. Socks tucked into
heavy and practical black oxfords that also, in some weird and unfathomable
way, had a sexily enticing look to them.
"What are you prepared for here?" she demanded, sitting
next to him on the very edge of the lounge and swinging the bulky Red Cross
knapsack survival kit into her delectably pleat-covered lap. "World War
Three?"
"I guess I did go into overkill." Kyle allowed himself a
little smile. A too tight one for sure, given the growing and not all that
unreasonable assumption that something was not at all right with the dream
woman who'd run him down like a dog. But it was a smile all the same. And he
was immediately aware of the effect it had upon her.
She fumbled the first aid knapsack. And all kinds of things
tumbled out.
Conveniently, one of them was an Ace bandage. One of the
extra-long ones that was just perfect for wrapping up a throbbing, unbroken
ankle.
"This looks like…" Surveying the supplies as she stuffed
them, a little untidily, back into the bag, Paulette seemed at a loss for
words. For the first time since he'd known her. Since he'd so abruptly and
unceremoniously met her. "My car," she said with no warning at all,
switching subjects so abruptly that his head spun and for the first time he
realized it had taken to thump-thumping damned near as much as his ankle.
"What about your car?" Kyle hoped he didn't sound too
discombobulated and out of it. Though he felt pretty sure he did.
"It's in your driveway. I can't just leave it there."
"About that."
He did have a duty.
To serve and protect.
Even if he had been run down and hadn't wanted to actually report
the episode because it could only…would only…complicate a life made
already way too complicated by just about one too many such strange and
inexplicable 'accidents'.
But that didn't change his duty to keep that car off the road. As
the menace it now was.
"I need to get going."
Looking up from the bandage he was still wrapping…and wrapping,
and wrapping, and wrapping…into a football-sized cocoon around his ankle, Kyle
shook his head. And frowned. Scowled, really. "I can't let you
drive that car in that condition. If you want, you can…"
Paulette's expression changed. It turned.
Ugly.
"I have to go." This time she did get to her feet. Did
move. Toward the stairs. And as she went, she hissed, every word barely
escaping through tight-clenched teeth.
"Wait!"
Kyle never expected her to stop. And found himself even more
discombobulated when she did.
"What's going on? What's
wrong? If you tell me, maybe I can do something to…"
"What the hell makes you
so sure I'm up to no good?" Paulette actually rushed back into the room.
For a second Kyle thought she was going to physically rush him.
"I never said a word about you being up to anything," he
shot back, his cop's instinct for trouble on full and bright-red alert now. "Good
or bad. Though now that you mention it…"
Something was very, very up.
And along with his duty to an innocent and unsuspecting public, to
keep her absolutely unfit vehicle off the road, he had another duty. An even
more important one.
He was responsible to find out what the hell was up.
If a woman was so distraught, so terrorized, as truly and
unmistakably guilty of something other than attempted vehicular homicide as
Paulette looked right about now, he had an absolute duty…as both a cop and a
decent human being…to find out why. And what.
There didn't seem to be many options.
Paulette was backing again. With a look in her eyes this time that
he did recognize. All too well.
She was going to bolt.
Big time.
In another second or two she was going to make a run for it unless
he did something drastic. Did it now.
Sucking in his gut, steeling himself around gritted teeth for the
bolts and jagged shards of pain to which he was about to deliberately subject
himself, Kyle got to his feet.
No. There was no 'getting' about it. He leaped to his
feet, taking the very greatest care to place the bulk of his weight squarely
where it didn't belong. Right on his injured ankle. And the results of his
action…all the results…were exactly as he expected.
His ankle sent a shot of white-hot pain all the way up his leg.
Demoralizing pain, sweat-inducing icy-hot pain that surged in less than an instant
all the way to his hip.
Sweat popped out in beads on his forehead and back. Beads that
immediately began to combine until the force of gravity got the better of them
and they began the long slide downward. Down his forehead, down the center of
his back between tensed shoulder blades.
His gut clenched first. Then it loosened again, right away. In the
most ominous way.
But first and foremost, the result was that Paulette ceased her
motions in preparation for flight. The wild look of terror left her eyes and
her face, replaced by the look she'd worn earlier. The first time he'd glimpsed
the impossible, pale loveliness of her face hovering above him in a mad welter
of darkness and fog and exploding, soul-searing pain.
It was an expression of sheer worry. Of pure alarm, and not a bit
of it for herself.
"My God." She rushed back into the room.
Kyle had just enough time to see her expression, just the smallest
fraction of a moment to feel guilty for having had to cause it. And then he
dropped back to the lounge, his eyes gliding shut on a swirling tide of red and
gold and bluish-tinted glittering stars.
He was about to pass out.
"Now see what you've done?" she demanded, her voice
rising to a new, raw, edge of terror and guilt.
Guilt, clearly, that she'd
struck him and injured him.
So maybe he'd been wrong about her being guilty of something else?
Kyle didn't think so.
The cop in him didn't think so.
Though he was hardly a cop operating at his optimum right now,
what with all the self-inflicted pain and a sudden, completely astonishing
rising of an entirely different kind of real suffering in another, very
separate and outspoken part of his anatomy. Suffering that intensified
immediately, out of control, when Paulette collapsed to the lounge almost on
top of him. Suffering that turned to imminent death when she reached for his
ankle. When she actually touched it.
Fingers…skin…touching his. Small and cool fingers, stroking
exposed flesh above the tightly wound bandage he barely even felt. Not now that
sparks of an entirely different kind had begun their shimmer along his leg.
Straight into his groin.
Straight into the center of his groin. Into a dick that
stirred relentlessly, uneasily, but not, never, anything less than eagerly.
Shimmering that made him forget all about wanting to clutch at his ankle in his
new need to clutch at other things.
Somehow, he managed to stave off the compulsion to clutch at
anything.
Somehow. He wasn't sure how.
But he wasn't so lucky, wasn't lucky at all, in his effort to
stave off and ignore the softly swift tide of scent that wafted through the
short…much, much too short…stretch of disturbed air that lay between them.
"God." His voice carried in it all the wonder of the
moment.
And all the dread of the next.
He was hard.
A man in his condition, his advanced state of trauma, should not
be hard. But he had all the hardness he would ever need right there between his
legs. And Paulette was doing the situation no good. No good at all.
"You need medical help," she stated as a flat-out fact as
she leaned forward…leaned dangerously, distractingly forward…and pressed a hand
to his forehead. "You…"
"And you were all set to run off into the…" Hesitating,
Kyle glanced at the wide window on the other side of the room.
Not night anymore.
Not exactly.
A definite grayness had begun
to seep in around the edges of the curtains. Little more than an easing of the
darkness that still pressed, heavy with fog and runaway anxiety, around the
outside of the house.
Night, or morning?
It was neither.
So he let the statement hang just as it was. Faintly accusing.
Seeming to dare her to go ahead. Do it.
Run.
Paulette only leaned closer. She peered straight into his eyes,
her own creased at the corners with a frown. She peered hard, as if she
expected to see evidence of the concussion he could very well be
suffering. She leaned so close, her hand running around to the back of his head
with a long, stroking motion that left a trail of fire in its wake, that…
Kyle couldn't help himself.
Lifting a hand of his own, he used it first to capture, then to
hold fast the back of her head.
And he kissed her.
Paulette knew she'd made a mistake.
She knew it in the split instant before Kyle's lips touched hers.
Her original intent, hours ago when she'd crept out of Tom's
apartment under cover of the foggiest early morning she'd seen in her ten years
in Colorado, had been to simply disappear. As if she'd never existed. To drive
east on the Interstate, out onto the endless sweep of open prairie. To switch
over at some opportune point onto the less traveled and mostly forgotten old
She'd meant to make the quickest escape possible and attract the
least amount of attention possible. And even when she had attracted
attention, in the worst way it was ever possible to attract attention, she'd
thought it would still be possible to make good her escape.
She'd thought Kyle's refusal to seek medical attention or involve
the police in any way was a Godsend. She'd thought it gave her exactly the
option she wanted.
But she'd been wrong.
Of course she had.
Nothing was ever so simple.
No plan, especially one so badly and horribly botched, ever went
off without a hitch.
The problem was, she'd never expected the hitch to be this.
Kyle's lips were soft. Much softer than her somewhat limited
experience in Tom's companionship would ever have led her to expect any part of
a man could be. And his mouth was warm. Opening as soon as the first brush of
lips against lips was completed, his softness caught her completely off guard.
His mouth coaxed hers. Cajoled hers. Convinced her lips in that one incredibly
short second to open in response. So that now, warmed and charmed, her fingers
seeking deep entwinement in the darkly gleaming gloss of hair Kyle wore far too
brutally short for any kind of entwinement at all, Paulette realized she was
already lost. Already in so deep there could be no turning back. No escape.
Even locked as she was to him, surrounded by the mouth that seemed
to want to devour her entirely and arms that lifted to enfold her and pull her
closer than she'd thought to place herself, the idea chilled her.
No escape.
Tom, or more likely one of his cold-eyed and even colder-hearted
cronies, would be looking for her. Maybe finding her. Definitely questioning
her if they did. Dragging out of her, by force if necessary, what she knew of
their activities. And then, when they had it all, when they were in full
possession of the considerable sum of what she did know…
Then heaven only knew what might happen.
Heaven probably couldn't imagine what might happen.
Paulette felt fairly certain they'd try to blame her for
everything…all of it. Or that they'd arrange some sort of cleverly staged 'accident'
that would rid them of her for good.
They'd be willing to sacrifice her. There had never been any doubt
of that in her mind, even though she'd never suspected what they were really up
to. Not until last night. Never suspected what their activities were, or what
part she had so unknowingly played in them.
They'd do it to save their own hides.
Of that much, anyway, there had never been any doubt in her mind.
Even long ago, long before she knew there was any kind of reason for them to
need to sacrifice someone…her.
They might very well kill her.
Remembering the cronies' eyes,
remembering the crazy hardness in Manuel's in particular, that seemed more than
likely, more than possible. That seemed the most certain certainty of all.
Either they'd kill her or she'd become their slave forever. As
they'd so often threatened, more with innuendo than direct words, to make her.
To Tom's everlastingly unconcealed amusement.
Whichever the case, whatever the case…
Paulette shivered.
Kyle's mouth never left hers, but he laughed. Softly.
The shimmer-shiver-quiver of sound seemed to swirl softly for a
moment, filling the air around them. Turning it gently sultry before,
penetrating all the way into Paulette's soul with its pervasive heat, it turned
her sultry as well.
Mistily sultry. Magically
sultry.
Obviously Kyle misunderstood the reason for her shiver.
Obviously he'd decided it was an expression of interest…of soaring
delight in the new contact he'd forged, and desire to see it continue. For as
long as it might be humanly possible to make it continue.
And was that so far from wrong?
In these last few seconds of murmuring warmth and sparkling
softness, weren't those the very things she'd begun to feel?
Shivering again, a little harder and a lot more honestly now, Paulette
knew there was some reason she should be trying to tear herself away from Kyle's
embrace. Something she should be thinking about other than the slow and
seething spiral of moisture in tremulous flesh between her thighs.
But the reality of it escaped her.
For the moment.
"You aren't going to…" Kyle murmured at last, his lips
skimming light and delicious patterns across hers as they moved to form the
words. "Are you?"
"Going to…" Breathless, she lost all track of the
conversation. As completely as she'd lost track of even her most important… most
vitally important… thoughts.
"What?"
"Run off." Kyle moved his head. Adjusting its angle and
position slightly. Only to readjust again immediately, as if in search of the
one truly and utterly perfect way to kiss her. Keep on kissing her. "Into
the night, or the morning, or whatever the hell you want to call what's out
there now."
Out there.
Paulette remembered. Though the memory wasn't enough to give her
strength to pull away from the intoxication he wrought within her and around
her…around the both of them.
"My car." She could barely form the thought, much less
the words. "It's in your driveway."
His mouth grazed slowly…oh, so torturously slowly…across hers.
It wandered gently. Yet firmly.
It searched for something, and Paulette's heart began to pound at
the expectation that sometime soon he might actually find it.
"I can't think of a better place for a car to be," was
his reply.
"It's in full v…view." And there she stopped. Unable to
go on. Afraid to go on. For there was no way she could explain, no words
she could possibly choose, that could adequately express her fears. Not without
giving herself away. Not without giving too much about herself away to a
man she knew nothing at all about. No matter how desperately his mouth sought
that very, exact knowledge in the depths of hers. No matter how hungrily each
of them or either of them searched for whatever elusive satisfaction waited in
the depths of the other.
"Your car will be okay, Paulette."
She had enough wits left…barely…to marvel that such a
conversation, simple and yet so terribly, insanely complex, could take place
between two pairs of lips that showed no willingness whatsoever to separate.
Not for any reason.
"You don't under…" She managed then to make the
separation, though it didn't last long. No longer than it took Kyle's arms to
tighten again…tighten more, so that escape no longer remained an option. Or a
desire. As, neither, did further speech.
Opening his mouth wider, wide enough that his heated devouring
very quickly neared the point of open obsession, he changed his kiss. Deepened
it in some fundamental way so that quite suddenly, though Paulette retained her
memory of wanting to go and needing to go, the desire actually to do it
was completely gone. Snuffed out in a cloud of delirium closing around her more
thickly, more completely and snugly, than any fog had closed before. Ever.
"Mmmm."
Was that him, or was it her?
It didn't matter.
Whichever of them voiced that sentiment…groaned that
sentiment…it was hers exactly. And no other.
"Kyle?"
He appeared not to hear.
His hands…arms…released her. A
little. They found the front and collar of the winter coat she'd never shed. A
slightly shabby short coat whose buttons no longer functioned with optimum
efficiency, since Tom was always so rudely adamant that appearances meant
nothing. That too many people placed entirely too much emphasis upon
appearances.
His insistence upon deliberate shabbiness, deliberate anonymity,
had been Paulette's first clue that something was not completely right in the
world of Tom Cantrell. As it turned out, a very accurate one that something
entirely purposeful was going on with every word he uttered, and every thing he
insisted. Something thoroughly self-serving and evil in his efforts to
cover and conceal his unsavory activities.
Tom had set about trying to make her invisible. Though she'd
fought and tried to hold on, he'd separated her, slowly but surely, from the
last of her college friends. He'd worked hard to make her invisible, right down
to the dull-white Camry with the broken spring he'd insisted she buy secondhand
when she'd wanted…had been easily able to afford…the flashiest red Mustang she
could lay her hands on. The newest, flashiest red Mustang she could lay
her hands on.
She wasn't invisible now, though.
Not if the glitter in Kyle's eyes as he shoved her sadly old and
worn wool coat back from her shoulders was any indication. Not if the gleam as
he followed immediately by tugging at the hem of her soft black pullover was
any kind of true gauge. And not if the shiver of waiting apprehension that
coursed through her the instant a wafting of icy morning air stroked bitterly
intoxicating fingers across the raised points of her now-bare breasts was to be
trusted.
Kyle caught his breath.
Seeming entranced, like a man
from whom all semblance of sense or reality had been stripped permanently, he
slipped his hands around. Slowly. Abandoning the shoulders and back he'd held
so firmly while refusing to allow her to pull away, he cupped her breasts with
incredible gentleness. He pressed his palms against straining nipples. To warm
and encompass. To touch the rounded, fullest part of their sides with
fingertips that managed to be just as gentle, yet unerringly firm in their
exploration.
Slowly, finally disengaging a hand from a breast that felt every
bit as benumbed and bewitched as he looked, Kyle dragged the zipper at the
front of his jogging suit down. He pulled the edges of his jacket apart in a
way eerily reminiscent of what he'd done with her coat mere seconds before.
Disappointment surged in Paulette's heart.
He wore a tee shirt under his jogging suit.
Of course he did.
The sensible, still sane part of her mind had known that. Expected
it.
Needing to explore, anxious and desperate to discover if he was as
sleekly silken-smooth beneath his clothing as her imagination had long since
painted him, how should she proceed beyond what seemed an insurmountable
roadblock?
As if he knew what she was thinking, Kyle laughed.
Softly. Again.
He moved back, away from her.
A leave-taking that brought with it the most terrible bereavement of pain.
Until she saw what he meant to do.
Without hesitation, lifting his arms, he slipped away his thick
and dark, long-sleeved shirt.
Beneath, he was as she'd imagined.
Beneath, he was lean. Not bronze-tanned as at the end of a long
summer spent in hot sun, but not sickly-pale white, either. As if he'd long
since left that summer behind him. His firm and well-modeled flesh lay somewhere
between. It carried the memory of August's bronzing, faded to a shimmering
murmur of golden gleam beneath a glossy furring of dark hair spread in gently
undulating waves across his broad chest. Furring that dropped and descended
delectably across muscular planes and swells of subtle gilt…furring that all
too soon, all too regrettably, disappeared beneath the waistband of his gray
sweat pants.
"What do you think?" he asked, and Paulette realized she'd
been staring.
"What do I think about what?"
He didn't answer. Didn't need to.
And neither did she.
Paulette felt certain the expression on her face said it all…said
every single thing in the world that needed to be said. Now. Or, she felt just
as certain, ever.
She really should leave.
Go.
Get the hell out of Dodge, right now.
Better sense, common sense, put up that final protest. That feeble
protest. But it was no more than a token. And Paulette was all too painfully
aware of it.
The time for leaving had come. And gone.
Leaving was no longer an option, if it had ever been.
For the moment she could only remain as she was…very, very still
and shaking all over. Shaking all through with the long and deliciously slow,
rolling shiver that coursed through her.
This man was…fabulous.
Something from one of her
wildest, mist-spun fantasies.
Or, more likely, he was from
somewhere so vastly far beyond even the most inventive of those fantasies that
she'd never actually seen that place. Because she'd never before been aware it
existed. Never known she should be looking for it.
"You have to be thinking something." Smoothly, as if
they represented no impediment at all, no concern at all, Kyle slipped free of
sweat pants and whatever sort of boxers or briefs he wore beneath. In less than
the time it took her heart to stammer through another unsteady beat, in less
time than was necessary for her to inhale a sharply caught and startled breath,
he revealed himself to her.
Naked.
Perfect.
More ready than she'd known any man could be ready.
"I'd like to know what
you're thinking now, Paulette."
"I…" She couldn't say. Mostly because she didn't exactly
know what she was thinking. "You don't give up, do you?"
He smiled. Lazily. Almost as if the smile was an afterthought,
with no connection to anything that had gone on in the last ten minutes or so.
"I don't give up,"
he confirmed, his voice dropping to a hushed memory of a whisper, his
fingertips tracing sparking trails along the outer curve of one of her bared
upper arms. "Not when I find something I very much want."
"And I…" Paulette's voice was thick. "That is to
say, you…"
"Not when I find that something right here. Right between my
hands. As if it was put there by some miracle of fate that knew exactly what I
wanted. What I needed, even when I didn't know myself. A miracle I'll accept,
but will never in my life even begin to understand."
"Miracle?" Automatically, Paulette shook her head. "Me?"
Kyle's eyes blazed. They flared brilliant, with a lightning-stroke
flashing somewhere in their immeasurable hazel-green depths.
Paulette could no more pull her gaze away from Kyle's eyes than
she'd been capable of tugging it away from the splendidly revealed planes of
his body moments before.
And then it was necessary to say nothing. Necessary not to even
try to think of anything to say.
Communication filled the air between them already. All
communication, all that would ever matter, right there in smoky dim, dawn-lit
morning hanging expectantly between them. Throbbing between them.
Communication was something they wouldn't have to work for.
Except, maybe, for the kind of communication that involved expressing
inexpressible concepts and ideas in something as mundane and ordinary as words.
Paulette looked at him.
She looked at Kyle, and she knew.
Everything.
"Is that what you think?" he asked with an inquisitive
lift of one eyebrow.
"Isn't that what you're t…telling me?"
His only reply was another
dragging. This time of knuckles. This time along both of her upper arms instead
of just one. And then, reaching her elbows, the dragging stopped. In a way and
with an abruptness that all but guaranteed it would never start again.
Strangled by the unexpected
leaping of her savagely thrashing heart into the base of her throat, Paulette
fought back a cry she could never have uttered anyway. A cry of sheer and frustrated
despair.
Laughing softly again, in a
way that only heated the cold air around her and made it instantly
scorching-intense, Kyle did exactly what she'd believed he would never do
again. He continued.
His hands descended. Again. Down. Lower. Making the jump from her
arms at the insides of her elbows, his fingers found the elastic at the waist
of her skirt and the tights that lay beneath. His fingers curled around it. And
began to push both of them down. And down, and down, and ever down.
Over her hips.
When he lifted her, urging her to move, she came.
There was no untoward fuss. No undue protestation, or even the
suggestion that she might be about to offer a protest.
Paulette, lovely and luscious, subtly rose-hued and even more subtly
rose-scented Paulette, simply did as he asked with the changing pressures of
his hands.
She came. To him.
Without hesitation she pushed herself to her knees and,
immediately, swung a leg across his lap. Facing him, watching him with an
expression almost of question infusing her face. And in that instant it became
the loveliest and most desirable face he'd ever seen.
She knelt before him. Over him. Nearly touching him.
Kyle couldn't have made a sound if he'd tried.
He didn't.
Didn't need to.
Paulette's eyes took on a quality he hadn't seen there before, not
even when she'd been all caught up in her guilty terror over the accident that
had in truth been all his fault and exactly that…a complete accident of
circumstance. Her gaze lapsed into a strange sort of visible fugue, going all
unfocused and almost unseeing, yet at the same time seemed to sharpen. Seemed
to slip more into focus than ever.
His gaze locked to hers. Locked tight.
And she hovered. Just above him, the center of her tantalizing
him, torturing him with nearness and promise, combined with steadfastly
maintained distance.
"Paulette."
His hands found their way to her hips. His fingers splayed
themselves across the pale satin of skin smoothed taut and firm over voluptuous
curves. And once there they gripped. Convulsively. Gripped with enough force,
surely, to damage. To leave marks upon the pale, exquisite satin of her flesh.
It was all he could do…almost more than he could do….to
make them relax. Not so much to allow her to go, not so much that they might
lose the little bit of control they'd managed first to gain, then to retain, in
a situation over which he had precious little possibility of control.
"Paulette." He said her name again. Murmured it, around
a sigh of undiluted delight.
Guiding her with eased but
still exerted pressure, he turned on the lounge. Turned, with Paulette
following his every command and every urging, so that he lay full length. Lay
with his head in its proper place, pillowed against and supported by the lounge's
raised and contoured back. Lay with her still kneeling over him. Still
astraddle him. And now more distant from him than ever.
"Don't slip away from me," he murmured.
"Have I done anything to make you believe I would?"
Kyle smiled. Or at least he tried to smile, battling an unsettling
jerking of lips that could only give away too many of his feelings. "Only
everything," he whispered hoarsely, attempting to guide her again.
Attempting only, with hands that re-tightened around her hips, unconcerned now
with the possibility of inflicting bruises in their haste to give the rest of
his body what it so openly and pointedly wanted.
Paulette resisted.
"Not yet," she urged, and he felt the tensing of heavy
muscles in her strong legs.
She held herself up. Held the
most delectably desirable part of herself determinedly away from and above a
dick that hardened like never before in anticipation of the taking. Of the
accepting that must come.
Must, or he would certainly die.
"Paulette…" Her name was a gentle phantom. Her name
stroked itself sinuously, succulently across his lips. "I need…"
"I know you do." Relaxing her rigorously upright kneel a
little, she relaxed the tight control she exerted with her hips as well. And
accepted the guidance he never stopped trying to offer. She accepted some small
part of it, allowing herself to be lowered, allowing herself to sink just
enough that the velveteen ridges of her flesh…her secret, sacred, guarded and
withheld female flesh…brushed just barely, just enough to tantalize and torment
to full and unparalleled outrage, across the tip of his dick.
She swayed her hips. So slightly that Kyle thought the motion
couldn't be described as real motion, real swaying, at all. It was much more
like the willowy waving of a long and languid stalk of grass reacting to wind
that wasn't really there.
He could barely feel the cling of her flesh as it passed across
him. And yet he felt every nuance of it…every smoking quiver and every muted
degree of those quivers. He felt the long fingers of its heat uncoil, felt them
wrap themselves around him and into him. Felt them tantalize him into even
greater agonies of need for what Paulette seemed so damned, diabolically
determined to deny. He felt the heat of her motion, and thought it affected his
sight as thoroughly as it undermined and made completely unreliable his trust
in any of his other senses.
She seemed to turn to a column of rippling, satiny steam. A column
so ethereal, so surreal, it was a sheer wonder that the fingers locked so
tightly to her hips didn't slip straight through.
"God."
Laughter bubbled across her lips.
It came as no small shock to Kyle to realize this was the first
time he'd heard it…the first instant she was relaxed enough to allow him
to hear it.
When Paulette dropped her head forward, when she allowed it to sag
in undisguised languor, the ribbon with which she'd tied her hair came loose.
Long ringlets, here tawny-amber where rays of early morning light reached it to
brush it with fine fingers of highlight and there deep cinnamon-dark in depths
where shadows lay thick and undisturbed, tumbled forward. Tumbled to hide her
face.
Kyle thought he saw a smile cross her lips in the second before
they vanished from view behind that gleaming fall. He thought her lips curled
in the truest sense of Mona Lisa mystery as an unreadable expression flickered
across her face. And then it was gone. The smile vanished. Lost beneath a
tumbling, rubescent waterfall that completely concealed it.
He thought so. And so did his dick.
Straining upward, reaching higher and then still higher for what
could never be reached, his dick reacted mightily. Mercilessly. To the smile it
knew he had seen.
"Please…Paulette?"
He wasn't used to begging. It didn't come easily. But now that she
had arrived and changed everything without half trying, he felt absolutely
right in doing it. Felt it was the most natural thing in the world to beg, and
plead. As if pleas and pleadings and offers to bargain were only right…only to
be expected.
He wasn't used to it at all. But he thought he could get
used to it.
Begging certainly gave surprising relief. As much relief as he
figured he was going to get anytime soon. Because Paulette was still hovering.
She held her position above him with the firmest resolution he
thought he'd ever seen. In anyone. On either side of the law.
She stroked him and stroked him and stroked him. With pure
hellfire.
It had to be hellfire. Had to, because only hellfire could
scorch with such fearsome intensity. Only hellfire could brand him so
completely, laying waste to everything it touched with its silken licking…its
heavy, velvet weight that after the first flaming shock of contact seemed
remarkably cool. And softer, he thought, than any hellfire in memory.
Her movements picked up speed.
They gained all new,
devil-driven ferocity as she sagged a little lower over him. As she allowed him
the slightest amount of entry. As he gained the merest suggestion of a rippling
of her flesh around the very, most enticed and enlivened tip of his.
"My God."
The kiss of hellfire had never felt like this. Hellfire had never
before been so sleekly soft. So clinging. Never reached with such incredible
tenacity or dragged itself so repeatedly across the tiny ridge of flesh beneath
the head of his suffering dick that had never shaken so badly beneath
the weight of barb-tipped knife stabs of heat. And agony. And the most
sublimely lightning-lit pleasure that coursed and flowed all along the length
of him.
In response, in eagerness and anticipation, he'd never in his life
been so hard. Never throbbed with such vigor of life, and need, and relentless
determination to overcome every obstacle…any obstacle…that might decide it had
a right to interfere with him, and what he wanted. Demanded.
Burial.
Of the sweetest kind.
Burial absolutely alive in the seething depths Paulette withheld
with such brutality…depths withheld far too long already. With far too terribly
disastrous consequences. For both of them.
Rallying himself, steeling himself, with a deliberate tightening
of muscles in arms and shoulders and hands that would no longer permit her to
resist the pressure they exerted upon her hips, he meant to force her down.
Down.
Now, while the outer folds of her flesh surrounded him. Now, while
she teased him with the succulent heat of that flesh, and before she took it
into her head to remove it completely and destroy him for good. For whatever
obscure reason she might have for wanting to see him destroyed…for wanting to
see him outright killed.
It seemed certain she must
have some such reason.
She'd for damned sure tried hard enough. First with her car,
running him down in a collision he'd never seen coming…not until the sound of
it, the massive and thunderous vibration of it, shook the marrow of his bones
and damned near made his heart explode in a frenzy of startled surprise. And
now, with her taunting. Her toying. Her infernal teasing, and her…
"Now," he declared through gritted teeth, increasing his
downward pressure upon her hips. "It's got to be the time."
"Time…"
Kyle couldn't tell whether that was a question or a murmur of
agreement. Either way, it didn't matter. Because the result, the
long-anticipated and fervently prayed-for result, was the one he needed. So
badly.
Uttering that single word, Paulette gave up. Completely.
Instantly.
Her body went soft. Went easily pliant and thoroughly moist.
It…she…opened for him and to him. And with a shaken, startled cry, Kyle felt
her slip down upon him. Barely more substantial than the thickened mist that
even now, even with the steadily brightening gleam of morning seeping through
and around closed curtains, nevertheless remained snug and tight against
windows and outer walls of the house, she was nonetheless real enough.
Nonetheless substantial enough to wring a low and guttural cry of astonishment
from the very depths of his soul.
The fit, of her taking him in with so little effort it might as
well have been no effort at all, was tight. Was perfect. Was exactly what every
red-blooded man dreamed his entire life of finding.
It was for certain what Kyle had ached and waited and prayed and
dreamed for. With virtually no hope he'd ever actually find a woman right
enough, sweet enough, willing enough to make all his aches-prayers-dreams come
true.
It was for certain what his body had needed through many, many
more dry as dust years than he ever wanted to count.
Paulette was life. Shimmering through him.
Life, warming the coldness left to grow unchecked and too long
untended inside his heart.
Life, the mist of her passage along and across his flesh reviving
and rejuvenating.
Life.
All the beautiful
possibilities of life he'd always denied he craved, because the possibilities
of seeing those cravings answered had always been dim, at best. Always been too
remote even for imagination.
Kyle needed the life she
offered. He'd always needed it. Always recognized his need for it. In the long
and effortless fire-shimmer of her flesh moving sinfully tight and doubly sweet
across his, he staggered beneath the weight of possibilities she opened for
him. Like a starving man who hadn't previously known he was starving, he
staggered beneath the onslaught of something he only now realized he'd needed
forever. And now, a man reprieved by only the narrowest of margins, he reveled
in it. Every bit of it. And wasn't willing to let it go.
He reveled in the subtle rightness of Paulette's movements. And he
took utter, ultimate glory in her stillness when, reaching the fullest possible
extent of her precipitous drop, she came to rest atop him. When she lifted and
dropped repeatedly, her thighs snugged tight against the outside of his and the
rest of her…the too long longed-for dream flesh of her…snugged even more
securely around him. Around a dick that, encompassed by her warmth and her
moisture, decided very definitively that it had died and gone to heaven.
"Jesus, Paulette!"
In response, she shuddered. The suggestion of her quiver
transmitted itself through her innermost silken velvet, in its own way so very
much more devastating than any overt and much more physical assault could ever
be. The suggestion of it startled his engulfed flesh. It started within it a
deep twisting. A sudden surging of need that put the supposed agony he'd felt
just the moment or two before completely, pathetically, to shame.
For that moment, barely the space of time it took to inhale a
shuddered and difficult breath, everything stopped. Kyle's world, his heart,
the softly searing swaying to and fro of the woman who'd taken him in only to
fail to live up to the promise inherent in the taking…everything just stopped.
Long enough for him to sigh,
but not much longer.
Hardly had he finished breathing that sigh than Paulette uttered a
cry.
Her body jerked. Not gently, but not terribly violently, either.
As if the truth of what had happened and was still happening to her had only
just caught up with her. As if she only now realized that he penetrated her. To
the fullness of his length and the limit of her depth. As if she had only just
discovered his presence, heavy and throbbing, inside her.
Her body jerked and her next exhalation brought with it another
cry. A sharper one.
It might have been a word. Might even have been an attempt to
speak his name.
With all his heart and with all the trapped longing in the dick he'd
given over so absolutely and completely to her, Kyle wished it might be his
name. But as it was, there and gone within the space of a second in which
passion and all the reverberations of passion ruled…in which they dimmed and
diminished everything else…he could make no sense of it. Suspected there might
in fact be no sense in it.
Then Paulette rose. One more time. And his hands followed. Still
holding the ripe rounds of her hips between sweat-slicked palms, they tried to
guide and assist. And in the end proved too toneless to do much of anything.
Too weak and debilitated to do more than simply maintain what little grip they
still possessed.
Streaks of white light rocketed through him. From him. Inside him,
as the velvet drag of Paulette's flesh stroked living sparks from his…from
flesh now fully awakened and fully energized. Flesh that would not now or ever,
he firmly believed, allow itself to be put at ease again. By any means known to
him. Or to her.
Lying flat on his back on the dark blue lounge, subjugated beneath
Paulette and now her complete possession, Kyle felt a wave of dizziness sear
through him. Hard on the heels of the barely-vanished white lightning.
It was an odd sensation. Feeling like he would lose his balance
and tumble completely even when his prone position made unbalance and tumbling
impossible. It was a sensation he thought he could come to like. One he knew he
could come to enjoy extremely. Given the chance.
Except that this was not the time for that kind of chance.
Paulette rose again. Unstoppably, and much faster than she'd
settled onto him or risen before. Seeming suddenly overcome by a wildness that
hadn't been…still wasn't…apparent in the lushly lovely appearance of her, she shot
upward. Her legs pistoned. Her knees pushed deep and hard into the lounge's
firm cushions. And when they did, as they did, the simple drag of her body
against his again took on the quality of white lightning he'd been so sure he
only imagined before.
She was going to leave him.
There was no way such a blistering of speed could be stopped in
time to prevent her leaving. And the leaving was going to kill him.
But then she didn't. Leave.
Just in the moment when he drew in his deepest possible breath and
held it, prepared to quite literally scream his disappointed, suffering
outrage, Paulette halted. With the tip of his dick enfolded gently, exactly as
it had been at the start, within her softest and most silken outer folds.
Kyle realized he couldn't exhale the breath he'd taken in. He
realized it only when a sudden burst of pain in expanded lungs warned, they,
along with his heart, might be about to burst from the strain. He saw, as
breath finally did escape in a dire and shuddering rush of heat, a vivid
bursting of stars and meteors on a field of swirling black that was all that
remained of his vision.
"Kyle."
This time there could be no mistake.
Paulette leaned forward. Over him. Changing the depth and
intensity of the angle at which she held him within her.
She said his name.
She'd never expected to do such a thing.
Seated squarely, firmly atop Kyle, feeling the depth of
penetration that came as a natural result of allowing the full weight of her
relaxed body to drive that penetration, Paulette wasn't sure how she'd come to
do such a thing. Or even when she'd come to do it.
It was part of the fog. The one that had surrounded her, engulfing
her and wiping out all sense and sensibility, for some time now.
This wasn't the cold and clammy fog that still filled the world
outside the safety of this room…the world beyond the windows of Kyle Storm's
modest, suburban ranch house.
This was a different kind of fog…an entirely internal fog, born
entirely of passion that had risen spontaneously. Passion that existed, for no
good reason she could ascertain, inside her. That had existed since almost her
first sight of him. Fog made up more of heated, vaporous steam than of
super-cooled mist coming from the outside. Fog that suddenly, scintillatingly,
readied itself to boil over and be reduced to its most vital, most unfathomable
state as she reached the bottom of her first plunge. Fog that nevertheless
obscured everything so that, finding herself so intimately connected with him,
Paulette had no clear idea how she'd come to be there.
It was enough that she was there.
Enough that he filled her so completely. So perfectly, in ways she
had only suspected it was possible to be filled. Ways in which Tom…her only
other and in so terribly many ways inadequate, contact with such intimacy…had
never filled her. Had no doubt never even thought of filling her.
And then, just as suddenly as it had been enough to simply be
there, joined to Kyle in the ages-old way, it became no longer enough. Not
nearly enough.
Craving filled her. As quickly as the hair's breadth instant it
took to realize just being with him wasn't what her body wanted at all,
craving surged. Soared. Really did boil over.
Paulette bit back a groan.
She tried to lift herself slowly. Much more slowly than she'd
dropped. And feared she didn't succeed.
Kyle's hands gripped.
Hard. As if in determined effort to hold her back. To stop her
movement. To slow that movement to nearly nothing.
She'd set out to relish every millisecond of what she wanted to be
a long and enduring stroke of her flesh onto his. She'd so eagerly anticipated
the sensation of Kyle's rigidity slipping through her and into her. And then it
was over. So quickly.
She discovered she lacked the stamina necessary for slow. Just as
Kyle seemed to lack strength to insist upon slow.
They both, it was now apparent, lacked some fundamental and
necessary quality needed for prolonged, or deliberative. When it came right
down to it, the same compulsion that came over her, demanding she rise, also
insisted she had to do it quickly. Had to do it in one long and smooth,
non-stop sweep of flesh releasing what it had never been meant to hold for any
length of time.
The rising ended almost before it began.
Or that was how it seemed to Paulette in the heat of the moment.
That was how it seemed to her fevered, frantic, instinct-driven mind.
Long before she was ready for the inevitable eventuality, she
found herself right back where she'd started in the initial, fever-stricken
moment when she'd first felt herself begin to part. When she'd taken in the
first roundness of him. When she'd felt the lovely and heated hardness of his
shaft inside her…barely. And it wasn't as good…as heart-stopping…this time
around. Having felt the swollen length of him completely submerged in her,
having known the depth that length could reach and the heat it could strike to
life within her, she could now be content with nothing else. Nothing less.
The pause this time, as she held the very tip of Kyle's shaft with
the softest grip of which she knew she was capable, as she held him tenderly
between the aching folds she wanted him to part again, was nowhere near as long
as the previous pause. The one at the bottom of her stroke. The pause this time
was but a mere hesitation, long enough only for gathering of breath. And
strength, before…
"Kyle."
Paulette could stand no more. Not the waiting, not the needing, not
the escalating throb of ravenous hunger that suddenly, instantaneously
transformed itself into the most painfully distressing kind of agony she'd ever
known.
As soon as she said his name, as soon as the murmur of it finished
shimmering across her lips, there was only one thing she could do.
Plunge.
Again.
Swiftly.
Sweetly.
Plunge with no thought except that Kyle was exactly what she'd
searched for. Without ever being aware she was searching for anything. Anyone.
Kyle was what she needed. What she'd always needed. Through more
dismal years than she knew how to count. He was everything she'd never had.
Everything she'd lacked without knowing she lacked in the foolish, blind-minded
days when she'd been so naively certain she had it all with Tom.
Her flesh rippled sublimely. Opening to his.
And his hardened again. Enlarged again, and hardened more. His
shaft shivered a little, taking on a new and strange independence of its own.
His shaft seemed suddenly to have little or no connection to the man who lay
mesmerized beneath her, his lips parted slightly in undisguised, wonder-struck
bewilderment.
His flesh moved gently within her. And
persistently, working to fill her to the rim with its heated pulsing. Its
shuddering insistence that it needed her, and she needed it.
So Paulette did it.
She rose.
Allowing her head to loll backward heavily, allowing it to roll
onto her shoulders, her hair shaking itself free in thick and tickling cascades
against the bare skin of her back, she tore herself away from the delight she
found so unexpectedly in her possession. Muscles tensing to painful tautness,
she drove her knees down. Forced them deep into the firm yet shifting, not
quite dependable, cushions beneath and around Kyle's hips. And at the same time
she straightened her legs. Abruptly. So that this time when she rose over and
above him it was with a virtual screaming of flesh against flesh. Shrieks,
multiple shrieks, of flesh releasing flesh. Of flesh crying out in almost
audible ways to re-possess flesh.
This time she didn't wait at
the peak of her ascent. This time she collapsed again immediately, driving down
again with the full force of which her body was capable. The full force of her
weight.
This time there was no delay in her taking of him. No hesitation
whatsoever.
This time it was easy and natural. And no longer such a silent or
one-sided thing.
This time a low and quavering groan escaped the deepest depth of
Kyle's throat. His arms came up. His hands abandoned her hips, and their futile
attempt to guide their movements. His hands gravitated now to her breasts, to
cup them and lift ever so slightly, relieving their freed heaviness. To
surround with incredible warmth…warmth that trembled, and transmitted the
desperate plea of his trembling into her.
"I don't think I can take much more." His words came out
a hoarse and difficult whisper. One that shook as badly as the shaft upon which
Paulette set out to satisfy herself. As badly as the tight and bunched muscles
beneath his sweat-slicked skin.
"Neither…" If his tone had been merely a whisper, hers
was not even that. It was so quiet, so breathless and unnerved that she had to
stop. Had to lick her lips. Had to adjust the position of her knees upon the
cushions and to draw a chest-expanding breath that drove already out-thrust
breasts forward even more. Straight into his grasp.
"Neither can I." Her second try was a little better. The
second time at least her words were audible.
Kyle laughed. A little. Very softly.
"Then what are you waiting for?" he asked.
Or maybe he was daring her.
If that was the case, if that was truly so, it was a dare Paulette
couldn't help but take. Because what he dared her to was exactly what she'd
been wanting all along. What she'd been working toward, all the time trying to
convince herself at the deluded back of her mind that she wasn't working toward
anything at all.
Shivering, she tore herself up and away again.
Tossing her head and her now-wild mane of hair forward, she
brushed his hands away from her breasts.
They fell to his sides. Limp and spent. Useless.
And she leaned even farther forward.
She leaned into him. Planting her hands firmly atop his chest, she
felt the subtle slip and slide as sweat-drenched palms met sweat-slicked skin.
As sweat mingled with sweat, creating a slip-and-slide surface not unlike the
deadly film of fog-ice that would have coated the streets and sidewalks outside
had the temperature been a scant five degrees colder.
To compensate, she dug in. She located the roots of the rich
furring of dark and silken hair drifted so perfectly across his chest and
twisted her fingertips tight among crisp-curling strands.
She used the grip to steady herself.
So she could do more.
At this new angle, almost on hands and knees, her movements onto
and away from Kyle's swollen and distended shaft, movements that both increased
in speed and grew ever more intense with each repetition, became as much back
and forth, rock and sway, as they had previously been simply up and down.
For a moment it seemed Kyle wanted to catch hold of her breasts
again. Or maybe her shoulders. For a moment his hands twitched, seeming to try
to coordinate themselves for some sort of movement of their own. Seeming to
attempt to summon the strength necessary for such movement. But the attempt was
obviously too much for him.
His hands lifted only slightly. Only the very tiniest bit. And
then they fell back. As useless as before.
He shuddered. With a force that rocked his body, and hers. A force
that quivered through the both of them.
His eyes slid shut.
His head tilted back, his chin thrust up and out, the muscles of
his neck and jaw tightening visibly with the strain of what he felt…of what she
inflicted upon him.
A sound murmured between his slightly-parted lips. Not a laugh and
not a groan, it carried a little of both in its vaguely shifting tones…carried
enough of both to make the sound nearly indescribable, all but
incomprehensible, an expression of some frightening emotion Paulette knew she
would never understand. Because no woman had been designed to understand.
As she stroked herself down and onto him, murmuring in softly
sibilant sounds of undisguised approval and an equal part of regret as she
followed each of her strokes with the corresponding, searing hurt of retreat,
Paulette felt a new tensing in the heatedly masculine body over which she
labored.
Kyle's abdomen tensed first.
Beneath and between her
wantonly-spread legs, it grew still more taut. Still more unrelentingly hard
and unyielding.
Reacting upon a quavered sigh of frustration, his shaft thrust
harder into her. It thrust deeper and then still deeper, even when she reached
the bottom of her next all-consuming plunge.
His hips lifted.
Or at least they tried to lift, though she'd long since
pinned him down with her weight and thighs that had never seemed as strong as
they seemed now. And once she had, once she knew she'd subjugated him at last
and completely to her whims and the increasing urgency of her body's misting,
floating, flowing need, she groaned. Aloud.
"My God." She wanted to cry from the sheer joy of the
moment. And then she did.
She cried out a sharp note of anxious anticipation that had
nothing whatsoever to do with joy, and everything to do with the heat of her
own unanswered, unabashed need. "I never had a clue!" she
half-whimpered, half-screamed. "I never had…"
A man like you.
Or a night…morning…like this.
"Don't talk." At last Kyle's hands found their strength.
Just enough that he could lift them.
Finding her hips, he grasped with all the clutching desperation of
a man in his very last throes.
Paulette expected him to do then what he'd done much, much
earlier. She expected him to try to take charge. To try to guide and control
the increasingly erratic jerks and convulsions of her rising-falling body…a
body already progressed far beyond the boundaries of any kind of control.
Instead he did the opposite.
Catching her at the downward end of her travel, his hands and arms
turned to iron. To steel. To an immovable force designed specifically to hold
her there. To hold her tight, jamming her onto him and him into her.
His eyes fluttered open, and he smiled at her. Smiled up at her
with a gleaming certainty in his steaming blue gaze. A growing certainty, a
completely transparent and obvious one that made it clear he was as aware as
she of the new truth to which she'd only barely tumbled. That he knew as well
as she that it was a miracle she'd ever survived without this. Without the
unfathomable sweetness of this.
For a moment nothing else happened.
Then another thrust. Of his hips this time, not hers. A swift
lifting as Kyle ground the length of himself into her. As he still held her
firmly down, and straddled upon him.
"The time for talk," he continued in a hushed and barely
controlled voice, "is past, Paulette. Long past."
She couldn't have agreed more.
Like all the rest of her, her hands convulsed. They tightened
brutally, digging into the mat of hair she still clutched as if it represented
her only hope of survival.
Kyle winced. But he didn't protest.
Other things were happening now.
One incredibly vital thing in particular.
A new tensing overtook his body. A deeper and more pounding
throbbing as his shaft stiffened more. As it stiffened beyond the limits of any
reasonable probability. As it gave a heavy and insistent jerk inside her. Reaching.
For the very utmost, the very most sensitive and yearning depth of her. The
depth she didn't so much sense as know would give him as much thrill of
satisfaction as it promised to give her.
Sighing, she tried to move.
Tried to do anything at all that might help to ease the surging of
terrible, terrifying and yet eager suffering that kept rising and rising and
rising, unquenchable and unbearable, inside her.
Nothing worked.
She was trapped by the ferocity of Kyle's grip. Pinned in place by
it. Held there and held powerless, so that the only release she could achieve
came from a kind of swirling atop him. A swaying, circling of her hips that had
nothing in it of the old rise and fall that hadn't achieved all that much
satisfaction, anyway.
The only thing she could do to help herself was move around him.
Circle endlessly the shaft that had long since pressed itself all the way into
her and seemed content to stay there indefinitely.
Or not.
No sooner did she perfect the circular movement that remained her
only hope for survival than she felt again the deep-seated, unsteady jerking of
what remained embedded within her.
The jerking wracked Kyle's flesh. Wracked hers in turn, and turned
out to be both the first and the last warning of the terrible pressure that had
built to the breaking point inside him. To beyond the breaking point.
The release, when it came less
than a millisecond after that warning, was mutual. Was so perfectly timed and
so perfectly coordinated that the searing jets of release from one body were
rendered entirely indistinguishable from the fiery release of the other.
Scalding moisture scorched
upward. A sharp bursting seared every smallest part of Paulette's inner flesh,
a sort of puncturing stab as everything she'd held back without realizing she
was holding anything back, let go in one single, sparkling rush.
Something shattered. Broke. Ceased to exist.
Some last vestige of reserve vanished like a mist of nothing. And
in the same instant Kyle uttered a sharp and stuttering cry of utter anguish as
his body gave its strongest jerk yet. Along with a new shimmer of heat. A pulsing
of heat that flowed from him to penetrate all the way into her. To raise her
internal temperature to degrees never before imagined and never before endured.
Paulette's essence and Kyle's mixed. Mingled. Intermingled,
raising galaxies of brand-new questions in both her mind and her body. And
then, acting in more of that amazing, startling, perfection of unison, provided
even greater galaxies of answers.
For a second her body threatened to spontaneously combust.
Then she went limp.
As did he.
In the very same instant.
Paulette collapsed atop him. Still holding his shaft inside her as
it began, not all that swiftly, to lose both firmness and purpose.
Kyle's arms swept up. They swept around her, their strength
magically restored and their purpose increasing as the rest of his purpose
diminished in his exhausted erection.
He held her tight.
Cuddled her close against the silken matting of hair she'd
previously tried to rip free by its roots. Cuddled her and murmured some soft
and unintelligible little nothing into the ear she inadvertently pressed close
to his lips.
Sighing, Paulette allowed her eyes to drift shut.
Just for a minute.
Just for two.
There was no denying it. Could never be even the slightest hope of
denying it.
These moments with Kyle, this unexpected and unplanned intimacy,
had left her feeling enormously good about herself. Better than she'd been able
to feel in almost as long as she could remember.
Better. And safe.
Oh, God, how the feeling of
Kyle's arms around her made her feel safe with their warmth and their strength!
With their absolute certainty in the rightness of what they were doing and the
infinite promise that he would, could, understand anything.
Understand and accept everything.
"What the hell?" Kyle pushed himself upright on the
lounge. "Paulette, what the hell are you doing?"
"Sock," she mumbled. Or at least he thought that was
what she said. Though it didn't make a hell of a lot of sense. And he could be
dead wrong about it, since she was running around the living room like some
kind of maniac with her sweater on but not her skirt, a shoe in one hand and,
for some inexplicable reason, the big orange bowl from his coffee table in the
other.
"What the…"
Kyle rubbed his eyes and realized he was still naked. Stark,
raving naked.
Paulette said something else, something he wouldn't even try to
pretend he understood. She put the shoe down, but not the bowl. And she was
peering beneath the low table that held his TV.
"Paulette, put the bowl down."
Muttering again, she spun around to face him. Her eyes flashed,
but the bowl flashed brighter. The bowl flashed almost lurid in a lone ray of
milky, unenthusiastic daylight that managed to find its way through a crack
between the curtains.
She spun, and two things happened.
His dick responded with an abrupt re-kindling of interest as he
caught sight of the round and perfect…perfectly delectable…mounds of her
breasts beneath the soft cling of her sweater.
And his heart responded too. With an anxious, fluttery jerk that
was a result as much of the sight of that bowl cutting its too-bright arc
through gloomy air as of the sight of her, dressed…undressed…the way she
was.
It wasn't much of a bowl. Hell, it was most likely the ugliest
damned specimen of a coffee table bowl he'd seen in his life…a kind of
knobby-looking misshapen thing that seemed to have grown, or melted, in a
series of haphazard rings representing just about every shade of bitter orange
on the face of the planet. It wasn't so much a bowl as an op-art blob that
happened to be flat on one side and deeply concave on the other, and it certain
as hell wasn't his style. At all.
But the hideous thing had belonged to his grandmother. It
was about the only thing he had of her, about the only thing that had somehow,
miraculously, survived the wild and unfettered hippie days of her youth.
He'd just bet she'd crushed out her joints in that bowl back in
the day. Her…what had they called the stuff back then? Panama Red, or
He didn't like the damned bowl. Didn't know why he kept it out in
sight instead of where it belonged, safe in the hidden depths of some dark box
in the closet in his extra bedroom.
But no matter how much he did or did not like the damned thing, he
didn't want to see it broken.
"Put the bowl down," he said again, a little more
forcefully.
Paulette stared at him. She stared hard, and even through several
dozen feet and a good deal of dim gray daylight that separated them he swore he
saw the pupils of her eyes dilate. Like she'd just been awakened from some kind
of bizarre and not entirely good dream.
"Put it down," he repeated, hoping gentleness might work
where requests and attempts to order had failed. Miserably.
"Bowl." She sounded mystified. But before he could open
his mouth to say it again, in God only knew what kind of tone this time, she
did.
She set the orange monstrosity down.
Not on the sleek black coffee table where it did have its
own inexplicable Halloween-night kind of charm.
She set the thing very
carefully, with utmost and exquisite precision, on the middle of the couch. The
one from which, his mother's choice of deeply cushioned, ergonomically shaped
lounge chairs notwithstanding, he liked to watch the Broncos on TV. Whenever
duty didn't get in the way. Whenever the paperwork that seemed to go endlessly,
unstoppably, with his job wasn't stacked to the rafters and the captain wasn't
bitching to high heaven about getting it all done.
She set the bowl down as if she was a cat burglar out specifically
to steal that one thing, and he'd caught her red-handed.
"I lost my sock," she said after a minute. As if that
was any kind of explanation.
"And you thought you'd find it by using my gramma's roach
bowl as what…some kind of divining rod?"
"Roach bowl." Paulette looked horrified. She stared at
the floor. Stared hard, as if she thought he meant that kind of roaches.
The scurrying, light-shy kind that had given even his mellow and unflappable
grandmother the heebie-jeebies.
Clearly Paulette was too far gone in frenzy to understand.
Also clearly, she'd lost a hell of a lot more than just a sock.
Kyle couldn't help the surge
of interest that rippled through him when he looked at her standing there,
apparently unaware of her state of dress. Or the effect her state of dress was
about to have on him.
She wore a sweater. A sock. A shoe.
Nothing else.
Try as he might, Kyle couldn't remember whether she'd worn
anything underneath that sweater or not. He didn't think so. But he was
damned-certain there'd been a skirt, a pair of leggings, some panties that were
either lavender or pink, and a pair of shoes. A pair of socks, too.
"You lost one?"
Wasn't that just typical? Him, catching on about an hour and a
week too late?
"I have to get out of here." Apparently she hadn't yet
noticed the disorganization in the way she was dressed.
"Paulette…"
She started hunting again. Opening drawers that hadn't been opened
the entire time she'd been in the house. Lifting cushions to peer beneath,
though they hadn't ever been moved, either. She even opened the front door to
check the snow-strewn mat outside.
Shit!
She stood in his front doorway for just a second.
Giving his neighbors plenty and a half to see, should any of them
happen to look.
"Jesus Christ, Paulette! Will you get back in here?"
Without thinking, Kyle leaped to his feet. With a hand out, as if he thought he
could reach her from halfway across the room to pull her back.
He had forgotten his wounded ankle.
It gave a horrific twinge.
Catching his breath, he shifted his weight to his good one, and
remained stoically on his feet. Using the bad ankle merely for balance.
But she'd already done it. Before he shouted.
She simply whipped the door open, glanced out, then slammed it
shut again. Just like that. All in one movement.
"I can't stay here." At last she found her panties…pink,
he saw, kind of satiny and trimmed with some kind of lace. She was pulling them
on. Trying to pull them on, so distracted that it looked like she wasn't
going to be coordinated enough to finish the job.
"Where are you planning to go?" It wasn't the argument
he wanted to use. Wasn't the 'stay here, stay with me to the end of time and
let me protect you from whatever the hell it is' that his heart kept demanding
he shriek.
But it would have to do.
Because it was the best he could manage. If he wanted to keep his
dignity intact. "Your car…"
"I have to get out of here."
Desperate, Kyle hobble-hopped toward her. He stepped on the ankle
as little and as briefly as possible, but that was plenty enough. Even if it
didn't feel quite so bad after…
He spared a quick glance at the starburst clock on the wall above
the sofa.
Eleven o'clock?
Good God!
Could it be possible they'd slept and had sex, and had sex, slept
and had hot, passionate sex for nearly six hours?
The clock insisted they had. And in that length of time, rest and
the thick wrapping of self-applied bandage had done some much-needed work.
The ankle still hurt. Just not like a son of a bitch anymore.
"I wish you'd tell me what this is about."
"Trust me." She
managed the pink satin panties at last, then turned her attention to the
footless gray leggings that looked like they were just as eager to and capable
of defying her every attempt to dress herself. "You don't want to know."
"I do."
He did.
He thought he did.
"I have to get out of here."
So they were back to that. Again.
It made him want to scream.
"You're not going anywhere in that car," he declared,
pulling his cop's attitude back out of wherever the hell it had decided to
hibernate for the last six hours or so. "I'm not about to let you…"
"My car." Paulette stopped with one leg in her leggings
and the other hopelessly mired in the supposedly simple process of getting into
her leggings, to look at him with honestly horrified…he knew he didn't imagine
it…eyes. "Oh my God. How am I going to drive my car with…and how could I
have forgotten the damage is so…so…" She spluttered then, a little
helplessly.
"Bad?" he suggested, stopping to lean on the wrought
iron railing next to the short flight of stairs to rest.
The ankle, damn its sorry soul, had started to twinge again.
Started to scream.
"It's too bad to be driven. You need to get it fixed first,
so…"
"I can't stick around to get it fixed." God, she did
look adamant. And determined, with her small and incredibly lovely chin thrust
out like a prizefighter's, just at the moment when she realized her opponent
wasn't going to get up and she was going to win the match. "I don't have
time to wait around for it to be fixed."
"Paulette, you cannot drive that car. I won't let you drive
that car. I won't let you do anything but call a tow truck to…"
"And it's sitting right out there in the open!" She
leaped…actually leaped…past him, to lift a corner of a curtain and peer
out. "It's right there where anybody can see it!"
Kyle glanced past her.
The car was indeed there. Right where they'd left it before the
sun rose, only to forget all about it in the course of all their other
assorted…activities. The damned thing looked sorrier than ever in the milky,
snow-riddled daylight. It looked so much sorrier than in the thick fog of early
morning darkness…an eight or nine year old Camry with a dented door on the side
he could see and a very obviously damaged spring on the side he couldn't…that
he almost laughed. Might have laughed, if he hadn't known through some instinct
the laughter would hurt Paulette's feelings, and drive her away from him no
matter how he tried to stop her. The car was old. A white thing covered by a
fresh layer of the snow that had fallen in the hours since they'd left it
there, listing visibly to port, its very whiteness nearly invisible beneath its
snowy covering.
"I really don't see the problem," he responded. Because
he really didn't. Except maybe for that characteristic listing to the side at
the back, the car really was invisible as a barely more solid whiteness in a
day that was filled with virtually solid white everything. And then he had to
fight off an uneasy, queasy twinge of guilt because he remembered what he'd
known damned well right from the start. That there was some kind of a
problem. A whole goddamned plethora of problems that she hadn't even begun to
tell him about.
They were back to reality.
Just like that.
"If any of the neighbors asks, we'll tell them you hit a
coyote. If any of them even notices. And that'll be the end of it."
Paulette's eyes widened. Her jaw dropped.
Kyle thought it was the first time he'd actually seen a jaw
drop.
"You have got to be kidding me." Finished with
the recalcitrant leggings at last, busy in the process of pulling her little
red pleated skirt on over them, she didn't look at him as she shook her head. "Do
you hear yourself? Who in their right mind would believe a coyote, basically a
big dog when you get right down to it, could do that kind of damage to a
car?"
Kyle felt himself flush.
He felt his face turn ungodly, scalded red. "Okay. Bad choice
of victim. We'll say it was a deer, then. A deer could do it. And anyway, the
windshield is covered with snow. There's really nothing to worry about until
the sun comes out tomorrow or the next day. Nothing anybody can see to begin
with."
He expected her to relax. He'd been hoping she would, once he
presented a perfectly logical solution for what was bound to remain a secret.
Because they were the only two people on earth who knew what had really
happened out there in the fog-choked night. And it had long since become a
given that neither of them was going to talk about it to anyone else.
She didn't relax, though.
Not even a little bit.
Reaching out, she parted the curtains at the front window again,
her hand shaking as she did. He saw it shake. And when she leaned
forward, pressing her eye up close to the opening, there was only one way he
could ever say she looked.
Sneaky.
As hell. Guilty as hell, furtive as hell.
"Listen. Paulette."
I'm a cop. Whatever it is, I can help.
The words leapt to his lips. Then they just sat there like some
kind of hulking, watchful creature begging to be allowed to make the leap. To
be set free to soar straight to her. Like the promise he really and truly meant
them to be.
He bit down on them.
There was no way to know the damage words like that might cause.
Though they'd have to be spoken sooner or later…sooner rather than
later. That much was certain. But for now, seeing the way she leaned to the
curtains, seeing the return of her definitely sneaky and surreptitious look
when she did, discretion in all things police-related seemed to be the only
safe and sane course of action.
"I have to go."
At some point, while he'd been
preoccupied with something else and hadn't been looking, she'd finished with
her skirt. Now she was stepping her one sockless foot into her shoe, and
grappling with her coat. Getting ready to pull it on. Getting ready to run.
Away. From him.
In her car or on foot. Whichever worked.
And once she did, once he let her get out that door, he'd never be
able to catch her. Not in his present, hobbled condition.
Kyle had to take a second. Had to consider very carefully what he
would say next. Because the next minute, the next few seconds, were absolutely
critical. If he wasn't to scare her into even faster flight.
"It's obvious you need some kind of help." Said the way
he managed to say it, in perfectly calm and reasonable tones filled with all
the concern he genuinely felt, it was the right thing.
It stopped her in her tracks just as she finished pulling on her
ridiculous old coat. Just as she reached the front door and put her hand on the
knob. Just as he saw the muscles in her wrist start to flex. Start to turn it.
"Why don't you tell me, Paulette? Why don't you let me see if
there's something I can do?"
"There is nothing," she said, and didn't turn away from
the door. Or let go of the knob. But she didn't turn it either…didn't make any
kind of move to open the door. And that had to be good news. "All you can
do is help me get away from here. Help me get far, far away. Otherwise…"
"Running away isn't going to solve anything."
"…I really don't think you want to hear the details."
"Why don't you let me be the judge of that?"
Sighing, she let go of the knob. At last. Tucking her hands behind
herself, she turned to face him. To lean back against them, lean back against
the closed door, and tilt her head back so she could stare up, directly into
his eyes.
Down below, the hardening began again.
Why hadn't he noticed before
how small she was…how fine-boned and almost, in appearances at least, fragile?
Why hadn't he taken time to notice?
"Be careful what you ask for," she advised after several
seconds of ticking, nerve-wracking silence. "That's what my gran always
used to say. Because if you ask for it, you just might get it."
Kyle tilted his head to the side. "What the hell is that
supposed to mean?"
"It means there are things I can't tell you. Because you don't
want to know. Because you're way better off not knowing."
He'd said it before. He'd gladly say it again.
"Why don't you let me be the judge of that?"
"I…" She glanced away from his face, toward the
curtained window. "I just can't. That's all."
They seemed to have reached an impasse. Paulette…small, lovely,
Paulette…stood with her chin thrust out provocatively. No longer looking even
the least bit like a prizefighter with a fresh win on her hands, she stared at
him. Seeming to challenge him.
Kyle stared right back.
Belatedly realizing he remained completely and uncompromisingly naked, his
erection out in the open and rampant for anyone to see, while she was now
completely dressed.
He wished he could retrieve
something. Just one piece of his scattered clothing with which to cover
himself. But he didn't want to take his gaze off her. He didn't think he dared
take his gaze off her.
"The car really is covered with snow," he reiterated. "Though
of course you can put it in the garage. If it really bothers you to have it
outside."
Nibble away at the edges of
the problem. And eventually you might get to the heart of things.
It wasn't his imagination that she relaxed just upon hearing the
suggestion. Or that it was a new relaxation. A depth of ease he'd never seen in
her before.
"You'd do that?" She sounded confused.
"I'm surprised I didn't think of it before."
"But what about your car?"
"The difference between us…one of the biggest differences,
anyway…is that I don't care if the neighbors see my car. I don't care if
anybody sees it, while you obviously…"
He gazed at her with narrowed eyes.
It wasn't his imagination, either, that she suddenly didn't look
at him. Quite deliberately made every effort not to look at him.
"You're in some kind of trouble." Kyle said it with
absolute certainty. Because there just wasn't any other way he could see it. Or
say it. Because instinct had kicked in. Big time. Cop's instinct that
smelled all kinds of trouble…cop's instinct that wasn't wrong and in fact had
never been more certain of its rightness.
"I nearly killed you a few hours ago." She still refused
to look at him. "Wouldn't you expect me to be a little nervous?"
Kyle hobbled back to the lounge and lowered himself onto it. He
lowered himself gingerly, wincing like a feeble old man as half a dozen new
aches and pains kicked in. "I haven't reported the accident," he
reminded her. "And I don't plan to. So I see no reason why you keep on…"
"And that's another
thing. I don't understand why you didn't want to report it." She
was looking at him now…was nailing him with steely darts that shot like daggers
from her eyes.
He damned near felt those darts and daggers. They were that
sharp. That piercing.
"That bothers me," she said thoughtfully. "I don't
understand that at all. And I have to tell you. I don't much like things I don't
understand."
"There are things you really don't
understand," Kyle searched for his clothes. Gathering up boxers and sweats
with a swoop of his arm, he arranged them in preparation for putting them on.
Paulette thought she'd never
heard an answer so unsatisfactory.
Even Tom, self-serving and secretive idiot that he was, gave
better answers than that.
"Might they be some of the same reasons why you wouldn't let
me take you to an emergency room?" she suggested. "Even when it was
so obvious and is still obvious in every move you make that you need
medical attention?"
"I told you. I have a friend who…"
"Where is this friend? More importantly, who is this
friend?"
"A retired doctor. He lives down the street. And he knows how
to mind his own business. Anything short of a gunshot wound, he's going to
figure I have a right to my privacy. More than I'd get at any emergency room."
"You've done things like this before then, I take it?"
Kyle smiled. And was quite attractive when he did. Quite sensationally
attractive. "You mean things like getting myself run down by a car?"
"I meant like refusing medical treatment when it's obvious
you need it."
"Okay." He sat up a little straighter. Too straight,
when Paulette knew he had to be hurting like hell. All over. "Things
are…complicated. But I guess you deserve an answer or two."
Well, I should think so.
But she kept quiet.
"I've had a few…scrapes…lately. Gotten myself into a few
situations I should have been smart enough to avoid."
She didn't want to relax. Didn't want to at all. But somehow she
couldn't stop herself.
Him, too?
Maybe that was the reason she felt such a persistent connection to
him. Maybe that was why something deep inside her, some nagging, niggling
little voice that went against all reason or common sense kept urging her to
stay here when she knew damned good and well she had to get moving. And stay
on the move.
"Doc…my neighbor down the
street…has saved my pride and privacy a few times now."
"By treating you on the sly."
"By treating me not exactly on the sly, but more like outside
the system."
"It's the same thing, isn't it?"
Kyle shrugged. "There's nothing illegal in me seeking private
medical care." He was pushing himself to his feet again, with a flat-out
bull-headed look that warned Paulette in no uncertain terms he was about to
repeat his little self-abusing performance of earlier. When he'd deliberately
stepped down on the ankle she'd ruined.
She wasn't sure why.
Maybe he wanted to punish her with guilt.
Not that she didn't fully deserve punishment.
"When can we go to this doctor of yours?" Rushing
forward, she slipped an arm beneath his and caught his weight. Just in time.
Kyle gasped, but then, amazingly, he grinned down at her. A
glittering grin that made her want to forget all about injuries, all about
doctors, all about terror and running. A grin that made her want to, need
to, remember only the intertwined heat of bodies pressed close…bodies fully
engaged one with the other and writhing in mutual passions of surrender and
mindless ecstasy.
"I didn't know you cared," he joked, and if the
expression on his face, the wickedness of his grin, hadn't been enough to make
her forget everything else, the note of laughing familiarity in every one of
those words would have been more than enough to do the trick.
As it was, she felt a dangerous steam start to rise inside.
She couldn't go on like this.
She was about to get herself seriously entangled with a man who
might be anybody or anything. Somebody with terrible secrets, dark ones he
wouldn't reveal. Secrets that might, though it seemed scarcely possible, be
even more terrible and terrifying than her own.
Shoot, he could even be a cop. For all she
knew.
That was a silly idea, and she tried to chase it right away.
Still, it made her shudder. Hard enough and long enough that Kyle's grin turned
quizzical. "What?" he demanded ingenuously, dispelling almost
immediately the far-fetched notion that he could possibly, possibly be
involved in any occupation on the other side of the law. The so-called 'right'
side of the law. "I'm sorry if I creep you out."
Paulette giggled. Suddenly. Very unexpectedly. In a way she hadn't
felt free enough or safe enough to giggle in the longest of times.
As long, really, as she could remember.
So maybe she had already escaped. In a way.
"We need to get you to that doctor," she said, trying
hard to frown.
Kyle opened his mouth.
"Right away. No more arguing."
This time the grin he flashed was more sheepish than stubborn. "I
was going to say that for once we're in complete and total agreement."
And from there they proceeded slowly. Out of necessity. Because
getting down even the few steps to the front door with the half-dead weight of
a man Kyle's size clinging hard to her shoulder wasn't the easiest thing
Paulette had ever done. It didn't rank among the top fifty easiest
things she'd ever done. But they did make it. Eventually. And she had worked up
a good, healthy sweat by the time they did. As had Kyle.
"Better bundle up," she advised as he pawed through
coats on the bentwood rack next to the front door, finally settling on a heavy,
shearling lined jacket. "You'll catch your death going out in this storm
with sweat all over you."
His grin faded. To a white-faced, grim shadow of nothing. A
reminder that he was still in pain. That no matter what her other concerns, and
she still had plenty, they came in only a distant second to this crucial
mission that could not wait.
"That's not how you catch cold," he replied through
gritted teeth.
"Oh. So now you're a doctor?"
Reaching over her head, he
shoved the front door open. "No. But you don't have to be a doctor to know
that much."
Moving slowly again, moving
more slowly than ever because the stress and fear of the last seven or eight
hours, working in combination with the exertions of the last few minutes, had
worn Paulette down to just about nothing, they hop-hobbled their way outside.
The day was gray.
Not foggy like the night and
early morning. Not exactly. But fuzzy somehow, with everything rendered
blurry and indistinct by snow that kept on falling, falling, falling. From a
low sky the color of super-chilled, heavy cream.
"Your car." Gritting his teeth, Kyle nodded toward the
driveway.
"That's what I keep trying to tell you." She couldn't
help it. She sounded impatient. Really, really impatient. "It's
sitting right there."
"No. I mean, it's in the way."
Of course it was.
It sat right where she'd left it. Right where she hadn't wanted
to leave it. And piled snow or no, concealing snow or no, it still looked way
too obvious to her. Way too blatantly, damningly revealing.
"We can't drive it." Kyle gasped. Leaning hard, with all
his might, against the brick wall right next to the garage door. "You'll
have to move it." He wiped a fresh beading of sick sweat from his
forehead.
"You're the one who keeps insisting you need to get it out of
sight. How about in the garage?" He punched a code into the keypad next to
his shoulder and the door rumbled up.
"But what about your…"
"Here." With a visibly shaky hand, he fumbled in his
coat pocket. And produced a heavy ring of keys.
She made a move to help him when he hobbled into the garage. But
he waved her off. "Move your car. I'll be okay. I'll wait for you in my
car. You'll have to drive it, since I'm in no shape to drive anything at all."
This was the answer.
The perfect answer.
Paulette hurried to back her car down the driveway, then pull it
in again, closer to the lawn on the side. Maybe onto the lawn on the
side, just so she could get it out of the way of the door she'd opened, and the
dark blue sedan parked inside. She had to brush the snow off hers to do it. At
least, brush it a little with a sweep of her arm in its old but still solid
wool sleeve. Just enough to give her a narrow path from which to see, so she
wouldn't have to worry about hitting anything else.
And through which someone who was really, really looking could see
the crazed lines and cracked surface of her sagging windshield that seemed even
more obvious now that snow filled every tiny crack with a line of solid white.
It was the perfect answer.
If she moved Kyle's car out,
when she pulled it out, she could pull hers in. Pull hers out of sight, and
pray the gods had been kind for one. Pray with all her heart that no damage had
been done by allowing it to sit outside for so many hours…a possibility which
seemed entirely, plausibly, possible, since she was still unharmed and Kyle was
still unharmed. Since no one had so much as come knocking on his door in all
the time they'd been together inside. Doing…whatever.
No one had come knocking yet.
That was the key.
Paulette paused for a second
as she got out of her car. For only a second, or more likely just for a split
instant that seemed like a dragging, interminable lifetime. Looking nervously
into the dimly lit cul-de-sac and beyond. To the distant through street, where
at the moment nothing at all moved. And no one watched.
Yet.
Where no one looked for her.
Though they would.
Soon.
They…she'd always hated the ambiguous sound of that, the way
people so often attributed everything good or bad to some mystical,
all-powerful 'they'. But in this case 'they' seemed entirely appropriate.
Seemed in fact the only way to express what had to be going on right now
somewhere in the grid of streets beyond and outside the narrow scope of what
she could see from Kyle Storm's driveway.
'They' knew where they'd lost her. Or had a pretty good idea.
Sooner or later they would embark upon a methodical search of the
area, if they hadn't already. And of course such a search was bound to reveal
her hiding place sooner or later. Should she be foolish enough or misguided
enough to stay put.
Immediately she revised her plans. Again.
Get Kyle to his doctor friend.
Get him home again, and settled into his house. Make sure he was
all right, and then get a move on. Whether he protested or not, whether her car
was apt to draw attention or not, she would just get into it and get the blazes
out of here. Before any of her worst nightmares…all her worst
nightmares…had a chance to come true.
Jamming her hands deep into her pockets, she hurried back to the
garage.
The idea of wasting another minute, even if it was to put her
damaged car inside and out of harm's way, evaporated the instant she slid
behind the wheel of his sedan and took a good look at him.
The gold-gleaming dome light counteracted and in most ways
canceled out the day's gray-blue, premature twilight glow. Even so, she saw
immediately that the short trip from house to car on the ankle she wasn't sure wasn't
broken had taken its toll. An enormous one.
Kyle didn't make a sound when she entered the car. But, then, he
didn't have to. His expression said it all. His expression revealed every bit
of the pain Paulette could feel as it radiated from him. The pain that seemed
to take its hold of her as well, simply through the act of sitting close beside
him.
His face was white.
Deathly pale.
He leaned his head back with a heavy listlessness Paulette could
feel almost as well as she could feel the radiating waves of pain. He pressed
his lips tightly together and closed his eyes, a bead or two of fresh sweat
sliding slowly, unheeded, along the side of his forehead.
He seemed lost in his own world. One made up entirely of pain,
completely separated from everything that went on around him.
"You're in a bad way." Paulette closed the car door
gently. As if a healthy slam or even a small one might bring on even more
suffering.
"It's not so bad." He didn't sound convincing.
Ignoring him, Paulette cast another anxious glance back at the
cul-de-sac and the street, then turned the key she found waiting in the
ignition.
"You're doing that thing again," he said without opening
his eyes. Without so much as moving any muscle not directly involved in the act
of speaking.
"What thing?" She backed the dark sedan out of the
garage.
The Camry didn't look half as bad as she'd feared. It didn't seem
half so hideously conspicuous with its nose snugged up close to a thicket of
shaggy juniper at the corner of the house. It looked so not-bad, in fact, that
in less than an instant her decision was reinforced.
Get Kyle to the doctor first.
That was the most critical, the most important, thing for the time
being.
She touched the button clipped to the visor. To bring the garage
door rumbling back down.
"That looking over your shoulder thing. And why aren't you
putting your car inside, after all the fuss about it?"
"How would you know? Your eyes are closed."
Kyle laughed. Humorlessly. Almost lifelessly. "They haven't
always been closed. And you just put the door down, so it's obvious…"
"I meant how would you know I'm looking over my shoulder
again? As for the car, I guess you were right. It's not so obvious after all.
Anyway, you're in pain. You need attention a hell of a lot more than any old
car needs attention right now."
And we'll be safe.
In a car no one would be looking for, no one from her world would
recognize, a car with mercifully dark-tinted windows to go along with its dark
color, they would be perfectly safe. Perfectly anonymous. Wherever they might
choose to go.
Kyle didn't lift his head away from the back of the seat. He just
rolled it to the side. Turning his face toward her.
"The pain's tolerable." He said it, but his expression
contradicted every word.
Thinned and white-ridged, his lips barely moved. And they didn't
smile at all. Not even when he made an obvious effort.
"No," she said. "It's not tolerable. You know that
as well as I know it. That ankle could be broken. It probably is broken,
and now I'm going to feel guilty for the rest of my life. For letting you lead
me around the garden path about getting it looked at for way too long."
"Paulette, it's really not…"
"Will you just shut up?"
"Paulette!"
"What?"
His smile seemed…looked…much more natural this time. "For
cryin' out loud, I was going to say the same thing myself. If you'd just given
me half a chance."
Chapter Eight
"It's not broken."
Kyle's heart nearly stopped at the sound of those
words. Those blessed, blessed words.
"It's strained. Maybe a
mild sprain."
He'd harbored a doubt or two
about that, even when he'd been vigorously denying the possibility. And having
all his denials confirmed now left him almost sick with relief.
Explaining a broken ankle to
the captain would have been tough as hell. Make that impossible as hell. The
captain would have demanded…would have had every right in the world to demand
and to have an answer or two…exactly how a broken ankle had happened. And where
the hell the hospital bills, the insurance charges, were. And that would have
put Kyle in a bad, bad way. A really bad bad way. But a strain, a minor
strain…
"You need to stay off
this for a few days."
Doc Huchinson…Ralph, as he
always insisted Kyle and everyone else call him, though Kyle hadn't been
brought up to go calling doctors by their first names…was just about finished
wrapping the ankle.
He'd inspected it, poked and
prodded the way it took medical schools eight years or so to teach students to
poke and prod and expertly aggravate whatever aching, sore spot they might be
after at the moment. And once he'd finished with it, he'd pulled out the
longest, freshest Ace bandage Kyle thought he'd ever seen and begun to re-make
the football encapsulating Kyle's ankle. Wrapping it tight. Wrapping it until
Kyle's toes tingled and there was no way he could coax even the smallest amount
of movement out of even one of his injured muscles.
Stay off it for a few days.
Kyle could certain as hell
manage that.
He had tomorrow off. And after
that, a good bout of flu would be plenty enough reason to call in sick for a
day or two. Or three.
The captain hated flu.
The captain regarded flu as
the worst scourge ever to hit the modern world.
He regarded as a thoughtless,
even criminal barbarian anyone who would appear for work knowing he…she…had flu
and might be contagious.
Flu, he would understand.
Flu, he would excuse. Unlike
an unexplained, unreported…
As if the Doc…Ralph…was
reading his mind, he spoke. "Have you been to the emergency room for this,
Kyle?"
Kyle couldn't force himself to
look at him. "N…" he started to say.
But of course Paulette chose
that moment to speak up. To speak for him.
"No, he hasn't," she
declared furiously. "And no, he wouldn't even consider it."
"Kyle?"
Swinging his cocooned leg down
from the dining room table where the Doc had had him prop it, being short an examination
table and all, Kyle tightened his jaw and nodded. Grimly. Unwillingly.
"What in heaven's name
have you gotten yourself into this time?"
"This time?"
Paulette's voice took on a new note. A badly aggrieved one Kyle didn't much
like. One that hinted much, much more was on its way. And he wasn't damned
likely to like it, either.
Doc looked at her. He blinked
at her as if he really saw her for the first time, really noticed that for the
first time in recorded history Kyle Storm had brought an accomplice with him,
and the accomplice was female. Highly attractive, highly desirable, highly
delectable female.
Kyle's dick made a preliminary
stirring motion. And he ordered it as firmly as he knew how to be still.
Doc would notice that too. Of
course he would.
Doc didn't miss much when he
got that probing, curious, ravenous-for-details, look on his face. The look he
wore right now.
"Kyle wouldn't hear a
word of it when I said I would take him to the emergency room this morning."
"Now, wait a minute,"
Kyle protested. "That's not exactly how I…"
"He just ignored me when
I tried to tell him he could be seriously injured."
"This morning?"
Doc swung around to look at Kyle. To glare at Kyle.
"I haven't been on my
feet all that much." Kyle's face burned hot. Burned red. He could feel it
burning…flaming with telltale color that surely would answer all Doc's
questions before he got around to asking them. "Except when I let Paulette
help me into the house right after the accident. And then back out of it a few
minutes ago."
"I don't think I even
want to ask what you've been up to in the meantime."
Kyle felt his face blaze
brighter. Hotter. More noticeably.
As did Paulette's when he
stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye.
"I don't understand you,
Kyle." Doc was about to lecture. He had another look…that look.
That tone.
Kyle didn't say anything.
Thanks to his clumsiness, his
ability to get into inexplicable scrapes that he'd had ever since he was a kid
and had nearly driven his mom crazy with his escapades, he and Doc had a long
history.
They'd had this conversation
before. More times in the last five or six years than Kyle could, or cared to,
count. And it always went the same way. There was never anything new to be
said. Never anything new to be added. The conclusion was always the same. This
conversation, like every similar conversation that had come before it, was
bound to conclude with Doc's statement that he didn't understand any of it. And
the tone would be the same one Doc always used. The one that said Doc was
completely baffled. Then Kyle would clam up tight, refusing to say a single
word to help Doc to understand. Just like always.
"I ran over him,"
Paulette declared suddenly. Unbelievably.
For a second…an hour, a
lifetime, an eternity…the silence in Doc's faded Colonial-style dining room was
an explosive charge hanging over all their heads. A deadly charge, primed and
ready to let go at the slightest jolt.
Which it did.
Let go.
"What?" Doc didn't
seem to know where to look. Where to turn. He had the slightly crazed look of a
man pushed all the way to the edge and hanging on by the tips of his
fingernails as he swung back and forth and back and forth. First to face
Paulette, then to face Kyle. And then, inevitably, back to Paulette again, like
some kind of puppet controlled by a completely deranged, completely out of
control puppeteer who was just about to snap a string. Or two. "Kyle?"
Finally Doc settled. Finally he stopped the swinging and focused entirely on
Kyle. Finally he glowered, the way Kyle had never in all their history together
seen him glower before. About anything. "Is this true?"
"She didn't run over me."
"I most certainly did!"
Paulette was breathing hard now. Was glaring daggers at him, and really intent
upon coming clean. And making a total mess of everything in the process. "I…"
"No." Kyle held up a
weary hand. Unable to look at her. Unable, he thought with a defeated,
exhausted heart, to do anything to stop her, either. "You didn't run over
me."
"I…"
"You hit me. A little."
"A little? Kyle,
you saw my…"
"How the hell can anybody
hit you a little?" Doc wanted to know, and he sounded really tense. Really
pissed, and just about ready to…
Kyle didn't know what Doc
sounded ready to do. He didn't want to think about it because his head…his
poor, suffering, sad-sack head…had had enough for one day. His head wanted him
to just crawl away, the way he usually did after one of Doc's impromptu
patch-up-and-lecture sessions. To find the usual dark and quiet place to hide.
To maybe slide a favorite Ted Nugent CD into the player in the bedroom before
burying himself under the covers so that some kind of healing could take place
and he could steel himself to announce another unplanned absence to a captain
who wasn't going to be exactly thrilled to get the news.
Even if it was 'flu'.
"You hit him with what,
young lady?" Giving up on Kyle, knowing as he had known for the longest
time that the discussion had come to an end as far as Kyle was concerned, Doc
obviously decided there were new ways to go about getting the information he'd
always been denied in the past. There were new suspects to interrogate,
suspects who were far more willing to spill the whole miserable story.
"My car. I hit him hard
enough to shatter my windshield."
From the corner of his eye
Kyle saw Paulette fold her arms.
She folded them high and
tight. Compressing her magnificent chest with the tension they exerted. And her
mouth tightened, too. Into a narrow and straight slash of self-righteous
determination.
"My God." Doc turned
to him again.
Unable to stop himself, Kyle
lifted his head. He looked straight into Doc's half-outraged, partly furious,
mostly concerned eyes.
"I was jogging."
"In the fog."
Slowly, Kyle nodded.
"And of course you weren't
being careful. As usual."
Now, that got to him. That was
just wrong.
"I beg your pardon. I
took every precaution. I was wearing my jogging suit."
"Did it have fluorescent
markings?"
Damn. He was going to have to
look for another Doc. One who didn't
know him quite so well, and couldn't predict him with such shockingly deadly
accuracy.
"Well, no. But…"
"You know better, Kyle.
You know you need to make yourself as vis…"
"The point is, Doc, that
a person should have been able to see me the instant the beams of her
headlights touched me. Fog or not. And if she hadn't come barreling out of
nowhere…"
"I wasn't barreling."
Paulette's arms twitched. They twitched so tight Kyle worried she might twitch
herself right in two with the force she exerted. "I was going the speed
limit. Because everybody around here knows the cops are like vultures along
that stretch of street. A quarter of a mile over that ridiculously low speed
limit and they'll pounce on you and write you a ticket so fast your head will
spin. Just like the…the Gestapo!"
Doc looked at him. Questioning
now.
Kyle felt his face flush
again. Flush even hotter, as if that was possible.
He was one of those cops. One of the ones who made this very
neighborhood one of his favorite lurking…favorite ticket-writing…grounds. Which
was the right thing to do, no matter what scofflaws and Paulette might have to
say about it.
There had been too many close
calls in the neighborhood. Too many people, kids and mothers with strollers and
idling old folks, nearly run down by maniac zipper-heads in SUVs or oversized
pick-ups. The kind of zipper-heads who drove without regard for anybody else.
Without consideration for the rights of people who wanted to just take a nice,
peaceful walk in their own neighborhood and actually expected to be safe
doing it.
There had been too many, damn
it! And one of these days…
Of course Paulette didn't know
any of that. How could she?
And now that the Doc knew she
didn't have a clue…
"Kyle?" Clearing his
throat at the same time he said it, Doc made Kyle's name sound like a growl. A
very, very accusing and threatening one.
"Give me a break,"
Kyle almost snapped. "I only met her this morning. And the situation wasn't
exactly conducive to…"
"I'll bet."
Was it Kyle's imagination, or
did Doc's gaze drop for just a second? Did it descend with perfect accuracy to
the place where Kyle's dick hadn't really obeyed his commands for it to be
still? Where the damned, recalcitrant thing still tried to wriggle and
squirm in anticipatory glee, looking forward to the moment he and Paulette and
it got back to the house. Where they could put it to use again.
Was it his imagination that
Doc smiled a little when he looked down?
No.
Doc's next words made that
absolutely clear.
"Might do you some good
to settle down," he declared, not looking at Paulette and not, thank God
in heaven, looking at Kyle's dick, either. "Might do you a whole lot of
much-needed good to take on a little responsibility and quit running around
like some kind of wild barbarian."
Paulette's folded arms
twitched.
Tighter.
"Oh, no." Kyle
couldn't believe how shaky his voice sounded. How ready to be overwhelmed. How
already overwhelmed and beaten into submission.
"I…"
Lifting his gaze, Kyle almost
snarled at Paulette. "Shut up."
Doc's eyebrows lifted.
"You don't know her,"
Kyle said.
"As neither, apparently,
do you."
Okay, so it was a good
argument. A great comeback. The most truthful comeback Kyle had had hurled his
way in the longest of long times.
But he still knew this
woman…this hellcat…way better than Doc ever would.
"She's dangerous,"
Kyle shot back. "I know that much. She's a time bomb with a secret. A time
bomb looking for a place to go off. And somebody to destroy."
"Miss?" Doc seemed
to dare her to speak. To refute any of it, argue against any of it.
As Kyle knew she would,
Paulette simply pressed her lips together. And remained silent.
One other thing he'd learned
about her in the past few hours, when he'd bothered to try to learn anything
more than the purely physical delights of her achingly gorgeous body, was that
she was honest. Painfully honest. So terribly and achingly honest that he'd
felt more than once she was about to break. Ready to break. Ready to unleash
and reveal whatever secret she'd been keeping in a way that went so very
obviously against her most basic nature.
So he watched her harder.
Amazingly, she stood strong.
She didn't cave and start spilling it all. The way instinct told him she had
to. Soon.
"He doesn't know what he's
talking about," she mumbled, not looking at either of them. "Did you
check for head injuries? Maybe that's what he's got. Maybe that's why he's
imagining all these crazy late-night-cop-show scenarios."
Doc looked amused by that.
Worrisomely amused. "There might be a head injury at that," he agreed
in a tone that exactly matched and in some ways even exceeded the amusement in
his expression. "I've suspected for a long time that Kyle sustained one
long ago. In his youth. And it's been making him do the most extraordinary
things ever since. But even so." Doc paused long enough to shake his head
and look very, very, very amused. When he wasn't looking furious and
concerned. "Getting run over by a car? Even for Kyle, that's…"
Kyle opened his mouth.
To tell Doc…tell them both…for
the millionth time or so that he hadn't been run over. He'd been struck.
Sent on a little bit of an unscheduled flight, from which he was going to
recover.
Doc held up a hand. "To
quote your own words, Kyle, 'shut up'."
That shocked him. Probably as
much as it had shocked Doc to hear him hurl the very same instruction at
Paulette earlier.
But he did. Shut up.
"I should think he might
have internal injuries, too." Putting on his
getting-down-to-medical-business face again, Doc resumed his glaring. At Kyle. "I
should think a smart man like him, a college graduate who did exceedingly well
in every course he ever took, would know enough to realize that. And do
something about it."
"He's not going to, Dr…"
Paulette unfolded her arms and flailed them helplessly, never having been
introduced properly in all the excitement of their arrival. Not with Kyle
hanging almost helpless, pinched and drawn with pain he'd never admitted, on
her shoulder. Not with Doc leaping into all kinds of action in the instant he
got a look at Kyle's face.
"Ralph." Doc held
out his hand. "Ralph Hutchinson."
"Ralph." Paulette
shook his hand. "Personally, I don't think Kyle's all that smart. About
much of anything."
Amusement returned to Doc's
eyes. "You'd be surprised. But in a way, you're right at the same time.
Kyle's not all that smart. Not when it comes to looking out for himself.
Or taking care of himself."
"You know me so well,"
Kyle barked back. "Both of you know so much about me."
And that got him to thinking.
In Doc's case, it might
actually be true.
They'd been
compatriots…co-conspirators, he guessed…for a good many years. Enough that they'd
revealed plenty about themselves to each other. In some cases, Kyle figured,
more than either of them had ever set out to reveal.
But with Paulette…
She didn't know him at all.
Didn't know the first thing about him.
And most worrisome of all,
most downright terrifying of all, Kyle didn't know a single, goddamned,
blessed thing about her.
Or the secrets he felt more
certain than ever she was harboring.
Chapter Nine
"You jump every time we pass an SUV."
Kyle's tone had a self-satisfied, almost a gloating note of
I-told-you-so to it.
"I beg your pardon. I do
n…"
"You've done it twice
since we left Doc's house. Jumped about a foot the minute an SUV appeared
around the next bend in the road."
"I do not!" Lifting
a hand away from the steering wheel, Paulette jabbed a finger in the direction
of the Escalade just passing in front of them, traveling from left to right on
Sable Avenue. "There's one now. And I don't see myself jumping at all. Not
even the littlest…"
"That one's red."
"What the hell are
you talking about, Kyle?"
"The two before were
dark. Black, and dark blue. You jumped about a foot when you saw them. The way
you always seem to be jumping when there are dark SUVs around. What the hell's
going on, Paulette?"
"I'm sure I don't know
what you're talking about."
But her fingers tightened
around the steering wheel. So tight that it was difficult to make her hands
respond, make them move the slight amount it took to negotiate the little kink
in the street at the other side as they crossed Sable without… thank you ever
so much, dearest Jesus… encountering another of the deadly, hulking dark
shapes.
She did too know what he was
talking about.
Boy, did she ever know.
Tom drove a dark SUV. One of
the
More than that, most of Tom's
henchmen drove them. They were like a…a uniform for henchmen, or something.
Just another way to blend in with a crowd who all seemed to be driving SUVs.
Another way to be insignificant and unseen in situations where being
significant and seen could be highly dangerous…even, possibly, highly fatal.
"What the hell is it with
you?" Kyle asked again. "Are you afraid of SUVs, or something?"
Well, there it was.
The out she'd wanted.
The one she'd thought she'd
never find.
Just offered right up for her,
on the biggest silver platter she'd ever had the pleasure to see.
And she took it.
"Damned things are a
menace in bad weather," she growled.
"It's not the SUVs. It's
some of the idiots who drive them." Kyle sounded like he was having a good
time with this one. A really, really good time, and all at her expense.
As if he knew…
"Call it fear of SUVs,
then," she all but snarled. "Call it snow fever, or whatever other
ridiculous thing you want. But for goodness sake, can we just forget about it,
already?"
"Snow fever!" he
muttered, actually chuckling aloud. But he did fall quiet then. Like he had
finally, maybe, decided she was right…had been right all along. About
everything. Including the snow fever.
The notion should have filled
her with a great sense of victory. Even glee. A day before, no more than
twenty-four hours, such an event would have done that, and quite a bit more. A
day ago, when she'd been under Tom's control…when he'd so seldom allowed her to
be right about anything through the simple act of admitting she was
right, the novelty of the whole thing would have delighted her, instead of…
Falling flat.
That was exactly what her
jubilation had done at just about the instant they had left Ralph Hutchinson's
split-level suburban house, with Kyle hobbling along on a pair of borrowed
crutches that didn't quite fit his tall frame, and her solicitously holding the
door for him. Solicitously trying as hard as she knew how to not look up at him
with newfound glee in her eyes, and even harder not to shout 'I told you so!'
loud enough for the neighbors and all the rest of the world to hear.
It had fallen flat.
Unutterably, dully flat. Driven, no doubt. by the sudden and almost shocking
realization that darkness was approaching.
Already the winter afternoon
had turned gray-blue. Already it had taken on a completely false sense of
expectation in the odd way even the most turbulent and troublesome of snowy
afternoons turned blue and expectant when the wind picked up a little. When
anticipation of an approaching storm hung heavy in super-cooled air and the
tumbling bluster of the wind drove plastic bags, dead leaves, even a child's
small blue ball ahead of it at breakneck speed.
It was hard to open the car
doors in that sudden bluster. Was all but impossible to run around the car
without getting swept off her feet by the violent force of it, all but
impossible to open Kyle's door and hold it so he could struggle out of the car
on his crutches when he was ready.
It would be pitch-dark soon.
One quick look around,
shivering in the icy wind while he took his own good time about it, and
Paulette decided that the simple fact she hadn't been ferreted out yet, her
hiding place revealed and invaded, had to be a very good sign. The best of
signs. A sign, perhaps, that she was destined to make good her escape. Destined
to reach someplace far away where Tom and her part, unwitting though it had
been, in his crimes, would never be able to touch her.
All she had to do was get Kyle
into his house, and then…
"God, I'm tired," he
groaned.
"Good."
And God, she hadn't meant to
say that!
Hurriedly, Paulette cast about
in her mind for something to say. Some way to explain what had slipped out in
all her distraction with the coming night, the coming weather, the coming and
long overdue flight for good into both of them.
Rolling his head across the
top of his seat, Kyle flicked his eyes open. "Yeah?"
God give her strength to find
something to say that wouldn't arouse any more of his too-aroused-already
suspicion!
"Yeah."
There.
She didn't sound too
pugnacious.
Just pugnacious and determined
enough to get his attention. To show him she meant business without leading him
down roads and into alleys she didn't much care to have investigated.
"It's about time you admitted you were
tired. About time you admitted it's been a hell of a day, and you…"
"Need to sleep."
Finishing for her, Kyle rolled his head back to its original position. He
allowed his eyes to slip shut again.
Paulette wasn't exactly sure
what she'd do if he fell into a bone-deep slumber from which she could not
rouse him. Freeze to death, maybe? With him still sitting in the car and just
as frozen by night air that seemed to have cooled by about twenty degrees in
the seconds since she'd left the safe warmth of her side of the car.
The wind had taken on a fresh
quality. A new and maniacally howling one that set her teeth completely on edge
and her skin to prickling with goose bumps on top of goose bumps on top of
goose bumps.
"It's going to be a
wicked night," she murmured, hoping he'd take the hint and put a little
bit of speed on.
It's going to be one of those
blistery-blizzardy nights that have been known to lock Denver and the
surrounding areas down tight.
The kind that could, and did shut down highways and airports. That could and
had often in the past sealed everyone in for the duration.
One of those famous nights
that could bring everyone and everything to a mercilessly complete, utterly
unforgiving stop.
The kind of night on which
running away would be difficult. At best.
And, her heart reminded her
with a burst of the glee she'd thought long lost, an even more difficult night
for following.
All she had to do was…
"You need to get into the
house, Kyle. You need to get to sleep. Get the rest Ralph says you need."
And once he goes to sleep, I'm
hitting the road. Maybe I'll borrow his car, and…
Paulette didn't want to think
about that just yet.
And Kyle didn't argue. He didn't
even reply.
He might have been asleep,
except for the sound of his breathing. A little raspy, too shallow in intervals
when she could hear it between pummeling gusts of debris-laden wind, his
breathing wasn't right for sleep.
His breathing made it clear he
was awake. Made it clear he was very, very aware.
Paulette looked across the
roof of the car. She looked out. At the cul-de-sac.
Everything looked all right.
Nothing appeared to have changed. Her Camry sat exactly where she'd left it and
exactly as she'd left it, nosed up against shrubbery that cast fully
dark night-shadows across it, concealing its damage.
No one had disturbed it.
Even her license plate was
barely visible in the rising gloom. Half-covered with frozen snow, dirty with
splashed mud and road grime where it wasn't…what Tom so elegantly called 'ape-barf'…its
numbers were unreadable. Especially from any kind of distance. Even the short
distance from the cul-de-sac to the car.
No casual observer would
distinguish this particular white Camry from the thousands upon millions of
other identical white Camrys that filled every street in the nation and quite
possibly the world. If they even recognized it as a Camry at all.
"We should get inside."
The realization that she
appeared to be absolutely and fundamentally safe in her current hiding place
wasn't enough to make her relax.
Or was that the bone-chilling
weight of the wind, penetrating her heavy if shabby winter coat as easily as if
she wore no coat at all? Was that simply the bluster and bite of the first
swirling of pre-storm snowflakes filling the air above the driveway?
Kyle didn't speak. He simply
struggled with his crutches on the snow-covered ground, pulling himself
laboriously to his feet.
His energy seemed to have
recharged itself in the three or so blocks they'd driven.
He seemed almost strong enough
and alert enough after his short rest to put himself back into action.
Dear God. She hoped that wasn't true!
She needed it not to be
true.
Gritting her teeth against
another, truly searing blast of wind, she helped him along the walk and to the
door. Through the door, where she waited for him to pull off his coat,
balancing first on one crutch and then the other, a little precariously. And
then up the stairs. To the living room.
"I'll make us some
coffee." He turned toward the kitchen.
Paulette pulled her own coat
off and dropped it into a corner. She could do that much before she left.
But she wrinkled her nose, and warned herself all over again to not get too
comfortable. To not get comfortable at all while she went about ensuring Kyle
got more comfortable than he would be able to bear. More comfortable than
wakefulness would be able to bear. "Shouldn't I be the one doing that?"
"You don't know where
things are."
She wrinkled
her nose again. Harder. "I can find them. I've been in a kitchen or two
before."
Boy, have I been in a kitchen
or two!
She almost snarled aloud at
the memory of Tom's attitude toward not just her but women in general. That
they were supposed to cater to a man's every whim and appetite. That they were
expected to spend their lives laboring gladly in the kitchen, delighted to be
given the chance to serve their male masters. That they should stay willingly,
gladly, at a man's beck and call simply because he was a man. And never
want anything more.
Except, of course, when the
mighty male master needed a woman to drive the getaway car during one of his
crime sprees.
Even and especially when he
didn't tell her it was a getaway car.
At least she could thank her
lucky stars Kyle wasn't anything like that. She could thank every lucky star in
the firmament that Kyle… and dear God! Paulette actually had to force
herself to shake off the thought. To shake off all kinds of thoughts that
automatically had her staying here. With Kyle.
This new way of looking at
things, this new kind of man who treated a woman like an equal, like she was
intelligent, was dangerous.
Horribly, unconscionably
dangerous.
Kyle was looking at her.
Strangely.
With his mouth half-open, no
doubt getting ready to make one of the insightful comments she so dreaded and
feared.
"Anyway," she put in
hastily, hoping it would be enough to cover her momentary lapse. "Is
coffee the best thing for you? If you plan to get that sleep you need…"
"I don't know about
sleep," he said calmly, moving onto the creamy Spanish tile kitchen floor
a little more cautiously than he'd taken the driveway, the stairs, the floor
between stairs and kitchen. "I haven't exactly done anything to wear
myself out today."
God, she hoped she didn't
blush at the images that remark conjured up!
"I don't care," she
shot back over her shoulder, not quite daring to look at him as she passed him
by. "You heard what Ralph said. About rest, at least, if not full-blown
sleep."
"I slept most of the
afternoon. I just want some good, hot coffee. To warm the ice out of my blood.
And I want to get off this ankle. Get it propped up."
"That's the first
intelligent thing you've said since Ralph told you that you had to take it easy
and you tried to…"
"Son of a bitch!"
Kyle's words were accompanied
by the sound of a crash. A small one, but a crash all the same.
"What?" Coffee forgotten, the warm milk she'd been about
to prepare whether he wanted warm milk or not just as forgotten, Paulette spun
around and rushed back to him.
"I dropped a damned crutch. Nothing to worry about."
"You need to be carefu. You need…" She took another step
forward. Then faltered. Stopped.
Considering the incendiary nature of the morning and afternoon
they'd spent together, considering some of the feelings she'd had even in the
cold and whipping breeze as she helped him stay upright long enough to get into
the house, it seemed less than a spectacular idea to move any closer to him.
Very suddenly, her body burned. Ached. Throbbed, with all kinds of
wickedly piercing throbbings that could lead to no good end.
Kyle's eyes glittered. Filled with a wild and sultry light that
matched all too perfectly, even in the gloom, the intensity of what throbbed
inside her heart. And other places as well.
"I was just…" Unable to finish because her mind suddenly
drew a complete and horrific blank, Paulette licked her lips.
Now it was Kyle's turn to move. As if he hadn't picked up on a
single one of the things she'd been thinking, things her body had been all but
shrieking for all the world, and him especially, to hear and immediately obey,
he made his way to the big, sculptured blue lounge chair. The almost
double-wide one that occupied place of honor next to the curtained and
concealed front window. The starlit blue one she'd sworn to avoid as much as
she could from here on out because its shape, its comfort, its alluring
invitation were every bit as wicked as the same qualities she'd found in Kyle's
body.
"Maybe what I really need is a good, stiff shot of bourbon,"
he declared, lowering himself onto the too-inviting lounge and tucking his
crutches out of sight beneath. "Bourbon's less work. But not right now.
For right now…" He looked at her. With those same incendiary eyes.
Paulette swallowed.
Hard.
This was not good. This sudden wafting of heat
that spiraled inside her body exactly as thickening snowflakes swirled and
drifted, apparently aimlessly and yet with full, aware intent and purpose in
the world outside.
It was not good at all.
Kyle crossed his arms in front of his chest. Caught the hem of his
dark knit shirt. Tugged slightly and lifted at the same time, pulling it up and
over his head. Up and away from his chest.
Bare chest.
And then he went to work on his sweat pants. Tugging them down
just as easily, just as thoughtlessly and effortlessly as he'd tugged the shirt
up.
Whether he'd worn anything beneath them or not, Paulette had no
idea. In just that one simple move, shoving down with both hands and lifting
first hips, then knees, then ankles, he shed the sweat pants.
And her worst fears, her sweetest and most impossibly fevered,
poorly-timed dreams, were answered. In one heartbeat.
Thick layers of dark material, barely a shade lighter than the
deep-evening couch upon which he lay so invitingly, vanished. And
revealed…everything.
Just that quickly, Kyle was naked.
Gloriously naked, gloriously gold-hued and rose-infused.
Gloriously offered for her entertainment, her enjoyment, her…
"We shouldn't be doing this." But she moved closer.
Licking her lips again.
"I don't know why not." Slipping to the side a little,
Kyle revealed more of the enticingly empty side of the lounge. Patting the
softness of dark-blue upholstery, he invited her to join him.
Despite her resolve, Paulette's feet made their way forward. All
on their own and without a bit of her permission, they drifted her forward.
Licking her lips yet again, in a way instinct told her was no wiser than her
unplanned approach to the lounge, no more conducive to her safety or the
success of her mission than if she'd simply torn her clothes off and thrown
herself bodily atop him, she advanced.
Her strength was surrendered, her will-power evaporated. Her sense
and sensibility gone for good in that single, enraptured moment of need great
enough to maim. Great enough, maybe, even to kill.
"I can't think of a way better to while away a long and snowy
night that's almost guaranteed to end with us snowbound," he murmured.
Inviting still. Alluring always.
"That's why I can't…we shouldn't…"
Damn. Her traitorous feet didn't
give up. They kept on drifting her forward. Drifting her ever, perilously,
closer to the stirring of the golden, shadowed shaft that rose majestically
between his thighs.
Kyle held out his arms. "Come to me, Paulette."
She didn't stop. Didn't so much, damn her horny and insatiable
hide, as hesitate.
"Come and keep your comrade warm."
She found sense enough to pull to a stop at the last possible
moment. Barely enough sense, and barely in time. With one knee already bent,
already resting upon the cloud-soft, intrinsically firm and welcoming lounge.
"It's not like we haven't done this before," he urged
with a breathtaking white smile. Lighting the gloom with it and dispersing it
every bit as thoroughly as the glitter and gleam of his eyes had wiped
hesitation from existence in the moments before.
It's not like…
Suddenly, Paulette's hands went to work.
Suddenly, as her second knee
joined the first, as she found herself kneeling agreeably next to him and over
him, her hands tore at her sweater. Her skirt. Her leggings, and everything
else that lay around and beneath.
Her hands tore at everything.
They would soon tear at her very skin if she didn't allow it to
feel…give it the sheer and unparalleled delight of feeling…the warm strength of
Kyle Storm pressed tight against it.
The lounge, he thought in the instant
before Paulette leaned over him, naked and available, was the perfect answer.
It had been the perfect answer all along. And he had no idea why
it hadn't occurred to him to use it before…why every time until he met Paulette
at the business end of her car's grille, he'd been in all kinds of a
balls-to-the-wall, blasted-to-hell-and-back hurry to get to the bedroom with
whatever woman held his fancy at the moment.
Not that there had been all that many women of the moment.
Still, it had never before
occurred to him to head straight for the lounge. Never before occurred to him
that it could be put to a few highly creative and undeniably constructive uses
he felt absolutely certain his mother had never intended when she'd bought the
thing for him for Christmas two years before.
The design was perfect.
Utterly.
Reaching for Paulette in the
second when her perfectly sculpted knees found their position on the
designer-soft cushions, he didn't have a clue what else to do. Didn't think
there really was anything else a man in his precarious state of balance,
lost somewhere halfway between sanity and all-out, full-fledged arousal of the
kind that had too often in the past been known to completely wipe out the last
traces of sanity in any red-blooded and normal man, could do.
Just…reach.
She had decided to play coy.
Or something.
Kyle imagined that was the
case, though he was way too far gone to think clearly about much of anything.
Paulette tilted her head a
little to the side. She looked at him quizzically. Looked at him with openly
curious, all but eternal hazel-green eyes that seemed to want to see through
him. To the very bottom of him…the very most hidden recesses, where he was
trying hard as hell to hold some small part of himself in reserve. To hold something
back so that he wouldn't blow the entire moment by giving up too much too fast.
By appearing as needy and desperate as he felt.
She tilted her head in her
distractingly come-hither way, and simply watched him. Doing none of the coming
and for damned sure none of the hither part of it.
Apparently that was the
message Paulette received. For she continued her head-tilted silent
questioning. For all of a hundredth of a second more before she straightened
her head and tossed her waves of glossy-tawny, not exactly blond and most definitely
not strictly red either, hair back from her face and shoulders. Before she bent
forward.
Again.
More.
Over him.
Licking her lips, she sighed the slightest amount. Just the right
amount necessary to cause the perfect rounds of her breasts to shift and
shiver. To have them instantly quiver themselves into a slightly new, slightly
more alert and upright position.
Or something.
God, something!
For sure Kyle wasn't thinking clearly now. For sure, with his dick
immediately engorged beyond every safe and sane limit of engorgement for what
was in truth just a plain old human, vulnerable and perishable body part, he
wasn't concentrating now on anything except the sharp knifing of pain that
shafted its way down and in. Pain that began ominously, at the very tip of that
suffering, distended and tormented thing he harbored between his legs.
Pain that seemed, really, to have no ending point. And if it did, seemed to
find that point somewhere well below the root of that same tormented thing.
Pain that ended, if at all, only deep, deep, deep below. In tissue and flesh
and sinew that had no prior experience with this kind of suffering. That thus
had no clear-cut idea how it was supposed to deal with it. What it was supposed
to do with it.
Still reaching, he groaned.
Still hesitating in her new, coy way, Paulette regarded him in
silence for another lifetime.
A complete and unabridged lifetime of thundering pulses that
filled every part of his body and instantly put all of them on alert. A
complete and aching lifetime he lived out ten or fifteen times at least in the
space of all of a second and a half of that damned, infernal, inexcusable
coyness.
And then she came.
To him.
That was what he'd meant, though if the sudden slackness of her
expression, the sudden misting and clouding of her magnificent eyes, were any
indication, he might suspect she had come in other ways too.
He might suspect the deep and sinfully heated internal flesh for
which he longed had already begun to release the burden of pent-up moisture she'd
released upon him and around him once before.
He might suspect that not only had she come to him, she had cum
for him.
"Name of God, Paulette. I…"
"Shhhhhh." Leaning still more, leaning until the twin
delirium of unfettered breasts hung tantalizingly close, achingly close, to his
upturned face, Paulette lifted a hand away from her thigh. For the first time
he realized both of her hands had been hard at work there already, pinching and
kneading the creamy-silken flesh between. She lifted that hand and, acting with
more of the coyness he'd never suspected in her, she reached out. Almost in
slow motion. Reached as if she'd been trapped in one plane of temporal
existence and he had somehow been doomed to another, not quite compatible plane
from which he could never again feel the brush of her. Never again know the
touch of her.
Paulette reached out. And then, as time resumed its normal
function and normal state of existence with a snap Kyle actually thought he heard
in the thrumming, humming air, she pressed two of her fingers to his lips.
Burning fingers.
Scorching, branding fingers with tips that felt like they left
their special mark emblazoned upon him forever. A mark he would be overjoyed to
wear, if only it would mean…
Automatically he spread his legs. Spread them as wide as he
possibly could when she moved up next to him. When she moved without stop or
hesitation over him.
Kyle had never been much in the experimentation department.
He knew there were books out there, some of them very old and
very, very sexually explicit, that would have aided the experimentation had he
ever been interested. But he hadn't. Until now. Until this moment when,
offering himself up unconditionally in response to some instinct he hadn't
known he possessed, he experienced the most fleeting moment of regret. That he
hadn't bothered to read things with shimmeringly exotic titles when he was
younger. That he'd always contented himself with and been content with the more
mundane and functional aspects of the sex act.
But Paulette awoke him. She awoke in him so many of the
very instincts he'd never bothered to entertain, never bothered to cultivate
and fine-tune. She awoke in him so many different things, all of them never
suspected, never truly acknowledged until, in the heat of one decidedly
inspired and inspiring moment, he found himself doing them.
Things like spreading his legs
wide. So that the rearing, agonizingly stressed column of his dick stood
upright and ready. So that it became a massive spear pointing to the ceiling
and the snow-clotted sky soaring above and beyond.
Things like making his hands find Paulette's hips. Like forcing
them to move enough to find her hips, since they seemed to succumb to some kind
of terrible, demoralizing shock that left them nearly paralyzed and only the
smallest amount useful.
Things like urging his fingers to close around the silken satin of
those hips. So he could guide her. So he could bring her to him, her hands now
clasping his shoulders, her eyes opening wide in hazel-green question.
Swiftly, he moved her.
Expertly. Relying on the same puzzling instinct that had appeared
as if from out of nowhere, borne on a small and chill breeze that managed to
infiltrate its stealthy way into the room and through the mounting sultriness.
Breeze that didn't diminish at all and didn't warm even the smallest amount
when it came in contact with air so heated it surely should have reduced any
hint of cold to a mere sizzle of dying steam long, long before.
He settled her upon his thighs.
Her legs opened naturally, much the same as his had opened for
her. Ready to accept without question what he had to offer. What he had long
since promised with the column of flesh that reared rock-solid and impatient
between them.
Tucking her toes beneath his ass, tucking them firmly so that she
would be well grounded and on solid footing for whatever instinct planned for
him…them…to do next, Kyle tugged at her hips again. A little more firmly.
Eyes questioning, hands clasping harder and harder, fingertips
digging greedily into tender flesh around and beneath his collar bone, Paulette
made no pretense of resistance.
She simply flowed to him.
In time with the sudden, strangely audible pounding of his heart.
She followed his guidance, and came to him.
"Kyle?" She spoke only the one word. And even then it
was a word barely spoken. A word barely audible above the steadily increasing
thud-thud-thud that now filled his ears, his mind, his entire soul and
consciousness.
"Like this." Raising his hands, he slid them up and up
the seductively curved rounds of her hips. He made his way to her waist.
Wrapped his hands around it, marveling with almost the last of his sensibility
at the supple smallness of its circumference. At the way his hands…not
particularly large as men's hands usually went…managed to surround and
encompass it entirely.
Instinct drove him through all of those moments. And a few more.
Instinct gave him even more, even more delicious, secret and cherished guidance
from somewhere within. From some place where it had lurked for too long,
unrecognized and unsuspected. Waiting for this precise moment to spring to life
fully bloomed. Waiting for this precise instant to change his life, and the way
he would from this point on into eternity live his life.
Instinct caused him to tug at
Paulette's waist. Gently. Almost negligibly. To tug her to him.
Her legs folded. And he placed
her squarely, firmly, atop him. Placed her so that with the slightest
additional tug…or maybe guidance was a better way to phrase it…her body slid
down and over his. Her flesh rippled open as it took him in without question,
then rippled again, rippled harder, as it immediately flowed shut around him.
Not entrapping him, for there was a smooth and sinuous deep moisture already
pouring from her body. Already softening hidden internal muscles that had such
uncanny ability to make him her complete prisoner at the slightest whim.
Muscles that had already, the previous time, done their best to enslave him.
That had once sought to entomb him permanently within their heat-hazed walls;
that he knew would seek to do the same again and again and again. All in the
name of providing every gratification she might demand. Every one he would
inevitably find himself frantic to supply.
Her body was ready for him.
It had softened to a degree and a stunning ease of entry he did
know well, in spite of every previous lack of imagination or creativity.
It was going to be fast this time.
Maybe too fast.
Maybe the kind of quick and desperate coupling a man would
remember with teary-eyed fondness until the very end of his days. And in the
remembering would regret deeply that he hadn't possessed the stamina or
fortitude to make it last longer. To force it to last longer…force it to
become a slow and stirring, soul-deep and star-soaring epic encounter of the
very most, the very best, the very sinfully luscious kind.
Paulette was too moist and soft, too ready, for epics.
So stamina be damned. And fortitude, too.
Kyle really didn't care.
He wanted her. That was the only important, the only meaningful
fact, in a world where she continued to move and to slip, to encompass and to
accept, once he lost the coordination or the will to guide.
Seated atop him, her knees folded tightly up beneath her arms, her
body drawn so insistently close to his that her heels surely…surely…had
to have met and melded with the hot, firm rounds of her ass, she moved as close
to him as sensibility would say it was possible for her to move close.
But it didn't matter.
It still wasn't enough. And so desperately, determinedly, putting all
of his heart and his soul into it, Kyle tried for more.
Gripping her upper arms in a way that same raw and unbridled,
unexpected and inexplicable instinct insisted would make the control and
the surrender so much easier, Kyle tried to draw her forward again.
Amazingly, it worked.
Already buried, already supposedly lost to the full extent his
length and girth would allow him to be lost inside her, he felt himself slip
deeper. Felt himself attain new and startling depths afforded by the unusual
opening she achieved with her acrobatic bending and folding as her body
complied. As it slipped forward again, even more.
And he quickly discovered his mistake. His one miscalculation that
was going to have enormous impact…was going to make all the difference in the
world to what happened next.
Bent like that, folded that way, held by the upper arms the way he
still continued to hold her, Paulette had the power.
All the power.
It was easy, once she reached
the farthest inward limit her actions made it clear she was going to permit,
for her to piston with those tight-folded legs. To suddenly uncoil them with
all the animal might any woman's legs had ever possessed, and grapple with her
feet against the cushions of the curvaceous and, incredibly, perfectly designed
lounge.
Kyle felt her feet tense as well as her legs. He felt her toes
contract and grapple with the smooth-supple surface of cushions that did not
immediately or completely allow the grip she sought. He felt her feet strain
tight beneath his ass, felt her pull herself slightly more erect upon him, felt
her tighten herself even more in the manner of a coiled spring awaiting
release. A spring ready to explode without control in the instant of its
release.
He felt all of that.
Felt more.
Felt Paulette begin the first, not-so-subtle pressure that would
lead to even more, far greater and far more productive, forms of pressure.
And then, the release.
Then, as her body unleashed a slow and simmering drizzle of its
own special, soothing and enrapturing essence onto him and across him, she
suddenly reversed the direction of her motion.
From trying to grip a surface that would not easily be gripped,
she suddenly shoved against it.
Hard.
Rocking her body away from his.
Silken, awash with waves of moisture she began to pour forth as if
they would have no end, could have no end, Paulette released the grip
she'd sought so hard and so desperately to gain with her tensed and struggling
toes. She released it, then pressed her feet flat and firm against the lounge
cushions. And straightened her legs. Partway straightened them. With an
abruptness and a violence that jerked from him a harsh cry of desperate fear.
"No!"
Even the hands encircling her waist, hands that had no more
control than the sheerest, silken thread could ever hope to control or stem a
runaway tide of tsunamic power, could not stop her.
They didn't even try.
Locked by some bizarre form of sexually induced rigor mortis, Kyle
could only allow his helpless, hapless hands to go along for the ride.
He could only pray Paulette would stop at the end of the dick that
did not want to give her up…stop in a place from which she could reclaim
him. And hopefully do it without killing him. Without bounding away from him
backward to ricochet off ceiling and walls and window while he lay motionless
in his lounge, powerless to move. Dying the slow and agonizing death of loss
and desertion at the single most enjoyable moment he had encountered in his
life.
He could pray.
And sometimes…this time, thank you God…prayers could be
answered.
Paulette didn't desert him. She didn't ricochet away like some
kind of manic and monstrous sex crazed balloon undergoing fatally explosive
decompression.
No. Instead she came back to him.
"Goooood!" Kyle
cried it aloud as she streamed herself back onto him. Rippled herself back
around him. Clenched talon-pointed fingers into the flesh of his shoulders and
gouged out great and quite possibly bleeding chunks of him.
He cried it at the top of his voice. Cried in the harsh and
suffering way a man enduring the most unendurable of tortures at the hands of
the most qualified of experts would cry. Cried it in a thick and phlegm-choked
rasp that echoed savagely over all the surfaces he'd only imagined she would
meet and respond to in her madcap and driven flight.
Paulette's body met his with a violence like none he'd ever
expected.
A violence that didn't come close to what he wanted. Or how he
wanted it.
She quivered her way over him, her inner flesh now damp and
clinging, moist and coveting, outright wet and unabashedly greedy to retain
what she captured.
"Paul…letttttttttttttte…"
If she made any sound in reply, Kyle didn't hear it.
He thought he'd gone beyond hearing. Gone beyond recognizing or
responding to any senses not directly connected with and intimately a part of
the drag of consuming female flesh across the seared and scarred length of his
dick.
In so many ways, none of his other senses had any use or
importance now. Not in a world gone mad. A world gone sex-mad, delight-mad,
satisfaction-mad. A world in which only rippling female flesh existed, and only
the sound of succulent female sighs of eagerness mixed and intertwined with the
hoarse rasp of his continued, repeated cries. A world made up almost
exclusively of such cries, emanating from a body wasted by pleasure and ruined
by the experience of pleasure.
It was a world without sight.
Without sound other than the sighs and the cries.
A world of flesh made unreal, bodies rendered unreliable, minds
reduced to their basest, most basic function.
Pleasure.
In every way it was possible, just…pleasure!
This was going too fast.
Paulette didn't know how to stop it. Or slow it down. Even a
little.
Not only was it going too fast, with the end already in sight,
this was something totally new. Something she'd never expected to do, or even
participate in. Something so out of the ordinary that the very difference in it
fueled the fire of passions long since run away. Long since gotten out of
control, and which announced in no uncertain terms there was never going to be
any getting them back into control.
Not this time around, for sure.
Beneath her, Kyle lay still. She had no idea if he couldn't move
because he was in shock, stunned and startled half out of his mind by her
unexpected forward behavior, or if it was because he didn't want to move. If he
was enjoying this every bit as much as the dazed and dazzled expression on his
face kept telling her he enjoyed it.
Either way, he didn't move.
Except for hands that had gained and now maintained an iron-clad
grip upon her hips first and her upper arms afterward, he gave no sign that he
might be capable of movement.
The same, however, could not be said for her.
For her, it was the very opposite. With her body poised upon his,
impaled and penetrated so fully by his, it was impossible not to move.
The very idea of stillness, of hesitation or the slightest
faltering seemed…sacrilegious. Somehow.
Kyle held her as she moved
upon him. He didn't so much guide her as steady her. Allowing her to find her
own path, determine her own speed, decide upon her own course within certain
highly prescribed limits, he simply held her where she was. Held her so that,
with all the freedom he allowed and even seemed to encourage, she was in no way
free to leave…no way free to end what she had begun.
He held her, didn't help her, seemed to expect infinitely much
more from her. And the sensation of it, the notion that the man beneath her
would wait to accept whatever she had to give and chose to give…needed
to give…was so different from anything she'd known before that it left her
breathless. Lost in a welter of terror that at any moment the dream of passion
might come crashing down around her. Like so much faulty and overrated
construction, right around her ears.
Her encounters with men before having been chiefly with the
condescending and self-centered Tom, of course.
And so she continued. Exactly as she had every intention of
continuing for as long as Kyle allowed her to continue.
Or until the end arrived.
Whichever came first.
The rod of flesh upon which she'd situated herself seemed larger
than it had on their previous encounter. So much larger, so much hotter, so
much heavier with its promise of relief and sustenance that for a moment she
actually felt her heart miss a beat or two. As if the man, Kyle, who had become
so intensely and intimately familiar in the short stretch of time since she'd
all but killed him with her car was someone else now entirely. As if the man
who wore Kyle's face and smelled the way she remembered Kyle smelled and
sounded, when he made a long and drawn out sighing-groaning sound…the way she
remembered he should sound…wasn't the real Kyle at all. As if some kind of
impassioned impostor had crept in to take his place. And reap rewards that
should be, were intended to be, his.
Of course that was ridiculous. Paulette knew it was. Even before
the man beneath her whispered her name.
"Paulette!"
His eyes, gazing up at her with new and never before known
infatuation, were indeed Kyle's eyes. And the soul she saw looking back at her
from their sparkling, sparking ocean-blue depths was his.
She didn't respond.
Not with words, for there were no words. No ability to
utter words.
There was only the moment. Only the flesh that, now that she'd
found it, was not going to be relinquished soon. Was not going to be
relinquished at all until her body told her the time was right. Until her body
completely and unequivocally satisfied itself.
When she swung her hips in a
slanting downward arc, using the natural angle at which his engorged and
swollen shaft stood away from his body to stroke him into her at a
corresponding angle designed to incite utter, complete madness, her flesh clung
to him. It clung greedily. Loath to give him up. Even if it really and truly
was necessary to give him up in order to achieve greater results. Greater and
even more inciting depths of penetration.
Kyle held her upper arms. And in turn she clutched his shoulders.
Clutched them tight, hard enough to damage and bruise.
Breath sobbed in her throat.
Tearing as it entered, tearing harder still as it struggled its way back out
around muscles that worked hard, straining, as all the other internal muscles
she possessed strained. Though in a completely different, delightfully
different sort of way.
Her breath could scarcely find its path in and out. And the
result, the sharp and strangled sounds she emitted without meaning to make the
slightest sound at all, seemed terribly loud in a room from which afternoon's
light had begun to flee. From which hazy snow-light had mostly fled already,
its gleam from behind closed curtains shining now with a subtle blueness of
twilit skies and lingering sunlight higher up. Far, far above them.
She tried to answer.
Tried to speak the one simple syllable of his name.
But it was no use.
Words failed.
The only means of communication left to her, the only method
remaining in which she could make known her terrible and still-mounting
desires, her runaway dreams, her bone-deep and aching needs, was the motion of
her body.
Hesitating at the end of every sloping arc, Paulette pressed
herself, the moist and quivering flesh at the center of herself, against his
abdomen. She pressed herself tight against the trembling base of the shaft she
clutched with manic purpose and unyielding ferocity with that very, selfsame,
moistened and maddened female center.
She hesitated long enough for Kyle to groan repeatedly, in low and
suffering tones. Tones that begged, also without words or any apparent
capability of creating words, for her to keep on. Keep it up. Don't stop,
never stop. She hesitated long enough that, obviously convinced she meant
to stop forever and leave him to suffer untold and irreversible torments of
destruction, his hands tightened their grip. So long that his fingers dug deep,
seeming to seek to snap the bones of her upper arms. So long that his arms and
hands jerked, just as obviously wanting and needing to create some kind of
motion that would urge her back into motion.
She hesitated, stopped, waited.
Gave him the chance to suffer.
And then, inevitably, driven by the deep-purple spiraling inside
her that would not be convinced to abate or take its time, she shoved hard with
her knees. Pressed them deep into the firm and sturdy cushions of the lounge
that seemed to have been made…seemed to have been specifically engineered and
angled by its creator…for just this kind of wanton and wonderful activity. She
pressed them deep. And then lifted herself away. Lifted herself off him,
surrendering the length of him only grudgingly. With tearings of flesh and
rippings of sanity at least the equal of the increasing difficulty of the
breaths that tore themselves from her lungs.
She straightened her legs. And the natural result was that she
slipped upward. Away again, reversing her original angle of approach. Until she
reached the end of him.
She allowed herself to slip away to the point where Kyle's fingers
convulsed harder. As did his body. Until he made superhuman efforts to prevent
her slipping any farther, slipping completely away.
And there, at that most desperate and despairing of points, she
halted again. As before, to wait. To look for exactly the moment when the next
searing plunge would be most effective. When it would do utmost damage by
creating the most infinite friction it was possible for flesh to create and
fuel against opposing flesh.
She did it time and again. Each time a little faster. Each time
with a little less waiting and hesitation and with correspondingly escalating
degrees of suffering for both of them.
She did it until, quite suddenly, Kyle's grip gelled around her
arms.
Until very suddenly she found herself restricted at the bottom of
one of those down-sloping arcs, held in place by hands that no longer seemed
incapable of acting. Until she found herself held fully opened around him, with
his shaft immersed and throbbing almost in anger at the hungriest depth of her.
"No," he said quite clearly, quite determinedly. "No
more."
"No…" She didn't have any idea what she meant to say.
Where that failed beginning might have been intended to lead.
She knew only that she was trying to agree with him. Only that
there could indeed be no more. Of the hesitation. The waiting. Though most
certainly the torment and suffering were meant to go on and on and on, right
into infinity. Right into forever, beginning with this moment and ending at no
time she could see before her. No time she could so much as imagine ever being
clear to her.
She agreed.
No more.
The next sound that escaped her tightened and still tightening
throat was something of a grunt. A low and desperate expression of agreement
that fell woefully short of expressing exactly how desperate she grew in
the very moment of agreement. Or how desperately much she required suitable
satisfaction if her life was to proceed from here on out.
"Nnnnnooooooooooo…moooore!" When they finally did manage
to escape, Paulette's words carried all the despairing heartache and hunger of
her previous attempt…of the guttural, inhuman groans that had come before.
In response, Kyle's hands tightened more. He smiled a little, too.
Smiled only barely, in the way of a man who has lost almost all the reason and
sensibility required to form any kind of human expression. And he contracted
his arms. Sharply. Hard. Contracted them to pull her harder against him. Harder
down. Forcing her body to open again, open wider than it had ever been willing
to open for any reason. For anyone.
His arms jerked as he closed
the last tiny millimeter of distance that separated them and marked them as
distinct individuals with existence apart from one another. His arms jerked as
he urged her, demanded her, forced her, to become a part of him. Forever and
inextricably.
And with the jerking and the struggling and the opening of her
body, something extraordinary happened. Something extraordinarily powerful.
The seething she'd long felt inside, the hungry yearning for
things she could never name because she'd never had the smallest clue exactly
what those things might be or why she wanted them, turned to a deeper burning.
A harder and more resilient one that had no beginning and no end. Because in
that moment the burning of heat and desire she felt was more a part of him
than it was of her. The heat had its beginning somewhere in the body pressed so
tightly against her own that she now felt everything it felt. And had its
ending there as well.
A loop had formed.
A magical circle.
Born of lust, and greed, and no small amount of shared
reciprocated passion, it was a circle that joined the two of them now and,
Paulette knew with a sudden certainty that startled as much as it amazed and
delighted, would continue to join them for as long as they existed. As long,
she felt just as certain, as time itself existed. And perhaps, quite possibly,
in every event probably, for even longer.
That couldn't be.
They didn't have time.
Didn't have forever.
Paulette's mind faltered, but not her body.
Engaged fully in the battle they'd entered for supremacy and
control and the very, very last word, her body could not falter. Could not
deviate from the course either Kyle or she had set for it. Or perhaps the
course had been set by the two of them, acting in tandem and combination.
She knew only that now that she had begun, now that she had seen
the advancing outcome of this moment, this acceptance of him and his invasion
of her at her own instigation, it could not and would not be stopped. Not in
any way except the one, the only, way that offered conclusion with the
possibility of survival.
She had to see this through.
Had to think, and worry, about forever later. When she had her
sanity back. When her mind took to functioning properly again, and the ache of
insatiable hunger…
She tried to lift herself away from him. Needed to lift, in
order to reach the end that, while it loomed so desperately and tantalizingly
close still hovered far enough out of reach that the distance destroyed what
little shreds of sanity she did retain. Enough distance to break her
heart, her mind. Her will.
"No." Kyle was firm. In the sound of his voice and the
feel of his hands upon her.
Somehow, at some point when she'd been distracted elsewhere,
probably with her dazzled thoughts of forever and the absurd impossibility of
any chance at forever, Kyle had moved his hands. Had left her upper arms, left
them free to flex and reach, free enough to move that her hands could now grasp
at his shoulders, his neck, his throat, anything they might encounter.
He'd left them behind. Had returned his killing grip to her hips.
The better to wrest the last vestiges of control from her.
The better to grind her down. Grind her onto him. Force her body
to take up a whole series of new and circular motions upon the molten, jerking
length of his shaft.
Much better to urge her into that motion as if he sought to show
her the way. A new way. A more potent and, despite the inability to lift
herself and drag herself the way her body craved lifting and dragging, even
more satisfying way.
Her body wanted only to feel the stroke of his swollen flesh along
its suffering inner length. Her body actually hurt, physically, with sensations
powerful enough to kill…hurt to have the satisfaction that would come with that
delightful, soothing, antagonizing stroking. To have it soon, have it now, have
it immediately.
Her body wanted all that it had had and known before. And it
wanted this new thing, too.
It wanted the sensation of wider and wider opening. Impossibly
wide and torturous opening as Kyle urged her to remain so closely and
improbably linked with his. As the jerking in his arms decreased a little, just
enough to allow some semblance of control over what she was doing and what he
was doing to her.
Her body wanted more of the softening that began with the
circling, varied and unpredictable pressures his shaft exerted upon the inside
of her.
It wanted the softening she'd known so little, known so sparingly,
in a life that had offered precious little opportunity for softening. It wanted
the kind of softening Kyle had taught her earlier in the day. For the first
time in her life. It wanted the softening that preceded the first light misting,
the one that came exactly simultaneously with the misting. It wanted the one
singular, inexpressible and incomparable moment when the building inside would
stop. When the early, hesitant signals of release would creep over her. Into
her. Through her.
Very suddenly, more suddenly than ever before, Paulette went limp.
She felt the electric vitality of life seep from her pores, every
pore, as the misting inside broke free at last. As it broke all the way to the
surface.
As it surrounded Kyle with its
softening effect, its ethereal and altogether insubstantial shimmer of ease.
She felt all vitality flow outward from every part of her. Felt it spiral into
hushed and ever-darkening twilit air that now, like her, retained very little
of the vibrancy of day. Air that began to sink inexorably into some other
place, some other form of existence. Some other…and she hardly dared allow
herself to think about all the implications and complications of it…state of
being. One that would never, ever and could never, ever be altered. No matter
how much effort she might want to put into it. Might actually succeed in
putting into it.
Her body lost form.
Just that quickly, just that abruptly, as it opened one more
time…what had to be one last and permanent time…she became…nothing!
Nothing at all of what had
been her previous self.
Joined to Kyle, inseparable and in no way distinguishable from him
as at last the clouds of mist with which she surrounded him turned to something
more substantial, as they became the only substantial and definable part of
her, she became someone entirely new. Someone she didn't know. Someone she'd
never expected to find existing deep inside her. Someone she'd never realized
needed to be set free, but whom she recognized completely and intimately once
freedom was inexplicably granted.
Paulette groaned.
It was a deep sound. Born of release. A sound that emanated from
the depths of her lungs, from her diaphragm and rib cage and the tissues that
connected one part of her to the next, and the next, and the next. A sound that
found its origination and its power in whatever small parts of her still
allowed her to be her and to retain the form in which she had always been her.
It was a sound wrapped around, a part of, the most intrinsic and
inarguable essence of, the dark and glistening rush of release that burst like
fireworks, like the most powerful and destructive weapon ever devised by the
mind of man, from a body that otherwise possessed no kind of power at all.
It was a psychotic break.
Kyle had heard about such things. Usually whispered as something
approaching legend or rumor, though he'd learned as he grew older that a
psychotic break was exactly what his Uncle Hank had suffered when he'd been
about eight and Unc had been found one afternoon stark-naked, standing at a
busy bus stop in Golden, calmly waiting for the three-forty-five into the city.
Kyle had heard about psychotic breaks often enough after that.
Had heard plenty.
But until this moment, until the sudden bursting of misted
moisture from the female body with which he found himself completely captivated
and completely obsessed, he'd never in his life expected to know exactly how a
psychotic break felt. How good old Uncle Hank had felt in those free and
easy moments at the bus stop, briefcase in hand and reality nowhere in sight.
Kyle's mind reeled. It swam.
Stumbled over hidden obstacles never before encountered and tripped right,
headlong, over the edge of reality.
His mind would never be the same.
What Paulette had done to it, what she continued to do to it…
It was like nothing encountered before.
It was like Uncle Hank's psychotic break, and for the briefest of
instants Kyle's swimming, dying mind struggled with the concept that the same
thing was about to happen to him. Minus the briefcase and the three-forty-five,
of course.
He struggled for a moment. Struggled mightily.
Then he just gave up.
The struggle was bigger than him. Bigger than both of them. And
the thing that was happening, what was going on inside Paulette, streaming from
her and building at a somewhat slower but no less deadly rate inside
himself…that was bigger, too. So much bigger that the last shards of his ruined
mind could no longer wrap themselves around it. Could no longer fasten upon it
at all, or make any kind of logical and sane sense of it.
He felt a depleting heaviness inside. A warning that there was
soon to be an explosion. That he was about to give his all, quite possibly give
his life. A warning that there could be nothing less than giving his life. And
with that heaviness came an emptying of the soul and the spirit. A draining
away of everything not intimately and directly connected with the heaviness. A
losing of all that had once been him. A losing that was now final, was now
irreversible, was now complete.
Tilting his head back,
pressing its top hard against the curved and curled lip of the lounge, Kyle
gritted his teeth. Beads of sweat, as heavy and pressurized as the internal
rising he could not stop, slid over his forehead and temples, his brow and
cheeks. He felt the drenching of it. Felt the tormented tightening of muscle
and sinew in his throat and chest, felt a new and alarming stuttering of a
heart that, previously healthy, suddenly decided it could and would take no
more. He felt all of those things, yet only in the most general of ways. Only
in the most disconnected and distant. For his body was no more present than his
mind, its sufferings no more real than the swirling and shimmering echoes of
sanity that so quickly deserted him. So quickly, in the time it took to utter
one long and savage, eviscerating breath between the clenched tightness of his
teeth, blackness dropped down upon him like a stifling blanket of night. Like
the fog that had overtaken the streets and the entire city in the earliest
hours of the long-ago morning. Fog that had very nearly cost him his life.
Fog that now would cost him his life, fog that had no mercy
or compassion.
Paulette moved; a silken and
insufferable fire atop him. Upon him.
He thought…dimly remembered…he had initiated the swaying motion of
her hips in an effort to encourage her to quit the leaving that had been so
painful, so intolerable, even when his failing mind had realized it was
absolutely necessary if she was to come back to him and incite him. But now she
was the one who carried through. It was she and no one else who kept the wildly
exotic flow of motion in motion. She who murmured in sweet-soft, searing
circles. She who applied herself with renewed vigor to the aching, staggering,
startled dick that had not yet, not quite, decided it was time to give up the
way his mind had long since given up.
She hurt him.
Used him.
Abused him.
And the pressure only built.
It seemed certain that in another moment, surely no more, a great and jagged
opening must rip in his abdomen somewhere close to the point where Paulette's
glistening, showering flesh stroked its living nightmares of delight and wanton
delirium into him. It seemed certain that was the only way the pressure was
ever going to release…seemed certain there could be no other way.
His body had no opening that could accommodate the rising flush
and rush of superheated agony. No opening that could possibly allow its release
without sustaining even greater damage than a great and gaping hole.
His body had no apparent wish to find another way.
But of course it did.
He felt a jerk. A hard one.
For a moment he thought it was Paulette, surrendering to the
sudden and voluminous outpouring of her body's most jealously guarded essence.
For a moment he thought she, like he, lost all other sense and all other
knowledge of existence. For that moment, rejoicing in the heat and the deluge
that inundated him, and her, and everything between and around them, he was
able to make himself believe it was her.
Then he realized the pressure had gone.
Vanished.
And in its place hung a hollow lightness. A sense that that last,
shivering part of himself had fled. Leaving only a used-up husk of himself, one
that would never regain its previous state of being.
Gone, vanished. And in its place hung a hot and jubilant delight.
He had given as he thought he would. Given all, given everything.
And was still somehow, miraculously, alive to talk about it. When and if speech
ever again became a possibility.
Paulette lagged a little behind.
She had given some. For a moment it seemed the great and exuberant
rush of misted moonlight pouring from her must be an equally complete release,
an equally complete and draining finish. But as it turned out that was only the
beginning.
In the moment when he came, exploding so much gratitude and hope
into the willing depths of her super-softened and thoroughly receptive body,
Paulette groaned. And it was a long groan. An almost harsh one, that snapped
him at least partway out of the dream of lethargy into which he'd been plunged
by the departure of his mind and his soul.
She groaned. Said something he couldn't decipher and couldn't
interpret. Leaned over him to dangle her breasts, small and firm, lovely
breasts, over him and to entangle grasping, clutching fingers deep into the mat
of hair at the center of his chest. And once she grasped, she pulled.
It was a painful pulling. Kyle thought not a deliberate one.
A look at Paulette's face said she was no more capable of
deliberation, no more capable of conscious thought or action of any kind than
he had been capable a moment before.
She looked…lost.
Or maybe 'transported' would be a better way
to say…think…it.
Definitely she had gone
somewhere else. Definitely she had lost as much of herself as she'd stolen from
him. And maybe, very probably, that was why he felt he'd come back to himself
only to find he had undergone some kind of fundamental and dramatic change.
Only to suspect he had indeed become someone else. Someone who was no longer
Kyle Storm, no longer really recognizable as the old and independent Kyle
Storm, someone who had at some point taken on most if not all the
characteristics that had once belonged entirely and exclusively to Paulette
Patterson.
In some strange and inexplicable way, with the bursting of her
upon him, he became at least partly her. And she…
Kyle shivered.
Did Paulette likewise become partly him? Did she take on some of his feelings, his thoughts, his emotions
and memories?
And if she did, did she even realize it?
Looking at her, too drained and exhausted to do more than focus
his eyes dreamily upon the lovely face bent so close to his, he thought she
couldn't realize anything. He saw nothing of rationality, nothing of
realization in that face. In those eyes that, fluttering open, seemed to have
the very greatest difficulty fixing their gaze upon him. Or recognizing him
even when they did.
She groaned.
Her body jerked suddenly. Violently.
It jerked, in its own way, harder than his dick had ever thought
of jerking, ever attempted to jerk.
It jerked from the top of her head to the tiniest reaches of her
toes. Bucking and gyrating with a welling of need that in the next second
reached completion.
Her body twisted.
Side to side.
Her fingers flexed mightily, with manic strength. Ready to rip the
hair she clutched free of his chest by the roots. Ready to rip, as even the
pressure he himself had felt and feared so recently had not been capable of
ripping, the greatest of bleeding, aching holes in his flesh.
Her back arched.
Her eyes closed again. Closed abruptly.
Her head lolled back upon her neck, languorously. It rolled side
to side with each increasing, spasmodic jerk that emanated from all the rest of
her…rolled helplessly. Seeming not to be a part of her any more, just as his
own had not been a part of him when he'd been caught up in the clutches of
similarly overpowering throes.
Paulette jerked once. Twice. Again.
She cried out, a sound that
was not a groan and not any other kind of human and intelligible sound either.
Cried out as something shattered and spilled deep within her.
The heat of its spilling washed, a miniature and still-deadly
tsunami, over the remains of Kyle.
Incredibly, his dick had not shrunk immediately upon reaching
completion, so lost in its own satisfaction that it never gave a moment's
consideration to what anyone else must feel. No. Incredibly, it stood strong
and straight even after the completion of satisfaction. Reacting, perhaps, to
the unbroken passion with which Paulette continued to lavish him. Or perhaps to
the knowledge, born of the change and the alteration that he could no longer be
concerned primarily with himself and the things he felt.
Perhaps his dick, like the shell-shocked remains of his sanity,
had tumbled to the fact that there was no more him. There was no more her.
Now, forever, there was only them.
Together. Inseparable.
Paulette jerked one last time. Approaching seizure.
Her back arched so that it was painful to witness, bowing her body
away from him. Her head rolled again, loosely and uselessly. Her lips parted
and a low sound, a feral and animal one, broke free in the same instant that
the final flooding of essence, the final misting and drenching of all that she
was poured from her body.
Kyle felt one last kick, a small but powerful one, deep down
inside. A reminder that he was not dead as of yet. Not quite. A reminder that
in his present drained and ruined condition, this woman had all the power over
him. All the power to seduce and continue seducing, all the power to manage and
control how he thought and what he thought. What he felt. What he would be and
would become in the not too distant future.
His body kicked.
Hers gave a last, almost gentle, twitch.
And she collapsed.
Falling forward onto him with
a new groan, a fresh one that once again sounded human and familiar, she
allowed the connection to sever. Allowed her whisper-light and no longer
frantic flesh to slip away from him and free him. Allowed his, sinking rapidly
now that the moment for which it had prepared and strengthened itself had
passed, to slip away from her.
She had no weight as she lay upon him, quivering.
She had, right along with him, given all of that up.
Had become as different in intangible ways as he.
As altered.
"Paulette?" Kyle wanted to get her attention. He tried
to get her attention, though there was nothing else he could do. He could only
whisper. His arms, leaden with exhaustion, could not be convinced to move. His
eyes, half-shut, could not be urged to open fully. His heart, hammering still,
would not be calmed.
She lay unmoving.
Her breath came in desperate gasps, rasping and harsh in air he
discovered, with no small amount of wonder and amazement, had at some point
lost the very last of its light and taken on the quality and consistency of
night once again. Her shoulders shook and heaved. Her body, coated with a fine
filming of sweat that might have whispered from her every pore and might just
as easily have been a product of his, prickled suddenly with goose-flesh as the
wind outside struck the big living room window a mighty blast.
The wind rose again.
A new storm was on the way. Just as the good folks down at Channel
Seven had predicted early this morning.
A fresh blast of arctic wind swept in from Canada even as they lay
there, intertwined and intermingled upon the deep-blue lounge.
It was going to be another long night.
Another terribly cold one. Filled with snow. Quite possibly, if
Channel Seven remained as accurate as usual, a night filled with the terrors
and pitfalls of blizzard.
But he wouldn't have to spend it alone.
A new, profound and endless joy constricted Kyle's heart as he
realized he wouldn't have to spend another night alone ever, suffering in the
cold of winter or struggling with the heat of summer.
For now, for ever, he would not have to.
"Paulette."
Still she didn't move.
"What?" she asked, and then no more.
Then nothing except the waiting and the patience, the idea that
she was indeed going to lie just as she was for all the rest of forever, a part
of him and all of him. All that continued to matter of him.
"It's cold."
In response, she shivered.
Caught in the grips of her snow fever, she'd worn herself out.
The notion brought the tiniest of smiles to his lips. The
faintest, and most fragile.
Snow fever.
That was one of the most ridiculous notions he'd ever heard. But
he was going to remember it. Was bound to remember it, for as long as he had
memory to serve him.
As if she picked up on his thought, the layering of prickly goose
flesh on Paulette's arms and legs, on every part of her that could be subject
to such prickling and puckering, increased. Grew more pronounced. As did the
shivering that was no longer quivering.
Somehow he found strength to move his arms.
They hitched a little and twitched a little, stumbling awkwardly
as if he'd long ago lost all use of them and only just discovered their motion
mysteriously returned. But they did lift. They did surround. They did close
around her shoulders, did encompass her the way he wanted to encompass her from
this time on. Completely. They did offer all the warmth and comfort he could
find within himself, all he could draw from some hidden store he'd been holding
back in anticipation of a moment just like this.
"Sleep," she murmured.
Kyle couldn't be sure what she meant by that. He couldn't be sure
she meant he should sleep now, which was exactly what he wanted and meant to
do. Or did she mean she needed to sleep, to regain her strength and
equilibrium so that they could…again?
It didn't matter.
One of his hands drifted away from her. The right hand drifted
away. Slipping over the edge of the lounge, it dropped easily, summoned by the
irrevocable pull of gravity to fumble at the floor beneath their resting place.
In search of the blanket he kept folded and hidden there. And then finding it,
his hand dragged itself back up with somewhat more difficulty, burdened now by
the heavy fold of fringed plaid wool.
He flicked the blanket open.
Flicked it over them.
Smoothed it across Paulette's back and arms. And made a final,
weak and ineffectual attempt to bring it across his bare and freezing feet
before his strength, tenuous and uncertain at best, failed entirely. For good.
Paulette
still trembled atop him, still in the circle of his arms as once again they
worked to surround her. But gradually that quieted.
Gradually she ceased to move. And more quickly ceased to gasp for
each and every breath.
Her breathing smoothed itself. Evened itself. Took on the deep and
certain rhythm of sleep.
And as Kyle's eyes drifted shut, his heart secure in the presence
of her, he realized he still knew nothing at all of her.
He still had so many questions. About her and her past. About what
she'd been doing out there in the fog early in the morning, why she'd seemed in
such a terror of hurry to go somewhere or away from somewhere that she
hadn't seen him.
Still so many things his cop's inbred suspicion insisted he had to
know before he could make any kind of a plan for forever.
Things that would wait till later.
Because, sinking deeper and farther toward the blessed ease of sleep,
his heart insisted there would indeed be a 'later'.
Chapter Thirteen
Paulette didn't breathe a sigh of relief until she called his name
four or five times…admittedly very gently and quietly…and he failed to respond.
If there had ever been a time to put her plan into action…
Stealthily, she crept around the room. Gathering articles of
clothing that seemed, despite everything she remembered about the way she'd
undressed earlier, the way she'd been undressed with no small amount of
help from Kyle, to have flung themselves hither and yon. With no particular
rhyme or reason. And into some of the damnedest places.
She had her leggings and
sweater, and one sock on. And was searching diligently, looking over her
shoulder every ten seconds or so to make sure Kyle remained asleep beneath the
dark-plaid blanket he'd dredged up from somewhere and pulled over himself.
Just like before, the matching sock had pulled a vanishing act.
And this time so had her skirt.
She considered briefly going without. Just jamming her shoe on
over bare toes and heel and heading on out, secure that her leggings would
cover enough leg…all of her legs, and keep her covered. But it was only the
briefest of considerations.
Wind roared outside. Shrieking around the corners of the house, it
sounded almost alive, and deadly ravenous. Setting even the low-slung and
sturdy ranch house to rocking beneath its fury.
Every time a fresh gust struck the front of the house broadside,
about every ten seconds or so, the windows rattled in their frames…rattled with
increasing fury.
She needed that sock.
Sparing a moment from her hide-and-seek game with clothing that
had developed a definite mind of its own, she saw that the fog had returned.
Only this time it wasn't the traditional kind of fog made up of suspended
moisture. It was one of snow… of a mad rush of heavily-swirling flakes giving
new whiteness to everything in sight. Everything that had been fairly white to
start with.
This was the blizzard promised by the radio broadcast she'd heard
somewhere, long ago when the day was still light. Perhaps here, perhaps at the
doctor's house or perhaps, most probably, in the car between here and there.
Going without a sock was not going to happen.
It was not a good idea. No
matter how creepy she'd begun to feel. No matter that when she lifted a corner
of curtain away from the back window that looked out over nothing more exciting
than Kyle Storm's back yard and the adjoining one, she had the most ominous
feeling. Like she was being watched. Her every move recorded. By someone who
had too much interest, unnatural interest. Someone who wanted to make a
complete and accurate record of what she did and exactly when she did it.
In order to predict what might happen next?
What she might do next?
Shuddering, Paulette dropped
the curtain back into place.
That was instinct. Telling her she'd stayed in this place, this
diabolically and deliriously delightful place, for too long. Telling her she
should have obeyed its commands in the first place, and moved on earlier. While
the day was light, the streets teemed with a bustle of life and traffic, the
true threat of snow still far off in both time and distance. While she'd had
the advantage, the sanctuary, of anonymity in a crowd.
This was instinct, reiterating that staying in one place this
close to the source of all her troubles and fears was a very, very dangerous
decision. A very, very stupid and possibly even fatal one.
The curtain shivered against the rough-plaster wall, a light panel
of polished cotton in a calmly neutral butternut shade. It couldn't make a
sound. Paulette heard no sound. But it might as well be made of iron, striking
a nearly transparent panel of thin and reverberating brass. Because in the
instant when fabric swished lightly against plaster, Kyle made a startled sound
in the other room. And jerked awake.
"Paulette!" He sounded alarmed.
"Here," she replied, struggling hard to keep her voice
as calm and even as the racing of her heart and the painful pounding of her
pulse were not. "I'm right here in the dining area, Kyle."
He sat up. Pulled the blanket with him and around him so that his
nakedness remained mercifully concealed, and peered into semi-light spilling
into the dining area from dim lights in the adjoining kitchen. "What are
you doing there? What's up? Is something…"
"It's snowing. Hard."
"Well, the radio said it would. For a minute I thought you
were going to start up all that stuff about leaving again."
Paulette's conscience gave a kick. "I really shouldn't stay
here." Twisting her hands together in front of her, palms toward the floor
and fingers tightly interlaced in order to hide their sudden, too-obvious
trembling, she advanced toward the only slightly less dim light of the living
room. "I mean, I really am intruding. I should get out of here and leave
you to…"
"What?" he demanded.
For a minute she misunderstood.
For a minute it seemed he had to be asking what she thought she
expected him to do once she did get out of here and leave him to his own
devices. And a wide assortment of answers rose to her lips.
Get back to your life?
Get the rest you need and let that ankle heal?
Go and bother someone else?
Lie in your bed or on your damned blue lounge and sweat bullets
the way I'm going to sweat them the minute I don't have you near me any more?
She never had a chance to say
any of them.
"What is it?" Kyle asked, expanding the field of
misunderstanding by about a mile.
"A snowstorm?" she answered automatically, a big part of
her focus still locked on their last bit of conversation. "Like you said,
the radio said it was going to…"
"No, not that."
Stumped, at a loss for original thoughts or even words to express
them, Paulette stood very, very still in the archway between rooms.
Her back was to the light.
She knew absolutely that Kyle could see nothing of her but a
dark-outlined silhouette. Knew he could not see the questioning look that
sprang to her face the instant he cut her off. "Then…"
"Something's wrong," he said. "With you. About you."
Oh, God. There they went again.
"What the hell are you trying to prove, Kyle? That you know
how to sound like a cop on a mission? Because if you are…"
She didn't finish the sentence.
Something about the sudden tension in the air, about the way he
stopped moving with the dark blanket tugged high and snug against his
pale-burnished nakedness, something about the way he tilted his head to one
side the very smallest amount, regarding her with every bit as much question in
his expression, stopped her before she could finish anything.
"What would you say if I told you I am a cop?" he
responded at last.
"I'd say you can't be
very good at it."
His face flushed, and that wasn't her imagination. "What the
hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, I mean, come on, Kyle! Running around in the fog like
that? In clothes that couldn't be seen in the dark? Getting yourself run over
by the only car on the street? What kind of cop would do things like that? Any
things like that?"
It wasn't her imagination, either, when she saw him bite down on
his lip. When she saw him bite down hard, and look like it was all he could do
to stem a tide of angry, outraged, defensive words.
Something about this whole
set-up just wasn't right. And Paulette narrowed her eyes.
The conversation, the
questions it aroused, started a niggling of doubt down deep inside her. A tiny
one…a very, very little one. But a definite niggling all the same.
"I could say the reverse is true, you know."
"What?" She blinked rapidly. Trying once again to
readjust her thinking into paths it didn't seem willing or even capable of
following. "Huh? If you're suggesting I can't be a very good
cop…because I have to tell you. That's one idea that's just plain, absolutely,
ridiculous."
"I meant I could just as well say you aren't a very good
driver." Kyle sounded about to snap. He almost snarled at her, and not
without some really good logic to back him up. "What the hell were you
thinking, Paulette?"
"I…"
"Running down the only man in the street. A man, I might add,
who wasn't really in the street. Who only had the misfortune to get run
down because you drove awfully damned close to the curb."
"Semantics." She was prepared to argue the point. She
even started to argue. Only to have him cut her off with a visibly impatient
wave of a hand that released its hold on the blanket just long enough to do it.
"What would you say if I told you I was a cop for real?"
"That of course you're joking. You have to be joking."
But would she?
Was he?
He looked serious when he said
it. Way too serious.
And Paulette's heart jerked.
It skipped a beat.
Rolled over right in the middle of her chest and played dead.
Dear God, he couldn't be.
She wouldn't let him be. Because that would be the worst
kind of luck. Just the most cruelly inhuman trick of fate, to allow her to run
down the only man in the street, who also happened to be the only cop in
the street.
Stoically, she shook her head.
"Okay." Kyle still had that serious look about him. That
way too serious look. "We'll put that aside for now. Because that doesn't
change the fact that something is wrong with you. Or maybe 'wrong for
you' would be a better choice of words. And you are not going out into a
blizzard, no matter what. Whether you decide to tell me what the hell that
something is, or not."
Paulette opened her mouth.
"No!" he insisted, rising up on his lounge as if he was
prepared to jump to his feet, injured ankle and doctor's instructions to stay
strictly off it, or no.
Dear Lord.
He certainly looked like a cop when he did that.
He looked all fierce. And stern. And you'd-better-not-think-about-messing-with
me.
Paulette's heart rolled over again, but instead of playing dead,
this time it solidified to a lump. Of hardened and frozen glacial ice, right in
the center of her chest. A dead and fear-filled lump that had no chance, no
matter what Kyle said or she said from this point on and no matter what either
of them did, of coming back to life any time soon.
"You're not kidding," she declared, not even bothering
to question this time. "Are you?"
"Are you going to tell me what's going on with you? Are you
going to come clean about whatever the hell got me into this predicament, with
my ankle hurting like hell on a hot Sunday afternoon and my entire life hanging
in the balance because I can't afford one more silly, avoidable accident? Or
aren't you?"
"I…" She gestured feebly. Toward the door. "I
really do need to get my car and…"
"Paulette, the street's under a God's foot of snow by now.
And so is the goddamned car. If the sound of that wind is any indicator."
Okay. So he had a point.
Paulette didn't think it would be wise to try to argue that one.
But she did it anyway. She'd kind of…obsessed…on the particular way the
car was damaged. The particular way it sat right out in public, just begging
for someone to turn a distant corner and spot it. The way it listed to one side
on its broken spring in a way that would identify it immediately and
conclusively should the right person just happen to turn that distant corner.
"Fine." Kyle reached for his jeans, discarded
conveniently close to the lounge, right within arms reach. He reached into the
pocket and pulled out the keys to his own car, the same ones she'd thought
about stealing before turning so honest she'd had to return them to him earlier
in the evening. "Take these."
"What?" Stupefied, feeling increasingly and agonizingly
more so with every instant that passed, Paulette could only gape at him. Her
mouth hung loose like the mouth of a congenital idiot, and her eyes no longer
focused. Because they'd taken on many of the characteristics of the idiot as
well. "You want me to take your…"
"I want you to go outside. Now, before the weather gets any
worse and you run the very real risk of getting lost or freezing to death in
the process of finding your goddamned car. I want you to put mine
outside in the driveway. And put yours into the garage."
"Kyle, I really don't th…"
"I want you to do it before I lose the very last of my
patience."
Sitting there with his arm
outstretched, with the ring of keys dangling from one sculpted and gleaming
fingertip, he didn't look like she'd gotten on his very last nerve. Or like he
was about to lose all rationality. But she had to remind herself, almost too
late, that she really didn't know him. Didn't know the first thing about him.
So she decided, more meekly and obediently than she'd done
anything in the past several hours, that it might be a good idea to just go
along with him. Just pretend…
And then when she was
outside…when she was safely out of his sight and in a place where he couldn't
easily follow naked and dependent upon crutches that wouldn't be any good at
all in the kind of weather that waited there, she could just go on about her
business. Just get the hell out of there.
Bending, she reached for her purse. For her gloves, and ID, and
entire life savings, and every other important and vital item it held inside.
The purse lay close to the lounge.
Way too close for safety, and
way too convenient for Kyle.
"No way," he said,
and snatched the purse up in the millisecond before she could gather her
courage. Before she could move close enough to wrap her fingers around its
dangling strap, he pulled it up onto the lounge. Next to him. Right under the
blanket with him. "I know you. You're planning to make a break for it. The
instant you're out of my sight. So, you go ahead and move the cars. Switch them
around any old way you want. But the handbag stays here. The handbag stays with
me. Where I can keep my eye on it until you come back."
"That's my property You can't just hold it hostage."
Kyle smiled. Smugly, she
thought. "I'm not holding anything hostage. You know what they say.
Possession, and all."
"But…but…" Paulette spluttered. Trying to think of a way
out of this mess. And coming up dead, flat, dismally empty. "You
say you're a cop. That means you, of all people, know it's illegal for me to
drive without my license. In my possession."
"Strictly speaking, that would be at the discretion of the
arresting officer." He smiled again. Even more aggravatingly. "If you
promised to produce it within…and anyway, you're going to be in my driveway.
On my private property."
"But…"
God, she was starting to hate him.
He had no idea what he was doing to her. What the result of what
he was doing to her could and very likely would be if she didn't get back on
track, and soon. If she didn't get herself focused on her primary
purpose…getting away.
What was more, what was most annoying and irritating and downright
aggravating of all, he didn't even seem to care.
Of course that wasn't true,
either. And she knew it.
She couldn't forget the way he kept asking over and over,
repeatedly, what was wrong. What was the problem, and what he could do to help
her with it.
For the briefest of seconds the idea flashed through her mind that
maybe she should confide in him. Maybe it was high time she trusted
someone…trusted him, enough to tell him everything. Enough to get all of it off
her chest, and just let the chips fall where they might. For that second as the
idea lingered, it grew. It took form…really, really attractive and irresistible
form…until she shook herself mentally.
And if he did turn out to be a cop?
She felt certain he was
pretending. Using a lie to try to inveigle her into something, or more likely
several somethings, she was determined to avoid at all costs now that she'd
cleared her head and straightened out her thinking.
But if he was?
What if the claim, improbable and transparently outrageous as it
seemed on the surface, was actually the truth?
Without realizing she was going to do it, Paulette shook her head.
If by some chance, even the most remote and patently ridiculous of
chances, Kyle was telling the truth, then admitting to him that she'd been an
integral part, no matter how unsuspecting and unwitting, of one of the biggest
convenience store robbery gangs to hit the city in years would be the worst
thing she could possibly do. The stupidest, most idiotic, most…she didn't even
know the words to describe how dumb a move like that would be.
So she bit down on the inside of her cheek. Hard. Until she tasted
the fresh, metallic warmth of blood on her tongue.
"You have a choice to make." Shaking the ring of keys,
Kyle held them out a little farther. Straining to move them closer,
irresistibly close, to her. "Are you going to switch the cars around and
come back in here where it's warm and moderately sane so we can talk about
this? Or are you going to stand there in the middle of the floor dithering and
fretting all night so that nobody gets any sleep, and nothing gets resolved?"
She didn't move.
"It's your decision. But you need to make it now."
"I…"
"Now, Paulette!"
Slowly, hating herself for doing it, still eyeing the purse he'd
tucked beneath his blanket where even a dynamite blast wouldn't be likely to
jar it loose, still wondering if and wishing she could somehow figure a way to
retrieve it and run with it, Paulette reached out.
She took his ring of keys.
Damn. She hadn't planned on this. The way he made her feel so
guilty with his concern.
Kyle was obviously worried for her. Worried about her. And she
really didn't deserve to be worried about by any decent person. Which she'd
long since decided he was, cop or not, in the kindness of his heart. Kyle Storm
had to be the most decent and caring man she'd ever met.
If only she could have crossed his path sooner.
About ten years sooner.
Pulling her coat tight and
snug around her, folding her arms protectively across its buttoned front as if
the folding could offer more security from icy blasts of wind that very nearly
tore the front door off its hinges and out of her hands when she swung it wide,
Paulette stepped outside.
Into the gale.
The wind battered her immediately. Snow-laden as only January
blasts of air swept down from the highest heights of the
It was a bitter wind. An unforgiving one. Reminding her again…as
if she needed reminding…that she had dallied far too long in one place. That no
matter how warm and inviting this place was, it was not for her. Would never be
for her or belong to her. Because Tom was out there. And Tom would see to it
that he found her.
Ducking her head, she scuttled along the short length of sidewalk
leading to the driveway. A frozen burn of tossed and flung snow struck the
small strip of flesh exposed between the low-tugged brim of the stocking cap
she'd grabbed from Kyle's coat rack and the up-turned collar of her coat. The
coat was old and battered, but made of heavy wool just the same. And it felt
thin as tissue in this onslaught.
Reaching the corner of the garage, she punched in the door code
Kyle had given her. And hurried inside, his keys clutched tight in the palm of
her hand.
Kyle peered out the big front window. Balancing on one foot since
he hadn't had time or the inclination to retrieve his crutches, he watched
until she disappeared from sight around the side of the garage entry, and then
he pulled on his jeans. Frowning.
She was in trouble.
He'd been sure of it right from the start. Right from the moment
he'd first felt the sinister kiss of her car's front fender and realized he was
no longer firmly attached to planet Earth…realized he was flying. In a way no
man, woman, or child had ever been meant or designed to fly, alone and unaided.
Flying with the most terrible sound ever heard still echoing in his ears and
the most incredible pain shooting the length of his leg and hip. Pain that was
nearly paralytic in its intensity and endless agony.
He wished he could figure out exactly what the hell kind of
trouble it was. But that wasn't likely to happen unless Paulette decided she
was good-and-damned ready to tell him. Which didn't seem very likely at all.
God knew he'd tried.
He'd poked. Prodded. Done his level best, and used all the tricks
he knew to try to get to the bottom of it. As gently as he knew how to get to
the bottom of it. All to no avail.
Every time he tried, no matter how much concern he put into it or
how hard he worked to make her understand that she could trust him…could count
on him no matter what the hell had gone so wrong in her world…she clammed up.
Refused to reveal the smallest clue about herself. Refused at times even to
look him in the eye.
Like she was ashamed of something.
Pulling back a little, automatically, from the wide window that
had steamed with the heat of his breath, Kyle felt his heart miss a beat.
That was an interesting possibility.
One he hadn't considered before.
For a minute or two after she
disappeared around the corner and into the garage, then again while his car
slipped backward out of it, all the way to the end of the driveway, his mind
reeled.
He'd assumed Paulette was
afraid of something, but…what could she possibly have to be ashamed of?
He was a pretty damned good
judge of character, if he did say so himself. Good enough to feel certain that
this woman, this wide-eyed, sometimes breathless and always gentle woman,
couldn't possibly have done anything in her lifetime to make her ashamed.
She was good.
Sweet-natured. Gentle. Naturally honorable, and decent to her very
core.
He'd stake his reputation on it.
Every bit of his reputation.
Even the last small shards he'd managed to hold together after his last
escapade …prior to the current one, of course…the one with the roller coaster
at Lakewood Park and a spiral fracture to his elbow that had had the captain in
the world's genuinely worst mood for a good month or so.
Something was sure as hell wrong. And Paulette was sure as hell
ashamed of it. Worried sick about it. Scared to death of it.
Her purse hung heavy from his hand.
He wouldn't look inside. He hated to look inside any woman's
purse, even when he knew she was hauling illegal drugs inside it, even when he
had a search warrant authorizing the search and knew it was the only way he was
ever going to be able to arrest her and get the drugs off the street.
It was one of his biggest failings…in the captain's and some of
the other officers' eyes, anyway. That he had the capacity to feel compunction
about such things.
But he did, and there it was.
He had Paulette's purse in his
hand. Very probably the answers to all his questions were right there inside,
and he was not going to look.
His own sense of honor and propriety, of a person's fundamental
right to privacy in even the worst and most compromising of situations, wouldn't
let him look. But he sure as hell had no qualms about hanging on to it. No
qualms at all about feeling its uncommon weight, and gauging from it that she'd
packed up house in a hurry. That she'd thrown whatever necessities she'd been
able to grab into it all helter-skelter and haphazard in her rush to hit the
road.
This was the purse of a woman on the run. And he had no problem
holding it hostage, exactly as she'd claimed.
It was his insurance policy. Dedicated to forcing her to come
back. So he could try one more time, and one more and then one more or a dozen
more after that. To get her to confide in him. Let him see what he could do to
help her. Because he wanted to help her. Because he cared about her,
cared about what happened to her.
In the driveway, his car's dark finish had already whitened. It
was already well along in the process of vanishing beneath a heavy mantle of
freshly fallen snow. As was Paulette nearly hidden by a twisting and at times
opaque curtain of drifting snow swept ahead of a gusting and howling wind as
she hurried back to her own car. His now sat, temporarily, he hoped, at the
very end of the driveway. It sat with its rear end hanging a foot or two out
into the cul-de-sac, right where it would be most vulnerable to attack by old
Mrs. Petrovich next door, who never could seem to remember to look
before she backed her behemoth Caddy into the street.
Paulette barely bothered to run a hand and arm across her car's
windshield before she climbed in. Kyle watched her ease the sad-sack Camry into
the garage. He watched it slowly, slowly, and cautiously slip from sight,
watched until nothing was left to tell the tale of its presence except the
blood-ruby glow of tail lights from the garage. A bloody gleam across snow that
had already shifted and stirred beneath the brush of the wind, so that her
footprints and the tracks of both cars were already halfway obliterated.
Halfway to being nothing but a memory.
The red lights extinguished.
And Kyle waited, expecting her to reappear, her head down again,
her steps rushed and brisk as she fought her way back through the wind and the
pounding of more flakes, thousands and millions of flakes, swirling in mad
profusion against the front of the house. Flakes that scoured windows, doors,
walls, with sandpapery rasps. Flakes that were more ice crystals now than the
huge, floating and drifting bits of lace that had fallen in the earlier part of
the storm.
He expected her to appear.
And when she did not, he
straightened away from the window. His fingers went suddenly tight against the
windowsill. The heaviness of her purse still dragged against his hand, a
constant reminder that she would not flee. That he had in his possession all
the items she would need in order to flee.
And yet…
His heart hitched. It jerked. It stuttered and stammered, and he
glanced behind him, wildly in shirt and crutches. Wondering how the hell long
it would take to assemble all of those things, to clothe himself enough to
avoid immediate immersion in and death at the hands of the expanding blizzard.
Wondering, too, how difficult it would be to negotiate whitened sidewalks and
driveways, and the softer areas of grass around the side and back of the house.
Obviously she'd fled in that direction. She'd had to, since he
would have seen her if she'd left by way of the street in front of the house.
Obviously she'd decided she would find a way to get by without the
few possessions she was going to need if she meant to go anywhere.
It was hopeless.
It wouldn't work.
He couldn't go after her.
Crutches on snow, on any slippery surface, were hazardous. Deadly.
No way to travel, especially when a man was in a hurry and a woman was on the
run from God still only knew what.
He'd be committing suicide if he even tried.
But he had to try something. That was for certain.
He'd expected her to appear. When she didn't immediately, he'd
managed to convince himself in less than a second that she had gone, despite
everything that was working against her. And then when she did reappear,
for an instant he could barely believe it. Could barely believe the way his
heart filled with a new, not entirely rational, lightness.
She'd decided to stay!
Nothing else mattered. Could be allowed to matter.
Paulette strode purposefully from the garage. His keys dangled
from her hand. Her car now sat hidden and secure in the place where he should
have insisted she hide it right from the beginning, for reasons he was still no
closer to understanding, other than that hiding it seemed absolutely essential
to her peace of mind.
They were out of the woods
now. At last.
Kyle felt that way until Paulette lifted her head to gaze along
the length of the cul-de-sac.
It was a casual gesture. The most casual, the kind of gesture
anyone might make in a similar situation. The gesture of a person glancing up
to see where she was going, to make sure she was going where she wanted.
It was entirely casual. And yet the most peculiar, most strangely significant
gesture he thought he'd ever seen anyone make.
In the instant when Paulette lifted her head to look out into the
street, the swirl of snow paused. Or that was how it seemed. Like the entire
world just suddenly ground to a halt, hesitating briefly in the weird way
storms had of hesitating in order to catch their breath and gird themselves for
the next, the much more serious and fully realized, blast.
Out on the cul-de-sac, the wind held its breath. The windows at
the front of the house ceased their impatient rattling against their sturdy
vinyl-clad frames, and the secret drifting of breeze around Kyle's feet halted.
For a split second he felt warm. Like summertime lingered out
there, and not the predicted worst blizzard of the last fifteen years.
When the wind stopped, so did the maddened snow-swirl.
The air between Paulette and the cul-de-sac, between her and
everything that lay outside the cul-de-sac and beyond it, cleared. And she
stood. Frozen in place, her attention caught. Held.
Kyle stared hard into the distance. But whatever it was, he didn't
see.
Whatever it was, it must have been there and gone, in just the
instant it had taken him to realize anything was there at all.
Paulette had had her hand up. It was still up when the wind found
itself again. When its infuriated shriek resumed, and the dancing obliteration
of windswept snow returned.
Behind her, the garage door rumbled to life. Hiding the evidence
for good.
Evidence?
Kyle fought back a shiver.
That was one hell of a weird
way to think of it. But he was a firm believer in the old 'if the shoe fits'
method of assigning labels. And in this case, the shoe really did fit. As snug
and secure as one custom made for a distinctly twisted and unnatural foot.
He expected her to go back to
his car. Expected her to trek through the snow, expected her to pull his back
up to the garage and out of harm's way.
She didn't.
She just stood. Watching something
he couldn't see. Something he increasingly believed she hadn't seen entirely
either. Something that might be, very probably had been a figment of the dark
and hidden depths of her imagination. Something he'd never be able to fathom,
much less see.
Much less make sense of.
She stood. As if it was
vitally important for her to remain precisely where she was until the garage
door finished its downward, concealing sweep. And then…only then, did
she move. Not toward his car. Simultaneous with the resumption of the wind's
manic howling, she lowered her hand. Turned toward the house, and vaulted
toward the front door, up the short flight of steps to the stoop, only to seem
to lose all ability to operate the doorknob once she got there.
She struggled, barely visible
now at such a sharp angle from his vantage point at the front window.
Bending to retrieve his
crutches, Kyle settled them beneath his arms.
Hopefully he could manage to
move without falling flat on his face. Hopefully he could get himself to the door
and find out what the hell was going on with her before she froze to death out
there, scant inches from the warmth and safety she could not seem to reach on
her own.
He was turning toward the
door, was already planning exactly how to lever himself down the inner stairs,
when the door flew open. Suddenly. Explosively.
Jumping, startled, he nearly
lost his balance.
Flung by a deliberate thrust
of the wind or maybe by an excited or terrified hand, flung most likely by
both, the door exploded into the house. It crashed into the red-brick
wall that marked the side of the small front landing with an impact so
shattering Kyle felt sure it would resound inside his head for probably the
next ten years. The violence of its flinging should have destroyed completely
not only the triple-diamond panes of glass mounted in the upper half of the
door, but the sturdy wood itself.
"What the living hell?"
Kyle demanded as the door bounced off the wall.
Bounced.
"Jesus Christ, Paulette."
His voice squeaked. Shamelessly. In a way that should embarrass the shit out of
a grown and mature man, and would have embarrassed the shit out of him
for sure if he hadn't been too rattled and dumbfounded to care about
embarrassment. About even the possibility of being embarrassed.
She looked up at him. And her
eyes blazed.
Kyle wanted to fall back. He
wanted to fall away from a spouting of fire like none he'd seen in a human
being's eyes before. Fire he never wanted to see in a person's eyes again. Ever.
"There's a car." She
was breathless. "Down on the street."
Her hand and arm, when she
raised them to point in the general direction of the cul-de-sac and the street,
was perfectly steady. Peculiarly steady, when he felt like he was just
about to come apart at every seam. Her hand and arm were as calm and steady as
if she'd never been anything but perfectly steady and in control of herself.
"What?"
"It was going real slow."
She didn't sound so calm. She didn't sound calm at all.
And collected, in charge of
herself?
Forget about it!
"It was down there. In
the next block. On the bigger street."
"A car."
She nodded.
Looking for me.
The words, ludicrous as they
seemed and ridiculous as they unquestionably were, insinuated themselves into
Kyle's thoughts, even though she didn't actually say them. And once there they
just spun around and around and around. Refusing to be dislodged. Refusing to
give him a moment's peace until he acknowledged them for what he suspected he'd
realized for some time they really were.
The truth.
"Be reasonable, Paulette.
That's where cars go. Along the street."
"This one…"
"No. Listen to me. Hear
me out. Just for a second."
"It was going slow, Kyle!
It was looking for me."
"You've got to get hold
of yourself, Paulette. It's the middle of a blizzard. Or at least one hell of a
beginning to a middle of a blizzard. One for the record books. No one's going
to be out there in this, looking for anybody."
"You don't know. Kyle,
you can't…"
Snow fever, be damned.
That was a pale-ass excuse for
what was happening, and everybody knew it. It had always been a pale-ass and
purely ridiculous excuse. And just like that, Kyle accepted the other truth.
The real one.
Just like that, just that
quickly and with that little effort, he admitted it silently to himself and to
the snow-laden night outside.
That someone was after
her.
Someone was looking for
her; someone was bent upon finding her.
Just that suddenly the whole
thing made sense.
Because having someone after
her put everything…all of it, the crash with the car, the no longer silly or
repetitive insistence that her car wasn't safe in plain view in his driveway,
and even the notion that she had to get out of here and get along on her
way to wherever the hell she was so damned determined to run…into perfectly
logical, utterly inarguable perspective.
Someone was after Paulette.
And he…
"Tell me about it,"
he ordered when his gaze met hers and he saw the first, unmistakable glitter of
tears about to fall from the wet, glimmering depths of her hazel-green eyes.
Chapter Fifteen
"I got in over my head," Paulette
mourned, turning her back on him. Turning to walk away from him, her
chin held just high enough to counteract and contradict the telltale slump of
shoulders that hinted nothing was nearly as right as she persisted in trying to
pretend.
"You got into what
over your head?"
She just walked away. Waved a
none-too-steady hand briefly behind her back, her face and the no doubt
entirely telltale expression stamped there hidden completely from him.
Completely, deliberately from him.
"You can't just say a
thing like that and walk away," he protested as she made the sharp right
turn into the bathroom at the top of the short flight of stairs leading to the
house's highest level. And shut the door behind her. Not quite with a slam, but
with a definite thump that told a tale all its own…a thump meant to keep him
out. And to keep her feelings, whatever she'd come so amazingly close to
revealing in the few seconds since she'd torn back into the house in a
near-panic, shut away as well.
Now Kyle felt his shoulders
slump.
"There has to be a way,"
he muttered to himself, turning toward the kitchen.
Liquor, maybe?
He cast a quick glance at the
closed cupboard that held his small supply of liquor and spirits. A woefully
small and inadequate supply. Being mostly a beer man himself, mostly a cold
Coors light on a hot, hot afternoon type, he generally had little use for the
other stuff. The stronger, harder stuff. And he didn't have a clue if Paulette
felt the same way. If she imbibed at all.
He'd sniffed her breath on the
sly after the episode that should have revealed a drinking problem…after the
car accident down the street. And he'd come up empty.
He'd smelled breath mints.
Nothing else.
And his job had taught him
that no breath mint in the world was strong enough to hide the kind of
plastered - within - an-inch - of - her - life drunkenness he'd first suspected
once his head cleared a little and he'd realized he wasn't dead. Once he'd
concluded he was very much alive, and in the kind of mortal pain few living men
ever actually find themselves forced to experience.
Still, if anyone he'd ever
encountered needed a good, stiff drink, it was the white-faced and wide-eyed
woman who'd burst back into the house after what was supposed to be a routine
mission to move a couple of cars and restore her peace of mind.
He took a couple of the heavy,
low-sided glasses he'd had for half of forever down from the cupboard, and
along with them the bottle of Ron Bacardi.
She looked like a rum and coke
kind of girl.
And the rum wouldn't knock her
for a loop the way ten-year-old scotch would. It wouldn't get her so inebriated
she'd be unable to discuss anything rationally. Which would kind of defeat the
purpose of trying to loosen her up and ease her over-reactive tensions in the
first place.
Water ran in the bathroom.
Kyle heard the small gurgle in the kitchen sink that always accompanied it.
Quickly, he poured.
A light layer of rum. Then a
little more. Then more still.
Didn't want the damned thing
to be too weak, either. That would accomplish even less than getting her
rip-roaring drunk.
It was tough going, getting to
the refrigerator on crutches with two half-formed drinks in tow. Luckily, he
was able to slide them most of the way along the counter that occupied two
walls of a kitchen designed for cooking way, way more than he'd ever had the
desire or the patience to cook. He slid them almost all the way, with brief
pauses for lifting across the twin pits of the double sink. Then he added ice,
topped off the drinks with Coke, and took a long and deeply appreciative swig
from one.
Who the hell was he kidding,
anyway?
It had been one nasty-ass kind
of day. In just about every way, good and bad, that a day could be nasty-ass.
Clearly, he needed a good stiff drink or two himself.
Behind him, soft footsteps
thump-de-bumped down the stairs from the upper level. They paused in the living
room for just about the length of time he figured it took Paulette to realize
he was nowhere in sight, and not lurking in any of the very few hiding places the
room offered. Then they resumed. Hurrying around the end of the intervening
wall, only to stop again just before she entered the kitchen.
"There you are," she
said, and he couldn't mistake what he heard in her voice.
She sounded relieved.
Really-sick-to-your-stomach
and ready-to-pass-out-relieved.
"Here I am."
Balanced on one foot against the counter, Kyle motioned with his glass. He
pointed with it toward its twin, darkly-full and faintly fizzing, waiting on
the counter for her.
Paulette crossed the room. She
lifted the glass, took the very smallest of sips, and wrinkled her nose. "How
much of that stuff did you put in there?" she demanded, looking at the
bottle he'd forgotten to put away. The just-started bottle of Ron Bacardi.
"Why? Too strong?"
"No." She sipped
again. Sipped longer, then sighed a little. "I'd say you're an excellent
bartender. If a bar ever decides to charge by the glassful for their booze."
He sipped again too. A little
slower than before. "So when are you going to tell me what's up? When are
you going to explain that last remark, and tell me how you got in over your
head? And how the hell I can help you get out?"
With her free hand, she
reached for the refrigerator door. "How about you feed me first?"
Kyle knew she was hedging. He
knew she was hoping to divert him with what was supposed to be every male
member of the species' primary concern…well, okay, his secondary
concern, anyway. In the hope he'd forget all about what he wanted to know. In
the hope she'd slide out of this much more easily than he had any intention of
letting anyone slide. Out of anything.
"There's not much in
there," he countered. Playing along.
"How the hell should I
know?"
"It's your house."
"It's something my mom
brought over."
Paulette arched an eyebrow. "So
you have a mom, do you?"
"Of course I have a mom.
What the hell's that got to do…"
"And what else do you
have?" Smiling in a way that sent up every warning flag he…any man…had
ever possessed, Paulette advanced again. She advanced on him in one of those
ways that could be very, very good or very, exceedingly bad. Just depending.
She was hedging again.
Hedging big time, in a way
that was bound to get her into a very different kind of trouble. If she didn't
watch what the hell she was doing.
"My mom thinks I don't
eat enough," he countered, hoping to veer her slowly, surely, back onto
the path he meant for her…their conversation…to take. "She claims I don't
eat right, and…I don't know. Paulette. For God's sake, you've got to…"
"Funny. I never
considered Jell-o a health food." Dipping her finger into the decidedly not
health food whipped dairy topping his mom liked to toss in with her cut and
cubed Jell-o, Paulette licked it. Appreciatively.
Unbidden though certainly not
unexpectedly, his dick danced. Also appreciatively.
A little more of that, and he
was likely to…
"It's better than cheese
curls and Jose's taco wagon deep-fried burritos. Paulette…"
She leaned back against the
counter. Lifting a cube of topping-coated Jell-o…how the hell she hung on to
the slithery, slippery thing was beyond him…she popped it into her mouth. And
sucked.
Jesus, God in heaven, how the
woman sucked!
His dick felt ready to
explode.
Literally.
"Listen, will you?"
he demanded, fighting off an urge to grasp it between both hands and try to
massage the agony out of it. "This isn't about me. This is about…"
"No, it's not. It's about
me being hungry, because I haven't eaten a thing all day." So saying, she
lifted another cube. Gripped it just as miraculously with the fingers that
wouldn't and didn't let go. "It's about me being starved."
"Can you at least use a
fork? That's hardly sanitary."
Her eyes widened. Silken dark
arches of eyebrow lifted in a way that set a few assorted parts of him to
lifting eagerly at the same time, and she flashed him a wicked-pixie grin that
was sure to start the lifting in anything else that hadn't quite made up its
mind.
His dick ached.
Burned.
Twitched uneasily inside his
jeans.
Not good.
Or maybe very, very
good. The jury was still out on that one, too.
"After all we've been
through together, you're worried about being sanitary?" Lifting another
cube, slipping her lips around it and the fingers that grasped it, cream-coated
and as delectable as any heaven-sent treat his mom had ever insisted he eat,
she sucked it in. In that same old way. The way that did set him to
thumping. For sure. So hard and so persistently he nearly thumped himself
backwards across the room.
"Don't do that, Paulette."
Wide-eyed, she did.
Again.
"The time really has come
for us to talk."
And again.
Thump, thump, ache and strain.
"I think I deserve a few
answers. Don't you?"
At least that got her to stop
the fingers-cream-lips thing. "How so?"
"Well, come on." He
wished like hell he could retrieve his crutches. Wished like anything he could
trust himself to remain upright on them long enough to get out of the kitchen,
out of her sight, out of sight of that damned, decadent Jell-o he felt sure his
mother had never regarded in exactly this kind of light.
Wished like hell he could
trust himself even to move without doing something desperate. Something
completely, horrifically deranged.
"You're in my house,"
he continued after an interval suitable, he hoped to high heaven, to get his
thoughts, his expression, and most of all his voice back into line. "You
damned near killed me. You accepted shelter from me even though I could tell
you didn't want to. And now you're standing there eating the goddamned Jell-o
my mother made for me. Of course I deserve some answers."
He thought she was going to
throw the bowl of Jell-o cubes. If not straight at him, her aim no doubt as
deadly and unavoidable as everything else about her, then certainly to the
floor.
He thought he must look a
little green. A little strained and a lot pale from the combination of anger,
stress, and just too much the hell happening in the last less-than-twenty-four
hours. And of course the too much the hell that was going on right at the
moment between his legs.
* * * *
Paulette squinted at him, the
bowl balanced a little uncertainly in her hand.
He looked…odd.
The word didn't do justice to
the queer and unfathomable light that burned in his eyes and filtered out to
taint the rest of his face. But it was the best she could do. After all, she had
been feeling decidedly uncomfortable in the last few seconds. Like she didn't
know he was deadly. Like she had failed in all stupidity to recognize the true
danger of sticking around here for any more of his…and she wasn't going to go
down that road, for sure. Not even in her innermost, most private and secure
thoughts!
He looked…
He took a step.
Paulette almost cried out, in
her own pain as much as in alarm at what she saw when he stepped on his wrapped
and injured ankle.
But if there was pain, if
there was any kind of sensation there at all, he gave no sign. His eyes simply
burned. His gaze never swept away from her. Never lost its grip upon her.
And hers remained tightly
focused on him. To the exclusion of all else. As if all else had magically
ceased to exist. As if at the very least all else had magically and
mysteriously ceased to have any kind of significance.
Which she supposed could be
the truth.
Certainly in that moment, with
her gaze locked to Kyle's and her heart pounding, struggling to reach out
through silent and no longer chill new-evening air to discern the beating of
his and match it stroke for quivering, shuddering stroke, all other thoughts
slipped far into the back of her mind. Even thoughts of Tom and the menace he
represented…the menace the sidekicks who would do his dirty work at his beck
and call represented.
She forgot almost without a
second thought even the dark and creeping truck, witnessed from a distance of
several blocks, that her heart had recognized and known. Because her heart had
feared that truck for far too long. Feared the driver of that truck, whoever
the driver might turn out to be.
Looking at Kyle now as all of
those things slipped from her mind with shocking ease, Paulette felt her heart
stutter. Her palms slicked instantly with sweat and her pulse kicked up a notch
or two.
Nothing, now, would be enough
to make her turn her gaze away from his.
Nothing in the universe was
strong enough to do that.
The connection between them,
the one she hadn't wanted to forge and had fought like hell every step of the
way while she'd been forging it, was that strong. That unbendable. That…
Kyle took another step
forward.
His hands lifted, then dropped
to her shoulders. Large and warm, warm and eternally strong, they closed around
the outermost rounds of her shoulders. And didn't let go. Didn't give a sign
they would ever let go again. For any reason.
That was fine with her.
In that moment, locked in by
the searing, pulsing waves of energy he radiated from every pore of his body,
letting go was the singular most undesirable thing Paulette thought could
happen.
The very most
undesirable.
"Kyle?" It was a question.
Though it certainly didn't need to be.
There was no question at all
in either Paulette's mind or her staggering, struggling heart about what was
happening here. Exactly and specifically what was happening.
"Paulette." Gaze
never wavering, eyes never losing the grip they had found and maintained upon
hers, he sounded amused. Almost.
His voice was thick.
Incredibly hoarse, incredibly unsteady, the voice of a man pushed to the
outermost brink of some terrible and intolerable physical limit from which he
felt certain he would never recover. And beneath all the hoarseness and hurt
lurked an undertone of something completely the opposite. Exactly the opposite.
It was an undertone of mirth,
and joy just about to break free. Just about to shatter forever the shell of
hardness and privacy that shut him in and shut his emotions in. That made him a
man she couldn't read easily.
Kyle cleared his throat. He
said her name again, "Paulette."
This time he sounded a little
more like himself. A little more firm and in control though the shell, revealed
now in its broken and battered state as the truly thin and unfinished thing it
really was, was dissolving. Was no longer a threat to her and no longer a
protection of any kind to him.
He cleared his throat. Said
her name in that more-confident tone. And the shell was gone. Completely.
Forever.
Paulette thought she could, if
she tried or if she wanted to try, see right through to his soul in that
instant. She felt all but certain she could see all the answers to all the questions
she'd sought so long and so hard throughout this very longest, most
inexplicable and unpredictable day of a life that had never been famous for its
rationality or its regularity.
She thought she could. But she
shied away. For reasons that weren't clear or focused even to her.
Instead she took a step of her
own.
Not backward, as she might
have done a few seconds before. Instead she stepped forward. Toward him. Toward
the smoldering promise that had never extinguished in his eyes. Toward all the
heat and the lightning and the forbidden, highly dangerous excitement he had
come to represent.
She stepped toward Kyle.
And he took one more step.
Another. Toward her.
Before he suddenly went down.
Whether it was his ankle
sending out a bursting jolt of intolerable pain at last, or whether it was
simply that the bolt had reached through finally to the awareness he'd
temporarily suspended, she didn't know. Or maybe the sudden fall, the crashing
to the kitchen floor with one hand hooking her arm to pull her down with him,
was entirely intentional. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with pain of any
kind other than the totally different male pain that bulged between his legs.
The one Paulette could actually feel in the expectant air, radiating
with special brutality from the swollen, hot and hungry thing he harbored
there.
Jell-o flew.
Cubes of it sailed, glistening
seductively, through the air.
They pelted to the floor,
their rate of descent somehow much slower than hers, and his. Or maybe the arc
at which they'd flown, hurtling upward at first as she dropped the bowl out
from beneath them, maybe the law of physics that insisted there had to be an
opposite and matching reaction from such a sudden dropping, was so high and so
purposeful that it simply took them longer to reach the floor.
Whatever the case, the bowl
clanged hard against the front of the cabinets. Metal rang as it bounced away
across Spanish floor tiles and came to a halt somewhere in heavy shadow beneath
the dining room table. Then the cubes rained down. Shimmering and quivering,
cool and enormous. Drops and droplets, cream-laden and silky, striking exposed
skin and covered skin, droplets that bounced and slipped, bounced and vibrated.
The crushed remains of the
dessert Kyle's mother had made and brought to him made the going undeniably
treacherous as Kyle rolled Paulette onto her back.
His eyes still burned.
Propping himself up on elbows
that slipped and slid in the midst of the cherry-red destruction, he looked
down at her. And didn't smile.
He didn't smile at all.
Chapter Sixteen
"I'm going to get the truth out of you."
Paulette didn't know whether to take that as a
threat or not. Certainly with the peculiar look in his eyes, the almost
ravenous and more than a little menacing look like none she'd seen in any man's
eyes before, it seemed reasonable it could be a threat. Except that Kyle's
voice, his hand when he lifted it away from the floor to stroke a thin and
succulent layer of softened dessert and tortured cream across the flesh of her
belly were soft. And he had so much of her to stroke. So much flesh revealed
when she went down so unexpectedly and her sweater hitched up to reveal way
more of her mid-section than she preferred to reveal even in the
belly-revealing weather of summer. Silken and seductive stroking. As silken as
the shivery whisper of disturbed cream sinking into her skin.
His voice, his hands, his
attitude.
All were soft. Gentle.
Caressing.
But not his eyes.
They continued to burn with
the same unpredictable light. Light that tried or maybe did more than just try,
light that maybe actually succeeded in slicing deep probes straight into her
heart. Deep, soul-reading probes that could and would pick up every nuance,
every flutter of her now rapidly throbbing heart. Light that would be able with
astonishing ease to discern the true meaning behind each and every throb and
understand every intent, whether it was known to her or not, behind every pause
between throbs.
"You know I will."
"I…" She didn't know
what to say.
There was so much certainty in
his tone, so much of the ring of truth and promise, that it really seemed there
was nothing she could say. Nothing that would make half a lick of
difference in the long run.
Meeting his gaze, she fastened
hers upon it in an effort to stare him down. An effort to out-burn and
out-mesmerize him with the wild and impassioned spiraling of sheer,
unadulterated need she felt gleaming in her own eyes.
Very softly, Kyle laughed.
Very slowly he reached with a
Jell-o stained hand to lift the hem of her sweater even higher. To brush it all
the way up, all the way back. To reveal even more…to reveal aching breasts with
rosy, pointed tips already puckered in the cold air. Rosy circles that
continued to shrivel and wrinkle as another vagrant draft from some unseen
chink or gap swept across the kitchen floor. Almost but not quite carrying a
sparkling of snowflakes in its grip.
Chilled instantly to the bone,
Paulette gasped.
Laughing again, Kyle stroked a
Jell-o coated thumb across the raised and anguished tip of one.
His touch was light. Like
fire. But chilled at the same time in its silkiness, and so laden with the
soothing yet oddly inflammatory burden of Jell-o that the combined effect
became a scintillating smolder of fire about to let loose. Freezing fire that
seemed in that instant or two no different from the sensation of heat where his
thumb touched her and rubbed her. Where his thumb struck blue-white, shocking
sparks from the quivering peak of her breast. No different, either, from
agonizing cold as the breeze changed direction slightly. As it found and
lingered over the semi-liquid coating upon her skin.
Paulette's nipple leaped.
The electrical energy of its
leaping bounded in great and unstoppable waves. All through her body…all
through her mind and her soul. And, or so it seemed, all through the world in
which such things existed. All through the world of the hard and no longer
steady floor that seemed to shift, molten into impassioned and greedy
quicksand, beneath her. All through a world that seemed to reach out hungrily
to swallow her up. Swallow her alive, even as she struggled mightily and with
every last ounce of her strength against the swallowing. At the same time
making no physical move. Not even the most delicate and quavering move.
Gasping again, the shimmer of
Kyle's electricity spread through her. It spread to every corner of her as he
lowered his hand to the floor again. As he raised himself to hands and knees,
levering himself over her. Into a position from which, when he raised that hand
for the second time, still Jell-o laden and still promising its ability to and
intention of inflicting torment, he could easily and quickly grasp the
waistband of her leggings. Easily and quickly lift her hips away from the floor
upon which she could no longer depend for steadiness or stability, and slip
them down. Over her body.
Easily and quickly.
In one sweeping swoop of
movement.
Carrying the ineffectual lace
barrier of her panties along with them.
He shoved the leggings down to
her knees.
Acting upon pure instinct that
drove her emotions and dictated her every movement, Paulette kicked them free.
Or at least she tried to kick away from them and out of them. Kicked a little
futilely, so that he had to help her once again, tugging at the leggings that would
not cooperate. And forcing them, so that in less than the time it took to
realize he'd taken matters into his own hands, Paulette lay naked beneath him.
Naked from the waist down in theory and yet, with her sweater rearranged and
rendered ineffectual as it had been, naked completely with her breasts
straining, stinging and aching in hard-peaked need, toward some as yet unnamed
and most likely unattainable goal of satisfaction.
Complete satisfaction.
"You need to talk."
Finished with the undressing, apparently as finished as time and circumstances
would permit, Kyle lowered his face toward her. He lowered it so far that
before he finished the thought, before the short and on the surface harmless
enough suggestion had a chance to run its length, his lips met her suffering
flesh. His lips stroked savage delights and thoroughly alien, thoroughly
unnerving patterns through the raised, dark bud at the peak of first one
breast, then the other.
"Gooood!" It was a
wail. Not a word. Breaking from her lips just as a rushing freshet of essence,
an entire tidal wave and whirlpool of seething, searching essence, broke
between her legs. Broke and then, flowing freely and without inhibition,
mingled with the ruins of Kyle's mother's dessert on the newly slicked and slippery
Spanish tile kitchen floor.
"You need…" Kyle's
tongue made contact, too.
Intolerable contact. Contact
that caused Paulette to lift her hands in one uncontrolled, convulsing spasm,
to find his hair. To wrap barely controlled and no longer controllable fingers
deep among its roots, grasping its terrible shortness in any way she could. So
she could pull his mouth all the way onto her pleading, demoralized nipple.
"You need to talk."
He resisted the pressure, such as it was. Pulling away from her in exactly the
instant she decided she would die if he didn't come completely to her, and come
immediately, he resisted enough that the distance between them increased. That
he could look down at her once again, his eyes burning anew with the fury she'd
seen and so barely understood moments before. So that he could fasten his gaze
upon her for what surely, undeniably, had to be the last time.
His gaze carried that much
power.
To subdue.
Seduce.
Silence and yet, in its own
strange and inimitable way, to scintillate all kinds of secrets…all kinds of
willingness to deal about the times and methods of revealing those secrets…from
her.
"I'll talk," she
agreed in a barely-quavered breath, much to her own surprise. "But you
have to talk, too."
Apparently satisfied, Kyle came
back long enough to give her a little, just the very barest, most cruel minimum
of what she wanted. "I have nothing to talk about."
"You have s…"
Paulette's words, the thought that went along with them and underlay them,
broke off in a long and sizzling, sibilant hiss as his lips grazed her nipple
only to wander away. Leaving a trail of charred and blackened cosmic
destruction in their wake.
"…sssssssssssecretssssssssss."
"I really don't."
He sounded guilty as hell when
he said it. He sounded exactly, completely, like a man who'd been keeping the
very worst kind of secrets. Secrets that could be worse, even, than the ones
she'd so recently learned Tom was keeping from her…secrets with even more
power, perhaps, to impact her life. And even more power to change it…destroy
it…forever.
Paulette tried to tell herself
that when she shivered right down to the very roots of her being it was because
Kyle chose that moment, that very and precise instant, to close his lips around
the tightened bud of the nipple he'd tormented for far too long with far too
much demon-inspired skill.
She tried to convince herself
she shivered because he began, less than a hair's breadth later, to worry the
engorged nipple with his teeth. And to dance silky, swirling strokes from the
tip of his tongue across its withered, dying flesh in between the slight, light
nips.
"Everyone has…" She
had to pause even to scream. To arch her back nimbly, with a divinely inspired
athletic skill and success she'd never in her life possessed before. She had
to do it, when he gave her nipple a sharper nip. When he followed soon after
with the longest, most sweeping and sinfully seductive stroke of his tongue
yet. "Secre…ttttttts."
"And are you going to
tell me yours?" Kyle's mouth moved against her flesh. Even as he suckled
lightly, even as he hesitated only to begin to suckle in earnest, drawing her
agonized flesh tighter and deeper between the strong barrier of his teeth, he
spoke. And as he did, when he did, she felt the old and familiar, hardly
soothing movement of his lips soft and heated against her flesh. Along with a
newer movement. A much different and in its way infinitely more predatory one.
She felt the searing scald of
his tongue. Felt liquid heat as it formed the syllables, felt liquid torture as
it swept each one aside instantly so it could form newer and even more
devastating ones.
"M…maybe."
He pulled back again. To look
at her again. "Maybe?"
His voice was strong.
How the hell could it be so
strong, how the hell could he be so strong, when she had turned to the same
kind of limpid, shivering and shimmering mass as the mounded cherry ruins of
Jell-o upon and amidst which she lay?
How could he?
It was a mystery of the ages.
One she could scarcely fathom, much less contrive to answer.
And it bothered her.
"I m…might," she
shuddered, more pleading uncertainty in her voice and her tone than either
promise or conviction. "M…maybe I could. B…but you have to…have to…you
have to…"
Kyle laved her breast.
Lightly.
With a gentle and yet
punishing hand, he stroked another thin film of melting cherry sweetness across
it.
With a sudden quaking in his
fingers and his gut, an anguish Paulette had all too unwittingly ignited and
which neither of them seemed equipped to extinguish, Kyle stroked his fingers
across the thrusting heat of her nipple. And watched in almost-detached
fascination as the interaction of the two, woman's scalding flesh and dessert's
sweetening chill, created a new softness in both. A melting of quivering
scarlet-red firmness that turned almost, nearly, to liquid in the space of time
it took him to stop his stroking and lower his head to drink…lower it to press
thirsting and dying, parched lips to that same cherry sweetness.
Somehow, Paulette tasted even
more like herself with the filming of molten cherry upon her and between them.
Somehow, impossible as the
notion had to be, she tasted even sweeter. Even more delectable. And far more
addictive.
"I have to what?" He
scarcely made sense of his own words.
If the truth was to be
admitted, there no longer seemed very much of anything even remotely resembling
sense in the world as it existed now, around them.
There was only sensation.
Only need. Only thirst he
could not quench, never quench, no matter how deeply he might try to drink of
the elusive cherry mist that radiated from and within her body.
"You have to t…tell me
t…too."
"Oh, I do, do I?"
Of course he did.
Kyle knew that.
He'd known it for quite some
time. That the time to come clean and reveal all had long since come. And gone.
Hard as it would be, scary as
hell in every way it was possible for the truth to be scary as hell, he knew he
was going to have to do it.
It was only fair, wasn't it?
If he expected her to make a
clean sweep of things, if he expected her to tell whatever the hell she had on
her mind…and he had long since convinced himself it was something truly
monumental and truly terrible…then it was only fair she should expect him to do
the same. Or maybe, since he'd already tried once to tell her, maybe it would
be more suitable to imagine he might try to convince her that everything
he'd said was true.
He wondered if she would
think, once she came to accept them, his truths were as inconceivable as he'd
started to brace himself for in the revelation of hers.
"S…so."
Sweet Lord, she shook all
over.
Her entire body shook. In open
longing. Open invitation that quickly, irrecoverably, verged into outright
demand for satisfaction. Of the kind Kyle knew for certain she wanted.
Longing and demanding swelled
in and swept from every inch of her. In much the same way she began to mist and
mellow with the escaping heat of her own arousal.
"So you will tell me."
The words grated across his tongue and lips.
Not exactly a warm or friendly
urging.
"And if I don't?"
Kyle laughed. Very softly. In
the way he'd already discovered was Paulette's complete and irreversible
undoing. "I guess if you don't…" He paused to take a lick. A long and
sensuous one. A lapping of the gleaming confection he heaped upon her swollen
and steaming nipple just a breath or two before he lowered his mouth to drink
it away and rescind whatever small measure of relief and cooling it might grant
her. He paused, licked, swallowed the cherry-ripe mouthful, and only then did
he take time to continue. "I'll have to punish you," he promised,
laughing again around the words in a way that made them seem certain promise.
No matter what she did. No matter how clean she came or how completely she
revealed everything she'd been keeping hidden.
"I h…had a
b…boyfriennnnnnnn…d."
Kyle wasn't certain he heard
correctly. There was so much unsteadiness, so many turns of up and down and
sideways and backwards in the shifting lilt of her tone that her words, simple
enough and revealing enough in their very existence, seemed to carry very
little weight. Very little rational, reasonable and understandable meaning.
"Lots of women do."
He clung to the firmness of his own tone by the very slimmest of threads. The
very most fragile and insubstantial thread that might well rip and separate at
any moment. At the next looming, threatening, most inconvenient moment of all
moments. "That usually doesn't drive them to try to kill innocent
bystanders by running them down in the street."
"I d…didn't…t…t…t…oh,
God, Kyle. Do it again? Do it more?"
He'd found the opening to her.
Found it with questing,
questioning fingers. Found it and invaded barely, just with the tips of one or
two. Just enough to part the heaven-soft and heavenly misted folds of her outer
flesh, and just enough to reach the swirling, abandoned, wanton depths that
lurked close beneath. So willingly and readily within his reach.
"D…do it more?"
He did.
Striking for new depths,
deeper and more promising…more punishing, should he choose to stop there and
stay there, depths…Kyle granted a little bit of her request. Just enough, he
hoped with shriveling and all too quickly disintegrating shreds of his own
self-control and ability to think about anything other than the softness of
female flesh he had within his hands, to coax a little more from her.
It was a hope immediately
realized.
He thought.
"I did…n't t…try to kill
you." Her body became a wave of unstoppable movement. She swayed from side
to side endlessly, repetitively, rippling in visible waves against the firmness
of his touch. Against his deliberate denial of predictable continuation of that
touch.
Until she granted him a wish
or two of his own.
"You ran me over."
He inserted his fingertips…it interested him to realize there were two of them,
no longer the single one with which he'd started the exercise of controlling
her and coaxing her in the first place…a little deeper.
They were on the brink of
revelation.
Kyle sensed it coming. He
sensed something coming.
And rewards, he'd learned very
early on in his dealings with Paulette Patterson, stood every chance of
succeeding. Even in situations where threats, or commands, or attempts at
intimidation woefully and utterly failed.
"I t…told you…"
In another moment she would
lose all ability to communicate.
Already her face had taken on
a wan and slack appearance. An otherworldly appearance that said her
consciousness and coherence were slipping away. As rapidly and in much the same
way as the steaming of essence over and across the fingers he slipped ever and
ever deeper into her all too cooperative and responsive body.
He would have to get something
out of her immediately.
Or wait for his results until…
until… whenever…
Chapter Seventeen
"Lots of people have boyfriends," he
grated in a voice Paulette scarcely recognized. "And they don't run around
using that as an excuse for trying to run people over."
"Y…you…" It took all
of her strength and more willpower than she thought she possessed to keep track
of her thoughts. To keep them in order so that she could focus upon them. So
that she could retain the meaning she knew had to lurk amongst them somewhere. "You
never knew anyone with a b…boyf…friend quite like m…mine. Oh, God, Kyle!
Oh dear and loving Gooooooooooood!"
"I don't care, Paulette.
Having a boyfriend is still no excuse for…"
What the hell was he babbling
about?
"What the h…hell…oh,
Jesus, Kyle. Don't stop!" Paulette grabbed his hand when he started to
pull away. She wanted…needed…to stop the removal of the delightful,
incomparable and incontrovertible torment he inflicted with that hand. And so
she grabbed it. Held on tight. Held on with more physical strength than she'd
ever dreamed she could possess, keeping his hand right where it was. With his
fingers inside her. Buried at least partially in the heated heart of her. Where
they could do the most damage. The most good. "What the hell are you
t…talking ab…bout, Kyle?"
"About you almost killing
me this morning."
He showed no sign of being
distracted. No sign of losing even a small amount of his focus.
Moving the hand with which he
sought to and succeeded in dominating her and bending her to his will…all
of his will, in whatever areas he might decide sooner or later to exert it…he
seemed right on top of things. Like he'd never been so focused. Never been so
completely zeroed in on a goal. Or so unshakable about achieving it.
"Who cares ab…bout…"
She gasped as his tormenting fingers made a new plunge. A deeper and in every
possible way more devastating plunge. Crying aloud a little, she struggled to
lift her hips away from the floor. Her back ached, its straining, bowed arch of
need and desperation completely unnatural. Completely impossible physically.
But her hips finally did
manage, just barely, to lift.
"You might say I care."
Damn him, anyway. Damn his
evil, overbearing heart all the way to hell and back.
A couple of times.
He really did sound
unshaken by the entire, intolerable episode.
He sounded like he was
enjoying this. Like he had no earthly intention of letting it come to any kind
of end any time soon. Whereas she…
Oh, God.
She was dying. Was fading
faster and faster with every passing instant, her back straining more than ever
in its struggle to lift her hips from the floor. And her stricken head
thundered. Remorselessly, where she pressed it hard against the slickened,
Jell-o slippery floor tiles. Her fingers scrabbled helplessly. Desperate to
find some kind of steadying grip upon a surface that would not, would never,
permit such grip. Because such a grip had never existed.
She was about to expire for
sure. With her heart pounding out strange rhythms never heard by any person in
the history of the world…rhythms she would never have the chance to enjoy in
all their complex seduction.
She was about to succumb to a
great and gray-streaked blackness that seemed to close in over and around her.
Blackness ready to swallow her up, blackness that coaxed her to give way to the
sudden, swirling loss of sensibility intuition warned lay only moments…half-moments…away.
"I think anybody would
have a right to be concerned about being run down and almost…"
"For God's sake, Kyle!"
Paulette's teeth clenched. They would not be convinced to unclench. Not by any
means of coaxing she could imagine.
Her jaws had locked tight.
Tighter than tight.
Strangling, dying, rabidly and
mindlessly tight.
"Who cares ab…bout…bout…oh,
Goooooood!"
He did it again. Following the
shortest retreat on record, a withdrawal that couldn't be measured in normal
time because it took no time at all and consumed no time at all, he plunged
again. Into her. He shoved the fingers with which he'd impaled and now sought
to incapacitate her farther into her than any pair of fingers…for any reason at
all…had any right to penetrate.
He shoved them into her. And
opened them wide. To spread the shaking, convulsing, rapidly contracting and
streaming layers of her inner flesh wide, until it seemed impossible the
gripping, deeply red strength they had begun to exert upon the invaders could
ever continue.
Impossible. But it did.
Her body gripped him.
It clung to him.
As determined in their own way
as Kyle was in his, the inner layers of her flesh sought to entrap him and hold
him for their own purposes.
Their own infliction of untold
forms of inhuman suffering, perhaps?
In vain, Paulette shook her
head.
She had no clue how she had
gotten to such a state…how her thoughts had become so tangled and snarled that
there seemed no longer any clear beginning to the line of them. And no way for
them to come to any logical conclusion.
"Who cares about what,
Paulette?"
Kyle did something else, then.
Something very, very good.
He made a rapid scissoring
motion with the fingers she had only, foolishly, thought were hers to
imprison. Or punish. And with the motion came another, slight and indistinct,
yet fraught with all kinds of possibilities…all kinds of results and outcomes she
had never even thought to imagine.
It was a circling movement.
A very small one.
Reminiscent of the way he
ground his shaft into her when he rolled his hips around her and over her.
Reminiscent, and yet not at
all the same. For there had always, ever, been only one shaft. Only one
penetration, singular and spectacular as it was, to drive her to the brink
of…she didn't dare even consider what.
There had been only the one.
And now, in the moment when he made a teasing movement, threatening to pull
away what she most craved and coveted just in the instant when she'd finally
realized she did crave and covet, there were two. Two separate invaders,
with two separate wills. Two separate plans. Two that came together sometimes
in truly wondrous ways, reminding her of all Kyle had done to her before and
promising more of the same in some distant, unseen, barely seeable future. Two
that always and inevitably shortly after the coming together separated. Two
that inevitably went their own ways and simultaneously, purposefully as she now
began to suspect, caught her so off guard that the entire planet seemed to
shift uneasily upon its axis. The entire planet seemed to wobble dangerously.
To change the course of its orbit so that nothing, ever, could or would be the
same again.
And the wonder of it…the true
and inarguable wonder…was that all of it was going on inside her. All of it was
completely separate from the storm-riddled night that raged beyond the kitchen
windows, completely removed and in no way even remotely related to the
Jell-o-strewn outer world around her.
All of it became a raging
inferno inside her. A cataclysmic event about to unfurl itself and then, in the
moments and instants and intolerable hours beyond the unfurling, to engulf her.
To engulf Kyle. To engulf for once and for all every thing in every world that
had ever existed.
All inside her!
She strained. Pushed down with
hands pressed hard against the slippery floor. Pressed with hapless hands that
slid and slithered, helpless to attain even the tiniest semblance of stability
that would give her the power to control…control…
"Who cares about what?"
"What?" She could
only squint at him. Could only convince passion-closed eyes to open to the
narrowest of slits, through which it was barely possible to see and not at all
possible to read or make sense of what instinct told her was a very peculiar
expression written across Kyle's face. "What are you t…talk…" She
hissed in delight, and in desperation, at a new thrusting. A new twisting and
separating of the fingers that held her completely powerless and completely at
his mercy. "Wh…what are you…" She groaned when the twisting and
separating stopped. When the plunging began anew. When it began, marvelously
and miraculously, all over again.
"We were talking about
you having a boyfriend." Kyle punctuated the sentence with a short
withdrawal that made her groan aloud in very real, very certainly fatal agony. "We
were talking about how it was no excuse for you to damn near kill me in the
street this morning." This time he turned his sentence into a mad and
unstructured expression of sheer, animal glee with a sharp and none too gentle
re-entry that buried his fingers all the way inside her. All the way to
sharp-boned knuckles that pressed and kneaded tight against the entrance to
her. Against soft and suffering flesh that had never been designed to, never
been intended to, endure such uncompromising and hard-edged pressure.
"P…please…" Paulette
grappled with his hand. She allowed her body to sink, all but exhausted from
its exertions, back to the floor in a limp and ragged huddle. Lifting her hands
with the very last of her available strength, she grappled with and tugged at
his tormenting hand. Trying to end what some small, inner and all-knowing voice
told her was never, ever going to end. Not while she possessed life, and for
certain not while she remained capable of enduring it.
"No." Kyle used his
free hand to brush hers away. "Not until we finish."
"But…" Tears seeped
from beneath her closed eyelids. Hot and scalding, they traced charred paths
along her cheeks before dripping, not at all cooled and not at all tolerable
even then, to the parched and taut flesh of her throat.
Her lungs ached with the
effort to cry out again. Her lungs burned and scorched with all the
force of her barely shed tears.
"And then you said,"
he murmured almost placidly, with another fierce and even brutal grinding of
knuckles into the softest and most vulnerable part of her, "you wanted to
know who cared about me being run over. Who cared about me being almost killed.
And then I said…"
She remembered.
Thought maybe she did.
They'd been talking nonsense.
Spewing gibberish back and forth at each other. And he'd completely
misunderstood the point of something or other she'd been trying to say. Something
completely innocuous. If there really had been a point to it at all.
"No." She said that
firmly, anyway. She managed to put so much heat and so much emphasis into the
word as she spat it from lungs almost too tortured and very nearly too locked to
sustain breath any longer that he had to hear. Couldn't help but hear. Couldn't
help but listen.
And he did.
He actually paused in his
ministrations.
Which wasn't what she wanted.
At all.
"I didn't…" She
found new strength. Enough to grapple with him again, though this time it was a
completely opposite and even more wildly, primitively frantic grappling.
Now she struggled to hold his
hand inside her.
Now she struggled, fierce and
furious with suddenly overwhelming determination, to shove him into her. Shove
his fingers deeper, and prevent the threatened withdrawal.
"I didn't mean who cares
about you being almost run over," she whispered in a scarcely audible
rush. Forcing her eyes to open long after they should have lost the last
capability to open, she blinked her eyes rapidly. Trying to clear away torrents
of stinging sweat that dripped and trickled into them. Trying to rid them, too,
of dampened and clinging, bitterly itching strands of sweat-drenched hair that
clung too close to their corners. "I meant…meant…meant…"
Kyle shoved his hand harder
against her.
And she almost lost her
hard-won, precious focus.
She gasped when his marauding
fingers reached deeper into her. When he resumed the maddening scissoring and
twisting that always, every time it repeated, drove her one, irretrievable step
closer to utter madness.
"I meant…" Clenching
her teeth, she barely managed to spit the exclamation between them. "Who
cares about boyfriends?"
The last word erupted from her
throat in a shriek. An explosion of sound from lungs too long locked to afford
any variation in tone. Lungs that could produce whispers or screams, but
nothing in between…nothing within the normal range of audible expression.
It was a mindless shriek. One
that began with explosion and ended, pathetically and pitiably, with the mewl
of a suffering, sinking kitten.
And then Kyle's composure
dissolved. It simply vanished as a paroxysm at least the equal of hers and in
so many ways the complete annihilation of hers swept over him.
He made one last thrust. Gave
one last twisting cant to the opening of her body, no longer forcibly and no
longer with any kind of difficulty. And then he fell away from her.
A scream echoed in the
snow-chilled air.
It might have been hers.
Might have been his.
A scream of agony, it wrapped
itself around Paulette with tight and piercing claws, scrabbling to reach into
the heart of her. Scrabbling to rip the living heart out of her, as if it knew
she was absolutely powerless to stop it.
"Please, Kyle!" Her
hands sought him. Found him and then, to their very great dismay and fury,
could not hold him. Could not even feel him, so useless and overwrought had the
nervous system upon which they depended for feeling and holding become. "Please,
please, please!"
She had no idea what she begged for. No idea why
she begged, or how to stop the steady, slurring stream of pleas that took on
lives of their own the instant they struck the air outside her throat and
realized they were freed from their confinement within. Pleas that bounced
around and around the kitchen, only to return to them. Only to hover over the
two of them in clouds of swirling, energized, persistent virulence.
Kyle groaned.
He came to her. Closed in on
her.
His face shone hot with sweat.
His hair, much too short for her taste, much too short to be gripped and
twisted and fondled in all the ways she wanted to grip and twist and fondle,
dripped with it and stuck even the short length of it to his skull in darkly
swirling patterns that closely resembled the hovering swarm. So closely that
they seemed actually to be part and parcel, the heart of, that very same swarm.
His face was strained. Taut.
Tight.
Not a face she had known
before, it was the face of some mad and maniacal stranger. The face of a man
bent upon doing to her all the savage, unspeakable things she longed…had always
longed…for a sinister stranger to do.
He was her fantasy.
It was a strange realization.
But it could be nothing other than the truth.
As he came to her, as he moved
over her, struggling with one hand to unzip his jeans and shed them in a
maddened frenzy of kicking, grunting, sweating and shivering energy, he was the
ultimate fantasy man.
Kyle…not Tom, never the likes
of insolent and insufferable Tom…was the man her mother had always warned her
about.
The one, her mother had warned
her in no uncertain terms, she should never trust.
Never give way to. Never
surrender to.
Chapter Eighteen
He couldn't wait to get inside.
That was the one overwhelming, the one overweening
and not to be ignored thought that kept sweeping like a maelstrom through Kyle's
thoughts. The one that kept ricocheting like a fever…perhaps even a snow
fever…newly hatched through every last, single cell and sinew of his body.
He couldn't wait to get inside
her!
Inside Paulette.
And when his jeans resisted
him, seeming suddenly devil-designed to be unmanageable with one hand the way
he'd managed them dozens…make that hundreds…of times in his life before,
under all sorts of circumstances, he wanted to rip them. Wanted to shred the
heavy denim to bits as if it had no more strength and far less substance than
the curtains of snow sweeping the streets outside.
He wanted to…almost had
to…dispose of his jeans by destroying them.
But at the last moment the
fastening, damned and demonic thing from hell that it was, released. At the
last moment the heavy zipper responded to fingers gone almost too rubbery to
manipulate a tab grown so tiny in that same short instant that once again he
worried. Knew.
He was never going to be able
to grasp again.
Then things worked out. Then,
almost too late for his survival or his sanity, the button slipped from its
too-small hole. The zipper slid down with a loud and reproachful growling, as
if it meant to promise it would find another time. Another day. Another chance,
to defeat him for sure.
At last, taking altogether too
many precious seconds away from the object of his desire, he managed to shove
his jeans down. His boxer shorts went with them, and he was free. Of them. All
of them.
It seemed, with whatever part
of his mind still retained ability to take note of and delight in the odd and
humorous aspects of life in a universe and galaxy dominated mostly by torture
of the kind Paulette knew all too well how to dish out, that he'd done a
terrible amount of that recently.
Kicking away. Kicking free.
It seemed to the increasingly
snow-fever riddled remnant of his brain that that was all he'd had time
to do lately. And something inside him, some small and failing voice that might
be the very last of his common sense, whispered he had it bad. He had an
irrecoverable case of…
God only knew what.
Shivering, shuddering, Kyle
descended over and onto Paulette before the thought could take root. Not that,
even firmly rooted and thoroughly viable, it would stand any chance of changing
his mind or the course of action his mind had long since set for him.
Some things were written in
stone.
This was one of them.
"We have…" he began,
poking the tip of his by now thoroughly over-wrought and outraged dick against
its chosen, desired target, "to learn to take these things a little
slower."
Paulette's eyes slid open.
That was the only way he could
describe what they did. The fluid and almost melodic way they drifted in the
direction opposite of shut, seeming controlled more by whim than by muscles,
more by instinct than by any kind of conscious, reasoning thought.
Her eyes slid open and she
stared up at him. Almost as if she didn't recognize him. "Haven't we been?"
she whispered in a tremulous and shallow voice that did nothing at all to ease
the sudden, straining impatience in a dick that, as usual in the less than
twenty four hours since he'd met up with her and become more involved than he'd
ever wanted or anticipated, wasn't going to wait one whole hell of a lot
longer.
Already he felt the
preliminary burn. The rising scorch that marked the beginning of the end. The
one that in better times and better days, days when he wasn't consumed by
terrible and yawning snow fevers that would not allow him to wait, came only
after hours and hours of languorous play. The rising scorch that, likewise in
those now far off and mostly forgotten days had marked some kind of dim
midpoint. Some kind of irrelevant division at which play would gradually cease
and other, more strenuous and purposeful business would start to take shape.
The rising scorch that, in the best of his times, meant he still had hours more
to go. Long stretches of languor and laziness to enjoy to their fullest before
things got really serious…got right down to the wire.
It just wasn't that way with
Paulette. Never had been and, he felt with the deepest instinct with which it
was possible to feel, never would be again.
Because he felt the burn now.
Already After just these few minutes. So that it seemed likely, just as in his
last encounter or two with the inestimable Paulette, things were well on their
way to fruition. Right here, and right now.
She was still looking at him.
Her eyes, her entire face and
expression, had the softly hazed look of a cat gorged on the most delicious
cream. A cat just about to lick its whiskers with greedy glee at what it had
accomplished.
Her eyes burned too.
Just like the ravaged inner
parts of him.
Kyle heard himself groan.
The sound seemed like it came
from someone else. But only seemed that way, because he knew beyond
doubt it came from him. He felt the warm ripple of it inside his throat, felt
the slight quivering of muscle as the groan escaped his throat to hang,
unanswered and unanswerable, in chilly, cherry Jell-o scented air.
On the groan, with the groan,
he insinuated himself into Paulette. Though that time the choice of words was
fundamentally inaccurate. And wholly inappropriate.
To insinuate implied
slowness. The careful and even deliberately misleading reaching of a desired
point by some roundabout and not readily discernable route. And neither could
have been farther from what he did.
He shoved into her.
Shoved the entire length of his engorged and suffering dick into waiting
warmth, parting folds, the deep and almost endless channel that lay beyond
those folds. The warmth, the folds, the channel that were supposed to give
relief.
Supposed to, but…
Groaning louder, the quaver of
his voice tearing enormous and suffering holes in what had until that moment
been a relatively peaceful and serene evening, he shoved as hard as he could.
Shoved hard enough that he should have sent Paulette scooting, sliding backward
away from him across the well-lubricated and none too reliable surface of the
kitchen floor.
Should have.
Didn't.
Because she'd taken to clinging
to him in the most peculiar way. The most determined and not to be shaken kind
of way.
Arms wrapped around him, legs
too, she held him with uncommon strength. Strength made up not of any normal
human desire or passion, but of something completely different. Something
supernatural that had no place in any normal, everyday human world of which he'd
ever been a part. Not even a world where passion could no longer describe what
she was giving him. With every second that passed and every amount of energy she
expended in holding him tight so that she could give it to him.
Well, he was willing…make that
eager…to take. He was more than willing to suffer whatever she might
have in store for him, if it would only…he would gladly suffer whatever she
might choose to give in the coming, fraught and distressed moments.
Groaning again, this time with
an exceptionally soft and guttural sound, Kyle made no attempt to resist the
ferocity of her grip. Instead he allowed it. Even encouraged it, murmuring
softly in wordless approval when her arms and legs tightened around him. When
she drew upon some boundless and inexplicable source of superhuman energy to
encompass him with all of herself. And more. With the very, needing and
seething aura of herself.
"How come," he
gasped, sweat beading hard on his forehead…sweat, despite the chill effect of
air that continued to whisper in unseen draughts and breezes around them,
caressing them with icy touches as it did its damnedest to insinuate itself
through them and into them.
How come.
And then no more.
"How c…come…"
Paulette gasped. She cried out. She made a responding groaning, almost mewling,
sound when he struck bottom. When he reached the absolute limit of her and
showed every sign of lingering there, just as he'd so enjoyed lingering on
their previous encounters. Especially when that very selfsame lingering caused
her to react in the only way she could. The only way he ever wanted her to
react.
With a tightening. A
moistening. A sudden, heated flow from the same deep recesses and reaches
disturbed by his entry and his presence. With a dozen such delightful,
desirable moistenings and tightenings.
"How come," he
responded around a sharp and even more rasped inhalation of breath, "things
always progress this way with you?"
"P…progress h…how?"
He laughed. Softly. "Lickety-split."
"D…do th…th…"
Kyle withdrew.
Terribly, unforgivably, Kyle
ceased suddenly to linger. Terribly and twice as unforgivably he actually
reversed the direction of the movement Paulette found so delightful. So scintillating
and so very, very, very full of the promise of satisfaction she feared
he would none too soon deliver.
"Do they?" Her
question, short as it was, was almost inaudible. Even to herself. She had that
little breath left…that little ability to control what breath she did have, to
direct it into paths that might serve some kind of constructive purpose.
Kyle only laughed.
It was his trademark, that
very, very soft laugh as he began his next plunge. The one she sensed must
bring the throbbing pulsing with which he impaled her, and the whole rest of
the world, to an end. An untimely one. An unfortunate one. But an all too
inevitable once, since she already had the answer to her own barely heard
question. She already knew the answer in her heart, and had begun to regret the
utter finality of it even before Kyle offered up his shaky, barely there
version.
"You know they do."
Paulette made no reply.
She no longer had breath even
for the shortest of replies.
"I always promise myself
I'm going to enj…joy y…you." It was clear he held on, to self-control and
the will even to exercise self-control, by the very thinnest of threads. The
very most gossamer and easily destroyed of threads.
He began to shake.
Arms, legs, the taut and hard
body Paulette held more tightly than ever within the constricting circle of her
own arms and legs, seeking to and succeeding in holding him to her forever. For
as long as forever should exist in her mind, in his heart, in a universe spun
wildly, unpredictably and in the next second not at all lamentably, out of
control.
Sweat dripped from his brow.
Heavy, anguished droplets of it combined into even larger, even heavier and
more gravity-driven beads as they flowed downward. Droplets formed into beads
and then the beads united themselves as well. Into rivulets. Rivers. Seeking
out the dark smoothness of hair around his temples, seeking to soak it through.
And then, even though the beads and droplets and rivers had nowhere else to go,
they vanished. Re-absorbed, no doubt, by quivering flesh that must surely be
approaching the limit of sweat it had to contribute.
Eyes closed, lower lip caught
firmly between exquisite white teeth…caught almost firmly enough to cause
serious and lasting physical damage…Kyle touched the bottom of her once more.
"I always promise myself
I'll take it slow," he murmured, no longer gasping as he seemed to achieve
some kind of second strength. "I always tell myself this time I'll take
the time. Have the time. To enjoy you. And then…"
Self-control began to shatter.
In a kind of slow motion that
was puzzling to watch and even more incomprehensible when Paulette realized the
very, selfsame thing was happening in every part of the inside of her, it
simply crumbled. From the inside out. The center out.
Slowly at first, but then
faster, and faster, and faster. As the jerking in the shaft he kept buried
inside her mounted. As the shaft itself seemed to take over when he lost the
ability. As his hips, no longer at all hampered or hindered by the rigidly
closed circle of her legs, began a new movement. A very special, very agitating
one.
Around and around, they swung.
Exerting new kinds of
pressures. All new kinds. All different varieties. Upon Paulette's most tender
inner flesh. Urging it to respond, demanding it respond, forcing it to respond
even though her heart said he was right.
It was not yet time! Not yet
enough!
And then her body overflowed.
Heated essence rose to the
surface. It threatened to boil over in the precise instant when Kyle's heat
rose and added to it. The precise instant when the combined essence of them
sparked to life in snow-fevered night air.
They came together. With
mutual cries made up of part satisfaction, part regret, and almost entirely of
resounding, purely animal ecstasy.
"We c…can…" Paulette
continued to cling. As tightly as she could. To his sweat-slicked shoulders.
But her arms, her legs, began to fail. With the sudden explosion of orgasm
shaking her and everything around her, they softened. Grew all but useless. And
then they fell away from him. And she lay limp, sated beneath him as he ground
out the very last of his killing paroxysm upon her. Into her.
She dug cramping fingers into
the tense meat of his shoulders. Willed her eyes to shut as hot, hot tears
filled them and overflowed. In time with and equal measure to the heated
steaming of the very most intimate life force still breaking and gathering and
then finally, impossibly, hesitating between her legs.
"We can always take it
slow later," she murmured in a heated rush, mindless rush. Before the small
amount of air she managed to dredge up from lungs fast losing all ability to
function could run out.
Finished, Kyle went still.
Inside her. Over her. All without withdrawing from her.
"Later?" he
murmured, clearly in question. "I wasn't aware you were going to allow
there to be a 'later', Paulette."
Funny. She hadn't been aware
of it either. Until just now.
"I wasn't aware you were
going to give up on your plan to…"
The world ended suddenly.
With an immense and ominous
sound.
For a startled second, as
sight fled her eyes and breath left her lungs for real, Paulette reeled. Trying
to adjust. Trying to make sense of the terrible thing she had just heard. What
she felt in the air, and sensed with a part of her that had long known this was
coming…long known this was expected, and only a matter of time.
A crash.
That was it.
A great and splintering, great
and torturous crash. A great and destructive thing that was very, very like the
crash of her car meeting Kyle's body in the darkest moment of her wildest snow
fever. A crash that was nonetheless very different, very much smaller. A crash
that came from feet…yards…away. From somewhere in the house.
Somewhere very nearby.
A crash. And Kyle rolled away
from her. Improbably, impossibly, he left her alone and undefended.
Already clutching for
half-shed clothes to shield himself from a sudden and monstrous rush of
snow-clotted air that filled the kitchen in less than the instant it took her
to hear and register the sound of the crash, he shouted. But his words swirled,
unheard, in a blue howl of blizzard-swirled, enormous and glittering, fractured
snowflakes. His words vanished straight up and away, through air that was
supposed to be safe from such swirling.
Kyle shouted again. A little
louder, though Paulette still couldn't hear his words. She couldn't understand
them.
She was too busy trying, with
her brain stuck in the warm and luxuriant moments just before the crash, to
make some sense of what had happened. What was still happening. She was far too
busy trying to reason out why the curtains kept lifting in white and effortless
billows that seemed to tatter and shred as they floated away from the floor.
Curtains that seemed to dissolve right before her eyes. Into sparkling white
bits and pieces that dropped onto a pile of shattered, golden-brown rubble.
What had once been a chair. A wooden dining room chair. Bits and pieces that
immediately, effortlessly began to coat both the remains of the chair and the
heavy, gray and leaden object that was still bouncing across the floor when she
began to regain her senses. Bouncing in a way common sense said it shouldn't
ever bounce.
Brain clear, gaze clear,
Paulette fastened fascinated eyes upon it. Sinisterly heavy, unpleasantly solid
and intrusive, the squared object left visible divots in the dining room rug
every time it touched down. And then finally, no more than a few sparse seconds
after it made its shocking entry, the object came to rest against a narrow
strip of wall next to the archway that separated dining room from living room.
Gouging out an immense and powdering chunk of plaster in the process.
"What the hell?"
Kyle's voice returned almost to normal. Or maybe it was Paulette's perception
of his voice that returned to normal. In either case, its speed seemed to readjust
itself from the draggy, growling slowness that had a moment or two before made
his every word unintelligible and alien, back to a state of crystalline
clarity. Of absolute and unquestionable meaning.
He almost had his jeans on. He
was looking around the kitchen wild-eyed. As if he'd never seen it before, and
didn't know what to make of what he saw there now.
"What the hell?" she
answered, grabbing for her discarded leggings.
"Someone threw a…"
As Kyle said the words,
Paulette at last recognized the object. And with recognition came
understanding. Frightening in its implications and threats. Understanding of
the strange billowing. The sudden, frigid cold. The swirl of snowflakes in
places where snowflakes had no business doing anything at all.
"Someone threw a concrete
block through the patio door," she breathed, the terror in her heart
already frozen solid.
Because it hadn't been 'someone'
at all. Had it?
Kyle paid no attention. He was
still looking around. Still in that wild and searching way.
Assessing the situation?
Getting ready for the next
part of it?
Automatically, instinctively,
Paulette found herself shaking her head.
He couldn't be getting ready
for anything. Because he could have no idea, not even the smallest clue, what
was to come next.
Leaping to her feet, her
leggings halfway on and badly twisted, she dove for her sweater. It lay halfway
across the kitchen. At a spot very near the living room archway. A spot very,
very close to the concrete block and dangerously close to whichever of Tom's henchmen
had hurled it.
* * * *
Shit. Kyle
wished for his gun.
Being a little tilted toward
the side of paranoia as so many cops were, he had several stashed around the
house. In addition to the service revolver hidden on the upper shelf of the
downstairs hall closet.
The closest lay just beyond
reach. Clipped to the underside of the counter enclosing the corner lazy Susan.
"Get down!" he
shouted at Paulette, putting as much venom as he could into the command. "For
God's sake, get down! Don't make a target of yourself!" And he tugged
sharply, insistently at her wrist.
She did as she was told. But
not, it became immediately apparent, for any of the reasons he wished.
Not for self-preservation.
Not out of any desire for
caution or any common sense.
Not even to satisfy his open
plea to grant him peace of mind.
As soon as she hit the floor,
with a resounding crash that made Kyle feel guilty because it sounded like it hurt,
Paulette began to scrabble frantically. Staying below line of sight of the
kitchen windows, down and behind intervening counters and appliances, she was
pulling on her clothing. Right over her Jell-o sticky, cream encrusted skin.
"Paulette, what the hell
are you…"
Silence reigned supreme in the
time…barely seconds…after the shattering arrival of what semi-calmed reason now
told him was a concrete block from the pile by the storage shed out back.
Watchful silence. Waiting
silence. Inherently evil and foreboding silence.
Now it dissolved in a shout.
"I know you're in there,"
a man's nasal, not at all familiar voice declared. "We all know you're
in there!"
"What the…"
"Manuel," Paulette
whimpered.
"You know this
goober?"
Finished with her clothes, she
was getting to her feet. Getting ready to make a real break for it, if ever in
his life he'd seen somebody getting ready to make a break.
"You need to come out
here now, Miss Paulie." With the sound of the man's…Manuel's…voice came a
long and jagged shadow dropping across the dining room floor. Cast by the bulb
over the backyard shed door, it was long and slightly misshapen, the shade of a
man zigging and zagging its way across strewn rubble on the dining room floor.
"Paulette…"
Before Kyle could finish
uttering her name, long before the last sibilant echo of it even thought
about whispering to a halt in the snow-choked air swirling into his house
through the new opening someone had been kind enough to create, Paulette was
gone. Jamming sockless feet into oxfords she didn't bother to tie, she indeed
went on the run. Snatching his blue all-weather parka with 'police' stenciled
in luminous letters across the back as she darted out the front door. Into
night, and oblivion beyond.
"Paulette?" Kyle
pushed the lazy Susan open. His hand closed around the handle of the .38 he'd
hidden there without ever expecting to find himself in a situation like this. A
situation where he needed it.
And then the man Paulette
called Manuel was upon him.
Chapter Nineteen
It was colder outside than the night before.
There was more snow, too. Drifts and piles and
floating whorls of dry-glittering, stinging stuff that reached above Paulette's
ankles. In places the drifts came halfway to her knees, chilling her instantly
and starting shoes that no longer seemed at all sturdy very quickly on their
way to being soaked through.
Oh, God.
The kiss of snow on bare
ankles was painful. Incredibly painful. Monstrously painful.
Brutally painful.
Her entire body tightened in
the split second it took to dart across the threshold and into a blast of
life-sucking wind so stabbingly fierce and icy, even in the relatively
sheltered corner surrounding Kyle's front door, that her every muscle wanted
immediately to stop. Wanted, tried, to grind with agonizing swiftness into
reverse. To retreat back into what little remained of warmth and security
inside the house now that it had been breached.
From behind, Paulette heard
unmistakable sounds of struggle.
Kyle shouted something
unintelligible.
And Manuel shouted in reply.
It had to be Manuel.
Of all the possible pursuers
in the world, Tom would have to send him.
Deadly, crazy, insanely
unpredictable and vicious Manuel.
An expletive, fierce and
commanding, from Kyle made her stop for a second. Hesitate less than a second.
God, she hated to leave him
alone in there.
She hated like anything to
leave him when he really did have no clue what kind of dangerous,
conscienceless criminal he was dealing with. When he was, moreover, nursing a
grievously injured ankle and wouldn't be anywhere near the top of his form.
Not that she thought the top
of any normal, sane person's form would be a match for someone as hardened and
outright lunatic as Manuel.
Alone.
Injured.
The realization gave Paulette
pause. But a second's pause only. And then instinct kicked in. Instinct for
survival, that sent her diving into shrieking blizzard wind that swallowed even
the sounds of impending confrontation inside the house
She dove into the night,
darting to the side. Instinctively, toward the area of greatest darkness…the
area around the side and rear of the house. Instinctively avoiding a
straight-out exit into open lawn or the cul-de-sac, where she would be
pitifully vulnerable in the off chance overconfident Manuel had brought
reinforcement. Hugging tight against shaggy, overgrown bushes at the front of
the house, glad for the thick and dark waterproof coat she'd snatched up on her
way out of the house, she dragged already freezing feet relentlessly through
deepening drifts.
Casting a series of wary looks
back over her shoulder as she neared and then reached the corner of the house,
she saw two things at once.
The SUV parked at the other
side of the cul-de-sac.
It hadn't been there earlier.
And it was familiar. Dark.
Tom's SUV, its side lights gleaming deadly gold in blurry, whitened
darkness.
And deeply furrowed tracks in
the snow.
Her tracks, marking her path and her progress as clearly as any path
or progress had ever hoped to be marked.
For a second, another wild and
uncontrolled one, she almost panicked.
If Manuel had brought back-up, if someone waited in the SUV,
he had just witnessed her departure. He knew which direction she had gone.
Then reason kicked in.
Blessed, cooling reason that told her two more things she hadn't immediately
noticed before.
One, the SUV appeared
unoccupied. And no one had leapt from it to give pursuit. Even if another part
of her reason warned her, in no uncertain terms, that where Tom and company
were concerned nothing could be counted upon to be as it appeared.
And two, her telltale tracks
were already being obliterated. Already being filled in by falling snow and
scoured clean by howling wind that set itself hard at work to create new
drifts. Fresh drifts, where others had been disturbed by her passage.
In another minute, maybe a
minute and a half, they would be gone completely. Indistinguishable.
If Kyle could just hold out for that long. If
he could just win for her a little more…
God, she hated to use him like
that.
God, she wished there was
another way. Any other way.
Rounding the corner of the
house at as close to a dead run as clinging snow and numbed feet would allow, she
veered hard toward shadows lurking at the very back of Kyle's property. Far,
far away from the searing beam of light from a fixture mounted above the door
to a small shed at another corner of the yard.
It was time to pray. That she'd
find a way out. That she hadn't just maneuvered herself into a blind,
death-trap alley from which there would be no escape.
She felt like the worst kind
of low-life.
She wanted to go back. Wanted
to offer whatever small amount of support she could, to rescue Kyle, if rescue
was even possible, from Manuel. Wanted in every way it was possible to want,
to…
She hesitated. Almost turned
back.
And then the blast from inside
the house sent her reeling.
As if shoved from behind by
enormous hands, Paulette sprawled forward. Feet numbed almost to the point of
being completely unable to feel, her arms encumbered by the drooping armpits of
the coat she'd grabbed mid-flight, she had no way to stop herself. She simply
dropped. Her heart seized solid and her breath halted hard and tight in the
bottom of her throat, she tumbled face first into the nearest snowdrift.
"My God," she wailed
into the frozen blanket that instantly clotted her nostrils, making breathing
all that much more difficult, "Was that a…a…"
Gunshot?
Shoving herself to her knees,
then back to her feet, Paulette ordered her heart to behave.
That was ridiculous.
It had not been a gunshot. Had
not.
It had been nothing more
menacing than an exceptionally loud backfire from a large vehicle over on
Sable, or maybe even farther over on Iliff Avenue, over beyond…she jerked her
head around, in every direction. She'd lost her bearings. Had no idea any
longer where in blue blazes Iliff Avenue might be.
It had not been a
gunshot!
Manuel, like the majority of
Tom's thugs, infinitely preferred the pleasure of fists and feet to the
anonymous violence of guns. Especially in close and quiet quarters like Kyle's
neighborhood, where the sound of gunfire was all but guaranteed to attract
attention. Exactly the way that blast a second or two ago was attracting all
kinds of attention right now.
Lights flashed on in houses
all around the cul-de-sac. And beyond.
Doors opened, and neighbors
peered cautiously out.
In another second, if someone
hadn't already, one of them would think to reach for the phone. One of them
would dial the police. And a few seconds after that…
Ahead, a high board fence
loomed, shutting Kyle's back yard and those on either side off from whatever
lay beyond. Shutting them off, at a glance, as any kind of escape route.
Paulette's heart faltered.
Her only cover now seemed to
be the small metal shed with its ominous light. Or the wicked and thorny spill
of untrimmed rose canes over his neighbor's chain link fence.
The canes seemed to reach out
to try to ensnare her as she brushed cautiously past, still clinging to
whatever safety she could find in the depth of the darkest shadows.
Then reason, still amazingly
clear-eyed, kicked in.
A board stood awry.
She could see it quite clearly
in the lighter, snow-lit air just beyond the thickest of the shadows. Reason
made note of it, even as her eyes still struggled to see.
A wide board stood aslant,
barely out of line. Revealing a narrow wedge of snowy gleam from whatever open
area lay beyond.
For a minute, maybe two…precious
minutes, irrecoverable minutes…Paulette couldn't run for the miraculous gap.
Her breath knotted tighter
than ever and harder still inside her throat.
Her side ached with a tense
burning, and a sharp stabbing in the area just beside and below her left breast,
warned she'd self-inflicted too much agony, done far too much unaccustomed
running, already.
And she wasn't done yet. There
was still so far to go, so terribly much more running to be done before this
night of flight and fear was finished.
From Kyle's house came no
sound. None at all.
She didn't have a clue who had
been injured. Who had very possibly been killed. If it was…her heart stuttered
nearly to a stop.
If it was Manuel, or if it was
Kyle.
God, sweet God, she would not allow
it to be Kyle!
Again she almost turned back.
The last echoes of the blast
had barely quit ringing through the cul-de-sac. Or inside her ears. Though
surely it had been minutes since the initial explosion.
In the waiting, not entirely
natural hush that returned in a headlong rush, she hears quite clearly the
voices of neighbors calling back and forth. Asking questions, and wanting to
know what that terrible sound had been, what had happened? And very
dimly, almost with a part of her mind she had never used before and didn't know
exactly how to connect to the more conscious and aware parts, Paulette heard
someone mention police.
Her heart jumped.
Jerked.
It danced nervously.
Uncertainly.
Police.
That was her cue to get
moving. Fast!
Gulping in a long, deep
breath, she spared less than a second to steady herself before she rushed
forward.
If she didn't find a place to
hide…warmth…soon…
The wind had cleared a path of
sorts for her.
An escape route.
Paulette saw it as soon as she
squeezed through the gap in the fence.
Beyond lay a long, endlessly
long open area. One of the drainages, possibly, from the nearby Cherry Creek
Dam or maybe the right-of-way for some seldom-flowing waterway or another. And
close along the side of the barrier separating it from Kyle's back yard on the
other side, the wind had cleared a perfect path. It had swept and swirled the
snow almost entirely away from short and tufted, winter-dry grass.
Paulette saw the line of it
quite clearly even through darkness and the thicker swirling of snowfall. The
cleared lane led to the left. Between dunes and hillocks of piled and blown
snow that stood out blue-pale and solid against the lacy downpour of spiraling
flakes.
Even as she looked, the snow
fell faster. With more, and ever more, fury, providing good cover and ample
opportunity for escape.
The snow would be her friend
and helpmate for the immediate future. But sooner rather than later she would
need to find shelter from it. And that looked like it might be a bit of a
problem.
A quick glance from side to
side and ahead in the direction of the winding, cleared path between drifts
revealed nothing in the way of shelter. Nothing even possible for shelter in
the limited distance she could see through the storm.
Pausing just outside the
fence, she looked back.
But she couldn't go there.
Maybe never again.
Her heart ached, hurt like
hell with the loss of Kyle and the knowledge that whatever they'd found,
whatever they'd had together, it was finished now. And then she set off along
the heaven-sent path, her speed doubling despite the abysmal condition of her
freezing feet.
The path was a gift from God.
One she had no intention of
questioning.
One whose wisdom or ultimate
destination she shouldn't question. Not even if at the moment it seemed
to lead nowhere but into the depth of icy darkness, nowhere but into certain,
frozen death in the white-shadowed night.
The path was a gift.
No question about it.
Hardened, frozen, dead grass
matted beneath her feet, lacking any ability to spring back in a way that might
reveal her passage.
The path would reveal nothing
about where she went. Where she might head.
The fence at her side curved
to the right. The bared stretch of ground followed for another twenty
feet…thirty, maybe…before the sheltering of the fence that protected it from
the storm's full brunt was no longer an effective barrier. Reaching the last of
that protection, Paulette shivered and huddled as deep as possible into the
inadequate protection of her borrowed, bottomless jacket.
The frozen wind revived
itself.
Its brief rest was over, and
it quickly gained new life. Quickly found new vigor and a newly awesome power
to fling and sweep curtains of dense and smothering white before it.
It was imperative she find shelter.
Any shelter.
Any place she might remove
herself from the storm's fury for at least a little while. At least until she
could figure out what the hell she was supposed to do next. With Kyle maybe
dead, with Manuel on the prowl and no doubt drawing closer even as she thought
about it, with no money or car keys or ID or anything, the possibilities were
just about non-existent. As was her ability to think clearly, or analyze
effectively.
Maybe if she wasn't so cold…if
she wasn't so afraid she would begin to cry and her tears would freeze,
rendering her unable to open her eyes, unable to see…
As the fence
curved, opening the space beside it to wind and storm, the cleared space in its
shelter began to narrow. Rapidly. Toward nothing.
Another
dozen steps, and she'd run out of space to walk.
Another half
dozen steps into the face of the obliterating blizzard, and hope had faded
almost to the same bitter, uncompromising nothing.
And then,
with no warning whatsoever, she found it.
What she'd
been seeking.
Something
that could, would have to, pass as shelter.
It was a copse of trees,
looming out of the storm. Three of them, conjoined, a group of young
evergreens. Pines or maybe spruces, dark and fragrant in the dull-white night,
they were already taller than the eight-foot fence at their side and already
thick with heavily needled branches spreading like skirts all the way to the
ground. Their branches were heavy, interlaced. Intertwined in a dark-greenwind
dance, they stood next to the very place where her wind-cleared pathway
narrowed finally to its end.
There were three of them.
Calling up the loveliest of memories from Paulette's childhood.
Pine caves, the kids had called them in the mountain town where she grew up.
They were the most secret of places. The most sacred, the ones no grown-up was
supposed to know about, green and fragrant cavities behind interlaced branches
and beneath their drooping shelter. Scented havens, they were. Away from the
world and everyone in it, their floors cushioned with deep layers of needles
shed over years and years and years, they were havens into which a stray child
or any adult small enough and aware enough might creep.
And find cover.
Paulette's feet headed her
automatically toward them, following a roundabout route that crossed a heavily
crusted area of snow that would reveal no more hint of her passage than the
dry-swept grass she'd followed before.
Kneeling, she inserted shaking
hands between the branches. She parted them. Revealed the hidden cavern
beneath, and knew memory had served her well.
The pine cave was concealing.
All but impervious to snow, its tightly laced branches holding it in sheltering
layers far above, while allowing very little to reach the ground beneath.
Shaking all over, Paulette
climbed in.
It was warmer here.
Marginally. The ground was barely damp, and the snow was drifted deep just
beyond the reach of concealing branches. They made a good wind break. Though it
continued to blow, seemed to howl harder and more viciously, she felt little to
none of it behind the mounded barrier.
Paulette lay where she fell,
her teeth chattering so badly she knew the sense of security offered by her
new-found shelter was false. And feeble. At best.
She had minutes, only.
Soon she would have to move
on. She would have to resume her struggle to stay alive. Because dying was not
in her plans. It had never been in her plans.
Drawing her knees up against
her chest, she wrapped her arms around them. Tucked her frozen, aching feet
beneath her as best she could, and her bare hands inside the bends of her
knees. Assuming the position some vague memory from some long ago summer camp
told her would preserve the most warmth. Offer the most chance she could wait
the trouble out and then…
What?
Finally an unwanted tear slid
down her face. Then a second and a third as she huddled deeper into Kyle's dark,
weatherproof jacket.
It smelled like him. It made a
warming tent around her huddled body. One that, by virtue of its thick and
durable nylon shell, would hold in some, a good amount, of her natural heat.
Paulette pressed her forehead
against her knees.
She was in trouble now.
Big, big trouble. Bigger than
ever.
In her pine-scented darkness,
huddled tight in the very last refuge she knew on this earth, one question rose
to the top. One that refused to be shoved aside or denied until she found some
kind of acceptable answer.
What the hell was she going to
do now?
Chapter Twenty
Wherever the hell she'd gone, Paulette had hidden
good.
Kyle's ankle hurt. Like a son
of a bitch.
He shouldn't be walking on it
right now. He could almost see Doc Hutchinson's face floating before him,
disembodied against a backdrop of sleeting, slashing snow. Like some kind of
demonic messenger from the World Beyond. Telling him he knew better than to run
out through the frozen wasteland at the side of his house this way, stumbling
and staggering over every unseen hillock of grass and uneven ground beneath the
deceptively white drifting. Trying to follow the tracks Paulette had left
behind.
Trying to let those tracks
take him wherever they were going to take him before the snow filled them in
completely and the wind whipped away what little trace the snow failed to
obliterate was lunacy. In the extreme.
But the pain in his ankle and
foot…his whole damned leg now that the wound had kicked up a full force fuss
and decided to get most of the entire lower half of his anatomy involved…was
nothing compared to what he felt in his shoulder.
Shit.
Make that double shit.
His bullet had ricocheted off
something.
Intended for the soulless
cretin who'd had the audacity to break down his patio door with one of his own
concrete blocks, who'd had the sheer balls to barge uninvited into the
middle of something he had no business barging into…the cretin Paulette knew
all right, because she'd called him…what?
Miguel?
Marcel?
Manuel?
Double shit again. It was
one of those.
And anyway, names didn't
matter. Not one hoot in hell, when he'd shot himself in the shoulder and it was
on fire from the inside out.
He was pretty sure the wound,
the very first gunshot of a career in which a man might reasonably expect to be
gunshot from time to time and might reasonably be expected to plan for the
eventuality and prepare himself for it, was merely a graze.
The top of his shoulder, kind
of down around the side of his arm, hurt like blue, blazing hell. But his breathing
was okay. Other than being a little short and hitchy due to the combined
effects of being shot for the first time, of plunging headlong into
temperatures that had dropped well below freezing already and showed every sign
of continuing their downward slide, and of lurching through the snow like some
kind of semi-human monster from the late night horror movies, he was just fine
and peachy. He was able to function, able to move his arm even if he did
infinitely prefer to keep the damned thing pressed tight and secure against his
side. Because moving it was a nightmare.
Moving his left arm was hell
on earth. And something he sure as hell didn't want to do unless he really had
to.
Make that really, really
had to.
Shit. He'd never imagined being shot…merely grazed…would hurt so
much.
"P…P…P…"
The cold had gotten to him in
the couple of minutes since he'd run out of the house like a crazed lunatic,
brushing off all questions from the cops responding to the neighbors' frantic
calls about gunfire in the vicinity. And at least one, if he'd heard everything
they said correctly, had reported the place was being taken over by every gang
known to operate west of the
Most of them were cops he
knew. At least three-quarters of them. But he'd taken time to answer none of
their questions.
He'd been in a frenzy.
To find Paulette, and stop her
from killing herself in the frigid night.
He could breathe okay, and
would have no trouble making himself heard.
His present trouble came in
the effort to form words. Because his lips just weren't working any more.
Paulette had gone through the
break in the fence. Her footprints led right up to it, They disappeared into
the drainage spillway at its other side, and then just vanished completely.
Right before his amazed and startled eyes.
She'd found the break and
taken full advantage of it. And for the first time he thanked his neighbor Zack
for failing to react to all his pestering in the last six months or so, since
Zack's kids had pried the damned thing loose in the first place. So that every
hooligan in the city of Aurora had quick and easy access to Zack's back yard.
And, by default, to every other back yard on the block.
Zack hadn't fixed it, and that
had allowed Paulette to escape. And hitching and staggering as he made his
lopsided and decidedly ungraceful way through the break, Kyle had no idea where
she might have gone. Other than feeling pretty damned certain she couldn't have
gone far. Not dressed in flimsy leggings and shoes without socks…shoes that
weren't going be worth a damn in this kind of snow and weren't going to do
anything but let the miserable white stuff in. And the cold. And the wet.
He knew she would go to ground
very soon. She would have to.
If she hadn't already.
And now he needed to find her.
He needed to let her know the culprit, whatever the hell his name was, was in
custody right this minute. Not talking, not revealing what the hell he was up
to or what exactly he'd been after, though Kyle had a pretty good idea or two
of his own about that last part. But he was in custody just the same. He was in
the hands of several cops known to Kyle. Cops who weren't exactly famous for
their leniency or tolerance for idiots who attacked other cops. Even if the
attack was mostly on another cop's patio door.
"P…Ph…aul…"
Wind had swept drifts in the
open space beyond the fence into high and fantastic shapes. Whorled shapes
layered upon other shapes, shapes layered almost infinitely upon themselves,
shapes whose frozen surfaces glittered with crusts of not-quite-ice sculpted by
that same wind. Whorled and interesting shapes that might offer some sort of
protection and cover. Except that Kyle could see no tracks leading into them or
around them. And a quick test with his foot…the injured and bandaged one since
it was easier to stand on the one that remained good, and solid while he probed
witg the less effective one… revealed the glittering crust was much too thin
and brittle-fragile to support a person. Even one as petite and sure-footed as
Paulette had proved to be.
She had taken the other
alternative. The one created by the wind at the same time it was in the process
of building those fantastical snow mounds.
Large areas of the drainage
channel lay clean. Scoured bare in a wide and slightly scalloping path…a swath
that even now, even as new-falling snow tried its best to cover it and make it
as blank-white and unrevealing as the mounds and drifts all around, was still
being scoured clean. By gusts that would not give up. Gusts that lifted columns
of dry spume higher than Kyle's head, transforming them into miniature whirling
dervishes and tornadoes before whisking them off into the depth of night, to
drop them at distant points. Well away from the bared patches and paths.
Paulette had very obviously,
very cagily, chosen to follow that dry-swept path. And that was a problem.
There weren't many places to
hide, that was true. But even though the cleared path veered in generally one
direction, it approached eight feet wide in places. Or more. It meandered
gently between surrounding dunes and drifts too numerous to count, like some
kind of fantastically strange demon world in which a man could easily get lost,
a woman could easily get swallowed up for all time. With her tracks invisible,
with the wind acting now on her behalf and as her accomplice, the number of
directions she might have gone skyrocketed to just this side of infinite.
"P…aul…lette?"
His teeth chattered.
Even so, he managed to listen.
Managed, and heard nothing but the sweep of the wind. Nothing but the dry rustle
of snow being lifted and tossed, snow being thrown high, high into the air so
that it could plummet back to earth with softly hissing sounds as it struck its
own kind and added its infinitesimal weight to the ice crusted drifts. Soft
hissing sounds heard in odd intervals when the wind took a moment's rest and
its shrieking sigh abated almost to nothing. Nothing but the memory of it
dancing among pine branches that rubbed and brushed themselves together. Unable
to immediately halt the motion begun by the wind in their depths.
Kyle listened.
Heard nothing.
No reply, when he tried again
to call her name, with a little more luck and a lot more force.
She couldn't have gone far.
Kyle kept telling himself
that. He kept trying to convince himself she couldn't. Even in his heavy
police parka she couldn't, when she'd already had to wade through clinging snow
with bare ankles and soaked shoes and leggings just to reach the fence. Couldn't,
when eventually she was going to have to wade through even deeper drifts once
the cleared path ended. If she meant to continue along the open channel where
the wind was free to work itself into a frenzy. Free to heap snow to whatever
impossible heights it so desired.
Sooner or later she had to
stop.
Sooner, he thought.
And he had to find her.
Rounding another
insurmountable and all but inconceivable mountain of snow, Kyle found the
pathway curving steadily and steadfastly away to the right, Moving farther from
his house. And it was tapering. Rapidly. It became nothing of consequence in
just a few more steps, and beyond…
Nothing.
Only more of the undulating
drifts, undisturbed by the touch of human hands or feet. Only drifts piled to
impassable heights unmarred by any footprint at all.
Which only seemed logical,
since the coyotes and foxes who usually made this their stamping ground…their hunting
ground…had much better sense than humans. They had better sense than to come
out here under conditions like these, far better sense than to think they could
survive on a night like this for longer than the littlest while.
Obviously Paulette had found a
place to hide.
But where? How?
She couldn't vanish into thin,
snow-riddled air.
Could she?
The cop in him certain as hell
didn't want to believe she could.
Weary, wracked with pain in
just about every part of his body, Kyle lifted a hand. He rubbed his eyes and
the motion reminded him in no small or uncertain way of the wound in his
shoulder. Forgotten in his preoccupation with cold and frozen wind, no doubt a
good deal numbed by that very same cold, the wound shrieked suddenly. Startling
him almost into falling into the drifts. Startling him almost into fainting
right there. The wound sent a long and shimmering, slightly shuddering razor
trail of pure fire all the way down his arm. All the way to his fingers, where
it seemed to erupt in visible red-orange sparks. And all the way up, too, into
the side of his neck and his chest. Radiating in awesomely terrible ways.
Bullet-grazed flesh and all
that lay beneath it, all the muscles and underlying tissue cried out in unison
with Kyle when he emitted a long and strangled exhalation of sheer misery.
All kinds of misery.
"Paulette?" His
voice shook. Not quite convincing, and no longer at all commanding. "I
know you're here."
As an answer…silence.
Nothing but wind-burnished
silence.
He waited.
Two minutes. Three. He didn't
think it could have been longer. In all truth, he didn't have longer. They
didn't have much longer.
"You've g…got to come
out, Paulette!"
He listened again. And still
heard nothing. Still received no hint about where she had gone, Or how,
when there was no way, really, for her to have gone anywhere. Unless she
harbored a secret and diabolical ability to levitate up, up, up…
Turning slowly in a circle,
scanning carefully though common sense told him there was really nothing to be
achieved by scanning, Kyle found himself looking up. He found himself actually
taking time to scan the swaying tops of the pine trees. As if he'd lost his
wits enough to believe it was possible she could levitate. Could have
somehow managed to clear the ground like one of those mythological, improbable
creatures of fantasy, and flown herself right up into the tops of those
snow-laden…
Trees.
Kyle's gaze dropped. Faster,
more automatically, and far more thoughtlessly than it had risen. Which was
plenty damned fast, and automatic, and thoughtless.
Trees.
There were three of them.
Three spired sentinels huddled
close together next to the fence. Three, huddled as closely as if they'd
escaped one of the enclosed yards beyond and now weren't sure what to do with
the freedom they'd gained.
Three.
Standing shoulder to shoulder.
Bough to bough. Not only near the fence, but more importantly right near the
place where Paulette's wind-cleared escape path met its sudden end.
Trees offered shelter.
All kinds of shelter, if his
memory of one hot and steaming night the previous July served him correctly. A
memory of the night he'd chased a pair of juvenile delinquents away from the
dollar store a few blocks over, where they'd apparently been polishing their
shoplifting skills.
The juveniles had vanished
then, as completely as Paulette seemed to have vanished now.
They'd pulled ahead of him.
Dashed around a corner barely a dozen steps ahead of him. And dropped right off
the face of the earth. Or so it had seemed.
Except that they hadn't
vanished at all. Because his cop's instincts had been right all along, that
vanishing wasn't possible.
The juveniles had found a
place to hide that sweltering July night. One lone, towering pine tree that was
far bigger than the three huddled in their tight cluster next to the fence.
One, with far fewer branches than Kyle saw now, interlaced into impenetrable
masses topped with mounded clots of snow that made their impenetrability, their
inviolate and undisturbed state, all that much more screamingly obvious.
"Paulette?" Slowly,
he moved forward. Taking painful steps now. His feet ached and burned from the
cold and his lungs threatened to shut down entirely with each inhaled draught
of it. And his shoulder…
Shit.
He'd thought the shoulder hurt
before. When the wound was new. When it sent out its first scorching waves of
protest and tried to cripple him even as he fought to keep his cool. So he
could subdue…handcuff to the wrought iron railing at the entrance to his living
room…the intruding, warlike Manuel.
But that hadn't been anything.
That pain wasn't anything
compared to the throbbing, bone-deep ache in his arm and chest now.
"P…Paulette?"
She'd almost come to seem like
a dream to him.
Or the answer to a prayer he'd
never realized he prayed.
She'd come to seem like the
most impossible of impossibilities. Like something that had never happened…the
one miraculous and good thing that couldn't possibly happen in his life,
because he'd long since come to the conclusion it wasn't destined to happen.
She'd come to seem the product
of some lunatic trance. Some crazed vision.
Kyle almost convinced himself
of that. Halting in his tracks, telling himself he'd been stupid and
irrational. That he'd really, really lost all judgment and sense at the hands
of a crazy man who'd barged headlong into his house for no real reason at all,
He almost convinced himself to
turn back.
Almost started to turn
back.
Then he heard the rustling.
And snapped to attention, his gaze focusing with unholy concentration upon the
lower branches of those three close-clumped trees.
It wasn't a rustling of wind.
That had died again in the
instant when he last called Paulette's name. It had, in fact, stopped entirely,
as if tired of the game it played. As if it wanted him to find her and take her
away…wanted him to leave it in peace. Leave it to the privacy of its own wintry
pursuits.
And if that wasn't the height
of crazy, he didn't know what was.
Assigning human emotions,
human intents, to something as thoroughly non-human as a bitter bluster of
wind!
Still, there was that rustle.
From those trees.
And the feeling remained. Of
Paulette, close by. Of her all around him. Of the aura of her, frightened and
desperate.
Something inanimate and beyond
the range of normal senses lingered in the snow-chilled air, tainting it with
its faint but irresistible call. Reaching him and piercing deep into his heart.
Where what he felt could not be ignored. Or treated as something of small
consequence.
Stepping toward the shelter of
the interlaced trees, Kyle could feel Paulette there.
Hiding from him.
Yet still, desperately,
needing him.
Chapter Twenty-One
"Paulette?"
He was moving closer.
Ever, steadily, closer.
He hadn't sounded very good
the first time she heard him call her name, dimly and from the other side of
the fence that was supposed to give her protection. He'd been shaky. Not just
from the searing bite of the wind, she suspected, but from something else as
well.
Something like the trauma of
having Manuel invade his house without warning?
That was an event that would
leave anyone shaken. And shaky.
But he was tiring.
He was not at all like his
usual, robust self. Not any longer.
Paulette made again the
worried, tenuous, but absolutely unavoidable connection to what had taken place
just a little while before in his kitchen…to the scuffle she'd heard breaking
out, the shouts and curses as she grabbed up Kyle's coat and fled into frozen
night that was considerably safer than the house. Even if it did present its
own unique and not to be underestimated kind of danger.
She should be glad Kyle was
here at all. Shaky, or otherwise.
Not many men went up against
Manuel and remained standing. Not many remained able to call out a name with
such vigor…not many necessarily remained alive…after a confrontation
like that.
The memory of the gunshot,
what she kept telling herself had been a gunshot though she'd never
actually heard one and had nothing to base the judgment upon, the memory of the
terrible and heart-stopping explosion of sound that had stirred her halfway
frozen feet to impossible speed and motion, still rang profoundly in her ears
whenever things got a little too quiet. Whenever she didn't have something else
on her mind.
Paulette's heart faltered.
Clenched. And she slid forward. Scooting as silently as she could across the
slick and sound-deadening carpet of needles beneath her conjoined trees.
She had no clear idea what she
meant to do. Only that she had to do something. Only that she no longer felt
free to just get up and run, just vanish into the night and look for a new
place to start over where none of the strings of past events would bind her to
them.
Because she was bound.
In a different way than she'd been bound to Tom and his evil doings. But bound all
the same.
The idea would bear some
thinking. Later. When conditions…when her mental state…were a little better for
thinking. And in the meantime…
She slid forward. Toward the
edge of her shelter.
After that things just sort of
started to roll.
"Paulette?"
Kyle was closer. His footsteps
were silent on the wind bared and cushiony carpet of dead grass. As silent as
she'd earlier prayed hers would be. If not for the sound of his voice, gaining
in volume with nearness even as it remained shaky and weak, she wouldn't have
ever heard him closing in on her. Deliberately and determinedly, as if she sent
out some kind of bizarre, guiding signal to lead him straight to her.
He knew she was hiding here.
Of course he did.
There had never been any real
question that he would. Not from the instant she'd crawled and kicked and
clawed her way through resistant branches in the hope of eluding him, of
eluding everyone, forever.
They…she and Kyle…had made a
connection sometime in the hours since their first calamitous meeting.
Somewhere and somehow, when she hadn't been looking for or wanting connections
of any kind, one had been forged. And it wasn't going to be severed easily.
If at all.
Kyle knew she was
hiding here.
That was absolute certainty.
Paulette felt the certainty in
her heart even before the thick-laced branches at the one accessible side of
her hidden pine cave began to tremble. Then shake. Even when they parted as she
held her breath and willed her racing heart to maintain its beating. Hoping
like hell she hadn't been wrong and the hand she saw emerging into her
no-longer-inviolate shelter would indeed belong to Kyle, and not to…
"My God, Paulette."
Kyle peered at her through the opening. "You scared the living shit out of
me."
"I?" She couldn't
move. Not even to go to him. Not even when she wanted to. Not even when he
reached between the branches and extended a hand to her. "S…scared y…you?"
"Why the hell did you run
that way?"
"Isn't that ob…bvious?
M…Manuel…"
"I had things under
control."
She didn't believe that.
Why the hell would she?
Tom's men, the infamously
insane and domineering Manuel especially, were the kind who controlled every
situation. Who knew how to force control. How to wrest it from anyone they
chose, and once wrested, how never to give it back.
She remained silent.
Motionless.
Kyle's hand remained firm.
Outstretched and waiting, as if he didn't notice, or more probably chose not to
notice, her hesitation.
He did look like he'd
come out of the conflict in good shape.
Which gave Paulette a kind of
hope she'd never known before. Or if she had known it, it had been a terribly
long time ago. So long that she'd forgotten how to feel such hope.
Still, she couldn't move. Not
an inch.
The cold was getting to her as
much as fear had gotten to her earlier.
The blood inside her veins no
longer felt hot or vital. It seemed to be turning quickly, inexorably, to
slush. Its pace seemed to grow sluggish even as she thought about it. Seemed to
grow half-hearted, and ineffectual.
"You have to come out of
there." He leaned forward a little more, and had visible difficulty doing
it. He winced a little, and when he extended his right hand he kept his left
arm down. Carefully down. Kept it tightly, almost jealously, pressed to his
side.
"Kyle, you're hurt!"
"It's nothing."
"I can see that you're
hurt. You should…"
"Come out of there,
Paulette." His extended hand never wavered.
"I c…can't." She
wanted to shrink back. Shrink away. And maybe she even tried.
But of course it wasn't going
to work.
Increasingly lethargic, increasingly
unresponsive, her body wasn't going to move in any direction at all.
He reached in farther. Again
with that alarming, visible difficulty. "Yes you can. Take my hand."
She tried. Her muscles
strained and struggled. And wouldn't respond at all until she forced them.
Until she worked, really worked, to lift an arm that felt suddenly,
horrifyingly dead in its sluggishness.
Closing around hers, his
fingers were surprisingly warm.
She expected them to be cold.
Thought they had no right to be anything but cold…anything but as frozen
as everything else in an increasingly lifeless, increasingly dark and soundless
world.
And even then, she resisted.
It wasn't completely the
unresponsiveness of her body that held her back, though the unresponsiveness
certainly did play a part. She still didn't want to come out. She still feared,
more than she feared cold and the increasing, menacing loss of feeling, or the
desire to surrender wakefulness and slide into sleep, what waited back at Kyle's
house.
She still feared Manuel. And
even worse…
"Let me help you."
As warm and comforting as Kyle's fingers remained around hers, Paulette sensed
in them a new weakness. A weakness in all of him in general that said he was in
little better condition to help her than she was to help herself. Having
wrapped itself all the way around her fingers for the very obvious purpose of
tugging her forcibly from her shelter if necessary, his hand and arm, his
entire body, seemed suddenly incapable of following through.
Worried about any number of
things, Paulette squinted up at him. "You want to take me back to the
house."
"We have to go back
there. We have to get w…warm. And this time I really do need to…"
"There are police back
there."
Kyle returned her squint. "Of
course there are."
His gaze hardened ever so
slightly. And all too alarmingly.
It fastened tight upon hers.
"What else would you
expect, with all the commotion in a neighborhood as quiet as this?"
She took a deep breath. Didn't
trust him…didn't trust anyone…a bit. Told her stomach to behave and stop its
jittery dancing, then steeled it for what began to seem all too inescapable. "I
can't go where there are police," she said in a quick and breathless rush,
forcing the words out before she could think better of the idea and start
holding them in again.
Kyle's gaze never wavered. "I
thought so. I knew so. You know you're going to have to tell me why. Don't
you?"
Dully, she nodded. Offered no
resistance when he made what had to be a superhuman effort. When he tightened
his weakening grip and pulled her in a sudden, swift yank out of her sheltering
pine cave.
"We have to go back."
Kyle pulled her now. Even weakened and depleted as it was, his strength easily
overpowered hers. Easily tugged her back the way she had come. Back along the
wind-scoured path to the break in the fence. And beyond, toward the warmth and
dubious welcome of a house that could never again feel completely safe or
secure.
Back to the police.
That gave her strength. As
nothing else could.
Digging in her heels Paulette
ground herself to a stop just feet from the opening in the fence that
increasingly, alarmingly, began to seem like an opening into another world. One
of evil from which she'd only barely managed to escape. Only by the skin of her
teeth.
"I can't have anything to
do with p…police, Kyle."
He stopped, but didn't release
his grip. Didn't ease it even the slightest bit. "You already have,"
he said grimly, turning halfway to face her.
"What?"
"I told you before. I am
the police, Paulette. One of the police."
"I…" She gave a tug,
then. A feeble one that accomplished nothing at all to win her release. "And
I told you before. You're not."
"It's written all over
the back of that parka you're wearing."
Though she knew it would be
impossible to see, impossible to twist her head around to an angle that would
allow her to read anything written across her back, Paulette tried.
"You should have told me,"
she declared heatedly, once she failed.
"I tried."
"You should have insisted!"
"I thought about it."
The hardness evaporated from his tone. And from what little she could see of
his face in the snow-fogged darkness. "Lots of times. But you were so
adamant about not believing. And there were so many other things going on. It
never seemed to be the right time. So I…"
Damn.
Crap.
Shit.
She'd slept with a cop!
She'd hit one with her car and
never had the sense or the instinct to…not even when he'd come right out and told
her!
"Why haven't you arrested
me?"
"It's been obvious from
the start that you're in trouble. All kinds of trouble. And anyway, you haven't
done anything to…"
"I r…ran over you with
m…my…c…c…c…"
Great.
Now she was going to do
exactly what everything she'd ever heard or read, exactly what everyone always
said, did absolutely no good with his kind.
Now she was going to cry.
She was already crying.
"Don't." Kyle pulled
her to him. Pulled her roughly. Pressed her face against the center of his
chest and, protecting the arm he still didn't move, wrapped the good one around
her. To hold her close against the warmth she remembered. The warmth she
realized she still needed and craved, no matter what else she might now start
to resent or fear about him. "There's no reason to cry."
"I h…h…hit you, and you
d…d…and now I know you're h…h…h…and it's all my f…fault Of course I d…deserve
to be ar…rested. And you d…don't even know the wh…whole story. You don't even
know the w…worst of it."
"Shhhh."
Paulette gulped. Shivered.
Swallowed and, incredibly, against the grain of everything she'd thought or
been told in the last few horrible years, relaxed against him. Into him.
"You're hurt," she
said again when she was able to speak without stuttering, or stammering, or
screeching like an unhappy newborn baby.
"I got shot a little. It's
n…"
"Shot?"
She tried to pull back from
him. Tried to push back.
He wouldn't let her.
"But Manuel never
carries a gun! Manuel prefers…"
"Brass knuckles."
Kyle's laugh was short. Pained. "I know. But he gave me a good, swift chop
to the nuts just when I was pulling the trigger, and my own shot went wild. I
didn't hit anybody I was aiming for. I hit myself instead. When the bullet
ricocheted off something or other, and…"
"Oh, God, Kyle. We have
to…you have to…"
"It's a flesh wound."
"What did Manuel do after
you shot at him?" The idea horrified her. The idea of the rage such
unthinkable audacity must have instilled in Manuel chilled her blood and froze
it solid as even the cold of the night hadn't been able to chill or freeze.
"I dropped the gun, and
he went for it. Used some really, really colorful language, and…that's another
thing, Paulette. We have to discuss the quality of the people you've been
hanging out with. But we can do that later. The scum tried to pick up the gun,
and my arm was hurting like hell. Still is hurting like hell. I couldn't
move it much at first, couldn't grab him or take a swing at him. So I did what
every ninth-grade girl knows to do in a knock-down-drag-out. I went for him,
and I bit him."
Paulette fought back a bark of
laughter. "You bit him?"
Kyle chuckled more openly. "Seeing
as how I was disarmed at the time, in more ways than one…"
"You need a doctor."
"For once, I agree with
you. But the wound's not that bad. I'll keep for another minute or two."
Paulette shivered. She nestled
back into his warmth. Knowing it was about to end. Knowing it had to
end, when the rest of it came out, and he found out…
"Now you need to tell me
what's going on here," Kyle said. As she'd known he would.
She shivered again.
"You need to tell me why
you were running this morning. What you were running from then, and what you're
running from right now."
Her shiver turned into a
shudder. "I can't."
"Don't start that again.
You can, and you will."
"But…"
"I need to know,
Paulette. If I'm going to help you I need to hear all of it. And quick. Because
it's damned cold out here. And you're shaking like an aspen leaf in a wind
storm. I need to get you…both of us…back to the house. Need to get somebody to
take care of us. But I need to know first. What we're up against."
"We? There's no 'we'
about…"
"You're stalling, Paulette."
She was. And she knew he knew she was.
"If I tell, then you'll
arrest me?"
"No."
"How can you be so sure?
If you haven't heard…"
"I can tell a victim when
I see one." His arm eased a little around her. His hand began to caress
her shoulder. Soothingly. Reminding her, as inappropriate and ill-advised as
the time might be, of other caresses. Igniting in her feelings she'd thought
long since dead. Feelings she'd been sure would never return once the horrible
words 'I'm the police' were uttered.
"I know you're running
from something. I know fear, and I know terror. And you're filled with both. So
I need you to come clean. I need you to tell me, so that when we go back to the
house you'll have somebody on your side. Somebody to help you."
"I…" Tears coursed down
Paulette's cheeks. Molten tears, freezing tears, painful and too long denied
tears. "You know the convenience store robberies?"
Just as she'd
expected…feared…Kyle stiffened.
"I do. Every cop in the
city has been looking for a clue for the last six months. And there are none.
There are…what the hell do you know about the convenience store robberies,
Paulette?"
She took a deep breath. Held
it for the longest of moments, then exhaled. And felt no better. No more
confident or courageous. "His name is Tom Cantrell."
"His."
"I can tell you where he
lives. Where you can find him. But I think maybe I'll need a lawyer first. I
think maybe I'll need somebody to arrange some kind of d…d…defense."
Kyle shoved her away. A
little. A little roughly. But not all the way away. Not so far that she had any
hope of, would make any effort at, escape. "You know who's been doing the
robberies?"
Biting her lip, she nodded. "T…Tom
Cantrell. "He was my b…boyfriend. He…"
"Paulette, how the hell
did you ever get mixed up with scum like that?"
"I met him at a p…party.
A th…theater thing one of my friends at work invited me to. He was handsome."
Not as handsome as you, Kyle!
"He seemed really, really
nice. And really, really charming."
Very suddenly, completely
unexpectedly, Kyle laughed. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it's the handsome
and charming ones who are the most dangerous?"
"Tell me about it."
She managed a weak smile.
"So." Too soon, Kyle
returned to business. All business. "You were running from him."
"He really is dangerous. He
said I couldn't leave. He said he'd send someone to find me…"
"Manuel, I presume."
She nodded. "He said he'd
have me k…killed if I even thought about running away. And then he said that
after everything I'd done, after the part I'd played in the robberies, I would
never…"
Kyle's hands…both of them now,
the pain of his injury obviously forgotten in the heat of the moment…came to
her shoulders. They gripped painfully. Gripped in a way that was almost
guaranteed to leave marks later. "Christ in heaven, Paulette! Your part
in the robberies? What the hell are you talking about? What the hell are you
trying to tell me?"
She closed her eyes.
Breathed deep again.
Breathed painfully around a
hard-edged lump rising in her throat.
"I drove the getaway car,"
she said, so quietly she felt sure he wouldn't hear.
But he did.
"You what?"
Now he shook her. Just a little. Just enough to get her to open her eyes and
look straight into his.
"I didn't know," she
whispered. "I never had a clue until the night before last. When…"
"A convenience store over
on Hampden was robbed. By the same gang." Kyle's voice turned hard.
Utterly hard, utterly lifeless, as cold as the stinging lumps of glacial ice
that had once been Paulette's feet. "Are you saying you were there?"
She nodded again. "I was
there for most of them. But I never knew what was happening. I only knew
that…Tom never wanted me to drive his cars. Only once in a while he would
insist. He would say you never knew when I'd need to drive, so he wanted me to
s…stay in p…practice."
"Don't you cry, Paulette."
Obediently, she gulped back
tears. "We would stop a dozen times. At a dozen different places. He'd say
he needed to use the rest room. Needed to buy a pack of cigarettes. Needed to
talk to somebody. All kinds of things. I was always supposed to stay in the
car. Keep the motor running because he'd only be a minute, he'd be in a hurry
when he got back, he'd be…"
"He cruised around from
one convenience store to the next? He maybe robbed more than one in a night?"
This time she shook her head. "No.
We went to all kinds of places. Bars. Supermarkets. Clubs. I think he was using
me. I think he knew all along what he was going to do, where he was going to
strike. Only he wanted to confuse me so that if I happened to hear a newscast
the next day I wouldn't have a clear memory that I'd been at that particular
store. And it worked. Until the other night, when…"
"The owner of the store
was shot the other night."
Paulette nodded, still
fighting tears. "Tom finally killed somebody. And now I'm an accessory
to…m…m…m…" She couldn't say it.
"No." Kyle shook her
again, a little harder. "The man wasn't killed. He wasn't seriously hurt.
He'll recover. So…"
Paulette breathed an enormous
sigh of relief. "Thank God. Thank you."
"And that was when you figured out what
was going on?"
She nodded again. "Tom
would always come out of wherever we'd stopped in a big hurry. He would jump
into the car and I learned a long time ago that I was supposed to drive away
right away. But not too fast. I was supposed to get us moving the minute he got
into the car, no questions asked. But then he sh…shot that m…man, and I couldn't
help but hear. And he told me if I ever said a word to anybody, if I ever
squealed on him, he'd have me killed. And then I started to c…cry, and he…he…"
"Like you're crying right
now." Kyle was holding her again. Holding her closer than ever.
"Y…yes. I was crying, and
he was screaming at me. Telling me it was all my fault. And he p…p…put the
g…gun he'd used to the side of my h…head. He…he…"
"Shhhh." Kyle
pressed her closer still. "Don't think about that part."
"It's kind of hard not
to."
"I know. But try. And
tell me what happened then."
"Then I r…ran away."
"He let you?"
It was Paulette's turn to
laugh. A little. "Not exactly. The doctor prescribed some medicine for him
a while back. He has back spasms. Only he never wants to take it because it has
this weird effect. It knocks him right out. So I slipped some into his drink.
And then when he was out like a light, I slipped out of the apartment and
around the block. I'd been keeping my old car parked on the street there
without him knowing. And I ran away."
"As simple as that."
"As simple as that. And
now…oh, God, Kyle. I don't know what's going to happen to me. What I'm going to
be charged with."
"I don't either."
His voice turned grim again. "But you have to tell what you know. You have
to do whatever you can to stop this guy and whatever other thugs he has…"
"There are several of
them."
"You have to do what you
can to get them off the street. Before someone gets hurt. Really hurt.
Because Tom's shot someone once, and he's going to do it again. He thinks he's
gotten away with it, and he's only going to get bolder. More vicious. And you're
right about one other thing, Paulette. You need a lawyer. Which we'll arrange
just the second we get back to the house. Before you say another word to
anybody."
"You're not going to
arrest me, then?"
He was leading her back to the
break in the fence. Back toward the place where the night flashed bright with
red and blue lights, and where distant voices crackled on a radio.
"I'm wounded. Too wounded
to do anything but let you drag me back to my house," he replied. "I'm
half out of my wits with pain, and don't remember anything. And don't you ever
forget it."
"You're going out on
quite a limb for me."
"Wouldn't be the first
completely ill-advised or irrational thing I've done in my life."
She sighed. Groaned softly.
And felt her stomach, all of her insides, tense as she helped Kyle through the
break in the fence. Then stepped through herself. Into a previously quiet
cul-de-sac filled with police cars.
Paulette felt a new need. A
sudden and overwhelming need to get it all out in the open. Get it all off her
chest, so that whatever future she might be able to find with Kyle, whatever
might happen to the steady spiraling of tight need she felt in aching flesh
between her legs, they could get on with it.
In the morning.
Tomorrow. Or the day after.
Whenever life became safe
again.
About the Author
A native of a small town not far from
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Evelyn Starr always had a passion for the glamorous,
the exotic, the sensuous.And she's always been willing to travel the world in
search of them.Among her favorite places are Boldt's Castle in the Thousand
Islands, Tasmania, Australia's tropical Queensland, and all the nooks and
crannies of the Rocky Mountains she now calls home.
Like her wanderlust, Evelyn's fascination
with words and stories began at an early age.She remembers being able to read
and write before she started school, and by the time she'd finished first
grade, she was writing her own little one-page stories. Following graduation
from high school, she left her small-town home and hasn't looked back.She
majored in journalism, romance, and adventure, and eventually married her
college sweetheart, who remains the most romantic, and the most adventurous,
hero of them all.