For All of Her Life (21 page)

“Not like Keith,” Kathy said evenly, staring at her husband, defying him to find anything wrong in her defense of their mutual friend.

“So he’s a pain in the butt. But he can play drums, we are making the big bucks, and I do kinda like this job!” Larry said, trying to be light, trying to make them smile.

But no one did. Derrick was staring at Judy, who was looking as if she’d like to slit Shelley’s throat. Shelley seemed to want to strangle Larry. Kathy could still feel both Miles and her husband watching her, Miles with a worried curiosity, her husband with something more.

At that moment, the studio door opened. Keith, oblivious to the rancor displayed in his absence, walked in with a broad smile and sheaves of paper for all of them. “Jordan, I think I’ve got it! This song is a hit, number one on the charts, I swear it, it’s all fallen in just right. I tried changing the breaks the way you said when we were working last night, and it’s made all the difference. Anybody have any objections to working on this first? Kathy, these are great lyrics, wonderful!” He walked to her, took her head in his hands, and kissed her on both cheeks. “We’re not ready to record, but we could introduce this piece tonight at the press party. Shall we work on it? Are there any objections?”

A strained silence greeted his words. “No objections,” Jordan said. Kathy knew he was staring at Keith, relieved that he was clean and sober. Jordan didn’t want his friend to leave the band. He would rather have no band. She wondered if the others realized that. It had been Jordan and Keith from the start. Jordan sometimes seemed to hate Keith, but he loved him, too.

The two were head to head then, poring over the music. Jordan glanced up at her suddenly, staring at her again. Keith started to give Larry special instructions for the keyboards, and Larry tested out what he was saying. Instruments screeched as they were tuned.

The fog kept rolling in. Darkness was falling. Because night was coming...

She knew she was dreaming and she commanded herself to wake up. She didn’t want to live through any more of that night. She forced herself to try to open her eyes. It was nearly ten years later. She was in her old room, Jordan’s, and she didn’t really belong here, no matter how right or comfortable it was, and like the biggest fool in the entire world, she’d slept with her ex-husband.

Her eyes opened. The room remained in darkness, except for the shaft of light coming from the bathroom, dimmed now, as if it had grown narrower. Shadows filled the room. Shadows of different lengths and sizes. Shadows the size of...

A man.

“Who is it?” she gasped out, panic seizing her as she realized that yes, someone was there. Someone silently standing over her as she slept. There was something so unnerving about it that a slow terror crept into her. “Who is it?” she repeated. She wanted to shout, but she had just come forth from a dream, and as in nightmares, when it was time to scream, she was so frightened she couldn’t quite dredge up the voice she wanted.

But it didn’t matter. The figure turned in silence, and fled, slipping out of the bedroom door so quickly that it was only a matter of seconds before she began to wonder if she had dreamed the intruder along with the past.

For several long moments, she lay in bed, shaking.

She leapt up then and walked out to the hallway in her bare feet. No one about. She walked down the hall to Jordan’s office, Jeremy’s room for the night. She hesitated, then twisted the knob and went in. Jeremy’s head rested on his pillow, the sheets were drawn to his shoulders. She came closer to him and listened to his deep breathing. He was definitely asleep and had been.

Jordan? What the hell was he up to? Should she go back to bed or walk over and confront him?

It suddenly seemed to her that their pasts had been a series of unspoken accusations. Whatever happened between them, she wasn’t going that route again.

She left Jeremy’s room and walked purposefully along the hallway to the stairs, down them and to the kitchen. Jordan had keyed in the alarm at the kitchen door. The little red light meant he had done it to protect those sleeping within the house. She hesitated a second, wondering if he might have changed things in the past decade and if she might not bring the police force down on them. She punched in the old number and the light flicked off. He hadn’t changed the code. She slipped outside and over to the guest house.

The door was unlocked. She started up the stairs, then paused. She could hear movement, sounds. She hesitated, chilled, then became too warm as a strange heat swept through her. Was he alone?

She started to turn away, but one of the sounds seemed like a groan—not one denoting ecstasy. He might be in some kind of deep and private pain. She had seen him twist, heard him moan before.

What if she was wrong? If he was with someone, if Tara had arrived early, if...

He groaned again.

Kathy rushed up the stairs, pausing at the landing to catch her breath and stare across the room.

Jordan was alone. In bed. His body was sleekly bathed in sweat, he had been tossing and turning so that he had kicked off his sheets. He was dreaming, in a nightmare. She had seen him this way before, but it had been very long ago, right after he had come back from Vietnam.

She wasn’t his wife anymore, she shouldn’t be here. If they hadn’t already had the strange experience of sudden sex after a decade apart she would have felt very awkward indeed.

But he was in pain. And she had already seen his sweat-sheened body tonight. To walk away would be—

Churlish.

She could not do it.

“Jordan!” She knelt at the side of the bed, softly touching his face, his cheek, trying to wake him gently. “Jordan, you’re dreaming. Jordan...”

He bolted up suddenly, eyes wild. They landed on her. For a moment Kathy thought he was lost in time. Then he blinked. His broad-shouldered frame shuddered, and he shook his head, shaking away the dream.

“Kathy,” he murmured. “Kathy...” Then, “What happened? Hmmm. Maybe I’m
nicer
than I thought. You left Muscleman to come back to me?”

“Damn you, Jordan, you were in the middle of a nightmare and I was trying to help you.”

“Thank you. But why are you here?”

She stood, irritated by her previous desire to ease him from the dark grips of his dream. The kindness was backfiring on her now. “There was a man in my room.”

“I thought you invited him.”

“Jeremy was not the man in my room.”

“You invited another man?”

“Jordan, I’m going to slap you in a minute.” It was quite obvious that he didn’t believe her.

“There was a man in your room, uninvited. In the middle of the night, in a house with an alarm. Well, did Jeremy catch him?”

“Jeremy is sleeping. I was sleeping. I looked up, and someone was in my room. I thought it was you.”

His eyes lowered suddenly. “I’ve been right here,” he said, his tone somewhat bitter.

“I can see that,” Kathy told him. Irritably, she clutched the tousled sheets and threw them over his body.

“Tempted?” he asked her pleasantly.

“Jordan, damn you—”

“I am,” he said very softly, suddenly smiling in a way that caught her entirely off guard.

Leave it to Jordan. Even when he was somewhat embarrassed at being caught in the middle of such a wretched dream. What had the nightmare been? He wasn’t going to share it with her, so it seemed, and was determined to taunt her instead.

“Don’t you think we’ve been foolish enough for one night?” she asked him.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m going to slap you at any instant Jordan, I saw someone.”

“You’re sure?”

She started to say that she was, then paused. She wasn’t. She’d been dreaming herself. Haunted by the past. By a houseful of people. By a night that had exploded on them all.

“I thought I was sure.”

He shifted over to one side of the bed, drawing the sheet tightly over him so that he looked decent. He patted the bed beside him. “Sit, tell me what you think you saw.”

She looked at the bed. “Sit?”

“Lie, then. Want me to make coffee?”

“I’m probably up because of the coffee.”

“It was decaf. The company is probably overstimulating.”

“Jordan—”

“Kathy, please come here. Lie down, relax. I just—”

“Just what?”

He shrugged. A slow smile curved his mouth. “Lie next to me. Talk to me. Let me hold you. Auld lang syne. I always wanted to protect you, you know. Be the great provider, make the shadows in the night go away.”

She hesitated, then slipped down beside him. Resting her head on the pillow, she gave in to sheer longing and turned against him, her head and face nuzzling his chest, her body close to his, his arms around her, his long fingers moving through her hair.

“Jordan, this is insane. What are we doing?”

“Does it matter? We are adults.”

“And we have separate lives. There are... there are others to worry about now.”

“He shouldn’t have left you.”

“What?”

“Muscleman. He shouldn’t have left you to the shadows of the night.”

“And what about Miss April?”

He hesitated. “She isn’t here.”

“Jordan, does it make this right?”

“Does it make it wrong?”

“Well, actually... yes.”

He didn’t say anything right away. Didn’t agree with her, didn’t disagree.

“Kathy,” he said huskily at last, “it’s good to hold you. I always loved you so very much.”

The burning of tears stung her eyelids. She tightened her jaw. “When you didn’t think I was sleeping with Keith.”

“Kathy—”

“I don’t think I realized until now that you really went farther than suspicion. You had condemned me.”

“I hadn’t.”

“I believe you did.”

“I don’t know what I thought back then.”

“Which would have been worse—that I’d somehow killed him or that I’d slept with him?”

“Kathy...” He groaned.

She suddenly pushed up and straddled him, staring down at him, demanding an answer. For a moment, there might not have been a Miss April or a borrowed Muscleman. It was amazing how the closeness, the intimacy between them returned.

“Which?” she snapped down to him.

He looked up at her, one brow arched high. “All right, I wasn’t made of stone, I was afraid. I hated you both sometimes when I was gone and in hell and I knew you two were together. I had visions of the two of you, head to head, commiserating with one another, laughing perhaps, getting high, talking music... needing comfort.”

“It never happened. Jordan, we fought over Keith when you came back from Vietnam. It was just over his drugs then, the stuff he’d left all over the house.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But you were already suspicious.”

“I think Keith wanted me to be. Maybe he even wanted to split us up. It didn’t happen then, but he liked to keep that wedge in there.”

“Nothing happened between us.”

“I believed you.”

“Most of the time.”

“Then... well, then...” He hesitated, then stared at her. “I thought I saw you the night he died, going to him. And Miles said he saw you with him before. It just seemed that people always saw you with him.”

She shook her head, suddenly more confused than angry. Yet it was true, if she thought about it. Miles had thought she’d been with Keith the afternoon he had died, and she hadn’t been. It was strange. And a little chilling. “Jordan, it wasn’t me. I mean, I was with Keith many times, not
with
Keith. As a friend, talking to him. I never lied to you. I wouldn’t have, I had no reason to. I did talk to him a while that day after the practice—”

“In our bedroom,” Jordan reminded her icily.

“Talked, Jordan. He’d been in that room before. Miles, Larry, Derrick—and Shelley and Judy—had been in our room at one time or another to talk to us. I’d been in Judy and Derrick’s room. If that implies—”

“It implies that I didn’t like him in our room, and that’s all,” Jordan said firmly.

“He was so excited about that last piece of music. It was as if he was about to turn around on his own. Clean up his act.”

Jordan stared at her, shaking his head. “Kathy, you always want to see the good in everyone. You’d argue like hell with me, but defend Keith or anyone else like a pit bull.”

“You never meant to throw him out of the band.”

“No, but I did mean to end it,” he said softly.

“You were a perfectionist. You wanted that from others.”

“Maybe I was too hard.”

“But...”

“But what?”

She shook her head. “Jordan, I still can’t believe someone killed him. It was just us here—Blue Heron. And the Garcias.” She shivered suddenly. “Then he died. And now you’re getting phone calls.”

“Cranks. Hoaxes. That’s what you told me.

“But now I could swear someone was standing over my bed.”

He hesitated just a second. “Do you think it might have been Jeremy, just making sure you were sleeping where you were supposed to be—and alone?”

“It wasn’t him.”

“Kathy, how can you be so certain that he isn’t the least bit afraid there might still be a spark between us?”

“Impossible,” she said flatly.

“That would be incredibly insulting, murder on my ego, if there weren’t a spark remaining between us,” he said innocently. “I think it was Jeremy.”

“It wasn’t.”

“How can you be so damned sure?”

“Because...” she began and broke off.

“Yes?”

“He was just... sleeping so soundly.”

“Tara would be damned suspicious, were she here. But she isn’t, thank God.”

“Jordan! You have a relationship with that woman—”

“I have one with you at the moment.”

“You don’t.”

“Damn! I do!” he told her. She started to speak, choked up, felt as if lava straight from Vesuvius poured though her. Color touched her cheeks. She had chosen her position, straddling his hips, nothing but the thin sheet between them. And now...

She could feel him. Fully aroused. Very warm. No, hot. Swollen. Stimulating. Intriguing. Exciting...

Where was her willpower?

Not where he touched her, that was for damned sure.