Janelle Taylor (12 page)
Authors: Night Moves
“Please,” she whimpered, as the waves of her climax left even greater need in their wake. She tugged at his shirt, then slid her fingertips beneath the sweat-dampened cotton fabric, stroking warm skin and firm
muscle, holding his shoulders and lifting her hips to make contact with his arousal.
He groaned as she rubbed against him, his eyes drifting closed momentarily. Then he opened them and looked at her, as though he had to force himself to stay focused. She began kissing his neck, his skin salty and sweet. Their hips rocked together in an intimate rhythm until she squirmed, needing to be closer than that, needing to remove the barrier of his clothes that lay between them. She tugged at the waistband of his shorts, but he put a hand on hers to stop her.
Startled, she looked at him.
“Oh, hell, Jordan … I don’t have … anything,” he said raggedly, his panting breaths stirring her hair.
Protection. He didn’t have protection. Her heart sank.
“Do you … ?” He trailed off, seeing the look on her face. “I didn’t think so,” he said flatly.
He rolled off her and lay, breathing hard, on his back. She lay beside him, staring at the lazily circulating paddle fan above the bed and slowly sinking back down to earth.
She landed with a thud and the realization that if Beau hadn’t thought about protection, it wouldn’t have occurred to her.
She had so blindly wanted him that she hadn’t stopped to worry about pregnancy, or STDs. Even now, she was half tempted to throw caution to the wind….
And she might have, if he hadn’t sat up when he did, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, away from her, effectively shattering what was left of the mood.
“I should go,” he said, not looking at her.
She instinctively pulled the sheet up to cover her nudity, suddenly self-conscious. So they were back to this
awkward sidestepping around each other, she thought darkly. She had told herself she would just allow this brief interlude, this one night with him….
But her escape hadn’t even lasted that long.
“Will you be okay if I go?” he asked, ever the Southern gentleman, bending to put on the shoes he had kicked off at some point.
“I’ll be fine,” she lied.
“Not just about this,” he said, straightening and turning to look at her. “I mean, with Spencer.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said again.
“What will you do?”
She noticed his use of the word you. Until now, she had felt almost as though they were a team. He had allowed her to feel that way, she realized. And no matter what she had told herself, or said to him …
She didn’t want him to leave tomorrow. She didn’t want him to be miles away, leaving her to grapple with her loss, and Spencer’s loss, and the veiled threat Phoebe had seemed to imply.
He searched her face. “If you need me—”
“I don’t,” she said, and it came out sharply. “You can go. Really. I’ll figure out what to do.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He stood. “I’ll call when I get home. I’ll only be gone a week.”
She nodded again, unable to speak.
“Okay, then. I’ll talk to you soon.” He was watching her as he headed for the door.
She made no move to follow him.
“Aren’t you coming down with me?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“But you should lock the door after I go, Jordan. Just in case…”
“I will,” she said, fighting back the bitterness—and fear—that rose in her throat. She was going to be alone again. Alone—and perhaps in danger. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to stay, and he wasn’t going to offer again.
He stood by the door, waiting.
She managed to speak again. “Just go, Beau. I’ll come down and lock up after you leave.”
“Okay.”
With a slight wave, he was gone.
She lay listening to his footsteps retreating down the stairs, then heard him open the door and close it firmly behind him.
He didn’t slam it, she noted dully, but he might as well have.
Tuesday morning, Beau woke to the bleat of the alarm he had set the night before.
Groaning, he came instantly to consciousness, welcoming it as he rolled over to turn off the alarm.
He saw that it wasn’t quite five o’clock. He’d better get up and take another shower—this time a hot one, unlike the one he’d taken before bed last night.
Returning home from Jordan’s, his body aching with frustration and unsated need, he had stepped directly into an icy stream of water, hoping to ease the tension enough to sleep.
But it was hours before he managed to drift off, and when he did, his dreams carried him back to the place his restless waking thoughts had visited. At first, he saw only Jordan and Spencer, and they were in trouble, and he was leaving them behind.
Yet as the nightmarish sequence his mind had conjured
wore on, it took an unexpected turn. Jordan and Spencer became Jeanette and Tyler. He knew they were in trouble, knew he had to save them, yet he was powerless to get to them.
It was a familiar dream—one that had haunted him over the years. But the parallel between his lost wife and son, and Jordan and Spencer left Beau feeling uneasy.
He toweled off after his shower, and put his shaving cream, razor, and deodorant into the small leather bag he used for toiletries when he traveled. It already contained several items he kept in it: spare razor blades, ibuprofin, extra shoelaces … and a small package of condoms.
Seeing them, he shook his head. If he’d had them with him last night, things would be different right now.
But he wasn’t the type to carry condoms around in his wallet, just in case. He had really only had two serious relationships in his life: Jeanette and Lisa. In fact, it was because of Lisa that the condoms were here in the first place.
She had gone off the pill a year ago, saying that it was making her nauseated. But that was right around
the
time she began talking nonstop of marrying Beau and having a child with him. He suspected that she had stopped her oral contraception in preparation for pregnancy. In reality, that was the beginning of the end for them. He knew that he couldn’t go down that road ever again, and that it was unfair of him to stay with Lisa, who deserved marriage and a family—blessings he’d already had and lost.
In the kitchen, as Beau went through the motions of preparing a bowl of cereal and a glass of fresh-squeezed juice, he pondered
the
day ahead.
Last night, he had convinced himself that after heading
over to the office this morning to tie up all the loose ends he had left yesterday, he would make the long drive to the beach house as planned.
Jordan hadn’t said anything to change his mind.
If only they hadn’t recklessly tumbled into bed together …
Oh, hell, no. The only
if only
he could logically entertain in retrospect was …
If only he had been prepared to tumble into bed with her.
He had no doubt that if their entanglement had followed through to its natural conclusion, he wouldn’t be going anywhere today. He would still be lying in her bed, in her arms.
His caution had effectively shattered their fragile bond—the emotional one, not just the sexual one. The moment he rolled away from her, he had brought down a massive stone wall between them.
Well, what should he have done? Proceeded to finish what they had begun, and to hell with protection?
No.
He had been there once before. With Jeanette.
He had met her in Europe, while he was traveling there after finishing his graduate work at Rice School of Architecture. It was such a cliché. He was the privileged American guy, taking a year off and piddling away a chunk of his newly inherited trust fund. Jeanette was a beautiful, footloose California girl in Paris on an art scholarship. She captivated him the moment they saw each other at the café, where she was sketching passersby and he was nursing a wine hangover with a cup of strong French coffee.
They were in his bed at the Ritz before the sun went down that night, and neither of them had stopped to
worry about protection. Inseparable thereafter, they were so caught up in each other that Jeanette didn’t even realize when she had missed her period a few weeks later.
Not until she found herself vomiting their usual breakfast of croissants and café au lait did it occur to either of them that their first night of passion might have created more than a carefree romance.
Or that their romance wouldn’t always be carefree.
But it worked out. He had proposed. She had accepted. They moved back to the States, into the sprawling Somerville plantation house, and along came Tyler.
Everyone said their marriage wouldn’t last.
After all, they were opposites: Beau the scion of filthy-rich Southern WASPs; Jeanette the product of alcoholic, blue-collar West Coast parents who divorced within months of her birth.
People assumed that once the blush of falling in love with each other and with their son wore off, they would drift apart.
He and Jeanette used to laugh about it—about how Beau’s father was braced for a bitter battle over alimony and a share in the family fortune, and his mother was worried about the future of her mother’s sapphire earrings, which Beau had inherited and presented to his bride on their wedding day.
Well, his mother had the earrings now, Beau thought bitterly, his stomach roiling as he poured his uneaten cereal down
the
garbage disposal. The sapphires were safely back in Mother’s jewelry box after having been dredged from the depths of the bayou….
Along with the bodies of Beau’s wife and son.
Somebody was screaming.
At the shrill burst of sound, Jordan sat straight up in bed, ripped abruptly from a deep sleep.
Realizing that it was Spencer—and that she was naked beneath the sheet—Jordan fumbled blindly for the robe that was draped over the bedpost. She pulled it on, noting that the screams had subsided as she raced down the hall and grabbed for the knob. For a split second, she froze, all sorts of terrible scenarios invading her mind. Then she pushed Spencer’s door open, telling herself that it had to be another nightmare.
It had to be….
But what if it wasn’t? What if Curt’s phone really had. been tapped and somebody had found her and Spencer, and simply walked through the front door and …
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Spencer’s bed was empty.
Frantic, she shrieked his name and hurled herself back into the hall.
That was when she heard it.
Sobbing.
It was coming from downstairs.
Jordan saw him from the top of the steps. He was sitting on the floor in the foyer, crying, rubbing his eyes. Relief coursed through her.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” She rushed down the steps to him, taking him into her arms.
He was trembling violently. “The pirate,” he said, and began to cry. “He got me.”
“Oh, Spencer, there are no pirates here,” she said soothingly.
“Yes, there are. He was here. He took me out of my
bed and he brought me downstairs and he was going to carry me away.”
“Sweetie, it was just a dream. You must have been sleepwalking.”
“I’m scared, Jordan.” He snuggled against her. “Please don’t let him come back and get me.”
“I won’t,” she promised, because it was easier than protesting again. “You’re safe here with me, sweetie. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
For now, for once, she actually believed those words. Of course he was safe here. Nobody knew where he was, and anyway, why would Phoebe and Reno’s killer bother tracking down a young child?
But…
For that matter, why would anyone with a vendetta against Reno have bothered killing Phoebe? Well, maybe she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, alongside her husband, Jordan thought uneasily. The fact that they were dead didn’t mean Spencer’s life was still in danger.
“Is it the middle of the night?” Spencer asked.
She looked at the clock on a shelf across the dimly lit room. “It’s almost dawn,” she said reassuringly.
“Do I have to go back to sleep? Please don’t make me. I’m scared he’ll come again.”
“It’s okay,” Jordan said, yawning. “We can get up.”
She stood, stretched, and reached for his hand.
“Jordan?” he asked, allowing her to squeeze his fingers.
“Hmm?”
“Do you think my mommy will come back for me today?”
She froze. A terrible, sick feeling washed over her.
“No, Spencer,” she said quietly. “I don’t think she will.”
She braced herself for the inevitable, but he seemed satisfied, if disappointed, with that answer.
At least, for now.
But sooner or later, she would have to tell him the truth.
As they headed for the kitchen, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the front door was locked.
It wasn’t.
All three locks were undone.
She stopped walking.
“What’s wrong?” Spencer asked beside her.
“Nothing,” she murmured, searching her memory.
She was almost positive that she had come back downstairs last night to lock the door after Beau left. She remembered lying in bed before that, growing drowsy, and realizing she was going to fall asleep and leave it open. She was pretty certain she had climbed out of bed and padded to the stairs….
But everything was fuzzy.
She had been so exhausted.
Maybe she only thought she had locked the doors. Maybe she had dreamed it, just as Spencer had dreamed about the pirate kidnapping him from his bed.
That had to be it, she reassured herself, giving Spencer’s small hand another squeeze.
It was almost eleven o’clock when Beau finally tossed the last duffel bag into the back of his SUV and climbed into the driver’s seat. It had been a long morning at the office, followed by a quick dash back to his apartment to pack and get ready for his departure.
He still wasn’t comfortable leaving Jordan and Spencer behind, but what choice did he have?
You could stay,
he told himself as he drove out of the parking garage beneath his building.
At least, he could call to make sure she was all right That thought had crossed his mind countless times this morning, but he had been so busy at the office that there was never an opportunity.