Longest Night (14 page)

“Cecily,
stay
.”

“Which part of ‘no' did you miss?”

Ian sighed dramatically. “You're not going to hurt me, and I'm not going to hurt you.”

She gritted her teeth. “I don't sleep near other people.” She stripped her blanket off the bed—or tried to. Ian was holding the other end.

“Stay,” he repeated. This time, he added, “Please.”

Forced to either give up or put down the gun and get into a schoolyard fight over a blanket, Cecily let go and stepped back from the bed. The cool bedroom air had her starting to shiver already. “I'm sorry, Ian, but I'm really not interested in sex right now,” she said bluntly. Silently, she berated herself for not keeping extra blankets on hand. She had a sleeping bag rolled up in the basement, but she had no energy to go down there and get it.

Ian laughed in amusement. “I turn down most clients because their cases are too boring. Police cases, too. I did cold cases as a hobby during law school.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cecily asked, giving her blanket an experimental tug. Either Ian was still holding it or he'd rolled on top of it. Of all the times to revert to being a five-year-old, apparently he had to pick
now
.

“My work, Cecily,” Ian said as if that should be obvious. “When I was new, I had to take the boring cases—DUI, assault, theft… Things any half-competent law clerk could do.”

Cecily shoved the gun into the back of her jeans, pinning it temporarily in her waistband. It was ridiculously unsafe, but at the moment, she didn't care. “So?” she asked, folding her arms as if she could trap her body heat.

“I defended an accused serial killer three years ago. Only five victims, so the police didn't have much to work on. Circumstantial evidence. The killer electrocuted them. Did a good job making it look accidental, too.”

Cecily went cold, flashes of memory—of the war—shattering her composure. She sat down, landing on the edge of the bed by sheer luck. Her arms tensed, pressing against her body, fists clenching against her ribs.

“The detective investigating the last death needed a conviction. As it turned out, the killer had stolen uniforms from my client's service truck two years before, and that's where their DNA evidence came from.”

Faced with the choice of listening to Ian's odd story or venturing into her own nightmares, Cecily clung desperately to his voice. She told herself to breathe, steady and deep, and tried not to count her too-rapid heartbeats. She didn't feel cold anymore, but that was an illusion. She knew she should get under a blanket. She just didn't want to move.

“The real killer wasn't in some run-down tenement or abandoned warehouse. Movies are hardly an accurate representation of reality,” Ian scoffed. “He lived with his wife in an apartment in midtown. Worked at a bank. When the police wouldn't listen to my evidence, I went to his apartment and confronted him.”

Slowly, the foolishness of Ian's actions worked its way through the jagged thoughts scraping at Cecily's brain. “That's incredibly stupid. You went alone, I take it?”

“The idiot detective had no interest in accompanying me, so yes.” He huffed as if irritated. “My mistake was dismissing the wife. She stabbed me with a fork.”

“
What?
” Cecily twisted around to stare at Ian in the darkness. The motion tightened the waistband of her jeans, forcing the gun to dig uncomfortably against her spine.

Propping himself up on one elbow to face Cecily, Ian shrugged. “It happens. After I disarmed her, I called in a detective who wasn't so obsessed with fame as to blind himself to reality, and that's one less serial killer on the streets.”

“Were they working together?”

“No. She was apparently afraid of losing her husband's pension if he went to prison.”

Cecily couldn't help but laugh. It was terrible, because Ian was talking about a serial killer and an insanely devoted (and greedy) wife and an incident in which he'd ended up stabbed, but once the laughter started, she couldn't stop.

“So tell me,” Ian continued, reaching out to touch Cecily's hip, “why should I let you go back to the couch?”

“What does that have to do—”

Ian shifted closer, sliding his hand down to curve over Cecily's thigh. “You won't hurt me.”

“It's not…” Cecily hesitated, shaking her head. “It's not just that, Ian. You saw how I woke up. It's dangerous. It's not—”

“Don't say ‘normal,'” Ian interrupted quietly. He sat up so he could move closer, pushing the blankets aside. “If I wanted normal, I would have followed my family's very successful, very boring traditions instead of going into criminal law.”

Cecily closed her eyes and raked a hand through her hair. She supposed she should take offense at the thought that the only person who was actually stupid enough to want to spend an entire night with her, nightmares and all, was most likely clinically insane, but “normal” held little appeal for her, too. Logically, she knew she should get up and leave the room, even if it meant shivering sleeplessly through the night until Ian relented and surrendered a blanket, but logic had nothing to do with the emptiness inside her. She'd never meant to be alone.

Ian moved even closer, drawing his hand up from Cecily's thigh to her abdomen, resting right over another patch of scar tissue that he hadn't yet seen. She flinched, but he made no effort to get under her shirt.

“You don't have to talk about your scars.”

“Fuck.” Cecily gasped, flinching violently this time. How the hell could he know what she was thinking? “Ian—”

“I already know.”

Through clenched teeth, Cecily accused, “Your brother told—”

“Told me nothing,” he interrupted. He closed the distance between them again and touched her face as if to hold her still. “I saw enough, Cecily. I know you.”

“Ian—”

“And I'm still here.”

Cecily closed her mouth, turning away from Ian, though the motion pressed her face against his palm. His hand was warm and steady, holding her without trapping her.

“That's just one more indication that you're probably crazy,” she managed to say, her voice distant and faint.

“So?”

Cecily laughed and nodded tightly. She pulled the gun out of her waistband and put it on the nightstand, finally feeling the cold. Shivering, she pushed back into Ian, saying, “Back up. You're hogging the bed.”

“We'll be warmer if we share blankets,” he suggested.

Cecily hesitated. “Ian…”

In answer, he moved back, mattress shifting as he settled down on the far side of the bed. “Tomorrow night, then.”

“I didn't picture you as an optimist.”

“Realist,” Ian corrected. “Go to sleep. You're awful company if you don't get at least four hours.”

“Thanks,” Cecily muttered, pulling her blanket up and trying to tell herself that Ian was right about sharing warmth. She curled up at the very edge of the bed and stared into the darkness, wondering if she'd be able to fall asleep listening to the sound of someone else's slow breathing.

***

Cecily moved in her sleep, sprawling over the bed one limb at a time until she seemed to achieve an impossible state by all laws of physics and anatomy, occupying far more of the mattress than a woman of her stature possibly could. Ian had awakened each time a hand or foot had invaded his side of the bed, determined that Cecily was restfully sleeping, and retreated until he was at the very edge of the king-sized mattress.

This time, though, when her movements woke him, he immediately identified the difference between those previous movements and a nightmare.

Without full disclosure of Cecily's past experiences, thoughts, and feelings, Ian couldn't be entirely certain that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The professionals couldn't agree if PTSD existed or if it should have a different name. They couldn't even agree on a course of treatment. Still, Ian had a vested interest in knowing as much as he could about it, given his family's tradition of military service. And because of that knowledge, he was prepared to handle the abrupt onset of her nightmare.

She didn't scream of thrash or even speak. Instead, she went quiet and tense, body moving in minute twitches, reminding Ian of watching the guard dogs dreaming in a pile on the kennel floor. He couldn't have been more than five when he'd asked Preston why the dogs' feet were moving, and Preston, twelve years old and pompous with unearned wisdom, had given some platitude about chasing rabbits. He'd been entirely unprepared for Ian's demands to explain the difference between dog and human consciousness and to explain how dogs could dream if they were “only animals.”

Without a proper bedside light, Ian had to depend on his cell phone. He knew better than to try and wake her while still in arm's reach. He guessed that Cecily would perceive any attempt at stealth as a threat, so he moved off the bed quietly but naturally, picked up his cell phone from the nightstand (where it served as nothing more than a clock), and stepped back.

He powered the device up and turned it, playing the glow of the start-up screen over Cecily. The blankets covered her from the neck down, magnifying every little twitch of her hands and feet into wavelike motions of fabric. Behind her closed lids, her eyes were moving rapidly and her jaw was clenched. Her pulse and respiration were accelerated.

Definitely a nightmare.

Ian couldn't gauge if it was a particularly bad nightmare, but it was best not to take any chances—not for his own safety but for Cecily's peace of mind. Shivering in the cold, he moved to the foot of the bed and held his mobile in one hand, pointed upward to illuminate both himself and the rest of the room as best he could.

“Cecily,” he said, his voice calm and pitched low but firm. He waited a few seconds before repeating her name two more times.

The fact that she didn't immediately awaken and grab for her weapon felt like an accomplishment. Subconsciously at least she might well have recognized Ian's voice and categorized him as safe.

Cautiously, he said, “Cecily, wake up,” as he reached down to touch the top of her foot.

Immediately, her body coiled in on itself. She twisted and sat up. The blanket went flying as she reached out with both arms, a quick motion to assess her surroundings. Then she started to reach for the weapon on her side of the bed, but her hand never made it that far. She stopped as her fingers crossed the edge of the mattress; she stared up at Ian, panting to catch her breath.

“Ian?” she asked, her voice soft and very tight, almost a whisper.

In answer, he pressed and held the power button on his cell phone. “Go back to sleep,” he said, determined to treat the situation as nothing out of the ordinary. He crawled up the bed, tossed the BlackBerry on the table, and then tried to sort out his blankets.

“What—” Cecily began, still sitting up. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, though I have no idea how someone your height can take up even more space than me,” he accused, mostly to divert Cecily's mind from any lingering trace of the nightmare.

She didn't immediately answer. She moved gracelessly back down the bed and thrashed under her blankets to get herself sorted. Only when she was lying down, blankets pulled up over her body, did she roll onto her right side to face Ian. “I had a nightmare,” she said.

Ian bit back his response:
Obviously
.

After a few silent seconds ticked by, Cecily asked, “Did I hurt you?”

“No.”

Cecily's exhale was shaky. “That's good. I didn't…say anything, did I?”

Ian moved a bit closer, shifting his pillow. “No. You barely even moved.”

He couldn't see Cecily's frown, but he could hear it in her tone of voice as she asked, “Then why did you wake me? Did I take up that much of the bed?”

Ian laughed softly. “Yes, but that's not why. Consensus is that it's best to wake someone from a nightmare. Did it help?”

“Hell if I know. Night always seems to last forever. Even if I shake off the nightmares, it's like I'm still half-asleep.” She moved then, reaching out to find Ian's arm with her fingertips. “Thanks.”

He resisted the urge to take Cecily's hand and instead pressed into the touch, taking it as an unspoken invitation to move closer. “If this were group therapy, I'd be expected to ask you how you feel,” he said, unable to hide the distaste in his voice.

“God. Don't,” Cecily said, sounding equally repulsed. “If you want to stay awake, there are far better things we can do than
talk
. Or I can just go out into the living room and let you sleep.”

“Sleep
is
a waste of time,” Ian agreed, trailing his fingers along the underside of Cecily's forearm, though she was still wearing her long-sleeved shirt and jeans. She shivered and made a pleased little sound. Encouraged, Ian hinted, “You're wearing too much for anything but talk, though.”

Cecily laughed. “Let me build up the fire. You deal with the mess we've made of the blankets.”

Ian sighed and reached for his cell phone to turn it back on for light. “Cecily…” he began as an idea struck him.

“Hm?”

“When you told my brother I could stay with you this winter, did either of you specify
where
?”

“Well, no…” Cecily hesitated. “Did you want to leave?”

“How would you like to see Ibiza?” he asked, surprising her with the odd question.

She said nothing as she worked on building up the fire. Slowly, light filled that corner of the room, throwing long shadows everywhere. She rose, surrounded by an aura of red-gold light that brought out bright highlights in her night-dark hair. Her back was turned, arms crossed, hands rubbing over her biceps.