There was no foyer, no entrance hall as such, but only a large open room that spanned the width of the house. It had an ornate marble fireplace centered between French doors that were draped in crisp red and white toile de Jouy. This was the focal point for the mixture of antique rosewood furniture and modern overstuffed oxblood leather sofas gathered around the Turkey carpets that defined the sitting areas. The keynote once more was grace combined with comfort.
As Janna paused to look around her, Clay shut the front door with a solid thud, closing them inside. Slowly she turned to face him. If he meant to take advantage of their isolation, or make his move toward retaliation, it would surely be now.
“Would you like a snack?” he asked, moving past her toward double doors that opened to one side. “It’s been a while since we had dinner, and you didn’t eat much anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. Food was the last thing on her mind.
“Something simple? Toast and milk? Fruit? Ice cream?” He turned on a light in the connecting dining room, then moved on out of sight, presumably in the direction of the kitchen.
Surely no man so intent on extending hospitality
could have revenge on his mind or even aggressive seduction? She’d worried for nothing. With an involuntary shudder, Janna called after his retreating back. “No thanks. The thing that holds the most appeal right now, the one thing I’d really, really love, is a hot bath.”
He stopped in a doorway on the far side of the dining room. Turning back toward her, he propped one hand on the facing and brushed his chin against his shoulder with a bearded rasp. His expression wry, he said, “A shower and a shave wouldn’t hurt me, either. We can eat afterward.”
“Don’t let me stop you if you’re hungry now,” she protested. “Just point the way to a bathroom.”
“Through here. This is the bedroom wing that I use, on the far side of the kitchen.” He tipped his head toward the dark hallway behind him.
She moved to join him. His gaze tracked her, turning opaque as she drew nearer and paused where he stood so it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. Her heart tripped into a stronger beat while her lips parted of their own accord.
His lashes flickered down to conceal his expression. He lowered his arm and stepped back, indicating with a brief gesture that she should move ahead of him into the connecting hall. Turning on lights as he went, he guided her past two closed doors then stopped at a third. He pushed inside, and walked quickly to a closet where he pulled out an oversize sleep shirt in white with hot-pink lettering, then handed it to her.
As she took the shirt, it fell open to reveal a picture of a bored woman with her arms crossed over her chest and a dialogue bubble above her head that read, Trust Me…I’ve Had Sex, And It Isn’t Like That. As she held it up, she gave him a laconic look. “Yours?”
“My mother’s,” he answered, his smile a little crooked. “She uses this room when she comes to visit. Feel free to take whatever you need from the closet. Or from the bathroom, either, for that matter.”
She thanked him, and he nodded. He didn’t linger, didn’t even act as if he might, but simply walked out and closed the door behind him.
He had been, for all intents and purposes, the perfect gentleman. Amazing.
She was grateful, of course. She was tired to the bone, had been wearing what she had on for more than twenty-four hours, and was worried, still, about Lainey. She’d been shot at this evening and had more problems about that incident and everything surrounding it than she could comfortably handle. Fending off sexual overtures was the last thing she needed, even if she and Clay Benedict had been in bed together a small eon ago, before Lainey’s latest medical nightmare began. Yes, she was truly appreciative.
Why, then, did she feel so deflated?
The bath was hot and revitalizing. She shampooed her hair as well, removing the last of the hospital smell and replacing it with a clean hint of roses and herbs. Combing out the long strands, she towel-dried them then pushed them behind her back.
It didn’t seem like a good idea to go to bed while her hair was still wet. Though she was tired beyond words, she was too keyed up for immediate sleep. Added to that was a feeling of unreality overlaid by restlessness. It had been so long since she’d been relieved from the minute-to-minute responsibility for Lainey that she didn’t feel right without it hovering over her. It seemed that she should be somewhere else, doing something else, that she had no right to be idle with only herself to look after.
She also felt a little hungry, after all. And she couldn’t expect to go to sleep on an empty stomach.
The sleep shirt was perfectly decent, covering her from neck to knees. There was nothing sexy about it since it skimmed over her breasts without emphasis and hardly touched her anywhere else. Even turning back and forth in front of the closet door mirror, she couldn’t see so much as an outline of her body through it. Not that she had any reason to worry too much about turning Clay on, she thought. He didn’t seem all that interested. Besides, he’d probably already eaten and gone to bed.
Wrong.
Clay was perched on a tall stool in the big, rambling kitchen with its white cabinets and tall, leaded glass windows that featured Art Deco stained-glass designs in their centers. He wore only a pair of gym shorts, and moisture from his shower slicked back his hair and clung to tops of his shoulders in droplets. Janna’s mouth went dry the instant she saw him.
She must have made some small sound, for he half
turned, his body rigid and gaze alert. As he caught sight of her, he relaxed again, giving her a smile.
“Change your mind? There’s plenty here.”
“If you don’t mind.”
The feast spread out on the slate gray-cabinet top included wafer thin deli-sliced ham, a wedge of cheddar, buttery crackers, apple slices and brownies enriched with nuts and chunks of caramel. Clay was using a paper towel for a plate, and he reached to pull off another one for her from a heavy brass holder. Leaving his stool then, he stepped around to the cabinet to take down an extra glass. Carrying it to the refrigerator, he asked over his shoulder, “Milk, iced tea, juice or something fizzy?”
“What, champagne?”
“Cola was what I had in mind, but there’s Bordeaux, if you want something stronger.” He reached for a bottle that sat far back on the top shelf.
“No, no, bad joke. Milk is fine,” she answered as she slid onto a stool. It was what he was drinking and sounded good with the brownies. With any luck, it might also help her to sleep.
He filled the tall glass and brought it to her, then returned to his stool where he faced her with one long leg outstretched as a brace. When he nudged the ham and cheese in her direction, she picked up a slice of each and a cracker to go with them, then watched as he selected a brownie. They sat eating for several minutes while silence grew thick between them.
Janna reached for her milk and took a long, cold swallow. It felt good going down, soothing to the
nervousness in the pit of her stomach. As she set the glass back on the cabinet top, she brushed her fingers along the side where condensation had formed. Finally she looked up at Clay. “I should thank you for not calling Roan earlier,” she said slowly. “It means a lot to me.”
The look he gave her was impenetrable, without warmth. He wasn’t happy with his decision, she thought. It was even possible he’d made no permanent decision at all.
“I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing,” she went on. “You think it’s wrong and even dangerous. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know.”
“Maybe?”
“All right, probably,” she said in tight agreement. “But I can’t just forget it.”
“Who are you trying to convince, Janna? Me or yourself?”
She looked away from his level gaze. “You don’t understand.”
“I think I do,” he answered in quiet contradiction. “But what about me and what I think? I’m her uncle. Doesn’t that matter?”
“You don’t know her.”
“I’ve known her for days. I’ve held her, talked to her, watched her smile. She’s family, blood of my blood. That’s sacred for a Benedict. It means everything. But you can’t buy a life with a life, Janna. It’s a devil’s bargain that smears everything it touches and kills the soul. It will destroy you, and Lainey.”
“I can’t help that,” she said, her voice aching in her throat.
“What are you going to tell Lainey one day when she asks who the person was who gave her back her life? What are you going to tell yourself if you keep this bargain and she dies anyway? How are you going to live with it, any of it?”
Agony took her appetite and her breath. He was so merciless in his hard anger and honorable stance, and so very right.
She pushed her milk away from her, then slid from the stool. Turning blindly away from him, she said, “I don’t know how. I don’t know what’s best or worst, what’s noble and good or even what’s cruel and selfish. All I know is that doing nothing is also a choice, one that’s more than I can bear.”
“Other people also have choices, Janna,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes you do what you must.”
She didn’t answer, wasn’t sure whether he was talking about her or himself. Did he call out to her again or slide from his stool as if he meant to follow her? She thought he might have done both, but couldn’t be sure. She saw nothing, heard nothing. Head high and back straight, she walked away from him, and didn’t stop until the door of the room she’d been given closed behind her.
The room was dark, but she didn’t turn on a light. Finding the bed in the dark, she sank to its cushioned surface and sat with her head forward and her hands braced on either side of her. She ached as if she’d
been beaten. Her mind was empty, yet something dark and unendurable hovered at the edges.
It was quiet, too quiet. The old house that was the ancestral home of Lainey’s father seemed to press in upon her. It weighed her down with its traditions and moral clarity and high expectations. It caused her to feel unsure of herself. It made all her defenses based on moral ambiguity and shades of gray seem foolish if not disingenuous. It forced her to stare her responsibility in the face.
If she continued on her present course, she would be exchanging her daughter’s life for that of another child. She would be condemning a young innocent to death and his mother to eternal grief.
She couldn’t do it.
She might once have been able to, might have convinced herself that the suspicious deaths had nothing to do with her, that she was not to blame for what others might do, or that her need outweighed all else. No more. She was forced to accept the fact that she could not make Lainey’s life right with that kind of wrong. She couldn’t snatch this bitter, bitter cup from her daughter’s lips and pass it to someone else.
Nor could she allow Clay to be implicated in what she was doing or be endangered because of it. Regardless of his intentions, he didn’t deserve that. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of the shooting incident this evening. Next time, they might not be so lucky.
She must put whatever trust she could find in Clay and cancel the surgery. She would see Dr. Gower and
take care of the latter tomorrow. She would tell him she couldn’t get the extra money, tell him that the discovery of the bodies in the swamp made it too dangerous, that Lainey was too sick or too closely watched by the Benedicts, something, anything to make him see that it was impossible to continue. That was, of course, if he meant to proceed after the hue and cry over the bodies in the lake and Anita Fenton’s threat to withhold the kidney.
Time seemed elastic, endless. She could feel her heart beating, almost hear the soft rush of blood through her veins. She was aware of where she sat, how she sat, the steady, corrosive paths of her thoughts and where they were taking her, but she was outside it all. Pain and fear were there, but their edges were muffled. She felt so strange, unreal, like an automaton that had come unwound. She needed something, had to have it, but couldn’t quite identify it.
As if from a great distance, she watched herself rise from the bed and leave the room. She walked along the dark hall, feeling her way along the wall until she came to the bedroom where she’d heard the sound of a shower earlier. The door was open a crack. She pushed it wider and stepped inside.
“Janna?”
Clay’s voice came from the big sleigh bed. She moved in that direction like a bat honing in on vibrating sound waves. Placing a knee on the high mattress, she lowered herself beside him, reaching for him.
His arms closed around her, warm and comforting
and so very, very real. And abruptly the pain and the fear were just as genuine, so she was lost in a world of hurt and fear and unending, unbearable grief over the decision she had made.
“Hold me,” she whispered as she turned her face into his neck and huddled close. “Please, please hold me.”
C
lay didn’t mind.
He accepted the warm, shivering, pliant woman into his arms, his bed, his mind and his heart. This was his purpose for living. He had been created for this and nothing else, to keep this one woman safe and whole and to banish her demons of the night.
He meant to do no more than that; he really didn’t.
Yet she felt so right, fit so perfectly against him, into him. He’d thought she might never want to touch him nor be touched by him again after the things he’d said. That she would come to him tonight had seemed a distant fantasy. He still thought it might be some form of a waking dream. Until he felt the soft press of her lips against the strong column of his neck.
He was just a man. He might have the best of intentions, but he had no immunity against the feel of soft skin, the woman scent that went to his head like fine brandy, or the powerful surge of the blood in his veins at the smallest hint of cooperation with his potent imaginings.
He could have rolled over her, into her, in a single fast act of penetration. The urge to do just that was strong, so strong. The lingering residue of his de
spairing anger at her refusal to be influenced by him drummed the need against the inside of his skull. Still he retained enough self-awareness there in the quiet darkness to know it would be inadequate. A fast, hard rut was a fine thing on occasion, but it would be over too soon. Janna required more, and so did he. He needed a deeper and longer connection. Tomorrow would come too soon, and he might never hold her, never see her after she found out what he meant to do at first light.
So he brushed her forehead with his lips in his first tentative move of the ancient
pas de deux
of love and waited for a response. It came, the delicate brush of her fingertips through the crisp yet sensitized hair that covered his breastbone, as if she could absorb some knowledge of him through touch alone.
He lifted his hand to her hair, threading his fingers through the damp strands, easing the long length from under her. The cool silken glide of it along his palm stoked the fire that burned low in his belly. Ignoring that building heat, he traced the curve of her ear, memorizing the small whorl and the petal softness of the lobe, before trailing along the gentle turn of her jaw to the point of her stubborn chin. The slightest pressure there tilted her face toward him. Then with a deep drawn breath, he set his lips to hers.
The kiss was sweet and powerful, and as long and deep as he intended to love her. He plumbed the heady recesses of her mouth, taking pleasure in the satin surfaces, the tiny, jell-like beads of her tongue, the slow and sinuous play of one slick surface against
the other. His mind expanded as he took the taste and feel of her deep inside him and carefully stored away their myriad variations as vital sense memories.
When did he shift his hand to her hip? He didn’t remember. The discovery that she was naked under her borrowed sleep shirt burst into his consciousness like a silent explosion. That she had sat in his kitchen like that only a short time ago, virtually unprotected even as they quarreled, brought a wave of hot need that tightened his grasp so he turned toward her, pulling her close against him.
She came willingly, fitting herself into his body until she felt locked to him. Compulsively he explored the slim line of her thigh, the curve of her hip, then skimmed along her backbone. The movement slid the folds of cotton knit higher until he was forced to ease away while he disentangled her from the sleep shirt. Flinging it into the darkness behind him, he got rid of the loose sleep shorts he wore, then pulled her against him once more. He spread his fingers over the tender fullness of her hip, pulling her into him until the warm, diamond-shaped valley between her thighs cradled his hard, pulsating length.
Perfect, the fit was so perfect, so exact that it was as if she was made for him alone. The sensation of his strutted flesh against her soft, cushioned heat was such exquisite torture that a low groan vibrated in his throat. Janna’s breath caught, so her breasts pushed more firmly against his chest.
A shiver rippled over the woman he held, leaving goose bumps in its wake. Feeling it, all his deliberate,
gentlemanly intentions vanished, displaced by naked, raging desire.
God, but he wanted her, wanted to taste every inch of her, delve into every fold and recess, to touch and hold until he knew her smallest secrets and felt her shudder again, out of control, in his arms. He had to have her completely and know that for this moment there was no shadow of anyone or anything between them.
And he did. Half-crazed with longing, totally absorbed, he pressed his face between the warm silk rises of her breasts. Climbing the peaks in slow, dizzying spirals with his tongue, he captured the tight peaks with cautious pressure of his teeth, then drew them into his mouth to abrade the raspberry nipples with the rough edge of his tongue. He smoothed his lips over her quivering abdomen and the resilient and flat surface between her hipbones, enjoying the fluttering reaction of her muscles. He tested the softness of the curls that protected the joining of her thighs, laved the fine-grained skin on the insides of her thighs with his tongue, then swooped down to delve into her soft, magnolia-petaled, citrus flavored folds. Gently he plumbed them until she writhed and gasped in his hold, and was so liquidly, scaldingly inviting in her openness that his willpower and rigorous self-containment shredded like a banana tree in a hurricane.
He would have taken her then in pounding oblivion if she hadn’t raised up, shifted away, then bent to take him with her mouth in such hot yet delicate encase
ment that he couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t make a sound without the risk of exploding.
Nothing, nothing had ever been so endlessly right in all the vital march of his days. He endured it, exalted in it while holding, barely, to sanity and restraint. Until heart and stamina could take no more.
Shivering, forgetting every compulsion or intention he’d ever had, abandoning all hope and pretense of delicacy, every convention except the mutual and primal joining, he gathered her close and buried himself in her depths.
It was the most perfect thing of all. It was the glorious dance of flesh against pulsating flesh, two people striving together with panting breaths, slick skin and mindless transmission of ineffable joy. It was stupendous, transfiguring, a storm of wonder that burst over them, shook them, carried them, then left them spent and gasping. It abandoned them, in the end, leaving them on their opposite shores, with their opposite values and intentions.
Afterward, Clay held her until her muscles relaxed, her breathing slowed, deepened, and she slept. For him, however, all hope of rest was gone. He lay staring into the darkness, soothing his hand down her back over and over, as he accepted, finally, all that he had never known, would never know, and all that he was going to lose.
“What have you been doing with yourself? You look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”
It was Roan who spoke, looking up from his pa
perwork, as Clay stepped into his office. Clay gave him a sour glance before throwing himself into the chair across from the sheriff’s desk. “That’s because I haven’t.”
“But I thought you and Janna went home last night to—Never mind.”
Clay refused to rise to the provocation that lurked in his cousin’s gray eyes. He appreciated the fact that Roan could make a semisalacious joke, however. Until he’d met Tory and learned to relax a little, he’d been much too uptight for that kind of banter. “Janna slept,” he said now. “I didn’t. Getting shot at can do that to a guy.”
“So you were involved in the hospital fireworks, after all?” Roan leaned back in his chair. “I thought it was too much of a coincidence that you’d just left.”
“Somebody told you, I suppose?” Clay asked in disgust. People always told Roan everything.
“Johnnie.”
“At least nobody shot up the hospital the way they did when Tory was laid up there.”
Roan inclined his head. “But it’s still getting to be entirely too popular a place for ambushes. So did you see who did it?”
“Not really. Did you?”
“Long gone by the time we got there, though he might not have been if you’d given me a buzz. Why was it, again, that I got the news from someone else?”
“We weren’t hit,” Clay said with a twitch of one
shoulder. “Getting Janna the hell out of there seemed a tad more important.”
“More important than seeing to it that it didn’t happen again?”
Clay propped one ankle on his knee and studied the laces of his running shoe. “Janna thought it might be a warning. She didn’t want you brought into it because…”
“Because she was afraid I’d put this Dr. Gower out of business.”
“Something like that.”
“Hell, Clay.”
“I know. I tried to talk her into reporting it, and into forgetting about this under-the-table transplant, but she’s determined.”
“In spite of all you can do?”
Clay gave his cousin a level stare. “I did try, believe me.”
“I thought you were more persuasive. I mean, look how you charmed Tory.”
“That was different.” The words were defensive.
“How? She’s a woman, Janna’s a woman.”
“If I have to tell you how, then you’re worse off than I am,” Clay said with precision.
“Meaning you had nothing to lose where Tory was concerned?”
“Something like that,” he agreed, then realized with irritation just how much he’d given away. “Damn it all, Roan…”
“Unfair, I know. So sue me.”
“I’ll let you make up for it instead, by telling me
what you found out about the shooting. Or anything you may have dug up about this doctor.”
“Found out he was a medic in ‘Nam, went to med school after he returned stateside. Could be he saw more than his share of wasted human organs while out there.”
“Or how easily young men can die?” Clay suggested.
“You saw him, even if you didn’t talk to him. What do you think?”
Clay frowned as he tried to get a firm hold on his impressions. Finally he shrugged. “That nurse of his wasn’t exactly what I’d call well-balanced, but I didn’t see enough of the doctor to tell.”
“Everybody says he’s a hard worker, donates a lot of time to the project close to his clinic. On the other hand, several teenagers, mostly gang members and punks, have turned up missing over the past couple of years. Nobody took much notice except their mothers and maybe their aunts and grandmothers. I mean, it’s a rough area, crack houses on every corner, all-night Ecstasy bashes, drive-by shootings as common as sneezing, and it’s a slow Saturday night when at least a half dozen don’t hit local hospital ERs for knife wounds. Who misses a few punks, one way or another?”
“They should be missed,” Clay said, his voice tight.
“I’m not saying it’s right, just stating facts.”
“You think somebody is taking advantage of the death toll?”
Roan stared at him a long minute. “You want my best guess? I’d say someone took advantage of it for a while. Then maybe a patient about to have his organs harvested came back to life, or could be there was no convenient corpse when one was needed. This person went from taking from the newly dead to stealing from the living. Since it was twice as profitable to take both kidneys and not much more dangerous, they started making a clean sweep, so to speak.”
“Such a way with words,” Clay drawled with a wry glance at his cousin. Then he frowned. “Most of these kids we’re talking about are from ethnic groups other than white, aren’t they?”
“Not all, but people desperate for a new kidney don’t care,” Roan pointed out.
“Of course not, but our culprits have to be aware that there’s less chance of rejection with cadaver transplants when the donor is from the same ethnic group. No such thing as discrimination politics in organ donation. It just doesn’t work. So if Gower is doing transplants on patients like Lainey with organs of unknown origin, then he’s endangering them.”
“You been doing Internet research or something?”
“Or something,” Clay agreed.
“Could be he doesn’t care. Besides, dead patients don’t complain, or their families who’ve been involved in illegal activity.”
“Which scares the hell out of me when I think of how close he came to using a scalpel on Lainey,” Clay said.
Roan made a grim noise of agreement. “At least that won’t happen.”
“Meaning the investigation is on track?”
“And moving right along. The Baton Rouge police are set to raid the clinic before noon today.”
“Without you?” Clay asked in mock surprise.
“Not exactly. It’s out of my jurisdiction, but I’ve been invited to come along for the bust since the evidence for it came from this office. A helicopter is standing by. I’ll be heading out of here any second.”
Clay felt no surprise whatever. There wasn’t a Benedict alive who didn’t think he could do a better job than anyone else at practically anything in which he had an interest—or who didn’t hate to be left out of anything exciting.
He said, “Don’t let me hold you up.”
“I won’t. Oh, and you can tell Janna about it after lunch. It should be all over by then.”
“Are you suggesting that she’d try to warn Gower if she heard sooner?”
“Who knows? But it’s best not to take chances.”
Clay picked a dried sand burr off his shoestring. “Maybe I’ll wait then. You’ll let me know how it goes?”
“Sure. I’m anxious to see this clinic shut down myself, regardless of whether the good doctor is involved in organ harvesting.”
“I don’t know what Janna will say about it. Nothing good, I imagine, especially when she finds out that I helped set up this raid. She thinks Lainey’s going to die, you know.”
“Is she?”
Clay set his lips in a firm line. “Not if I can help it.”
“But can you?”
That was, of course, the question. “I’m working on it.”
From Roan’s office in the courthouse, Clay went by the combination flower and gift shop that lay on the other side of the town square. Immediately afterward, he headed for the hospital. He needed to relieve April, for one thing, but he was also anxious to see Lainey. It seemed he’d been away from her for days instead of mere hours.