Well, she couldn’t exactly fault him for that now, could she? He was being sweet.
She got into the car, automatically reaching for the seat belt as he closed the car door for her. Damn, but she was going to hurt when it was over. But she knew better than to assume what was going on between them would turn into something more this time around. Clay was Clay and she couldn’t ask him to change. The only thing she could do was hope that he would because he wanted to.
Stop it,
she upbraided herself.
He came to pick you up. Be happy with what you have, stop pining after what you want.
As Clay got in on the driver’s side, her cell phone began to ring. The soft noise jarred her, and she instantly stiffened.
When she made no move to reach for her phone, he looked at her. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” There was an odd expression on her face. He wondered if something had gone wrong that Janelle hadn’t disclosed. Why else would she look like that?
“Sure.”
Praying the ringing would cease, she reached into her purse for the phone.
The ringing continued.
Maybe it was a call she wanted, she told herself. Maybe it was even Alex on the other end. Initially feeling that her son needed some stability, she’d written down her number for him. That way he could call her any time he wanted to hear the reassuring sound of her voice.
But even as she flipped open her phone, her gut told her that it wasn’t Alex, wasn’t anyone she wanted to hear from.
And she was right.
“Don’t get too cocky,” the metallic voice on the other end of the line warned in response to her tense greeting. “Your time is coming. And once it does, you’ll be sorry.”
Not bothering to acknowledge that she’d heard a word, Ilene slapped the phone closed.
Clay hadn’t started the car. The tense expression on her face had his entire attention. He’d been watching her until she’d abruptly shut the phone without saying a word. “What’s the matter?”
Ilene shook her head, firing the word “Nothing” at him.
Definitely not nothing. Clay shifted so that he was directly facing her. His voice was stern now. He spoke to her the way he did to a reluctant witness. “Who was on the phone, Ilene?” They weren’t going anywhere until he found out.
She pressed her lips together before launching into a lie. “Nobody. Just someone trying to get me to subscribe to the local paper.” She jerked her shoulder into a careless shrug. “I get that sometimes. You’d think that they wouldn’t have access to cell phone numbers, but—”
“That wasn’t someone trying to get you to subscribe to the local paper. Nuisance calls don’t make you turn as pale as a ghost. You’re almost translucent, Ilene. Now who was on the phone?”
She shook her head, giving up the pretense. “I don’t know. It sounded like E.T.”
A voice synthesizer, he thought. He immediately thought of Walken. “All right, what did they say?”
“That my time is coming.” She tried to shrug it off again. “Maybe I’m making something out of nothing. Maybe it’s just some religious sect—”
“Stop it, Ilene,” he ordered. Then, when she fell into silence, he gently took her hands in his. His voice softened. “We both know who it was, or at least, who’s behind it.” Clay searched her face for some kind of a sign. “This wasn’t the first time, was it?”
She took a deep breath, then exhaled before answering. “No.”
Clay bit off an oath. Losing his temper with her wasn’t going to help. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What good would it do?” Detective or not, she didn’t want him getting hurt on her account. So far, there’d just been veiled threats, a stupid drawing and her house had been trashed, but no one had been hurt. She didn’t want Clay to be the first. “He’s too smart to make the calls from his house or office. John Walken is a very sharp man. I only caught him because I accidentally came across supply lists and expenses that weren’t accounted for. Lists I’m the only one with copies of, because the originals were undoubtedly shredded the second he knew he couldn’t buy me off.”
He didn’t care about lists or inflated stock options. He only cared about what happened to her and Alex. “He can’t get away with threatening you.”
“And he won’t,” she insisted. “As long as you keep Alex and me safe. That’s the bottom line, Clay, keeping us safe.” And then she gave voice to something she’d been wrestling with in the wee hours of the morning, when problems always seemed to be at their worst. “And if you have a choice, if for some reason you can only save one of us, Clay, I want you to swear to me that you’ll choose Alex.”
About to finally start the car, he stopped again to stare at her. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s not an either-or situation.”
“But if—”
“You’ll be safe, you’ll both be safe. Nobody’s going to harm either one of you as long as I’m alive. As long as any member of my family is alive,” Clay amended. He couldn’t cope with her flirting with her own demise. All this past week, he’d fought with his feelings. Always drawn to Ilene, he hadn’t thought he could be a good husband, a good father. Both Ilene and her son had been through a great deal and he didn’t want to complicate their lives any further.
But try as he might, he couldn’t divorce himself from the desire to be with her. He’d developed parental feelings for the boy as well, something he’d never thought possible. He looked forward to coming home after a tough day on the streets, not just to her, but to Alex, to the innocence and purity that he saw in the boy’s eyes. Knowing this would end soon was no longer comforting. Now the tranquility of the moment was important, as well.
As was she.
“Don’t you get it yet?” Clay added. “My father considers you and Alex family now. There’s no way anything is going to happen to you.”
She tried to let his words comfort her. And restrained herself from asking him if he felt the same way as his father did about them.
And from telling him right then and there that Alex was his son. Because that path only led to trouble. But it was a path that was becoming increasingly more insistent as it beckoned to her.
Chapter 13
T
he sigh that escaped her lips seemed to come from deep down in her soul. Clay glanced at her before looking back on the road. “Tired?”
There was a point where she thought the deposition was going to be never ending. Each time one lawyer retired, another barreled in to take his place. She was surprised that her head wasn’t throbbing.
The smile she offered him was weary. “I feel as if someone’s vivisected me, then put me back together using a blunt needle and fishing tackle.”
The light turned red. He gave her more than a fleeting look. “Well, they did an admirable job of it. You look terrific.”
Without thinking, she touched his cheek, a fondness filtering through her. He really did know the right thing to say at times. “Thanks, I needed that.”
The light turned green. He eased his foot back on the accelerator. “Anything else you need, I’m here for you.”
“Are you?” The question came out before she could stop it.
“You know I am.” He looked at her again though the traffic was thick.
Ilene wanted to believe that he would be there for her, not just today, but tomorrow and the day after that, straight on to infinity, but she knew differently, had been abruptly shown differently.
The freeway connection was just ahead. There was a minimall adjacent to it. “Want to stop somewhere for a drink?” Clay asked.
Any other time she might have said yes. But after being shark bait all afternoon, she just wanted to go somewhere to feel safe and pull herself together. “No, straight home is fine.” She stared at his profile. It looked somehow stronger in the shadows that were dancing around in her car. “I just need to look at my son.”
He understood what she meant. The people you loved were a haven. “He’s a great kid.” His own words echoed back to him and he grinned. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that about someone who comes up to my belt buckle, but he is.” Clay got into the carpool lane as it fed onto the freeway ramp. “You did a great job raising him.”
It wasn’t finished by any means, but the years so far had been good to her. “He’s still a work in progress,” she reminded him. “They tell me the roughest part is still ahead.” She recalled one friend’s on-going lament. “Teenage boys aren’t supposed to acknowledge their mother’s existence.”
“Alex won’t be like that.”
He said it with such confidence. “What makes you so sure?”
He lifted a shoulder, letting it fall in a noncommittal shrug. “Just a feeling. Not all teenagers ignore their mothers, you know. Shaw didn’t. I didn’t.” Until that infamous, fateful day, he would have said that he was closest to his mother. “Although I did give my father some grief before I settled down. But that was after—” His voice trailed away. Even now he really didn’t like to talk about it.
Ilene read between the lines. “After your mother died?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. The words sounded so damning. Eyes on the lane next to him, he switched over. “He doesn’t believe it, you know, my Dad. He doesn’t believe she’s dead.”
She could understand that. Andrew was a man who was stubborn about his convictions. “Maybe for him, she isn’t.”
Somehow, because he was talking to Ilene, the words came easier than he thought they would. He found he needed to talk, to share what had been sealed inside for so long. “Every so often I catch him going through the files he kept, looking for something he might have missed the thousand other times he went over the information.”
Her heart went out to the older man. And to Clay. She could tell by the tone of his voice that he still had trouble accepting his mother’s death himself. “He must have loved her very, very much,” she said softly.
And so did you.
“Yeah, he did.” He laughed shortly, remembering. “When we were kids, that was the only redeeming quality our father had, in our eyes—that he loved the same person we did.”
She thought of the man who had welcomed her and her son into his home without so much as a pause. A sense of loyalty had her defending him. “I’m sure he must have had others.”
“If he did, we never knew about them. We hardly ever saw him,” Clay explained. “Longest period of time he was around was when he was recuperating from that gunshot wound he took to the shoulder.” He and the others had spent most of the time tiptoeing around out of his father’s way. “Talk about a wounded bear,” he said, grinning.
Her sense of loyalty couldn’t remain silent any longer. “Your father seems like a wonderful man, Clay.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But that came after.” He glanced over and saw her puzzled look. “It was as if he felt he had to fill her shoes for us. Become both mother and father.” He could remember thinking that the roof had collapsed and that the walls were caving in. “It’s a
hell
of an adjustment.”
“You’re lucky he cared enough about you to do it. Some people just withdraw altogether, refuse to have any contact with anyone, especially their children.” She gazed at him for a long moment before looking away. “Not all parents know how to love their children.”
“You’re talking about yours, aren’t you?” The shrug she gave him reflected in the side window. She didn’t turn to look at him. “You never mention your parents,” he realized.
“That’s because there’s not much to mention.” And because talking about them and their lack of affection hurt. She used to think all parents were cold like that until she discovered it wasn’t the case. Not all parents were nearly as self-absorbed as hers was.
“I don’t even know if they’re still living,” he realized. He took the off-ramp and made a hard right. They were almost home.
“Still living,” she confirmed. “Somewhere.” Her father had written in his last communiqué that he was moving almost eleven months ago. She still didn’t have a new address for him. “They have their own lives. I get Christmas cards. Sometimes. We’re not close.” No matter how much she’d tried when she was young, that hadn’t happened. And if anything the birth of her son had only driven them further away.
She turned to look at him. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have what you have.”
He looked at her significantly as he brought the car to a stop at the curb before his house. “I’m beginning to learn.”
More than an hour later, Ilene sighed as she dropped down into the easy chair in the family room. Ordinarily, this was considered Andrew’s chair, but he had already gone off to bed.
She offered what she could of a smile to Clay, who looked as if he’d been waiting for her to come down again. Getting Alex to bed had taken her longer than she’d thought. “Well, he’s all tucked away. Three readings of
The Cat in the Hat,
but he finally dozed off,” she said, feeling as if her eyes could close with little encouragement.
“You look like you’re about to doze off, too.”
“I am.” She tried to rouse herself. “I just came down to say good-night.” She looked around. The silence had finally penetrated. “Looks like everyone else turned in early.”
“Or turned out,” he contradicted. “Teri and Rayne are out for the evening. Dad’s in his room.” He nodded toward the stairs. “He said something about finishing a good book.” He knew that his father was really poring over his mother’s files, but it was the kind of open secret neither commented on.
“And what about you?” When they’d been together all those years ago, he’d considered going to bed before two in the morning something that only old people and stick-in-the-muds did. “Are you now this sedate, stay-at-home type?”
There was something to be said for staying home. As long as there was someone important to stay there with you. “Seems that way.”
She knew better. Detective or not, he still led a pretty wild life. “Teri told me stories.”
“Lies.” He looked at her, assuming the angelic face of a choirboy.
She bit back a laugh. “Rayne backed her up.”
“Bigger lies.” He rose to his feet and crossed to where she was sitting. “Besides, I’ve turned over a new leaf.”
She eyed him innocently. “Why would you have to turn over a new leaf if what your sisters told me were lies?”
“Don’t complicate things with logic.” She couldn’t quite read the look in his eyes. “I have something better at home than I could possibly find outside.”
Her grin teased him. “Another way to look at it is you have something at home that doesn’t require much effort to get.”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” he hooted. “You take a hell of a lot of effort.”
She grinned up at him. Since she’d gotten here, she’d been his for the asking. They both knew that. “Since when is crooking your finger considered a hell of a lot of effort?”
He laughed as he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Pulled her to him. “C’mere you and stop giving me lip.”
She cocked her head, her mouth curving. The stress of the day began to drain away. “I thought that was the whole point.”
“The whole point of everything,” his voice dropped down to a seductive whisper, “is being here with you.”
Framing her face, he brought his mouth down to hers before she could say anything in reply. Brought his mouth down to hers and began that whole wonderful, delicious process again. The one in which her entire system became a whirling blender on the verge of spinning wildly out of control.
Her fingertips digging into his shoulders, she pressed her body against his, taking comfort from his presence, sealing herself to the energy that vibrated between them.
And then he stopped.
Still holding her face in his hands, he drew his head back. “If you’re too tired—”
Damn, he couldn’t withdraw now. She needed him. Needed the magic they formed together. “The day I’m too tired to kiss you, Clay Cavanaugh, is the day you can start throwing dirt on my cold, dead body.”
God, but he loved her. How could he have convinced himself, even for a moment, otherwise? How could he have believed that he could live his life without her? “You know what I mean.”
She opened her eyes wide, feigning ignorance as she looked up at him. “No, what do you mean?”
In response, he scooped her up in his arms. “Witch,” he pronounced.
Because she was. She was a witch who’d cast a spell on him. She made him happier than he ever thought he could possibly be. And made him realize how very shallow his existence was without her. Home, family, career, they all meant a great deal to him, but without her, without the feeling that coursed through his veins every time he was with her, everything else seemed diminished somehow. Ilene was the spotlight by which everything else was highlighted.
Even the fear that had dogged his life and haunted his mind for so long had faded into the background. It was still there but no longer looming over him.
All because of her.
“I can walk,” she protested. “Put me down.”
He just kept walking toward the stairs. “And let you get away? Not likely.”
She laced her arms around his neck, amused. Ilene caught her lower lip between her teeth. “This isn’t exactly torture you’re offering me.”
He resisted the urge to nibble on her lip. “I’m taking no chances.”
Wonders just never ceased. “Since when have you become this steadfast person?”
“Since you,” he told her. On the landing, he walked into her room and closed the door with his back. “The whole change in me falls directly on your shoulders.”
Before she could protest, he deposited her on the bed. She bounced up, scrambling to her knees and moving to the edge of the bed in front of him. There was mischief in her eyes.
Catching hold of his shirt, she pulled him closer to her. “I dare you to say that again,” she challenged. “Without your clothes on this time.”
He laughed. “Never met a dare I couldn’t meet.” Spreading his arms wide, he stood before her, ready. Eager. “Do your worst.”
“My best,” she corrected, her fingers flying down the buttons of his shirt, releasing them. His shirt hung open, and she pushed it back off his shoulders, stripping it from him before she turned her attention to his belt buckle. She only had enough time to un-notch it before he pressed her back against the bed.
“You’re getting ahead of me.” Joining her, he made quick work of her blouse. The next second, he’d managed to unhook the clasp behind her back. Her bra teasingly moved away from her breasts. He swept it aside with the flat of his hand.
She wiggled against him, her pulse quickening. “I’m the guest, I’m supposed to.”
He paused to press a kiss to each breast before answering. “I’m the host, I should lead the way.”
Adrenaline filled her veins, hand in hand with desire. “You always have.”
He pulled the skirt away from her. Her underwear went the same way. Banter died in his throat as his eyes swept over her.
No matter how many times he saw her like this, he would never tire of it. Never view her passively. Anticipation rose just as it had the first time.
More.
Because he knew what was in store for him.
And because he loved her.
Pulling her down against him, he sealed his body to hers as he kissed her over and over again, losing himself in the process as he made love to every inch of her body. Worshipping her flesh because of the peace and excitement she brought to him each time she surrendered to him. And took him prisoner.
They explored each other’s bodies as if the terrain was not firmly etched in their brains, as if they didn’t know it far better than their own. The tastes and scents teased and aroused and gave comfort to them in the heat of their passion.
Having brought her to a climax, Clay was about to enter her when she surprised him by suddenly switching positions. Now she was the one on top. She wiggled as she straddled him.
“I thought you were tired,” Clay whispered. The heat from her core as it spread over him aroused him more than he thought he could bear.
Her mouth, its outline blurred and mussed from the imprint of his, widened into a mischievous grin that teased his soul even as it aroused him even further. “Second wind.”
He loved the expression in her eyes, loved the way they shone, as if they were sharing some secret joke with him that he had yet to catch on to.