He nodded, then started violently when the phone rang. She went to pick it up, and he waited for his heartbeat to slow down before he said, “That’s probably Al now.”
The big red-gold letters on the digital clock beside the bed said nine o’clock on the money, and he thought what a luxury it was to always know the exact time. He was accustomed to determining the passage of days by the waning of darkness and light, and weeks by counting scratches he’d made on the walls of his cell. One of the first things he’d do when he got back to the world, he decided, was buy himself a watch.
That reminded him of something he’d forgotten to ask Jess.
She put the phone down and turned to him, eyes too bright. “That was your ride. He’s waitin’ for you downstairs.”
He nodded and reached for the cane he’d left propped against the bed. “Jess, there’s something—”
“He said to take your time.” She was hugging herself, and her smile looked strained. He wished he felt strong enough to put his arms around her and make her feel safe and protected, the way he used to. But he knew he wasn’t.
“Come down with me,” he said. “You can meet my shadow. Al’s a good guy.”
She nodded, and waited while he shifted the cane to his left hand and opened the door and held it for her.
“There’s one thing you can do for me,” he said, and she looked at him again in the eager way he remembered from when they were first dating. “Tomorrow, if you want…while I’m busy at the hospital, you…uh, maybe you could go shopping for me? Pick me up some clothes?” His smile slipped sideways. “Just occurred to me, I don’t have any civvies.”
“Sure, I’ll do that. I’d love to.” So eager to please him it made his throat ache. “Where— I mean…”
“I don’t know what there is around here. Al can probably tell you. Or—did they assign you somebody?”
“They did—Lieutenant Commander Rees, my casualty assistance officer. He’d probably even take me. Oh—” her eyes darkened as they swept across his body “I don’t know what size—”
“Just get me my old size,” he said softly as he closed the door behind them. “I’ll grow into ’em.”
“Promise?”
He took a deep breath. “That’s a promise,” he said fervently. Then he put his arm around her shoulders and brought her to his side. Suspense hummed in his muscles until he felt her body relax against him, and there was an aching familiarity about her softness as she slipped her arm around his waist.
Back in her room half an hour later, Jessie closed the door and leaned against it. She felt drained and lonely. It had taken all the emotional stamina she’d had left to make brave small talk for Major Sharpe, and then to smile and let her husband slip away from her side and walk away. Funny—as apprehensive as she’d been about this reunion, and as awkward and difficult as it had turned out to be, watching him leave again had been the worst. She’d wanted to cling to him and cry like a child. Instead she’d kept her smile plastered in place and returned his little farewell wave—it had seemed so uncharacteristically tentative, for Tris—and then turned and walked back inside and up the stairs on legs that were suddenly trembly. Now, with no one to see her, she clamped her hand over her mouth and let the tears come.
Gulping sobs, she felt her way to the huge bed and sank onto it. Shaking, bereft, she reached blindly for something to hold on to—a pillow—and found herself hugging a large plump Teddy bear instead.
She stared at it in surprise, and then a gust of laughter replaced her sobs. Intermittently laughing and sobbing, she gazed at the fat brown bear while she mopped at her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. Whose idea had it been to leave her such a thing? she wondered, poking and tugging distractedly at its cheery yellow bow.
Heavens, she’d never been the Teddy bear type, even when she was little. Joy, now—she was the one for bears. Joy Lynn, Ms. Sophisticated New York Career Person, had bears all over her apartment. She had them on her bed and her sofa and her dressertop. She had one sitting on the back of her toilet, for heaven’s sake.
Jessie had been…well, somewhere between the baseball mitt and the Nancy Drew type, which was a hard place for a Southern girl raised in the seventies to be. In fact, come to think of it, she’d had a hard time fitting into any recognizable niche, growing up in Oglethorpe County, Georgia.
Until Tristan Bauer had come along. Right then, for the first time in her life, she’d known exactly who she was and where she belonged.
She lay back on the bed, hugging the bear to her chest. With her eyes closed she could see him walking away from her, not the way he’d looked tonight, thin and worn, steps uneven, but on a night half her lifetime ago, striding down the second-floor walkway of a Florida beachfront motel, tall and strong and straight, head set with that proud and arrogant tilt, radiating self-assurance in almost visible waves.
And she, leaning against the wall outside her door because she feared her legs weren’t going to hold her up if she left it, and her lips still throbbing from his kiss and her insides turning upside down, had called out to him. “You don’t have to go, you know.”
At the top of the stairs he’d paused to look back at her, one hand on the railing, smile tender, eyes dark with regret.
“You can stay if you want to,” Jessie had said to him in a husky, grown-up voice that hardly trembled at all. Lauren Bacall, sexy and sleepy-eyed. But inside her head she was crying in panic, If you leave me now, I’ll just have to die.
He sauntered back toward her while her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest, and when he was close enough to touch her he stopped. Smiling wryly, teeth white against his dusky skin, he murmured, “Darlin’, much as I wish I could, I don’t have any protection, and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either.” He lifted a hand and lightly brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he turned away once more.
And she’d known—she’d absolutely known—that if he went ahead and walked away from her then, it was going to be forever, that she was about to lose her one and only chance for true love and lifelong happiness. The man was gorgeous, and this was Florida, spring break. There had to be hundreds—no, thousands!—of girls out there on those beaches more beautiful, more sophisticated, more prepared than she was. If she let him slip away tonight she was gonna lose him—simple as that.
Trembling, she’d heard herself say, “I’m on the pill.” In the comparative innocence of that long-ago time, pregnancy had been the only concern on both their minds.
He turned back to her once more, looked down into her eyes and smiled. Then he tucked his finger under her chin, lifted it and kissed her, pressing her back against the wall until she felt the whole hard length of him against her. He kissed her in ways she’d never known before, then took her room key from her nerveless fingers and unlocked her door. Somehow or other they found their way inside.
The door had barely closed behind them before he was taking off her clothes—not that it was a hard thing to do, a tug on the tie of her new beach coverup, another on the string of her new matching bikini—and kissing her all the while, until her mouth felt hot and swollen and her breathing was only desperate sips, caught between whimpers. He kissed her throat until the pressure made her pulse pound like a bass drum, then moved his mouth downward, kissing his way across the tops of her naked breasts. Hot as she was, her nipples went puckered and hard as if she had a chill, until he began to warm them, pulling one deep into his mouth and sucking and stroking it with his tongue while his hand covered and chafed the other, and she thought she couldn’t possibly stand so much…so much