A Coral Kiss Part 9

Jed shook his head at Gloria. "And to think I've always admired a.s.sertive women." Obediently he disappeared back through the doorway.

Gloria's gaze was thoughtful as she watched him leave. "An interesting man."

"That's one way of putting it."

"I think he might make a very good friend for the right woman." Gloria smiled serenely and began stacking the buffet plates.

Amy watched her mother and realized how much she had always taken Gloria Slater's efficiency for granted. For as long as Amy could remember, her mother had been a woman whose life revolved around order. She always knew what she would be doing in the next hour, the next day, the next month. She had raised her children and planned her husband's social life with cool organizational ability. She had taught Amy to dive with the same methodical approach.

Her approach to life did not make Gloria inflexible by any means. She was brilliant at accommodating last minute changes, houseguests or alterations in plans that had been laid for months. She was simply a naturally organized woman, always looking ahead to the next detail.

And that, Amy thought with abrupt insight, was how her mother survived; she didn't look back, she kept moving forward. New plans, a new life, a new direction. She could almost visualize Gloria walking away from the death scene, certain she had taken care of every detail, her mind already busy with the task of reordering her future.

But she herself kept going back, Amy thought. She was caught in some kind of time loop and she kept going back in her mind. She was trapped.

Amy faced the fact that Gloria Slater's method of survival wasn't going to be one her daughter could use.

Amy would have to find another way. She thought of Jed.

Several hours later Jed lay awake in bed, his arms crooked behind his head as he gazed thoughtfully out the open window. The rustle of palms was a low murmur hovering just beyond the veranda. The big, fat tropical moon threw a long spear of light across the ocean's surface. The water itself looked black and impenetrable for the first time that day. His ribs had felt reasonably good most of the evening, but now they were aching again. He considered getting up and taking one of the little white pills, but finally voted against the idea. Maybe aspirin would do the trick.

He swung his feet down to the carpet and padded over to the window. The scent of ocean and exotic flowers was carried on a warm, balmy breeze. It was almost unreal. For a moment Jed stood looking out, mentally comparing the beautiful, inviting darkness of the veranda to the b.l.o.o.d.y darkness of the alley where he'd taken the bullet in the leg a couple of weeks before. Then he turned and went into the adjoining bathroom to find the aspirin. As soon as he swallowed them he knew he needed something else. He wanted to share the darkness with Amy.

Her room was two doors down from his. Her parents' bedroom was at the far end of the hall. Jed had been given what Gloria called the boys' room. There were pictures of Hugh and Darren in high school football uniforms on one wall. An elaborate trophy for first place in a wrestling compet.i.tion stood on the chest of drawers. Several smaller trophies for everything from band to track had been placed along one wide windowsill. Gloria had apparently moved all the important family mementos to the island when she and her husband had retired. Jed wondered if there were any certificates or trophies in Amy's room. He doubted it. Not unless they gave awards for daydreaming or the secrets of a woman's hidden thoughts.

Jed walked back out of the bathroom, not bothering to switch on any lights. He found his jeans lying on the chair where he'd left them, stepped into them and headed for the door that opened onto the veranda.

He was curious to see if Amy was alseep.

He made no noise as he moved along the gallery to her room. She would be infuriated if he accidentally woke her parents. She was playing a silly game trying to pretend he was only a friend, Jed told himself. It was time he put a stop to it. Just because he'd been trying to give her a little breathing s.p.a.ce didn't mean things between them had reverted to their original level. Besides, there was no point pretending that what existed between them was only friendship. Her parents had known better right from the start. Jed had done nothing to alter their conclusion. In fact, he'd had fun answering the Slaters' purposeful questions that evening, although he didn't quite understand why. He could only conclude he was enjoying the unusual role he was playing.

Amy's veranda door was closed. Jed tested the doork.n.o.b cautiously. It turned easily under his hand. He quietly slipped into the room and at the same time heard a faint sound from the first floor. The front door was being opened or closed.

Amy's empty bed answered the rest of Jed's questions. She had left the house. This left him no option.

He would have to follow her.

Downstairs Amy stood on the front step, inhaling the fragrant night air. At least the sky was clear, she thought as she started slowly down the steps. Last October there had been a storm brewing out at sea the night she'd gone down to the caves.

She had tugged on a pair of white jeans and a coral T-shirt before leaving the house this evening. Shoving her hands into the back pockets of the jeans, she started down the path that led through the palm trees.

The scent of the water and the surrounding jungle vegetation grew thicker as she walked.

For the past two hours she had sat at her bedroom window telling herself there was no point in paying a visit to the caves. It would serve no purpose except to make her more nervous. But she had a growing feeling that she needed to pa.s.s through some sort of exorcism. Perhaps, she thought, this was the strange sensation that drove a criminal to return to the scene of a crime.

The jagged memories pushed insistently at the edges of her mind. They were always there these days, hovering in the shadows. But tonight, she decided, she was going to stop fighting them for a while. She let them fill her head, her muscles tightening instinctively in resistance.

She never knew what it was that had awakened her that night in October. Amy remembered sitting upright in bed as if reacting to a shout or a scream. Her heart was pounding and the blood was moving too quickly through her veins. But there had been no sound. She sat listening to the silence, straining to understand what it was that had brought her awake so abruptly.

Finally, she had gotten out of bed and walked out on the veranda. She saw Bob as he walked beneath her, leaving the house to head toward the jungle. He had been carrying a diving tank and a duffel bag full of equipment, and was dressed for swimming. Even as she watched in startled silence, he disappeared into the shadows. She couldn't believe he was going diving alone, especially at that hour of the night.

They had already gone down in the cove that afternoon and Bob had seemed to have had his fill.

Something was very strange and very wrong.

Just as she wasn't certain what had brought her awake, Amy wasn't sure what it was that drove her to pull on a pair of jeans and one of the few dark shirts in her wardrobe and follow Bob LePage out of the house. At that point she hadn't sensed real danger, she was simply compelled to follow him. The mystery of the situation dominated her thoughts as she let herself out the front door.

Within a minute or two Amy knew LePage wasn't heading for the cove. He was going into the jungle, following the path she had shown him earlier in the afternoon when he'd finally cajoled her into showing him the entrance to the caves. Amy had to move quickly to keep up with him, and a sense of foreboding filled her.

Eventually Bob halted. Holding her breath, Amy stopped some distance behind him and watched through swaying branches and drooping vines as he flicked on a small light. He seemed to be examining a piece of paper in his hand.

When he was finished, he turned to the right. A hundred feet further on he stopped again, and now Amy was certain of his destination. He was standing near the opening to the twisting, underwater caves that honeycombed this portion of the island. Amy couldn't believe he meant to go diving in them alone.

She watched as he adjusted his equipment. Bob slung the tank on his back, buckled it and tested the regulator by taking a few breaths through the mouthpiece. Then he climbed over the treacherous lip of the rocky cave opening and carefully entered the dark water. Once he was safely in the pool he put on his fins. Amy stared in bewilderment as he vanished from sight.

Cautiously she had emerged from her hiding place and glanced more closely at the rippling water that filled the cave opening. An eerie luminescence reflected faintly up from the depths because LePage had switched on his light. It hovered in the water a moment and then disappeared as he swam into the yawning underwater pa.s.sage.

Something underfoot caught her attention as she stood uncertainly near the cave opening. She reached down to pick up the piece of paper LePage had trapped under his duffel bag. It was a crude map, barely discernible in the fretful moonlight. She picked up the pencil flashlight LePage had used earlier.

The map depicted what appeared to be the first few meters of the convoluted underwater pa.s.sage, itself.

How could LePage possibly know what the inside of those caves looked like?

Amy jerked herself back to the present, trying to push aside memories of her own confusion, growing fear and the certainty that something terrible was happening. All the frightening images that had a.s.sailed her that night had flooded back much too quickly. For eight months she'd tried to shut out the scene, but her efforts had been unsuccessful. As she stood listening to the soft murmur of water in the cave, every haunting detail was as clear in her head as it had been the night it happened.

"Amy?"

There had been no sound until he called her name. Amy spun around, stumbling a little over a trailing vine as she heard Jed's low voice.

"Jed. I didn't hear you." She stared at him, knowing her startlement must be plain. She was tense and Jed would see that tension. He noticed such things. Until recently she hadn't realized just how much he saw.

He stood in the shadows, half hidden by the swaying foliage, watching her. The midnight moon barely touched the harsh angles of his face.

"It's a little late to be out walking alone, isn't it?" He came closer, moving soundlessly through the tangle of greenery that surrounded his feet. Idly he reached out to brush aside the long, sweeping tendrils of a fern.

"It's perfectly safe out here." Conscious of the cave opening only a few feet away, Amy started forward.

She hoped he would notice nothing more than the jumble of rocks that hid the entrance. "How did you know where I was?"

"I was on my way to your room when I heard you leave the house." He looked past her as she stepped closer, his gaze on the rocky formation that marked the cave.

"You were on your way to my room? Why?"

His mouth rose slightly at one corner and his gaze moved from shadowed rocks to her face. "Why the h.e.l.l do you think? We're lovers, remember?"

His casual att.i.tude flicked her on the raw. "Barely. You haven't shown much interest since that... that one night, so I a.s.sumed it was a fluke."

"A fluke?"

She shrugged in what she hoped was an offhand manner. "I decided you were just letting off tension, or something. You'd had a long trip, you'd been hurt, you were sleeping in my bed. I was convenient. It all sort of went together."

"Ah, I see what you mean." He reached out to catch hold of the hand she was waving haphazardly. His strong fingers closed around hers, stilling the nervous movement. "A fluke."

"That's right." She made to brush past him. Jed didn't try to hinder her, but neither did he let go of her hand. Instead he fell into step beside her as she walked pointedly away from the vicinity of the cave.

"Tell me something, Amy, who was using whom to release a little tension that night? You were the one who woke up screaming because of a nightmare."

She gave him a quick, sideways glance. "Okay, so it was a mutual thing."

"A friendly thing."

"If you like." She nodded stiffly.

"A neighborly thing."

"Jed-"

"A casual roll in the hay between a couple of friendly, neighborly folks who both just happened to need a bit of physical release."

Amy glared straight ahead. "You don't have to make a joke out of it."

"I'm not making a joke out of it. I'm just trying to see it from your perspective."

Amy lost her fragile hold on her equilibrium. She spun around to confront him. "I don't know what my perspective is. And I haven't the vaguest idea of what your perspective is on the subject, either. I'm not sure what going to bed with you meant. Therefore I choose to think of it as a friendly gesture on both our parts, all right?"

"Bulls.h.i.t."

She blinked at the dismissive tone in his voice. "Then you tell me what it meant, dammit!"

"Why try to find words for it?" Jed asked quietly. "There's no need to pin a label on it."

"How can you say that?" She snapped. "Of course there's a need."

He led her out of the thick greenery to a bluff overlooking the moonlit cove. He paused to look down at the silvered strip of sand below. "You say that because you're a woman."

Amy set her teeth together. "So?"

"So, I'm a man and I don't feel any need to label and categorize things just yet." He wasn't paying much attention to her. Retaining his grip on her hand he was seeking the path down the small cliff.

"You're the one who said we were lovers. Lovers. What's that if not a label?" Amy didn't know why she was arguing. It was a ridiculous discussion in the first place. She didn't know why she was letting Jed lead her down the cliff to the beach, either.

Jed's fingers tightened around hers. "Okay, it's a label," he said soothingly. "It's sufficient for now."

"I'm not so sure, Jed." They were almost down to the beach. Amy looked at Jed's profile, aware of the way the moon made his dark hair shine. "Do you realize how little I know about you? I don't know anything more about you today than I did the day we met."

"That's not true." He sounded thoughtful, as though he was just now considering the matter. "You know that I was getting into the habit of going a little heavy on the Scotch when you first met me. I saw the way you watched me after that evening you dropped by unannounced and found me hitting the bottle. Right away you put me on white wine and limited me to two or three gla.s.ses whenever I was with you."

"Good grief! That wasn't a conscious effort to rehabilitate you, Jed. White wine is what I drink, so it's what I offered you when you came for dinner. You never protested or insisted on bringing your own Scotch."

"That's because I didn't mind." He sounded amused. They were on the beach now. "You know how much I like designing bird cages. You're always hinting I should give up working for my engineering firm and make a career out of the cages instead."

"Jed, that's hardly an example of in-depth knowledge or indicative of a meaningful relationship."

He led her along the sand. "A lot of people who know me don't know about my bird cages."

"Well, maybe that's because you don't socialize very much," she pointed out tartly.

"And that's another thing you know about me. I'm not much of a socializer."

"You seem to be doing just fine with my parents."

"Mmm. That's different."

"Oh, really? Why?"

He shrugged, his strong, bare shoulders catching the gleam of moonlight. "I don't know. Maybe because they're connected to you."

Amy dug in her heels, forcing Jed to stop and look at her.

"Tell me something, Jed. Why are you putting up with all Dad's not-so-subtle questions about your financial status? And why are you being so tolerant of Mom's questions about your family?"

"Because they're your parents and because I'm their guest. And because I'm sleeping with their daughter and they know it. That gives them a right to a few questions."

"Is that so?" Amy demanded, feeling thoroughly exasperated. "What about me? Do I have a right to a few questions?"

"I think so."

"Well, thanks a lot! I always had the impression you liked your privacy, that you didn't want me asking questions." Amy swept her hand out in a disgusted movement.

There was a heartbeat of silence and then Jed said quietly, "I had the same impression about you. If you've got a question, Amy, ask it."

They stared at each other for a long moment. The soft, warm air lifted a tendril of Amy's hair, lacing it around her throat. Jed reached out and caught it. He held the silken strand between his fingers while he studied Amy's searching eyes.

"Have you ever been married?" Amy asked baldly.

Jed shook his head, saying nothing.

"My mother told me to ask." Amy smiled in an unexpected burst of humor.

"I was engaged once about eight years ago."

"What happened?" she waited tensely for the answer.

"It didn't work out. My brother died about the same time. I had to handle some things." Jed spoke tersely. "The engagement fell apart."

"Stress," Amy said knowledgeably. She wondered just what it was he'd been required to handle and why his fiancee hadn't been able to deal with the situation.