Clay (14 page)

Beyond the windows, the lightning flashed with an almost constant glimmer. The lamp beside the bed, the only illumination in the room, dimmed almost as if the storm was stealing its power. With a glance in that direction, he said, “The generator on the front porch has been around a while, has a lot of hours of use on it. Have you checked to see if it works?”

“I asked Denise about it as backup for the dialysis. I’m not completely irresponsible about my daughter’s health.”

He clamped his lips shut against the retort he’d like to make. He’d only asked, with no thought of accusing her of neglect. When he could speak again, he asked, “So you haven’t cranked it recently?”

“There’s been no need.”

“But you know how?” he insisted.

“What do you think?”

“Good. You may need it, since electric service isn’t too reliable around the lake in bad weather.”

She glanced at the machinery that sat humming against the wall at the head of the bed, then to the lamp, and back again to his face. A frown appeared between her eyes. “I see no problem.”

“Gasoline engines aren’t always cooperative. It might be better to check it out before everything goes dark.”

Haunted indecision came and went in her face as she looked down at her daughter. Smoothing the tears from Lainey’s pale, contorted cheek with the palm of her hand, Janna said, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Unlock this,” he said in clipped tones as he indicated his restraint, “and I’ll do it for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Damn it, Janna, if I’d wanted to hurt you, I’ve had plenty of opportunity before now.”

She didn’t even look up. “Go back to bed and leave us alone.”

“I can’t.” The words were the stark truth, though he wasn’t sure she was capable of recognizing it.

Voice cool and infinitely remote, she said, “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked, then went on before she could answer or make more of the derision in his voice than he’d intended. “Let me have Lainey, then, while you go see about the generator.”

He thought she was going to refuse. Her grasp tightened while she lifted her gaze to his face as if searching for hidden motives. Then she gave a tight nod.

He moved forward and sank down onto the mattress, taking the girl in his arms with caution and all the gentleness he could muster. “All right, Lainey,”
he said in soft yet positive command. “That’s enough. Quiet now.”

Perhaps because he was calmer or his hold somehow stronger and more authoritative, Lainey turned toward him as she settled into lap, burrowing her wet face into his neck. She sobbed once or twice more, her whole body shaking, then her cries died away to a hiccuping whimper.

Clay felt his heart constrict while savage protectiveness flowed along his veins. At the same time, he was more aware than he wanted to be that Janna had not released her hold, as if she still didn’t quite trust him. His bare skin burned where her arm was caught between him and Lainey. For an instant, they supported her between them, their arms overlapping, faces inches apart. Above the medicinal and other inevitable odors of a sickroom, he caught the faint herbal scent of Janna’s shampoo combined with a lingering hint of spent passion and female musk. She met his gaze over her daughter’s tumbled head, and he saw tears glistening where they pooled in the corners of her eyes.

Need rolled through him like the thunder outside. More than mere lust, it was the urge to hold her close and comfort her, to keep her safe and make sure that nothing ever hurt her again. With that fulsome desire, running just as swift and strong, was a floodtide of compassion for his dead brother who had not lived long enough to marry Janna and bring her home to Turn-Coupe. Matt had never slept with her in the great sleigh bed at the house they called Grand Point,
never held her through a cold wet winter into a gentle, sensual spring. He had never seen his daughter, couldn’t have since the date of his death had come before her birth. He’d never heard her giggle, never watched the secret intelligence bloom in her eyes, never cuddled her in the circle of his arms.

Whatever last shreds of jealousy Clay might have felt toward his twin melted away. If he had to choose between being a woman’s first love or her last, then there could be no doubt which was better. If he could be either Janna’s future or her past, then he would settle for the time that was longer. That was, of course, if he was permitted a choice at all.

It was the wrong time and place to speak of it, but he wasn’t sure there would ever be a better one. His voice quiet, he said, “You were Matt’s mystery woman.”

She stared at him as if she couldn’t make what he’d just said fit into the interior framework of her thoughts. At last she said, “You knew.”

“I knew there was someone just before he died,” Clay corrected, “but not who, where, when or anything else about you, including the pregnancy. Matt had his reasons for keeping quiet, I suppose, and he wasn’t always the most practical of men, but it isn’t—wasn’t—like him to turn his back on his own child.”

“He didn’t,” she said shortly as she drew away from him, leaving Lainey to him. “He never found out about her. There wasn’t time to tell him.”

His sigh of relief stirred the fine curls of Lainey’s
hair as he drew her closer against him. It was good to know he hadn’t misjudged his brother. “Why didn’t you come to his family. We’d have helped you.”

“I did that. You didn’t.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, frowning so his brows snapped together over his nose.

“I saw the news of the offshore explosion on television. That’s how I first learned he was missing. When I called Turn-Coupe to find out more, I spoke to your father. He told me that Matt was dead. Just like that. I tried to explain that we were engaged, but he wouldn’t listen. He seemed to think I was some con artist after money, or just a girl trying to make a good thing out of a one-night stand when Matt wasn’t there to set the record straight. He advised me to send proof of paternity after the baby was born. Then he would consider what price to set on any child of Matt’s.”

“Jesus,” Clay whispered. It sounded like the old man, especially in the weeks following Matt’s death. He’d been stiff-rumped and suspicious at the best of times, but grief had made him granite-hard and bitingly destructive. A part of his sorrow was because he’d been hardest on Matt while they were growing up, probably because he was closest in personality to the wife who’d left him. However, Clay had always known Matt held a special place in the old man’s heart for the same reason.

“You never contacted him again?” he asked in
stifled tones. “Never tried to talk to the rest of us Benedicts?”

“My baby wasn’t for sale.” That declaration held infinite layers of contempt before she added more quietly, “Risking having her taken from me wasn’t an option.”

“But Denise must have known about Lainey?”

“Not at the time, not until recently, in fact, when I asked her about the camp. And I asked because I spent a week here with her the summer after our freshman year at LSU. That’s how I first met Matt.”

That explained why Denise had suggested he look in on Janna. She’d known Janna hadn’t wanted to see the Benedicts, but had also realized that he needed at least an opportunity to learn about Lainey. He owed her, he thought, though it was unlikely that Denise would let him forget it.

“Matt died in November,” he said in soft contemplation.

She gave him a look of irony. “We had four months together after he looked me up again in Baton Rouge, that’s if you’re counting on your fingers.”

“I wasn’t. Not exactly.” He was counting, but not in the way she meant. Janna had met Matt, but not him, because he’d been busy taking medical classes that summer. How different it might have been if he’d seen her first. They’d be comfortable old married folks by now. He’d be a vet, more than likely, since he’d have had little opportunity to follow his artistic bent. The two of them would be the proud parents of three or four kids. If there had been a Lainey, then
she’d have been brought up at Grand Point in the more healthy back reaches of the state. She might never have caught the virus that had led to renal failure.

The same train of events could have occurred if his father had been a different kind of man, Clay was sure. Janna could have been accepted as his sister-in-law in all but name, housed at Grand Point where anything might have happened when she got over Matt’s death. Lainey could have been a real Benedict by now, a happy normal child romping with all her cousins.

“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “Sorry the Benedicts failed you and Lainey, sorry we weren’t there when you needed us.”

“So am I,” she said on a deep sigh as she put a hand to her face, rubbing her eyes. “But it isn’t your fault.”

“I knew there was someone, and I should have looked into it. If I’d made some effort to find you, everything might have changed.”

“Why? You didn’t know I was carrying Lainey. What would you have said or done that would have made any difference? Matt was gone. That was the end of it.”

His smile was brief and without humor, for all that he appreciated her exoneration. Voice even, he repeated the words she’d spoken to Denise, “You didn’t need a replica.”

“No.”

That was certainly plain enough, though he had a
notion that there was something tentative in her face, as if she meant to add to that flat denial. He waited, since he’d been half afraid that she’d come to him earlier because she’d decided she’d settle for one, after all.

Her gaze drifted away, coming to rest on her daughter who was now almost asleep with her cheek resting on the soft mat of his chest hair. After a moment, she said, “I’d better see about that generator.”

He didn’t answer, which was just as well since she didn’t wait to hear it. Seconds later, the screen door slammed behind her.

Clay let out his breath in a slow, almost soundless whistle of surprise for the fact that he’d survived this particular encounter with Janna, first of all, and second, that she had actually followed his suggestion. Still shaking his head, he glanced down at the child he held, then picked up her tubes, checking them, before doing a rough pulse count with his fingertips against her fragile, blue-veined neck. He was still counting the tripping beats when the lamp beside him flickered again, then went out. The air conditioner stopped. The dialysis machine ceased its humming and drained away into silence.

S
he was cursed; Janna was sure of it. At some point in her life, she had taken a bad turn so that everything she touched went wrong. Her parents, staunch in their fundamentalist religious values would say it was when she slept with Matt Benedict without benefit of clergy, and who was she to disagree? That event seemed to mark some midpoint where all before had been okay, if not perfect, and everything that came afterward tainted with disaster.

Except for Lainey, of course. Her daughter was and always had been a blessing.

It was apparently too much to ask that she be able to test the generator before the front porch was plunged into darkness. Clay had been right again. She should have known.

Inside the house, she could hear her daughter crying once more. Lainey hated the dark. Janna was torn between running to ease her fear and working at frantic speed to get the generator up and running. Now, of all times, Lainey needed to complete her dialysis, and without extra pain, or extra hours attached to the machinery. On top of that, a light of some kind was needed to help Nurse Fenton locate the camp in the
darkness and the storm. If she missed the gravel driveway, Janna wouldn’t put it past the woman to turn around and go back to Baton Rouge without seeing Lainey.

As she hesitated, Janna could hear the deep, soothing tones of Clay’s voice. Lainey’s cries began to diminish. Her daughter didn’t need her mother, after all. Funny, but her reaction was closer to jealousy than relief. It had been the two of them against the world for so long that it was hard to be so easily supplanted, even for a short time.

The rising wind carried a cool mist with it from across the wave-ridden stretch of the lake. In the lightning flashes, she could see the dark and churning surface of the water. It was a violent thunderstorm. It might be minutes before power was restored, or it could be hours or even days. According to Denise, the houses on this side of the lake, most of them empty except for the weekends, came pretty far down on the power company’s priority list, so were among the last to receive attention. She had to get the generator going as soon as possible.

Swinging around, Janna banged her way back through the screen door and into the kitchen. Moving by feel, she located the kitchen junk drawer where she’d noticed an emergency flashlight. With it clutched in her hand, she hurried back out to the porch.

Her experience with gasoline engines was nothing to brag about. She’d cranked the family’s old push mower while living with her parents, and that was
about it. Apartment life didn’t include lawns to mow, weeds to cut or trees to trim, and if her car quit, she called a garage. She hadn’t lied to Clay; she’d looked at the generator when she first moved into the camp. She’d read the directions for starting it that were printed on the side. But she hadn’t actually started the monster, certainly hadn’t switched the power for the camp over to it. It was a serious oversight.

After reading hastily through the directions again by flashlight, she flipped the power switch, then pressed and held the starter button. The generator rumbled for a second, then shuddered and died.

Janna took a steadying breath then read the instructions carefully once more. Following them with exaggerated care, she tried again. The only result was an abortive grunt.

“Janna?” Clay called from inside the house. “You may need to clean the plugs.”

Turning her head, Janna caught a glimpse of his tall form in the dim recess of the hall. The glow of a lightning glimmer showed him standing empty-handed. Voice strident, she shouted, “Where’s Lainey?”

“She’s okay, trying hard to be brave for you. I put her back in bed,” he answered. “You may have to remove the housing to get to the plugs. Once you have them out, a rub or two with sandpaper should remove any corrosion.”

“Denise said they had been recently replaced,” she informed him.

“Then try the manual pull cord.”

It was a reasonable suggestion. With her jaw set in determination and a foot braced against the crouched housing of the dumb machine, she yanked on the pull cord again and again. The results were the same, a few rumbling grunts followed by silence.

“Don’t wear yourself out,” Clay advised above the roll of thunder. “Try choking it.”

He was the one she’d like to choke. Voice glacial, she asked, “And just how would I do that?”

He told her in detail, adding, “When you’re done, give the thing a good, hard pull.”

She tried, she really did. She pulled with all her strength, tried until her arm and stomach muscles burned and tears of frustration were whipped from her eyes by the wind. It did no good. Time was passing, slipping away from her, while the stupid generator sat there in sullen noncooperation.

She couldn’t do it.

Added to all the other problems and mistakes, it was the final insult, the last abysmal failure. Everything was wrong, so wrong.

The promised kidney was going to someone else. Dr. Gower was going to be convicted for his clandestine transplants, if not as an accessory in the deaths of the teenagers found in the swamp. She was going to prison for purchasing an illegal organ as well as for kidnapping Clay. Above all, Lainey was going to die.

Renal disease was going to claim her daughter as it had so many others, that was if peritonitis, blood chemical imbalance, simple infection or a hundred
other ailments harmless to normal children didn’t claim her first. And whatever happened, it was going to be Janna’s fault. For the rest of her life, in prison or out, she would have to live with the memory of all the difficult decisions and wrong choices that had led to this place, this night, this one last failure. If she could bear to live at all.

Dropping to her knees, Janna put her face in her hands and pressed her fingers to her eyes. She rocked a little with the wind and the anguish inside her, but she didn’t cry. Some things were beyond tears.

“Let me try, Janna. Turn me loose and let me give it a shot.”

Clay’s deep, seductive voice came to her from out of the darkened house. He knew she’d failed, had been waiting for it. Now he was testing her to see if she’d set him free in order to safeguard the person dearest to her heart.

Her daughter or her freedom? It was, perhaps, the last of the difficult choices. Once she’d turned Clay loose, what happened would be out of her hands. Or was that strictly true? According to Arty, Clay had been free to ride the lake in his airboat the night before. If he did have some private agenda that required him to return to his captivity, might it not work in her favor?

She didn’t know. All she could do was take the chance. It was possible it was the biggest gamble of her life.

“Janna?”

She made no reply, but pushed upright again. Pick
ing up the flashlight, she followed its beam into the house. Clay blocked the hall with his wide shoulders, a ghostly presence, omnipotent and powerful in the small tunnel of light. She turned aside a second to fish around in the kitchen junk drawer. Finding what she wanted, she stepped to where Clay stood. She shined the flashlight beam full on his face a second. He didn’t flinch from its brightness but held her gaze. Turning, she put the light on the stove where it would illuminate what she was doing, then swung back to him.

As she reached around him, searching for the padlock, he put a hand on her shoulder. It was a gesture that could have been a caress but that she took as approval. She ignored it and he removed his hand after a moment. The restraint had tightened with his pull against it earlier; she fumbled with it, taking long seconds to release the lock. As it fell open, she slipped if off, tossed it to the stovetop along with the key so they made sharp, clanging sounds in the quiet. She sent his waist rope after them.

She expected him to step away. Instead he reached for her hand. She searched his shadowed features in the lightning-shattered dimness, afraid of what she might find there. Her fingers were trembling in his warm hold. Would he stay or go now that he was officially free, help her or require some form of revenge for his captivity to this point? Wary, hovering on the edge of panic, she waited to see what he meant to do.

They were so close, there in the narrow hallway.
She could feel his body heat, hear the soft sound of his swift-drawn breath. Her heartbeat stumbled, then increased to a hard throb while a slow tide of memory and need threatened to engulf her. How could that happen, here, now? This wasn’t the time, the place, nor the right man. She didn’t trust Clay Benedict, and knew he had no reason to trust her. There was no bedrock on which to build anything between them. The attraction they felt was a fluke without permanency or future. She knew it, but was defenseless against its onslaught.

“Please,” she whispered, and wasn’t totally certain for what she pleaded.

He nodded, then released her and reached for the flashlight. “Right,” he said, his voice carrying a trace of huskiness. “The generator.”

As he moved past her and through the kitchen to the porch, Janna leaned against the wall and waited for strength to return to her knees. Gratitude was a strange thing to feel at that moment, but she was pathetically grateful for his initiative anyway. A moment later, she pushed upright with a jerk and went to look in on Lainey.

Her daughter had drifted off, though her skin felt even warmer than before. Janna tucked the sheet over her, but there was nothing she could do to help her just now. She made her way back out to the porch.

Clay squatted beside the recalcitrant generator, holding the flashlight under one arm while he polished the end of a spark plug on the rough fabric of his jeans. He looked up as the screen door squeaked
open. Janna held his eyes for an instant, then reached for the flashlight. When he let it go, she directed its beam on the spot he indicated.

Scattershot rain hit the porch roof at that moment. A second later, it became a deluge. Warm, heavy and incredibly wet, it whipped in on them in a windblown curtain, sifting like fog through the porch screen. The wetness snared in the plastic mesh and hung there like a silver veil, while beyond it was nothing except a rushing wall of water.

They were both soaked to the skin in seconds. There was nothing to be done about it, however, except get the job done.

Clay checked and probed and adjusted under the flashlight’s yellow light while rain whipped across his face and made his hair cling to his head in black waves. Then he rose with athletic grace and bent to grasp the starter cord. Janna stepped back out of the way as he gave it a fast, hard pull.

The generator roared, almost caught. Clay made a minor adjustment. The rain-wet muscles across his bare back rippled as he hauled back on the cord again. The generator exploded into life, then settled to a steady hum.

“You did it!” Janna cried.

As he straightened, she put out her hand to clutch his arm. Under her palm, his skin, warm until that moment, pebbled with chill bumps. He grinned down at her. “No sweat. Literally.”

His face was open, without shadows or guile, in the flashlight’s glow. For an instant, it seemed she
could see inside him to the wide, fearless reaches of his soul, could feel the gentleness beneath the force of his personality, the caring that tempered his strength. He was wet and chilled, but didn’t care. He’d been drugged, bound, denied his freedom for days, but had responded to her need, and Lainey’s, instead of leaving them stranded.

It was devastating to see him in that light, but there was a problem with it. She had no way to tell whether what she saw was the actuality or only her imagination, if her view of him was true or only as she would like him to be.

His eyes darkened. “Janna.”

Fear that she was wrong feathered over her with coldness more painful than the rain that plastered her clothes to her. She retreated a step, then pushed the flashlight at him. “Here,” she said in breathless haste. “I have to see about Lainey again.”

He made no reply, but stood staring after her as she slammed back into the house. By the time she reached the hallway outside Lainey’s bedroom, he had switched the power over to the generator so the light came on overhead to show her the way.

Her daughter was restless, twitching and moaning in her sleep, while her skin was flushed with heat. Janna stood beside the bed, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. It would be some time yet before Nurse Fenton arrived. Janna hated this waiting. Something inside her shrilled that it was dangerous to delay, that she should be taking action. It was pos
sible she was overwrought, as the nurse had suggested on the phone, but it felt like educated instinct.

She reached to smooth the backs of her fingers over Lainey’s tender and puffy little cheek. The skin was hot, so hot. How much of it was fever, how much from the warm night, she couldn’t tell. The heat was increasing in the house in spite of the rain. The generator could power the basics, but wasn’t designed to run the air conditioners. At least she could open a few windows for air, even if rainwater did splatter inside.

Clay was ahead of her. He’d already shoved up enough window sashes for a decent cross draft by the time she reached the kitchen area, and was opening more. The kettle sat on the gas range as well, and the smell of fresh coffee hanging in the air told her he’d put grounds in the drip pot.

He hadn’t changed, she saw. His wet jeans clung to his body like indigo skin. A wet streak trailed down the small of his back to disappear under his waistband, and raindrops spangled the tops of his shoulders. Every step he made left a wet track on the floor in the shape of a bare foot. Regardless, he appeared incredibly competent, healthy and sexy, particularly since she suspected he was naked under his one piece of clothing. If he was conscious of it in any way, he gave no sign.

“Lainey all right?” he asked over his shoulder as he pulled up a blind to keep it out of the way of the sash he’d just raised.

Lightning flared, outlining him at the window in a
silver glow. She turned quickly from the sight, moving to the dish cabinet. As she took down two cups, she answered, “I wish I knew.”

“But you really don’t think so.”